Panopticon Jeremy Bentham

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot

by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein  · 6 Sep 2021

Decisions How to Govern Algorithms Opening the “Black Box” Chapter 5: What’s Your Privacy Worth? The Wild West of Data Collection A Digital Panopticon? From the Panopticon to a Digital Blackout Technology Alone Won’t Save Us We Can’t Count on the Market, Either A Privacy Paradox Protecting Privacy for

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often, social consequences are not considered until a major screw-up makes the problem transparent for everyone. At that point, it may be too late. Jeremy Weinstein went to Washington with President Barack Obama in 2009. A key staffer in the White House, he foresaw how new technologies might remake the

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us understand, anticipate, and even mitigate the impacts of technology on society. When he returned to Stanford in 2015 as a professor of political science, Jeremy made it his top priority to teach young computer scientists and to bring social science to the study of how technologies are reshaping our social

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should be able to develop technology—for example, encryption—to ensure that no one, not even the government with a warrant, can access personal information. Jeremy saw such debates play out over years in government, where the White House Situation Room was a mirror of society’s broader disagreements, with the

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data access, ownership, and protection rose to the fore. What the British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham proposed in the eighteenth century as a tool of desirable social control—an omnipresent surveillance of prisoners, or “panopticon”—is no longer just a philosopher’s fantasy. But nobody expects, much less desires, to be

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the kind of privacy protection we need and should demand in the online world. A Digital Panopticon? In a public lobby of University College London, you will find a most peculiar sight. The embalmed corpse of Jeremy Bentham, clad in one of his favorite black suits, sits on a chair accompanied by his

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pass him every day. The arrangement is not due to some macabre wish to honor the eighteenth-century British philosopher; it is a reflection of Bentham’s own wishes, expressed in his 1832 will. In addition to detailing the transformation of his body into an Auto-Icon

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, Bentham’s will specified that on occasions when his friends and disciples gathered at the university to discuss utilitarianism, the box should from time to time

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be taken to the room and stationed as if to take part in the discussion. Philosophers can be strange, even in death. Bentham is widely regarded as the founder of utilitarianism, a philosophy that espouses achieving the greatest good for the greatest number of people. In essence, utilitarianism

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renders ethics as a system of moral mathematics. Not just a philosopher scribbling out the abstractions of utilitarianism, Bentham was also an important social reformer. He deployed the ideas of utilitarianism to justify a wide range of progressive policy changes. He engaged in the

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, many of them quite radical, meant to deliver enormous benefits to society. Perhaps the most famous of such proposals is his idea of a panopticon. The panopticon refers to the architectural design of a prison where a watchtower sits in the middle of a circular edifice of prison cells. The tower shines

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bright light from the center outward so that the watchman is able to monitor everyone in the cells. Why call the design a panopticon? It was Bentham’s invented term for an all (pan)-seeing (optic) mechanism, a novel construction that would allow a watchman to observe the prison’s occupants

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without their knowing whether they are being watched. Prisons were dangerous, dirty places. Bentham thought his proposal to construct prisons as panopticons would be a great step forward, allowing for cleaner, safer, and more efficient systems of incarceration. Fewer guards would be required

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costs would be lower and outcomes better. All privacy for prisoners was sacrificed in the name of improved security. The preface to his short treatise “Panopticon,” in which he introduced the idea to the world, offered a catalogue of the social benefits to be gained from his clever “inspection-house”: morals

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would be reformed, health preserved, industry invigorated, and public burdens lightened. Bentham was clear-minded about why the panopticon could be so powerful: it was a revolutionary unidirectional form of psychological control over prisoners. He described it as a “new mode

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will the purpose of the establishment have been attained.” Prison reformers in the twentieth century adopted Bentham’s proposal and built a number of prisons based on his panopticon design. One of many, the last roundhouse Panopticon prison, F-House at the Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois, closed only in 2016 (and temporarily

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the world, including France, the Netherlands, and Cuba. Today, however, the idea of a panopticon summons to mind not progressive prison reform but dystopian social control and a surveillance state. The French philosopher Michel Foucault invoked Bentham’s idea in the 1970s to describe the growth of modern techniques of surveillance in

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—with multiple authorities. The growth of surveillance made its presence, paradoxically, more insidious and hidden. Modern conditions of surveillance amount, Foucault thought, to an omnipresent panopticon of unparalleled social control. We accustom ourselves to its operation, and we adapt and conform to its power. Surveillance could be permanent in effect, even

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freedom by an invasion of our privacy. All of which leads to the obvious question: Given modern technology, do we now live in a digital panopticon where nearly every last bit of privacy has been eroded? We know that we are observed a millionfold more than before the advent of digital

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technology and unimaginably more than would have been possible in Bentham’s day. The prison panopticon seems positively quaint by modern standards. As we’ve seen, the Wild West of data collection by tech companies goes far beyond what

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playful project created recently by students at University College London. Deploying modern-day technology, they installed two webcams, one in the public lobby pointing toward Bentham’s Auto-Icon and another atop the Auto-Icon pointing outward toward the people who pass by to gawk at his body encased in a

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a constant livestream to anyone in the world of people looking at Bentham and of the view of Bentham gazing at passersby. You could watch Bentham watching others omnipresently—all from the comfort of your home. Thinking about a digital panopticon makes painfully clear what is lost in a world when everything is observed

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: we lose our privacy, and with that, we undermine our freedom, diminish the possibility of intimacy, and compromise our capacity to control what others know about us. As Bentham so clearly understood, surveillance

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), and innovation (think of personalized medicine). But none of this is to say that privacy has no value. And with the arrival of a digital panopticon, there has never been less weight placed on privacy. Indicators of this view were present more than twenty years ago. As Scott McNealy, the CEO

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to explore important topics, like sensitive health issues, sexuality or religion. If the digital age has delivered to us the technologies that constitute a digital panopticon, we have good reason to worry that we have sacrificed the value of privacy entirely. Is there any way out? From the

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Panopticon to a Digital Blackout In 2009, Stanford graduate Brian Acton and his friend Jan Koum developed WhatsApp, now the most popular messaging app in the

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that can effectively balance our interest in privacy with our needs for security and safety. Technology Alone Won’t Save Us Between the poles of Bentham’s fully transparent world and WhatsApp’s fully opaque world, we might imagine technological solutions that could help us achieve some level of privacy while

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, the only important thing in life? In answering that question in the negative, he was taking aim at utilitarianism, the philosophical creed first developed by Jeremy Bentham. Utilitarianism holds that the ultimate good in life—the summum bonum—is happiness, understood as the experience of pleasure, and that the morally correct action

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important supporters. Rob thanks Heather Kirkpatrick, who is optimal in every possible way. Mehran thanks Heather Sahami, who always keeps focus on what truly matters. Jeremy thanks Rachel Gibson, who demonstrates every day the love and compassion that humans offer but robots never will. Notes PREFACE former president of the university

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’s Terms of Service,” Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/terms.php. Bentham’s own wishes: “Extract from Bentham’s Will,” Bentham Project, May 30, 1832, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/who-was-jeremy-bentham/auto-icon/extract-benthams-will. his idea of a panopticon: Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, ed. Miran Božovič (London: Verso, 1995). a catalogue of the

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: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977). they installed two webcams: “Watching You Watching Bentham: The PanoptiCam,” UCL News, March 17, 2015, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2015/mar/watching-you-watching-bentham-panopticam. “It doesn’t really bother me”: Katherine Noyes, “Scott McNealy on Privacy: You Still Don

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.gov/resource/mtj1.048_0731_0734. “To refuse a hearing”: John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism and On Liberty: Including Mill’s ‘Essay on Bentham’ and Selections from the Writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin, ed. Mary Warnock, 2nd ed, (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), 100. freedom to choose their own: Ibid, 134. Denying freedom

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Barlow, John Perry, 25, 46, 52, 61 bartenders, robotic, 163 Bates, Laura, 220 Bedoya, Alvaro, 47 Belsky, Marcia, 188 Benjamin, Ruha, 98 Bentham, Jeremy, 113–14, 120–24, 168 Bentham display, University College London, 120–21, 124 Berners-Lee, Tim, 29, 126, 149–50 Bezos, Jeff, 30. See also Amazon bias elimination, 80

