The Urge to Persecute

People have always sought to project evil onto their neighbours, and that desire now extends to random strangers on the Internet. Malcolm Gaskill shows how the science of witch-hunting took a leap forward in the Enlightenment period, thanks to the meticulous assembly and analysis of data to confirm or confound hypotheses, and describes how one seventeenth century German woman was found innocent of witchcraft only after the intervention of her son, who was able to use these same tools in her defence. Of course it helped that her son happened to be one of the greatest intellectuals of the period, Johannes Kepler.

Empiricism made witchcraft possible as an actionable crime before it made it an impossible one. Kepler saved his mother through formidable concentration, sticking to a firm line of reasoning and dissecting his opponents’ arguments, point by point.

In this week's news, two tech executives were spotted cuddling one another at a Coldplay concert, drawing attention to themselves by ducking in a guilty fashion when they realized they were being shown on the big screen. Internet sleuths were able to discover their identity, public shaming ensued, and jobs and marriages were lost - an example of what Cathy O'Neil calls Networked Shame. In his commentary on the incident, Brandon Vigliarolo noted our willingness to persecute someone for a perceived wrong despite not knowing the full story. 

Vigliarolo then went on to remind us of the eagerness with which other tech executives are pushing mass surveillance, which will apparently keep everyone on their best behavior through the use of constant real-time machine-learning-powered monitoring. 

Because we can trust machine learning to know the full story before jumping to conclusions, can't we?

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See also: Witnessing Machines Built in Secret (November 2017), Metrication and Demetrication (August 2021), The Purpose of Shame (April 2022)

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Malcolm Gaskill, Money, Sex, Lies, Magic (London Review of Books, 38/13, 30 June 2016) 

Malcolm Gaskill, Social media witch-hunts are no different to the old kind – just bigger (Guardian, 13 October 2016)

Cathy O'Neil, The Shame Machine (New York: Crown, 2022) 

Jon Ronson, So You've Been Publicly Shamed (Picador 2015)

Geoff Shullenberger, The Scapegoating Machine (The New Inquiry, 30 November 2016)  

Brandon Vigliarolo, Ellison declares Oracle all-in on AI mass surveillance, says it'll keep everyone in line (The Register, 16 September 2024)

Brandon Vigliarolo, Coldplay kiss-cam flap proves we’re already our own surveillance state (The Register, 18 Jul 2025)

Insurance and the Veil of Ignorance

Put simply, the purpose of insurance is to shift risk from the individual to the collective. When an individual cannot afford to bear a given risk, the individual purchases some risk cover from an organization - typically an insurance company or mutual - which spreads the risk over many individuals and is supposedly better able to bear these risks.

Individuals are sometimes obliged to purchase insurance - for example, car insurance before driving on the public roads, or house insurance before getting a mortgage. In some countries, there may be legal requirements to have some form of health insurance.

Insurance companies typically charge different premiums to different individuals depending on the perceived risk and the available statistics. For example, if young inexperienced drivers and very elderly drivers have more accidents, it would seem fair for these drivers to pay a higher premium.

Insurance companies therefore try to obtain as much information about the individual as possible, in order to calculate the correct premium, or even to decide whether to offer cover at all. But this is problematic for two reasons.

The first problem is about fairness, as these calculations may embed various forms of deliberate or inadvertent discrimination. As Joi Ito explains,

The original idea of risk spreading and the principle of solidarity was based on the notion that sharing risk bound people together, encouraging a spirit of mutual aid and interdependence. By the final decades of the 20th century, however, this vision had given way to the so-called actuarial fairness promoted by insurance companies to justify discrimination.

The second problem is about knowledge and what Foucault calls biopower. Just suppose your insurance company is monitoring your driving habits through sensors in the vehicle or cameras in the street, knows how much red meat you are eating, knows your drinking habits through the motion and location sensors on your phone, is inferring your psychological state from your Facebook profile, and has complete access to your fitness tracker and your DNA. If the insurance company now has so much data about you that it can accurately predict car accidents, ill-health and death, the amount of risk actually taken by the insurance company is minimized, and the risk is thrown back onto the individual who is perceived (fairly or unfairly) as a high-risk.

In her latest book, Shoshana Zuboff describes how insurance companies are using the latest technologies, including the Internet of Things, not only to monitor drivers but also to control them.

