Quotes About Panopticon

For a spy novelist like me, the Edward J. Snowden story has everything. A man driven by ego and idealism - can anyone ever distinguish the two? - leaves his job and his beautiful girlfriend behind. He must tell the world the Panopticon has arrived. His masters vow to punish him, and he heads for Moscow in a desperate search for refuge.

Total surveillance is increasingly the general condition of society as a whole.

Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.

In other words, everyone in the panopticon knew they could be watched at all times, so in the end, only minimal watching actually needed to happen. The panopticon would create a sense of paranoia so pervasive that its inhabitants became practically self-governing.

There was this philosopher-slash-historian called Foucault, who wrote about how society is like this legendary prison called panopticon. In the panopticon, you might be underconstant observation, except you can never be sure whether someone is watching or not, so you wind up following the rules anyway." "But how do you know who's a watcher and who's a prisoner?"... "That's the point. Even the watchers are prisoners.

To Cassidy, the panopticon wasn't a metaphor. It was the greatest failing of everything she was, a prison she had built for herself out of an inability to appear anything less than perfect. And so she ghosted on, in relentless pursuit of escape, not from society, but from herself. She would always be confined by what everyone expected of her, because she was too afraid and too unwilling to correct our imperfect imaginings.

There was this philosopher-slash-historian called Foucault, who wrote about how society is like this legendary prison called the panopticon. In the panopticon, you might be under constant observation, except you can never be sure whether someone is watching or not, so you wind up following the rules anyway.

We tend to crave a "and so it is" and "so it was" that the illusion of a single perspective brings, but one thing I have learned from being in the world is that there is no such panopticon. Panopticons are for surveillance states. It behooves us as writers and artists at this moment in history to honor the unknown and the unknowable.

In Europe, it's a done deal. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's social contract is being slowly but surely replaced by a life contract inspired by Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism and the "panopticon" of his surveillance state.

Sand???m?zdan çok daha az Yunanl?y?z. Ne tiyatro basamaklar?n?n ne de sahnenin üzerindeyiz; bizzat yönlendirdiÄŸimiz -çünkü onun bir çark?y?z- onun iktidar etkileri taraf?ndan kuÅŸat?lm?? olarak, Panopticon makinesinin içindeyiz.

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived of his "panopticon" in the late 1700s as a way to build cheaper prisons. His idea was a prison where every inmate could be surveilled at any time, unawares. The inmate would have no choice but to assume that he was always being watched, and would therefore conform. This idea has been used as a metaphor for mass personal data collection, both on the Internet and off.

And then the Internet happened: and the panopticon society, cameras everywhere and augmented-reality tools gobbling up your peripheral vision and greedily indexing your every spoken word on duty.

Unless we are read as Muslim or trans, Asian Americans are fortunate not to live under hard surveillance, but we live under a softer panopticon, so subtle that it's internalized, in that we monitor ourselves, which characterizes our conditional existence.

Visibility is a trap.

Panopte's Eye Tamai Kobayashi