The Panoptic Sort was published in 1993. Its focus was on privacy
and surveillance. But unlike the majority of publications
addressing these topics in the United States at the time that were
focused on the privacy concerns of individuals, especially those
related to threats associated with government surveillance, that
book sought to direct public toward the activities of commercial
firms. It was highly critical of the failure of scholars and
political activists to pay sufficient attention to the threats to
individual autonomy, collective agency, and the exercise of social
responsibility. The Panoptic Sort was intended to help us all to
understand just what was at stake when the bureaucracies of
government and commerce gathered, processed, and made use of an
almost unlimited amount of personal, and transaction-generated
information to manage social, economic, and political activities
within society. It argued that unlike Foucault's panoptic prison,
which involved continual, all-encompassing surveillance, the
panoptic systems being developed at that time were turning their
attention toward the development of techniques for the
identification and classification of disciplinary subjects into
distinct groups in ways that would increase the efficiency with
which the techniques of "correct training" could be applied to
those group members. While the first edition provided numerous
examples from marketing, employment, insurance, credit management,
and the provision of government and social services, the second
edition extends descriptions of the technologies that have been
developed and incorporated into the panoptic sort in the nearly 30
years since its initial publication. In addition, it places these
technological advances and systemic expansions into the context of
quite significant transformations in the nature of capitalism. In
addition to the massive expansion in the amount of data and
information being gathered, processed, and distributed for use by
corporations, government agencies, and newly developing
public-private partnerships, advances in artificial intelligence
and machine learning have placed the development of autonomous
devices into positions of power that had barely been imagined in
the past. Assessments of the implications for democracy that many
associate with the possibility of an algorithmic Leviathan, invite
a reconsideration of Jacques Ellul's distressing predictions about
the future that ended the first edition of The Panoptic Sort.
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