10 ms·

Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normal

Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? Michel Foucault

paulpauper 6y ago
this is because tall, rectangular buildings maximize volume to surface area, whether a hospital school or prison. It is not a form of social control or domination. it is more efficient this way. A one-story hospital would be prohibitively expensive to build in an urban area, and it is not like healthcare is not already too expensive.
- jhardy54 6y ago
  > tall, rectangular buildings maximize volume to surface area, I imagine that you mean that tall buildings maximize ground area, and that most property is rectangular. The way to maximize volume to surface area is to build spheres, or cubes if you're forced to remain rectilinear, but tall buildings optimize for ground area.
  - dooglius 6y ago
    You shouldn't be downvoted, this is correct
  - gpm 6y ago
    Surface area in this case refers to surface area of the earth, while volume refers to volume of the structures placed on the earth. OP is entirely correct, and no one misunderstood the point OP was making. You are simultaneously being needlessly pedantic, and less than charitable by needlessly interpreting inconsequential ambiguities in OPs sentence in a way that would have made them incorrect. Someone else commented on the downvotes on your post being wrong, the above is why I downvoted you.
    - wlesieutre 6y ago
      I misunderstood the point OP was making. But even interpreting "surface area" to mean "ground area", it's only right in dense areas without open land. The reason schools are built the way they are is to optimize for cost. Some of that's land, but some is also the design and construction. You're probably hiring a design firm that specializes in building efficient brick box schools and similar institutional projects, maybe with a big glass atrium to have one showcase area, and they've got that design patten pretty well nailed down. When you have space, you get sprawling flat schools. Still probably a brick box, but not a tall one. My school had large portions that were only one floor tall, and one area that stacked two floors. They've since knocked it down and replaced it with a 3-story building, because now they need more capacity and no longer had space to keep tacking additions on. Would it have used a smaller footprint to stack it taller to begin with? Sure, but the building lot wasn't the liming factor, budget was.
    - jhardy54 6y ago
      > You are simultaneously being needlessly pedantic, and less than charitable by needlessly interpreting inconsequential ambiguities in OPs sentence in a way that would have made them incorrect. Dial it back. When I hear "most volume per surface area" I think of dome architecture, and anyone with even a slight interest in geometry or architecture would probably think similarly. I wasn't being rude, I was helping explain their point because the words they used didn't match the ideas they meant to convey.
- rmrfstar 6y ago
  I think the excerpt more about the artificial regimentation and the arbitrary authority than the shape of the building.
- lukifer 6y ago
  Foucault is explicitly referring to norms of behavior, not the shapes of buildings: - regular chronologies - forced labour - authorities of surveillance and registration
  - Der_Einzige 6y ago
    Are you sure? I've seen some pretty panoptic school designs, and this IS indeed a shape of building that Foucault focused on... Here's the chapter of his book about the nature of certain building styles and shapes being important here... https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.disciplineAndPunish.panOpticism/ https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.disciplineAndPunish... Also interesting to talk about, are the ways that the people influenced by Foucault talk about space, area, and architectural design. Deleuze and Guattari had a whole lot to say about all of those topics, and they are one of the principle reasons for Foucaults fame...
  - cyberbanjo 6y ago
    I believe it's that they're linked and both arrive out of the same logics of dominion, and authorizing use of dominion over a spaces and people.
    - lambda_obrien 6y ago
      Form follows function, I agree.
  - alisonatwork 6y ago
    Where is the forced labor in schools, barracks, hospitals and factories? I understand there are some instances where this might be the case, but generally people go to those places because they want to, or because it offers them a favorable outcome that they're willing to temporarily trade some autonomy for. You can deconstruct the whole of society and make an argument that all labor exchanged for capital is oppression, that all regular chronologies favored by the dominant culture is oppression, that all authority figures are oppressive etc... But it's difficult to imagine a thriving, post-industrial society not featuring some of those things. Even looking back in history, people have self-organized into hierarchical, regimented systems. I think a lot of this is just a natural reaction to our environment, which is also dictated by regular chronologies (days, lunar cycle, seasons), necessary labor (biological need for food and shelter) and implicit authority figures (parents).
- jstummbillig 6y ago
  This is certainly a sound explanation – but is it a good one? If we optimize school buildings and prison buildings in a way that they end up being indistinguishable from one another, maybe we should reconsider the metrics we are optimizing for.
  - kace91 6y ago
