Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Burning down the Panopticon

Episode Date: October 11, 2016

Our new miniseries on Surveillance begins with your host tripping over the corpse of Jeremy Bentham, the man who gave us the Panopticon.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Burning Down the Panepticon. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the corpse of Jeremy Bentham. Jeremy Bentham was a British philosopher, born in the 18th century, died in the 19th. He founded a school of thought we call utilitarianism. He advocated for things like the separation of church and state, individual legal rights, and freedom of expression. He also famously advocated for a building his brother Samuel designed. A building that was an actual surveillance machine.

A building called the Panopticon. Bentham's Panopticon has two parts. There's an open circular building and an illuminated tower in the middle. A person standing in the tower can see into all of the open rooms that line the circle. Now Bentham imagined all kinds of uses for this panopticon setup, but mostly he talked about it as a prison. So a guard in the tower and convicts in the rooms or cells. The guard in the tower can see into every single one of the cells. But since the tower is illuminated,

the prisoners in the cells can't see the guard in the tower. So they never know if they're being watched. Jeremy Bentham believed his panopticon offered society a technological fix. And while some panopticon elements did make their way into a few prisons, there is no physical Panopticon I can show you. But there is a Panopticon metaphor, and it's massive, monumental. It's a metaphor that towers over our conversations and debates about surveillance.

But I believe that Panopticon is a terrible metaphor. I believe that if we truly hope to understand surveillance, what it is, how it works, and what it's doing to us today, well, we need to kill the Panopticon. Which is why I've been thinking about Jeremy Bentham's corpse so much. In fact, I knew as soon as I began plotting out this new Theory of Everything miniseries that Jeremy Bentham's corpse would be the starting point.

So when I was in London last summer walking around with fellow Radiotopian Helen Zaltzman and she just casually asked if I wanted to see the body of Jeremy Bentham which is on display in some hallway at University College London, and she just casually asked if I wanted to see the body of Jeremy Bentham, which is on display in some hallway at University College London. I was like, uh, yeah. What am I really sitting in front of here? Uh, well, a collection of Jeremy Bentham's garments in a cupboard,

and some bones that you can't see, and a model of a face. Wow! This is his actual bones. Yep, inside those gloves. I feel like that hat is taking liberties with history. But who knows what's under that hat? He said the results were too gruesome for display when they tried to preserve the head. The auto-icon is the mortal remains of Jeremy Bentham. Long before he died, when he was in his 20s,

he first specified in his will that he wanted to be.....that his remains to be taken apart and the skeleton to be reassembled, dressed, and put in a suit of his clothes and then put on display. That's Tim Cosser. He's a senior research associate at the Bentham Project at University College London. I met with him to learn the story about how and why Jeremy Bentham became an auto icon. There are a few theories as to why he did this um some suggest he was just having a bit of a joke some suggest he was quite vain it's very likely that it was another plank in his attack on organized religion so if you were buried you had to pay um fees to the church of england to bury you so by being an auto icon, he would never be buried and

the church would never get their hands on any money for putting him in the ground. The Jeremy Bentham auto icon is one of those objects with more than one history. It has a factual chronology and a mythical one as well. Probably the most well-known myth about the autoicon is that students kick the real head around UCL's quad as a football. And if you've seen the real head, you would know that even the smallest impact on it, it would disintegrate. When Bentham died, autoiconing wasn't exactly a thing. In fact, donating your body to science wasn't even really a thing. It's certainly been a source of debate, why Bentham did this. And the fact that it was actually done and his wishes were fulfilled is quite remarkable in itself.

Before he died, he wrote a rather odd and very funny pamphlet called The Father Uses of the Dead to the Living, where he talks about auto-iconisation and how he hoped it would catch on. So rather than having your portraits of your dead ancestors hanging on the wall, you could instead have your dead ancestors in your living room or dotted around your garden. Or you could use auto-icons

as theatrical props and create a hall of great people throughout history and have debates between dead, famous people. Jeremy Bentham is the sole auto-icon you will find in the hallways at UCL, so it would be difficult to pull off a debate with another dead great philosopher.

