The Algorithmic Panopticon

Foucault's panopticon, a prison designed to induce self-surveillance through perpetual visibility, pales beside AI's capacity for control. Facial recognition systems in Xinjiang track Uyghur minorities by gait and DNA. Predictive policing algorithms in Chicago label Black youth "pre-criminals" based on zip codes. Social credit scores in China dictate access to education and travel. These are not dystopian fantasies but current realities, enabled by machines that learn to discriminate faster and more ruthlessly than any human bureaucracy.

Orwell's Big Brother relied on fear and propaganda; AI automates oppression, rendering it impersonal and inescapable. Rousseau's famous lament—"Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains"—takes a digital twist: today's shackles are lines of code, invisible and inscrutable. The Global South bears the brunt of this new colonialism, serving as testing grounds for invasive technologies later marketed to the West as "innovations."

Breaking these chains requires both technical and moral ingenuity. Decentralized AI models, developed through open-source collaborations, could return power to communities. International treaties banning autonomous weapons and surveillance tech, akin to the Geneva Conventions, might curb state excess. But liberation also depends on storytelling—on amplifying voices like those of the Kazakh activists using VPNs to bypass censorship or the Kenyan workers unionizing against AI-driven exploitation. Resistance, as Audre Lorde taught, begins with naming the problem.