Bentham’s Panopticon in the Age of Ring Cameras: A Posthumanist Reading of Surveillance in Dickens

This article reads Charles Dickens’s fiction – particularly Oliver Twist, Bleak House, and Hard Times – alongside Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and twenty-first-century Ring cameras and AI-driven surveillance networks. Drawing on posthumanist theory and surveillance studies, I argue that the Panopticon’s logic has mutated: what was once a centralised, architectural apparatus of state discipline has become a distributed, privatised, and algorithmically mediated network in which surveillance is exercised not upon subjects but through them. Dickens’s novels anticipate this mutation by depicting surveillance as exceeding institutional walls and seeping into everyday life. However, Dickens’s fiction resists any simple celebration of resistance: internalised surveillance produces not only critical awareness but also cynical acquiescence. Reading Dickens through surveillance technologies – and Ring cameras through Dickens – reveals both the persistence of panoptic logic and its transformation into something Bentham could not have imagined: a system in which the watched become watchers, and the human subject is indistinguishable from the data it generates.