You can see this design pattern in many places. A supermarket chain I once worked at has the managers office elevated above the store with a one way mirror, so

You can see this design pattern in many places. A supermarket chain I once worked at has the managers office elevated above the store with a one way mirror, so they can see out and no one can see in. It works. You never know if the manager is watching. I'm sure it deterred thieves as well as prevented staff from slacking on the job. The same concept for years here was used in traffic light cameras, although they're really commonplace nowadays, in the past the traffic authority only had a relatively small number of actual cameras, but the camera boxes at intersections were fixed in place. You would never know if the camera at any particular time was in there, so everyone slowed down, took their time, and behaved at those intersections regardless. Then there are satellites orbiting overhead. Maybe not a concern for you and I, but real-time, high resolution footage of basically any location on the planet is at the fingertips of many countries' agencies. You don't know if anyone's looking at you at any time, but just knowing that up there in the sky could be hidden eyes watching is a massive deterrent if you're trying to, I dunno, secretly mobilise an army, or move piles of drugs to a secret warehouse. The US government invested a lot of time and money designing blimps that would be equipped with sensitive radio receivers and gigapixel cameras, that can float at high altitude virtually invisible to the naked eye while powerful onboard computers use image recognition to classify and track every moving object within a city (oddly called ISIS - Integrated Sensor is Structure). The best part is you don't need to actually build and deploy these things, or if you do you don't need total coverage, just the very shadow of a threat of being observed secretly from afar is an really economical approach to getting large masses of people to fall into line. Knowing that it's possible is enough to raise the question of whether or not it's already been done. From a supermarket to space, the panopticon pattern is nested and stacked under, over and around us in ways that we sometimes barely even recognise or know exist. Probably not a big issue for the most part if you're not up to anything nefarious, undoubtedly in many instances it's of benefit to productivity and society at large. But sometimes governments can turn nefarious, or you get an asshole boss, and then it becomes a problem for people. So yeah I don't think you're weird thinking that open plan offices resemble a panopticon, though to make it work the boss needs his own side entry and a way of looking out while no one can look in. Add a loudspeaker so they can yell at people on the floor if they think they're being slack, and you have a warehouse I once worked in. I do seriously doubt many of these workplaces made a conscious decision to build a panopticon, but it's apparently a natural product of a distrusting, cunning intellect.