    I'm not sure I get what's the problem with schools and prisons looking the same. Prisons should look like the rest of the world after all, they're supposed to be places where you learn to function in society.
    - jstummbillig 6y ago
      Fair enough. If our prisons end up looking open, warm and inviting, then that would be a very positive outcome indeed. That's not my takeaway, after looking at these photos though.
      - throwaway201103 6y ago
        Prisons have to be resistant to the attempts of their occupants to escape, or to cause damage or destruction. This doesn't really seem compatible with warm and inviting.
        lambda_obrien 6y ago
        Most prisoners don't want to escape, or cause harm, they just want to finish the term and go home and move on. I'd say you could have the honor system (unlocked doors) for 95 percent of prisoners, by letting them know if they escape they'll go to a more secure and less free prison. Then you make prison a place to learn new skills and get treatment for addictions and therapy, and you'll actually see some improvement in society. Also, send less people to prison.
        throwaway201103 6y ago
- smhost 6y ago
  > It is not a form of social control or domination. it is more efficient this way. efficiency doesn't stop with a building's dimensions. efficiency demands social control. it doesn't care whether that happens through self-control and self-discipline or through domination.
- tikhonj 6y ago
  High-end office builds are also efficient rectangular prisms far more often than not, yet they don't feel like hospitals, schools or prisons. I've spent extensive time in all of these except prisons, and I can tell you the difference is stark. What explains that? Is it all just down to expensive trim and interior decor? I'm sure that plays a part, but that was never my main impression. Instead, it comes down to the layout and light and feel: it's clear when a building, however regular and rectangular, is designed to support and empower the occupants and when it's designed to control and direct.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    High-end office buildings cost massively more to build. Also plenty of them put employees in a very aesthetically pleasing well-lit panopticon with open-plan seating. I much prefer my dingy fluorescent-lit office that has a door that closes. (And I turn of the fluorescent lights in favor of my own small lamp.)
    - DecoPerson 6y ago
      Floor fitout is typically left to the tenant, not the landlord. Building skyscrapers with empty floors gives flexibility to future tenants, increasing the rental/purchase value. Tall office buildings may often have open plan, but this should be attributed to the fitout builder’s client (e.g. SomeCrazySoftwateCompany as the incoming tenant), not the building builder’s client (e.g. SomeGroupInvestmentCompany the owner of the building)
      - ineedasername 6y ago
        If you takeout the actual tenant configurations of offices, the idea of "High-End office buildings" becomes pretty irrelevant in this conversation & context of the comment I replied to. Because at that point you're basically just talking about the lobby & the elevators, and the view out the windows.
  - watwut 6y ago
    But they would fit right into these pictures. Not super expensive design offices, but normal administrative building looks roughly the same.
- calibas 6y ago
  I've noticed authoritarians tend to care about maximizing volume to surface area over aesthetics, so I don't think those things are entirely unrelated.
friendlybus 6y ago
When you shove 30 kids in a class or 200 students in a university lecture hall, you're going to value conformity and pulsed, factory-like processes.
dash2 6y ago
This is one of the most delightfully overblown quotes of all time. But Herbert Marcuse went one better: he compared amusement parks to concentration camps.
- paganel 6y ago
  I still have actual regular nightmares from my school-years, even though I've just reached 40 years of age. They started when I was 20-something, and they will probably never go away. What is more interesting is that during my school years I never looked at school as an institution as being repressive or "prison-like", looks like my unconscious/subconscious/whatever there is there inside was very good at repressing that obvious fact.
  - dash2 6y ago
    I hated school too. But what caused your nightmares? For me, it was my peers, not oppressive teachers. Most modern high school movies seem to suggest the same thing. So perhaps we should fix the quote. Schools are like prisons - where the prisoners have taken over the institution.
- claudiawerner 6y ago
  I don't think Marcuse should be taken lightly on this point. As a Jew during the second world war and an immigrant to the US, he worked with Adorno and others who regularly (and correctly, in my opinion) viewed the Holocaust as humanity's greatest horror and a turning point of modernity.
  - dash2 6y ago
    Marcuse wasn't a Jew, actually. But yeah, I don't really find the analysis convincing. I mean... amusement parks have towers, and queues, and walls round the outside, like concentration camps? And they're... organized and administered? Somehow this isn't quite getting past the laugh test. (Isaiah Berlin was absolutely outraged by the Marcuse quote, incidentally.) Update: Marcuse was a Jew, actually. My bad. I'd misremembered this from Martin Jay's book.
Bakary 6y ago