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political power, 63 See also winner-take-all, disruption vs. democracy differential privacy, 130–33 Digital Equipment Corporation, 35 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 225 digital panopticon, 113–14, 121–26 digital trustmediary, 149 dignity, 13, 190–1, 198–202, 208, 209 DiResta, Renee, 218 disinformation, xii, xiii, xxviii, 40, 188, 190

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Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 174 Oversight Board of Facebook, 213–16 Oxford University, 174 Page, Larry, 27–28 Panopti-Cam, 124 panopticon, digital, 113–14, 121–26 “Panopticon” (Bentham), 121–22 parking tickets, social harm or social benefit, xix–xxi Perkins, Frances, 54, 55 personal computing industry, 26 personal ethics, xxix

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politics, xxxii–xxxiii, 25, 52, 67, 75–76 Popper, Karl, xxxii–xxxiii, 75–76 Postal Service Act (1792), 3 poverty, escaping from, 170–71 prison panopticon, 123 privacy, 111–51 overview, 114–15 anonymization, 129–30 Apple’s privacy by design, 134–35 beyond GDPR, 145–47 consumer privacy, 125, 126

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data mining vs., 84–87, 115–20 differential privacy, 130–33 digital blackout, 127–29 digital panopticon, 121–26 digital trustmediary, 149 effect of COVID-19 pandemic, 139 FTC regulation role, 150–51 GDPR data protection, 142–45 harm from lack of

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, 254, 260–62 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 173 United States Postal Service, 3–4 universal basic income (UBI), 182–84, 185 University College London Jeremy Bentham display, 120–21, 124 unsupervised data, 85 US Air Force Academy, 103 US Capitol assault (Jan. 6, 2021), xi-xii, xxvi, 115, 187, 209, 215

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washing machines and laundry, 157–58 watch time metric, 34 Watchdog.net, xxiii Weapons of Math Destruction (O’Neil), 98 Weinberg, Gabriel, 135–36 Weinstein, Jeremy, xv–xvi, 72 Weld, William, 130 Western Union, 57 Westin, Alan, 137–38 WhatsApp, 127–28 Wheeler, Tom, 63, 76 Whitt, Richard, 149 “Why Software

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1,500 students per year. Mehran is also a limited partner in several VC funds and serves as an adviser to high-tech start-ups. JEREMY M. WEINSTEIN went to Washington with President Obama in 2009. A key staffer in the White House, he foresaw how new technologies might remake the

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relationship between governments and citizens, and launched Obama’s Open Government Partnership. When Samantha Power was appointed US Ambassador to the United Nations, she brought Jeremy to New York, first as her chief of staff and then as her deputy. He returned to Stanford in 2015 as a professor of political

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leads Stanford Impact Labs. Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com. Copyright SYSTEM ERROR. Copyright © 2021 by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami, and Jeremy M. Weinstein. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

by Bruce Schneier  · 2 Mar 2015  · 598pp  · 134,339 words

no longer matter whether or not you’re wearing one. It’s kind of like herd immunity, but in reverse. UBIQUITOUS SURVEILLANCE Philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived of his “panopticon” in the late 1700s as a way to build cheaper prisons. His idea was a prison where every inmate could be surveilled at any

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, all the time, and that data is being stored forever. This is what an information-age surveillance state looks like, and it’s efficient beyond Bentham’s wildest dreams. 3 Analyzing Our Data In 2012, the New York Times published a story on how corporations analyze our data for advertising advantages

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groups that are out of favor with the ruling elite, will be affected more. Jeremy Bentham’s key observation in conceiving his panopticon was that people become conformist and compliant when they believe they are being observed. The panopticon is an architecture of social control. Think of how you act when a police car

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has emerged. (Honestly, it blows me away that most of this surveillance has emerged in less than two decades.) We’re growing accustomed to the panopticon. You can see it writ large, when people shrug and say, “What are you going to do?” You can see it in a microcosm every

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surveillance storage: How much is enough?” http://m.seagate.com/files/staticfiles/docs/pdf/whitepaper/video-surv-storage-tp571-3-1202-us.pdf. Jeremy Bentham conceived of his “panopticon”: Jeremy Bentham (1791), The Panopticon, or the Inspection-House, T. Payne, http://cartome.org/panopticon2.htm. idea has been used as a metaphor: Oscar H. Gandy Jr

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Political Economy of Personal Information, Westview Press, http://books.google.com/books?id=wreFAAAAMAAJ. on the Internet and off: Tom Brignall III (2002), “The new panopticon: The Internet viewed as a structure of social control,” Tennessee Tech University, http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/apcity/unpan003570.pdf. All of

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. terrorism agency to tap a vast database of citizens,” Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324478304578171623040640006. procedures for getting on these lists: Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux (5 Aug 2014), “Watch commander: Barack Obama’s secret terrorist-tracking system, by the numbers,” Intercept, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article

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Agency (24 Jun 2008), “HALLUXWATER: ANT product data,” http://leaksource.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/nsa-ant-halluxwater.jpg. American-made equipment sold in China: Jeremy Hsu (26 Mar 2014), “U.S. suspicions of China’s Huawei based partly on NSA’s own spy tricks,” IEEE Spectrum, http://spectrum.ieee.org

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2014), “Man jailed for offensive Ann Maguire Facebook post,” BBC News, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-27696446. US military targets drone strikes: Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald (10 Feb 2014), “The NSA’s secret role in the U.S. assassination program,” Intercept, https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014

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Setty (Jul 2012), “The rise of national security secrets,” Connecticut Law Review 44, http://connecticutlawreview.org/files/2012/09/5.Setty-FINAL.pdf. D. A. Jeremy Telman (Mar 2012), “Intolerable abuses: Rendition for torture and the state secrets privilege,” Alabama Law Review 63, http://scholar.valpo.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article

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so uncool,” Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhimler/2014/08/12/uber-so-cool-but-so-uncool. different prices and options: Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Jeremy Singer-Vine, and Ashkan Soltani (24 Dec 2012), “Websites vary prices, deals based on users’ information,” Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles

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cutting edge, anonymity in name only,” Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748703294904575385532109190198. other companies … are also adjusting prices: Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Jeremy Singer-Vine, and Ashkan Soltani (24 Dec 2012), “Websites vary prices, deals based on users’ information,” Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles

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.org/comment/the-eu-general-data-protection-regulation-toward-a-property-regime-for-protecting-data-privacy. They pay for this information: Jennifer Valentino-DeVries and Jeremy Singer-Vine (7 Dec 2012), “They know what you’re shopping for,” Wall Street Journal, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324784404578143144132736214

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. Jeremy Singer-Vine (7 Dec 2012), “How Dataium watches you,” Wall Street Journal, http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/12/07/how-dataium-watches-you. transparency

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mining by, 137 base rate fallacy, 323–24 Bates, John, 172, 337 behavior: anomalous, 39 data mining and, 38–40 Benkler, Yochai, 99, 341–42 Bentham, Jeremy, 32, 97 Beria, Lavrentiy, 92 Bermuda, NSA recording of all phone conversations in, 36 Berners-Lee, Tim, 210 Bill of Rights, 210 Bing, paid search

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, of government surveillance, 161–63, 169, 172–78 Oyster cards, 40, 262 packet injection, 149–50 PageRank algorithm, 196 Palmer Raids, 234 Panetta, Leon, 133 panopticon, 32, 97, 227 panoptic sort, 111 parallel construction, 105, 305 Pariser, Eli, 114–15 Parker, Theodore, 365 PATRIOT Act, see USA PATRIOT Act pen registers

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

by Anthony M. Townsend  · 29 Sep 2013  · 464pp  · 127,283 words

the walls of the smart city ourselves, for they will be the ultimate setup for surveillance. Will smart cities become the digital analogue of the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s 1791 prison design, where the presence of an unseen watcher kept order more effectively than the strongest bars?36 In the 1990s, the Surveillance

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stream for the city—by licensing the data. A growing number of start-ups and open-source projects, like the Personal Locker project started by Jeremie Miller, are exploring ways for individuals to control and even pool their private data to trade with companies. (As the creator of Jabber, the dominant

