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This makes work a panopticon prison. > The concept of the design is to allow all (pan-) inmates of an institution to be observed (-opticon) by a single watchma

This makes work a panopticon prison. > The concept of the design is to allow all (pan-) inmates of an institution to be observed (-opticon) by a single watchman without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

MisterTea 9y ago
This is is automated, real time, omnipresent surveillance of everyone. It's worse than a panopticon as in a panopticon prison you have one person surveilling 1000 for example but only able to watch one at a time. The idea is the prisoners never know who is being watched so in theory they all behave thinking they are all being watched. But math kinda destroys that theory as they each have at least a 1000:1 chance of being watched so the odds are in the prisoner's favor.
- chewbacha 9y ago
  True that this is worse! But you still don’t know if someone is going to be reading it or if it will be flagged. The relation I was trying to make to panopticon is that workers will live under constant fear. In regards to the math, I don’t believe that humans perceive risk with such objectivity. If the cost of being observed is high, then even a low risk may impose constant anxiety. Of course, perhaps criminal behavior selects for a group that tends to undervalue the costs and under estimate the risk.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Foucault was prescient about the sorts of harms panopticon would cause, and the metaphor is still an informative one. In particular, it was an insightful as to psychology under uncertain surveillance. But people are still calling it hyperbole when in fact we surpassed it years ago. Panopticon had vulnerabilities: a brief or infrequent transgression could go uncaught, and an uncaught transgression could never be recovered. The current situation is that active surveillance can be applied algorithmically to everyone, and 100% of past data can be retained for later analysis. That's utterly unprecedented, and I don't think we've really done much to grapple with what it's going to mean.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  That's a good point but even a total surveillance system has limits of actionability. Any given response system or mechanism is going to have limits of attention that it can apply to actual and justifiably observed behaviour. That is, if the goal is to identify, and reduce, negative behaviours, then whatever it is that your policing mechanism is can only act on some n cases in any given period of time. The problem is that reducing negative behaviours in a just fashion is not the only, or even the most likely, possible dynamic for such a system. In a tyrannical regime (political, social, economic: this is not strictly related to politics), there's a great deal of power and control to be had by acting arbitrarily, without predictability, and without recourse, at any given time. Take the example given in Paths of Glory, a 1957 film telling the story of the (arbitrary) execution of three French soldiers who had refused to undertake suicidal attacks in the trench warfare of World War I. The process draws on the ancient tradition of decimation, which is the arbitrary killing of one in ten of ones own troops* in order to instill on the remainder the consequences of failure to follow command. The real risk of global surveillance is that it provides either the justification for, or the plausibility of justification for, arbitrary prosecution of any given individual at any given time. That's an absolutely despotic state.

MisterTea 9y ago

This is is automated, real time, omnipresent surveillance of everyone. It's worse than a panopticon as in a panopticon prison you have one person surveilling 1000 for example but only able to watch one at a time. The idea is the prisoners never know who is being watched so in theory they all behave thinking they are all being watched. But math kinda destroys that theory as they each have at least a 1000:1 chance of being watched so the odds are in the prisoner's favor.

chewbacha 9y ago
True that this is worse! But you still don’t know if someone is going to be reading it or if it will be flagged. The relation I was trying to make to panopticon is that workers will live under constant fear. In regards to the math, I don’t believe that humans perceive risk with such objectivity. If the cost of being observed is high, then even a low risk may impose constant anxiety. Of course, perhaps criminal behavior selects for a group that tends to undervalue the costs and under estimate the risk.
Bartweiss 9y ago
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Foucault was prescient about the sorts of harms panopticon would cause, and the metaphor is still an informative one. In particular, it was an insightful as to psychology under uncertain surveillance. But people are still calling it hyperbole when in fact we surpassed it years ago. Panopticon had vulnerabilities: a brief or infrequent transgression could go uncaught, and an uncaught transgression could never be recovered. The current situation is that active surveillance can be applied algorithmically to everyone, and 100% of past data can be retained for later analysis. That's utterly unprecedented, and I don't think we've really done much to grapple with what it's going to mean.
dredmorbius 9y ago
That's a good point but even a total surveillance system has limits of actionability. Any given response system or mechanism is going to have limits of attention that it can apply to actual and justifiably observed behaviour. That is, if the goal is to identify, and reduce, negative behaviours, then whatever it is that your policing mechanism is can only act on some n cases in any given period of time. The problem is that reducing negative behaviours in a just fashion is not the only, or even the most likely, possible dynamic for such a system. In a tyrannical regime (political, social, economic: this is not strictly related to politics), there's a great deal of power and control to be had by acting arbitrarily, without predictability, and without recourse, at any given time. Take the example given in Paths of Glory, a 1957 film telling the story of the (arbitrary) execution of three French soldiers who had refused to undertake suicidal attacks in the trench warfare of World War I. The process draws on the ancient tradition of decimation, which is the arbitrary killing of one in ten of ones own troops* in order to instill on the remainder the consequences of failure to follow command. The real risk of global surveillance is that it provides either the justification for, or the plausibility of justification for, arbitrary prosecution of any given individual at any given time. That's an absolutely despotic state.