The Inspection House
An Impertinent Field Guide to Modern Surveillance
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- 5,99 €
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- 5,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
In 1787, British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham conceived of the panopticon, a ring of cells observed by a central watchtower, as a labor-saving device for those in authority. While Bentham's design was ostensibly for a prison, he believed that any number of places that require supervision—factories, poorhouses, hospitals, and schools—would benefit from such a design. The French philosopher Michel Foucault took Bentham at his word. In his groundbreaking 1975 study, Discipline and Punish, the panopticon became a metaphor to describe the creeping effects of personalized surveillance as a means for ever-finer mechanisms of control.
Forty years later, the available tools of scrutiny, supervision, and discipline are far more capable and insidious than Foucault dreamed, and yet less effective than Bentham hoped. Shopping malls, container ports, terrorist holding cells, and social networks all bristle with cameras, sensors, and trackers. But, crucially, they are also rife with resistance and prime opportunities for revolution. The Inspection House is a tour through several of these sites—from Guantánamo Bay to the Occupy Oakland camp and the authors' own mobile devices—providing a stark, vivid portrait of our contemporary surveillance state and its opponents.
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Horne and Maly offer a provocative essay on surveillance in modern society. The Panopticon (from the Greek pan meaning all and optikon meaning seeing) is the concept for institutional building first proposed by Jeremy Bentham as an architectural design for prisons where prison guards could watch prisoners without being seen. The prisoners, unable to know when they were being watched would observe prison rules willingly in fear of punishment. Michel Foucault reintroduced the idea in his book Discipline and Punish where the panopticon is used to describe the effects of personalized surveillance for societal control in multiple institutions. Both treat buildings as machines of surveillance. In this book, the authors review seven contemporary sites, all examples of panoptic space where surveillance is blended to the existing architecture in order to control without being seen; using cameras, sensors, physical barriers and even our own cellular phones with often unintended consequences, such as allowing us to watch right back. Each example demonstrates how surveillance permeates every aspects of our lives and explores its effects, intended and unintended on both advocates and opponents. The book asks compelling questions about what we relinquish for the sake of safety.
