Post-Utopian Panopticon
Who's watching us?
Nobody. But we don’t want that.
Happy Labor Day.
My writing has been pretty spotty over the summer. I guess I quiet-quit without knowing it. Thanks for all of the support over the last three months. There is a very real, tangible financial revenue stream that comes with writing this Substack. That is a responsibility I take to heart. You do as well, so I thank you.
The first 185 weekly post literally dropped out of my head, almost effortlessly. Not really, because there is always more to every story than meets the eye. Looking back though, the reason is pretty simple. I was pissed off and writing this was an avenue to blow off steam and getting a bunch of people to let me vent to them.
Some of you even paid to let me rage against the wind! It was pretty awesome. And it is more awesome now that it was before. I don’t know if I still have that rage, or if, as I’ve written about, I’ve learned to make peace with some of my demons. See example below.
In either case, I’m realizing that writing now for me is more structured and less intuitive. Which is is sucking for me. Musicians I’ve interviewed speak of it. I’ve read about performers or athletes hitting their walls.
Walls come in many forms. Physically and mentally. The walls I’m hitting physically are career-related, and that arena of my life is undergoing a massive change at present. I’ll have some news to share in my next post related to the current state of my career.
As far as mental walls, I think that is where we can all meet. Each of us has our own wall in our own mind. Or maybe it’s in your heart. Could be both I guess. But where those walls are constructed is not the thing. Only the builder of those walls can dismantle them. And we love to waste time looking for that wall-builder.
One gaze into the mirror reveals the builder and the dismantler, all in one. That reflection comes hard to some, me being the poster child for hard knocks. This post kicks off a series loosely revolving around this concept of Panopticon - the concept that constant surveillance or observation induces those being watched to self-regulate (hence improve morally) their behavior.
My goal here is to open some new doors that we can walk through together. I started writing this particular post about 4 or 5 months ago. As you will read, Twin Towers Correctional Facility became the prompt of sorts, not just to write something about its architecture, but to feel something about its design. As a subject of that design.
As a friend has pointed out, it is possible to get that close to the sun without burning up. I needed to purge the emotion trapped behind the walls, but first, I had to dismantle the walls. Hell, I had to find the damn wall first!
But I think you know where your walls are. And exactly who built them and why. For me, serving a prison sentence was a physical reality. It was only eight months. Just 240 days. No big deal hard-core dudes would tell me, “I pulled 8-months on the shitter.” Yeah, got that.
And at the risk of sounding like a pussy, it wasn’t that damn easy. I suppose the physical thing was manageable - Burpees by the hundreds and push-ups by the thousands. Inter-personal conflict was always a razors edge. But the real demon is the isolation.
What are the long-term effects of enforced isolation amongst hundreds of inmates while simultaneously under constant surveillance while occupying a 6’x9’ cell with another human being?
What are the ramifications of imposing this “design system” into other mass-group activities? Does this work for schools and factories? What about Work From Home? Is this design intrinsically evil? Or just its nefarious practitioners?
Look for more in this series. Click along if you’re interested in more Substack Panopticon related posts.
Please join the conversation. Let me and your fellow readers know about you Panopticon experience. Could this be good?
I thought by now I'd have it figured out How not to make the easy thing so hard to do I bet that I'd be further down this road If I could read the signs that point me to the truth I never planned on being nothin' but a cowboy Cody Johnson, written by Travis Meadows & Tony Lane
Sometimes, we can only say it in a song.
An orphan who turned into a preacher, A preacher who turned into a songwriter, A songwriter that turned into a drunk, A drunk that is learning to be a human Travis Meadows
The reports of my demise are greatly over-stated. I just coined that phrase. Rolls off the tongue, don’t it. But then again, what if it wasn’t over-stated?
What if the requirement for knowledge was experience? No knowledge for you unless you do the thing that makes you learn the thing. And what if the experience required was to experience the most challenging two-month stretch in a 45-year paycheck-collecting career?
To continue means to go back to Square One. To move forward, take three steps sideways and one step back. And then proceed a half-step. To the unknown destination. That’s why I laugh now when somebody asks “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Five years? You might as well ask “So, when are you planning your death?”
Who the hell knows what is going to happen 5-minutes from now, much less 5 years. I do know what’s happening to me right now, and what explains my scarcity around here. We just completed 125 events in 55 days. It felt like 55 years.
Being apart from writing and this community space that we share was perhaps the most difficult concept for me to grapple with during this stretch. I received payment for Substack during this time. Usually a source of pride and motivation, those alert beeps now suddenly twisted into a pang of guilt and shame.
