surveillance: the story about us and a prison

New surveillancethe story about us and a prison

Jeremy Bentham

• The liberal philosopher (you didn’t know this)!

• The main idea was “the greatest happiness principle,” but who cares.

• Unfortunately for all of us, he also was an architect.

• He created the model of the ideal prison, and you can see it on the next slide.

But we better put it this way: he has been creating design of the ideal prison for 16

years (the hard worker, right?)

the panopticon

Meet your ultimate evil of modernity…

observer’s tower

cells

cells

cells

…and its foundation in the same time.

they simply stretched the

Bentham’s concept all over the western civilization (and not

only).

then story of western world can be expressed in one sentence:

one hundred years of creativity and innovations TM

“We create to spy, we spy to create”

Michael Foucault• If someone did a great job to ruin

Bentham reputation — Foucault did.

• But as you probably know it was a right thing to do as it is an ubiquitous prison we are talking about.

• For Foucault the panopticon is a basis for perfect power distribution with a heavy focus on individuals.

• The regime of vision, when someone is a supervisor and a superman because of it and you… well you are just you.

The discipline appeared as a critical concept here. It was a time when

humanities changed everything (again)

What happened next?

What you about to see is a sum of concepts that should help you

to study contemporary surveillance

BureaucracyMax Weber

It was always here, even before the concept of panopticon, but it goes in line with this concept very well. The main idea

is to write everything down

End of panopticon

Jean Baudrillard

The main idea here is that the panopticon is obvious and nobody cares about it

anymore

NonopticonSiva Vaidhyanathan

The main idea here is that digital surveillance is not obvious for everyone. It

is almost an antithesis to Baudrillard’s theory

Panopticon is still hereA few good men

The stories are not true. The classic surveillance is alive and well. By the way,

that is not a contradiction at all as all depends on your perspective

BanopticonDavid Lyon and

Zygmunt Bauman

The most interesting part. It is when you create a board and guard it. Like a region restriction on DVD or the fact that you can’t change your device (and somebody can)

Liquid surveillance

David Lyon and Zygmunt Bauman

Authors mean that the contemporary surveillance is everywhere and we barely

can notice its presence. We also don’t know where its limits

Society of control

Gilles Deleuze

The main idea here is that machines (from ATM to Siri) now control people everywhere

and by universal mechanisms

SynopticonZygmunt Bauman

According to a classic panopticon concept the one was watching everybody

else. In a reality TV case everybody is watching the one

Thank you for attention