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/bhoomi-e-governance.pdf. 35Kevin Donovan, “Seeing Like a Slum: Towards Open, Deliberative Development,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs 13, no. 1 (2012): 97. 36Jeremy Bentham. The Panopticon Writings (London: Verso, 1995), 29–95. 37Farah Mohamed, “Sen. Franken on facial recognition and Facebook,” Planet Washington, last modified July 18, 2012, http://blogs

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Batty, Michael, 85–87, 295–97, 313, 315–16 Becker, Gene, 112–13 Beijing, 49, 273–74 Belloch, Juan Alberto, 223 Beniger, James, 42–43 Bentham, Jeremy, prison design of, 13 Berlin, 38 Bernstein, Phil, 302 Bettencourt, Luis, 312–13 Betty, Garry, 196 Bhoomi, 12–13 big data, 29, 87, 191, 292

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, 113–14, 283351 Menino, Tom, 212–13, 240 microcontroller, 135–36, 138–39 Microsoft, 13, 290 alliance with Intel of, 290 Miller, Elan, 319 Miller, Jeremie, 293 Minnesota, University of, 35 Minot, Charles, 5 Mirror Worlds (Gelernter), 69–73, 89, 298 MIT, 25, 59, 76–77, 218–20 Media Lab Lincos

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Paes, Eduardo, 66–68, 223–24 Pahlka, Jennifer, 237–43, 291 Pakistan, 233 Palmisano, Sam, 62–63, 68, 223–24 PalmPilot, 121–22 Panasonic, 127 Panopticon, 13 Paris, bicycle sharing in, 11 ParkNOW!, 244–45 patents, 60–61 Path Intelligence, 271 Pattern Language, A (Alexander), 144, 285–86 Paulos, Eric, 41

The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism

by Adrian Wooldridge  · 7 Apr 2026  · 342pp  · 129,097 words

pretty. The utilitarians’ idea that you could speed up history through the scientific application of rewards and punishments raised worrying questions of power. Bentham produced the idea of a panopticon or ‘total prison’ which ground ‘rogues honest’ by the systematic use of observation and control.30 The prison would be built in

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to wear masks whenever they ate with each other; guards in the watchtower would keep an unceasing watch on their charges. Happily, prisoners escaped the panopticon because of institutional inertia but schoolchildren were not so lucky: the chancellor of the exchequer, Robert Lowe, established a system of ‘payment by results’ that

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venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different.’4 Jeremy Bentham put radical individualism at the centre of his great philosophical scheme. In the world of the greatest happiness of the greatest number each individual counts

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a perpetual progression they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition’). Four years later, in A Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying (1648), Jeremy Taylor (1613–67) defended intellectual freedom on the opposite grounds: that the impossibility of absolute knowledge should lead to absolute toleration. But both insisted that

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intellect – would unleash havoc. ‘Men of money’ might undermine the institutions of the state and the Church, blind to everything but profit and loss. ‘Calculators’ (Bentham’s utilitarians) would team up with ‘sophisters’ (intellectuals) and, through their insensitive pursuit of progress, bring the system crashing down. The answer was to balance

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also turned them against more conventional liberal thinkers, notably Voltaire, with his facile optimism (Johann Herder, the German philosopher, called him a ‘senile child’), and Bentham, with his inhumane calculations. Aron talked about the ‘catastrophic optimism’ of the left. Shklar focused on ‘the liberalism of fear’.32 Berlin celebrated Mill’s

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the two. Populist movements are rooted in their local soil. Donald Trump is an archetypical American huckster – big, brash and loud-mouthed. Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn could not be anything other than British: Johnson the bastard offspring of Bertie Wooster and Oswald Mosley, Corbyn a Britain-hating bearded Bolshie straight

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regeneration and a blueprint for the form that a future regeneration should take. Mill’s father, James, was the ‘most faithful and fervent disciple’ of Jeremy Bentham. He provided his son with a gruelling educational regime, as we have seen, in a bid to turn him into an unstoppable ‘reformer of the

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decade later, ‘never played at cricket: it is better to let Nature have her way.’ Mill did not abandon his youthful utilitarianism entirely. He retained Bentham’s belief that established institutions needed to be reformed in the light of reason and utility. He nevertheless realized that seeing the world as no

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system was something much more complex and many-sided than I had previously had any idea of.’3 Crucially, he discovered poetry, famously dismissed by Bentham as merely lines that fell short of the margin, starting with the Romantic Lake Poets, and read widely outside the narrow world of the philosophic

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preserving and what is passing and forgettable. And from Taylor, he learned to care more about the fate of the oppressed than his father or Bentham ever had. Mill’s move to the left is the most eye-catching: he moderated his enthusiasm for free markets to make room for trade

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of man here below? Mahomet has answered this question, in a way that might put some of us to shame! He does not, like a Bentham, a Paley, take Right and Wrong, and calculate the profit and loss, ultimate pleasure of the one and of the other; and summing all up

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29 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France and Other Writings, ed. Jesse Norman (New York, Everyman’s Library, Alfred Knopf, 2015), p. 468 30 Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon: The Inspection House (1791) (Scotts Valley, CA, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017) 31 A.V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion

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, Merit: The History of a Founding Ideal from the American Revolution to the Twenty-First Century (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2013), p. 25 24 Jeremy Jennings, Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France since the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 29 25 John

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of Liberalism, p. 72 4 John Adams, The Political Writings of John Adams, ed. George A. Peek, Jr (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1954), p. 89 5 Jeremy Jennings, Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France since the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 244 6 Christopher

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Unwin, 1908), Vol. 1, p. 187 2 Stuart Lau et al., ‘What Genocide? Volkswagen’s Morally Expensive Bet on China’, Politico, 20 June 2023 3 Jeremy Jennings, Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France since the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 166 4 John

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, Julien: La Traison des Clercs 95 Bengal, India 60, 119, 124, 128 Bengal Renaissance 128 Bengalee 128 Bennet, James xi Benoist, Alain de 195–6 Bentham, Jeremy 12, 19, 26, 60, 66, 114, 221–2, 315 Bentinck, Lord William 119 Berar, Prince of 122 Berlin, Isaiah xvi, 113–15, 307; ‘Two Concepts

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liberalism 240–42 reweaving social fabric 251–3 San Francisco 242–3 Cook, Robin 192 Cook, Tim 206 Coolidge, Calvin 86 Cooper, Robert 233 Corbyn, Jeremy 153 Corn Laws 18–19, 86, 205 corporations xi, xii, xviii, xxi, xxii, 55, 68, 79, 90, 137, 185, 188–9, 195, 198, 202–5

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of Man 128 Pakistan 176, 179–81, 184 Palantir Technologies 206 Palihapitiya, Chamath 217 Palmer, R.R 234 pamphlet wars 41 Panikkar, K.M. 121 panopticon 19 Papini, Giovanni 90 Parakilas, Sandy 217 ‘pariah people’ 22 Paris Agreement (2015) 287 Parker, Sean 217 Parkes, Joseph 17 parliamentary debates xvii, 89, 92

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, 157–8, 205, 225, 231, 257, 277, 287, 299, 300 food taxes 251 inheritance tax 79, 207 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 212 Taylor, Harriet 222 Taylor, Jeremy: Liberty of Prophesying 38, 42 Tea Party 158 technocratic liberalism 231 technology ix, 41, 69, 83, 125, 173, 200–17, 235–8, 261–3, 274

The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control

by Jacob Siegel  · 24 Mar 2026  · 348pp  · 103,246 words

America’s Gilded Age, publicity meant something like enlightened transparency. Their understanding was influenced by the work of the eighteenth-century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The father of utilitarianism, Bentham was a materialist who saw happiness as the basis of morality and advocated organizing society to yield “the greatest good for the greatest

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number.” Publicity played a critical role in balancing this equation because, as Bentham wrote, “the eye of the public makes the statesman virtuous.” Bentham applied his philosophy in his design for a model prison that he called the Panopticon. The architecture of the prison was circular, with rings of cells organized around

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a central surveillance tower. Constant awareness of the tower’s all-seeing eye was intended to keep the prisoners on their best behavior. It was not necessary that the prisoners actually be watched at all times, Bentham