For the world to be organized any other way you'd need to essentially revise the entire economic system and social contract. If there are billions of people and very unequal resource partitions this will be the inevitable result
lldbg 6y ago
Foucault advocated for pedophilia, and that knowledge has tainted him for me. Can he still be a moral authority?
- smhost 6y ago
  skepticism about age of consent laws is a time-honored libertarian tradition. it's not even strictly foucauldian. and as a nietzschean, foucault didn't believe in moral authority.
- scandox 6y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_of_consent_laws https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_... More or less the entire French Intellectual establishment argued at that time for "the decriminalization of all consensual relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen". While I agree that seems extremely stupid, it is based on a morally tenable argument that people under that age could give consent. That may be incorrect but if accepted as a premise would justify their position. So if Foucault believed this and his moral arguments derived from that, it would seem unwise to dismiss all his moral authority just because you believe he was wrong on this point. I personally think he is totally wrong and that even people at the age of eighteen struggle to know their own minds clearly with regard to consent. However I do not as a result think Foucault is impossible to take a moral lead from.
  - watwut 6y ago
    > More or less the entire French Intellectual establishment argued at that time Then the question is, how does one become intellectual establishement. Sounds like dissenters were somehow excluded from that nebulous subjective category.
    - scandox 6y ago
      Well I just meant that the roll call of names that signed the petition is fairly extraordinary: Louis Aragon, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Leiris, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Philippe Sollers, Jacques Rancière, Jean-François Lyotard, Francis Ponge, Bernard Besret
wisty 6y ago
It's funny how people complain about "motivated reasoning" and demand an immense amount of rigour when someone says something they disagree with (say, whichever side people take on the "Google's ideological echo chamber" argument); but are very willing to buy very reductionist and broad statements when their gut tells them it's just right. I suppose maybe there is some truth to it. But he's highly disingenuous with his implications. It's like a Twitter hot-take that's expanded into a book. Hard libertarians might argue that taxation is in some way equivalent to slavery, which is also technically true but a very biased presentation of the facts. Schools and hospitals are similar to prisons in the same way taxation is similar to slavery (you can find similarities, but ignoring the differences is just asinine). Every right requires responsibilities. If students have a right to learn, then schools have a responsibility to teach them. If young adults have a right to be educated in a broad range of topics (many of which did not interest them as children) then children have a responsibility to learn. Control is all about forcing people to take responsibility, because otherwise rights will be unfulfilled. The question isn't whether control exists (it can and should) but whether the intent and implementation is just and efficient. A communist dictator can claim the right to a huge portion of the country's wealth while its population starves, this would be unjust. There are valid questions to ask about control. Is it better to control inputs or outputs? Is it better to have a rule of laws and systems, or a rule of individuals with authority - discretion means giving more power to individuals. Are the trade-offs our society makes currently fair and worthwhile? If a punishment keeps the majority of the population responsible (thus giving creating rights) but hurts the occasional person who is somehow resistant to control is it a bad thing? But simply assuming that control is bad is silly.
- Miner49er 6y ago
  I think the point isn't that the point of school isn't to learn, as you assume. It's main point is to control, learning is secondary.
Balgair 6y ago
1984's From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe is a great dive into the 'modern' look. It's not a deep look, but a fun one all the same (it is Tom Wolfe after all). He traces the design we all see in the downtowns to the works of early german communists and their desire for good looking spaces and architecture that could cheaply be made for the masses in the coming revolution of the working classes. When capitalists heard about it they stopped listening after 'cheap' was uttered. "Oh, this is the 'modern' look and it's the new thing and it's cheap? Do 'em all like that then." My recollection of Wolfe's short piece is a bit dated, but that's the theme as I remember. It's a short and fun little satirical look at how the 80's downtowns got to be looking as such. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House As an aside, I wonder how Minecraft is going to change the look of architects and cities in the future. I'm dead certain that the architects of the 2070s will have gotten their love of design in Minecraft.
mr_toad 6y ago
> prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals A lot of palaces, museums, galleries, opera houses, universities and houses of government share the same basic layout. You’d be hard pressed to say what the function of the Palace of Westminster was if you didn’t know. It certainly looks a lot like some schools and universities.

