The Surveillance System in Your Head is Controlling Your Life
How do you stop surveilling yourself?
Jeremy Bentham was a philosopher whose ideas were used by the British government to design surveillance systems in British prisons of the 18th and 19th centuries.
He came up with the panopticon, a central surveillance unit inside a circular design of a prison in which the inmates would always be watched without knowing they were watched, and thus, would be ruled by the power of “mind over mind.” They would be forced to self-surveil themselves by the very architecture of their prison.
Foucault described how that system of surveillance has been adopted by “power” over the centuries, so that now, from the time a man leaves his house and goes to work, until the time he comes home at night he is more or less under a constant state of surveillance, with power “watching” him and making sure he stays in line.
It is how we relate to this power that defines our project of self, according to Foucault. We can’t just ignore it. We have to kind of play with it and hope that we can adapt our project of self in such a way that it does not get destroyed by power.
The worst thing of all, according to Foucault, is that modern power has enlisted ourselves in the cause of surveillance. We have…