Telematics are not intended merely to know but also to do (economics of action). They are hammers; they are muscular; they enforce. Behavioral underwriting promises to reduce risk through machine processes designed to modify behavior in the direction of maximum profitability. Behavioral surplus is used to trigger punishments, such as real-time rate hikes, financial penalties, curfews, and engine lockdowns, or rewards, such as rate discounts, coupons, and gold stars to redeem for future benefits. The consultancy firm AT Kearney anticipates 'IoT enriched relationships' to connect 'more holistically' with customers 'to influence their behaviors'. (p215)

So much for risk sharing then. Surely this undermines the whole point of insurance?

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Sami Coll, Consumption as Biopower: Governing Bodies with Loyalty Cards, (Journal of Consumer Culture 13(3) 2013) pp 210-220

Caley Horan, Actuarial age: insurance and the emergence of neoliberalism in the postwar United States (PhD Thesis 2011)

Joi Ito, Supposedly ‘Fair’ Algorithms Can Perpetuate Discrimination (Wired Magazine, 5 February 2019) HT @WolfieChristl @zeynep

AT Kearney, The Internet of Things: Opportunity for Insurers (2014)

Cathy O'Neil, How algorithms rule our working lives (The Guardian, 1 September 2016)

Jathan Sadowski, Alarmed by Admiral's data grab? Wait until insurers can see the contents of your fridge (The Guardian, 2 November 2016)

Carissa Véliz, If AI Is Predicting Your Future, Are You Still Free? (Wired, 27 December 2021)

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Profile Books 2019) esp pages 212-218


Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Foucault

Related posts: The Transparency of Algorithms (October 2016) Pay as you Share (November 2016), Shoshana Zuboff on Surveillance Capitalism (Book Review, February 2019) 

 

Update: I have just come across a journal special issue on the Personalization of Insurance (Big Data and Society, November 2020). I note that the editorial starts with the same Zuboff quote that I used here. Also adding link to a recent article by Professor Véliz.

Witnessing Machines Built in Secret

#amtsb @proto_type's current performance work, which I caught at the South Bank Centre in London this weekend, is called A Machine They're Secretly Building. The title comes from a warning by Edward Snowden, as reported by Glen Greenwald.

"I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."

As I filed out of the performance, I bought a copy of the script, paying with cash rather than credit card (as if that's going to stop THEM knowing I was there). In her introduction, Alwyn Walsh mentions Henry Giroux and the idea of disimagination. Henry Giroux credits this idea to Georges Didi-Huberman who, starting from four photographs taken by Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau, had offered an extended and profound meditation on the status of the image as a means of historical analysis. Giroux's version of the politics of disimagination refers to images (and also institutions, discourses, and other modes of representation) "that undermine the capacity of individuals to bear witness to a different and critical sense of remembering, agency, ethics and collective resistance".

According to Giroux, therefore, the disimagination machine "functions primarily to undermine the ability of individuals to think critically, imagine the unimaginable, and engage in thoughtful and critical dialogue: put simply, to become critically informed citizens of the world". Thankfully, Walsh tells us, "this ... is what theatre and performance is so perfectly equipped to challenge".

So the Proto-type show aims to bear witness about what is going on. As the audience files into the performance space, we see two women dressed in black, with pink balaclavas. And a large screen facing the audience. One of the women is facing a camera: her face (or what we can see of it) is shown on the screen. As the show progresses, the screen (which has equal billing with the human characters in the script) also displays text and documentary fragments, apparently offering "facts" to illustrate or substantiate the shifting subjective voices of the human characters - sometimes resigned acceptance, sometimes angry protest - exploring the conflict between the security narrative (normal, law-abiding citizens versus terrorists, "keeping you safe") and the privacy narrative (state surveillance versus private individuals with rich inner lives). At the climax of the show, the screen shows the audience, with random members marked with green and red rectangles as if indicating targets of suspicion, perhaps based on behaviour or backstory. (From a technology point of view this looked pretty unsophisticated, but from a dramatic point of view it was sufficient to provoke audience discomfort.)

But if THEY are secretly building a machine, who exactly is THEY?

For Edward Snowden and Proto-type, THEY means governments - mostly the British and American governments, although Pussy Riot is referenced both in the script and in the pink balaclavas. But of course the power behind the machine could also be Google or Facebook, which might possibly (but how would I know?) be much more powerful than those of mere governments.