But researchers at the Bentham Project are always trying to find ways to have Bentham engage with the UCL community and the hundreds of tourists that come to see him every year. There's a web page, art projects. Someone even took a sound recording from the inside of Bentham's cabinet. And with so much interest in the Panopticon these days, Tim and his colleagues mounted a camera to the top of the display case, the Panopticam. So the Panopticam is a, essentially it's a 3D printed webcam that sits on top of Bentham's,

on top of the Auto Icons box, and just sort of records people passing by, and there's a Twitter account, there's a Twitter account attached to it which every, I think it's every minute past the hour, takes a photograph and tweets it and at the end of the day creates a sort of time lapse of people walking past in front of what Bentham would see if the auto icon could see. There are certain days when, sort of out of term, it's just photographing an empty floor. So every tweet during the day is just an empty floor and it's like waiting for Godot. But then during term time, it's heaving. The panopticon might very well come down to some folks having a laugh.

But with every new story about government spying and mass surveillance, there is a spike of interest in Bentham and his panopticon. You can't really blame these Benthamites for trying to cash in on the attention. There were more people accessing the Panopticon pages of the website when certain news stories come out. The Panopticon and the autoicon are the two things that Bentham's best known for, for better or worse. And so, all these people who flocked to the Panopticon pages of the Bentham Project, hoping to find something that will help them better understand our surveillance society,

what do they get? Well, according to Tim Causer, not much. Bentham would have been quite baffled by the parallels, I think, in terms of digital surveillance. For him, the Panopticon was an institutional building that would have helped reform prisoners more cheaply than ever. For him, I don't think it was a metaphor. It was a practical exposition of his philosophy. The Panopticon makes its big leap from architectural plan to philosophical metaphor about 150 years after Bentham dies, or moves into his glass case. In 1975, the French philosopher Michel Foucault publishes a book called Surveiller et Punir,

or Discipline and Punish in English. In this work, Foucault uses Bentham's panopticon to explain the disciplinary gaze of power. This is Foucault. Each individual in his place is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor, but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does not see. He is the object of information, never a subject in communication. The arrangement of his room opposite the central tower imposes on him an axial visibility, but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. And this invisibility is a guarantee of order.

If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences. If they are patients, there is no danger of contagion. If they are madmen, there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another. If they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time. If they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect, or cause accidents. The crowd, a compact mass, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities. From the point of view of the guardian, it is replaced by a multiplicity that can be

numbered and supervised. From the point of view of the inmates, by a sequestered and observed solitude. The panopticon presents a cruel, ingenious cage. Like I said, the Bentham brothers never oversaw the construction of an actual Panopticon in their lifetime. Well, that's not exactly true. There was this weird art school that got built in St. Petersburg in 1806, but it also burned down mysteriously a few years later. We'll come back to that story in a future episode. But Foucault does not want us to think of the Panopticon as a dream building. He warns,

the fact that it should have given rise, even in our own time, to so many variations projected or realized is evidence of the imaginary intensity that it has possessed for almost 200 years. Foucault died of AIDS in 1984. He's buried in a cemetery in Vendemmes. There is no Foucault auto icon. Which is a shame, because it would be amazing to set him and Bentham up in some hallway together. Can you imagine that? I can.

Here's how I think it would go. Mr. Foucault, your work is very interesting, but I'm baffled as to why my name gets attached to your metaphor of the panopticon. It's almost as if you are putting words in my wax replica mouth. My project is about reform and transcends your very interesting but still fantastically reductive idea of discipline. My Panopticon was also a laboratory. It could be used as a machine to carry out experiments,

to alter behavior, to train or correct individuals, to experiment with medicines and monitor their effects. Naturally, it could also be used to try out different punishments on prisoners according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones. But also to teach different techniques simultaneously to the workers, to decide which is the best, to try out pedagogical experiments, and in particular, to take up once again the well-debated problem of secluded education by using orphans. One could bring up different children according to different systems of thought, making certain children believe that two and two do not make four, or that the moon is a cheese, and put them together when they are 20 or 25 years old. One would then have discussions that would be worth a great deal more than the sermons or

lectures on which so much money is spent. One would have at least an opportunity of making discoveries in the domain of metaphysics. The Panopticon is a privileged place for experiments on men and for analyzing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them. You pretend a high degree of sensibility. You have considered this continual inspection, which constitutes the peculiar merit of the Panopticon,

as objectionable. You have depicted it as a place of torment? In so doing, though, you have forgotten the state of most other prisons, in which the prisoners heaped together can enjoy tranquility neither day nor night. You forget that under my system of continual inspection, a greater degree of liberty and ease will be allowed, chains and shackles suppressed. But alas, these real advantages are overlooked by your fantastic sensibility. Foucault's reply, I am in turn baffled by your bafflement, and your reply baffles me even more. I have only one question for you, only one.

