This was the final paper for my WRA 260 class. Finished on 03 May 2005.
The idea of the Panopticon has evolved since its creation in the late 18th century. It began as a simple concept for a prison, proposed to Czarina Catherine the Great, blossomed into a social theory and observation by Michael Foucault, and finally metamorphosed into the messy interaction between observer and observed that we can find on the Internet today. Those who espouse theories of a purposeful and universal Panopticism in every-day modern life are labeled as paranoids living on the fringe of society, while those that deny the Panopticon’s existence ignore the obvious evidence that stares them in the face. A prime study of the modern evolution of the Panopticon can be found on the Internet.
Jeremy Bantham, an English lawyer living in the early 18th and late 19th centuries, was quite interested in social and political reform. He is considered one of the forefathers of utilitarianism, a principle which he felt was embodied in his “greatest happiness principle.” Today, his theories are considered to be based upon a refined form of hedonism. Bantham considered that which brought pleasure to be good, and that which brought pain and suffering to be evil. So, in a logical fashion, acts that ran contrary to happiness, even the happiness of society, were morally wrong. He applied this to all aspects of his life, including both law and politics. For instance, Bantham wrote quite a bit on the subject of liberty. He considered liberty good, as it brought about strong happiness on an individual scale. Since law, by necessity, limits liberty, law is inherently evil. However, law is needed to ensure that the happiness afforded by liberty can be granted to everyone in a society. Therefore, happiness is brought about on the greatest scale by logical and well thought out law that restricts liberty by only the needed amount, and no more. Bantham, then, would have considered properly applied law a greater good, while both liberty and law, when mishandled, could bring about suffering, and therefore evil.
This philosophy was taken into account during a trip to Russia to visit his brother. Bantham created the concept of the Panopticon, a “perfect prison”, for Czarina Catherine the Great. The building was designed in the shape of an octagon, built around a central tower. The cells were located in the outer ring, the octagon itself, and were always well lit. One wall of each cell was open to the central tower, which was always darkened. Thus, anyone observing from the tower could observe without being observed in turn. Because of this, whether or not a prisoner was actually being observed, the possibility was strong enough to persuade him to act on his best behavior. Bantham carried this concept a step farther, stating that those whose duty it was to watch should also be observed in a similar manner by their superiors, so as to discourage any untoward acts while on the job. The Czarina never accepted this idea from Bantham. Indeed, the concept never found fruition while he was alive, despite its widespread implications in today’s society.
In the 1970’s, Michael Foucault published his observations of society in relation to the concept of Bantham’s Panopticon. In this work, he traced the concept’s development from the prison design, to a community set up, to a workplace environment, and finally to an insinuation of observation by authorities in day-to-day life. He makes the argument that prison design eventually works its way into all nooks and crannies of society. Today, one of the most prevalent examples is the Internet.
The Internet was a project begun by the military. In an effort to keep communication and data transfer available during a nuclear attack, our cold-war government tasked the military with linking several of its base computer networks with key universities across the country. Programmers in the military and at the universities slowly developed protocols such as e-mail, USENet, Internet Relay Chat, and others. The World Wide Web, the component of the Internet that is most commonly believed to be the whole, didn’t arrive until over a decade after the original project began. In the mid-nineties, when the World Wide Web was made mainstream by such bulletin board systems as Prodigy, CompuServe, and America Online, the original idea of a distributed communication system in case of apocalyptic disaster was shoved to the background in favor of a bold new marketplace.
Even such early bulletin boards as Prodigy were employing the Panopticon – a file was placed on each user’s hard drive that tracked everywhere the customer went and everything the customer did, in order to better “serve the customer.” In reality, this is a common tactic to gather information to track market trends. Every user that was logging on to Prodigy was being observed from the darkened tower; every single movement was tracked.
