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Video Description
The old totalitarian dream of total surveillance never achieved its goal — until the smartphone went into every pocket. This lecture from Academy of Ideas draws on Weissman’s Crowdsourced Panopticon to describe the prison we now carry with us. In this new arrangement, the many watch the many, and the many punish the few, through shame, doxing, and mob judgment. The deepest trap is that we internalize the guard’s gaze and police ourselves. The video asks whether it amounts to a new kind of invisible slavery — and ends by asking if the same technology could ever be turned toward freedom.
Full Video Transcript
In the book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt describes the rudimentary mass
surveillance system used by the secret police force of the Russian Empire.
Every suspect was noted on a large card in the center of which his name was surrounded by a
red circle. His political friends were designated by smaller red circles and his non-political
acquaintances by green ones. Cross relationships between the suspect’s friends, political and
non-political, and the friends of his friends, were indicated by lines between the respective
circles this system was limited by the technology of the early 20th century but theoretically a
gigantic single sheet could show the relations and cross-relationships of the entire population
and a network of this type rent called the utopian goal of the totalitarian secret police
this goal however was not utopian this goal has been achieved and in many ways far exceeded in
In this video, relying on the fascinating book by Jeremy Weissman, The Crowd-Sourced
Panopticon, we are going to explore how modern communication technologies have given rise
to the most dystopian mass surveillance states the world has ever known.
Technology, a child of modern science, is out of humanity’s control, has ceased to
serve us, has enslaved us and compelled us to participate in the preparation of our own
destruction.
To be effective, a mass surveillance state requires the coexistence of two systems, a
system of surveillance and a system of control.
In his book Private Lies and Public Surveillance, James Rule defines a system of surveillance
as consisting of those activities having to do with collecting and maintaining information,
so that those in charge know, when rules are being obeyed, when they are broken, and, most
important, who is responsible for which.
Systems of control, on the other hand, consist of the actions, procedures, and mechanisms
used to enforce the rules, norms, and laws of a society.
Or in the words of Ruhle, a system of control consists of the actual management of behavior
through sanctioning or exclusion.
In the mass surveillance states of the 20th century, be it the Soviet Union or East Germany,
police forces, spies, civilian informants, judges, and jailers were the key players in
systems of surveillance and control. But in modern surveillance states,
these systems are augmented by a peer-to-peer component. No longer are political suspects,
dissidents and others deemed to be enemies of the state, merely watched by police,
followed by spies, or reported on by informants. And no longer are judges and jailers the only
ones to dole out punishment. Rather, we live in a world transforming into a panopticon type of
open-air prison, where the many watch the many, and the many punish the few.
The Panopticon is an architectural creation of the 18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham,
and as Weissman explains, The core of the Panopticon’s design
consists of a roundhouse with prison cells encircling all sides, visibly open,
light shining upon them, and stacked on top of each other to form circular walls.
In the center is a watchtower, which is cleverly installed with a combination of Venetian blinds
and mirrors, so that inmates in their cells, all at an equal distance from the tower,
can never be sure if they are being watched by the guard.
A smartphone in every pocket, smart devices all around us, and all constantly connected to the
internet, has created a variation of the Panopticon that does away with the need for any
special architectural design. We are surrounded by a public who embodies the potential gaze of guards.
At any moment our actions can be recorded by another person and displayed to hundreds,
thousands, or even millions of people for quick, and sometimes ruthless, judgment.”
The panopticon broken free of its physical architecture, writes Weissman,
is a paranoiac delusion made reality as anyone may potentially be watching at any time,
at least as soon as one steps foot out the front door.
In this panopticon type of peer-to-peer surveillance society,
we become, in the words of Michel Foucault, the principle of our own subjection.
Always knowing that our words and actions can be recorded and uploaded to social media
leads to the emergence of a new form of justice based not only on the punishment of transgressors,
but on preventing even the possibility of wrongdoing, by immersing people in a field
of total visibility where the opinion, observation and discourse of others would restrain them from
harmful acts. Or as Weissman explains, through the state of constant uncertainty over whether
one is being watched, we ultimately internalize the gaze of the guard, and in a sense become a
guard over ourself, constantly monitoring, judging and correcting our behavior, and eventually
thoughts and attitudes. But the peer-to-peer element of our mass surveillance society is
not limited to the surveillance side of the equation, with police, judges, and jailers
left to take care of the system of control. Rather, social media is a medium through which
all can act as judge, jury, and, in some cases, even executioner.