 And if the machine was so secret, how could such a machine affect "the ability of individuals to think critically, imagine the unimaginable, and engage in thoughtful and critical dialogue"? Surely a much more dangerous machine would be one that seduced people into suspending their critical imagination, a machine that presented us with apparently objective facts, a machine that persuaded us to think with the majority - or at least what it told us was the majority view. (Surely that couldn't happen here?)


In his essay on the relationship between coercion and consent, Walter Streek refers to

"a huge machinery of coercion, easily the largest and most expensive in history, maintained in readiness for the state of emergency that may one day have to be called"

and chimes with Proto-type in suggesting that cover for the growth of this machinery is provided by the "war on terror", 

 "waged to enable the masses to continue living their pressured lives of competitive production and consumption".

In his 2011 documentary, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (#AWOBMOLG), Adam Curtis presented a powerful dialectic about technological capitalism. Although there were some logical flaws in his argument, as I pointed out at the time, I think Curtis was correct in identifying some of the key trends, as well as pointing at the multiple centres of power - for example, Madison Avenue, Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington. The multiple centres of power (media, technology, corporate, state) were also explored (with rather more academic rigour) at the Power Switch conference in Cambridge in March 2017.

A Machine They're Secretly Building is darker than Curtis (if that were possible) and more narrowly focused. But although one may be justifiably alarmed by state surveillance, the disimagination effect is arguably wreaked more by corporate surveillance, hashtag #YouAreTheProduct. So I'm looking forward to their next show, which I understand will be on economics.

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Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Trans. Shane B. Lillis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) review by Paul B Jaskot in Journal of Jewish Identities Issue 3, Number 2, July 2010 pp. 93-95

Henry A. Giroux, The Politics of Disimagination and the Pathologies of Power (Truth Out, 27 February 2013)

Glen Greenwald et al, Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations (Guardian, 11 June 2013)

Laura James, Power Switch - Conference Report (31 March 2017) - liveblog of CRASSH PowerSwitch Conference

Wolfgang Streeck, You need a gun (London Review of Books, 14 December 2017) (subscribers only)

Richard Veryard, All Chewed Over By Machines (26 May 2011) - review of Adam Curtis.
See also Pax Technica (24 November 2017), IOT is coming to town (3 December 2017), Shoshana Zuboff on Surveillance Capitalism (February 2019)

Aylwyn Walsh, Staging the Radical Potential of the Imagination: A Critical Introduction to A Machine they’re Secretly Building (via Academia.edu, undated)

Andrew Westerside and Proto-type Theatre, A Machine they’re Secretly Building (Oberon Modern Plays, 2017)


updated 18 December 2017

Purpose of Anonymity

This post is an edited and extended version of my comments to Robin Wilton's post The Department of Perverse Consequences.

Campaigners are eloquent on the dangers that threaten anonymity and privacy: administrative inquisitiveness, gratuitous leaks, fraud. But what exactly is the purpose of anonymity and privacy? What are the benefits to the individual and to society? Indeed, does society benefit in any way from anonymity and privacy, or does this debate expose a fundamental conflict of interest between society (so-called "public interest") and the individual?

Here's the example from Robin's blog: anonymity of voting in elections. Robin mentions the fact that camera phones were banned from the polling booths in the recent Italian elections. Obviously this ban doesn't actually prevent voters from selling their votes - votes were being bought and sold long before cameras were invented - but the lack of photographic evidence reduces the economic efficiency of the transaction.

In this example, anonymity has a specific social purpose - to protect voters from improper influence, and to protect the democratic system from being bought by the highest bidder. In other words, it is a security mechanism, whose purpose is to counter certain specific forms of vulnerability and abuse.

If anonymity is merely a security mechanism, it is a means-to-an-end rather than an end-in-itself. Any claim of the form "security mechanism X protects against vulnerability Y" raises a number of questions of effects and effectiveness.

• How effective is X at protecting against Y?
• What alternative mechanisms could be devised to protect against Y?
• What other effects does X have?
• In particular, how does X-preventing-Y affect the wider sociotechnical system?
• Overall, does the prevention of Y provide sufficient justification for X?

And it is not obvious that anonymity is the only or best way of protecting individual voters and the electoral system from bribery and corruption. After all, we often protect systems against bribery and corruption by a security mechanism that appears to be based on exactly the opposite principle: transparency and openness. There is also an apparent conflict between the principle of anonymity and the principle of non-repudiation - the "stand-up-and-be-counted" principle. So why is anonymity appropriate for some situations, and transparency and non-repudiation for others?

