As we flounder in the chaos of this nascent age of digital documentaries, the occasion has come to reevaluate two truism of bygone times. First, Surveillance stimulates rehabilitation. Second, The omniscient eye of Sauron, Big Brother, squelches freedom. The tragedy/atrocity in Ferguson, and the government reaction, reveals the overlooked obverse of Bentham and Orwell. Stepping back, it is interesting to observe that the proposal for the panopticon was born from optimism and trust in human nature. Public accountability and sufficient time to contemplate the Good News mends a broken, twisted soul. Conversely, Orwell sketched a dystopian Britain born of distrust of hominid's natural tendency to seek mischief and cause harm. Left on his own, the life of an East End boy is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. We continue to ignore the East End hominid's penchant for cave painting, ritual burial, and crafting jewelry (for now let's ignore the pregnant revelation that homo neanderthalensis made and wore make-up).
Turn the panopticon inside out. The persistent surveillance of the jailer promotes justice, nay, liberty. No space evades the eye of the captive criminal so no abuse of authority goes unobserved. Equilibrium. Without hominids digitally recording the actions of the police in Ferguson, the death of Micheal Brown would be a mere twinkle of a star, ominous and quickly forgotten in a field of black.
In response, police departments across the country have invested in digitizing every moment of the work of police ("Nobody wants to be that cop from Ferguson"). Orwell forgotten, the justification cited is that complaints of abuse by police dramatically drop when they are accountable for each word and action.
