#스마트시티 는 빅데이터로 감시하는 #판옵티콘 #네이버열린연단

Overview

The video is a lecture-style commentary on Michel Foucault’s theory of power. It explains how power operates through surveillance, punishment, and governance, and then connects these ideas to contemporary smart-city systems.

Main arguments and analysis

Foucault’s “new concept of power”

• Power is not merely something that opposes freedom; it is the condition that enables power to operate.
• Domination that prevents resistance is treated as something opposite to power.
• The lecture frames the key issue as how power operates on the “subject” in modern society.

From torture to imprisonment: “economization” of power

• Historically, torture coerced confession and restored authority, but the lecture emphasizes that excessively cruel torture has high social costs.
• Over time, reforms shifted toward imprisonment.
• Following Foucault, imprisonment is presented as a more effective form of power that:
  • reduces social costs
  • increases efficiency
• This is described as the “economization” of punishment.

Disciplinary society and omnipresent surveillance

• The argument extends beyond prisons: modern society becomes a disciplinary society where surveillance, evaluation, rewards, and sanctions spread throughout social life.
• Power is described as anonymous, functional, productive, operating through relationships rather than a single centralized oppressor.

Body, space, and the production of subjectivity

• A central methodological emphasis is that power acts on the body through spatial arrangements (e.g., institutions and layouts).
• This produces “souls” or subjectivity.
• Educational and disciplinary power are treated as shaping subjectivity through bodily operation.

Critiques of Foucault-like power theory

• Lack of normativity: If everything is power, it’s hard to determine what counts as right/wrong and how to ground resistance.
• Scale problem: Focusing on localized power relations can make it difficult to analyze power at the state/national level.
• Marxist criticism: Foucault’s focus on deviance/crime is considered too peripheral to explain state-level power (as presented in the lecture).

Biopower → governance/governmentality

• The lecture adds a shift from disciplinary power toward management power:
  • Biopower links state administration to biological and social life management.
  • Power becomes more multidimensional through state-level bio-management; sexuality is discussed as something modernity “scientified.”
• It then moves to governmentality:
  • Governance is framed as a practice that works through self-constitution, not just rule or coercion.
  • It targets populations to promote life/health/security, using knowledge such as political economy.
  • A historical explanation is offered: Western liberal techniques connect to pastoral traditions (“care for souls”) that enter politics.

Freedom as minimal, and resistance as small gaps

• While power relations transform subjects, the lecture insists that freedom is always minimally present (there is always some possible refusal or change).
• However, this freedom is portrayed as limited rather than fully emancipatory.
• The key difference between domination-by-normalization and the exercise of freedom is framed as creating distance from governmentality strategies—especially through the “gap” between guidance and self-conduct.

Smart City as a modern surveillance form

• The lecture applies Foucault’s framework to contemporary urban governance:
  • Surveillance shifts from the historical “Panopticon” to the Smart City.
  • The Smart City is characterized technically as:
    • Big Data
    • Everywhere (pervasive sensing/connection)
    • Biometrics
• Although framed positively as efficiency and safety, it can also be described negatively as an electronic surveillance society—qualitatively different from the older panoptic model.
• Korea’s population policy is used as an example of changing governmentality:
  • From encouraging larger families to later shifts in preferences and slogans emphasizing different family structures—showing governance through health/happiness calculations.
• When disasters/epidemics occur, state response is described as shifting toward safety mechanisms rather than purely legal prohibition—embedded in recalculations of “ideal” normalcy.

Conclusion: ethics as relationships, not grand liberation

• The speaker rejects interpretations that portray Foucault as nihilistically denying freedom or conservatively suggesting resistance is impossible.
• Instead, the focus becomes ethics as how one establishes relationships with oneself and others.
• Resistance is reframed as not total detachment, but recognizing moments when conformity becomes unbearable and then creating a gap—a practice of distance and reconsideration.

Video contributors / presenters

• Professor Do Seung-yeon (Injaenium College, Kwangwoon University)