How Zoomers Learned To Love The Panopticon
Embracing perpetual surveillance in the Instagram comments section.
English philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed the panopticon in 1787. Bentham described a circular prison, the “prisoners in their cells, occupying the circumference — The officers … the centre.” The prisoners would be visible to the officers in the center, the officers obscured to the prisoners, “hence the sentiment of a sort of invisible omnipresence.”
Bentham conceived of the panopticon as a reform to prevailing prison schemes of the day, promoting good behavior in the prisoners and guards alike. The prisoners would behave, since they might be observed at any time. The guards would avoid excess cruelty, since they would be subject to intermittent observance by the public.
Bentham’s moral architecture has greater application than prison design. Consult George Orwell’s “1984.” Each apartment in Oceania is outfitted with a telescreen, a two-way video device.
“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment .... It was even conceivable that [the Thought Police] watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized,” Orwell wrote.
The panopticon, as envisioned by Orwell, subjects every citizen to an invisible omnipresence, making every citizen an inmate.
Orwell pictured a dystopia enforced by a top-down, totalitarian government. Enthusiasm for The Party varies among Oceanians, but the looming threat of violence keeps would-be dissidents in line.
Orwell wrote of boot-on-the-face slavery. Our situation is something closer to Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” which describes eyes-on-the-screen slavery. Citizens are primarily lulled, rather than beaten, into submission. Psychological and genetic manipulation, behavioral conditioning, and entertainment are the state’s primary means of control.
Huxley wrote, in a 1949 letter to Orwell, “Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”
Let’s attempt some synthesis of these visions, taking a little from Bentham, a little from Orwell, and a great deal from Huxley.
In our hypothetical country, children are prepared, first through embryonic gene editing, then through childhood conditioning, to enter a well-defined caste.
Upper-middle and upper class citizens pacify themselves with drugs. They enjoy free sex, alienated from both pregnancy and love. They do intellectual work. They don’t think about death. Death is something which happens to other people.
Status is the source of meaning. If you can’t be popular, try for notoriety. Citizens spend their income on two-way communication devices that connect them with an invisible, anonymous public. Mass media propagates an enemy of the day, or week, or month. The citizens whip themselves into a hysterical rage over this subject.
There are places and people in this country who reject all the aforementioned in favor of a bucolic, even savage, lifestyle. The urbanites aren’t barred from defecting. But why would they want to? The lives of the country folk are ugly and unpleasant, and worst of all, boring.
A glance at Gen Z suggests some obvious parallels with the above hypothetical. Evidence for the Zoomer’s strange psychology can be found in a surprising, and abundant, source: Instagram comments.