Are We Living in a Modern Panopticon? | 300 Years of Surveillance

Our Take

Obsidian Archive's history lesson lands on an uncomfortable truth: Jeremy Bentham's 18th-century prison design was built on the idea that people behave differently when they merely believe they might be watched. The genius of the Panopticon wasn't the watchtower, it was the uncertainty. Flock Safety has essentially automated that uncertainty and scaled it to every street corner. You don't know who's watching your plate, when, or why. You just know a camera got it, timestamped and logged.

What the video captures well is the shift from human watchers to automated ones. A guard in a tower gets tired, distracted, or reassigned. A network of ALPRs never blinks, never forgets, and never has to justify a single scan in the moment. That's the real escalation from Bentham's design: the removal of a human decision point entirely. The camera doesn't need to intend anything. It just captures, stores, and shares, and the surveillance apparatus that follows is built entirely on the assumption that data collected without cause is fine as long as it might be useful later.

That's exactly the architecture we track. If this history makes you want to know what's actually watching your own street, check our camera map and see how far the network has spread near you, then head to take-action for concrete ways to push back locally.