The tower sees every cell; the person in the cell cannot see inside the tower. The possibility of being watched does more than a constant supervisor would: a person becomes the guard of their own behaviour.
When surveillance is mentioned, we first think of a pair of eyes watching us. The camera, the guard, the police officer or the manager is visible; we change our behaviour accordingly. What makes the idea of the panopticon striking is that we do not know whether the watcher is really looking. The tower at the centre can see every cell, while the person in the cell cannot see inside the tower. The possibility of being watched does more than a constant supervisor would: a person becomes the guard of their own behaviour.
From a prison design to a model of society
The panopticon designed by Jeremy Bentham was an architectural project aimed at supervising a large number of prisoners with few staff. Michel Foucault used this model not merely as a prison plan but as a symbol for understanding modern disciplinary society. School, hospital, factory and barracks were also building structures that made bodies visible, divided time and recorded behaviour.
Discipline was subtler than raw violence. It did not merely punish a person; it turned them into a usable, comparable and correctable subject. The examination defined the student, the file the patient, the performance record the employee. Once a person entered the record, their past came out to meet them and turned into the measure of their future treatment.
The economy of the possibility of being watched
Watching everyone at every moment is expensive and usually impossible. But if people do not know when they are being watched, supervision comes far cheaper. We do not know whether the traffic camera is working, which emails the employer reads or which movement the platform will treat as suspicious. This uncertainty can lead us to restrict our behaviour more than necessary in order to stay on the safe side.
The most successful form of surveillance leaves no need for obedience to be imposed from outside. The employee extends their own hours at the screen, the student works not only to learn but according to the constant possibility of assessment, the citizen keeps quiet thinking which word might one day be held against them. Even if the watcher disappears, their gaze goes on living in the mind.
Keeping records is not neutral
Modern institutions see the record as a representation of objective reality. Yet what is recorded and what is left out is a choice. The number of emails an employee sends is measured, while the invisible problems they solved may never enter the record. A student’s exam mark is stored, the support they gave a friend forgotten. The system tends to treat what it can measure as real and what it cannot as unimportant.
Records also fix people to their past behaviour. A mistake can turn into a score, the score into a risk profile, the risk profile into a narrowing of future opportunities. Even if the person changes, the file follows them. Surveillance does not only regulate present behaviour; it turns the past into a permanent authority over the future.
What is different about the digital panopticon
Today’s surveillance has no single tower. Phone, card, camera, browser and platforms collect different data. Moreover people do not merely endure being watched; they produce their own data in exchange for sharing, convenience and visibility. In the classical panopticon the prisoner wanted to escape the tower. In the digital order the user may experience not being seen as a kind of social non-existence.
This does not make surveillance voluntary. When communication, work and public services are tied to particular platforms, not using the system creates a heavy cost. The “I accept” button is not a real negotiation. In order to reach a service, people hand over a wide field of data without knowing how it will be processed.
Visibility for whom, darkness for whom?
In a panoptic order the governed are visible and the governors invisible. While an institution collects detailed information about us, it may not explain how the algorithm decides. While the state demands transparency from the citizen, it may hide its own transactions on grounds of security or confidentiality. The company measures the employee but does not share the details of its pay policy and management decisions.
The opposite of surveillance is not being wholly invisible. Shared life requires some records and mutual knowledge. The point is that visibility should not be one-directional. The institution collecting data must also explain its purposes, criteria and decisions; a person must be able to reach the record about them, correct errors and have unnecessary data deleted.
The panopticon tells us not merely that we are watched but how the possibility of being watched transforms us. Freedom is not limited to looking for a corner without a camera. It is being able to ask who sees whom by what right, how long the record is kept and why the owner of the gaze remains invisible.
The power of the panopticon today lies in the watcher not being a single person. Camera footage is held by a security unit, location data by an app company, purchase history by a bank, health data in yet another system. Each piece may look ordinary on its own; combined, they produce a detailed portrait of a person’s habits, circle, fears and movements. Most of the time a person does not know among whom that portrait circulates, in which decision it is used and how long it is kept.
For surveillance to change behaviour, the records need not actually be examined continuously. When an employee thinks a screenshot could be taken, a student that exam software might treat facial movements as suspicious, a citizen that they could be identified by cameras in the square, they adjust their behaviour in advance. Not arousing suspicion becomes a new everyday task. The problem is not only that offenders are caught; it is that “normal” behaviour is defined by the system and the burden of explaining ordinary deviations is left to the individual.
Surveillance is not error-free either. A false match, missing context and biased data can make innocent behaviour look risky. Because the record is taken as objective, a person is forced to prove what they lived through. A device’s location error, a wrong result from facial recognition or the suspicion of an automated exam monitor may count as more reliable than a personal account. Surveillance thus does not merely see; it also decides whose narrative will be accepted as true.
It is therefore wrong to see privacy as the demand of “those with something to hide.” A person can experiment, err and change to the extent that they do not know they are being watched, can live their different identities in separate spheres and do not have every behaviour turned into a permanent file. The possibility of being forgotten is one of the conditions of freedom. Opposing the panopticon is not defending the right to commit crimes in the dark; it is making the owner of the gaze visible, the record limited and the watched a party able to object.