Panopticon
Based on Wikipedia: Panopticon
The Prison That Watches You Even When No One's Looking
Imagine a prison where you never know if you're being watched. The guard tower sits in the center, its windows darkened or shuttered. You can't see inside. But whoever is inside—if anyone is inside at all—can see you perfectly. Every moment of every day, you might be observed. Or you might not. You have no way to know.
So you behave. Always.
This is the panopticon, and it's one of the most unsettling ideas in the history of architecture. Designed in the late eighteenth century by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, it was meant to be a humane reform of the brutal prison systems of his day. Instead, it became a metaphor for everything we fear about surveillance, social control, and the modern state. Today, when we debate social media monitoring, workplace surveillance, or smart speakers that might be listening, we're having a conversation that Bentham started over two hundred years ago.
A Philosopher Visits His Brother in Russia
The panopticon began, oddly enough, with a family visit. In 1785, Jeremy Bentham traveled to Krichev, a town in what is now Belarus but was then part of the Russian Empire. His brother Samuel was working there for Prince Potemkin, the powerful favorite of Catherine the Great. Samuel had a practical problem: how do you supervise a large number of workers in a factory when you can't afford to hire enough overseers?
His solution was architectural. Design the workspace so that one person, standing in the right spot, could observe everyone at once.
Jeremy saw something bigger. Much bigger.
While staying with his brother for nearly two years, Jeremy began sketching out letters describing a new kind of institution. The word he coined for it—panopticon—comes from the Greek "panoptes," meaning "all-seeing." In Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes was a giant with a hundred eyes, the perfect watchman because some of his eyes were always awake. Bentham's building would give mere mortals the same power.
How the Design Actually Worked
Picture a large circular building, like a donut made of cells. The inmates' rooms line the outer ring, all facing inward toward a central tower. The tower is the key to everything. From inside it, guards can see into every cell. But the inmates cannot see into the tower. Bentham specified that blinds, screens, and carefully controlled lighting would keep the inspectors invisible.
Here's the psychological genius of it: the guard doesn't actually need to watch everyone all the time. In fact, it's physically impossible—one person cannot simultaneously observe hundreds of cells. But because the prisoners never know when they're being observed, they must assume they always could be. The uncertainty itself becomes the mechanism of control.
Bentham put it memorably. The building would create "the sentiment of a sort of invisible omnipresence."
Think about that phrase. Invisible omnipresence. It sounds almost religious, like the all-seeing eye of God. And that's not a coincidence. Bentham, who was a founder of the philosophical school called utilitarianism—the idea that the best action is whatever produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number—understood that effective control doesn't require constant watching. It requires the constant possibility of being watched.
Not Just for Prisons
Bentham never thought of the panopticon as merely a prison design. In his mind, the principle applied to any institution where people needed supervision. Hospitals. Schools. Asylums. Poorhouses. And especially factories.
This was the era of the Industrial Revolution. England was filling with massive new manufacturing facilities where hundreds of workers operated machinery for long hours. How do you make sure they're actually working? How do you prevent theft, sabotage, or simple slacking off? The traditional answer was more overseers. Bentham's answer was better architecture.
He even commissioned detailed drawings from an architect named Willey Reveley. And his brother Samuel actually built a panopticon in 1807 near St. Petersburg—not a prison, but a training center for young men entering naval manufacturing. The principle worked in practice, not just in theory.
Who Watches the Watchmen?
Here's where Bentham's thinking gets interesting, and where he differs from the dystopian interpretations that would come later. He didn't just want to watch the prisoners. He wanted to watch the watchers.
The Latin phrase "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"—who guards the guards?—is one of the oldest problems in political philosophy. Give someone power over others, and how do you prevent them from abusing it? Prison guards of Bentham's era were notorious for cruelty and corruption. They operated behind walls, invisible to the public, accountable to no one.
Bentham's solution was radical transparency. The panopticon manager would be observed by the general public and by government officials. The prison would be open to inspection. The warden who could see everything would himself be seen.
Publicity, Bentham argued, was the chief mechanism that would keep prison managers humane. The same architecture of visibility that controlled the inmates would control their keepers. Everyone watches everyone. Power becomes accountable.
