The Importance of Watching the Watchers

"Surveillance comes naturally to the brain because of its need for explanations for events and, most of all, for people, both individually and collectively. Why this? Why now? What does it all mean?-these kinds of questions. The brain thrives on information like the lungs thrive on oxygen. Nothing creates anxiety more than the unexpected and the unexplained."

"The design of the panopticon, as envisioned by philosopher Jeremy Bentham, ensured that prisoners would never know at any given moment whether they were being observed. Bentham referred to the resulting uncertainty produced in the prisoner as 'the sentiment of invisible omnipresence.'"

"George Orwell, in his novel 1984 (published in 1949), captured the agonizing uncertainty created by surveillance: 'There was of course, no way of knowing that you were being watched at any given moment...you had to live...in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.'"

Surveillance emerges naturally from the brain's fundamental need to understand events and people through information gathering. Unexplained situations create anxiety, making surveillance psychologically compelling. Knowledge accumulated through widespread surveillance of multiple people simultaneously becomes increasingly useful for control and prediction. Governments across all political systems value surveillance for maintaining power and order. Modern surveillance represents the most extensive monitoring in national history, evolving from 18th-century origins. The panopticon design concept from 1787 pioneered surveillance by enabling observation without the observed knowing when they were watched. This uncertainty creates psychological pressure on those monitored, a principle captured in Orwell's 1984 and continuing in contemporary surveillance systems.

Read at Psychology Today