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How to be Human Online | Death to the Digital 000
2022
A Video Essay
All kinds of people are opting into being watched en masse by everyone, all the time.
The panopticon is a prison, a school, a hospital, a factory — a reality tv show. Contestants after being ridiculed and punished by the public correct their behaviors. When a future contestant bears witness to the ridicule a current contestant has faced, they learn to not replicate that action when it’s their turn on screen. That internalized panoptical gaze may reduce the harms that they experience on the show, but it doesn’t make for entertaining television. So, why does it entertain us?
We don’t just want to be watched, we want to watch, we want to do the looking. Why?
When does the impulse to see, to watch, to look, become the urge to spy, to pry open, to render visible?