2011 continues to be a year of protest on an international level and as we see protests in nations with very different GDPs and reputations I think we are learning some interesting things. Clearly there are gigantic differences between the events in Tahrir Square now and in January/February and the Occupy protests across many ‘western’ countries, from the tactics of both the demonstrators and authorities to the stated aims of the protestors to the issues that have prompted them. One thing that is similar across the world is the use of cameras and phones by the protestors and spectators to document and publicise what is happening. Earlier this week, Slashdot commented on the ‘perception wars’ that now occur concurrently with the conflict between protestors and authorities in an article titled  The Future of Protest In Panopticon Nation.

First a little background for those who might find the term ‘panopticon’ unfamiliar. A little understanding of the way the Greek language has contributed to our language may help you to detect that it refers to ‘all-seeing’ or total observation, but its history is interesting. It is attributed to an 18th Century Englishman, Jeremy Bentham, who imagined prisons (and other institutions) built as a circular building around a central observation tower, so that a minimal staff could observe and control the inmates or workers effectively. Critically, the observation was to be one-way, so the inmates would never know when they were or were not being observed and would have to always behave as if they were being closely observed.

Bentham’s panopticon prison was never constructed as he designed it, though it has inspired the way prisons have developed since the late eighteenth century. The technology to make it feasible was not available then – and once it was available it negated the architectural design he suggested. The use of CCTV in the UK (England and Wales has by far the highest concentration of CCTV cameras of anywhere in the world) has made the panopticon something not just for inmates, but of all members of society. The obsession with testing and measuring performance means it is a day-to-day part of life for many workers – they do not know when precisely their speed or accuracy will be checked, but it will, so they must always do the best possible, whether on a factory production line or in a call centre or an office. This level of observation perhaps even goes beyond the surveillance of police states behind the Iron Curtain, while inspiring less fear as the penalties do not match the terror inspired by the Stazi or KGB.

I first came across the term ‘panopticon’ in the writing of the French thinker Michel Foucault. He devotes an entire chapter of Discipline and Punish to the idea of ‘panopticism’, describing its power as ‘visible and unverifiable’. Visible, because the inmate can always see the central tower ‘from which he is spied upon’; unverifiable, because though he might be seen at any or all moments, he cannot be sure when he is or is not. Foucault links the ideal of the panopticon with the growth of a police system with local stations which could look out for disturbance and respond as necessary – exactly as today we call for more police ‘on the beat’ to make us feel safer. Foucault’s aim is to unmask and name the power at play here, to show how we have become a ‘carceral culture’ and discipline is used to control us, his analysis continues to resonate more than 35 years later.

But this discipline is fragile and the illusion of control can shatter quickly. The violence and destruction in several cities in England in August this year was an illustration of what happens when the illusion that the police have total control breaks down. Looting spread around London and to several other cities as it seemed the police could not respond to or contain the people smashing windows and taking big-ticket items from shops or attacking individuals and burning property. It took several days for the message that the police would arrest and the courts would punish those involved to become believable and discipline to be restored.

Part of the success of the UK police was based on their use of social media and other electronic communication tools, as well as still photos and video from CCTV and FITs. The Metropolitan Police ‘Forward Intelligence Teams’ photograph and video suspects, especially at protests. But they’re not the only ones recording everything: people on the other side of the police line are too.

A powerful example of this is the (now infamous) video of a police officer using pepper spray on seated protesters on the UC Davis campus. You can’t help but notice that so many of the students are recording the whole thing on their phones or camcorders. The result of this is that two police officers have been suspended – and it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that there will prosecutions for assault.

It’s been alleged that the light-handed response of the Metropolitan Police in August was because of the criticism of their rather heavier tactics with the student protests in 2010 and March 2011. That’s a direct result of the videos available of the ‘kettles’ they employed as well as the legal action and press responses. The death of Ian Tomlinson resulted in a police officer being tried using video footage of the beating he dished out. The classic question ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ has an answer – everyone is watching (and recording) all that the watchmen are doing.

I don’t believe it will take many incidents like UC Davis and the clearance of OWS to make US cops rethink their response to peaceful protests. The US and other western countries cannot afford to give governments from Iran to Myanmar the excuse that they have seen what has happened in New York or California and have just done the same. The Egyptian military government should not be able to compare Tahrir Square with Zuccotti Park (and their use of US made tear gas is a whole other issue.)

This ‘sousveillance’, an inversion of state surveillance, by people desperate to keep their government and police accountable is changing the nature of protest. And the change is not complete – the tactics of stormtrooper costumes and chemical weapons is not a viable one in this world of panopticism, so police tactics are shifting – covering up names and numbers on uniforms, more plainclothes FITs, police ‘agent provocateurs’, who knows what. All we can be certain of is that the panopticon is inverted, the inmates of this institutionalised society are looking in at the centre and doing their best to keep it accountable.