SAN BUENAVENTURA, Tristan T.

Comm 11 - F

2020-05300 December 15, 2020

Observation and Manipulation: Modern Technology and the Global Panopticon

The Panopticon is the architectural form of the ‘perfect social control mechanism’

conceptualized by Jeremy Bentham in 1785 (Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology 2008). French

philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1975 work, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,

saw this idea as a symbol that can be expanded beyond the prison system to cover the everyday

life of every citizen. This expansion, to be fully realized, needed the right tools and the right

place in history. With advancements in surveillance and media technology, Bentham and

Foucault’s visions have surpassed the threshold of no return as people in power seek to take

societal control into a level of omnipresence: the ultimate extension. Today, governments and

companies alike have imprisoned humanity inside a global panopticon brought about by

technology. The danger of this unveils itself as we look at pieces of evidence focusing on

China’s mass surveillance system which shows that not only are authorities capable of watching

over all of us anywhere in the world, but they can also discriminate against vulnerable groups

and orchestrate entire societies into submission.

“There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore.

Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me’.” Those were words uttered some thirty years

ago by the late Philip K. Dick, who was a prominent and visionary figure in the science fiction

and alternate history scene with his timeless works The Man in the High Castle and Do Android

Dream of Sleeping Sheep? which inspired the blockbuster movie Blade Runner 2049 (The

Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica 2020). The Truman Show, a film released in 1998, is a

psychological science fiction film that explores the extremes of surveillance, manipulation, and
reality simulation (Weir 1998). Dick’s quote and The Truman Show’s plot bluntly sums up the

paranoia of us at the present regarding surveillance and our privacy, which day by day is slowly

slipping from our grasp. Today, because of modern technology, works of fiction are starting to

become our reality.

Surveillance cameras were used as early as the 1940s by the Nazis during the Second

World War but the modern ones that are prominent today were born in the 1980s as new sensors

made it possible for cameras to adjust to low light and show footages in high resolutions. After

the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, the whole world started to see the

need for security cameras from the houses of the public to the offices of the government

(Garnham 2019). Surveillance cameras now have advanced facial recognition specifications

coupled with other compatible technologies that make up the foundation of each country’s own

mass surveillance systems. Privacy International, an organization that helps monitor privacy

rights violations, defines mass surveillance as “[the use of] systems or technologies that collect,

analyze, and/or generate data on indefinite or large numbers of people instead of limiting

surveillance to individuals about which there is reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. Under

currently available forms of mass surveillance, governments can capture virtually all aspects of

our lives” (2012). The last sentence in the said description accurately sums up the massive state

surveillance program currently being implemented in the most monitored nation in the world:

China.

China has four times the number of surveillance cameras compared to the United States

of America, making it the state with the highest number overall. It is estimated that in 2019, the

nation was using over 200 million surveillance cameras and data shows that this number can

triple and reach a total of 626 million cameras by the end of 2020. as part of China’s massive
state surveillance network ‘Skynet.’ The network, which shares the same name with the fictional

artificial superintelligence group from the Terminator series, is credited with having the ability to

“catch a fugitive within five minutes” from anywhere in the mainland (Shen 2019). The system

was first developed in 2005 to hunt down “fugitive corrupt officials.” This expanded into

preventing and tracking down all types of crime, from capital offenses such as murder to petty

crimes such as jaywalking. The network also famously takes advantage of China’s national I.D.

system by incorporating it into its pedestrian tracking and facial recognition system that is

connected to the state’s vast informational system. In 2015, its government announced that it can

now efficiently monitor every corner of Beijing which spans an area of 16,808 km², roughly

twenty-seven times larger than Metro Manila (Ms. Smith 2017). Frankly, the Skynet Network

will have, and arguably already has, the ability to hover around every intersection and every

sidewalk in the fourth biggest country in the world.  

In 2015, the nation started an initiative that made countless privacy organizations and

democratic governments shocked: the Citizen Score system. The system is linked to the national

I.D. cards of roughly 1.3 billion Chinese citizens. It goes hand-in-hand with China’s censorship

mandate as it tracks the population’s movement across all social media sites. This is possible

because the system is run by Alibaba and Tencent, two giant companies that run 100% of such

sites in the state. The Citizen Score rates citizens from 350 to 950 and that is tied to each

person’s credit scores, and it goes down whenever the person posts, buys or interacts with

content that the Chinese government sees as “inappropriate” or whenever the person does any

crime as monitored by Skynet. The points go up, however, whenever citizens are engaged in

“good behavior.” All in all, the system is designed to measure each citizen’s behavior and

trustworthiness (Stanley 2015; Kobie 2019).

