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     Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon (1791) is, for Michel Foucault, an ideal architectural model of modern disciplinary power.  The panopticon is a design for a prison, built so that each inmate is separated from and invisible to all the others (in separate “cells”), but where each inmate is always visible to a monitor situated in a central tower.  Conversely however, prison monitors do not always need to see each inmate.  Because the ‘essential restraint’ resides in the fear that any inmate could be seen at any time.  Since inmates never know whether they are being observed, they must act as if they are always objects of observation.  As a result, control is achieved more by the internal monitoring of those controlled than by physical or technological constraints.

     Panoptic mechanisms specifically arrange spatial unities to make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately.  In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; vision instead becomes the trap.  Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.  The inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must always be sure that he can be seen.

    The principle of the Panopticon can be applied not only to prisons but to any system of disciplinary power (a factory, a hospital, a school, a street, a screen).  And, in fact, although Bentham himself was never able to build this prison, its principle has come to pervade every aspect of modern society.  The Panopticon is the instrument through which modern discipline has replaced pre-modern sovereignty (kings, judges) as the fundamental power relation.  It presents a unique, cruel and ingenious cage.

     ... Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison was written in 1975.  Much has changed however.  Where Foucault suggested possibilities of resistance to surveilling authoritarianism, today we discover we are all agreeably both inmate and monitor -- simultaneously the watched and the watcher.  For the ‘eye of power’ lurks equally in every camera/screen/gun technology - and also in their controls.  No one today carries an empty holster.

     And so I made this video essay into 20mins of cacophony (sous ratour over linear montage), since my concern here is not that we are all unwittingly constructing our own surveillances, or that we should fear its consequences, or even that we need to be better informed of privacy dangers, etc.  Today’s incessant media chatter has another quite specific purpose.  The real horror of ubiquitous surveillance is hidden along side its alleged protection mechanisms.  For simply the constant reminder that we have off-buttons, or op-outs, or controls against surveillance is enough to invoke forms of profound social passivity (at least for now perhaps).  Indeed, the very belief that there can be controls against surveillance is itself a form of social control.

     In my ethnographic archives I discovered I had collected hundreds of oddly quite similar media clips regarding surveillance and social privacy, each essentially saying the same thing in almost exactly the same way: “Privacy is being badly breached...but here are some other technological ways to help protect yourself.”  But if this topic is so important and receives such repetitive TV air-play, why then do we find the problems of privacy deepening?  Isn’t more news coverage concerning privacy settings useful enough to viewers to thwart the surveillance tactics hidden inside our ubiquitous technologies?  No. 

      Today’s endless cacophony over privacy --both for and against-- importantly is but another kind of parallel surveillance tactic, a tandem social control inside our ‘inspection house’.  We will continue to hear still more privacy-concern cacophony, exactly as we happily employ still more technologies that supersede our privacies even faster.  The result?  We simply continue to surveil each other like hegemonically slaughtered lambs regardless of ever-impotent privacy settings firewalls.   

     After all, WE are the ones who create obscene spyware, as well as each ominously concerned news report.  Faceless entities like Google, Facebook, CNN, Police, etc. are not to blame here.  Blame falls upon us all -- particularly upon so-called-citizens often working inside these surveilling corporations.  Yet we continue to do this, expressly because we enjoy spying upon each other.  We make these technologies, we write the operating codes and the stories they tell.  We buy and sell them, we use them, we love them, we profit from them, and we fear them.  Indeed, we even attempt to control them, but of course never quite enough to convince each other to stop using them all. 

     In short, I posit our chains of surveillance (technological traps of visibility), AND our so-called means to break these chains (supposed privacy checks) do us equal harm.  Think about that and “keep on smiling” the next time you enter a public toilet.  And then ask yourself as you squat, “Is privacy even possible anymore?”

     But then I suppose, unbeknownst to most of us, there is so much truly evil surveillance, and other breachings of public privacy going on right now behind the scenes, that little in this video probably even matters anyway, right?  After all, we have willfully created this ingenious and cruel panoptic cage for ourselves.

                                “You gotta see this.”