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“ Eventually something close to full surveillance becomes a reality – close enough that with just one more turn of the screw it can be turned into High-tech Panopticon ”
The High-Modern Panopticon: Technocratic Totalitarianism
The High-Modern Panopticon is a governance model that fuses high-modernism's drive to produce "ultra-legible subjects" (Scott) through classical Weberian bureaucracy with surveillance capitalism's (Zuboff) logic of totalising behavioral control, incipient in Bentham's original prison design and Foucault's disciplinary power. It reaches its most explicit form in Bostrom's global surveillance system — where "freedom tags" with cameras and AI-augmented analysis enable a population to be preemptively policed to prevent civilizational catastrophe from the diffusion of destructive technologies. As a system of power, the HMP utilises big data and digital twin simulations to systematically monitor complex human societies and ultimately render them malleable to social engineering from above: in the darkest of scenarios, forcing the silicon 'gates of the technocratic prison' (Mumford) shut forever, ad infinitum ∞.
❝ Everybody is fitted with a ‘freedom tag’ – a sequent to the more limited wearable surveillance devices familiar today, such as the ankle tag used in several countries as a prison alternative, the bodycams worn by many police forces, the pocket trackers and wristbands that some parents use to keep track of their children, and, of course, the ubiquitous cell phone (which has been characterized as ‘a personal tracking device that can also be used to make calls’). The freedom tag is a slightly more advanced appliance, worn around the neck and bedecked with multidirectional cameras and microphones. Encrypted video and audio is continuously uploaded from the device to the cloud and machine-interpreted in real time.
AI algorithms classify the activities of the wearer, his hand movements, nearby objects, and other situational cues. If suspicious activity is detected, the feed is relayed to one of several patriot monitoring stations. These are vast office complexes, staffed 24/7. There, a freedom officer reviews the video feed on several screens and listens to the audio in headphones. The freedom officer then determines an appropriate action, such as contacting the tagwearer via an audiolink to ask for explanations or to request a better view. The freedom officer can also dispatch an inspector, a police rapid response unit, or a drone to investigate further.
In the small fraction of cases where the wearer refuses to desist from the proscribed activity after repeated warnings, an arrest may be made or other suitable penalties imposed. Citizens are not permitted to remove the freedom tag, except while they are in environments that have been outfitted with adequate external sensors (which however includes most indoor environments and motor vehicles). The system offers fairly sophisticated privacy protections, such as automated blurring of intimate body parts, and it provides the option to redact identity-revealing data such as faces and name tags and release it only when the information is needed for an investigation. Both AI-enabled mechanisms and human oversight closely monitor all the actions of the freedom officers to prevent abuse. ❞
— Nick Bostrom The Vulnerable World Hypothesis Global Policy (2019)
History of the All-Seeing Eye: Omnipresent & Omniscient Surveillance States
The Panopticon (Bentham): The Panopticon (Bentham): Jeremy Bentham's 1791 prison design featuring a circular structure with a central observation tower from which a single guard could observe all inmates without being seen, creating uncertainty about when one is watched. The architectural innovation lay in its efficiency: by making surveillance potentially constant but actually intermittent and invisible, inmates would internalize the disciplinary gaze and regulate their own behavior, reducing the need for actual guards while maximizing behavioral control through the psychological effect of perpetual visibility.
The Panopticon (Foucault): Foucault transformed Bentham's architectural blueprint into a diagnostic concept for modern power—not repressive force but productive discipline shaping subjects from within. In Discipline and Punish, the Panopticon becomes the paradigmatic mechanism of disciplinary societies where surveillance, normalization, and examination create "docile bodies" across institutions. The crucial insight: panoptic power doesn't require constant observation; the mere possibility of being watched induces self-surveillance, making individuals active participants in their own subjection.
