EMILY HORNE

In Michel Foucault's groundbreaking 1975 study, Discipline & Punish, the panopticon became a metaphor to describe the creeping effects of personalized surveillance as a means for ever-finer mechanisms of control. Forty years later, the available tools of scrutiny are far more capable and insidious than Foucault dreamed. Public squares, container ports, terrorist holding cells and social networks all bristle with cameras, sensors and trackers. The Inspection House is a tour through several of those sites – from Guantanamo Bay to Occupy Oakland to the authors' own iPhones – providing a stark, vivid portrait of our contemporary surveillance state. 

 

The Inspection House was published in October 2014 by Coach House Books. You can buy it directly from them, or from Amazon!