How to use this guide
This guide describes fourteen watchers. Some are machines, some are buildings, some were never built, and two exist only on television. They are arranged not by what they are made of but by the kind of watching they do, in four Orders.
The first Order takes its name from a building. In 1787 Jeremy Bentham, writing from his brother's workshop on a Russian estate, described a circular house in which every cell faced a central lodge, and the lodge was fitted with blinds. The occupants could be seen at any moment and could never tell which; so they behaved, at every moment, as though they were. Bentham called it the Inspection-House and thought it would work for prisons, factories, schools and hospitals alike. Parliament declined to build it. Two centuries later, the word he coined for it is applied to almost every camera on a pole.
Most of the species in this guide do not work the way the Inspection-House works. They do not require you to wonder. A plate reader at the entrance to a subdivision reads every plate, every time, and keeps the record for thirty days, where anyone with a login can search it. It has no lodge and no blinds; it has a database. The uncertainty that Bentham relied on has been replaced by its opposite — certainty, stored — and the tower has been replaced by a thousand small boxes owned by homeowners' associations, shopkeepers, and neighbours. This guide calls that Order Archivalia, and it is by a long way the most numerous. Two smaller Orders account for the rest: the crowd that watches one (Synoptica) and the subject who watches themself (Autoscopica).
Each entry records, beside the usual field marks, four things: who watches, whether the watching is certain, whether it is kept, and whether it has a centre. Readers who learn to ask these four questions of a camera will find they can place almost any watcher in its Order at a glance, and will find the word panopticon less useful than they expected.
Counts marked LIVE are the number of each species that volunteers have so far mapped in OpenStreetMap, refreshed daily. They are undercounts without exception; where we know roughly how badly, we say. Counts set in grey are taken from published sources and dated. Species marked fictional, extinct or never built are included because the guide would be incomplete without them, and because their field marks are the easiest to learn.
Notes on classification
A field guide classifies by what can be seen. This one classifies by something that mostly cannot: who is on the other end, whether they are there, whether anything is kept, and whether there is a centre. I owe the reader an account of why.
What the word was for
Foucault's chapter on the panopticon, in Discipline and Punish (1975), is about a mechanism, not a building. The mechanism has three parts. There is a centre, from which everything can be seen. There is uncertainty: the occupant of a cell can be seen at any moment and cannot tell which, and so behaves at every moment as though he were. And there is nothing kept, because nothing needs to be: the effect is produced in the occupant, in advance, and the inspector may go home. Foucault's phrase is that the occupant becomes ‘the principle of his own subjection’. The building does not watch you; it arranges for you to watch yourself.
Three things in this guide work that way. Bentham's Inspection-House, which is the type and was never built. Orwell's telescreen, which is the same idea installed in a flat — the novel is explicit that the watching is intermittent and unknowable, and that this is what makes it work. And China's Sharp Eyes programme, which is the only large real system I know of that aims the uncertainty where Bentham aimed it: your neighbours may be looking at the feed from the camera outside your door, or they may not, and you will not be told. I have put Bentham's own preserved body in the same Order, with a webcam on its case, because it amused me and because it is, in fact, one camera at a centre with no archive worth the name.
The Stateville roundhouse is in the Order too, and it is there to make a point. It has the ring and the tower; it lacks the blinds. Everyone could see everyone. That is not a panopticon in Foucault's sense, it is merely a round prison, and the fact that it is routinely called one is the first symptom of the confusion this guide is about.
What most of the cameras actually do
Now look at the largest Order. A plate reader on a pole at the entrance to a subdivision has no centre. It is one of many boxes, owned by a homeowners' association, and what it feeds is a database. It is not uncertain: it reads every plate, every time, and it would not work otherwise. And it keeps what it reads — thirty days by default, longer by request — so that the thing can be searched afterwards by whoever has a login. None of Foucault's three parts is present. The doorbell camera is the same, at a smaller scale and in larger numbers. So is the dome on the shop ceiling, which is not watched live but consulted after the fact, and which came of age in Britain not because anyone was looking at it but because a frame of it, later, showed a small boy being led away. The cruiser-mounted reader goes further: it does not even wait for you to pass.
This is a different machine. Its power is not in your uncertainty but in its certainty — in the fact that the record exists and can be pulled. Deleuze, writing in 1990, already saw the shift from the enclosed institution to the open field of the record, from the watchtower to the password. The people who cancelled Flock contracts in American cities in 2025 were not worried about being watched. They were worried about what was kept, and who could search it: an immigration agency, a police force in another state, an officer with a grudge. That is an archive problem, and calling it a panopticon obscures exactly what is wrong with it.
Two entries in the Order sit at its edge, and I have kept them there deliberately. The speed camera keeps only the offence; it is candid about itself; it flashes. The facial recognition van is certain and searching, but it keeps only matches, and it puts up a sign — it wants you to know, which is Bentham's instinct in a new body. The Order is not a condemnation. It is a description of how the watching works, and the reader can decide which parts of it to mind.
The crowd and the mirror
Two smaller Orders remain. Mathiesen pointed out in 1997 that the twentieth century had built the opposite of Bentham's machine as well: the many watching the few, on television. He called it the synopticon. The phone held above the crowd is its current form, and Black Mirror has returned to it more than once because it is the part of the modern arrangement that frightens people most: not the unseen guard but the seen crowd, and the record that never goes away because it is nowhere in particular. It belongs in a separate Order because the geometry is reversed — one subject at the centre, many eyes — and because the archive has no owner.
The last Order is the one Foucault did not anticipate. The body-worn camera watches the public and its wearer at once; the Grain watches only its owner, forever. Whether a record you make of yourself is surveillance at all is a fair question. I have answered it by including it, on the grounds that a guide should show the whole family, and because the question of who the record is for — the wearer, the employer, the court, the audience — is the same question the rest of the guide asks.
About the counts
The live figures are what volunteers have mapped in OpenStreetMap, and they are low everywhere. For doorbells they are absurdly low. They are included anyway because they are honest, they are public, they update, and their distribution is telling: the plate-reader count is what it is because a small number of people in the United States decided to go and find the cameras and put them on a map. The gap between the mapped number and the real one is itself a fact about each species — how visible it is, and how much anyone has cared to look.
There is one piece of evidence that Bentham's mechanism still operates on us, and it is worth stating plainly. After the Snowden disclosures in 2013, traffic to Wikipedia articles on terrorism-related topics fell, measurably, and stayed down. People who believed they might be watched read less. That is the panoptic effect, and it was produced not by a tower but by an archive made suddenly visible. The two machines are not unrelated. But they are not the same, and the word for one does not describe the other.
So: use panopticon for the first Order, where it is exact. For the rest, say what the thing does. It reads. It keeps. It can be searched. That is usually the point.