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, as long as they believed that they might be. To prevent the tower guards from abusing their position, Bentham suggested that publicity could keep them in line. Here was an early version of a profound claim: that information itself, not morality, legal rules, or

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social relationships, could perform the role of a beneficent surveillance modifying people’s behavior. He advocated the Panopticon, initially intended for a prison, as a universal model for schools, hospitals, poorhouses, and other public facilities. Shortly after he was picked to head the

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, “What Publicity Can Do,” Harper’s Weekly, December 20, 1913, 10. “the eye of the public” Gerald J. Postema, Utility, Publicity, and Law: Essays on Bentham’s Moral and Legal Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2019), 299. “the religion of democracy” Hamilton, Manipulating the Masses, 101. “whether the inner lines at home

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York Times, August 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/business/balance-fairness-and-a-proudly-provocative-presidential-candidate.html. “We were invaded” Jeremy Binckes, “‘We Were Invaded’: On Bill Maher, Keith Olbermann Says the Real Question Is ‘How Much the Russians Decided Our Election,’” Salon, January 21, 2017

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29, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/29/technology/apple-alphabet-facebook-amazon-google-earnings.html. “Big Tech’s Pandemic Year” Therese Poletti and Jeremy C. Owens, “$1.4 Trillion? Big Tech’s Pandemic Year Produces Mind-Boggling Financial Results,” MarketWatch, February 7, 2022, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/1

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friend Roy Scranton for reading through the draft and providing me with sharp and helpful critiques (and for letting me steal his Wallace Stephens epigraph). Jeremy England for his thoughtful comments and review of the scientific chapters. My friends Zach Intrater and Stuart Halpern for letting me learn with them. My

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Baldwin, Richard Ball, Molly Baran, Paul Barba-Kay, Antón Barlow, John Perry Barricelli, Nils Aall Bateson, Gregory Bazelon, Emily Bell, Daniel Bell Labs Beniger, James Bentham, Jeremy Berenson, Alex Berger, J. M. Berger, Morroe Berlin Wall Bernays, Edward Bezos, Jeff Biden, Hunter Biden, Joe COVID-19 pandemic and presidential election of 2020

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Pool, Ithiel de Sola populism post-industrial society Postman, Neil Poulos, James Poynter Institute Prince (Prince Rogers Nelson) Princeton University Princip, Gavrilo PRISM prisons Bentham’s Panopticon dystopian Privacy Act (1974) progressivism Project AGILE Project Birmingham Project Camelot (Methods for Predicting and Influencing Social Change and Internal War Potential) Project Genoa Project

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness

by Simone Browne  · 1 Oct 2015  · 326pp  · 84,180 words

and applies it to an understanding of surveillance. I work across multiple spaces (the airport, the plan of the Brooks slave ship, the plan for Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, Internet art) and different segments of time (the period of transatlantic chattel slavery, the British occupation of New York City during the American Revolution

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1851). Library of Congress, Printed Ephemera Collection; Portfolio 60, Folder 22. 30.5 × 25 cm. The Chapters If, for Foucault, “the disciplinary gaze of the Panopticon is the archetypical power of modernity,” as Lyon has suggested in the introduction to Surveillance Studies: An Overview,66 then it is my contention that

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the operation of disciplinary and sovereign forms of power over black life under slavery by looking at plantation management and running away. In Jeremy Bentham’s plan for the Panopticon, small lamps worked to “extend to the night the security of the day.”69 I examine this idea of the security of the

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to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging In early August 1785, English social reformer Jeremy Bentham set out from Brighton, England, destined for Krichëv, Russia. It was in Russia where Bentham would first conceive of the Panopticon in a series of letters “from Crecheff in White Russia, to a friend in England

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those eighteen “young Negresses” held captive in the hatches of that cramped Turkish caïque. That somewhere along a journey that ends in The Panopticon; or, The Inspection House Jeremy Bentham traveled with “18 young Negresses (slaves)” guides me to question the ways that the captive black female body asks us to conceptualize the

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links between race, gender, slavery, and surveillance. In other words, how must we grapple with the Panopticon, with the knowledge that somewhere within the

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history of its formation are eighteen “young Negresses” held “under the hatches”? If Bentham’s Panopticon depended on an exercise of power where the inspector sees everything while remaining unseen, how might the view from “under the hatches” be another site

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to think creatively about what happens if we center the conditions of blackness when we theorize surveillance. Seeing without Being Seen: The Plan of the Panopticon The Panopticon was conceived by Jeremy Bentham in 1786 and then amended and produced diagrammatically in 1791 with the assistance of English architect Willey Reveley

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. Bentham first came upon the idea through his brother Samuel, an engineer and naval architect who had envisioned the Panopticon as a model for workforce supervision. Pan, in Greek mythology, is

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prefix pan- gestures to pastoral power. Pastoral power is a power that is individualizing, beneficent, and “essentially exercised over a multiplicity in movement.”5 Bentham imagined the Panopticon to be, as the name suggests, all-seeing and also polyvalent, meaning it could be put to use in any establishment where persons were

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7 This is control by design, where population management and the transmission of knowledge about the subject could, as Bentham explains, be achieved, “all by a simple idea of Architecture!”8 The Panopticon’s floor plan is this: a circular building where the prisoners would occupy cells situated along its circumference (figure

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s presence is unverifiable; and there is said to be no privacy for those that are subject to this architecture of control. Security in the Panopticon, as Bentham asserts, is achieved by way of small lamps, lit after dark and located outside each window of the inspection tower, that worked to “extend

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in this instance, power is covert and achieved by a play of light. FIGURE 1.1. The plan of the Panopticon (1791). Published in 1843 (originally 1791) in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. IV, pp. 172–173. If an act that is deemed criminal is an assault on the sovereign’s power

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to conceptualize disciplinary power and the ways that it comes to be internalized by some. Some theorists of surveillance have used the metaphor of the Panopticon to generate other ways of conceptualizing surveillance. For example, Thomas Mathiesen’s synopticon (1997) is a reversal of the panoptic schema where the many

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offers a critique of panopticism in which he contends that “post-Panoptical subjects reliably watch over themselves” without need of the physical structure of the Panopticon.26 He suggests that panopticism has been “transcended by the emergent practice of pre-visualization” where simulation, profiling, and prevention occur, rather than merely

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into categories of risk, are offered as a means of qualifying and understanding forms of surveillance that are sometimes overlooked. On the overrepresentation of the panopticon and accounts that take power as unilaterally exercised, Lyon writes that “not only does this kind of account distract attention from the subtle interplay

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instances in which the body is used as a means of resistance, and she argues that these acts are expressions of inmates’ struggles with the panopticon.36 Intensive management units, or special housing units, are solitary confinement units where certain inmates are segregated from the general prison population, spending up

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of documentary accumulation.”45 The examination in the disciplinary institution seeks to objectify and transform individuals through architectural arrangements, registration, and documentation. Prefiguring Bentham’s design of the Panopticon and the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century disciplinary institutions that Foucault lays out in Discipline and Punish, the architectural design, registration, documentation, and

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Through its creative remembering of the brutalities of slavery and its afterlife, Caryl Phillips’s short story “The Cargo Rap” (1989) makes links between the Panopticon, captivity, the slave ship, plantation slavery, racism, and the contemporary carceral practices of the U.S. prison system. Racism is, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore

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of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade produced and distributed Description of a Slave Ship (figure 1.2). Unlike Bentham’s blueprint of the Panopticon, this schematic diagram of a maritime prison is populated with tiny figures dressed in loincloths to represent the legally allotted amount of enslaved

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make dark matter visible. Rhode’s subject in the Pan’s Opticon series is suited up with a prosthetic look. His ocular interrogation confronts the Panopticon and the architecture of surveillance—corners, shadows, reflections, and light—covering the wall with dark matter. On the subject of walls and architecture, Rhode

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writes that “when one speaks of walls, one speaks of security, privacy, and demarcation.”127 Rhode’s Pan’s Opticon is a play on Bentham’s Panopticon. Rhode’s naming of his series of photographs with the possessive noun Pan’s is a claiming of

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Bentham’s eighteenth-century plan for “obtaining power of mind over mind.”128 Rhode’s black subject is not backed into a corner, but facing it,

