Watched but Not Seen
Among the Zulu people of South Africa the traditional greeting is “Sawubona” literally “I see you”. Contrast that to the English, “How are you?” -- literally a demand for an evaluation. Evaluations, peer reviews, and performance reviews can be friendly or not. Jeremy Bentham deserves partial credit for their dark side. Jeremy Bentham thought prisons should be designed around a central panopticon , a tower that would allow the guards to watch every prisoner around the clock to deter mischief. Modern philosophers like Michel Foucault see panopticons as pervasive in modern society–we are all under the surveillance of others and we all stay on guard to conform. Performance is quantified on scales that are tied to carrots and sticks. The numbers have a hard time saying full sentences about who we are and how we matter. Throughout the year the sense that one is constantly being watched by a corporate evaluator leads to the stress of chronic...