China polices Uyghurs through AI-powered panoptic surveillance

Evidence

14. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Penguin, 1975), 205. A panopticon is a form of prison designed to maintain continual surveillance of the captives. Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon (1791). See also Ross Anderson, “The Panopticon Is Already Here,” The Atlantic, September 2020, examining President Xi Jinping’s use of artificial intelligence to police and subdue Xinjiang’s Uyghur. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1499

Categorization

• XREF: Panoptic surveillance territory connects to the reader’s earlier Frankfurt School material on rationalized domination, and to 2001/We-style totalitarian imaginaries only in the loosest thematic way.
• DEEPTHINKING: The leap from Bentham’s prison architecture to Xi’s AI-driven social control of an entire ethnic population is a dense instance of Foucault’s disciplinary society thesis being technologically accelerated.