 The system is the enlarged version of the Panopticon, and like the ideal prison, the

surveillance programs have produced positive results. The government has reported having

solved over 17,000 cases two years after implementing Skynet and said that cases for multiple

felonies have significantly dropped by up to forty-two percent in some areas. Overall, it boosts

Chinese public safety (Yu 2016). But the sheer scale of the programs means that the measures

can often discriminate.

Ethnic groups in China that are predominantly Muslim are seen as groups that are more

susceptible to violence and terrorism. Uighurs—but also Kazakhs, Uzbeks, and Kyrgyz—are

monitored the most and are required to give up biometric data such, fingerprints, DNA, blood,

and voice samples. The Skynet system red-flags simple culture-based actions such as growing a

beard, leaving the house through the back door, and most shockingly: visiting a mosque more

often than usual. People with flagged behavior are then interrogated by the police and some are

even sent to detention or worse, internment camps. This results in a dystopian society for

Chinese locals and ethnic groups alike (Campbell 2019).

Many governments, organizations, and critics see China’s programs as terrifying, but at

the same time evidence of what the technologies of humanity can do: “China appears to be

leveraging all the tools of the information age—electronic purchasing data, social networks,

algorithmic sorting—to construct the ultimate tool of social control” (Stanley 2015).

Currently, no other nation in the world is proven to compare to the level of surveillance

China implements, but many have started to develop and use the same methods that could one

day match the scale of China’s systems such as the United States, the United Kingdom,

Singapore, Israel, South Korea, and even some poor countries like Ecuador. AI technology, such

as superior face recognition, object recognition, and event recognition, is at the center of China’s
mass surveillance system, and seventy-five countries currently hold the capability to implement

AI-assisted surveillance programs, with the richest forty countries holding the most capability

(Feldstein 2019). With more and more countries using intensive AI surveillance, it’s not hard to

imagine the dystopian future that science fiction has described.

What’s happening in China is an eye-opener for the world. The nation has pushed social

control to a new level, has proven that the things that were once science fiction are now science

fact, and has made Bentham and Foucault’s ideas a reality. Modern technology, spearheaded by

artificial intelligence, is skewing our world into becoming a global panopticon wherein everyone

is involved and wherein the line between the watcher and the prisoner is blurred. It has produced

some applaudable results, but the danger of implementing it on an unprecedented scale is

present. Suffice to say, the global panopticon is a double-edged sword, and it is up to the

governments of the world to decide if withholding rights such as privacy are truly worth the risk

in hopes of creating a more secure and trustworthy society.

 References

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November 21, 2019. https://time.com/5735411/china-surveillance-privacy-issues/.

Feldstein, Steven. “The Global Expansion of AI Surveillance.” Carnegie Endowment for

International Peace, September 17, 2019.
https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/09/17/global-expansion-of-ai-surveillance-pub-
79847.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan.
New York City, United States of America: Pantheon Books, 1975.

Garnham, Matt. “When Were Security Cameras Invented? Find out from Our Experts!” Orange
Security, July 25, 2019. https://www.orangesecurity.com/blog/security-cameras/when-
were-security-cameras-invented/.

Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World. Internalized Authority and the
Prison of the Mind: Bentham and Foucault's Panopticon, 2008.
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Kobie, Nicole. “The Complicated Truth about China's Social Credit System.” WIRED UK.
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explained.

Ms. Smith. “Skynet in China: Real-Time Spying on Citizens.” CSO Online. CSO, September 26,
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Privacy International. “Mass Surveillance: Privacy International.” Privacy International, 2012.

https://privacyinternational.org/learn/mass-surveillance.

Shen, Xinmei. “‘Skynet’, China's Massive Video Surveillance Network.” South China Morning
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Stanley, Jay. “China's Nightmarish Citizen Scores Are a Warning For Americans.” American
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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Philip K. Dick.” Encyclopædia Britannica.

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