The panoptic sort

The consensus is clear. Personal privacy will become the dominant issue of the 1990s. Yet a focus on privacy, as we have come to understand it so far, all but guarantees that we ignore the implications of the privacy debate at the more fundamental levels of individual autonomy, collective agency, and bureaucratic control. The Panoptic Sort helps us to understand just what is at stake when the bureaucracies of government and commerce gather, share, and make use of an almost unlimited amount of personal information to manage the social and economic systems within their spheres. Unlike…