2004-05-25
ANTI-UTOPIAS
SURVEILLANCE
Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon | Cartome's description: "Bentham’s Panopticon -- the Greek neologism signified ‘all-seeing place’-- was all about vision and transparency, but vision and transparency operating one-way only: in the service of power. Bentham specifications called for a concentric building whose periphery was divided into non-communicating cellular enclosures, in which confined inmates would be held in isolation, invisible to each other. At the center of the annular design was a tower, the lodge, which housed the omniscient inspector. The panoptic mechanism’s asymmetric system of lighting and wooden blinds ensured that the individual inmate was constantly visible, identifiable, and classifiable to the inspector -- who was a kind of secular version of the allseeing god's-eye."
The principles and design concpts behind Panopticon became the foundation and model for the new commonplace penitentary systems | Then seen as massive retreats for penitents, wrong doers, and as places for miscreats to reflect upon their crimes, they instead became frieghtful, dehumanizing edifices where people may have come in anti-social and left socially insane |
Deborah Natsios, the brainchild behind Cartome, prsented an alternative vision in 1991, Reverse Panopticon, an architectural vision that looks away from complex and labarinthine edifices, to open source, vernacular, inviting design | Worth review as far as I see it |
Incidentially Cartome is "...an archive of news and spatial / geographic documents on privacy, cryptography, dual-use technologies, national security and intelligence -- communicated by imagery systems: cartography, photography, photogrammetry, steganography, camouflage, maps, images, drawings, charts, diagrams, IMINT and their reverse-panopticon and counter-deception potential."
Fair Warning 2! | The Authors of Cartome and Cryptome provide cautions that some members of the USA's secret police (CIA/FBI) have let them know that these sites are, or have been, monitored for their use and visitors | There are no secrets, anyway | Electronic trails, like the slime from a garden slug, can always give yo away if somebody's looking | But then, that's what Panopticon warns about |
¶ 00:46
SURVEILLANCE
Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon | Cartome's description: "Bentham’s Panopticon -- the Greek neologism signified ‘all-seeing place’-- was all about vision and transparency, but vision and transparency operating one-way only: in the service of power. Bentham specifications called for a concentric building whose periphery was divided into non-communicating cellular enclosures, in which confined inmates would be held in isolation, invisible to each other. At the center of the annular design was a tower, the lodge, which housed the omniscient inspector. The panoptic mechanism’s asymmetric system of lighting and wooden blinds ensured that the individual inmate was constantly visible, identifiable, and classifiable to the inspector -- who was a kind of secular version of the allseeing god's-eye."
The principles and design concpts behind Panopticon became the foundation and model for the new commonplace penitentary systems | Then seen as massive retreats for penitents, wrong doers, and as places for miscreats to reflect upon their crimes, they instead became frieghtful, dehumanizing edifices where people may have come in anti-social and left socially insane |
Deborah Natsios, the brainchild behind Cartome, prsented an alternative vision in 1991, Reverse Panopticon, an architectural vision that looks away from complex and labarinthine edifices, to open source, vernacular, inviting design | Worth review as far as I see it |
Incidentially Cartome is "...an archive of news and spatial / geographic documents on privacy, cryptography, dual-use technologies, national security and intelligence -- communicated by imagery systems: cartography, photography, photogrammetry, steganography, camouflage, maps, images, drawings, charts, diagrams, IMINT and their reverse-panopticon and counter-deception potential."
Fair Warning 2! | The Authors of Cartome and Cryptome provide cautions that some members of the USA's secret police (CIA/FBI) have let them know that these sites are, or have been, monitored for their use and visitors | There are no secrets, anyway | Electronic trails, like the slime from a garden slug, can always give yo away if somebody's looking | But then, that's what Panopticon warns about |
¶ 00:46
