The All-Seeing Eye

And there is a very interesting point here: some of the Muslims said that the television is like a Dajjāl — it is a one-eyed type of beast.

There is an interesting section in the second volume of Lewis Mumford's work on the mega machine which is about the one eye of Ra, the all-seeing eye of Ra. He talks about how one of the things about the mega machine traditionally was that these previous kings and rulers did not have an all-seeing power. And he said that what is happening, though — and he wrote this in 1961^** — is that in the near future we have theoretically at our hands a machine that will be able to monitor all of our life, which is the computer. And this is what Foucault called the panoptic society, the all-seeing society.

It was designed after the idea of a prison system that Jeremy Bentham designed — utilitarianism — where you had a centrepiece: you had this centre, and you only needed one guard, and around the guard were all the prison cells. So in the middle was a tower from which this one guard could watch everything at one time. And so there is the idea of the all-seeing state apparatus, in which we are all monitored.

A really interesting book about this subject is called The Naked Consumer — one can see the cover, because it has that pyramid with the eye on it. It is a very interesting book about how we are watched. A lot of people do not know this, but when you buy things with your credit cards, they go under bio-data. And so they can work out — one starts getting all this material about different types of books, things from spiritual book companies and so on, because they have worked out what you buy, and then they sell it. They do bio-data on you, find out what type of books you like to read, and then they sell that list to people.

There is the account of a family who, a week after their first child was born, began getting all these things in the post, and the mother took it for a sign — which is a classic problem with religion. But no: there is somebody who monitors all the births in the county for the corporations, and they sell your address to people. It was not a sign. Or rather it was a sign that we are in big trouble — that everything is being watched by these. So there is this idea of a panoptic culture; and the interesting thing now is this idea of computers with an actual camera on them. A very interesting phenomenon. Because who else can watch, while you are having your conversations and things like that?