9 March 2010: "THE ALT REPORT opens ‘TIP LINE’ 2 connect with readers"

This post is about the panopticon. Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham first conceived of the panopticon as a form of prison architecture that would allow a guard stationed at the center to observe unseen all the inmates, who were arrayed around him in a radial configuration.

Michel Foucault famously adopted the concept as metaphor for the carceral society, in which ideological discipline operates regardless of the presence of overseers or punishers. The presence of the observer is instead always assumed. The Panopticon is designed "so to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers." The power relations are expressed through dominated people's relations with one another.

Carles adopts this critique and applies it to the growing social preoccupation with celebrities, which in its intrusive voyeurism is already an emblem of panoptic society. Thus he invites his readers to make explicit the implicit surveillance they are already conducting, led onward by an administered proclivity for passive curiosity and vicarious fascination with those famous persons who seem to dictate delineations and degrees of alterity and mainstream-ness, and become actual informants, supplying him with information as if he were a Stasi bureau chief in charge of cultural subversives:

Recommended TIP submissions:

* alt celeb scandals
* nude pix of alt celebs
* mild misunderstandings that need more exposure to turn into over-exposed controversies
* Photographs of Alt Encounters that happen
* Injustices...

And so on. Carles's point of course, is to demonstrate how the media machine no longer needs diabolical masters to operate it and use it to chew up and dismantle reality and the possibility of grasping it as a totality. Instead we ourselves fuel the machine with the sweat and blood of our own toil. We create the material bases for our own ideological predetermination through our own eagerness to participate in the mystified consciousness and culture industries.

In servicing the machine, we become machine-like ourselves, as Carles notes ironically: "This is an effort by the Alt Report Robots + Interns to connect with the fans, letting them know that they are ‘in charge’ of the content." Interns, robots, readers, jack-booted thugs, pogrom ralliers...these are all becoming one and the same.

Foucault notes that the panopticon "is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad." By reporting on one another, we feel as though we have become more famous ourselves, more certain that every move of our own is being watched and evaluated, that our ongoing performance has indeed hit the big time. Someday, as Carles suggests, we all become "premium content."