paulpauper 6y ago

this is because tall, rectangular buildings maximize volume to surface area, whether a hospital school or prison. It is not a form of social control or domination. it is more efficient this way. A one-story hospital would be prohibitively expensive to build in an urban area, and it is not like healthcare is not already too expensive.

jhardy54 6y ago
> tall, rectangular buildings maximize volume to surface area, I imagine that you mean that tall buildings maximize ground area, and that most property is rectangular. The way to maximize volume to surface area is to build spheres, or cubes if you're forced to remain rectilinear, but tall buildings optimize for ground area.
- dooglius 6y ago
  You shouldn't be downvoted, this is correct
- gpm 6y ago
  Surface area in this case refers to surface area of the earth, while volume refers to volume of the structures placed on the earth. OP is entirely correct, and no one misunderstood the point OP was making. You are simultaneously being needlessly pedantic, and less than charitable by needlessly interpreting inconsequential ambiguities in OPs sentence in a way that would have made them incorrect. Someone else commented on the downvotes on your post being wrong, the above is why I downvoted you.
  - wlesieutre 6y ago
    I misunderstood the point OP was making. But even interpreting "surface area" to mean "ground area", it's only right in dense areas without open land. The reason schools are built the way they are is to optimize for cost. Some of that's land, but some is also the design and construction. You're probably hiring a design firm that specializes in building efficient brick box schools and similar institutional projects, maybe with a big glass atrium to have one showcase area, and they've got that design patten pretty well nailed down. When you have space, you get sprawling flat schools. Still probably a brick box, but not a tall one. My school had large portions that were only one floor tall, and one area that stacked two floors. They've since knocked it down and replaced it with a 3-story building, because now they need more capacity and no longer had space to keep tacking additions on. Would it have used a smaller footprint to stack it taller to begin with? Sure, but the building lot wasn't the liming factor, budget was.
  - jhardy54 6y ago
    > You are simultaneously being needlessly pedantic, and less than charitable by needlessly interpreting inconsequential ambiguities in OPs sentence in a way that would have made them incorrect. Dial it back. When I hear "most volume per surface area" I think of dome architecture, and anyone with even a slight interest in geometry or architecture would probably think similarly. I wasn't being rude, I was helping explain their point because the words they used didn't match the ideas they meant to convey.
rmrfstar 6y ago
I think the excerpt more about the artificial regimentation and the arbitrary authority than the shape of the building.
lukifer 6y ago
Foucault is explicitly referring to norms of behavior, not the shapes of buildings: - regular chronologies - forced labour - authorities of surveillance and registration
- Der_Einzige 6y ago
  Are you sure? I've seen some pretty panoptic school designs, and this IS indeed a shape of building that Foucault focused on... Here's the chapter of his book about the nature of certain building styles and shapes being important here... https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.disciplineAndPunish.panOpticism/ https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.disciplineAndPunish... Also interesting to talk about, are the ways that the people influenced by Foucault talk about space, area, and architectural design. Deleuze and Guattari had a whole lot to say about all of those topics, and they are one of the principle reasons for Foucaults fame...
- cyberbanjo 6y ago
  I believe it's that they're linked and both arrive out of the same logics of dominion, and authorizing use of dominion over a spaces and people.
  - lambda_obrien 6y ago
    Form follows function, I agree.
- alisonatwork 6y ago
  Where is the forced labor in schools, barracks, hospitals and factories? I understand there are some instances where this might be the case, but generally people go to those places because they want to, or because it offers them a favorable outcome that they're willing to temporarily trade some autonomy for. You can deconstruct the whole of society and make an argument that all labor exchanged for capital is oppression, that all regular chronologies favored by the dominant culture is oppression, that all authority figures are oppressive etc... But it's difficult to imagine a thriving, post-industrial society not featuring some of those things. Even looking back in history, people have self-organized into hierarchical, regimented systems. I think a lot of this is just a natural reaction to our environment, which is also dictated by regular chronologies (days, lunar cycle, seasons), necessary labor (biological need for food and shelter) and implicit authority figures (parents).
jstummbillig 6y ago
This is certainly a sound explanation – but is it a good one? If we optimize school buildings and prison buildings in a way that they end up being indistinguishable from one another, maybe we should reconsider the metrics we are optimizing for.
- kace91 6y ago
  I'm not sure I get what's the problem with schools and prisons looking the same. Prisons should look like the rest of the world after all, they're supposed to be places where you learn to function in society.
  - jstummbillig 6y ago
    Fair enough. If our prisons end up looking open, warm and inviting, then that would be a very positive outcome indeed. That's not my takeaway, after looking at these photos though.
    - throwaway201103 6y ago
      Prisons have to be resistant to the attempts of their occupants to escape, or to cause damage or destruction. This doesn't really seem compatible with warm and inviting.
      - lambda_obrien 6y ago
        Most prisoners don't want to escape, or cause harm, they just want to finish the term and go home and move on. I'd say you could have the honor system (unlocked doors) for 95 percent of prisoners, by letting them know if they escape they'll go to a more secure and less free prison. Then you make prison a place to learn new skills and get treatment for addictions and therapy, and you'll actually see some improvement in society. Also, send less people to prison.
        throwaway201103 6y ago
smhost 6y ago
> It is not a form of social control or domination. it is more efficient this way. efficiency doesn't stop with a building's dimensions. efficiency demands social control. it doesn't care whether that happens through self-control and self-discipline or through domination.
tikhonj 6y ago
High-end office builds are also efficient rectangular prisms far more often than not, yet they don't feel like hospitals, schools or prisons. I've spent extensive time in all of these except prisons, and I can tell you the difference is stark. What explains that? Is it all just down to expensive trim and interior decor? I'm sure that plays a part, but that was never my main impression. Instead, it comes down to the layout and light and feel: it's clear when a building, however regular and rectangular, is designed to support and empower the occupants and when it's designed to control and direct.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  High-end office buildings cost massively more to build. Also plenty of them put employees in a very aesthetically pleasing well-lit panopticon with open-plan seating. I much prefer my dingy fluorescent-lit office that has a door that closes. (And I turn of the fluorescent lights in favor of my own small lamp.)
  - DecoPerson 6y ago
    Floor fitout is typically left to the tenant, not the landlord. Building skyscrapers with empty floors gives flexibility to future tenants, increasing the rental/purchase value. Tall office buildings may often have open plan, but this should be attributed to the fitout builder’s client (e.g. SomeCrazySoftwateCompany as the incoming tenant), not the building builder’s client (e.g. SomeGroupInvestmentCompany the owner of the building)
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      If you takeout the actual tenant configurations of offices, the idea of "High-End office buildings" becomes pretty irrelevant in this conversation & context of the comment I replied to. Because at that point you're basically just talking about the lobby & the elevators, and the view out the windows.
- watwut 6y ago
  But they would fit right into these pictures. Not super expensive design offices, but normal administrative building looks roughly the same.
calibas 6y ago
I've noticed authoritarians tend to care about maximizing volume to surface area over aesthetics, so I don't think those things are entirely unrelated.

