If you are reading this article on your smartphone or your laptop, chances are you are being watched. Maybe it’s your parent waiting for you to put the phone down and have dinner (like me when I was writing this), or even if not, you were likely being tracked- by the CCTV nearby, by your front camera, the 128 active cookies that exist in your browser (I counted them all), spyware and malware lying behind the new trendy game and in today’s world, the newest AI crawler.
We are being watched (maybe not optically) wherever we go, whatever we do by people that we might not even know exist (what is Cambridge Analytica anyways, and why do they need my data in the first place?), doing things you didn’t know they could do with your data (who knew parties would tailor their ads to exactly what my fears are?). We are living in the age of the Panopticon(s) (why the s is present will become clear later).
Jeremy Bentham is widely regarded as the father of Utilitarianism, a school of ethics that broadly prioritizes aggregate well-being. His work also heavily influenced the work of John and John Stuart Mill, who we more associate with utilitarianism today. Panopticon was one of the offshoots of Bentham’s explorations as to what makes us more productive (which in turn maximizes aggregate utility).
For Bentham, the Panopticon is a system of surveillance where an impression of being surveilled is created so as to increase the probability of desired behavior (from the perspective of the surveillant), usually at the cost of the surveilled. For Bentham, the best example of this was a prison worker camp, which is watched over by a central tower, where the surveillant can observe anyone they wish, but the surveilled can’t know if they are being watched at that time or not.
This was heavily inspired by the prisons of Russia (where Bentham spent considerable time in) and later informed the design of prisons across the Western world and their colonies. (Un)ironically, these principles also began the design of the factories of the rapidly industrializing England and the rest of the world as they industrialized, the rise of mass production and consumption only increased the reach of the panopticon (pun intended).
Factories were designed to be watched over. Layers over layers of watchmen and supervisors began to be the surveillants of the industrial choreography that is the modern factory and its workers. As the 20th century progressed, newer technologies like the CCTV camera and biometric scanners began to appear, allowing humans to partially step down from the watch tower and taking us closer to the panopticon of Bentham’s dreams.
Today, we believe in a world of two panopticons. One is a direct descendant of the panopticon that Bentham devised. They are present as cursor trackers for corporate laptops, motion sensors for factory workers, eye trackers for delivery drivers, and much more, pervading and quantifying every minute aspect of our professional lives, squeezing that last piece of purported productivity out of us.
But the other late-stage, almost late-stage sibling of the panopticon could be of more interest (and worry) to us. Unlike the old “monopolistic” system, where a single entity watches over a set of people that are usually exclusive to them, a multi-agent surveillance regime where everyone wants to watch everyone has emerged over the last 25 years or so.
The first to the party were the tech companies who laid the basic infrastructure for this system through the incessant violation of data rights and exploitation of consent, they are able to build a more complete profiles of us than probably most people we know. As laid out by Shoshana Zuboff in her work, this data is then used to extract more attention from us and to monetize us further through advertisements.
Following them were governments, who went to any lengths (as described by Nicole Perlroth’s book) to procure ways to spy and extract information and then use those and public surveillance to create intricate and advanced systems of surveillance where everyone is being watched by everyone (I’m writing this in an American client in a Chinese tablet using an Indian ISP, all with a questionable record on data protection), thereby creating a late-stage panopticon where being watched is not only the means to be productive, but the end itself.
This is all compounded by the rise of highly powerful AI systems (and the supposed coming of Artificial General Intelligence), which can not only observe and collect more information but also collect these from sources that weren’t possible before. These systems can also process and generate inferences much more efficiently than a human or even a regular algorithm
Ironically, this mix of AI and a set of actors with the “right” incentives are taking Bentham’s panopticon to its weirdly logical conclusion, creating a world where we are being watched by no one but everyone.
Edited by Yatin Satish
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