Whether this would have worked in practice is another question. Bentham never got the chance to find out.
A Dream Deferred
Bentham spent years trying to build an actual panopticon prison. He offered to construct one at Millbank, in London, largely at his own expense. He believed so strongly in the concept that he was willing to manage it himself, with his salary tied to the outcomes. If prisoners died, escaped, or failed to reform, he would suffer financially.
The project dragged on for decades. There were endless negotiations with the government. Land was acquired, then disputed. Plans were drawn, revised, rejected. And finally, in 1812, the British government decided to build a prison at Millbank—but not according to Bentham's designs.
The National Penitentiary that opened in 1821 borrowed some ideas from the panopticon but missed the central insight. It became known as Millbank Prison, and it was a disaster. Disease outbreaks plagued it. The reputation was terrible. Bentham, who lived to see it built, watched his vision corrupted into something he didn't recognize or support.
He remained bitter about it for the rest of his life. He became convinced that King George III and the aristocratic establishment had deliberately thwarted him. This sense of persecution shaped his later philosophy. He developed elaborate theories about what he called "sinister interest"—the way that powerful elites conspire to protect their privileges against the broader public good. The man who designed a system of total surveillance became obsessed with the idea that he himself had been the victim of hidden machinations.
What Actually Got Built
Though Bentham never saw a true panopticon constructed, his ideas echoed through the prison architecture of the nineteenth century—sometimes faithfully, often in distorted form.
Pentonville Prison, built in London between 1840 and 1842, after Bentham's death, became the model for over fifty prisons in Victorian Britain. It had a central hall with prison wings radiating outward like spokes on a wheel. This "radial design" allowed guards to see down long corridors, but it wasn't really a panopticon. Guards still had to walk the hallways. They could only see into individual cells by peering through peepholes in the doors. The constant potential surveillance that made Bentham's design psychologically powerful was missing.
The same was true of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, which opened in 1829 and became influential in American prison design. It used the radial layout but operated on what was called the "separate system"—prisoners were kept in solitary confinement, isolated not just from guards but from each other. The goal was reflection and penitence (hence "penitentiary"), not the efficient surveillance of Bentham's vision.
In the Netherlands, several circular prisons were built that looked like panopticons but failed the essential test. The cell windows facing inward were so small that guards couldn't actually see inside. The architecture gestured toward total surveillance without delivering it.
Cuba's Accidental Dystopia
The closest anyone came to building Bentham's actual vision was in Cuba, and the result was grimly ironic.
In 1925, President Gerardo Machado commissioned a modern prison complex called Presidio Modelo. Cuban officials had studied American prisons and were particularly impressed by Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois. They built four massive circular structures, each five stories tall with ninety-three cells per floor. The cells faced inward toward central guard towers with shuttered windows—exactly as Bentham had specified. Guards could see prisoners; prisoners couldn't see guards.
The design included something even more ambitious than Bentham imagined. The four panopticons were connected by tunnels to a central community building. In keeping with Bentham's belief that prisoners should do meaningful work, there were no doors on the cells. Inmates could roam freely, attend workshops, learn trades, become literate. The theory was that surveillance would ensure good behavior while education would enable rehabilitation.
For a brief time, it may have even worked.
Then came overcrowding, underfunding, and political upheaval. By the time Fidel Castro was imprisoned at Presidio Modelo in the 1950s—before his revolution succeeded—the four circular buildings held six thousand men. Every floor was piled with trash. There was no running water. Food was barely adequate. The workshops had closed. What was designed as a humane alternative to brutal traditional prisons had become its own kind of hell.
The panopticon promised control through architecture. It delivered control without the resources for humanity.
The Digital Panopticon
In 2006, a prison opened in Lelystad, in the Dutch province of Flevoland, that achieved what Bentham dreamed of through entirely different means. Every prisoner wears an electronic monitoring tag. Sensors track their location at all times. The system requires only six guards to supervise one hundred fifty prisoners—a ratio that would have seemed miraculous in the nineteenth century.
No circular building. No central tower. No architectural tricks of light and shadow. Just data, constantly collected, constantly analyzed.
Is this a panopticon? Bentham's design depended on uncertainty—you might be watched, or you might not. The electronic tags remove the uncertainty entirely. You are definitely being monitored, all the time, with perfect accuracy. The architecture of possible observation has been replaced by the technology of certain observation.