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of the State closes with Dean and Brill turning the tables on the NSA agents and analysts that have tracked them throughout the film. Answering Jeremy Bentham’s question of “quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (who watches the watchers?), Dean and Brill surveil their surveillers; they watch the watchers. In this way,

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13. 66. Lyon, Surveillance Studies, 57. 67. The call for a “critical reinterpretation” of panopticism is made by David [Murakami] Wood in “Foucault and the Panopticon Revisited,” an editorial in the journal Surveillance and Society, where in a discussion of the ways that panopticism is taken up by scholars and academics

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(in the same issue) mapping of “appropriation and application; rejection; and qualified acceptance subject to empirically-dependent limitations” (236). 68. Ibid., 235. 69. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4, 41. 70. City of New York, Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York, 1675–1776, vol. 4, 86

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pre-9/11 protocol in place if such an event were to occur are discussed in detail. 1. Notes on Surveillance Studies 1. Jeremy Bentham to his father, Jeremiah Bentham, “On board a Turkish Caïk from Smyrna to Constantinople, E. of the Island of Metelin,” letter 550, November 9, 1785, in Christie,

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The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, 387. The City of İzmir was formerly called Smyrna. 2. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 1, 443–444. 3. Ibid., 444. 4. Ibid. This passage was first published in 1812 in Étienne

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Richard Smith and published in 1825 as “Rationale of Punishment.” Smith’s English version was published in the 1843 Bowring edition of The Works of Jeremy Bentham as book 2 of Principles of Penal Law. However, it is not clear how faithful Dumont was to

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Bentham’s original writings. The original manuscripts for Principles of Penal Law are held at the Bentham Project at the University College of London. According to Philip Schofield, director of the Bentham Project and general editor of the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, Hugo Bedau, who produced the

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transcripts, thought them to be written by Bentham in the 1770s, but “as so often

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is the case with Bentham’s texts, it has a complex history.” P. Schofield

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, personal communication, December 15, 2012. 5. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 125. 6. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4, 40. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 39. 9. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200. 10.

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Ibid., 41. 11. Foucault, Psychiatric Power, 77. 12. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4, 41. 13. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 49. 14. Ibid., 3. 15. See McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, chapter 4, in which she writes on the

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associated “tsotsi aesthetic” with criminal gang activity. 127. Robin Rhode in “Robin Rhode and Catharina Manchanda in Conversation” in Manchanda, Catch Air, 19. 128. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4, 39. 129. hooks, Talking Back, 9. 2. “Everybody’s Got a Little Light under the Sun” 1. After the race is

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Surveillance and Policing, edited by Elia Zureik and Mark B. Salter. Portland: Willan, 2005. Bentham, Jeremy. The Works of Jeremy Bentham, volume 1. Published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring. Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843. _____. The Works of Jeremy Bentham, volume 2. Published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring. Edinburgh: William Tait,

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1843. _____. The Works of Jeremy Bentham, volume 4. Published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring. Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843. Best

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New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972. Cherki, Alice. Frantz Fanon: A Portrait. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Christie, Ian R., ed. The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham: Volume 3, January 1781 to October 1788. London: Athlone, 1971. Clarkson, Thomas. The Argument That the Colonial Slaves Are Better Off Than the British Peasantry

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Americans and the Politics of Representation. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. Haggerty, Kevin D. “Tear Down the Walls: On Demolishing the Panopticon.” In Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond, edited by David Lyon, 23–45. Portland, OR: Willan, 2006. Haggerty, Kevin D., and Richard V. Ericson. “The Surveillant Assemblage.”

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. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. _____. Identifying Citizens: ID Cards as Surveillance. London: Polity Press, 2010. _____. “The Search for Surveillance Theories.” In Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond, edited by David Lyon, 3–20. Portland, OR: Willan, 2006. _____. Surveillance after September 11. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2003. _____. “Surveillance, Security and

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.edu/gtmarx/www/surandsoc.html. _____. Undercover: Police Surveillance in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Mathiesen, Thomas. “The Viewer Society: Michel Foucault’s Panopticon Revisited.” Theoretical Criminology 1, no. 2 (1997): 215–234. McAllister, Marvin. White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and

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, no. 4 (2012): 600–607. _____. The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Wood, David. “Foucault and the Panopticon Revisited.” Surveillance and Society 1, no. 3 (2003): 234–239. Wood, Marcus. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and North America, 1780–1865

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P., 91 banopticon, 38–39 Baraka, Amiri, 172n92 Barbot, John, 94–95, 97 Bedau, Hugo, 169n4 Beloved (Morrison), 93, 100 Bennett, Colin J., 135, 152 Bentham, Jeremy, 7, 24, 31–38, 121 Bertillon, Alphonse, 112, 180n77 Bertillonage, 112, 180n77. See also finger-printing Best, Stephen, 43 Better Off Ted (TV show), 189n5

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digital epidermalization, 26, 109–10, 113 Digitizing Race (Nakamura), 108 disabilities, 25, 55–57, 70–71, 94–95 discipline and disciplinary practices. See gaze, the; Panopticon; surveillance Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 35–37, 41–42 Discrim-FRO-nation, 131–32, 156, 159, 164 Dix, Cuffe, 71 DNA analysis, 109, 114,

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place (term), 16, 25, 54, 60, 72, 98–99, 110, 129, 179n32 Pamela Z, 8, 134, 152–56, 159 panopticism, 24, 32, 38–42, 168n67 panopticon: Bentham and, 7, 11, 24, 31–38, 35, 42, 45, 121, 169n4; Brooks and, 24; design of, 32–35; Foucault on, 24, 34–35, 37–38

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43–44, 50, 97, 124, 182n115 Priceless #1 (Thomas), 123–25, 125 Principles of Penal Law (Bentham), 169n4 print (technology), 11, 25, 51–55, 66–76, 83–88, 175n8 prisons, 40, 43. See also panopticon Private Lives and Public Surveillance (Rule), 14 prototypical whiteness, 26–27, 92, 110, 113–18, 122, 162

The Internet Is Not the Answer

by Andrew Keen  · 5 Jan 2015  · 361pp  · 81,068 words

immensely powerful new monopolists like Google and Amazon. Its cultural ramifications are equally chilling. Rather than creating transparency and openness, the Internet is creating a panopticon of information-gathering and surveillance services in which we, the users of big data networks like Facebook, have been packaged as their all-too-transparent

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is a monopolist with control of an astounding 91% of the search market,26 things got so bad in 2011 that the British culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, warned Google that unless it worked on demoting illegal sites in its search results, the government itself would introduce new laws forcing it to

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and Facebook updates, however, we are choosing to live in a crystal republic where our networked cars, cell phones, refrigerators, and televisions watch us. The Panopticon “On Tuesday I woke up to find myself on page 3 of the Daily Mail,” wrote a young Englishwoman named Sophie Gadd in December 2013

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hadn’t been the only late-eighteenth-century European to go to Russia to enjoy Catherine the Great’s largesse. Two English brothers, Samuel and Jeremy Bentham, also spent time there gainfully employed by Catherine’s autocratic regime. Samuel worked for Count Grigory Potemkin, one of Catherine’s many lovers, whose name

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has been immortalized for his “Potemkin villages” of fake industrialization he built to impress her. Potemkin gave Bentham the job of managing Krichev, his hundred-square-mile estate on the Polish border that boasted fourteen thousand male serfs.38And it was here that

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1786 in Krichev and is best known today as the father of the “greatest happiness” principle, invented the idea of what they called the “Panopticon,” or the “Inspection House.” While Jeremy Bentham—who happened to have graduated from the same Oxford college as Tim Berners-Lee—is now considered the author of the

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Panopticon, he credits his brother Samuel with its invention. “Morals reformed—health preserved—industry invigorated—instruction diffused—public burthens lightened—Economy seated, as it were, upon

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a rock—the Gordian knot of the poor law not cut, but untied—all by a simple idea in Architecture!” Jeremy Bentham wrote triumphantly

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from Krichev to describe this new idea. What Jeremy Bentham called a “simple idea in Architecture” reflected his brother’s interest in disciplining the serfs on Potemkin’s Krichev estate. Borrowing from the Greek myth of Panoptes, a giant with a hundred eyes, the Panopticon—intended to house a large institution like a

