Escape from Panopticon. Taunton, Matthew. New Statesman. mar2008, Vol. 137 Issue 4889, p48 48.

Prévia do material em texto

Arts&Culture
48 | NEW STATESMAN | 24 MARCH 2008
It was a damning indictment of
my record as a blogger. Bored in
Brussels, with nothing but my
laptop for company, I decided to
check on my blog. Perhaps I was
half-thinking about posting some
photos; perhaps I just wanted
to see who was linking to me. In
the end, my intentions didn’t
matter. The blog had gone.
How could this have happened?
Simple: I had forgotten to renew
my domain name. Machine-
envy.com/blog, once (I like to
think) a bustling hub of the digitally
informed, was now an advert for
a domain registration service.
Although it was distressing to
think of all the lost page rank –
Google goodwill that once meant
my blog was returned third on
a search query for “Becky” – what
was more distressing was that I
hadn’t even noticed.
They say there’s a new blog
created every second. But that’s an
empty statistic. Blogs are like gym
memberships – it’s not creating
them that’s important, it’s
keeping them up. Once, it was
a badge of honour to have a blog
(hand-coded in HTML, naturally)
which it was clear you hadn’t
updated in five years. It meant you
had been there at the start, before
off-the-shelf blogging software
became commonplace. And long
enough to have started, got
distracted by something more
interesting (a multimillion-dollar
web start-up, say) and stopped
blogging. But that was 2004. Now
an expired blog just looks sloppy.
When Machine-envy started,
it too was hand-coded in HTML. It
didn’t need to be – I was just
showing off – and later it migrated
to the custom blogging system
WordPress. Although I have
tried to encourage co-bloggers,
my stipulation that they must use
their real names puts most off, the
only taker being the in-house tech
support. His post on installing
Linux on a Nokia mobile remains,
to my despair, the blog’s most
popular post. An unconscious
motivation behind my own
neglect, perhaps? In any case, the
last time I posted to Machine-envy
was on 30 December 2007, when
Egypt announced its intention
to extend copyright to the Great
Pyramids, lengthening the law’s
effect by almost 4,000 years. The
time before that was August.
I could at least take heart that
I’m not the only one to forget.
In 2003, Microsoft failed to
renew the domain name for its
email hosting service,
Hotmail.co.uk, despite, like me,
receiving reminders from its
registrar. But just as I was starting
to believe I could get over this
episode pride intact, the emails
started coming. Friends, readers
and random correspondents got
in touch: did I know my blog had
disappeared? Was there anything
they could do to help?
In the end, it was all much
simpler than I’d expected: half an
hour’s conversation with my
domain registrar service, and the
blog was back online – with only a
one-point page-rank drop. But
the episode has taught me a
valuable lesson. What’s that? To
find out, just read my blog . . . l
Escape from
Panopticon
We may have nothing
to fear but freedom itself.
By Matthew Taunton
“Big Brother is watching you.” With these words
the postwar era began, and in some ways they
have come to embody the principal political
fear of our time. Worries over identity cards and
CCTV are part of a tendency t0 see surveillance
as the means by which power is enforced. The 
repression in Nineteen Eighty-Four must be re-
sisted. But is our focus on surveillance distracting
us from more pressing political concerns?
Michel Foucault was influential in propagating
the notion that power in modern societies is
based on surveillance, and his work remains a
cause of acute paranoia and depression among
countless humanities students. In Discipline and
Punish, Foucault argues that Jeremy Bentham’s
Panopticon – a prison designed so that all inmates
are potentially under constant surveillance by
an unseen official – is a template for modern so-
ciety, “a society penetrated through and through
with disciplinary mechanisms”.
This position is irritatingly watertight, as any-
one who disagrees is implicitly the unknowing
servant of power. But the endurance of the Pan-
opticon thesis is more to do with its huge psy-
chological appeal, which can be explained using
the ideas of a thinker who has cachet among a
certain type of teenager but is less fashionable
than Foucault in universities: Jean-Paul Sartre.
Sartre argued that, far from living under the
spell of surveillance society, we are “condemned
to be free”, and that the thing that we most fear
is our own freedom. To illustrate this, he pointed
to vertigo: the sickening sensation one has when
standing on the edge of a cliff, caused by the
knowledge that one could freely choose to jump.
People will do almost anything to avoid con-
fronting this freedom, because it is not simply
liberating, but profoundly terrifying.
Sartre distrusted belief systems that allow
people to disown responsibility for their
thoughts and actions by implying that they are
not freely chosen. Psychoanalysis – which ex-
plained thoughts and actions as consequences of
desires and drives repressed in childhood – was
anathema. Similarly, Foucault’s insistence that
in modern society power is enforced by surveil-
lance is merely a comforting parable. It’s all too
easy to point at the CCTV camera or the identity
card and complain that our lives are conditioned
and determined by sinister forces beyond our
control. This lets us off the hook when it comes
to taking control of our destiny. Like it or not,
you’re freer than you think you are. l
Bentham’s prisoner gradually internalises the
feeling of being watched, and in effect begins to
police himself; he “becomes the principle of his
own subjection”. Foucault uses this to argue that
liberal societies are at heart profoundly authori-
tarian: even when we think we are acting freely,
we are probably obeying the tenets of oppressive
power structures that we have unwittingly ab-
sorbed through surveillance.
Design for watching: Bentham’s Panopticon
REBOOT
Lost in the
blogosphere
Blogs are like gym
memberships – it’s
keeping them up
that counts, writes
Becky Hogge
TI
M
E 
&
 L
IF
E 
PI
CT
U
R
ES
/G
ET
TY
 IM
A
G
ESThe ideas corner lSurveillance .
008ideas+reboot.qxp 17/03/2008 19:59 Page 48