The Eye That Didn’t Blink
Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon was never just a prison design. It was a system. One central watchtower. Ringed cells. Light arranged so that every prisoner could be seen at any time—yet never know when they were being watched. He developed the idea in 1786, and published it in 1791. The brilliance wasn’t in surveillance. It was in the possibility of it.
That was the point. If people believed they were visible, they would police themselves. No chains needed. No guards shouting orders. Just the architecture of control, quietly doing its work. Later thinkers saw what Bentham had built. Foucault called it the model for modern power—not violent, but internalized. Discipline through constant visibility.
And long after the physical prisons changed, the logic remained. Today, the structure doesn’t need walls. Visibility is ambient. The tower is nowhere. But the design still works—because the feeling it creates hasn’t changed.
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