"Visibility is a trap." — Michel Foucault
In 1791, Jeremy Bentham sketched a prison where the walls were transparent and the guard tower was dark. He called it the Panopticon. The genius of the design wasn't that the prisoners were always watched; it was that they might be. Paranoia did the heavy lifting. The inmates eventually policed themselves.
It’s a terrifying concept. It’s also outdated.
Comparing the modern internet to a Panopticon misses the fundamental psychological twist of the 21st century: We aren't captives. We are volunteers.
The Narcissism of Being Watched
Critics like Shoshana Zuboff rightly skewer "Surveillance Capitalism" for mining our lives for data. But they often treat us as passive victims, stripmind for "behavioral surplus." This analysis completely overlooks the dopamine-soaked reality of why we signed the Terms of Service.
In an increasingly atomized, secular world, privacy feels suspiciously like non-existence. If you go on vacation and don't post a Story, were you really there? The algorithmic gaze of Instagram or TikTok validates our reality. It whispers, "I see you. I can predict you. You exist."
We trade our privacy not for convenience—that’s the lie we tell ourselves—but for ontological security. We fear the silence of the private life more than the noise of the public one. We are building our own cells, painting them gold, and calling it "Content Creation."
The Hard Turn: When the Gaze Weaponizes
But here is where the trap snaps shut. By building this "Soft Panopticon" for vanity, we laid the fiber-optic cables for the "Hard Panopticon" of control. The data doesn't stay in the validation loop. It flows downstream.
Take Pegasus, the flagship weapon of the NSO Group. This isn't the clumsy malware of the 2000s where you had to be foolish enough to click a link. Pegasus is "Zero-Click." It exploits the way your phone parses a missed WhatsApp call or a silent iMessage. It compromises the device before the screen even lights up.
Once inside, it doesn't just read your texts. It turns your microphone into a bug. It dumps your encrypted Signal history. It is the ultimate expression of the Panopticon: The victim has zero agency, and the attacker is God.
The Chilling Effect
The tragedy isn't just that a dissident in Saudi Arabia or a journalist in Mexico gets hacked. It’s what happens to the rest of us who aren't targets yet.
It’s the Chilling Effect. When you know the walls are glass, you stop dancing. You self-censor. You avoid the search term that might flag a database. You don't message the friend with the radical politics. You flatten yourself into the shape the machine expects.
We built this glass house to be seen. Now we are realizing the door is locked from the outside.
