Fight, Don't Fear the Panopticon

It may be that working on an essay about the political economy of counterterrorism has me in a pessimistic mood. Or it may be that I'm not pessimistic enough, but I've been seeing signs of the Panopticon all around. It started with an odd exchange with Network Solutions, the company responsible for Internet's global domain name service, a crucial part of Internet infrastructure. I have dozens of domains registered under my name, so I tend to pay attention to email from NetSol. While reading mail Wednesday morning, I found this:

Hi Kendall. I was surfing the net before work early this morning and noticed that in a post you were dissatisfied with the service that you had received from us in the past. If I can do anything to assist you I would be happy to do so, or if I could not assist, I would give it to someone that could. I would be happy to help.

And it was from a Technical Support Team Lead at NetSol. This message struck me strange because I know companies monitor the Internet for dissatisfied customers "trashing" corporate clients, otherwise known as citizens using the First Amendment. I didn't think NetSol was doing that though. (These monitoring companies are vultures, as I learned during the A16 protests in DC when they crawled all over a16.monkeyfist.com). So, I surmised, maybe NetSol has hired one of them? But I didn't remember complaining about NetSol on any Web sites (though God knows I've complained about their terrible service, billing system, their arrogance and mendacity to friends and colleagues often enough).

Acting from an abundance of caution and just a little curiosity, I responded:

You'd have to direct me to what you saw me say online before I respond to this. URL?

The NetSol person responds immediately:

[url deleted] Didn't give any info as to what exactly, just said "Network Solutions sucks" on the bottom of the post, in what looked like a sig file...?

Ah! I remember: I had used the email signature "Network Solutions Sucks!" a bit last summer in response to them privatizing the WHOIS database and some other obnoxious practices. Ok, so what? Why does this guy care? And is his job to troll the Web looking for this kind of stuff? Yuck!

Even though I knew it was a bit unfair to actually tell this person the truth, given that he is just another wage slave, I decided to answer his question honestly:

Netsol is just a nasty monopoly that managed to socialize all risk and all costs, and privatize *all* profit. That's bullshit. I was expressing my political views about the government handover of Internet infrastructure to a private, unaccountable tyranny. Is that a problem?

The eventual response?

Well, it does appear that you have a lot of political views. I went to the site in your sig file. Good to see that you are politically active. So many people are apathetic about things that are more important than they realize.

Isn't that swell? The nice corporation is happy that I am politically active!

What this (inconsequential) exchange put me in mind of is Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and how it so well prefigures the current period of very late Western capitalism, where surveillance, both public and private, threatens the very existence of public space and privacy on all sides. Workplace surveillance may be so well entrenched already that worker privacy is simply lost without serious reform. Public surveillance, the corporatization of public space, and public property, threatens to turn what we all hold in common into what we all once held in common.