Total visibility of subjects requires assigning each a serial number
Evidence
No one has found a better metaphor for this frame of mind than the great Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who entitled the final volume of his tetralogy on the colonial period Rumah Kaca – the Glass House. It is an image, as powerful as Bentham’s Panopticon, of total surveyability. For the colonial state did not merely aspire to create, under its control, a human landscape of perfect visibility; the condition of this ‘visibility’ was that everyone, everything, had (as it were) a serial number. This style of imagining did not come out of thin air. It was the product of the technologies of navigation, astronomy, horology, surveying, photography and print, to say nothing of the deep driving power of capitalism. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 680
Categorization
- XREF: The Glass House/Panopticon of surveyability directly parallels the surveillance state in We (Zamyatin) and the number-assignment logic of ID cards.