In 1786 the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham travelled to Krichev, in what was then the Russian Empire, to visit his brother Samuel, who was managing estates and workshops there. Samuel had sketched a way to supervise many workers from a single central point. Jeremy turned the sketch into a grand idea, wrote it up in a series of letters in 1787, and published it in 1791 as Panopticon; or, The Inspection-House. The name means "all seeing," and the design has haunted discussions of surveillance ever since.

Bentham's design

Picture a ring shaped building divided into cells, each with a window facing outward and another facing inward. In the center stands an inspection tower. Light streams through the cells, so a guard in the tower can see into each one, but blinds and partitions keep the tower dark. The crucial feature is that the inmates could never tell whether they were being watched at that moment. Because they might be observed at any time, they would behave as if they always were.

Bentham was a reformer, not a villain. He believed his design would make prisons cheaper, safer and less cruel, since good behavior could be secured without chains or beatings. He thought the same plan could serve factories, hospitals, schools and poorhouses. He described the idea, with obvious pride, as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example." He spent years and much of his own money trying to persuade the British government to build one, without success. Later prisons, such as Stateville in Illinois and the Presidio Modelo in Cuba, borrowed parts of the circular plan.

Foucault: power that runs itself

In his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, the French philosopher Michel Foucault made the panopticon a symbol of modern society. Older forms of punishment, he argued, were public and physical: the scaffold, the whip. Modern power works differently. It observes, measures, records and ranks. Its most efficient form is the one Bentham found: people who believe they might be watched begin to police their own behavior. The guard can even leave the tower. Power becomes automatic, because the watched carry the watcher inside their own heads.

Foucault saw this pattern in schools with their grades and timetables, in hospitals with their charts, and in armies with their drills. One need not accept all of his sweeping claims to recognize the insight. George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949, gave the same fear its most famous image: a screen in every room that might, or might not, be watching.

Chilling effects

Lawyers have a name for what happens when people change their lawful behavior out of fear of being observed: a chilling effect. The term grew up in US free speech cases, where courts worried that vague laws would frighten people away from speaking even when their speech was protected.

Is the chilling effect real? Some evidence suggests so. After the 2013 revelations about US government surveillance, the legal scholar Jon Penney found that views of Wikipedia articles on terrorism related topics dropped and stayed lower, even though reading them is perfectly legal. A 2013 survey of writers by PEN America found that about one in six had avoided writing or speaking on a topic because of surveillance worries. Such studies have limits, and other factors may contribute, but they fit the panopticon's logic.

Beyond the tower

Critics argue that the single tower is now an outdated image. Modern surveillance is spread across thousands of companies, cameras, apps and agencies, none of which sees everything. The sociologists Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson described a "surveillant assemblage" in which scattered fragments of data are pulled together into a data double: a digital version of you, made of records, that institutions judge in place of the real person. Your data double may get a loan or be refused one, be flagged at an airport or waved through, without you ever being seen.

Watching also runs in more than one direction. The engineer Steve Mann coined the word sousveillance, "watching from below," for ordinary people recording the powerful. When a bystander filmed Los Angeles police beating Rodney King in 1991, the video changed a national debate. Phone cameras and police body cameras have since made such recording common. Observation, in other words, can protect the weak as well as control them.

Worked example: monitoring software at work

A company with many remote workers installs software that takes screenshots at random moments, counts keystrokes and rates each employee's "activity." Managers rarely look at the screenshots, but everyone knows they could.

This is Bentham's design in software. The randomness matters: because workers cannot tell when they are seen, they behave as if they always are. Foucault would predict self policing, and indeed workers report keeping their mouse moving and avoiding personal messages. The chilling effect reaches beyond slacking: people may stop discussing pay or working conditions, conversations that are often legally protected. The activity score is a data double, and it may reward busy looking work over thoughtful work.

The company has fair reasons: preventing fraud, protecting client data and keeping remote teams accountable. A reasonable policy might tell workers exactly what is collected, limit monitoring to what the job truly needs, and let employees see and challenge their own records. The panopticon's lesson is not that all watching is wrong. It is that being watched changes people, so watching should be justified, limited and visible.