Miner’s panopticon

70 days ago, 33 miners in Chile started their imprisonment inside a mine 700 m deep.  It was the 5^th of August, and an accident imprisoned them in San Jose mine, 800km from Santiago, Chile. For more than one week nobody knew if they were alive. Then, using very high technology equipment, they found out they were there alive. Since the miners were found, they are experiencing something that brings me the idea of a Panopiticon.  The concept, design by Jeremy Bentham in 1785, is an architectural figure that comes in direction to surveillance without feeling watched, because the big tower is transformed in 15cm role from where a camera goes to the miners, 700 meters down the Earth. As said in the article Panopticism by Michel Foucault, the panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.

In this kind of building, the crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities. From the guardian´s point of view, it is replaced by a multiciplicity that can be numbered and supervised; from the point of view of the inmates, by sequestered and observed solitude (Bentham). In the case of these 33 miners the solitude comes with the tragedy, in situations like that the discipline is essential, but it happens because of the individuality of each other. They have the discipline to live in that situation; they have to organize themselves to go through an extreme routine. And they have been watched 24 hours a day, not for just one person, but for the entire world.  It is amazing because everyone looked at them, but they did not realize that, the focus was just in their one life on day-by-day.  All because cameras were send to them.  The Panopticon is a marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behavior. All that was the good luck for the miners.

Eventually, after so many days they were out. As soon there are coming out, after being in almost complete dark for more than two months, it is not the lights that they will have to take care. They will realize the attention that they have been exposed and what it will influence their life from now. Before they were miners that used to spend a lot of time inside the earth, and with not much contact with anyone. Miner is one of the oldest professions, nothing to do with communication. And now they are celebrities, because of all these digital culture technologies. In two months, the unexpected would happen. There are none in all channels of communication that are not talking about them, their names  are on Google, the television everywhere are talking about them, in places for sure they would have never thought existed. That´s the miner reality show.  

Reference

Foucalt, Michel (1977). “Panopticism”. In Kaplan, D.M. (ed) Readings in the philosophy of technology. (2004) Lanham.