----- Forwarded message from Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com> ----- Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 10:19:31 +0200 From: Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com> To: a moderated mailing list for net criticism <nettime-l@mail.kein.org> Subject: Re: <nettime> Pascal Zachary: Rules for the Digital Panopticon (IEEE) Message-ID: <5257B493.1010201@openflows.com> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.0 Reply-To: a moderated mailing list for net criticism <nettime-l@mail.kein.org> The concept of the panopticon has been very popular ever since Foucault elevated it to the rank of a central metaphor for modernity in "Discipline and Punishment" (1975). And the NSA revelations seem to confirm its usefulness once again. But I think this is mistaken. We are not living in a panoptic world at all, at least not in the Bentham/Foucault sense of the term (is there any other?). I follow here largely Zygmunt Bauman, one of the last negative thinkers in the European tradition. He makes two arguments against in this regard: First: "Today's Big Brother is not about keeping people in and making them stick to the line, but about kicking people out and making sure that when they are kicked out that they will duly go and won't come back." And, more importantly, Bauman argues, power hates the responsibility/costs that comes with being a prison guard / running a prison (assuming they have not been turned into a source of profit). They don't want to be tied down, together with the inmates. They want to be mobile, weightless and separate. So surveillance has been decentralized and turned into task performed by the prison inmates themselves, and make into a precondition for staying inside: think credit ratings, facebook friends, google ranks etc. You have to make yourself continuously and actively available for surveillance, provide your own data, in your own time and at your own costs, in order to avoid big brother to jump into action and kick you out. Some people are using the concept of "ban-opticon" to express this. On 10/10/2013 08:41 PM, Patrice Riemens wrote:

original to: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/rules-for-the-digital-panopticon

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