In 1965, the conservative historian
Shirley Robin Letwin traced the
Fabian zest for
social planning to early utilitarian thinkers. She argued that Bentham's pet gadget, the panopticon prison, was a device of such monstrous efficiency that it left no room for humanity. She accused Bentham of forgetting the dangers of unrestrained power and argued that "in his ardour for reform, Bentham prepared the way for what he feared". Recent
libertarian thinkers began to regard Bentham's entire philosophy as having paved the way for
totalitarian states. In the late 1960s, the American historian
Gertrude Himmelfarb, who had published
The Haunted House of Jeremy Bentham in 1965, was at the forefront of depicting Bentham's mechanism of surveillance as a tool of oppression and social control. Foucault first came across the panopticon architecture when he studied the origins of
clinical medicine and hospital architecture in the second half of the 18th century. In 1975, Foucault used the panopticon as metaphor for the modern disciplinary society in
Discipline and Punish. According to Foucault, a disciplinary society had emerged in the 18th century, and this discipline consisted of techniques to reinforce the ordering of human complexities, with the ultimate aim of docility and utility in the system. He argued that discipline had replaced the pre-modern society of kings, and that the panopticon should not be understood as a building, but as a mechanism of power and a diagram of political technology. In 1984,
Michael Radford gained international attention for the cinematographic panopticon he had staged in the film
Nineteen Eighty-Four. Of the
telescreens in the landmark surveillance narrative
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949),
George Orwell said: "there was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment ... you had to live ... in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised". In Radford's film the telescreens were bidirectional and in a world with an ever increasing number of telescreen devices the citizens of Oceania were spied on more than they thought possible. In
The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (1994) the sociologist
David Lyon concluded that "no single metaphor or model is adequate to the task of summing up what is central to contemporary surveillance, but important clues are available in
Nineteen Eighty-Four and in Bentham's panopticon". The French philosopher
Gilles Deleuze shaped the emerging field of surveillance studies with the 1990 essay
Postscript on the Societies of Control. Deleuze argued that the society of control is replacing the discipline society. With regards to the panopticon, Deleuze argued that "enclosures are moulds ... but controls are a modulation". Deleuze observed that technology had allowed physical enclosures, such as schools, factories, prisons and office buildings, to be replaced by a self-governing machine, which extends
surveillance in a quest to manage production and consumption. Information circulates in the control society, just like products in the modern economy, and meaningful objects of surveillance are sought out as forward-looking profiles and simulated pictures of future demands, needs and risks are drawn up. In the 1998 satirical science fiction film
The Truman Show, the protagonist eventually escapes the OmniCam Ecosphere, the
reality television show that, unknown to him, broadcasts his life around the clock and across the globe. But in 2002,
Peter Weibel noted that the
entertainment industry does not consider the panopticon as a threat or punishment, but as "amusement, liberation and pleasure". With reference to the
Big Brother television shows of
Endemol Entertainment, in which a group of people live in a container studio apartment and allow themselves to be recorded constantly, Weibel argued that the panopticon provides the masses with "the pleasure of power, the pleasure of sadism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, scopophilia, and narcissism". In 2006,
Shoreditch TV became available to residents of the
Shoreditch in London, so that they could tune in to watch CCTV footage live. The service allowed residents "to see what's happening, check out the traffic and keep an eye out for crime". The
Cornell University professor and information theorist Branden Hookway introduced the concept of a Panspectrons in 2000: an evolution of the panopticon to the effect that it does not define an object of surveillance more, but everyone and everything is monitored. The object is defined only in relation to a specific issue.
Paris School academic
Didier Bigo coined the term "
Banopticon" to describe a situation where profiling technologies are used to determine who to place under surveillance. In their 2004 book
Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control,
Derrick Jensen and George Draffan called Bentham "one of the pioneers of modern surveillance" and argued that his panopticon prison design serves as the model for modern
supermaximum security prisons, such as
Pelican Bay State Prison in California. In the 2015 book
Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness,
Simone Browne noted that Bentham travelled on a ship carrying
slaves as cargo while drafting his panopticon proposal. She argues that the structure of chattel slavery haunts the theory of the panopticon. She proposes that the 1789 plan of the
slave ship Brookes should be regarded as the paradigmatic blueprint. Drawing on
Didier Bigo's
Banopticon, Browne argues that society is ruled by exceptionalism of power, where the
state of emergency becomes permanent and certain groups are excluded on the basis of their future potential behaviour as determined through
profiling.
