On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane

by Emily Guendelsberger

I used to live near Philly’s Eastern State Penitentiary, a tourist destination that looks like a few square blocks of medieval castle plunked down into a residential neighborhood. From above, though, it looks a bit like a flower, or a windmill: It’s one of the first physical examples of a panopticon, a concept dreamed up by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. He imagined a circular prison built so every inch of every cell was visible from a central observation point—hence “pan-optic,” meaning “all-seeing.” A single jailer could watch over an entire prison from this central point, as in the diagram of Eastern State. Prisoners, however, would be able to see neither the jailer nor any other prisoners as they went about their daily labors.* If prisoners could never know whether they were being watched at any particular moment—only that someone could be watching—Bentham thought they would behave as if they were always being watched. A prisoner would watch and police himself, as if his own personal jailer had been installed inside his head.