00:00What if the most powerful prison in the world had no bars, had no walls and you willingly walked into
00:07it?
00:07Welcome to yet another episode of Philosophy in Pocket series and today we are going to talk about Focus Panoptagon.
00:14First, you need to understand what a panoptagon is.
00:17It's a circular prison system and initially it was envisioned by Jeremy Bentham who was a philosopher
00:24not just for prisoners but also for factories, asylum, hospitals, anywhere where inmates are constantly under surveillance
00:33while the guard sits at the center.
00:35It was designed in such a way that the guard can see all the inmates but the inmates cannot see
00:42if they are actually being watched by the guards.
00:45So they feel like they are under constant surveillance but they do not in fact know when they might actually
00:52be watched.
00:53This idea was initially propagated by Jeremy Bentham because he believed that this was the most efficient way to govern
00:59people.
01:00Michael Foucault in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish showed us how this kind of surveillance has in fact expanded
01:09and is now placed on us even in our most private and personal moments.
01:14When you know that you may be watched at all times, you will behave as if you are being watched
01:19all the time.
01:20And here is the most chilling part.
01:23This doesn't even require an actual guard to be present.
01:26Just the mere possibility that you are being watched is enough for us to self-discipline ourselves.
01:32What ends up happening is we assume the responsibility and we effectively police ourselves.
01:38We become our own guard.
01:40So power in the modern world is maintained not through force but rather through the surveillance and the self-policing
01:47that we engage in.
01:48This is also the most effective surveillance system because self-discipline is considered as a virtue.
01:56Being a gold star obedient worker or a student gets you rewarded while any form of rebellion gets squashed by
02:04your other inmates.
02:05In this case your family or your friends before it ever reaches the guards.
02:10The ambiguity of what exactly the rules are perpetuates the self-policing even further.
02:16When you do not know what exactly is allowed and what isn't, you end up playing it safe and you
02:23comply with everything.
02:24Our data is being sold over and over again.
02:27Our phone knows exactly where we are, what do we do, what do we eat, when do we wake up,
02:33who do we wake up with and everything else.
02:35We as a society willingly walked into this prison and we keep walking back into this prison every day.
02:42So collectively once in a while we have to stop and ask ourselves, is it actually worth it?
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