Foucault's work on this is fascinating and still well worth reading, but to some degree it's already been eclipsed by reality. The essential breakthrough of pa

Foucault's work on this is fascinating and still well worth reading, but to some degree it's already been eclipsed by reality. The essential breakthrough of panopticon was using uncertainty as a multiplier, pushing people to act in fear of surveillance far more often than they're actually surveilled. That's an accurate description of getting dog-piled for a random tweet, but it increasingly doesn't reflect modern surveillance or even sousveillance. A government can tap webtraffic to monitor everyone who searches for privacy tools, or put up a Great Firewall with known holes and track the people who bypass it. Lately, even random individuals can automate things like finding everyone who liked a tweet they disagree with, then searching their profiles for anything that might spark outrage. Even the ubiquity of videocameras represents a change from Foucault's era, since so much that's not a problem at the time is recorded and scrutinized later. A lot of his ideas about the psychological impact of panopticon still apply, since consequences for this sort of thing are not applied consistently. But it seems important to note that observers who used to be constrained by perception are now constrained by agency, and so can more actively select which misdeeds to react to.