Panopticon

It had been described as "a device of such monstrous efficiency that it left no room for humanity." The referenced "device" was an institutional building and system of control designed in the eighteenth century by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham. The so-called panopticon, from the Greek word for "all seeing," was devilishly simple.

A prison consisted of individual cells arranged along the circumference of a multistory rotunda, each cell facing inward. An inspection house sat in the middle. The efficiency allowed a single unseen guard in the inspection house to watch over hundreds of inmates. The power lay in the fact no prisoner was ever aware at any particular time whether the prisoner was being watched. This asymmetric viewing system served as the model for fifty-four prisons in Victorian Britain.

Subsequent thinkers regarded Bentham's entire prison philosophy as a metaphor for the modern disciplinary society aimed at the ordering of human complexities through docility and utility, thereby paving the way to a totalitarian state. This surveillance narrative, as you know, was later at the heart of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four which provided, "there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment . . you had to live . . on the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

The panopticon metaphor maintains relevance. The movie The Truman Show satirized a human existence held hostage to the commercial world as the ever-present OmniCam showcased the behavior of one unwitting man, in this case for advertisement. On a smaller scale, the proliferation of cheap cameras married to the internet has enabled all levels of private voyeurism for fun or profit. One could reasonably regard the effects of these intrusions as relatively benign so long as the "targets" are conscious of the trade-offs involved.

Our discussion, however, centers around the way technology can be applied outside the conscious level. One level is through subliminal concealment, as we discussed in MM 11/20/20 Media Bias. Social media offer "free" platforms that are essentially attention extraction machines designed to peek into and, when powered by artificial intelligence, exert control through algorithms that know us better than we consciously know about ourselves (reference the wonderful documentary, The Social Dilemma).

Yet, we may be on the threshold of yet another level of concealment. Apple announced last week the planned introduction of two new tools which would involve scanning private iPhone images (NYT, Apple Backdoor). We'll stipulate for purposes of this discussion that the motivation behind this particular program is entirely worthy i.e. scanning for images related to the sexual abuse and exploitation of children. We might also note Apple responded to the immediate criticism by seeking to clarify that their botched announcement failed to communicate the limited scope of the programs and the degree of privacy safeguards.

That's not the point. The point is that Apple's new tools demonstrate the capability to surreptitiously access files, communications, and images on your private phone. Their defense pretty much came down to “trust us.”

Now leverage this potential technological panopticon array into the public sphere. Consider China as Exhibit A, the subject of MM 9/17/18 Artificial Intelligence/Tyranny of the Drones wherein the central government furthers social engineering by means of triangulating and processing input from countless private data streams.

Let us examine and discuss the matter as follows:

Thesis: our society has now reached the Bentham tipping point where technology has enabled the ordering of human complexities through docility and utility, thereby paving the way to a totalitarian state;

Antithesis: technology has been and will always be simply a tool to be used within the context of our constitutional Republic and is thereby subject to all the checks and balances therein.

The question comes down to whether humanity can coexist with “monstrous efficiency.”