We can try to answer this question by looking at the other effects of anonymity. One likely possibility is that anonymity makes it easier to change your mind, because you don't have to explain or justify your change of mind to other people, whereas delegates who are publically committed to a political position need to construct an elaborate rationalization before they can change position or party. Anonymous elections can therefore respond more quickly to the tide of public opinion, and elected politicians get a more rapid judgement from the electorate. It is of course debatable whether this is a Good Thing or not.

On this argument, anonymity is not just a security mechanism, but a system feature that affects the dynamic behaviour of the electoral system in an interesting way.

In this post, I have talked purely about the possible social benefits of anonymity. Obviously there may also be arguments for anonymity in terms of individualism, but for the time being I'll leave those arguments for Robin and others to articulate ...

No Smoke Without Fire 3

There will undoubtedly be some voters in America who jump to unwarranted conclusions about the secrecy surrounding Barack Obama's passport file, which was accessed by temporary contract staff at the US State Department on three separate occasions [BBC News 21 March 2008].

Bill Burton, a spokesman for Senator Obama, has called for a thorough investigation. Chris Walsh reckons that Bill Burton "has a keen grasp of the issues" [Emergent Chaos, 20 March 2008]

Emergent Chaos is a group blog on security, privacy, liberty, and economics, so these are obviously the issues Chris is referring to here. But what about the political and psychological issues?

Three contractors may have been motivated by idle curiosity. Is it not likely that thousands of journalists and millions of US citizens will share this curiosity, and will now start to ask whether Senator Obama has anything to hide?

If Obama handles the ensuing challenges successfully, gains in popularity, becomes President, and proceeds to improve the law on privacy and breach notification, then the Emergent Chaos group may have something to celebrate. Obama's team may well have worked out a really good game plan, but we haven't seen it yet. Let's hope Bill Burton has a keen grasp of ALL the issues.

Poetic Justice 2

In my previous post Poetic Justice I commented on the ironic downfall of Eliot Spitzer, and quoted Laura Trevelyan who compared it to Greek tragedy. In a post called Banks, Privacy and Revenge, Adam Shostack writes:

"Eliot Spitzer made a name for himself attacking banks. Setting aside the legitimacy of those attacks, I find it shocking that he didn't realize how much banks know about each one of us. It's doubly shocking that he didn't expect revenge."

For my part, I am always astounded by the things people expect to get away with. Is it sheer arrogance, or an unconscious desire to be found out? There are undoubtedly some people who unconsciously engineer their own downfall. Sigmund Freud (who certainly knew something about Greek tragedy) called this the death drive. Sometimes there is no other obvious explanation for people's self-destructive behaviour.

By chance, I've just been reading a beautiful short book by David Grossman called Lion's Honey, The Myth of Samson. Grossman carefully analyses the biblical story of Samson, who is secretive and yet confides in women, who is betrayed over and over again by these women, who destroys thousands of Philistines and destroys himself in the process.

"He goes through life like a walking enigma, marvelling over his secret, his riddle. He enjoys approaching the dangerous brink of being found out by others. Yet, on second thoughts, the word 'enjoys' is inaccurate: more likely he is driven to this, compelled to confront this feeling, this bitter-tasting knowledge that he is impenetrable, that he cannot be released from his strangeness, nor from the mystery within."

Update

And here's a great summary by Jessica Hagy from "Indexed".


Image copyright (c) 2008 Jessica Hagy

Something to hide?

There is a perceived conflict between two things. On the one hand, security and law enforcement. On the other hand, privacy and confidentiality.

The advocates of security and law enforcement often dismiss concerns about privacy and confidentiality with the "something to hide" argument. In other words, if you've got nothing to hide, then you've got nothing to worry about. Among other things, this argument is used to defend the proliferation of surveillance and CCTV.

This leads to the grossly unfair assumption that people who are highly protective of their privacy and confidentiality are probably up to no good. This is linked to the popular (but sometimes misleading) POSIWID-related assertion: No Smoke Without Fire.

There are lots of complex and politically charged aspects to the investigation of dealings between British Aerospace (BAe) and members of the Saudi Royal family [BBC News, June 26th 2007]. One of the possible effects of the investigation is that it may disrupt BAe's attempted take-over of the US firm Armor Holdings, which US competitors have viewed with some disfavour.

