In the latest instalment of dystopian Britain, the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmoud,admitted that she had aimed to turn the criminal justice system into little more than the architecture of ubiquitous surveillance.
This seems like an extraordinary case of saying the quiet part loudly
In an interview with former Prime Minister Tony Blair, Mahmoud said, “When I was [Secretary of State for Justice], my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.”
This seems like an extraordinary case of saying the quiet part loudly. But our surprise and alarm should not preclude deeper thought. What is this “Panapticon”?
Bentham, an 18th-century social theorist, was the designer and theoretical engineer of at least four separate panoptic structures, but it would be his prison panopticon that would take hold in the popular mind. The design of this panopticon consists of a circular or octangular building with a central tower inhabited by an inspector who oversees the activities of inmates within their cells arranged surrounding him. In this design, with the presence of the central tower constantly able to be viewed by inmates, the illusion of constant surveillance is created; illusion as the inspector would not physically be able to surveil all inmates at once, but inmates, being unable to discern when they are being surveilled, would be inclined to act as if they always were.
The idea of the panopticon formed the basis of French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault’s most popular work, Discipline and Punish, which acts as an analysis of the mechanisms behind the development of penal systems in the West. For Foucault, the main benefit of the panopticon was the “type of power that is applied to individuals in the form of continuous individual supervision … the modelling and transforming of individuals in terms of certain norms.”
As the world has moved away from the analogue and more towards the digital, the idea of physical surveillance by an individual no longer makes sense; the illusion of constant surveillance can be replaced by real, constant surveillance through technology. As Mahmoud said, “I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals”.
To this end, technologically native versions of the panopticon have been theorised as far back as the early 1990s. In 1991, American philosopher Manuel deLanda, in his prescient workWar in the Age of Intelligent Machines, coined the term panspectron to differentiate this new, digital panopticon. For DeLanda, the panspectron is described as a system that “does not merely select certain bodies and certain (visual) data about them. Rather, it compiles information about all at the same time, using computers to select the segments of data relevant to its surveillance tasks”. No individual inspector is required to surveil potential wrongdoers, as technology can capture all data instantaneously and communicate important points to individuals who can escalate.
Technological developments have resulted in such all-encompassing surveillance systems being applicable to society as a whole
Though this theoretical system was created with warfare in mind, technological developments have resulted in such all-encompassing surveillance systems being applicable to society as a whole. What this means, in real terms, is a surveillance state. While in the panopticon the inmate knows the inspector is there and could be watching, in the panspectron one may be completely unaware that surveillance is occurring at all, making it much less likely to encourage shifts in behaviour in the same way. As Chris Bayliss argued, “Recent history is littered with examples of government heralding technological solutions to political problems, which in the implementation reveal the state’s impulse for control … Shabana Mahmood’s panopticon will surely be another example of this.”
Foucault realised that such a development in surveillance was coming. In the 1970s, only a few years before his death, Foucault envisaged a surveillance system that affected “the grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives.”
This omniscient surveillance is already the case in contemporary Britain, though the extent of its success is less clear. Andy Marsh, the head of the College of Policing, claimed that last year the College has created approximately 100 “innovative practices” that use artificial intelligence in their objective of reducing crime, if that means anything. This includes the use of “AI assistants”, which will be trialled by frontline police officers in Greater Manchester, providing them with real-time updates on relevant pieces of criminal law. One would expect police officers to already be aware of criminal law without the need to rely on AI, but perhaps that is putting too much faith in them.
The real issues with the panspectron in our nation do not come from the police using tech buzzwords to appear innovative; rather, it comes from the constant monitoring and policing of what individuals say and do online, through the enforcement of autocratic pieces of legislation like the Online Safety Act. According to the Online Safety Act Network, one of Britain’s lesser-known dubious quangos, “A significant number of people [have been] charged with criminal offences for social media posts”, and while many of these posts have been inflammatory and obnoxious, the constant monitoring of social media and the frequent prosecution of individuals for writings published online does little to prevent similar cases from occurring. Rather, what is viewed as a heavy-handed police approach to words on a screen only intimidates the public and inflames already existing tensions.
One of the Prime Minister’s latest U-turns, on a compulsory Digital ID, is a welcome retreat from a “papers, please” authoritarian state, though Starmer backtracks only for popularity reasons, rather than a change in beliefs. When a commitment to constant surveillance is so central to the axioms of the state, returning to any semblance of freedom from the panspectron is an almost impossible task. Whoever runs the next Government (for it won’t be Labour) must slash the size of the state and commit to a reduction in regulation, not just for businesses but for individuals’ lives, lest Britain end up like China without the economic prospects or global power.
