A Field Guide to the Watchers

How to use this guide

This guide describes fourteen watchers. Some are machines, some are buildings, one was never built, and two exist only on television. They are arranged by the kind of watching they do rather than by what they are made of, in four Orders.

The first Order is named for a building. In 1787 Jeremy Bentham, visiting his brother in Russia, described a circular house in which every cell faced a central lodge fitted with blinds. An occupant could be seen at any moment and could not tell which, and so had to assume he was being seen all the time. Bentham called it the Inspection-House and proposed it for prisons, factories, schools and hospitals. Parliament considered it for twenty years and then built something else. The word he coined for it has since been attached to nearly every camera on a pole.

Most of the species here do not work like the Inspection-House. A plate reader at the entrance to a subdivision photographs each car that passes, reads the plate, and stores the record for thirty days in a database that any customer or agency with a login can search. Nothing about it depends on the driver's uncertainty, and nothing about it is central: the boxes belong to homeowners' associations, shopkeepers and neighbours, and what they have in common is the database they feed. This guide calls that Order Archivalia. It is by a long way the most numerous. Two smaller Orders account for the rest: the crowd that watches one person (Synoptica), and the person who watches themself (Autoscopica).

Each entry records, beside the usual field marks, four things: who watches, whether the watching is certain, whether anything is kept, and whether there is a centre. A reader who asks those four questions of a camera can usually place it in its Order from across the street.

Counts marked LIVE are the number of each species that volunteers have mapped in OpenStreetMap, refreshed daily. They are undercounts in every case; where the scale of the undercount is known, the entry says so. Counts set in grey come from a published source and carry its date. 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 things that mostly cannot be seen: who is on the other end, whether they are there, whether anything is kept, and whether there is a centre. The reader is owed an account of why.

What the word was for

Foucault's chapter on the panopticon in Discipline and Punish (1975) describes a mechanism rather than a building, and 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, cannot tell which, and so behaves at all times as if he were being seen. And nothing is kept, because nothing needs to be; the effect is produced in the occupant in advance, and the inspector can go home. Foucault's phrase for the result is that the occupant becomes ‘the principle of his own subjection’.

Three things in this guide work that way. Bentham's Inspection-House, which is the type specimen and was never built. Orwell's telescreen, which is the same arrangement 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, 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 may not, and you will not be told. Bentham's own preserved body is in the same Order, with a webcam on its case, partly because it amused me and partly because it is one camera at a centre with no archive worth the name.

The Stateville roundhouse is in the Order to make a point. It has the ring and the tower and lacks the blinds: everyone could see everyone. In Foucault's sense that is not a panopticon but a round prison, and the habit of calling it one is the first sign of the confusion this guide is about.

What most of the cameras actually do

Now consider 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, feeding a database. It is not uncertain. It reads each plate as it passes, and would be useless if it did not. And it keeps what it reads, thirty days by default and longer on request, so that the record can be searched later by whoever has a login. None of Foucault's three parts is present. The doorbell camera works the same way at a smaller scale and in larger numbers. So does the dome on the shop ceiling, which nobody watches live and which is consulted after the fact; in Britain it spread not because anyone was looking through it but because one frame of it, later, showed a small boy being led away. The cruiser-mounted reader does not wait for you to pass; it is driven past you.

This is a different machine. Its power lies in its certainty rather than in your uncertainty: 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, in effect, 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 hides what is actually wrong with it.

Two entries sit at the Order's edge, and they are kept there deliberately. The speed camera keeps only the offence and flashes when it fires. The facial recognition van is certain and searching, but it keeps only matches, and it puts up a sign, which is Bentham's instinct in a new body. The Order is not a verdict. It describes how the watching works, and the reader can decide which parts to mind.

The crowd and the mirror

Two smaller Orders remain. Mathiesen pointed out in 1997 that the twentieth century had also built the reverse of Bentham's machine: 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 a record that never disappears because it is nowhere in particular. It gets its own Order because the geometry is reversed, with one subject at the centre and 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, for life. Whether a record you make of yourself counts as surveillance is a fair question. The Order is included on the grounds that a guide should show the whole family, and because the question it raises — who the record is for: the wearer, the employer, the court, the audience — is the 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 because they are honest, public and current, and because their distribution says something. 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 true 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 works on us. 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, produced not by a tower but by an archive that had suddenly become visible. The two machines are related. 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 device does — that it reads, that it keeps, and that what it keeps can be searched.