Like the concept of the Panopticon, the Internet has evolved. From its many and varied purposes and protocols, a few have survived in wide-spread use. Certainly there are still users out there, “hard core” and “old school”, using USENet, IRC, and Gopher, but these are few and far between. E-mail exists today in the exact same way it did at the beginning, though programs have evolved to include multimedia content and file attachments. The World Wide Web still exists as a collection of home pages and bookmarks, though the script used to code the pages have become nothing less than crystalline in their complexity and ability to create beauty. Interactivity and multimedia blossom as this protocol has become known, simply, as “the internet.” Chat has succumbed to the concept of Instant Messaging, which originated in America Online’s not-quite-internet service, and migrated to the Internet with programs like ICQ, AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, MSN Messenger, and Jabber. This type of chatting has become so prevalent that programs were designed to incorporate all of the different IM protocols into one program. Two popular examples are Trillian for the PC and Adium for the Macintosh. Most popular of all is Peer-to-Peer Networking, or P2P for short. Programs, and the companies that made them, such as Napster, Morpheus, Gnutella, Limewire, and others have all become the target of both music and movie distributing companies – not to mention their lawyers. This type of networking, currently culminated in the BitTorrent protocol, is wildly popular. It has a particular influence on the Internet’s version of the Panopticon that I will address later. Together, all of these protocols make up today’s Internet.
Technology is reaching the point that tracking anyone, anywhere, anytime will only be hampered by sorting through the glut of information that is being fed to those in authority. Cellular phones are tracked – in case of dialing 911 for emergencies – by global positioning satellites. Otherwise, you have a few-square-mile radius by tower triangulation. Soon, with the wireless technology that can connect your cell phone to your laptop, radar images of the immediate area will be available by bathing the area with communication waves from that cellular phone. Cameras linked into wireless Internet hot spots are available and will replace normal security cameras. These cameras will soon be wireless Internet routers in their own right, linking each other and supporting routes of connectivity if one or a few go south. Motion-sensitive cameras are already covering the Detroit suburban area, so that the traffic light knows if there is a car waiting for it to change. Microphones and radar devices can already tell a police officer what is going on inside a relatively small house, so there is little need for a search warrant. Soon, many of these technologies will be able to be solar-powered. Permanent and semi-permanent observation installations will be quick and easy to install. The available technology allows the observer to stay in his darkened tower, watching more easily than ever.
Panopticon and E-Government
There are two words that strike annoyance into the hearts of Internet Service Providers everywhere. Carnivore and Eschelon. Each of these is a program created by government agencies, and each is designed to monitor the Internet traffic of users, with or without their permission. Code words can trigger an email being copied and re-routed to a government facility. Terrorist. Jihad. Al-Queda. Hussein. Even electronic communications without these triggers can be diverted as a random sample from the very backbone (the ISP of your ISP) of your local Internet connection. E-mail and chat are the big targets of our government agencies, as any other part of the Internet can be monitored without intrusive measures. This is done in the guise of protecting ourselves and our children from terrorism and malicious “hackers and crackers.” Despite the limited number of such people, both the media and the government would have you believe that your computer is constantly at risk, and these evildoers could destroy your data at any moment. Luckily for these agencies – and the corporations that write the aforementioned software – fear works the same both on and off the ‘net. The Panopticon becomes reinforced, as safety is desired over autonomy. Once again, the elevated value of a perceived safety brings about observation on a massive scale. The truth is, there are only a few of these malicious hackers and crackers out there; most are pubescent and pre-pubescent teens with something to prove. A financial or business network is far more tantalizing a target than the pictures of your vacation to Timbuktu.
Peer-to-peer networking is used to share files. While the protocol and programs themselves are not illegal, these networks are most used to illegally share music and movie files. These creative works are shared without the author’s or distributor’s consent, and therefore constitute copyright violation. The argument can be made that this is just the new incarnation of bootleg cassette tapes, which brought about the popularity of the bands that are most vocally against this sharing, like Metallica. This argument tends to continue with tirades about how information and art should be free to all, and that these networks promote a universality of sharing amongst their users. If this were true, I would welcome such a utopian ideal and noble practice. However, statistics show that a mere 1% of users on these networks share 75% of the files. This layout does not promote sharing of any kind; it simply functions as a distribution network. A few distribute the illegally copied material to the many.
