The Nationalized Panopticon

Why a Flag Change Won’t Free the Feed

We avoided the TikTok ban, but at what cost? By looking at the history of prisons and propaganda, I argue that moving servers to Texas doesn’t solve the problem of surveillance—it just changes who watches us.

The Silent Watchman

I want to start with a concept that haunts modern sociology: the Panopticon. Jeremy Bentham, an 18th-century philosopher, designed a prison where the inmates could be watched at any time but could never see the watcher. The brilliance, and the horror, of the design was that the prisoners began to police themselves. They internalized the gaze. As the French philosopher Michel Foucault later observed regarding this mechanism:

He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.

– Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

We usually think of this in terms of stone walls and guard towers, but hold that thought.

The War for Your Mind

Now, let’s jump to the Cold War. It wasn’t just about nukes; it was about the airwaves. Radio Free Europe wasn’t sending soldiers; it was sending rock and roll, news, and Western ideals. The Soviets jammed these signals because they understood something we often forget: culture is the upstream source of politics. If you can shape what a population enjoys, what they hum, and what they discuss at the dinner table, you don’t need to invade them. You’ve already won. The transmission of culture is a weapon system.

The $14 Billion Texas Compromise

This brings me to the news of the week. TikTok has finalized its massive deal to create a new U.S. entity, effectively ‘Americanizing’ its operations to avoid a ban. The servers are moving. The corporate structure is shifting. The White House breathes a sigh of relief. On the surface, it looks like a win for sovereignty. We pulled the app out of the hands of a foreign adversary and placed it safely within our own borders. But I can’t help but feel we are missing the forest for the server farm.

Changing the Guard

Here is where the mosaic comes together. We are celebrating the fact that the ‘watchman’ in the tower is now an American corporation rather than a Chinese one. But we haven’t asked why we are living in a Panopticon in the first place. The danger is not the nationality of the algorithm, but the existence of the algorithm itself. Whether the behavioral modification engine is run from Beijing or Austin, the effect on the human mind is identical. We are still the inmates in Bentham’s prison, scrolling endlessly, modifying our behavior for an invisible audience, assuming the position of subjection.

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The True Trap

Shoshana Zuboff, the scholar who defined ‘surveillance capitalism,’ warned us that we have drifted into a state where human experience is merely raw material for commercial extraction. As she puts it:

Industrial capitalism transformed nature’s raw materials into commodities... Surveillance capitalism turns human nature into a commodity.

– Shoshana Zuboff

The TikTok deal is a business transaction, not a liberation. It ensures that the extraction of your attention continues uninterrupted, merely redirecting the profits and the data access to different ledgers. We have preserved our access to the entertainment, but we have not regained our cognitive freedom.