Surveillance technology about video surveillance The metaphor of the panopticon prison has been employed to analyse the social significance of
surveillance by
closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in public spaces. In 1990,
Mike Davis reviewed the design and operation of a
shopping mall, with its centralised control room, CCTV cameras and security guards, and came to the conclusion that it "plagiarizes brazenly from Jeremy Bentham's renowned nineteenth-century design". In their 1996 study of CCTV camera installations in British cities, Nicholas Fyfe and Jon Bannister called central and local government policies that facilitated the rapid spread of CCTV surveillance a dispersal of an "electronic panopticon". Particular attention has been drawn to the similarities of CCTV with Bentham's prison design because CCTV technology enabled, in effect, a central observation tower, staffed by an unseen observer. In 2026, UK
Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood linked artificial intelligence-driven monitoring to the metaphor, stating her intent to "achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his panopticon". She further noted that this technology allows for a system where "the eyes of the state can be on you at all times".
Employment and management Shoshana Zuboff used the metaphor of the panopticon in her 1988 book
In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power to describe how computer technology makes work more visible. Zuboff examined how computer systems were used for
employee monitoring to track the behavior and output of workers. She used the term 'panopticon' because the workers could not tell that they were being spied on, while the manager was able to check their work continuously. Zuboff argued that there is a collective responsibility formed by the hierarchy in the
information panopticon that eliminates subjective opinions and judgements of managers on their employees. Because each employee's contribution to the production process is translated into objective data, it becomes more important for managers to be able to analyze the work rather than analyze the people. Foucault's use of the panopticon metaphor shaped the debate on workplace surveillance in the 1970s. In 1981 the sociologist
Anthony Giddens expressed scepticism about the ongoing surveillance debate, criticising that "Foucault's 'archaeology', in which human beings do not make their own history but are swept along by it, does not adequately acknowledge that those subject to the power ... are knowledgeable agents, who resist, blunt or actively alter the conditions of life." The increasing employment in the
service industries has also been re-evaluated. In
Entrapped by the electronic panopticon? Worker resistance in the call centre (2000), Phil Taylor and Peter Bain argue that the large number of people employed in
call centres undertake predictable and monotonous work that is badly paid and offers few prospects. As such, they argue, it is comparable to factory work. The panopticon has become a symbol of the extreme measures that some companies take in the name of efficiency as well as to guard against employee theft.
Time-theft by workers has become accepted as an output restriction and
theft has been associated by management with all behaviour that include avoidance of work. In the past decades "unproductive behaviour" has been cited as rationale for introducing a range of surveillance techniques and the vilification of employees who resist them. and the 2014 book by Simon Head
Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans, which describes conditions at an
Amazon depot in
Augsburg, it is argued that catering at all times to the desires of the customer can lead to increasingly oppressive corporate environments and
quotas in which many warehouse workers can no longer keep up with demands of management.
Social media The concept of panopticon has been referenced in early discussions about the impact of
social media. The notion of
dataveillance was coined by Roger Clarke in 1987, since then academic researchers have used expressions such as
superpanopticon (
Mark Poster 1990),
panoptic sort (
Oscar H. Gandy Jr. 1993) and
electronic panopticon (
David Lyon 1994) to describe social media. Because the controlled is at the centre and surrounded by those who watch, early surveillance studies treat social media as a reverse panopticon. In modern academic literature on social media, terms like
lateral surveillance,
social searching, and
social surveillance are employed to critically evaluate the effects of social media. However, the sociologist
Christian Fuchs treats social media like a classical panopticon. He argues that the focus should not be on the relationship between the users of a medium, but the relationship between the users and the medium. Therefore, he argues that the relationship between the large number of users and the sociotechnical
Web 2.0 platform, like
Facebook, amounts to a panopticon. Fuchs draws attention to the fact that use of such platforms requires identification, classification and assessment of users by the platforms and therefore, he argues, the definition of
privacy must be reassessed to incorporate stronger
consumer protection and protection of citizens from
corporate surveillance. == In popular culture ==