Onopticon: Sovereignty as Environmental Structuring

Introduction: No Longer Surveillance, but Pre-Processed Life We still speak of surveillance, the disciplinary society, algorithmic governance, and data extraction. Each of these once explained a historical period. They no longer suffice. Because the problem is no longer that the human being is watched, that behavior is predicted, or that preference is nudged. The problem is that access to the vital thresholds of life is pre-processed in advance. The problem is that the conditions of subjectivity are technically prepared before action. The problem is that the world is closed off to the individual before it is ever opened. The regime through which we are living is not, in the classical sense, a regime of surveillance. It is a regime of sovereignty in which the subject’s relation to the world is pre-structured by technical infrastructures. The name of this regime is Onopticon. Onopticon does not treat the individual merely as a watched being or as a producer of data. It constitutes the individual as a being whose recognizability, mobility, access, priority order, risk profile, and vital legitimacy have already been processed in advance. Power here is no longer simply the force that legislates, prohibits, or disciplines. Power now organizes not merely the field of visibility, but the field of possibility. Whatever the person does, the path available to them has already been narrowed. For this reason, the transformation underway is not a simple continuation of previous forms of power. Discipline, security, biopolitics, control society, surveillance capitalism, algorithmic governance: all of these described the roads leading to this threshold. But we have now reached the end of those roads. Today, the individual has ceased to be a subject who can still be described in moral and political terms, and has instead been reduced to a processable form of life bound to vital, biological, and technical thresholds. The name of this new form of being is Homovictimus.