Obscured vision

Jeremy Bentham's panopticon

This week - on my ANU course 'Digital Culture' - we've been looking at the potential of the Web to become the core component of a dystopian future. One of the readings set for our discussions is a 2014 article, The Net is not a panopticon by David Weinberger. As my response below makes clear I was far from persuaded by Mr. Weinberger's argument.

Wednesday’s lecture has made me critically re-appraise David Weinberger’s essay ‘The Net is not a panopticon’ which, initially, I had (more or less) discounted as a Panglossian thought bubble; not much going on there, I thought. However, reflecting on the lecture’s references to dystopian texts (particularly Huxley, Orwell, and Dick and movies such as Blade Runner (1982), The Terminator (1984) and Brazil (1985) – all of which I know quite well) alongside the chronology of surveillance-related legislation in the USA, it’s impossible (for me at least) not to find the complacent naivety of Mr. Weinberger’s quasi-analysis deeply troubling. 

Re-reading the essay, three cultural references popped into my head, quite unbidden. At first they seemed mildly ridiculous, superficial; daft indeed. But in an odd way they help crystallise my revised response and frame my critique more firmly within a dystopian paradigm of the Internet akin to an Orwellian / Brazil future. These were my thoughts:

• Mr. Weinberger’s article may be Internet journalism’s version of Bobby McFerrin’s 1988 hit single ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’  – whimsical and dislocated from reality. Coincidentally both McFerrin’s video and Weinberger’s essay feature re-assuring performances by characters in bathrobes. Proof positive, perhaps, that “we’re fine … with who we are in the new public of the Web” as Weinberger puts it. 

• A high-security, hi-tech panopticon prison features in Marvel Studio’s Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). (Incidentally – from which our intrepid band of heroes escape to meet a criminal mastermind at a location named Knowhere). As ridiculous as this may sound, the approach taken by the character Groot (“travelling as [a talking raccoon’s] personal houseplant-slash-muscle”) to circumvent the prison’s hi-tech surveillance potential is almost a metaphor for how I see the limitations of dystopian fears (to some degree credible) that underpin legitimate concerns about the clear evidence of convergence and centralisation of government and corporate institutions co-operating to capture, retain and store data about and from the nation-state’s citizens. In short, Groot walks up to the panopticon’s power source and rips it from the wall.  The jail goes dark, the computers go down, a riot ensues and our heroes escape. 

Surveillance states pre-date the Internet. Enemies 
of such states (righteous – such as those who opposed McCarthyism or in Soviet Russia circulated The Gulag Archipelago in samizdat formats – or malevolent such as ISIS) behave – after a fashion – like Groot. They operate offline, below the radar, strive to leave no trace. To personalise these matters to some degree, the Australian State could, I suppose, waste even more of our taxpayers’ money searching through my metadata to determine whether or not on a Sunday morning I watch BBC Television’s Match of the Day of Saturday soccer highlights from the UK via a VPN. But if I strapped a self-detonating waistcoat to my chest tomorrow to match the tragic and senseless violence in Belgium recently there would be no trace of my inclinations or potential so to do anywhere online [NB: in case it needs to be clarified … this is intellectual speculation for the purposes of completing an assessed work at the ANU, not reasonable grounds for suspicion]. So, although Weinberger grossly underplays the potential for the Internet to be developed by surveillance states as time passes, I think there remain limits and democratic protections that can and should be built and defended ‘before it’s too late’.

• Bringing me to my third and final reference. It was - I thought as I re-read - that Mr. Weinberger can’t see the wood for the trees. The new technologies of the information age do contain, within their (over)reach, potential to support, bolster and empower totalitarian, authoritarian surveillance states. His six-point deconstruction of the risk of society developing or allowing the creation of a new, online panopticon misses the point. If – Orwell suggested when – the
  
  surveillance state takes over, its mechanisms and architecture will not look like an 18th Century Benthamite block. It will look quite different – more like our shiny new Web – and superficially appealing. That, of course, is what the Trojans said about that nice horse the Greeks left them as a gift.