The Panopticon: I see you, you don’t see me
In 1791, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed a new kind of prison: the Panopticon.
A tower in the center. Cells all around it. From the tower, a guard could watch every inmate. But the inmates could never see the guard.
Bentham’s goal wasn’t brute force. It was psychological discipline. Since inmates never knew when they were being watched, they had to behave as if they always were.
Power becomes invisible. Then it moves inside the person.
Then came Foucault
If the Panopticon is famous today, it’s thanks to French philosopher Michel Foucault. In 1975, in Discipline and Punish, he turned it into a metaphor for modern society. In his view, our schools, hospitals and workplaces all run on the same model: getting people to discipline themselves through the simple feeling of being watched.
Today, we could add cameras, data and social media algorithms.
In fact, a line from that book opens my next novel.
Book 2 in the Vestigia series has a title: Panopticon Umbrae.
Forget the all-seeing digital eye of action movies, tracking everything in real time. The Panopticon I’m writing about is quieter and far more unsettling. A human network. A message that arrives at exactly the right moment. A face that shows up one time too many. The idea that you can control someone without ever touching them, simply by letting them know they are seen.
If you’ve read the epilogue of Shadows of Dubai, you may remember a certain red dot…
An ending? A warning?
Where I’m at
I changed the way I write for this book. The first novel took shape as I went. This one, I’m building first: a full timeline, character files and a four-act structure. The prologue is written, and the skeleton of Act One is almost done.
It all started by hand, in my notebook.
Many of you have asked whether the story will take us back to Dubai.
All I’ll say is this: when you’re being watched, where you are matters far less than who’s watching.
Haven’t read Book 1 yet? The Shadows of Dubai ebook is free until Halloween with code HALLOWEEN. Want to know when Panopticon Umbrae comes out? Join the newsletter.
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