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ANDREW KEEN
these critics is the individual who tries to protect his invisibility, who takes pleasure in his own opacity, who turns his back on the camera, who—in the timeless words of Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis—just wants to be let alone by the technologies of the mass industrial age. Our Age of Great Exhibitionism Yet now, at the dusk of the industrial and the dawn of the digital epoch, Bentham’s simple idea of architecture has returned. But history never repeats itself, not identically, at least. Today, as the Web evolves from a platform for impersonal data into an Internet of people, Bentham’s industrial InspectionHouse has reappeared with a chilling digital twist. What we once saw as a prison is now considered as a playground; what was considered pain is today viewed as pleasure. The analog age of the great exhibition is now being replaced by the digital age of great exhibitionism. Today’s simple architecture is the Internet—that ever-expanding network of networks combining the worldwide Web of personal computers, the wireless world of handheld networked devices like my BlackBerry Bold and other “smart” social products such as connected televisions,13 gaming consoles14 and the “connected car”15—in which around a quarter of the globe’s population have already taken up residency. In contrast with the original brick and mortar Inspection-House, this rapidly expanding global network, with its two billion digitally interconnected souls and its more than five billion connected devices, can house an infinite number of rooms. Th is is a global AutoIcon that, more than two centuries after Jeremy Bentham sketched out his Inspection-House,16 is finally realizing his utilitarian dream of allowing us to be perpetually observed. This digital architecture—described by New York University social me-1—
dia scholar Clay Shirky as the “connective tissue of society”17 and by U.S.
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