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Do you think this is a realistic divergence?
Ah. Well, no, I think I don't. That is to say, that I can certainly see that societies might tend more or less towards surveillance, but I don't think a society without any observation of one by t'other has existed. You might actually say that modern society is less "unwatched", because many of the people living in it don't believe that God is watching them all the time.
But, points out our sophisticated reader, God wasn't watching them, was he? Perhaps not. But then, haven't you heard that many speed cameras are not loaded with film? For that mattter, in Smoothly's world of total visibility, if 60 million people are being watched 24 hours a day, who is monitoring all that information?
Posit: The panopticon works even if (or at least equally well whether or not) there is nobody actually inside it. (Nb - Alterity has mentioned this in the gap between me starting this post and actually sending it, but I hope I can flesh it out a bit)
I realise I'm not breaking any new ground. In fact, so hackneyed is this argument that I'm even quoting myself. Hold on...
***
Okay - the panopticon is a form of prison proposed by Bentham. Essentially, it's a ring of cells, with a warder in the middle in a tower. The setup is designed so that the warder can look at any cell at any time, while the prisoners only know the warder is observing them if he addresses them. On a pragmatic level, this makes it easy to notice when something rum is happening. On a more theoretical level, it means that the prisoners behave, because they never knew whether and when they were being observed.
Foucault (in Discpline and Punish, which I maintain should be the title of a monthly magazine) takes the idea of the panopticon as a progression of the idea of the state taking over rtesponsibility for punishment (that is, in the olden days you were punished by the families of the person you had injured, then by the King, then by a state apparatus working with the approval of the King (the Crown Prosecution Service, Mer Majesty's Prisons), and so on - in each case removing the idea of punishment from the idea of the specific offence and its impact on the injured party. So, the panopticon for Foucault is a mtaphor for the imminence and immanence of observation - the point being that you never know when the state is observing you, but you always have to behave as if it is, because it might be.
From Discipline and Punish:
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. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.
***
Now, theoretically, we could all be being watched all the time. there is a security camera in this room, there may be other hidden cameras. My Internet usage may be being monitored, and so on. As has been mentioned, there is a balance of powers, probability and, realistically, hassle.
Take cash. At the moment, if I have a purchase I want to make that I do not want to be immediately traceable to me, I have the option of paying for it in cash. Of course, this is by no means a secure system. A tenacious individual could follow me to a cashpoint, follow me into a shop and then quiz the shopkeeper as to what I have bought, for example. However, it takes a degree of effort not provided by current levels of purely electronic surveillance - the cameras that record you taking money out of the cashpoint will not be owned by the same company as the security cameras in the shop, and there will probably be no enshrined process for sharing that information. Again, one is protected from a single entity _automatically_ having total knowledge of what you do, and thus the effort of piecing it together. Total surveillance effectively destroys this model for cash - you can be followed from the cashpoint to the shop to the unwrapping at home by a single agency. So, you can no longer buy anything illegal. How about anything embarrassing? For that matter, how about things that are not illegal, but are prejudicial? Many of us probably know people who, for example, have more than one partner. That is not illegal, but is potentially prejudicial to the way social services will treat you. Of course, the employees of Social Services will be filmed, and so will be accountable to... and so on, up the chain. Of course, the more people are involved in the investigation, the more resources will need to be devoted to scanning and viewing video, and the further up the chain one goes the more likely it is that somebody will have the means and the knowledge to behave in such a way that they are not susceptible to constant surveillance or accountable for actions taken while iunder surveillance. That is the reason why the panopticon functions even when empty - the people being watched can't look in and see if the watcher is there.
So, a model of total surveillance would rely not only on visibility but also transparency, and ultimately in the completely ethical performance of those operating the means of surveillance. Without these two elements, you are looking at the removal of privacy without anything very much in exchange - and also the abandoning of privacy to people whom, you do not know and have no reason to suppose have any desire to use the information they are gathering to your benefit. Which is much the situation we have today, as far as I can tell...
At the risk of sounding Leaptopian, and taking into account Lord Henry's points about the right to practice religion within the laws of the land, is there a question here about that ol' ship... called... dignity? |
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