Part 3 |
The Panopticon |
|
While the Clinton administration was attempting to build the type of groundswell for the National Information Infrastructure (NII) that characterized Kennedy’s Space Program, a troubling vision of the proposed information matrix was coalescing in academic circles. If the NII was to usher in an era of technological freedom, its opponents saw a dangerous nightmare that was already present. This section outlines:
The Inspection House
In 1791, Jeremy Bentham proposed a new era in penal reform with the publication of his book, Panoptican or The Inspection House. He envisioned a novel prison architecture based on a simple idea: implied surveillance. A central tower was placed at the hub of a circular building, the individual prison cells fanning out from this tower in a mandala-like pattern. The key to Bentham’s design was the tower’s visual supremacy. All inmates could see the tower, the tower could see into every cell. But inmates never knew whether anyone was in the tower or whether they were watching. Bentham suggested that this ever-present surveillance, whether actual or implied, would stop the inmates of his Panopticon from behaving in an inappropriate manner. George Orwell, in his famously dystopian novel 1984, generalized Bentham’s ideas from a single building to social control on a grand scale. His characters live in a society under constant surveillance, where every word they utter, every gesture, every thought could become evidence of their own guilt. And, as in the Panopticon, this surveillance is never relegated to the background. The inhabitants of 1984 are constantly reminded of their subjugation: Though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-moustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Inspection As Power
The panopticon as a symbol for contemporary methods of social control was revitalized by Michel Foucault in the late 1970’s. Calling upon his early studies of eighteenth-century medical architecture and penal reform, Foucault explored the organizing and isolating tendencies of the panopticon in a series of works. In his book Power/Knowledge, Foucault invoked the panopticon with its promise of seeing-without-being-seen as a symbol of the ultimate power of authority: "There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorization to the point that he is his own overseer..." Social theorists eagerly applied Foucault’s reading of the panopticon metaphor to subjects ranging from cultural history to pedagogy. While several authors in the 1980’s began to write about newfound threats to personal privacy, it was cultural theorist Oscar Gandy who galvanized the growing concerns about the loss of autonomy in the burgeoning information society. His seminal 1993 book, The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information, used Bentham’s model to denote the digital infrastructure as being both the circular walls and the central tower of a modern panopticon. Gandy vividly painted the "panoptic sort as a typr of hih-tech cybernetic triage through which individuals an groups are being sorted" to meet corporate and political ends. The author detailed the types of "all-seeing" institutions that covertly track, collect and manage the continuous flow of personal data that pulse across the globe every minute. His list of panoptic watchers included the CIA, various financial institutions, and the IRS. In addition to "real world" transactions, Gandy warned of the potential for clandestine surveillance of consumer activity on the Internet. Other authors of this period took up the panoptic metaphor to warn the general public of the deleterious consequences of the digital infrastructure. Howard Rheingold, in The Virtual Community, also predicted the rise of electronic consumerism as a surveillance tool: 
It will begin not by secret police kicking in your doors but by allowing you to sell yourself to your television and letting your supermarket sell information about your transactions, while outlawing measures you could use to protect yourself. (Rheingold, 1993) Rheingold’s prediction is slowly being realized. Several years after the publication of The Virtual Community, the Safeway grocery stores instituted a new program by which shoppers could get discounts on products by using their Safeway card when making purchases This red plastic card resembled any credit card. It was the same shape and had the familiar magnetic strip on the back. The shopper had the grocery clerk scan the card while making purchases, and a discount was taken off the bill. Unfortunately, customers didn’t know that their personal information and their purchasing patterns were being collated the corporation. Who knows what Safeway does with that information? There may be no way of knowing how they use it or to whom they sell it. Rheingold was predicting the future. David Lyon, in his Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society, also drew parallels between Bentham, Orwell, and the information infrastructure. Lyon points to the role of digitized transactions as the foundation of the panoptic sort: Orwell’s dystopic vision was dominated by the central state. He never guessed just how significant a decentralized consumerism might become for social control. The Panopticon, on the other hand, offers scope for social analytic interpretation in precisely such contexts. (Lyon, 1996) Inspection As Control
Over the next several years, references to the Panopticon were used liberally to bring together ideas of digital surveillance, consumerism, and social control. In 1995, Gandy’s views were applied directly to the National Information Infrastructure by Alex Wexelblatt of the MIT Media Lab in a paper entitled "How The NII Is Like A Prison." In his paper, Wexelblatt expands upon Foucault’s (and Gandy’s) thesis that the corporate and governmental panoptic sort would necessarily lead to self-censorship: People trained to expect denial (of services, credit or opportunity) will soon cease applying for more. Subject to observation at any time by unknown persons with unpredictable means of retribution, we chill our own speech and action in ways antithetical to democracy. This process is already in evidence in America today. (Wexelblatt, 1995) These words directly reflected Foucault’s concern that implied surveillance created a self-limiting stance of censoring one’s own thoughts and desires. However, Wexelblatt is not talking about overarching cultural mores and behaviors as did Foucault. He is describing the effect of a concrete technology that was actively being built at the time. This author was calling for a rethinking of the NII concept from the ground up. While Gore was heralding in a radiant era of technological marvels, Wexelblatt and his peers warned of the already-emerging dangers inherent in the NII. If the Information Superhighway was to be built on the pre-existing network of corporate and governmental computer hardware, wouldn’t the existent privacy issues necessarily escalate? What systems were being devised that would ensure that these new technologies were being used responsibly? Within a week of Gore’s first public address on the NII in 1993, journalist Brock Meek posted the following on a bulletin board in the “Wired” section of the cybercommunity The Well: Buried deep in his speech, in a single ominous sentence, Gore made a pledge that is sure to send a chill into privacy advocates everywhere: “We’ll help law enforcement agencies thwart criminals and terrorists who might use advanced telecommunications to commit crimes.” In laymen’s terms: We’re f*ked. (Meeks, 1993) For all of the Vice President’s shining rhetoric, the increasingly panoptic potential of his program was clear. Meek’s comment in an online bulletin board visited mostly by computer scientists attests to the growing consciousness in that field of the dangers of the NII. While America was beginning to pour money into Gore’s project, many people were also beginning to fell an acute case of buyer’s remorse. |
Follow Trail: Fallout |