friendlybus 6y ago

When you shove 30 kids in a class or 200 students in a university lecture hall, you're going to value conformity and pulsed, factory-like processes.

dash2 6y ago

This is one of the most delightfully overblown quotes of all time. But Herbert Marcuse went one better: he compared amusement parks to concentration camps.

paganel 6y ago
I still have actual regular nightmares from my school-years, even though I've just reached 40 years of age. They started when I was 20-something, and they will probably never go away. What is more interesting is that during my school years I never looked at school as an institution as being repressive or "prison-like", looks like my unconscious/subconscious/whatever there is there inside was very good at repressing that obvious fact.
- dash2 6y ago
  I hated school too. But what caused your nightmares? For me, it was my peers, not oppressive teachers. Most modern high school movies seem to suggest the same thing. So perhaps we should fix the quote. Schools are like prisons - where the prisoners have taken over the institution.
claudiawerner 6y ago
I don't think Marcuse should be taken lightly on this point. As a Jew during the second world war and an immigrant to the US, he worked with Adorno and others who regularly (and correctly, in my opinion) viewed the Holocaust as humanity's greatest horror and a turning point of modernity.
- dash2 6y ago
  Marcuse wasn't a Jew, actually. But yeah, I don't really find the analysis convincing. I mean... amusement parks have towers, and queues, and walls round the outside, like concentration camps? And they're... organized and administered? Somehow this isn't quite getting past the laugh test. (Isaiah Berlin was absolutely outraged by the Marcuse quote, incidentally.) Update: Marcuse was a Jew, actually. My bad. I'd misremembered this from Martin Jay's book.

