From the Desk of Kiler Davenport

George Orwell did not write 1984 as a book about Jeremy Bentham. But the world of 1984 contains a principle Bentham would have recognized immediately. You do not need to know whether you are being watched. You need to know that you could be . The Telescreen Orwell's telescreen collapses the distance between surveillance and ordinary life. Observation enters the home. That represents an important development in the Panopticon's evolution. Bentham's prisoner entered a surveillance institution. Orwell's citizen lived inside one. There was no meaningful boundary between the institution and everyday existence. That distinction is enormous. The Panopticon surrounds the prisoner. Orwell surrounds society. The Psychological Objective Both systems understand something fundamental about human behavior. Certainty is unnecessary. Possibility can be enough. People behave differently when observation might be occurring. They choose words differently. They select companions differen...

Every surveillance system creates two populations. The watched. And the watchers. We spend enormous amounts of time discussing the first. Bentham's Panopticon forces us to confront the second. Power at the Center The central inspector possesses something the prisoner does not. Information. The inspector can see outward. The prisoner cannot see inward. That imbalance is what makes the architecture work. But once that imbalance exists, another problem appears. What restrains the person at the center? Critics of Bentham eventually focused heavily on this problem. Historian Shirley Robin Letwin, writing in the twentieth century, attacked the Panopticon's relentless emphasis on administrative efficiency and warned about the danger created when human beings become objects of centralized management. The criticism extends far beyond Bentham. A surveillance system cannot be evaluated solely by asking whether it catches wrongdoing. We must also ask whether the system itself can be abused...

Jeremy Bentham never saw his exact Panopticon prison realized as he imagined it. The idea survived anyway. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, architects and governments experimented with radial prisons, circular prisons and institutions influenced to varying degrees by the central-inspection principle. The distinction matters because not every circular prison was a true Benthamite Panopticon. But the concept had escaped its creator. The Netherlands Circular penitentiaries were constructed in places including Arnhem, Breda and Haarlem. Their great domed interiors created an unmistakable spatial hierarchy. Cells surrounded an open central space. Authority occupied the center. The incarcerated occupied the circumference. Yet physical construction exposed one of Bentham's problems: perfect surveillance was harder to achieve in practice than on paper. Some supposedly panoptic prisons did not provide the unobstructed observation Bentham's theoretical model dema...

There are years that pass quietly into history—and then there are years that divide time into a before and an after. For millions of people, 2020 became that dividing line. We resumed working. Businesses reopened. Traffic returned. Events filled the calendar again. From the outside, society appeared to restart. But beneath the visible activity, something never fully returned. The rhythm of life changed. Time seems to pass more quickly now. Weeks collapse into months, and entire years disappear before we feel we have lived them. People are connected to more devices, platforms and information than ever before, yet many feel increasingly isolated from one another—and sometimes from themselves. Earlier decades were not perfect, but they seemed to contain more natural pauses. Summers had room to unfold. Music belonged to recognizable periods. Holidays created anticipation. People gathered without documenting every moment, and boredom sometimes became imagination rather than a problem requir...

A prison guard who must watch every prisoner continuously has an impossible job. Bentham proposed another solution. Make prisoners unable to determine when they are being watched. That single change transforms surveillance. The objective is no longer continuous observation. The objective becomes continuous uncertainty. You Don't Need an Eye on Every Person Bentham's central tower was designed so that the inspector could see the prisoners while the prisoners could not reliably see the inspector. The effect was psychological. If you cannot determine when observation occurs, the safest assumption is that observation might occur at any moment. Behavior begins changing accordingly. This is the Panopticon's enduring insight. The system becomes powerful not because surveillance is literally constant, but because its subjects cannot establish its boundaries. That distinction becomes even more important in digital environments. You may not know which camera is recordi...

The Panopticon did not begin with prisoners. It began with workers. That distinction matters. Jeremy Bentham's younger brother Samuel developed the central-inspection principle while working in Russia, where he faced the practical problem of supervising labor. The idea was straightforward: arrange people and work so that a small number of managers could observe a much larger number of workers. Jeremy saw something larger in it. The principle could become architecture. And architecture could become management. The arrangement eventually evolved into the famous circular prison: individual cells around the perimeter, an inspection station at the center and an asymmetry that gave the observer extraordinary informational power. The people on the outside could be seen. The person in the center could not. The University College London Bentham Project traces the central-inspection principle directly to Samuel's Russian work before Jeremy adapted it into his proposed Inspectio...