Michel Foucault's Panopticon

[Magical Realist]

Summarizes Foucault's radical reconception of modern power as diffuse, non-centralized, and invisible under the metaphor of the "Panopticon". Think more "Brave New Worldish" and less "1984ish"..Think less surveillance and more "self-surveillance"..


https://www.google.com/search?q=panoptic...XLgqM,st:0

[Image: BSrEdmb.jpg?fbclid=IwY2xjawROD0BleHRuA2F...9z547epS1A]

It's hard not to see Foucault's concept of power insidiously infecting humanity as prescient of advancing technology, deleting for us the very possibility of privacy and freedom. As P. K. Dick already observed in the 1970's:

"There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me’".

The imminent arrival of AI promises many things for our society--from liberation from the drudgery of working to an exponential expansion of knowledge and medical discoveries.

In the meantime we feel the gradual onslaught of a life controlled and defined by our instantaneous accessibility and utilization within the inhuman functionality of the System. Humans as mere prosthetic extentions of an all-powerful hive mind nowhere and everywhere at once.

[Magical Realist]

"Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms."---Michel Foucault

“If you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled. And this they will do, partly by drugs as I foresaw in Brave New World, partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man, and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, and his physiology even. And so making him actually love his slavery. I mean, I think this is the danger: that actually people may be in some ways happy under the new regime, but they will be happy in situations where they oughtn't to be happy.”
― Aldous Huxley