I appreciate the concern, but we all already live in the digital panopticon.

The basic setup of Bentham’s panopticon is this: there is a central tower surrounded by cells. In the central tower is the watchman. In the cells are prisoners – or workers, or children, depending on the use of the building. The tower shines bright light so that the watchman is able to see everyone in the cells. The people in the cells, however, aren’t able to see the watchman, and therefore have to assume that they are always under observation.

The Victorian idea was to ensure compliance of the incarcerated by actualizing the impression of omnipotent surveillance. They’ve built that into the framework of digital spaces by hijacking the ISPs at the source, creating a permanent man-in-the-middle.

The room… contains several racks of equipment, including [devices] designed to intercept and analyze Internet communications at very high speeds. It is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic… [giving] access to all Internet traffic that passes through the building, and therefore “the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic.”

‘Swimming in the noise’ was a decent way to stay unnoticed, but AI and ML processing throughput combined with metadata is carving that out rapidly.