Foucault traced power's evolution through three modalities:
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disciplinary power operates through continuous surveillance, normalization, and examination in enclosed institutions like schools, prisons, and factories, producing "docile bodies" that are simultaneously individualized through examination and standardized through norms—power becomes efficient by making subjects discipline themselves rather than through sovereign commands;
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biopower shifts focus from individual bodies to populations, managing life itself through statistics, demography, and interventions optimizing collective vitality (birth rates, public health, longevity), marking biological life's entry into political calculation;
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governmentality emerges as the "art of government" for managing populations through calculated interventions rather than direct commands, using knowledge systems that render populations legible while shaping conduct through apparent freedom.
Succeeding Foucault, Deleuze's Postscripts on the Societies of Control (1990) argues these disciplinary societies are giving way to open-ended digital monitoring that follows individuals across contexts through networks, codes, and databases—shifting from enclosed institutions to continuous modulation, from the molded individual to the "dividual" continuously analyzed through data profiles, enabling infinite postponement (perpetual debt, endless credentialing) while maintaining constant surveillance.
The High-Tech Panopticon (Bostrom): Bostrom's proposal for mandatory wearable surveillance devices ("freedom tags") with cameras and microphones continuously uploading data to AI systems monitoring for civilizationally destructive activities. Presented as necessary infrastructure to stabilize "Type-1 vulnerabilities"—scenarios where individuals could single-handedly destroy cities—by creating "extremely effective preventive policing" through ubiquitous real-time monitoring. The system exits the "semi-anarchic default condition" where states cannot reliably prevent catastrophic individual actions, though Bostrom acknowledges it creates "turnkey totalitarianism" risks.
The Low-Tech Panopticon: Pre-digital surveillance systems achieving panoptic effects through human informant networks, neighborhood watch schemes, political commissars, and centralized dossiers—exemplified by East Germany's Stasi (one informant per 63 citizens). These systems relied on social pressure, fear of denunciation, and meticulous paper records rather than automated monitoring, creating pervasive suspicion where citizens policed each other and themselves. Though labor-intensive, low-tech panopticons demonstrated mass surveillance could function without advanced technology.
The Iron Cage (Weber): Max Weber's metaphor for how modern bureaucratic rationalization traps individuals in systems of instrumental reason and impersonal rules, where efficient but dehumanizing structures make means into ends and transform individuals into cogs in administrative machinery—limiting human freedom and meaning through rationalized control.
The Silicon Cage (Ramsahoye): Weber's iron cage updated for the digital age, where algorithms, platforms, and automated systems create rationalized control through digital code rather than political bureaucracy (legal code). Digital technologies shape behavior through invisible constraints—recommendation systems, content moderation, predictive analytics—creating a cage more flexible yet more totalizing than its iron predecessor.
Silicon Goliath (Kemp): This represents the emerging, modern iteration of the Goliath structure, where control is maintained through mass surveillance and advanced algorithmic systems. In this model, the primary "Goliath fuel" shifts from physical grains or gold to data (a lootable resource), while mass surveillance systems serve as the mechanism for "caging" the population. It marks a transition where dominance is enforced not just by physical force, but by automated cognition, killer robots, and the centralization of information power.
A Typology of Totalitarianisms: The Path to Absolute Power
Totalitarianism (Arendt): Hannah Arendt distinguishes totalitarianism from authoritarianism through its aspiration to total domination of all private life, not just politics. Key features include comprehensive ideology explaining all history, systematic terror destroying social bonds, and elimination of public-private distinctions. Unlike tyrannies suppressing opposition, totalitarianism remakes human nature through propaganda creating fictional reality that replaces objective truth—sustained through isolation and arbitrary terror.
Inverted Totalitarianism (Wollin): Sheldon Wolin's concept for contemporary democracies achieving totalitarian ends through inverted methods. Unlike classical totalitarianism mobilizing masses via charismatic leaders, inverted totalitarianism operates through corporate power deliberately demobilizing citizens into political passivity and consumerism. Democratic forms remain (elections, constitution) while substance is hollowed out, with real power exercised through economic dominance—totalitarianism through depoliticization rather than mobilization.
