During the Coronavirus crisis, day after day, cafes were closed, concerts were cancelled, flights between the countries were stopped; and, more people started to stay at home and work from home. Being at home mean spending time with family, working from home, watching Netflix, other platforms or TV, socializing through social media and video calls. I was looking for a series to watch on Netflix and found ‘Omniscient’. It is about a city where citizens are watched by a bee-like robot 24/7 so as to reduce crime rate. This little robot has the ability to locate where you are, what you do, and collects data of your heartbeat, the change in the pupils… It is like a smart watch flying and not touching you. All the bee-robots communicate each other. The IOT works very well.

All these thing happening both in Turkey and other countries, the series, how I perceive social media and the theories about why we experience this transition to online, theories of microchips that control if you are healthy etc. reminds me again “the Panopticon” a surveillance system. Briefly, it is a circular building with cells and a tower in the middle. The ones in the cell cannot see each other but all are seen from the tower which makes them watch their behaviour. Foucault defines this mechanism as “perfectly individualized and constantly visible”. You can find more about it here.

It is emphasized in his essay that this building takes its inspiration from plagues. During the plague, people are put in quarantine and therefore immobilized by a syndic to review and register the living and death. Such a disciplinary system was practiced to track, record and control any movement in order to prevent from contagion and end plague. But it is very time consuming and not easy so that a design like panopticon, locking people in cells, or meanwhile at home works efficiently.

You see that the panopticon is inspired by the plagues and we are experiencing one today. The order is changing and the surveillance works for everybody in the world at the same time. Government is imposing bans and everybody is warning each other and it the order is not followed, they report them to the government. I wonder what we will experience in near future .