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prison, a school, or a hospital—was a circular structure designed to house a single watchman to observe everyone in the building. This threat of being watched, Jeremy Bentham believed, represented “a new mode of obtaining

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power of mind over mind.” The Panopticon was a “vividly imaginative” fusion of architectural form with social purpose,” the architectural historian Robin Evans explains. And

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this purpose was discipline. The more we imagined we were being watched, Jeremy and Samuel Bentham imagined, the harder we would work and the fewer

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rules we would break. Michel Foucault thus described the Panopticon as a “cruel, ingenious cage.” It was “a microcosm of Benthamite society,” according to one

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historian, and “an existential realization of Philosophical Radicalism,” according to another.39 As the founder of Philosophical Radicalism, a philosophical school better known today as utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham saw human beings as calculating

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machines driven by measurable pleasure and pain. Society could be best managed, Bentham believed, by aggregating all these pleasures and pains in order to determine the greatest collective happiness. In

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the words of the British legal philosopher H. L. A. Hart, Bentham was a “cost-benefit expert on the grand scale.”40 And

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the nineteenth-century Scottish thinker Thomas Carlyle criticized Bentham as a philosopher focused on “counting up and estimating men’s motives.” Half a century before

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his compatriot Charles Babbage invented the first programmable computer, Bentham was already thinking about human beings as calculating machines. And the Panopticon—which he spent much of his life futilely trying to build—is a “simple idea in Architecture” that enables everything

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and everyone to be watched and measured. The establishment of a Bentham-style electronic panopticon, fused with his utilitarian faith in the quantification of society, is what is so terrifying about twenty-first-century networked society. We are drifting

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.41 And with its Gross National Happiness Index and its secret experiments to control our moods, Facebook is even resurrecting Bentham’s attempt to quantify our pleasure and pain. In an electronic panopticon of 50 billion intelligent devices, a networked world where privacy has become a privilege of the wealthy, it won

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-erasure and self-invention in today’s digital panopticon, with products like the aptly named Panono ball camera that films everything it sees? What is the fate of privacy in an Internet of Everything and Everyone? Today’s “simple idea of Architecture,” as Jeremy Bentham put it, is an electronic network in which

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everything we do is recorded and remembered. Bentham’s eighteenth-century Panopticon has been upgraded to a twenty-first-century instrument of mass surveillance. Like Vannevar Bush’s

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project,” which, he told me, would build community and understanding in San Francisco. With his half-British accent and eccentric air, he might have been Jeremy Bentham detailing, with mathematical precision, the social utility of his greatest happiness principle. “How do you become a member?” I asked. “We want diversity. Anyone original

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the equivalent of the environmental movement for the digital age. Web 2.0 companies like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram have reassembled the Bentham brothers’ eighteenth-century Panopticon as data factories. Bentham’s utilitarianism, that bizarre project to quantify every aspect of the human condition, has reappeared in the guise of the quantified-self

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movement. Even the nineteenth-century debate between Bentham’s utilitarianism and John Stuart Mill’s liberalism over individual rights has reappeared in what Harvard

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, “Five Things I’ve Learned.” 38 Simon Sebag Montefiore, Potemkin: Catherine the Great’s Imperial Partner (New York: Vintage, 2005), p. 299. 39 John Dinwiddy, Bentham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 40 Ibid., p. 109. 41 Parmy Olson, “The Quantified Other: Nest and Fitbit Chase a Lucrative Side Business,” Forbes, April

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson  · 15 May 2023  · 619pp  · 177,548 words

the rough edges later. WE HAVE BEEN here before, many times. One vivid example began in 1791, when Jeremy Bentham proposed the panopticon, a prison design. In a circular building and with the right lighting, Bentham argued, centrally positioned guards could create the impression of watching everyone all the time, without themselves being observed

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idea at first found some traction with the British government, but sufficient funding was not forthcoming, and the original version was never built. Nevertheless, the panopticon captured the modern imagination. For the French philosopher Michel Foucault, it is a symbol of oppressive surveillance at the heart of industrial societies. In George

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of the Galaxy, it proves to be a flawed design that facilitates an ingenious prison breakout. Before the panopticon was proposed as a prison, it was a factory. The idea originated with Samuel Bentham, Jeremy’s brother and an expert naval engineer then working for Prince Grigory Potemkin in Russia. Samuel’s idea

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was to enable a few supervisors to watch over as many workers as possible. Jeremy’s contribution was to extend that principle to many

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kinds of organizations. As he explained to a friend, “You will be surprised when you come to see the efficacy which this simple and seemingly obvious contrivance promises to be to the business of schools, manufactories, Prisons, and even Hospitals.…” The panopticon

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’s appeal is easy to understand—if you are in charge—and was not missed by contemporaries. Better surveillance would lead to more compliant behavior, and it was easy to imagine how this could be in the broader interest of society. Jeremy Bentham was a philanthropist, animated by

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schemes to improve social efficiency and help everyone to greater happiness, at least as he saw it. Bentham is credited today as the founder of the philosophy of utilitarianism, which means maximizing

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the combined welfare of all people in society. If some people could be squeezed a little in return for a few people gaining a great deal, that was an improvement worth considering. The panopticon was not

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factory system spread rapidly in the second half of the eighteenth century across Britain. Even though they did not rush to install panopticons, many employers organized work in line with Bentham’s general approach. Textile manufacturers took over activities previously performed by skilled weavers and divided them up more finely, with key

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, “I am determined for my part, that if they will invent machines to supersede manual labour, they must find iron boys to mind them.” To Jeremy Bentham, it was self-evident that technology improvements enabled better-functioning schools, factories, prisons, and hospitals, and this was beneficial for everyone. With his flowery language

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, formal dress, and funny hat, Bentham would cut an odd figure in modern Silicon Valley, but his thinking is remarkably fashionable. New technologies, according to this view of the world, expand

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the flourishing circumstances of the society, the real price of labour should rise very considerably.… In any case, resistance is futile. Edmund Burke, contemporary of Bentham and Smith, referred to the laws of commerce as “the laws of nature, and consequently the laws of God.” How can you resist the laws

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Britain 250 years ago. We are living in an age that is even more blindly optimistic and more elitist about technology than the times of Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke. As we document in Chapter 1, people making the big decisions are once again deaf to the suffering created in

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expansion in food production, and shoppers do not live differently. The situation is similarly dire for workers when new technologies focus on surveillance, as Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon intended. Better monitoring of workers may lead to some small improvements in productivity, but its main function is to extract more effort from workers and

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limited set of actions. Those actions needed to be precise; any deviation from the required pattern could disrupt production or damage the equipment. Even if Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, which we discussed in the Prologue, was not adopted widely, employees were closely supervised to ensure that they paid sufficient attention and followed orders

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political leaders were the vanguards of progress, and everybody would benefit from this progress, even if they did not fully understand it. The views of Jeremy Bentham, like those of Saint-Simon, Enfantin, and Lesseps in France, are emblematic of this vision. In addition to a firm belief in technology and progress

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. In fact, in many jurisdictions it was illegal to connect flushing toilets to sewers. Edwin Chadwick changed all of that. He was a follower of Jeremy Bentham, but over time he started paying more attention to the plight of ordinary people. He undertook an extensive investigation into urban sanitary conditions, with a

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: “The marketing power of AI is such that many companies use it without knowing why. Everyone wanted to get on the AI bandwagon.” The Modern Panopticon Another popular use of modern AI illustrates how enthusiasm for autonomous technology, together with massive data collection, has forged a very specific direction for digital

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things we hear consistently from workers is that they are treated like robots in effect because they’re monitored and supervised by these automated systems.” Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon was meant to be a model not only for prisons but also for early British factories. But eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bosses did not

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path of technological change. The same can be done for the future direction of digital technologies. 1. Ferdinand de Lesseps: “the great canal digger.” 2. Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon—proposed in 1791 for more “efficient” surveillance in prisons, schools, and factories. 3. The Suez Canal. According to Lesseps, “The name of the Prince