The Saudi government has always insisted that these dealings should remain confidential. And if the dealings between BAe and the Saudi Royal family are legal, then they have just as much right to confidentiality as any other corporate entity. Let us hope that the advocates of confidentiality in this case (possibly including Tony Blair) are as vocal in their support of the principles of confidentiality and privacy in other cases.

Government for the People

Why are our elected representatives such prats?

There has been lots of high moral commentary about the latest action by British MPs, who voted to exempt themselves from the Freedom of Information Act. Not for their benefit, you understand, but to preserve the privacy of their constituents.

We could have a technical discussion about the degree of protection constituents already had - either from the Data Protection Act or from other provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. I had a minor disagreement with Robin Wilton recently on the adequacy of the DPA. [See his post Exploding Venus Probe.] For my part, I don't believe the DPA is strong enough. But if our legislators have now (belatedly) realised this, the proper thing for them to do would be to make the DPA stronger, rather than tinker with some other legislation in an apparently self-interested way.

In a later post, Robin despairs of our elected representatives. "I don't know what's more depressing; the idea that our MPs haven't read their own legislation, or the idea that they think we can't."

This problem is not a new one. Our beloved legislators produce too much bad law all the time - and not just when there is any apparent self-interest. In general, legislation is hopelessly complicated, self-contradictory, and riddled with accidental loop-holes and unintended side-effects. (I've seen a lot of badly designed software systems, and I recognize many of the same characteristics.)

What is the effect of this bad legislation? More work for lawyers, and more wriggle-room for the powerful. In many cases, it is not the MPs themselves who are affected by the low level of legislative competence, but those behind the scenes pulling the strings.

But I wanted to go beyond the technical legal discussion. Some people have complained that blatant self-interest serves to distance the elected representatives from the people they purport to represent. I don't agree with that argument. We may observe that the rogue with his hand in the till often has much more popular support than the cold fish who wouldn't dream of bending the rules.

It's an interesting question - should not the elected representatives have the same collection of strengths and weaknesses as the population as a whole - including their moral weaknesses? Surely the biggest turnoff for the electorate is to be presented with a supposedly superior governing class? In the past, the supposed superiority has been through attending the right schools and universities (the magic combination of Eton and Oxford has a good chance of producing yet another Prime Minister, if Gordon Brown doesn't watch out) - or perhaps the right trade union credentials. In the future, perhaps, the superiority will be through squeaky clean morals, a completely respectable CV, and a total lack of testosterone.

But who can the British people relate to better - John Prescott or Hilary Benn? Yes our MPs may be prats, but there are worse alternatives.

[Update July 2008] This was written before Prescott published his autobiography, revealing that he suffered from an eating disorder. [Prescott tells of bulimia battle BBC News April 2008]
I'm not sure whether that makes any difference to my argument, although clearly he was not willing to reveal this until his political career was over. However, there are larger questions about politicians and mental health. [MPs reveal mental health problems BBC News July 2008]

Anonymity

In a comment to my earlier post on Root Cause, Robin Wilton suggested a link between anonymity and bad behaviour.

"If all potential criminals were identifiable all the time, they would be inhibited from committing crimes ... [and therefore] if no-one has any anonymity, everyone will be law-abiding."

This proposition appears to justify a high level of surveillance, as a crime-prevention measure. It also appears to justify various forms of "naming-and-shaming". Unfortunately, the proposition is not universally true. There are apparently some people who are not inhibited - and may even be encouraged - by the possibility of being identified.

For example, "a head teacher has spoken of his shock at seeing a video clip posted on a public website of a laughing pupil hurling a rock at a classroom window". [BBC News Jan 3rd 2007 via Into the Machine] And see also "Is there shaming in naming?" [BBC News Magazine via Tomorrow's Fish and Chip Paper, with a comment from me.]

So we have two kinds of identity in competition here. There is an old-fashioned notion of identity-as-respectability, and a Big-Brother notion of identity-as-notoriety. And so if social control mechanisms are designed by and for people with a given mindset, how are they supposed to work on people with an entirely different mindset? On people who find the proposition "Big Brother is Watching You" thrilling rather than chilling?

According to Donella Meadows' 12-point framework for system intervention, changes in mindset or paradigm are among the most powerful modes of system change (leverage point 2). Old fashioned social control (including the measures enthusiastically embraced by the current Government) doesn't seem to have the requisite variety to respond appropriately to these changes.

