I love how good places let me think… Today i’ve been trying to grapple with the overarching tendency to see the digital realm as a Panopticon. This troubles me because while the end results are awefully comparable, Bentham architected the Panopticon for a particular purpose. Conversely, the digital realm was not constructed with this purpose in mind; it has evolved. In its evolution, people are not cognizant of the observation and thus are not following the same type of obedience to authority noted by Bentham. Instead, people are developing their own prison under the false impression that they are building a castle (referring to the terrible movie “The Last Castle”). They think that they are providing information to help their lot, but instead they are building boxes that not only keep them in but compare them computationally to a societal norm and then treat them according to their distance from such. Anyhow, fresh thoughts… yummy thinking.. Yay for San Francisco!