This article is a condensed and overly simplified version of a chapter in the forthcoming book, "Invisible Crises", edited by George Gerbner, Hamid Mowlana, and Herbert I. Schiller (Westview Press, 1995, forthcoming). This article originally appeared in "Adbusters Quarterly" #11 Contact: Adbusters Media Foundation 1243 W 7th Avenue Vancouver, B.C. Canada V6H lB7 Tel - (604) 736-9401 (Subscriptions $16/year in US and Canada, US $40 overseas) Copyright 1994 by Rick Crawford Techno Prisoners by Rick Crawford Until it turned us into mass consumers, television was supposed to infuse our nations with insight and public debate. Now, with the Information Highway set to girdle the globe we are once more dashing down the corporate gullet. For we are too much caught in the dreams of technology. We are techno prisoners, all. The idea of a panoptic prison originated with Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon; or, the Inspection House, published in 1791. The circular architecture consisted of a central surveillance tower, surrounded by a series of individual cells. Each cell was illuminated from the perimeter, backlighting the inmates. But the central tower remained dark, so that wardens could keep their inmates under constant surveillance without being seen themselves. Unable to talk with each other, the inmates lived in isolation. In a "virtual" sense, that prison is now being built on a global scale. New digital techniques for remote surveillance have rendered a physical prison obsolete. The power of a panoptic architecture comes from techniques that classify, segment, and isolate the population. In Bentham's Panopticon, the inmates, unable to communicate with one another, would be reduced to the status of "solitary sequestered individuals ... Indulged with perfect liberty within the space allotted to him, in what worse way could he vent his rage, than by beating his head against the walls?" [ J. Bentham, 1791 ] This 200 year old passage chillingly foreshadows the much-vaunted "consumer choice" of modern life. As public spaces erode and fragment, individuals are isolated inside shrinking private spaces - corporate-designed technological enclosures such as the automobile and the "home entertainment center". While mentally confined within these cells, individuals are "indulged with perfect liberty" to choose among the advertised corporate products. Consumers are offered images of freedom and community, but never the real thing. Millions of people are already prisoners of television technology. Although they are allowed to leave their living rooms on "work furloughs," they have given up control of their dreams and their time to the rhythms and dictates of institutional marketing strategies. But even television technology is primitive compared with what's coming. Designed to channel the flows of data and socio-economic power, the panoptic project is a transnational effort to overlay Earth with a computerized surveillance grid. So far, there has been little criticism of plans to crisscross North America with the fiber-optic pathways that are supposed to vault us into the next century. The "digital convergence" of TV with telecommunications and computer technology is mostly seen as inherently good - a time-saver, a life-enhancer, a better entertainer. Techno-makers tout its merits and spend billions to push their products. But its possible downsides are ignored. The road to freedom via a two-way Information Highway may turn into a one-way Surveillance Street, used to condition people's thoughts and control their behavior. Of course, the panoptic prison project is not the result of some vast conspiracy. It is driven instead by consumer marketing; its surveillance made possible by new technologies. In the United States and Canada, the wardens of the Panopticon are mostly corporations, as opposed to the government agents and military elites of other countries. In the United States and Canada, we are protected from the government by our constitutions, but unlike most of Europe, we have no such protection against private-sector abuses of power. There is scant reason to believe that other technologies, such as the Internet, will somehow save us by defanging corporate power. --- Personal Data: Corporations Own your Digital Shadows --- In Bentham's prison, power comes from the way panoptic architecture allows enhanced surveillance capabilities. The global Panopticon under construction is not a unified architecture with a single central tower. Instead, there are multiple virtual towers controlled by various institutions, including credit bureaus, insurance companies, media conglomerates and government agencies. The towers may block one another's views of the inmates, but they can solve the problem by sharing and selling surveillance data. Many transactions today generate permanent electronic records. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the modern consumer to go through life without leaving the equivalent of glowing digital tracks - a "data shadow." Every time we use a check or electronic card in an economic transaction, we allow our actions to be tracked by digital surveillance. These digital traces are called "Transaction-Generated Information" (TGI). A large market has arisen that trades in this Transaction-Generated Information. Because there are few legal obstacles to marketing TGI, companies have created millions of files - dossiers on our "digital personas." These digital records can be used to predict what products people might be willing to buy. Institutions routinely use files of this TGI to identify a poor credit risk, or to identify a sucker for buy-two-get-one-free sales ploys. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Michel Foucault explains how the insidious power of panoptic structures lies in their ability to induce those under surveillance to mentally confine themselves, and thereafter, to discipline themselves. The inmate "assumes responsibility for the constraints of power ... he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the instrument of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects; it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation, and which is always decided in advance." If the design of the panoptic prison influences prisoners to discipline themselves, the electronic version could tell people how to view themselves. Once a person is strapped into a straitjacket of self-identification, it doesn't cost much to control his or her behavior. Corporations are keen to exercise such power because it helps them influence what people buy. In the absence of an Orwellian government, corporations will control the Panopticon. They will use its interactive surveillance tools as phenomenally efficient and precise techniques for cultivating more "needs" that damage our mental and physical environments. Already television ads tell us who we should be and what products we need to be that person. Those who don't know themselves, or who are dissatisfied with themselves, flock to buy the "new improved" identities sold by corporate marketeers in the form of brandnames, styles, team logos, even cartoon characters. What we consider "free time" is increasingly imprisoned - confined to a life sentence at the labor of consumption. Shopping becomes a pastime. If we take up cycling or jogging or sight-seeing, we find ourselves needing the latest high-tech alloy frame, or $200 shoes with special inflatable supports, or the latest zoom-lens camera. What is portrayed as individual freedom and "consumer choice" is restricted more and more. It is controlled by the invisible exercise of corporate power. This is the key to understanding the politics of the Information Age. --- Privacy: Human Right or Corporate Property Right? --- Many North Americans are aware technology could pose a threat to personal privacy. But those paid to think about the impacts of the information age, have for years been warning of other major concerns. A 1982 report to the Club of Rome, called Microelectronics and Society , says "The real issue at stake is not personal privacy.... It is power gains of bureaucracies, both private and public, at the expense of individuals and the non-organized sectors of society, by means of gathering information through direct observation and by means of intensive record keeping." Of course, these computerized records can be used for simple spying, too. In June 1991, in response to a grand jury subpoena, Cincinnati Bell searched the dialing records of 650,000 residential customers. The aim: to help Proctor & Gamble identify employees suspected of leaking embarrassing company secrets to a reporter. In this case "corporate privacy" took precedence over the privacy of 650,000 households. Privacy rights are not well defined, but they arise from the principle that individual dignity and autonomy are sacred. Clearly, personal autonomy is violated when institutions compile information on a person's past, and use that power to influence her - to narrow her options, or to alter her preferences. Personal dignity is violated when institutions use biodata to influence the way people define themselves. By using this fine-grained panoptic surveillance data, it is now possible to lump together thousands of outwardly different people into a single "psychographic class." Having segmented the population, corporations can then conduct controlled experiments on them to hone their marketing techniques. All the members in a psychographic class will be susceptible to the same forms of mental manipulation. The result: fine-tuned target-marketing. And predictable profits. At the third conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy in 1993, a speaker described how, to generate repeat business, a "fat farm" - an intensive, live-in weight-reduction clinic - sold its list of customers to a mail-order house that sells bonbons and chocolates. --- Big Brother Is Watching You ... via your Appliances! --- Many people are aware of telephone wiretapping. But few have heard of Realtime Residential Power Line Surveillance (RRPLS). U.S. drug enforcement officials have used a primitive form of RRPLS for years, acquiring billing records from electric companies to find people who are using high-powered lights to grow marijuana. Now devices called "smart meters" are boosting the data-gathering power. Early forms of RRPLS only took power readings. Smart meters are far more nosy. They can record which electrical appliances an occupant uses, and when. RRPLS is the latest "dataveillance" technique in the digital panoptic arsenal. Utilities have already deployed it in pilot programs at thousands of U.S. homes. Their stated aim is to reduce costs and save energy. But the technology will also become a potent marketing tool. Companies could buy a profile of a household's appliance usage. One family might use their microwave oven every weekday morning. Suddenly, lo and behold, free samples of microwave breakfast snacks start coming in the mail. Health insurance companies could pool the RRPLS data from thousands of policy holders, correlating health insurance claims with statistical appliance usage profiles. They might determine that morning microwave users constitute a high risk group, and boost their insurance premiums accordingly. When the data from RRPLS are combined with data from other commercial sources, it will become both possible and economical to track the behavior of entire populations at an incredibly detailed level. For example, an individual may inadvertently "broadcast" an illicit sexual liaison to the commercial world via RRPLS data: Contrary to a household's normal pattern, one of its occupants, a 43-year-old married male (according to his driver's license and credit file data), arises early one Saturday morning, showers, shaves with his electric razor, and irons some clothes. He buys gas in town, then that night pays for two dinners and two tickets to a show (all on his credit card). After returning home, the stereo is turned on (a rare event, according to his RRPLS file). The data from the water bed indicates an unusual night - each time the sheets are thrown back, the RRPLS detects the water bed heater cycling. The next morning, data indicates an unusually long shower, followed by two uses of the hair dryer. The second use is much longer than normal for the male occupant, indicating he shared the shower with a long-haired person. During this time, commercial transaction records indicate the occupant's wife is halfway around the globe, on a business trip paid for by her employer. RRPLS data from her hotel room also indicate an overnight visitor. Within days the couple is inundated with direct mail solicitations from divorce lawyers! The greatest danger of widespread RRPLS is an invisible one, that utility companies will gradually degrade our expectations of privacy. Americans have an appalling tendency to allow inalienable Human Rights to be monetarized into transferable Corporate Property Rights. Utility companies can "buy