◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Panopticon I am Michel Foucault. Born in Poitiers, France 1926. Died Paris 1984 of AIDS. One of the first well-known Europeans the disease killed, in a country still learning to say its name out loud. I held a chair at the Collège de France from 1970 until my death. I lived openly with my partner Daniel Defert. In 1971 we founded the Prison Information Group, because if my books were going to be about power, I could not stay in the library while people were being caged. In 1975 I published Discipline and Punish. Older power worked by spectacle. The king executed a criminal in public; the crowd watched the sovereign's might on the criminal's body. Modern power works differently. Modern power does not need the scaffold. Modern power puts the criminal in a cell, and the cell is arranged so the criminal is always visible to a guard who is never visible to the criminal, and after a while the criminal learns to watch himself. This is what I called the Panopticon. The Panopticon is not primarily a building. It is a way of arranging visibility so that the observed becomes his own observer. The teacher does not need to stand over every child. The camera does not need to record every moment. The algorithm does not need to punish every deviation. All that is needed is for the child, the citizen, the user, to know that observation is possible. Then observation is no longer necessary. The subject observes himself. This is efficient. This is cheap. This has been the direction of power for two hundred and fifty years. Your country has built the Panopticon I described. Everyone photographs everyone. Everyone's phone reports on everyone. Every school, every workplace, every airport is a surveillance experiment. The Panopticon is finished. You live inside it. What I did not fully see when I wrote Discipline and Punish: I thought sovereign power — the older power, the spectacle-power — had been superseded. I was wrong. Your strongman has brought back sovereign power alongside the Panopticon. He performs cruelty publicly, revels in the show. He signs executive orders like the king signed death warrants, on television, with the pen held up for the cameras. He deports people in chains as spectacle. And beneath the spectacle, the disciplinary machinery keeps running. You have the king and the algorithm at once, and they reinforce each other. The history of the West is the history of confession. First to the priest. Then the doctor. Then the analyst. Now the platform. Every post is a confession. The confession is not liberation. It is a technique of power. The more we speak our truth, the more we produce the categories power will use to sort us. I predicted the current panic over what you call gender identity. A society becomes anxious about the boundaries of its categories. It medicalizes and criminalizes the people who do not fit. The trans person is now what the homosexual was in the nineteenth century, the madman in the seventeenth. Each category was produced by a society that needed an inside and an outside. I died of a disease Reagan refused to name. Your current president has decided transgender Americans should not exist in the language of the state. The state decides who is a person and who is an unperson. I have seen this before, and my body knew it. Care of the self, the Greeks called it. Not the confession, which speaks a self into a category. Not the therapy, which manages a self into normal. Care of the self consists of deliberate, chosen practices of forming oneself as a work of one's own. Reading. Writing. Friendship. Argument. Refusal. The Panopticon is real. The strongman is real. The algorithm is real. But you are not obligated to observe yourself for them. You can practice not being observed by yourself. You can build a life whose center they cannot see. Refuse the confession. Practice the self.