Cryptography

The principle problem of the Panopticon metaphor is rooted in Bentham’s original purpose for the structure: behavioral modification. As Walker puts it, Bentham believed that the mere act of being being watched constantly would alter a person’s behavior, adding a layer of accountability and therefore pushing the person in question towards a more moral or sociably acceptable course of action.

As Walker points out, however, modern surveillance is completely incompatible with this idea. He uses the example of digital watchers overstepping their boundaries, but it is apparent that even in everyday, mundane examples of surveillance, people simply don’t change their behavior. For example, consider Facebook. It’s no secret that Facebook tracks and stores almost every bit of information its users will provide it (how else will Zuckerberg learn what it means to be human). Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, that knowledge became headline news; everyone knew Facebook was effectively spying on them. Since then, Facebook has gained almost 100 million users.

If people know they’re being watched, why do they opt into the system?

Simply put, it’s because it’s impossible to live without the system. The Panopticon may have been a prison, but technology is so integral to modern life that opting out simply isn’t an option. Beyond just Facebook, social media provides a fast and efficient communication system, and Google is the premiere tool to find information in the blink of an eye. These systems are unlike prison in that we want and need to be a part of them to survive the modern world. They’ve made life easy and convenient enough that the expectation is that we use them to augment our abilities to both work and play. For that reason, the Panopticon is a defunct metaphor that cannot encapsulate the complexity of modern surveillance. It’s not just that there are too many actors that watch us from the watchtower, but that we have to remain in the prison if we want to maintain a standard of living that we’re used to; we’ve collectively decided that the opportunity cost of opting out of the system is too great, even if we maintain some semblance of privacy. Yet, we don’t begrudgingly use these apps, either. People still love to browse using Google, wish their friends ‘happy birthday’ on Facebook, and post their latest fire selfie on Instagram.

Altogether, we just really don’t care that we’re being watched.

Jeremy Bentham’s great theory was the Panopticon: a hypothetical prison design in which all inmates could be seen and observed by those in charge, but the inmates themselves could not see the observers, nor could they see any other inmates. It’s an interesting concept to think about in theory, but it is not useful as a metaphor in our conversations about surveillance, and, as time goes on, its effectiveness will only diminish.

There are two key features to the Panopticon that make it unique: the observer sees all, but is not observed, and those being observed are isolated from one another. The first feature fits fairly well as a metaphor into our conversations about surveillance. The observer (in this case, probably the government) takes information from the internet, from travel history, from any official record of our existence in the world, without our knowledge. We are observed, but we never see it happen.

Where the Panopticon metaphor breaks down is in the second feature: those being observed are isolated from each other. In the conversation of surveillance, it’s unclear exactly what this part would stand as a metaphor for. People are more connected now than at any point in human history, and that is made possible by the same technology that makes modern surveillance possible. Instead of building metaphorical walls between us, the internet gives us access to each other like nothing ever has. It’s called the information superhighway for a reason: it instantaneously connects us from across the world.

For the Panopticon to be a more useful metaphor, I would suggest a tweak to the design: make the walls between inmates out of glass. Better yet, remove them entirely.