off" the uninformed people by offering *surveillance subsidies* - discounts or rebates to those who allow the sale of their private data. These personal surveillance contracts will be advertised as "new improved services". But for a utility to obtain the genuinely "informed consent" of its customers would require an expensive campaign to educate people about the social consequences of this Panoptic surveillance. Given the inherent conflict of interest, it is clear that once again, the *consent* of the technological consumer will be *manufactured*, rather than *informed*. Surveillance subsidies will "pay" citizens to transmit their own highly personal data to the Panoptic wardens in distant bureaucracies. But just as with advertising, citizens ultimately pay the price of the communication, since the subsidy costs are recovered by corporations through the cost of their products. Because the transmitted data induced by surveillance subsidies is so highly personal, it allows the subsidizing institution to zero in on an individual, and target her with attempts at personalized manipulation designed to be effective for her particular psychgraphics. Surveillance subsidies are not unique to the utility industry and RRPLS. They will become more and more common as corporations "mine" the nets for useful data. --- Invisible Power in the Dis-Information Age --- In the post Cold War era, corporate technological power is growing beyond the military-industrial complex that produces weapons of mass destruction. It is evolving into a media-industrial complex that induces mass consumption. The "saturation bombing" tactics of mass marketing are becoming obsolete. Modern corporate firepower is evolving to extract precise intelligence data via consumer surveillance, and then respond with surgically targeted commercial "smart bombs" - individualized advertising. In North America we like to believe we have transcended the false idols of ideology. But the Market is our god. Data surveillance and techniques that classify, segment and isolate the population are already here. Soon each consumer will be segmented into a specific "target" audience; each of us will become increasingly isolated in our own separate technological enclosure or cell. The result is the Virtual Panopticon - a new instrument of social control. Computerized corporate "wardens" can observe every detail of every life from the central tower. Their precisely calibrated interactive feedback can induce consumers to willingly follow patterns generated by psycho-demographic profiles. More efficient than naked military power, panoptic arrangements offer a better way of extracting money from consumers through the tactics of computer-targeted micro (rather than mass) marketing. In the Gulf War, the media's new technological power enabled them to define events as they happened, and to impose those definitions on viewers as "instant history." Similarly, the panoptic surveillance grid will increase institutions' power to tell people how to view themselves - to impose self-images on them. Human beings are susceptible to the "Boiling Frog Syndrome." Drop a frog in a pan of boiling water, and it hops out immediately. But place it in a pan of cold water, gradually heat it to boiling, and the frog will boil to death. It becomes accustomed to the gradual degradation of its environment, and it fails to perceive the danger, until it's too late. Our society has become accustomed to gradual degradation of the environment - increasing air and water pollution, overpopulation, urban violence, militarism. But just as air pollution is often "invisible," so too is the degradation of personal privacy and autonomy that has brought us to the gates of the virtual panoptic prison. Its construction has been so gradual and insidious that most people have failed to notice it. Now, as the media monopoly gathers steam, emerging new technologies may allow the production, distribution and even the consumption of products to be orchestrated from a central corporate surveillance tower. Should the system ever reach that stage, the balance of power could be lost. Institutions engaged in the manipulation of social reality would then control the manufacture of "meaning" itself. To the degree that interactive technologies will be linked to the engines of computerized surveillance and classification, it will become economical to distribute individually tailored panoptic disinformation. Everyone would see different, customized images of their selves and environments, including the risks, options and opportunities to realize their dreams. Such a move would let media conglomerates fool most of the people most of the time. In their quest for profits and power, the wardens of the panoptic prison are working to hasten the ongoing colonization of consciousness. The most secure prison is one where the inmates think they are free, because then they can harbor no thoughts of rebellion or escape. As the outer walls of the Panopticon slowly solidify around us, few North Americans realize they are being sentenced to a life of panoptic disinformation. The warning signs of this invisible Panopticon were apparent way back in 1954: Jacques Ellul wrote, "It will not be a universal concentration camp, for it will be guilty of no such atrocity. It will not seem insane, for everything will be ordered ... We shall have nothing more to lose, and nothing to win. Our deepest instincts and our most secret passions will be analyzed, published, and exploited." Ironically, it may take nothing short of total ruin to save us. Before everyone can be imprisoned in virtual panoptic cocoons, crises in the external environment will likely intrude on our media-induced sweet dreams. As ecosystems collapse all around our socially dysfunctional cities, these disturbances may very well intrude on the sanctity of the virtual shopping mall and crash through our panoptic cell walls. It's morning in America - to paraphrase Ronald Reagan. Time to wake up and cast off the chains of market-structured consciousness. AUTHOR BIO: Rick Crawford is a researcher in computer security at the University of California at Davis. He is a director of the Cultural Environment Movement, and an activist with Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility and Sierra Club. This article is a condensed and overly simplified version of a chapter in the forthcoming book, "Invisible Crises", edited by George Gerbner, Hamid Mowlana, and Herbert I. Schiller (Westview Press, 1995, forthcoming).