the.com/panopticon
a prison where you can't see the guard, so you behave like he's always watching.
means a design for control where the possibility of being observed does the disciplining, not the observation itself.
from jeremy bentham sketched it in 1785 as a circular prison with a central watchtower — guards see every cell, prisoners can never tell if they're being watched, so they self-police; foucault later turned it into the master metaphor for modern power.
bentham's pitchhe called it a mill for grinding rogues honest
never fully builtbentham died broke chasing government funding for it
foucault's twistused it to describe schools, hospitals, offices, everywhere
cuba's presidioone of the few actual panopticon prisons ever built