During my time away from here, I completed an interview with Enslaved’s Ivar Bjornson and finally got it into editing. I actually just got an editing request. I’ll let you know when that piece drops over at mxdwn.com. Thank god for transcribing software, but none I’ve used can translate a Norwegian accent.
You can find my music writing here at mxdwn.com. Or scan below.
What you’re made to think, you will become.
The brain is a powerful force to reckon with. This piece I have been working on for months now. It started with my daily commute through DTLA. I became focused on one particular building. And how that building came to be. Not just physically, but what what was the design intention. And who conceived of it?
You know me and fabbit-holes. I go all in. This building had a different effect on me than Lancaster State Prison. To catch up all of my new readers and subscribers, in 2008 I spent 240 days incarcerated. I spent that time in five different institutions.
I had an occasion while inspecting properties for appraisal work in Lancaster to drive by that institution. Right next to the prison, I completed several inspections and wanted to run out of daylight. But I work too good. I had time leftover. Oh Crap!
I drove with intention towards the Main Gate, determined to make contact with the oppressors from my past. Finally, I can stand up to the demons that torment my dreams at night and trouble my thoughts at day. Then I crumpled.
A hundred yards from the gate, the enormity of the complexity overwhelmed every fiber of being in my body. I was convulsed with sobs and hyperventilated. So much so that the guards became suspicious. I drove off a beaten dog with my tail shaking between my legs. That was 15 years after I was released. And barely three years ago.
My incarceration began at The Twin Towers. That was the first place I arrived after the dramatic made-for-tv moment when I got handcuffed and led out of a packed courtroom, mouthing “I Love You” to the wife. Now the ex. Driving by it now on a daily basis seems to have increased my empathy for all locked inside that utopian hell-hole. Guilty and innocents alike.
Checking in to the new Hotel California is more akin to time-traveling back to 1785. And then lurching ahead to 1984. Finally, whipping backwards to the 1920s when the Presidio Modelo was built, the first in the Panopticon Design Theory in practice. Now and Then.
Twin Towers is a radical refinement of those aged structures. Its hygienically dubbed “inmate reception center” is a passage to a world carefully removed from our own. Inmates enter through a quarter-mile-long twisting corridor, where they are unchained, numbered, bathed, tested and categorized. Tiny isolation cells are set along the corridor to contain panicked prisoners until they passively accept their fate. Architecture reinforces the idea that here authority is everything.
Inside, there is an almost dumb primitive order. Both towers--each a squat seven stories--are shaped like two interlocking hexagons, with an elevated central observation booth at the core of each. Cells are arranged in two neat stories along the hexagon’s outer walls, creating six distinct modules, and each of those, in turn, is divided into six pods with 36 inmates--the jail’s principal unit. Cells are the legal minimum--72 square feet for two inmates.
The new Panopticon is broken down into identical segments, each pod and module repeated over and over again like an image endlessly reflected in two opposed mirrors: They are color-coded because even guards familiar with the jail could get lost. Thus, the inmate will be locked within a maze-like trap that denies the existence of an outside world even as it also denies individuality. As is true of any typical jail system, there is perhaps no greater punishment than the denial of a man’s existence.
The loss of individuality while simultaneously being a number in a crowd and concurrently a member of a defined tribe, with allegiances demanded from and compromises bargained for, is exactly the goal of this type of prison design.
One of my favorite creators here on Substack is Nishant Jain. Nishant dropped out of an engineering profession (sure the parents loved that!) to become a “street artist”, podcaster, developed a 10K subscriber base, author, and he is one of the deepest thinkers and smoothest talkers I know of. There is no wasted time spent with Sneaky Art. Please indulge yourself.
And exactly the goal of the new-now-normal Pandemic Panopticon. We see it in the increasingly desperate dictums and mandatory motives put forth by “experts'“ and “CEO’s” demanding cubicle-dwellers cease-and-desist working productively from home. Or wherever.
Workers must return to empty office building, we’re told. It’s for your own benefit, they plead. Think of all that you’re missing out on, they bribe.
What kind of Panopticon do they want here? My next post will dive into the RTO vs. WFH debate, and what i believe is really behind this massive push, by nearly all sectors and CEOs to scold-order us back to the office.
In a related parallel universe, Charter Cable CEO and Disney CEO are in a pissing war and guess who is being told it’s raining on their leg? Yup, the paying customer. Well guess what? The cord-cutters won. Fuck the Man!
Cable TV giant Charter has stuck a dagger into Bob Iger with Disney and ESPN on the ropes
I made this playlist at the same time I started the post. It’s aged well. Please give it a listen.
be well, and let yourself control your own thoughts and feelings,
ric
WFH isn't an option for me (hard to work flights from your kitchen), but I find the debate/discourse around it endlessly fascinating.
I assume the career news is good? Looking forward to hearing more soon.