Is it surprising that the cellular prison, which is regular chronologies, forced labor, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons. After the break, three reasons why the Panopticon needs to be burned down. Okay. This is kind of awkward. I was supposed to have an ad here,

but the company just canceled at the last second. Maybe they didn't like my host read copy. I can't see why not, though. The ad was for this new outfit that hopes to disrupt the baby food industry. They make these cute little multicolored pouches of organic, environmentally friendly baby food that get delivered straight to your door. So I wrote, make baby happy with a mouth-watering beef bag today. I'm telling you this because I kind of wrote the show around this new mid-roll slot. I mean, I can't exactly say we'll talk about

why the Panopticon needs to go after the break and then not have a break. But I can't have you rushing out to buy a mouth-watering beef bag thinking you're supporting the show when you're not. This is a total disaster. Hopefully we'll have this figured out by the next episode. Sorry. The way I see it, there are three major problems with the Panopticon metaphor. The first one is totally obvious. User-generated surveillance. The guard in the tower has been digitally disintermediated by the people in the

cells, who now compile their own files. Facebooking, snapping, liking, searching, clicking, FitBidding, swiping, podcasting, and checking in. The panopticon metaphor, it's just fundamentally incapable of accounting for all this self-surveillance. But even if it could, there's another problem. You see, the Panopticon metaphor has this tendency to reduce surveillance down to a very simple-minded tale

about government spying. So it's the NSA in the tower and the rest of us going about our business in the rooms unaware. Now, I'm not saying this metaphor doesn't work. I mean, as I'm recording this, news just broke that Yahoo allowed the U.S. government to scan every single email that came through its servers. But what if it's not just the NSA in the tower? What if Yahoo, Facebook, and Google are up there as well? And what if they're surveilling us not for the government, but for advertisers, marketers, or even themselves?

This is where the Panopticon metaphor kind of fails us. And it's not unlike the problem Jeremy Bentham had with the Panopticon apparatus. He believed his Panopticon was something that could be put to use for all sorts of tasks, including A-B testing on orphans. But most people, they just saw prison. We need something that encourages us to deal with the varieties of surveillance experience, not one that reduces everything to government spying. Which leads us to problem number three. Now, for Jeremy Bentham, the

prisoners in the cells were put there, they were put under constant observation in order to change their behavior. For Bentham, surveillance equals behavioral modification. It's the same for Foucault. The disciplinary gaze of power, it shapes who we are. So the panopticon metaphor, by design, should push us to talk about how surveillance is changing us. Not only our behaviors, but our identities as well. But for some reason, it just doesn't. Every time we learn that the guard in the tower has

overstepped his authority or disregarded some policy we clicked on, we just can't help but feel violated, like we're dealing with a peeping Tom. The very optics of the panopticon, I believe, push us to view surveillance this way, as an infringement of our privacy rights, rather than an act of force shaping who we are. So that's why we're ditching the Panopticon in part one of this new series. And I'm not sure yet how long this project is going to run for. We have a lot of ground to cover, a lot of places to visit. But I promise you this, by the end, we will have a metaphor that actually

works for us. Okay, maybe it won't be a metaphor, maybe it'll be a picture or a story, but it will be something that will help us articulate what it is we are really talking about when we talk about surveillance. We have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Burning Down the Panepticon. I've got a lot of people I'd like to thank this time around. Helen Zaltzman, Tim Kauser, Mathilde Biot, Martin Zaltz-Ostwick and Sam Pei. Martin and Sam have a podcast of their own, a podcast about every Tom Waits song ever recorded.

Go to songbysongpodcast.com and you can give that a listen. Also, thanks to Julie Shapiro and everyone at Radiotopia HQ. Feel free to drop me a line if you've got something surveillance-related you'd like to talk about. Like I said, this miniseries is going to run for quite some time. You can get in touch with me through the website, toe.prx.org, or you can find me on Twitter at Benjamin Walker. The Theory of Everything is a proud member of Radiotopia,

the world's best podcast network. Special thanks to our launch sponsors, the Knight Foundation, MailChimp, and listeners like you.