The method of managing behaviors through the peer-to-peer element of the system of control,
writes Weissman, is done primarily through the sanctions of sometimes severe public shaming,
humiliation, and psychological terror via unwanted global exposure of recorded content,
meme manipulation of such content, uninhibited anonymous commenting, doxing, and a deluge
of threats.
Of all these forms of punishment, the attempt to shame and humiliate is the most common
and this is no innocuous form of punishment.
For online shaming campaigns can reach traumatic proportions as their end goal is often the
destruction of the targeted individual’s livelihood.
If the target accepts the judgment of the social media mob and succumbs to the shame,
he or she will be led to believe that his or her very selfhood is irrevocably flawed.
For as the author Peter Stearns explains, shame emphasizes self-abasement.
It is the self that is at fault, not merely the commission of the act.
And as the psychologist Todd Cashton writes, people who feel shame suffer.
to people dislike themselves and want to change, hide, or get rid of their self.
Shame, if too severe or endured for too long, can cause mental illness, lead an individual
to lash out at society, or in extreme cases, even to take his or her own life.
Shame is a problem emotion, writes Stearns.
Shaming can go too far, causing levels of emotional pain out of proportion to offending
behaviors.
Social media has heightened the problematic nature of shame to levels never seen before.
Prior to the internet, to shame someone we typically had to be in their presence.
This created a two-sided exchange.
We would shame another, but we would also experience the effect our shaming had on this
person, which helped limit its severity.
But with social media this exchange has become one-sided.
Shielded by screens we don’t see the negative impact of our shaming.
Instead we see rewards in the form of likes, shares, and comments, commending us on the
wittiness of our memes or comments.
In addition, as but one in a crowd of thousands taking part in the act of online shaming,
we can easily shirk responsibility for any harm done by telling ourselves that we played
but a negligible part in the shamed individual’s downfall.
This threat of being on the wrong side of a crowdsourced shaming campaign helps enforce
a hyperconformity.
As few dare run the risk of a ruined life at the hands of a social media mob, individual
and community resistance to the power of the public becomes increasingly snuffed out, writes
Weissman.
If one must constantly be aware that even a momentary spontaneous diversion from normality,
from conformity with a mass-approved script of speech and action, may be filmed, broadcast
to the entire world, ridiculed for eternity, and lead to one being potentially cut off
from society indefinitely, that’s a pressure that even the freest individuals can scarcely
resist.
But what makes living within a peer-to-peer mass surveillance society even more difficult
is that the rules and norms we are expected to follow are constantly changing.
What is permitted today may not be tomorrow, and so even past actions can be the seeds
of a future downfall.
The situation is made even more sinister as the rules, norms, and values we are expected
to follow, are not an emergent and spontaneous byproduct of the interactions of social media
users, but are increasingly being shaped to align with the interests of certain corporations,
governments and other powerful global institutions. By manipulating what we see and what we don’t
see, and the frequency with which we see things, tech companies can effectively influence what
we believe and what we value. The more time we spend glued to our screens, scrolling through
Through these manipulated and censored social media feeds, the more we run the risk of becoming
mere automatons serving the interests of a small group of elitists whose ultimate goal
is to control and exploit us.
To what extent are modern technologies of surveillance, advertising, and control creating
a new, modern slavery taken for granted because of its invisibility, asks Oswald Sobrino.
It is arguable that those controlled and deceived by modern technology are being transformed
into the slaves by nature that Aristotle described and accepted as normal, as our modern subservience
to technology shares many traits with ancient slavery, by creating and resting upon an easily
manipulated population.
But can the tables be turned?
Can these technologies be used to bring about our liberation instead of our enslavement?
In the final video of the series, we will examine this question.
Source: Academy of Ideas