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more balanced portfolio of new innovations. Part II: Sources and References, by Chapter Epigraph “If we combine…” is from Wiener (1949). Prologue: What Is Progress? Jeremy Bentham, “You will be surprised…,” is from Steadman (2012), with details in his note 7. This is from a letter from

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Bentham to Charles Brown in December 1786. For context and details, see Bentham (1791). “No man would like” appears in Select Committee (1834, 428, paragraph 5473), testimony of Richard Needham on July 18

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Snoswell (2022), Pan, Bhatia, and Steinhardt (2022), and Ilyas, Santurkar, Tsipras, Engstrom, Tran, and Mądry (2019). “The marketing power…” is from Romero (2021). The Modern Panopticon. “The ETS…” is from Zuboff (1988, 263). “One of the things we hear…” is from Lecher (2019). “They basically can see…” is from Greene (2021

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, Gary S. 1993. Human Capital, 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Beckert, Sven. 2014. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Vintage. Bentham, Jeremy. 1791. Panopticon, or The Inspection House. Dublin: Thomas Payne. Beraja, Martin, Andrew Kao, David Y. Yang, and Noam Yuchtman. 2021. “AI-tocracy.” NBER Working Paper no. 29466

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. Statute of Labourers. 1351. From Statutes of the Realm, 1:307. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/statlab.asp. Steadman, Philip. 2012. “Samuel Bentham’s Panopticon.” Journal of Bentham Studies 14, no. 1: 1–30. Steinfeld, Robert J. 1991. The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and

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Coded Age, we need not only trade unions, civil society, and trustbusters, but also legislative and regulatory reforms to prevent the advent of a new panopticon of AI-enabled surveillance. This book will not endear the authors to Microsoft executives, but it’s a bracing wake-up call for the rest

Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres

by Jamie Woodcock  · 20 Nov 2016

the technological methods. For example, Foucault’s writing is often cited in discussions of call centres, but these mainly focus on his account of the Panopticon. While we will return to that later, Foucault’s work on discipline is also useful for our understanding of supervision. Foucault discusses factory discipline at

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frequently in the academic literature on call centres. Often these involve arguments about control, either its totalisation or the effect of minimising resistance. Jeremy Bentham first discussed the Panopticon as an architectural structure that would allow ‘a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example’.31

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apparent omnipresence of the inspector . . . combined with the extreme facility of his real presence’.32 It is worth looking at Bentham’s writing before moving on to discuss Foucault’s developments. Bentham argues that when dealing with workers: ‘whatever be the manufacture, the utility 80 Management of the principle is obvious and

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incontestable, in all cases where the workmen are paid according to their time’.33 He foresaw an application for the Panopticon to remedy the indeterminacy of

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labour power. Bentham compares this to pay ‘by the piece’ which he regards as the superior method of payment for work. In this case

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time and pays an hourly rate for shifts. However, the sales bonus introduces an element of piece-work. The call centre Panopticon is not recreated exactly along the lines described by Bentham. There is no central tower from which the supervisors can simultaneously observe all workers, while remaining unobserved themselves. The computer

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surveillance is clearly analogous, offering the potential to interrogate each worker without their knowledge. Yet the arrangement of the call-centre floor is also reminiscent of the Panopticon. Each

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row of desks has a supervisor seated at the end. From here they can observe individual workers, both their physical performance and their computer screens. Bentham expresses concern for finding a method to allow the inspector to view

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‘funny’ pictures of cats. Unfortunately for them this 81 Working the Phones sometimes became apparent as the filter cannot prevent conversations between supervisors being overheard. Bentham’s discussion of punishment is also worthy of consideration. A critic claimed prisoners would disprove the omnipresence of the inspector through experimentation. In response

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Bentham spells out a frightening response: Will he? I will soon put an end to his experiments: or rather, to be beforehand with him, I will

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What is notable about this example is the role of punishment. It is not just a case of catching someone breaking the rules. Rather, ‘in Bentham’s eyes, punishment is first and foremost a spectacle: it is insofar as punishment is not intended for the punished individual, but for all others

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created a spectacle of shouting. This reiterated how workers who broke the rules would be made an example of. After all, the aim of the Panopticon is, as Miran Božovič argues, to ‘deter the innocent from committing offences by producing an appearance through reality’.37 The analogue conception of the

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Panopticon must therefore create the fiction of omnipresence. The advent of computer surveillance means the fiction of the ever-watching supervisor could become reality. Even if

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of ways in which workers can be subjected to the management gaze. It is at this point worth turning to the notion of the ‘electronic panopticon’ that Sue Fernie and David Metcalf use,38 beginning with Foucault’s notion specifically: the perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single

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would escape and a centre towards which all gazes would be turned.39 This is the ideal type of surveillance found in architectural form in Bentham’s account. Yet this total notion of surveillance is not what management is attempting to achieve. As Foucault argues, ‘the disciplinary gaze did, in fact

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the production process. The development in call centres thus builds on a long history of integrating supervision into the productive process. The notion of the Panopticon continues this integration of supervision and production to a new level. Foucault argued that the major effect of the

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Panopticon was ‘to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’. The ‘perfection’ of that power ‘

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, that ‘the factory and the office are neither prison nor asylum, their social architectures never those of the total institution’.45 The potential of the Panopticon for surveillance, controlling and intensifying the labour process is clear. To be able to ‘diffuse the locus of supervision from the individual who can not

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movements in multiple places at once’.46 That would be the dream of factory foreman of the past. new management techniques The metaphor of the Panopticon can extend beyond the workplace to take on broader implications. Massimo De Angelis argues that ‘a socially pervasive market order’ – like that found in contemporary

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capitalism – ‘presents organisational and disciplinary characteristics that are similar to those of a prison, not just any prison’, but ‘the panopticon’. He remarks that some might ‘find this comparison odd, if not paradoxical’.47 On a deeper comparison, the contribution becomes clear. It focuses on the

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their interaction’.48 This is particularly useful because it connects the management techniques in the call centre with the broader experiences of neoliberal capitalism. The Panopticon itself was conceived of as a physical building. Yet it ‘can be interfaced with the outside world through an administrative device, bookkeeping and the publication

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neoliberal capitalism both involve ‘impersonal mechanisms of coordination of individual subjectivities that give form to social labour’. While Bentham found that the impersonal quality imbued the Panopticon with the ability to inspect, Hayek’s conception of the market emphasised ‘abstract rules of conduct, which bind together private individuals so that there is

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no need for them to develop common aims’.49 For the Panopticon the observation tower mediated between individuals, distributing punishments and rewards. Now it is money and prices that play the mediating role.50 These processes of

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context that De Angelis argues neoliberal capitalism can be understood as a system of interrelated virtual ‘inspection house’, which we may call the ‘fractal panopticon’ . . . each panopticon, that is each set of interrelationships of control and resistance defined by a scale of social action, is in turn a singularity within a series

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stands in relation to each other in such a way that their action constitutes a ‘watchtower’ that is external to them, thus forming a greater panopticon – and so on in, in a potentially infinite series.54 This regime of surveillance utilises new technologies. The past few decades have seen many new

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call duration, break length, time between calls and so on. Sue Fernie and David Metcalf argue that call centres have become organised like an ‘electronic panopticon’.79 They argue that the ‘possibilities for monitoring behaviour and measuring output are amazing to behold – the “tyranny of the assembly line” is but a

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and Bain’s point that this ‘represents an unprecedented level of attempted control which must be considered a novel departure’.22 The metaphor of the Panopticon – which has been frequently referred to in the literature – was used to illustrate the process of surveillance and control in the call centre. Returning to

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Bentham’s Panopticon writings23 before looking at Foucault,24 the Panopticon was here used as a theoretical metaphor to explore the empirical research in detail. The Panopticon – both physically and in terms of processes – maps easily onto the organisation of

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‘disavow the possibilities for collective organisation and resistance’.26 However, as we have discussed, if these limitations are taken into account, the metaphor of the Panopticon can be used effectively to illustrate what management attempts to achieve on the call-centre floor. The example of the undercover consultant illustrates how supervision

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. 27. Ibid., p. 10. 28. Ibid., p. 16. 29. Marx, Capital ([1867] 1976), p. 342. 30. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1991), p. 167. 31. Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings (London: Verso, 1995), p. 31. 32. Ibid., p. 45. 33. Ibid., p. 80. 34. Ibid., p. 106. 35. Ibid., p. 105. 36. Miran Božovič