Initially, this sort of file sharing may have had little or nothing to do with the Panopticon. More recently, however, major distributors of movies and music have used their combined legal power to create a darkened tower in the center of these networks. Previously illegal systems, such as Napster, have been forced into the legality of pay-for-play systems. Other legal alternatives have arisen, such as mp3.com and the iTunes Music Store. Each of these tracks your purchases, what kind of music you like, etc. The party line is that this is done so that you may re-download the songs that you’ve already purchased, in case your computer crashes. As more and more audio and video media players (Windows Media Player, RealPlayer, Quicktime) begin to log your actions, they report back what kind of internet-based music you listen to and what kind of movies and movie trailers you watch. Some are even set this way right after they are installed, and you must turn this function off if you don’t want it. While there have been controversies about these default settings, they have been short-lived. Outcry is quickly silenced as these companies leverage for control of the darkened tower.
Spyware is the first instance on the Internet of the Panopticon backfiring. Spyware, like virus programs, copy themselves. They replicate, install themselves on your computer, and run all on their own. Spyware programs are most commonly contracted through Peer-to-Peer networking programs, taskbar weather programs like WeatherBug, and through email attachments. In all of these ways, Spyware and virus programs are very similar. Instead of being intentionally malicious, Spyware is designed to advertise and track. It tracks the places you go, records the information, and sends it back to the company that made it. It creates pop-up and pop-under advertisements, tailored to the sites that you have previously visited. It uses as much of your computer’s resources as it can to do this as it replicates itself. In concept, this type of program is the epitome of an Internet-based consumer Panopticon. Unfortunately, most computers cannot handle many of these programs running at the same time. A few will slow your computer and Internet speeds to a crawl, more than that will outright crash your machine.
In the rush to take advantage of this advertising tool, the designers of Spyware have made their programs too effective. They spread quickly and indiscriminately, each jockeying for the resources of your computer. These programs alone can overload your computer’s ability to allocate its resources by themselves, let alone when you attempt to use your computer. The resultant crash defeats the purpose of these programs, as they can no longer harvest and report data. In this case, the observer will be able to observe for a time, but the tool that allows them to observe will eventually darken the room that they are watching.
The Internet, in its various forms, has an incredibly complex effect on the concept of the Panopticon. The Internet is forcing the Panopticon to evolve more quickly than ever before. The technology for real-world observation via the Internet becomes more viable every day. The hardware becomes cheaper, and the preference for replacing manpower with technology grows exponentially. Among the different protocols that make up the Internet, the Panopticon is evolving in different ways. The government can and does monitor electronic communication via email, instant message, and chat with software programs that are designed to both search for keywords and randomly sample data from main communication trunks. Peer-to-peer networking has enhanced the legality of the Panopticon as major companies bring suit against the biggest distributors of copyrighted material.
The Internet also seems to be a key motivator in a new resident of the darkened tower. In the past, the Big Brother that has been in that tower has been government. In this case, corporations seem to be elbowing for their own room as residents, even masters of the tower. As the observed, we also can be said to be moving from the seat of citizen to that of consumer. It is becoming just as important to know what we are buying as it is to know what we are reading, where we are traveling, and with whom we are associated.
Can either Big Brother Government or Big Brother Corporation handle the information that they’re scrambling for? The government’s random samples of data bring them gigabytes of information daily, and they need more people than they can hire to sort through it to determine its relevancy. Purchasing and shopping information is so detailed and so intuitive to begin with, what can a glut of details do except for reinforce trends that have been plotted by simpler means? We have already seen what too many information-gathering tools can do to a computer that is connected to the Internet. Machines crash every day from having too much Spyware installed. How long before there are more rooms – more people – in the tower than in the prison? How useless has the data already become when so many Internet users already use false identities? The sheer mass of the information gathered becomes coupled with the anonymity of the Internet, which will only increase misrepresented trends and false positives.
While the Internet may be pushing the Panopticon to evolve to a new and frightening size, it is unlikely that increasing the size of the tower will increase its efficiency. Those of us who are observed, and were raised being observed, will continue to ignore the tower unless forced to look directly at the structure. In the end, the structure of the Panopticon will become useless when mining information from the Internet. There is simply too much information, true and false, to be efficiently sorted through. However, if the Internet is used as a tool for moving real-world data, such as observations from wireless and solar-powered cameras, the power of the Panopticon in “meatspace” will only increase.
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URL: http://theoryandscience.icaap.org/content/vol003.001/brignall.html
(2002)
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URL: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/rant/panopticon-essay.html
(2002)
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