Our Panopticon Society
January, 2007
AS UNIVERSAL SURVEILLANCE BECOMES A WAY OF LIFE, WE INCH EVER CLOSER TO A CULTURE THAT RESEMBLES A PRISONEnglish philosopher Jeremy Bentham (left) conceived the idea of a prison system he called the Panopticon in 1787. In Discipline and Punish, from 1975, Michel Fou-cault wrote its most famous exegesis: "The major effect of the Panopticon is to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assuresthe automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the s...