Some would say this is worse. Others would say it's simply more honest.
Foucault and the Metaphor That Escaped
The panopticon might have remained an architectural curiosity, a footnote in the history of failed reform proposals, if not for a French philosopher named Michel Foucault.
In 1975, Foucault published a book called "Discipline and Punish" that transformed how we think about power, surveillance, and modern society. The panopticon became his central metaphor.
Foucault argued that Western societies had undergone a profound shift in how they controlled their populations. In the pre-modern era, power was spectacular and violent. Kings demonstrated their authority through public executions—the torture and killing of criminals in front of crowds. Power was visible, concentrated in a single ruler, and exercised in dramatic bursts.
Modern society works differently. Power is invisible, distributed, and constant. Instead of the king watching the execution, everyone watches everyone. We internalize the surveillance. We discipline ourselves.
The panopticon, for Foucault, wasn't just a prison design. It was a diagram of how modern power operates. The principle had escaped the building and spread throughout society—to schools where children sit in rows facing a teacher, to hospitals where patients are observed and documented, to factories where workers' movements are timed and analyzed, to cities laid out in grids that make populations visible and manageable.
You don't need walls to create a panopticon. You need a system where people believe they might be observed and modify their behavior accordingly.
Social Media and the Voluntary Panopticon
Foucault died in 1984, before the internet transformed daily life. But his analysis seems almost prophetic now.
Consider social media. Billions of people voluntarily post their thoughts, locations, relationships, and activities to platforms that record everything. We curate our behavior knowing that employers, family members, potential romantic partners, and complete strangers might see what we post. We self-censor. We perform. We internalize the gaze of an audience that might be watching at any moment.
Bentham's prisoners couldn't see into the guard tower. We can't see the algorithms that decide what content gets promoted or suppressed, which posts get flagged, whose accounts get suspended. The asymmetry remains. We are visible; the mechanisms watching us are not.
But there's a crucial difference. Bentham's prisoners were forced into the panopticon. We walked in voluntarily. We built our own cells and decorated them with photos.
Some theorists call this the "participatory panopticon" or "surveillance capitalism." We trade our visibility for connection, entertainment, and convenience. The bargain might be fair or unfair, empowering or exploitative, depending on who you ask. But it's hard to deny that we've created something Bentham never imagined: a surveillance system that people actually want to join.
The Elf on the Shelf
Perhaps nothing captures the domestication of panoptic thinking better than the Elf on the Shelf, the Christmas toy that became a cultural phenomenon starting in 2005.
The premise: a small elf doll "watches" children during the holiday season and reports their behavior back to Santa Claus each night. Parents move the elf to different locations to create the illusion that it's alive and active. Children know the elf might be watching at any time, so they behave—or try to.
It's the panopticon as a game. Surveillance as a holiday tradition. The invisible omnipresence that Bentham designed for criminals, repackaged for toddlers.
Some parents and critics find this creepy. They argue that it normalizes surveillance, teaching children from the earliest age that being watched is normal, even fun. Others shrug it off as harmless fantasy, no different from Santa's traditional all-seeing powers ("He sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake").
But the debate itself is telling. We've become so saturated with surveillance—cameras in stores, phones that track our location, websites that remember our preferences—that we now argue about whether it's appropriate to introduce it as a toy.
The Limits of Watching
Bentham believed that visibility would produce good behavior. Watch people, and they'll act ethically. Watch the watchers, and they'll act humanely. Transparency would solve the ancient problem of power.
Two centuries later, we can assess this claim.
Sometimes visibility does constrain behavior. Police officers with body cameras use force less often than those without. Workers observed by their peers are more productive than those working alone. Public officials subjected to press scrutiny are less likely to accept bribes.
But visibility has limits. People adapt to surveillance. They learn what's being watched and modify only that behavior. They find blind spots. They game the metrics. The panopticon assumes that the observed behavior is the same as the real behavior—but humans are experts at performing one thing while being another.
Moreover, surveillance requires someone to actually watch. All those security cameras generate footage that often goes unreviewed. All that data collected by tech companies sits in servers, analyzed by algorithms that miss context and nuance. The possibility of being watched loses its power when people realize that no one is actually looking.
