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The Great Catopticon

The Catopticon1, 2 is inspired by the Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. It's design has been greatly influenced by Surveiller et punir from Michel Foucault. However, while the Bentham's Panopticon was a surveillance achitecture, the Catopticon summarize the organization of a sousveillance3 society.

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From surveillance to sousveillance

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* Sur-veillance: the watcher is above those who are watched, e.g. Penitentiary-Houses, Prisons, Manufactories, Mad-Houses, Lazarettos, Hospitals, Schools etc.

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* Sous-veillance: the watchers are socially below those who are watched, e.g. using their mobile phone people who are attending a demonstration in the street where policemen are beating youths can immediately take pictures of the scene and diffuse them through the web.

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* Equi-veillance: equilibrium between sousveillance and surveillance that is produced by modern IT

Architecture of Surveillance

The Panopticon, i.e. the Architecture of Surveillance is built as a ring around a central tower, where observers can see all prisoners’ actions. The cells are transparent: they receive and transmit the sunlight in such a way that the inspector may observe every movement of a prisoner without being viewed. In addition, prisoners are totally isolated from each others.

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To summarize, the three main Panopticon principles are:

  1. the total transparency of cells,

  2. the fundamental dissymmetry, which makes the observer watch all the prisoners, without being watched, and

  3. the isolation of the prisoners who can’t communicate each others.

Architecture of Sousveillance

By analogy and by contrast to the three surveillance principles on which Panopticon is based, there are three fundamental principles of sousveillance that are:

  1. the total transparency of society,

  2. the fundamental symmetry, which gives everybody the ability to watch – and consequently to control – everybody, and

  3. the total communication, which makes everyone able to exchange to everyone.

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In practice, it means that there is no hierarchy in the Catopticon, i.e. in the architecture of sousveillance, since nobody inhabits the central tower, and that everyone may communicate to everyone in a total transparency. This structure differs radically from the Panopticon schema. The design of an edifice that renders possible such a total communication among its inhabitants is here derived from Panopticon schema. This architecture of sousveillance, which obeys to the three above mentioned principles, replaces the Panopticon watchtower by an empty mirror-tower that renders everyone able to communicate with everyone. It is based on the notion of "reflectionism"; a word invented by Steve Mann to describe the procedures using technology as mirrors against bureaucratic organizations. Since this architecture is a derivation of Panopticon based on mirrors, we decided to call it Catopticon (from the catoptrics, the study of light reflection and mirrors).

Extension of the Catopticon

The Catopticon architecture that is derived from the Panopticon architecture supposes, implicitly, that it is also restricted to a building. As a consequence, its size is also limited. With the information and communication technologies, the structure of both Panopticon and the Catopticon may be expanded in huge proportions. Nowadays, neither Catopticon nor Panopticons are restricted to a local area.

Geographical Extension

Modern information technologies, e.g. webcams or wearable computing, render now possible the extension of Catopticon to the global human society throughout the entire planet. More precisely, new devices, for instance the Jennifer Ringley’s ''JenniCam'' or the Steve Mann’s ''EyeTap'', are designed to record continuously personal information and to retrieve it anytime, anywhere, throughout the globe. As a consequence, it is possible for anyone to get information about anyone, which corresponds exactly to the principle of sousveillance on which is based Catopticon. Let us remark that, simultaneously to this extension of Catopticon to the global society throughout the entire planet, Panopticons themselves may be considerably extended. Nevertheless, we can also prove that, by nature, Panopticons cannot be extended to the entire society, since they have been designed to correct and to reform people and it is – at least in principle – transitory.

Extension to the Virtual World

In parallel to its physical extension to the entire planet, Catopticon has also been enlarged to the infosphere: not only human, but other informational organisms – the so-called inforgs4 – belong to Catopticon. More generally, a modern Catopticon is part of a virtual world built on the infosphere. Equipped with artificial intelligence techniques, inforgs may freely communicate among each others; some of them are humans while others may be artificial intelligent agents, virtual robots or chatterbots. All human beings, artificial intelligent agents and other inforgs, belong to Catopticon. Nevertheless, even if Catopticon can be extended to the infosphere, it is not sure that it contains all the infosphere. This point needs a further discussion.

Note that Panopticons may also be extended to the overall infosphere with the use of new information technologies. But, the meaning of both extensions, the extension of Panopticon and the extension of Catopticon, differ. Since the inhabitants of the Panopticon periphery, i.e. the cells, cannot communicate to each others, no matter the presence of artificial agents there. In contrast, artificial agents that would have been admitted in the watchtower could act as efficient controllers. These agents could continuously check that the activities of the inhabitants of the periphery are conforming to the rules. Consequently, it would considerably decrease the amount of work of the official warder. In the future, one could even imagine that for the sake of equality nobody would allow anyone, except artificial agents, to act as controllers.

