William J. T. Mitchell
[Writer, theorist, and architect, b. 1944, Melbourne, Australia, lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.]
...the thing that’s really fundamentally changed is we all become a sort of locus of surveillance and being surveyed at the moment. So it’s a decentralised system, it’s not a centralised system in the same way that the original panopticon was. A very good example of that is what’s happened with camera phones. They’ve just got themselves worked into the culture and all of a sudden all over the world we have these millions of wireless devices that have video capture devices on them. And any place in the world is potentially electronically visible instantly any place else, it’s absolutely amazing. But it’s not a centralised thing, it’s a decentralised candid system.
