The Panopticon

 

This is around the time that the United States Constitution had been hammered out, across the way in the UK, social theorist Jeremy Bentham was coming up with the Panopticon.

Bentham had denounced the ideas of the Declaration of Independence as "subversive of every actual or imaginable kind of Government". He demanded that force be used to "teach this rebellious people" that "there is no peace with them, but the peace of the King".

After the "Peace of the King" failed in the United States, Bentham turned to his obsession with the Panopticon. The Panopticon would be a prison in which all the prisoners could be watched all the time to achieve, in Bentham's words, "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example."

Bentham's Panopticon never worked, but the internet has made the Panopticon and its ability to obtain "power over mind" a reality. In a "quantity hitherto without example".

Social media has made private discourse public. In the Wilson days of WWI, when hysteria was at its peak, people could be arrested for private conversations. But that was the exception, not the rule. It was only in the worst Communist societies that informants were so rife that private discourse was almost completely stifled. But the internet shreds the line between public and private.

The new informer doesn't file a report at the local KGB office. He participates in a social media collective which among its hobbies plucks some obscure "problematic" remark out of the social stream and turns its speaker into a target for a mob. A lynch hashtag is born and someone loses their job. All of this is done with the self-pitying catastrophic crybullying so typical of social justice warriors who scream that they're the victims even while they're gleefully destroying someone else's life.

It's no coincidence that this foul habit emerged out of Communist China where morality mobs targeted petty offenders on the internet in collective shaming rituals that sometimes escalated into violence or suicide. The Communist dictatorship that gave us the Cultural Revolution helped give birth to its hideous CyberStalinist offspring which enforces political correctness through bullying.

Social media made the surveillance society possible. Even in the early days of the internet, the metaphor of the Panopticon was revived to predict its future. Art students still continue to churn out laboriously pretentious projects involving surveillance cameras and faceless mannequins. But it's the voluntary participation in social media that provided material for surveillance.

The old internet was anonymous. The new internet was data hungry. Nearly every major dot com is built on collecting and making use of information about people. Google, Facebook and a hundred other companies offer free products in exchange for personal data. Free apps for smartphones are built on gaining access to your address book. Everyone is trying to build the biggest and most comprehensive database for selling ads and manipulating user behavior.