Stable Totalitarianism (Clare, 80K): The prospect that modern surveillance, AI, and data processing could enable totalitarian systems to achieve unprecedented permanence by overcoming historical fragility. Advanced technological control—comprehensive surveillance, social credit systems, algorithmic prediction, automated enforcement—could eliminate the conditions (information asymmetries, coordination problems) that destabilized past authoritarian regimes. AI could automate oppression by detecting dissent preemptively, creating a "lock-in scenario" where technological totalitarianism becomes effectively irreversible.
The Operational Ideologies of Technological Modernity
Modernism: A cultural movement (roughly 1880-1940) characterized by deliberate breaks with tradition and faith that reason, science, and technology could reshape society by sweeping away inherited constraints. Modernism celebrated the new, rational, and efficient—Bauhaus functionalism, Joyce's fragmented narratives, Fordist production—unified by conviction that innovative techniques could solve social problems. Examples include Le Corbusier's planned cities, Schoenberg's atonal music, and abstract art, all expressing confidence that systematic reason would create superior social and aesthetic orders.
High-modernism (Scott): Scott's term for an authoritarian modernism variant combining supreme confidence in scientific progress with willingness to use state power to impose rational order on society and nature. High-modernists prefer geometric simplicity and standardization, treating local practices as obstacles rather than repositories of practical knowledge (mētis)—exemplified by Soviet collectivization and Brasília's planning. The ideology becomes dangerous when four elements converge: administrative ordering, high-modernist faith, authoritarian power, and prostrate civil society—producing catastrophic failures by ignoring practical wisdom in organic social orders.
Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff): An economic system pioneered by Google and Facebook claiming human experience as raw material for behavioral data, computed into prediction products sold in behavioral futures markets. Unlike industrial capitalism's labor commodification, surveillance capitalism commodifies everyday experience through extraction of behavioral surplus—data from searches, movements, purchases, interactions. This creates radical asymmetry: companies see us far better than we see them, using machine intelligence to predict and shape our behavior for commercial interests, transforming labor exploitation into life exploitation through "instrumentation power."
Dataism (Harari): Harari's term for an emerging worldview treating data flow and information processing as supreme values, supplanting humanist faith in feelings and religious faith in commands. Dataism holds that the universe consists of data flows, system value lies in data processing contribution, and freedom means maximum information flow—making human experience valuable only insofar as it generates data. This underlies convictions that we should outsource decisions to algorithms, that connecting everything to the "Internet of All Things" is desirable, and that human consciousness may become irrelevant once external algorithms process information more efficiently.
Technocracy: A governance ideology advocating rule by technical experts rather than elected politicians, treating social and political problems as technical challenges with objectively correct solutions discoverable through specialized knowledge. Technocracy depoliticizes governance by framing policy questions as technical optimization problems, marginalizing value-based debates and local knowledge in favor of data-driven expert decision-making.
The Cybernetic Hypothesis (Tiqqun): the thesis that cybernetics — the science of systems, communication, and control — functions as the dominant political rationality of late capitalism, treating society as a self-regulating system requiring constant adjustment and feedback loops. Emerging from post-WWII military research, cybernetic governance replaces sovereign command with homeostatic regulation: problems become "dysfunctions" requiring technical adjustment rather than political contestation, while humans are reimagined as nodes in information networks whose behavior must be optimized through feedback mechanisms. This creates a totalizing framework where all resistance is preemptively incorporated as "negative feedback" to be corrected, transforming politics into systems management and eliminating the possibility of genuine rupture or revolutionary change.
References (10)
Nick Bostrom The Vulnerable World Hypothesis Global Policy (2019)
Stephen Clare Stable Totalitarianism as an Existential Risk Factor 80,000 Hours (2023)
Gilles Deleuze Postscript on the Societies of Control (1992)
Shoshana Zuboff The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power PublicAffairs (2019)
Yuval Noah Harari Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016)
Tiqqun (collective) The Cybernetic Hypothesis translated by Robert Hurley Semiotext (2020)
James C. Scott Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998)
Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977)
Jeremy Bentham The Panopticon Writings edited by Miran Božovič (1995)
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