Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1A SIMPLE IDEA OF ARCHITECTURE“Morals reformed—health preserved—industry invigorated instruction diffused—public burdens lightened—Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock—the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws are not cut, but untied—all by a simple idea in Architecture.”1—JEREMY BENTHAM The Inspection-HouseIf this was a picture, you’d have seen it before. History, you see, is repeating itself. With our new digital century comes a familiar problem from the industrial age. A social tyranny is once again encroaching upon individual liberty. Today, in the early twenty-first century, just as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this social threat comes from a simple idea in architecture.In 1787, at the dawn of the mass industrial age, Jeremy Bentham designed what he called a “simple idea in architecture” to improve the management of prisons, hospitals, schools and factories. Bentham’s idea was, as the architectural historian Robin Evans noted, a “vividly imaginative” synthesis of architectural form with social purpose.2 Bentham, who amassed great personal wealth as a result of his social vision,3 wanted to change the world through this new architecture.Bentham sketched out this vision of what Aldous Huxley described as a “plan for a totalitarian housing project”4 in a series of “open”5 letters written from the little Crimean town of Krichev, where he and his brother, Samuel, were instructing the regime of the enlightened Russian despot Catherine the Great about the building of efficient factories for its unruly population.6 In these public letters, Bentham imagined what he called this “Panopticon” or “Inspection-House” as a physical network, a circular building of small rooms, each transparent and fully connected, in which individuals could be watched over by an all-seeing inspector. This inspector is the utilitarian version of an omniscient god—always-on, all-knowing, with the serendipitous ability to look around corners and see through walls. As the French historian Michel Foucault observed, this Inspection House was “like so many cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible.”7The Panopticon’s connective technology would bring us together by separating us, Bentham calculated. Transforming us into fully transparent exhibits would be good for both society and the individual, he adduced, because the more we imagined we were being watched, the more efficient and disciplined we would each become. Both the individual and the community would, therefore, benefit from this network of Auto-Icons. “Ideal perfection,” the utilitarian figured, taking this supposedly social idea to its most chillingly anti-social conclusion, would require that everyone—from connected prisoners to connected workers to connected school children to connected citizens—could be inspected “every instant of time.”8Rather than the abstract fantasy of an eccentric Englishman whose experience of life, you’ll remember, was no more than that of a boy, Bentham’s radically transparent Inspection-House had an enormous impact on new prison architecture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The original Oxford jail where I had breakfasted with Reid Hoffman, for example, had been built by the prolific prison architect William Blackburn, “the father of the radial plan for prisons,”9 who built more than a dozen semicircular jails on Benthamite principles. In Oxford, Blackburn had replaced the medieval “gaol” in the city’s castle with a building designed to supervise prisoners’ every movement and control their time down to the very minute.But Bentham’s simple idea of architecture “reformed” more than just prisons. It represented an augury of an industrial society intricately connected by an all-too-concrete network of railroads and telegraph lines. The mechanical age of the stream train, the large-scale factory, the industrial city, the n