[rumori] panopticon


From: Steev Hise (steevATdetritus.net)
Date: Wed Jan 03 2001 - 00:09:52 PST


Tue, 2 Jan 2001 found Reed Hedges writing:

>> seen by "everyone." Universal Panopticon!
>>
>> I thought this was an absolute nightmare, at first.

this reminds me of another silly idea Bruce Sterling had,
but this was supposedly "nonfiction", an article in Wired or
Mondo a while back: put surveillance cameras EVERYWHERE,
and give EVERYONE access to them! whee!

guh. sometimes science fiction writers should just stick to
fiction....

>['panopticon' aka 'the inspection house' - the perfect jail, 24 hour
>undetectable surveillence built into the walls of the building (this was 1791,
>and the idea involved lots of mirrors and prisms)]

yes, i believe jeremy bentham invented it, and michel
foucault wrote about it too, much later. i didnt know about
the mirrors and prisms, thot the idea was basically that you
have a guard tower in the middle, cells around the outside
in a ring, with windows in the back of each one. so all the
prisoners are sillhouetted in the light of the windows,
impossible to hide anything you're doing.

or something like that.

smh

Steev Hise, Would-be World-Wide Web Wizard (WWWWW)
steevATdetritus.net http://detritus.net/steev
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