ISBN10: 1552453014, ISBN13: 9781552453018, [publisher: Coach House Books, Toronto] Softcover Paperback. In 1787, British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham conceived of the panopticon, a ring of cells observed by a central watchtower, as a labor-saving device for those in authority. While Bentham's design was ostensibly for a prison, he believed that any number of places that require supervisionfactories, poorhouses, hospitals, and schoolswould benefit from such a design. The French philosopher Michel Foucault took Bentham at his word. In his groundbreaking 1975 study, Discipline and 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, supervision, and discipline are far more capable and insidious than Foucault dreamed, and yet less effective than Bentham hoped. Shopping malls, container ports, terrorist holding cells, and social networks all bristle with cameras, sensors, and trackers. But, crucially, they are also rife with resistance and prime opportunities for revolution. The Inspection House is a tour through several of these sitesfrom Guantanamo Bay to the Occupy Oakland camp and the authors' own mobile devicesproviding a stark, vivid portrait of our contemporary surveillance state and its opponents.Tim Maly is a regular contributor to Wired, the Atlantic, and Urban Omnivore and is a 2014 ...