Inspiration today came from an interesting article by Lynn Stuart Parramore on the Lapham’s Quarterly, a suggestion posted on twitter by David Murakami Wood…
In her text, Parramore discusses how new labour biometric tracking resembles old forms of workplace surveillance from the dawn of capitalism. He cites Jeremy Bentham (and his influential brother, Samuel Bentham) to show how the panopticon had an impact on the creation and development of Taylorism as an instrument for productivism through a better shaped and “optimised” labour force (physically and mentally). New surveillance and control bionic technologies are meant to make workers, as Parramore titles her article, “happy all the time”, and obviously more productive!