Panoptism

Michel Foucault used the term Panoptism (all-seeing) to describe the methods of control and surveillance used by industrial society to discipline and control the lower classes, whether in factories, schools, hospitals, mental institutions or other bureaucratic institutions. In these, everyone is under constant observation and surveillance, being analyzed, evaluated and regulated, and the most extreme versions of this system would be found in police states like Nazi Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union. He began his chapter of Panopticism with a description of a 17th Century town under quarantine for the plague. This was not yet the full-fledged machine of control that would emerge in the 19th and 20th Centuries but only a hint of things to come. Of course, the quarantine was only a temporary measure while the system of Panopticon is permanent, and the methods of control and surveillance were still primitive and crude in a preindustrial society....
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