And sometimes visibility backfires entirely. People who know they're being monitored don't just behave—they resist. They find ways to subvert the system. They band together against the watchers. The panopticon assumes atomized individuals, each alone in their cell. But humans have an inconvenient tendency to form communities, even under surveillance.
Privacy and Its Discontents
The opposite of the panopticon is privacy—the ability to be unobserved, at least sometimes.
For most of human history, privacy was a luxury of the wealthy. Peasants lived in one-room houses with extended family. Workers slept in shared dormitories. Only the rich could afford walls and doors and rooms of their own. The poor were observed by default.
Modern privacy—the expectation that ordinary people can have spaces free from surveillance—is a relatively recent invention. It emerged alongside the same industrialization that Bentham was trying to manage. As people moved to cities, joined anonymous crowds, and lived in separate apartments, they gained the ability to be unknown.
The digital age is changing this again. Our devices track us. Our purchases are recorded. Our faces are recognized. The wealthy can afford privacy consultants, encrypted communications, and homes in remote locations. The rest of us are increasingly visible, our data bought and sold, our behavior predicted and nudged.
Some argue that this is fine—that privacy is overrated, that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear. This is essentially Bentham's argument. Visibility produces good behavior. Surveillance protects the innocent.
Others argue that privacy is essential for human dignity. That constant observation is inherently oppressive, even when no specific harm results. That we need spaces free from watching in order to develop as individuals, to experiment, to make mistakes, to be truly ourselves.
This debate has no easy resolution. But Bentham's ghost haunts both sides. He showed us that architecture and technology can shape behavior in profound ways. The question we're still arguing about is whether that shaping is liberation or control.
The Tower Stands Empty
In the end, the most disturbing thing about the panopticon might not be the surveillance itself. It's what happens inside our heads.
Bentham's design worked because prisoners internalized the watching. They didn't need an actual guard in the tower; they imagined one. The architecture created a guard inside their own minds—one who never took breaks, never looked away, never slept.
We do this to ourselves now, without any building at all. We imagine how our posts will look to others. We anticipate judgments that may never come. We censor ourselves not because someone is watching but because someone might be. The guard tower could be empty, and we'd never know the difference.
Foucault called this the creation of "docile bodies"—people who control themselves so thoroughly that external control becomes almost unnecessary. The perfect exercise of power is the one you don't even notice because it's become part of who you are.
Is this entirely bad? Self-control is also called self-discipline, and we usually consider it a virtue. The person who behaves well only when watched is, in some sense, not really good at all. The panopticon might create mere compliance, but genuine ethics requires something more: doing the right thing even when no one is looking.
Bentham, the utilitarian, might have been satisfied with compliance. If people behave well, does it matter why? The consequences are the same whether you're genuinely good or merely performing goodness.
But most of us sense that something is lost when behavior becomes pure performance. The self that exists only for display isn't quite a self at all. We want spaces where we can be unobserved, unperformed, authentically ourselves—whatever that means.
The panopticon offers efficiency, safety, and order. It offers a solution to the eternal problem of how to make people behave. What it cannot offer is freedom—not the freedom from being watched, but the freedom to be someone worth watching.
Looking Back at the All-Seeing Eye
Jeremy Bentham died in 1832, disappointed that his great project had never been realized. In accordance with his wishes, his body was preserved and displayed in a wooden cabinet at University College London, where it can still be seen today. The man who wanted to make everyone visible made himself permanently so.
His panopticon was never built as he envisioned it. But the principle escaped into the world anyway—into prison design, factory management, urban planning, digital technology, and the countless ways we watch and are watched. The specific architecture failed. The idea conquered.
We live now in something like an inverted panopticon. Instead of prisoners in cells observed by an unseen guard, we're all guards and prisoners at once, observing and observed, watching and watched. The tower is everywhere and nowhere. The structure is invisible because it's inside us.
Bentham thought he was designing a humane alternative to the brutal prisons of his day. He may have been right about that. But he also designed something else: a template for a society where privacy becomes impossible, where the self becomes a performance, where we never quite know whether we're alone.
The panopticon still watches. The question is whether we'll ever look back.