Sousveillance Devices

The JenniCam

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Jennifer Ringley had installed webcams in her student bedroom and then, during seven years, from April 1996 until the end of 2003, she has continuously diffused views of her intimacy on the web. She quickly became very popular. There were more than five millions visits per day on her website, which has been seen as a social phenomenon.She5 herself has been considered not only as a young exhibitionist but also as a conceptual artist who could anticipate the future state of a society. She developed a special webcam, the so-called “JenniCAM”, giving her the opportunity to continuously broadcast videos on a personal weblog.

The EyeTap

Steve Mann designed a new device called the “EyeTap”6 worn in front of an eye and acting both as a camera, which captures the continuous visual flows, and as a screen that displays computer-generated imagery, the latter coming from other “EyeTaps” or from any visual recorder.

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A Few Contemporaneous Examples of Sousveillance

Munbai Attacks

Everybody remembers when, the end of 2008, during the Mumbai attacks, terrorists used Twitter, Flicker and other social web technologies, by amplifying the scope of their action through the international medias, and, in a more active manner, by exchanging and obtaining strategic information about the current situation.

Among the many papers published on this topic, the interested reader may refer to the Telegraph (see The Telegraph)

Neda

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In Iran, June 20, 2009, Neda, a young 26 year old woman was killed by a bullet in the chest launched by the paramilitary Basij militia during a demonstration to protest the results of the presidential election. In the totalitarian regimes of the past, this news would have been quickly suppressed and nobody would have known nothing. Today, even the black crows of the theocratic Muslim power cannot hide it: with Twitter, the event was relayed instantly all around the world and all, whether in Paris, New York, London, in Canberra, in Bamako or Tokyo could live almost directly. The name Neda, which means "call" in Persian, became the symbol of democratic protest in Iran.

Paris Subway

In Paris subway, travelers of the line 13, very often delayed, have decided to exchange information with their mobile phones using the Twitter messaging facilities (cf. http://twitter.com/ligne13).

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French Public Political Life

During the past few months, there have been some public affairs in France that are directly related to the generalized sousveillance. Here are a few examples of them.

Alain Duhamel

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In November 2006, a few months before the March 2007 French presidential election, M. Alain Duhamel, a politic commentator, was invited to participate to an academic debate in the Paris school of political sciences. During his intervention, he criticized the campaign of one presidential candidate, M. François Bayrou7 But, to weaken his critics against the politician, he said incidentally that he would vote for him. It happened that someone made a non-authorized video record of M. Duhamel’s intervention (see the video) and diffused it on the web some months later, in February 2007. Having being accused to publicly support M. François Bayrou, Alain Duhamel was condemned to stop his activities of political commentator in the media during the presidential election campaign. This example shows how the so-called sousveillance leads to the confusion between an academic freedom of speech and an official declaration in the public sphere. This could have tragic consequences for us, as academics, if our debates and discussions would be permanently diffused to everybody in the world.

Brice Hortefeux

Brice Hortefeux is a French politician. He is the present Minister of Interior in France. During the 2009 UMP Summer school, at Seignosse in Landes, posing for a photo with a young UMP activist of North African origin, he said: "It does not correspond at all to the prototype. We always need to have one. When there is one, okay. It is when there are many that there are problems." The scene was filmed by a team of Public Senate that decided not to diffuse it. However, the video of this exchange has been operated by Le Monde newspaper (see ''Le Monde'' paper and it raised controversy. The young North African UMP activist who is on the photo said that this video betrays the Minister of Interior in particular, that "It was completely out of context. My county clerk joked with the minister because he speaks Auvergne and that's where we were." The left party calls for the minister's resignation.

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  1. Ganascia J.-G., "The Great Catopticon", in Proceedings of the 8th International Conference of Computer Ethics Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE), 26-28 June 2009, Corfu, Greece (2009) (pdf file) (1)

  2. For more detail, the people who read french can consult ''Voir et pouvoir: qui nous surveille?'', Editions Le Pommier, 2009 (2)

  3. The notion of sousveillance has been introduced by Steve Mann. For more detail, see Mann, S., Nolan, J., Wellman, B. (2003), Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments, Surveillance & Society 1(3): 331-355, http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/ojs/index.php/journal - http://wearcam.org/sousveillance.pdf (3)

  4. Charles Ess (ed.), « Luciano Floridi’s philosophy of information and information ethics : critical reflections and the state of the art », special issue of Ethics and Information Technology, vol. 10, n° 2-3, septembre 2008. (4)

  5. The interested reader may refer to the Wikipedia article about Jennifer Ringley - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Ringley (5)

  6. Interested readers may read the “EyeTap” home page (http://wearables.blu.org/) or the wikipedia article dedicated to the “EyeTap” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EyeTap) (6)

  7. François Bayrou was one of the candidates to the French presidential election in 2007. He got 18,57% of the votes in the first round, and was positioned just after Nicolas Sarkozy (31,18%) and Ségolène Royal (25,87%) (7)