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Escaping the Digital Panopticon: Unmasking the Myths of Self-Improvement
An unpopular opinion.
Intro
Hello everyone! Buckle up as we explore the hidden gears of the self-improvement madness sweeping our lives. Let’s go, let’s go, time waits for no one! Be the master of your destiny, the captain of your soul, the monk who sold his Ferrari- be whatever the hell you want to be! It’s an enticing pitch. But is this promise all it’s cracked up to be, or are we entangled in a web of control?
Today, we will debunk the type of ‘freedom’ peddled by our modern digital panopticon. Now you might wonder, what the hell is a digital panopticon? Welcome to the 21st-century surveillance state, where the digital panopticon takes philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s old-school prison design and launches it into the digital stratosphere! It’s an architectural ruse: a single guard observing all inmates without them knowing whether they are being watched that facilitates self-regulation and compliance.
Bentham argued in The “Panopticon” that the perfect prison would be structured in such a way that cells would be open to a central tower. In the model, individuals in the cells do not interact with each other and are constantly confronted by the panoptic tower (pan=all; optic=seeing).
