Dystopian Future (and present)
April 30, 2013 6:18 PM   Subscribe

Panopticon is a documentary which details how our concept of privacy is altered by the modern surveillance state.
posted by antonymous (12 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
I hate to immediately comment on my own thread, but I found the first several minutes to be alarmist and somewhat off-putting. (I'd be interested to know if others feel the same way) It does get much better.
posted by antonymous at 6:21 PM on April 30, 2013




I don't think it started out alarmist, but I'm already on the watch lists. Nothing new in the first 20 minutes (maybe that the Dutch are a little more honest about what's in the databases); I'm not sure this is news, although it deserves to be. It's not the individual pieces of data anyway. It's the fact that you can get them and correlate them and do all sorts of uncomfortable things with them, although it seems like a lot of work or too hard or not worth worrying about to too many people.
posted by spacewrench at 6:49 PM on April 30, 2013


Are not the surveillance cameras just an absolute dream environment for all the folks that want to be watched?
posted by sammyo at 6:55 PM on April 30, 2013


Does this film do any pop psychoanalysis about the public's exhibitionist narcissism in the modern age, from reality TV to social media?
posted by Apocryphon at 7:13 PM on April 30, 2013


Are not the surveillance cameras just an absolute dream environment for all the folks that want to be watched?

Depends who's watching. I like to imagine that I'm being surveiled by an attractive thirty-something-year-old in a tight skirt and efficient ways.

But then again I'm mildly insane and have a thing for men in tight skirts.
posted by Mario Speedwagon at 8:20 PM on April 30, 2013 [1 favorite]


Thanks. Fascinating. I guess I'm out of the loop, but this is presented very well and is informative.
posted by dobie at 8:22 PM on April 30, 2013




Affective Privacy And Surveillance
Since no spaces are private anymore in the sense of being unobservable, all that is left is the illusion of it. “Privacy … has nothing to do with escaping the gaze,” Bogard insists. Being disconnected from the network, away from the screen, doesn’t feel like privacy and isn’t an option for it; it’s just desolate isolation, social death.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:13 PM on April 30, 2013 [2 favorites]


Great film. Kind of odd that Germany, because of its past history, seems to be best suited at handling privacy issues.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 12:30 AM on May 1, 2013


Great film. Kind of odd that Germany, because of its past history, seems to be best suited at handling privacy issues.

Not sure how closely you watched the film. It is repeated several times that precisely because of Germany's history of personal data collection and surveillance by the state -- the Nazi's Gestapo; the Stasi in post-war East Germany -- many in the country are particularly sensitive on the issue of the collection and use of personal information, privacy, and incursions therein.
posted by Mister Bijou at 6:28 AM on May 1, 2013


Mister Bijou: "Not sure how closely you watched the film. It is repeated several times that precisely because of Germany's history of personal data collection and surveillance by the state -- the Nazi's Gestapo; the Stasi in post-war East Germany -- many in the country are particularly sensitive on the issue of the collection and use of personal information, privacy, and incursions therein."

Yes, I saw that, and I understand that, and can see the cause and effect clearly. I merely meant that it was odd that all of the suffering and pain caused by those organizations and their time in power would, in one way, later end up being a sort of "blessing" in disguise. Meanwhile, those of us in the "free" countries in the West are at a disadvantage because we never suffered through such regimes.

Ultimately, I guess you learn from your mistakes, and since the people in the WWII allies never made the mistakes that the Germans made, we have yet to learn those lessons. Seems unfortunate.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 12:06 PM on May 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


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