The Digital Panopticon: Foucault and Privacy on the Internet In 1977, Michel Foucault wrote in Discipline and Punish about the disciplinary mechanisms of constant and invisible surveillance, partly through an analysis of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon. The panopticon was conceived as a circular prison, at the center of which was a watchtower. Along the circumference, individuals resided in cells that were visible to the watchtower but invisible to each other. Importantly, this watchtower was backlit and therefore prisoners were unable to tell for sure whether or not they were being watched at any given time. Bentham championed the merits of the panopticon, conceiving of it as a great instrument of social progress in which distractions would be limited and the productivity of whether the student, worker or prisoner would flourish. Critically, Foucault considered the panopticon a “compact model of the disciplinary mechanism” through which people learn to regulate themselves under the tyranny of total visibility. While the panopticon has largely failed to materialize on an architectural level, online surveillance has similarly facilitated the deterioration of privacy and normalizing public targeting through perpetual and invisible scrutiny. I argue that the digital age has ensconced us in a "digital panopticism" whereby our purchases, behaviors, thoughts, questions, relationships, images, our very identities are under perpetual monitoring and that such monitoring functions as a "disciplinary mechanism " as clarified by Foucault forty years ago. previous. To explain how pervasive technological surveillance in the present moment functions as a disciplinary mechanism of a non-corporeal panopticon, if you will it is important to fi...... middle of the paper ......genous categories of people based on certain aggregate inputs . When Jeremy Bentham conceived of the panopticon, he was considering its social value through precisely a capitalist framework: the productivity framework. Yet productivity is not the only indicator of a thriving society; incessant production subordinates our more human desires for privacy, as well as camaraderie and recognition, replacing them instead with pale commodified substitutes. As privacy is increasingly undermined and ignored as a precious human experience, we risk being blinded by the same narrowness that seduced Bentham: the seduction of accelerated cycles of production and consumption. It is worth asking what is sacrificed in the productive thirst of the modern panopticon, and how we can imagine alternatives to our increasingly global surveillance architecture.