Very real effect. I argue with the massive increase in surveillance that I should never have to submit a form or write a contract again, particularly with government. Simply answering yes/no to the correct question that is recorded and databased should count as effectively as filling out the endless DMV forms. All of the corresponding ID work has already been done once country-wide face recognition is in place and the phone can act as a physical confirmation device.
Radical vulnerability is the only way forward. There are comedians like Dara O Briain asking young people not to take dick pics or sex videos (for the love of christ), because it ends up on the cloud and out from there. But I argue if you are going to shine a light on everything, then you have to take it all. The only way to combat the panopticon is to radically reveal everything you can consciously do, and then hold the authority to the same higher moral standard. An elected official cannot be as vulnerable as your average citizen and they must be pressed to create safe harbours from the eye of computing judgement. Once the politicians have protected themselves the line between privacy and transparency will have been renegotiated and it will spread downwards.
The problem with the Panopticon as a model for current society is that the criminality in the story removes innocence. We have plenty of innocents that need protecting. Protecting from the world but also the Panopticon itself, which changes the model from a power dynamic to something more fluid.
With the new "always recorded" culture any unscripted behavior can be edited out of context by malicious actors.
I used to work with journalists who media trained corporate spokespeople for TV interviews. It feels like we are now carefully managing our brand at all times in the same way. Pray that you don't get your 15 minutes of fame.
Editing out of context can be managed by having a predictable reputation which most people have, but it's in the dark. Editing out of existence is scarier. The police body cam footage disappearing means there's already holes in the net. If we grow to rely on non-public surveillance and data, the record can be changed behind the scenes. Increasingly so as deep fakes and video fakery grows.
I've already had my 15 mins of severe negative attention. It was a relief in some sense that for some sectors of life at least, it has no long lasting negative repercussions.
There was a DEFCON talk about statistical deanonymization of data. You can relatively easily correlate points of data like URL visits down to a few identities that can be validated. It's easy to identify anonymised data. This ID'd a german judge who liked to watch porn of a particular taste during chambers and some of the working day. The more these stories grow in number, the more we have to ask questions about what is normal for people in society to do and how we manage the privacy of those acts. The 15mins of negative attention is to boldly go to the frontier of this stuff at the moment.
Radical vulnerability is the only way forward. There are comedians like Dara O Briain asking young people not to take dick pics or sex videos (for the love of christ), because it ends up on the cloud and out from there. But I argue if you are going to shine a light on everything, then you have to take it all. The only way to combat the panopticon is to radically reveal everything you can consciously do, and then hold the authority to the same higher moral standard. An elected official cannot be as vulnerable as your average citizen and they must be pressed to create safe harbours from the eye of computing judgement. Once the politicians have protected themselves the line between privacy and transparency will have been renegotiated and it will spread downwards.
The problem with the Panopticon as a model for current society is that the criminality in the story removes innocence. We have plenty of innocents that need protecting. Protecting from the world but also the Panopticon itself, which changes the model from a power dynamic to something more fluid.