Orwell Removed the Tower

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 differently.

They control facial expressions.

Eventually, the most efficient surveillance system does not need to intervene constantly because people begin anticipating intervention.

That is why 1984 remains useful even though modern surveillance does not resemble Orwell's machinery.

The technology is different.

The psychological question is not.

Orwell's World Was Centralized

There is, however, a major difference between Orwell's nightmare and ours.

Orwell imagined an unmistakable political surveillance apparatus.

Modern observation can be fragmented.

A retailer gathers one type of information.

A vehicle generates another.

A mobile device generates another.

A camera network generates another.

A data broker assembles another.

A government agency may obtain access to something originally collected elsewhere.

No single Ministry of Truth is required.

The system can emerge from hundreds or thousands of individual systems, each justified separately.

That may make modern surveillance harder to recognize.

There is no enormous tower dominating the skyline.

There may be no single switch capable of turning everything off.

Instead there are contracts, sensors, databases, APIs, retention policies and access agreements.

Orwell imagined the screen staring at you.

The twenty-first century made the screen optional.

The surveillance infrastructure can operate quietly in the background.

And that brings us one step closer to the modern Panopticon: not a society in which everyone visibly confronts the surveillance system, but one in which surveillance becomes so ordinary that people stop noticing the architecture altogether.

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