Life in the Panopticon
Volunteering myself for the surveillance state (in hopes of selling books).
If there’s an award for appearing on the most podcasts in a month, I’ve got to be in the running. My book came out exactly one month ago and, as of today, I have been interviewed about it on 16 podcasts. (And that doesn’t include the two podcasts that I’m hosting.) It’s a lot, and I’ve got more on the calendar.
This week, I ran up to the northern reaches of Minnesota to hang out in Grand Marais, paddle on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, and record an episode of the Paddle & Portage Podcast (to be released on May 10), which was way better than another Zoom interview. But it was still a canoe trip that included microphones and selfies:
Jeremy Bentham (1784-1832) was the founder of utilitarianism, and he also introduced the idea of the panopticon, his idea for designing a prison that was more humane and less resource-intensive: a prison in which a single guard could observe all the prisoners, and none of the prisoners can see any other prisoners.
Some prisons have been built on this general plan, with mixed success. But on a metaphorical/explanatory level, the panopticon has been far more powerful. Michel Foucault used it as a central idea in his own book, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. In the words of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Guards do not in fact always see each inmate; the point is that they could at any time. Since inmates never know whether they are being observed, they must behave as if they are always seen and observed. As a result, control is achieved more by the possibility of internal monitoring of those controlled than by actual supervision or heavy physical constraints.
The principle of the Panopticon can be applied not only to prisons but also to any system of disciplinary power (a factory, a hospital, a school). And, in fact, although Bentham himself was never able to build it, its principle has come to pervade aspects of modern society. It is the instrument through which modern discipline has been able to replace pre-modern sovereignty (kings, judges) as the fundamental power relation.
Foucault argued that the surveillance state breeds docility, whether it’s in prisons, schools, or places of work, reducing our bodies to machines, useful to state and corporate power systems.
Then, in 1984, the postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard took up the idea in his essay, “Precession of Simulacra.”
Baudrillard, most famous of his book, Simulacra and Simulation (which you may remember from its cameo in The Matrix), argues that the original idea of the panopticon is falling apart because in the postmodern situation, there’s no more subject and object — that is, there’s no more observer and observed, no more guard and prisoner. Those distinctions have collapsed. If the tower in which the prison guard sits is a “God’s eye view” of the prisoners, Baudrillard leans on Nietzche’s Parable of a Madman: “Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” In other words, the distinction between “god” and “not god,” between divine and mortal has collapsed.
Baudrillard is hard to grasp, but here’s a bit of what he’s talking about:
“You no longer watch TV, it is TV that watches you (live),” or again: “You are no longer listening to Don’t Panic, it is Don’t Panic that is listening to you”—a switch from the panoptic mechanism of surveillance (Discipline and Punish [Surveiller et punir]) to a system of deterrence, in which the distinction between the passive and the active is abolished. There is no longer any imperative of submission to the model, or to the gaze “YOU are the model!” “YOU are the majority!” Such is the watershed of a hyperreal sociality, in which the real is confused with the model, as in the statistical operation, or with the medium. …Such is the last stage of the social relation, ours, which is no longer one of persuasion (the classical age of propaganda, of ideology, of publicity, etc.) but one of deterrence: “YOU are information, you are the social, you are the event, you are involved, you have the word, etc.” An about-face through which it becomes impossible to locate one instance of the model, of power, of the gaze, of the medium itself, because you are always already on the other side.”
Baudrillard studiously watched one of the first reality TV shows, in which a camera followed a California family and recorded everything they did. The presence of the camera, of course, changed the family’s behavior. Just as every character — other than Truman — is acting for the thousands of cameras hidden in the false (?) reality of the Truman Show.
I write all this by way of confession, to confess my ambivalence about my last month. A book is a particular kind of communication, a medium of ideas that communicates in a certain way. The problem, as we learned in a viral Substack post last week, is that no one buys books anymore. Every year, more books are published, and every year, Americans read fewer books.
So what’s an author to do? Hustle, that’s what. Get on every podcast he can. Push the book daily on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn — and even into the void that is Twitter/X. Shoot POV videos and mix them with music. Subscribe to Canva so that his videos are more compelling, more likeable, clickable, shareable. Tag people with bigger platforms in hopes that they’ll share news of the book. Pray that something magic happens and the book catches fire.
I’m basically volunteering myself for the surveillance state, sacrificing myself, as it were, on the altar of surveillance. Even in the BWCA, out of cell range, I took the above selfie, knowing that I would post it later and maybe, as a result, someone will buy the book.
I don’t love it, but I don’t know what else to do. I speak to aspiring authors regularly — I zoomed with one earlier this week — and they often say, “I’m terrible at marketing myself.” I get it. But I tell them that they’ve got hustle. That’s the only way, at least for those of us who fall well below the mega-authors who drive the publishing industry.
So I will live ambivalently, posting in hopes that my acquiescence to the surveillance state might lead to a few more people buying my book. But I will also look for times for opt out of the surveillance state, and for places where, as I wrote in The God of Wild Places, the “tentacles of data” cannot reach me.
Maybe you’ll join me there some day.
Thanks for reading.