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How virtual power is imprisoning us in a surveillance society

Monitored: Business and Surveillance in a Time of Big Data
by Peter Bloom
(Pluto Press, £16.99)

THE panopticon, philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s unrealised design for a total institution, enabled a single unseen warder to observe its every inmate.

[[{"fid":"10311","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]In Monitored, Peter Bloom explains that advances in surveillance technology are making all of us prisoners in the electronic equivalent of Bentham’s blueprint.

Bloom shows how the interaction of individuals and corporations has created a command-and-control society in which people are defined by the information they produce.

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