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, ‘Introduction’, in The Panopticon Writings, by Jeremy Bentham (London: Verso, 1995). p. 4. 37. Ibid., p. 8. 38. Sue Fernie and David Metcalf, (Not) Hanging on the Telephone: Payment Systems in the

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Call Centre (2013). 21. Goodrich, The Frontier of Control (1975). 22. Taylor and Bain, ‘“An Assembly Line in the Head”’ (1999), p. 109. 23. Bentham, The Panopticon Writings (1995). 24. Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1991). 25. Alan McKinlay and Phil Taylor, ‘Foucault and the Politics of Production’, in Management and Organization Theory

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, CA: Semiotext(e). Bergevin, R., Kinder, A., Siegel, W. and Simpson, B. (2010) Call Centers for Dummies, Mississauga, Ontario: John Wiley and Sons Canada. Bentham, J. (1995) The Panopticon Writings, London: Verso. Beynon, H. (1973) Working for Ford, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Blackburn, R. (1967) Union Character and Social Class, London: Batsford. Brant, M

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. [Originally published as Contre Feux 2: Pour un movement social européen, Paris: Éditions Raisons d’agir]. 184 References Božovič, M. (1995) ‘Introduction’, in The Panopticon Writings, by Jeremy Bentham, London: Verso. Brophy, E. (2010) ‘The Subterranean Stream: Communicative Capitalism and Call Centre Labour’, Ephemera, Vol. 10, No. 3/4. Burawoy, M. (1979) Manufacturing

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13, 51, 59, 96, 156 on growth of 50 on job quality 112, 154 on organisation 140–1 on unions 118, 161 Benefits Street 153 Bentham, Jeremy 80–3 Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’ 52, 53, 58, 137–8 Beynon, Huw 97, 118 Blackburn, Robert 141 Boltanski, Luc 88 Bolton, A. 97 bonuses 21

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–50 humiliation/infantilisation tactics 3, 8–10, 40, 71, 75–6, 90–1, 125–6 media portrayals of 1–11, 51–2, 60, 152–3 panopticon analogy 80–8, 95–6, 155–6 power abuses 9–11, 65, 70–2, 157 processes and methods 39–40, 42–3, 49, 50, 59

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–2 potential for 140–4, 160–2 victimisation of activists 119, 126–7, 131, 132–4, 143 see also trade unions outsourcing 17, 18–19 panopticon analogy 80–8, 95–6, 155–6 part-time work 58 pay bonuses 21, 37–8, 39, 69–70, 81, 93 disputes over 128–9

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–6 continual monitoring 39–40, 42–3, 50, 81–4, 155–6 as counterproductive 51, 53 of customers 37 to maximise value extraction 17–18 panopticon analogy 80–8, 95–6, 155–6 undercover managers 60–4, 156–7 see also management Tartanoğlu, Şafak 103 Taylor, Christopher 145, 146, 147, 160

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders

by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton  · 19 Sep 2016  · 1,048pp  · 187,324 words

at the Hunterian Museum, also in London.) Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London. 51.498190 0.173972 Now functional: Charles Babbage’s Victorian computer. Jeremy Bentham’s Auto Icon LONDON Jeremy Bentham has been sitting in a corridor at University College London since 1850. The moral philosopher, whose advocacy of animal welfare, prison reform, universal

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wooden cabinet, under a placard reading “Auto Icon.” He also suggested that his corpse could preside over regular meetings of followers of his utilitarian philosophy. Bentham’s plans for his remains became something of an obsession. For 10 years prior to his death, he reportedly carried a pair of glass eyes

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in his pocket so that embalmers could easily implant them after his death. Unfortunately, when the time came, something went wrong in the preservation process. Bentham’s head took on a mottled, hollow-cheeked look, its leathery skin sagging under a pair of intensely blue glass eyes. In order to create

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a less grotesque display, preservers created a wax bust of Bentham and screwed it onto the skeleton. They placed the real head between Bentham’s feet. There it sat, undisturbed, until 1975, when a group of mischievous students kidnapped it and demanded a

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£100 ransom be donated to charity. The university made a counteroffer of £10, and the students caved, returning Bentham’s head to its rightful place between his legs. After a few more pranks, including one in which the skull was apparently used as a

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Street, between Grafton Way and University Street, enter the university grounds at Porter’s Lodge. Find the ramp entrance to the South Cloisters, Wilkins Building. Jeremy Bentham is just inside. 51.524686 0.134025 Seated in a hallway at University College London, the long-dead utilitarian philosopher guards his own head from

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named after Jencks’s late wife. 55.129780 3.665830 Within these gardens are the keys to life and the universe. Also in Scotland Britannia Panopticon Music Hall Glasgow · The world’s oldest surviving music hall. Cultybraggan Camp Perth · Built to hold the worst of the worst of Nazi war prisoners

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isolated from each other and the outside world in the hope that their solitude would induce profound regret. Eastern State’s design was based on Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, with cell-block “spokes” radiating from a central observation post. Each cell was equipped with a bed, flushing toilet, skylight, and Bible. All other

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Modelo housed political dissidents, counterrevolutionaries, and even Fidel Castro. Cuban president-turned-dictator Gerardo Machado oversaw the prison’s construction in 1926. Modeled after Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon design, with tiered cells surrounding a central observation post, the prison provided constant surveillance of its inmates. Fidel Castro spent two years at Presidio Modelo

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of the Whales, 191 Vizcaíno Creek Fossil Bed, 408 DISEMBODIED BODY PARTS Galileo’s Middle Finger, 57 Heart of the Dauphin, 37 Holy Right, 80 Jeremy Bentham’s Auto Icon, 12 Sati Handprints, 133 St. Catherine of Siena’s Head, 55 see also Crypts and Cemeteries; Mummies and Bones EROTIC ODDITIES Good

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, 421 Dashi-Dorzmo Itiligov, 159 Death Mask Collection, 97 Douaumont Ossuary, 33 Eggenburg Charnel, 25 Fire Mummies, 178 Incorruptible St. Zita, 55 Ivolginsky Datsan, 92 Jeremy Bentham’s Auto Icon, 12 Jeweled Skeleton of Saint Munditia, 43 Křtiny Ossuary, 78 Luang Pho Daeng, 159 Manna of St. Nicholas, 59 Mummies Museum, 417

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Playhouse, 351 Bob Baker Marionette Theater, 281 Bok Tower Gardens, 342 Boswell Embalming Bottle House, 260 Boulders of Monsanto, 66 Bridge to Nowhere, 243 Britannia Panopticon Music Hall, 20 Bruno Weber Skulpturenpark, 72 Carriolu Miniature Village, 40 Chan, 405 Chand Baori Stepwell, 132 Cigar Band House, 65 Clown Motel, 300 Concrete

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, 80 Bata Shoe Museum, 271 Battleship Island, 162 Batu Caves, 174 Beer Bottle Temple, 183 Beichuan Earthquake Museum, 150 Belogradchik Rocks, 75 Benga, Ota, 37 Bentham, Jeremy, auto icon, 12, 363 Berkeley Pit, 313 Bete Giyorgis, 209 Betty and Barney Hill Archive, 374 Beverley Sanctuary Stones, 5 Biblio-Mat, 271 Big Baobab

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Bozhou Medicinal Herb Market, 148 Brahe, Tycho, 100, 108, 110 Brazilian National Pororoca Surfing Championship, 391 Bridge of Love, 94 Bridge to Nowhere, 243 Britannia Panopticon Music Hall, 20 Bruno Weber Skulpturenpark, 72 Brutalist architecture, 75, 76, 216 Buddha Statues, Giant, 172–73 Buena Vista Park Tombstones, 287 Bugarach Mountain, 40

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(top); Paul Rushton p. 148; Keren Su/China Span p. 146; Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo p. 164; Jack Sullivan p. 120 (top); SuperStock p. 137 (inset); Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert p. 163; TravelStockCollection - Homer Sykes p. 116; Tim Whitby p. 143 (btm); John Zada p. 121 (top). AP Photo: David Guttenfelder p. 165

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