I am not saying that people are changing their notion of identity solely in order to evade social control - paradigm shifts aren't generally amenable to such rational calculation. But it is interesting that certain changes in the prevailing notion of identity seem to have the effect of weakening or negating certain social control mechanisms. And it is conceivable that these social control mechanisms have the effect of reinforcing certain social trends, including a paradigm-shift in notions of identity.

See my earlier post on Big Brother. And see Scribe's post on The Polarizing Effect of Surveillance.

Mr Prescott Regrets

I''ve said it before and I'll say it again, they just don't know how to treat a lady. 

Former UK Prime Minister John Major described his affair with Edwina Currie as the most shameful event of his life. [source: BBC News September 2002. TrustBlog commentary: Network Privacy and 2]

And now UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott regrets his affair with his assistant private secretary. [source: BBC News April 2006. Profiles: BBC News, TheyWorkForYou, Wikipedia. RacingSnake commmentary Clarke in the Headlights] 

[update] Now we know why Prescott needs two Jags.

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Men who disrespect their lovers in public don't deserve to have lovers at all. But what then is the purpose of having an affair? If you are ugly or boring, then it may be quite gratifying if everyone discovers your secret, discovers that there is at least one person in the world (apart from your poor wife who no longer has any choice) who finds you attractive. You feel as if you could be the equal of Kennedy (the womanizer, not the drunkard), and that maybe Marlon Brando would be the right actor to represent you on screen. 

[Update April 29] Janice makes a similar point in her article in today's Times: Ooh Prezza Would You Drive My Bus?

Office affairs are getting unhappy employees through the day. ... However seedy they seem to outsiders, the lovers concerned do not feel tacky. In fact, they have never felt more glamorous, as if their dreary workaday selves and imperfect bodies have been replaced by hot Hollywood actors. Their secret trysts and hurried couplings are projected in their minds as grainy film noir. The affair is an exciting sub-plot in their monotonous story line.

Even the secrecy is inauthentic.

The participants [always] believe no one knows about their relationship even though “I’m at it with X” might as well be franked on their foreheads.

Why is it franked on their foreheads? Because deep down they want to be found out, they want to flaunt their sexual power. (Nobody can deny the unconscious!)

POSIWID says that a lot of gossip is designed for effect. Gay celebrities pretending to be straight (or vice versa), dull politicians pretending to be a bit exciting, celebrity couples (Tony and Gordon) pretending to quarrel, a bit of rough, anything for the front pages. The purpose of a system is what it does.

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[update] Interesting radio discussion between Edwina Currie and Margaret Cook on the BBC Woman's Hour (Friday April 28th)

Surveillance and its Effects

Surveillance is a process of keeping people (such as customers and employees, as well as members of the public) under close supervision. What are the effects of surveillance? Here are two answers from an interesting blog (now called Into The Machine) whose main purpose seems to be to critique the authoritarian policies of the UK Home Secretary (past and present).

• All CCTV monitoring does is lock down the public face of our nation, allowing us in our public capacity to simply sweep aside all the factors that lead to the crime and attitude we're experiencing every day. (The Two Faces of CCTV)
• Surveillance will always produce nothing but underground revelry and a false sense of security. (The Ubiquity of Unnatural Surveillance)

[update: blog title and URLs changed, content looks the same]

It is clearly important to understand the effects on those being observed. But it is also interesting to note the effects on those doing (or relying upon) the observing.

Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon was originally a prison so designed that the warder could watch all the prisoners at the same time. By extension, this term is used to describe any technical or institutional arrangement to watch/ monitor large numbers of people. It forms part of Foucault's analysis of discipline, and provides a useful metaphor for various modern technologies

• CCTV
• workforce monitoring
• database systems such as customer relationship management (CRM)
• Google

The panopticon provides surveillance, and may result in a loss of privacy for the people being watched / monitored, but may also make people feel they are being looked after (better quality of service, safer). If you know you’re being watched, this may trigger various feelings – both positive and negative.

Besides the impact on the people being watched, the pantopticon often has an adverse effect on the watcher. The panopticon gives the illusion of transparency and completeness – so the watcher comes to believe three fallacies

• that everything visible is undistorted truth
• that everything visible is important
• that everything important is visible

This is one of the reasons why surveillance mechanisms often become dysfunctional even for those doing the surveillance. For example, instead of customer relationship management (CRM) promoting better relationships with the customer, it becomes a bureaucratic obsession with the content of the customer database.

See also Surveillance 2 (September 2005)