A Foucault podcast, a seminar on truck surveillance, a scene from Suits, and a quote from Dan Koe all walked into the same week. And somehow they all said the same thing.
Three years ago I started learning digital marketing.
That became web development. Web development became web design. Web design became data analytics and business intelligence. Every time I switched, I told myself I was pivoting, chasing something more relevant, more useful, more in demand. But I think if I’m honest with myself, every single move was driven by the same quiet refusal. I didn’t want to sit inside a machine and become one of the parts. I didn’t know how to say that then. I do now.
This week was the week it all crystallised.
The panopticon.
I was on my way to campus, earphones in, half awake, listening to Philosophize This. The episode was on Michel Foucault, specifically his book Discipline and Punish. Foucault talks about a prison design called the panopticon. A single tower at the centre of the building. Every cell is arranged in a ring around it. The guard at the top can look into any cell at any time. The prisoner looking out sees only the tower, never whether anyone is actually inside it, never whether they’re being watched right now or not.
That’s the whole design. Not the physical walls. Not the bars. The not knowing.
Because you can never be sure whether you’re being observed, you start watching yourself. You internalise the guard. You police your own behaviour not because someone told you to but because the possibility of being seen is enough to make you act as if you are. Foucault’s argument, and this is the part that stayed with me long after the episode ended, is that the most efficient system of control isn’t one that enforces rules from above. It’s one that makes people enforce the rules on themselves. No guard needed. Just the architecture.
I walked into the seminar still thinking about that. And then the seminar handed me a real-world example I wasn’t expecting.
Then the seminar confirmed everything.
The speaker was talking about logistics. How their company monitors truck drivers. Cameras mounted in the cab. Constant GPS tracking. The system logs every stop, how long the truck was stationary, where it stopped, what the driver was doing. Point A to point B has a 36-hour window. Arrive late and there’s a formal process. Questions asked. Answers required. A paper trail started.
She was presenting this as operational efficiency. And I get it, that’s a legitimate business concern. You’re moving goods across the country, timelines matter, accountability matters.
But I was sitting there with Foucault still ringing in my ears and I couldn’t hear it that way.
What I heard was: the driver never stops being watched. Even when nobody is actively looking at the screen, they know someone could be. The camera is always on. The GPS is always live. The 36-hour clock is always running. And so the driver drives the way the system expects, not because they’re incompetent, not because they need micromanaging, but because the architecture has already decided what right looks like. All they have to do is not deviate from it.
And I thought, that’s a panopticon. Just with a salary attached.
There’s no room in that system for a judgment call. No room to take a different route because you know something about the road conditions. No room to stop because something feels off and you need five minutes to think. The system has decided all of that in advance. Your job is to execute within the margins it’s already drawn.
Suits made the same point before Foucault did.
I’ve been watching Suits, I know, late to it, and there’s a scene in the first season that I keep coming back to. Mike Ross is a first-year associate. It’s 5pm. He packs up his things and heads for the door. Donna catches him. Not angry, not threatening — just that look. Half amused, half you genuinely don’t know what you’ve walked into. She tells him: technically yes, the job is a 9-to-5. But nobody here leaves at 5. The people who matter, the people who stay, the people who make it — they’re here until 10, 11, sometimes midnight. You want to survive? You stay.
Nobody is holding Mike at gunpoint. There’s no policy that says he must work until midnight. There is no guard.
But there doesn’t need to be. The culture is the guard. The other associates grinding away at their desks — they’re the guard. The senior partners who notice when you’re not there, they’re the guard. The unspoken understanding that leaving at 5 means you’re not serious, that’s the tower in the middle of the room. Mike looks around, understands immediately what the architecture expects, and falls in line.
Foucault described that exact mechanism. He just described it in a French prison in the 18th century. Turns out the structure translates pretty well to a Manhattan law firm in 2011.
And then Dan Koe said the quiet part loud.
I came across something from Dan Koe this week — from The Art of Focus — and it hit harder than I expected. He makes the point that slaves in Roman times were trained for one specific task. One thing. For life. In service of their master’s goals. Their value was in their function, and their function was their entire existence.
Then he asks the question he wants you to sit with: how different is that from what we call a career today?
You go through years of education designed to make you competent at a specific function. You enter the workforce. You perform that function, repeatedly, within a structure that someone else designed, in pursuit of goals that someone else set. You are compensated for it, that part is different, genuinely, but the shape of the thing is remarkably similar.
I’m not saying employment is slavery. That’s not the point. The point is the question it forces: what are you optimising for? If you spend the majority of your waking life inside someone else’s system, executing someone else’s vision, regulated by surveillance you’ve internalised so deeply you don’t even feel it anymore, what exactly are you living?
I couldn’t shake it. I still can’t.
What I actually want.
I want to say clearly, this isn’t a rant at people who work corporate jobs. Some people genuinely find meaning in structure, in teams, in the progression of a well-defined career. That is real and I’m not dismissing it.
But I know what I want. And weeks like this one make me more certain of it, not less.
I don’t want to be defined by what I do for money. There is a real difference between what you do for a living and what you do for money, and the reason people confuse them, the reason “what do you do?” has become the first thing you ask someone you’ve just met, is because most people spend so much of their lives at work that the two things have collapsed into one. The job fills the hours. The hours fill the identity. Before long, what you do for money is what you are.
I want to close my laptop after four or five hours of focused, meaningful work and actually go live. I want the work to be good, I care about doing it well, but I don’t want it to be the whole thing. I don’t want to get to the end of something and have only a job title to show for the years I spent.
There needs to be more of a transcendent value to life than the function you perform to pay your bills.
The panopticon, the truck driver, Mike Ross at 5 pm, Roman slaves, Dan Koe asking the question nobody wants to answer — they all said the same thing this week. Different languages, same sentence.
I heard it. Loudly.
Until next time — ponder this:
If the surveillance disappeared tomorrow, would you still do your work the same way? Or have you already become the guard?