Our Post-Privacy World
IN 1786, JEREMY BENTHAM was visiting his younger brother, Samuel, an engineer overseeing the laborers on one of Prince Potemkin’s Russian estates, when he learned about his brother’s invention of the panopticon. Samuel’s idea was to create a circular structure incorporating the “inspection principle.” This would allow a limited number of overseers to extract the maximum amount of labor from workers. Watched from a central vantage point, and not able to see into the tower looming over them, workers, fearfully exposed and constantly visible, would end up surveilling themselves.
Bentham, the great utilitarian tinkerer, took his brother’s idea back to England and tried to interest the government in building panopticon prisons. Forced laborers outfitted with looms and controlled by the inspection principle could become a profit center for the state. Bentham died before his vision was realized, but the panopticon as an “institution of discipline,” as French philosopher Michel Foucault called it, has become a model for the working world at large. Bentham foresaw that his architectural designs could be used for factories, asylums, hospitals, and schools, and by the time George Orwell was writing 1984, Big Brother had moved from a tower into a TV screen that watched people around the clock.
Thomas A. Bass, a professor of English and journalism at SUNY Albany, is the author of seven books, including The Eudaemonic Pie and The Spy Who Loved Us.
Surveillance systems used for the management and control of people rank among the most important technologies developed over the past 200 years. They rely on networks of agents, whether human or artificial, who are trained or designed to analyze the deluge of data produced by surveillance. The first step in developing this technology was the making of lenses for enhancing the power of the eye. Affixed to a camera, lenses, along with sensors, actuators (components that control a mechanism’s function), and other autonomous agents, now scrutinize our bodies, both inside and out. The desired end to this surveillance is total information awareness. At first, we resisted this project, but in the era of pandemics, environmental war, and randomized terror, we are learning to embrace surveillance as a new form of social media. We are building networks that address today’s anxieties while ignoring tomorrow’s regrets.
Lenses ground from quartz were manufactured in Egypt 5,000 years ago, and optical lenses made from rock crystal were produced in Mesopotamia 3,000 years ago. Eyeglasses first appeared in northern Italy in the late 13th century, and by the early 1600s, the Dutch were applying for patents on spyglasses. After Vermeer used a camera obscura to paint his domestic
