Born to Squint, Forced to See ⚜️

  • 0 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 5 days ago
cake
Cake day: April 26th, 2025

help-circle








  • Ive heard it before, but never seen it uselessly and incorrectly described as a “panopticon”.

    Like even the first sentence of this article kind of implies to me that the author has a very loose grasp on what panopticon means.

    The panopticon is the basis for prison designs in France, where you have a circle of cells facing a guard tower in the center. The prisoners cant see inside the guard tower, so they dont know if they are being watched or not at any given time. As such, they regulate their behavior as if being watched, regardless of whether they are actually being watched or not by a real guard.

    Once you understand that concept, it becomes difficult to see how its remotely analogous to mass data collection. Mass data collection is literally just us actually being watched 24/7, and we know we are. The article spends a lot of time showing that we know exactly how they are collecting data and what they are collecting.

    Is panopticon just some hot buzzword? What do people think it means?