Bakary 6y ago

For the world to be organized any other way you'd need to essentially revise the entire economic system and social contract. If there are billions of people and very unequal resource partitions this will be the inevitable result

lldbg 6y ago

Foucault advocated for pedophilia, and that knowledge has tainted him for me. Can he still be a moral authority?

smhost 6y ago
skepticism about age of consent laws is a time-honored libertarian tradition. it's not even strictly foucauldian. and as a nietzschean, foucault didn't believe in moral authority.
scandox 6y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_of_consent_laws https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_... More or less the entire French Intellectual establishment argued at that time for "the decriminalization of all consensual relations between adults and minors below the age of fifteen". While I agree that seems extremely stupid, it is based on a morally tenable argument that people under that age could give consent. That may be incorrect but if accepted as a premise would justify their position. So if Foucault believed this and his moral arguments derived from that, it would seem unwise to dismiss all his moral authority just because you believe he was wrong on this point. I personally think he is totally wrong and that even people at the age of eighteen struggle to know their own minds clearly with regard to consent. However I do not as a result think Foucault is impossible to take a moral lead from.
- watwut 6y ago
  > More or less the entire French Intellectual establishment argued at that time Then the question is, how does one become intellectual establishement. Sounds like dissenters were somehow excluded from that nebulous subjective category.
  - scandox 6y ago
    Well I just meant that the roll call of names that signed the petition is fairly extraordinary: Louis Aragon, Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Leiris, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Philippe Sollers, Jacques Rancière, Jean-François Lyotard, Francis Ponge, Bernard Besret

wisty 6y ago

It's funny how people complain about "motivated reasoning" and demand an immense amount of rigour when someone says something they disagree with (say, whichever side people take on the "Google's ideological echo chamber" argument); but are very willing to buy very reductionist and broad statements when their gut tells them it's just right. I suppose maybe there is some truth to it. But he's highly disingenuous with his implications. It's like a Twitter hot-take that's expanded into a book. Hard libertarians might argue that taxation is in some way equivalent to slavery, which is also technically true but a very biased presentation of the facts. Schools and hospitals are similar to prisons in the same way taxation is similar to slavery (you can find similarities, but ignoring the differences is just asinine). Every right requires responsibilities. If students have a right to learn, then schools have a responsibility to teach them. If young adults have a right to be educated in a broad range of topics (many of which did not interest them as children) then children have a responsibility to learn. Control is all about forcing people to take responsibility, because otherwise rights will be unfulfilled. The question isn't whether control exists (it can and should) but whether the intent and implementation is just and efficient. A communist dictator can claim the right to a huge portion of the country's wealth while its population starves, this would be unjust. There are valid questions to ask about control. Is it better to control inputs or outputs? Is it better to have a rule of laws and systems, or a rule of individuals with authority - discretion means giving more power to individuals. Are the trade-offs our society makes currently fair and worthwhile? If a punishment keeps the majority of the population responsible (thus giving creating rights) but hurts the occasional person who is somehow resistant to control is it a bad thing? But simply assuming that control is bad is silly.

Miner49er 6y ago
I think the point isn't that the point of school isn't to learn, as you assume. It's main point is to control, learning is secondary.

Balgair 6y ago

1984's From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe is a great dive into the 'modern' look. It's not a deep look, but a fun one all the same (it is Tom Wolfe after all). He traces the design we all see in the downtowns to the works of early german communists and their desire for good looking spaces and architecture that could cheaply be made for the masses in the coming revolution of the working classes. When capitalists heard about it they stopped listening after 'cheap' was uttered. "Oh, this is the 'modern' look and it's the new thing and it's cheap? Do 'em all like that then." My recollection of Wolfe's short piece is a bit dated, but that's the theme as I remember. It's a short and fun little satirical look at how the 80's downtowns got to be looking as such. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Bauhaus_to_Our_House As an aside, I wonder how Minecraft is going to change the look of architects and cities in the future. I'm dead certain that the architects of the 2070s will have gotten their love of design in Minecraft.

mr_toad 6y ago

> prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals A lot of palaces, museums, galleries, opera houses, universities and houses of government share the same basic layout. You’d be hard pressed to say what the function of the Palace of Westminster was if you didn’t know. It certainly looks a lot like some schools and universities.