From Panopticon to Algorithm: The Transformation of Surveillance

Jeremy Bentham designed a prison in 1787. A tower in the centre, cells arranged in rings around it. The guard in the tower can see every inmate; the inmates cannot see the guard. Not knowing whether they are watched, inmates regulate their behaviour under an internalised gaze. Bentham called this structure the panopticon.

Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish (1975), read the panopticon not as architecture but as a diagram of power. The building was not the point; the point was how the form of seeing produced a subject.

The diagram transforms

In the 21st century, the panopticon is no longer stone but code. The guard’s tower is a load balancer, the cell is a session ID, the internalised gaze is a feedback loop.

Notice three shifts:

1. Who watches? Bentham had a single guard. Today the watcher is a system — distributed, asynchronous, sometimes unknown even to itself.
2. What is watched? Behaviour used to be the object. Today intent is: hesitation before a click, slowing of a scroll, the duration of a message typed then deleted.
3. Direction of discipline? Foucault’s panopticon produced obedience. The algorithmic panopticon produces prediction — and beyond that, nudging.

From obedience to anticipation

Shoshana Zuboff called this “surveillance capitalism.” I find the term insufficient: the issue is not just collecting data, but the subject delegating its capacity for self-understanding to an algorithm.

“We no longer use them; they learn us and sell us to ourselves.”

This is not conspiracy. It is a structural shift: power no longer represses identity, it offers identity.

Panopticon as API

If Instagram’s recommendation engine is a kind of guard, this guard:

• GET /user/{id}/signals — watches you
• POST /feed/reorder — disciplines you by deciding what comes first
• PUT /user/{id}/model — updates your predictive model

Foucault’s prison was a building; today’s panopticon is a REST API. And critically: you must use this API, because so much of your social existence now lives there.

Three exits (none easy)

1. Invisibility. Leave no trace. Possible but socially costly. OpSec discipline breaks daily life.

2. Obfuscation. Produce noise. Helen Nissenbaum’s strategy — hide real behaviour within fabricated behaviour.

3. Structural struggle. Law, standard, collective action. Slow, hard, but lasting.

None of the three is sufficient alone. Two are individual, the third collective. Exit from the panopticon is not a single act because the panopticon is not a single thing.

Conclusion

Bentham drew a building. Foucault made it a diagram. We turned it into an API. At each step the gaze sharpened, its force thinned, but resistance grew harder.

The question is not: “Am I being watched?” You are. The question is: “Do I notice that I am watching myself?”

Because the panopticon’s real genius was not seeing, but making the inmate build the habit of looking. The rest is history.

---

Sources: Foucault, M. (1975). Surveiller et punir. · Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. · Nissenbaum, H. & Brunton, F. (2015). Obfuscation: A User’s Guide.