The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information

The Panoptic Sort was published in 1993. Its focus was on privacy and surveillance. But unlike the majority of publications addressing these topics in the United States at the time that were focused on the privacy concerns of individuals, especially those related to threats associated with government surveillance, that book sought to direct public toward the activities of commercial firms. It was highly critical of the failure of scholars and political activists to pay sufficient attention to the threats to individual autonomy, collective agency, and the exercise of social responsibility. The Panoptic Sort was intended to help us all to understand just what was at stake when the bureaucracies of government and commerce gathered, processed, and made use of an almost unlimited amount of personal, and transaction-generated information to manage social, economic, and political activities within society. It argued that unlike Foucault's panoptic prison, which involved continual, all-encompassing surveillance, the panoptic systems being developed at that time were turning their attention toward the development of techniques for the identification and classification of disciplinary subjects into distinct groups in ways that would increase the efficiency with which the techniques of "correct training" could be applied to those group members. While the first edition provided numerous examples from marketing, employment, insurance, credit management, and the provision of government and social services, the second edition extends descriptions of the technologies that have been developed and incorporated into the panoptic sort in the nearly 30 years since its initial publication. In addition, it places these technological advances and systemic expansions into the context of quite significant transformations in the nature of capitalism. In addition to the massive expansion in the amount of data and information being gathered, processed, and distributed for use by corporations, government agencies, and newly developing public-private partnerships, advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning have placed the development of autonomous devices into positions of power that had barely been imagined in the past. Assessments of the implications for democracy that many associate with the possibility of an algorithmic Leviathan, invite a reconsideration of Jacques Ellul's distressing predictions about the future that ended the first edition of The Panoptic Sort.

Table of Contents:
List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgments Chapter 1: Prologue Chapter 2: Information and Power Chapter 3: Operating the Panoptic Sort Chapter 4: Corporate Perspectives on the Panoptic Sort Chapter 5: Relationships and Expectations Chapter 6: The Social Origins of Views on Privacy Chapter 7: A Data Protection Regime Chapter 8:Conclusion Notes About the Book and Author Index

About the Author :
Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. began as a lecturer in communications at the Third College at UC San Diego, served as assistant and associate professor of communication at Howard University. He served as associate and full professor at the Annenberg School of the University of Pennsylvania, achieving emeritus status in 2006. His teaching throughout his career has been primarily in the area of the political economy of communication and information, with an emphasis on communication and race and surveillance and privacy.

Review :
Surveillance capitalism may have been birthed by Google but its gestation began towards the end of the twentieth century. This welcome reissue and update of Oscar Gandy's signal classic, The Panoptic Sort, comes with a luminous afterword, connecting digital discrimination in the 'dot-coms' with the exploitative activities of today's platforms. Their inequitable global challenge is unflinchingly explained along with hints of hope for a fairer future." - David Lyon, Director, The Surveillance Studies Centre, Queen's University Thirty years ago, one might have thought, The Panoptic Sort, a brilliant concept, mainly of academic interest. Time has revealed its deadly precision - time lost to ravaging surveillance, incipient schemes for sorting people out, and the rise of a class of powerful controllers. In the Second Edition, Oscar Gandy offers a reprise, including a generous review of thirty years of work, which A masterful book of undisputed importance, The Panoptic Sort examines the forebearers of today's surveillance regimes. At a time when society is being asked to reckon with discriminatory technologies of power, Gandy's seminal work equips us with the tools to understand-and challenge-sociotechnical systems of control." -Seeta Peña Gangadharan, Associate Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science