A fabricated fiction of God sustains panoptic deterrence

Evidence

What has to be staged in the panopticon for the gaze of the prisoners is reality itself, i.e. God. Whereas the innocent are deterred from offending by real punishment, by the real suffering of the punished, the prisoners in the panopticon are deterred from transgressing by the fiction of God. It is therefore the fiction of God that sustains the universe of the panopticon. This deterrence of the prisoners in the panopticon from transgressing is unquestionably an example of the Benthamite end, which Bentham himself promotes through fallacy or illusion, through an appearance which is not itself an effect of reality – in a word, through fiction. — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 41

Categorization

• XREF: Central to the reader’s thesis: this staged fiction of an all-seeing God is precisely what Orwell realizes through telescreens — the ministry’s surveillance apparatus fabricates an omniscient invisible observer. — connects to: The panopticon’s power rests on a fiction at its core — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 31; Building the panopticon produces God as an emergent architectural byproduct — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 65; The panoptic inspector must hide for fear his fictional divinity will be exposed — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 81 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how far does this ‘fiction sustains surveillance’ reading extend to modern algorithmic surveillance, where no single human ever watches but the assumption of watching polices behavior?

Related

• The panopticon’s power rests on a fiction at its core (similarity 0.92)
• The panoptic inspector must hide for fear his fictional divinity will be exposed (similarity 0.86)
• Building the panopticon produces God as an emergent architectural byproduct (similarity 0.83)
• The panopticon’s gaze functions as God independent of the human inspector (similarity 0.81)
• Panoptic power derives from invisible omnipresence rather than real presence (similarity 0.80)
• The panopticon could experimentally prove universal educability (similarity 0.80)
• The panopticon governs through prevention rather than detection (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Building the panopticon produces God as an emergent architectural byproduct #corroborates (0.95) — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 65
• The panopticon produces God the way an assembly line produces a body #corroborates (0.95) — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 63
• The panoptic inspector must hide for fear his fictional divinity will be exposed #expands (0.90) — Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, 81
• Gods become fiction when their cultural support base drains. #qualifies (0.80)
• Readers simultaneously believe fiction and know it is fabricated #exemplifies (0.75) — Janet Burroway; Elizabeth Stuckey-French; Ned Stuckey-French, Writing Fiction, Tenth Edition, 583