So, so pleased to welcome Emily Horn, who's one of the co-authors of the book. Emily is a designer and photographer for the webcomic, a software world, am I getting that right? A software world. Tim Malley is based here in Cambridge. He is a fellow at the MetaLab, which is a unit here that's also part of Brookman that studies network culture in the arts and humanities. And we're grateful to welcome you both. So welcome. Thanks. To whom it ought to concern. This is a field guide to the rich terrain of the Panopticon. Can you correctly identify a Panopticon? Knowing more about surveillance enhances our experience and helps us to share encounters with friends and family. Getting started. Who's watching you? Make a list of all the people or institutions that are tracking you. Are you being observed directly? Are there CCTV cameras in your neighborhood? Are your whereabouts and purchases being logged by your phone provider? Do you use a computer to access the internet? Are you carrying any credit cards or smart cards? Did you have to fill out a time sheet or report to a supervisor today? Did you hand in any assignments? Have you interacted recently with the police or emergency services personnel? Does your country conduct domestic surveillance operations? Do any other countries on your planet conduct foreign surveillance operations? Do you have friends or family who wonder where you are? Has your region been mapped? Do you ever pay bills or taxes? Do you use local utilities? Do you have any subscriptions? Do you have a to-do list? Do you track your fitness or diet goals? Can you watch back? Once you have completed the above activity, go back over the list and mark which of these agents you can observe in return. Can they see more about you or can you see more about them? Is there anyone you can talk to about your experience of being watched? The Inspection House has three central players, none of which are human. The first is a collection of letters written by British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, describing his initial design of the Panopticon. The second is Discipline and Punish, a book written by Michel Foucault that reinterprets Bentham's Panopticon as an emblem for a particular way of organizing society. And the third is our strained present condition. We will use each of these characters to try to understand the other two. Following in the footsteps of our first two players, this book is architectural, though it contains very little architecture. Both Bentham and Foucault treat buildings as machines for disciplining, tools for altering behavior. Their descriptions tend to be idealized or vague. We have chosen specific sites to illustrate the messy interface between power and history. Yesterday's ideologies are frozen into today's architecture, and today's ideologies must contend with or replace that inherited built environment. Letter number one, idea of the Inspection Principle from Kretchev in White Russia, 1787. Dear Redacted, I observed, tether day, in one of your English papers, an advertisement relative to a house of correction therein spoken of as intended for Redacted. It occurred to me that the plan of a building, lately contrived by my brother, for purposes in some respects similar and which under the name of the Inspection House or the Elaboratory he is about erecting here, might afford some hints for the above establishment. I have accordingly obtained some drawings relative it, which I here in close. Indeed, I look upon it as capable of applications of the most extensive nature, and that for reasons which you will soon perceive. To say all in one word, it will be found applicable, I think, without exception to all establishments whatsoever, in which within a space not too large to be covered or commanded by buildings, a number of persons are meant to be kept under inspection. No matter how different or even opposite the purposes, whether it be that of punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curing the sick, instructing the willing in any branch of industry, or training the rising race and the path of education in a word, whether it be applied to the purposes of perpetual prisons in the room of death or prisons for confinement before trial or penitentiary houses or houses of correction or work houses or manufactories or mad houses or hospitals or schools. So it's not normal to read from someone else's book, your book reading, but that's Jeremy Bentham. And this is his design. So just to get really basic about what we're talking about for a moment, Jeremy Bentham's design for the Panopticon is this circular building, and you can see the A's mark the cells and the, I don't know, the N or the M is the central observation tower. So the idea here is that, let's call it a prison. Your prisoners are in the cells. The guards are in the tower. You need to use very few guards to observe very many prisoners, because the prisoners can't watch the guards as the guards watch them. So you never know if you're in one of these cells, whether you're being observed or not. And then the second benefit is that you can't talk to your neighbors, right? So you can't coordinate with one another.   He doesn't use that phrasing. And so in 1975, this guy picks it up, it's Michel Foucault, and makes the word famous. If you do a Google Ngram search for Panopticon, there's this like spike in the 1780s, and then it goes away for a while. And then starting in 1975, it starts to climb again, and it climbs and climbs and climbs and climbs to the point where we decide to write a book about it, because it's a word that's getting used a lot now, even in the popular press around the degree of surveillance which we live under. Now, so we wrote this thing. It's got seven chapters. Each one is based around a site. I got to do this because the last time we did this, we spiked one specific chapter, and then they were like, so what does this have to do with surveillance? So I, but we don't have time to do the whole book. And also I was told that if you just tell people your entire argument, then they don't buy the book. So they're like, oh, I was at the talk. So this, so what you're missing is we talk about Millbank Prison, which is where Bentham tried and failed to build a Panopticon. We talk about the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution, where they, amongst other things, make genes. We talk about Camp Delta in Guantanamo Bay. We talk about the Port Newark Container Terminal in New York. And New Jersey, we talk about London's Ring of Steel. We talk about Oakland and Occupy Oakland and the Domain Awareness Center. And then we talk about our own iPhones. But for this community, for the Berkman people, we wanted to spend some time on the personality of Jeremy Bentham. Which is nicely illustrated by his mounted corpse. This is Jeremy Bentham's auto icon. Until relatively recently, his mummified head used to sit at his feet, but they had to take that away because of student pranks at the college where he lives. But his real skeleton is underneath those clothes, and that's a reasonable facsimile of his head. And so, like, the Panopticon is objectively a terrible place to be, right? Like, solitary confinement is not an OK condition for humans. It's awful.  And just generally, like, it's not a comfortable thing to be under constant surveillance or to feel like you're under constant surveillance. It really hurts. And it's a prison. And that's not a great place to be, either. And Foucault's argument and Bentham's claim is that that is a good design for everything, right? Like, we should make our schools more like a Panopticon. And it's a sort of weird, utopic, one-size-fits-all belief that he had. Are you grabbing the reading? Yeah, I got it. So in the classic 18th century style, the title page to the Panopticon letters, which was published in 1791, has this wonderful list of all of the great advantages of the Panopticon. So I'm going to read those. Morals reformed, health preserved, industry invigorated, instruction diffused, public birthings lightened, economy seated, as it were, upon a rock. The Gordian knot of the poor laws are not cut but untied, all by a simple idea in architecture. This is really, really a one-size-fits-all solution. And I think we all know that those kinds of solutions are suspect. So it's like, and the book ends, and he's serious about this. He spends a bunch of time figuring out how you would design a hospital, right? It's a great way to keep attention to patients, and you can quarantine them. And they're all separated from one another. So that's lovely. And it'd be great for school. And he has a bunch of ideas towards the end of the book about how you could set this up, and then you could do some experiments to find out.  He's weird, forbidden experiments. And he suggested it would be a great way to ensure that you could educate young girls without risking their virginities and make them the perfect future wives. These are real things that he really proposes in his real book. But this was the alternative, right? He really thought, Jeremy Bentham is not a autocratic monster, right? He is one of the fathers of liberal democracy, right? This is, and he really thought that this panopticon would be humane. And he wasn't wrong compared to what was going on at the time. Yeah, and he's writing in a time of great prison reform around England and in other places. So he's not by any means the only person who is trying to improve the conditions in sort of dungeon-like prison sites at the time. So here's his argument. This is our book again. From a central position of power, the unseen watcher potentially sees all. The inmates subjected to the whims of their guards and at peril of brutal reprisals for any wrongdoing must assume they are being watched at all times. Because they are kept isolated, they are unable to coordinate any kind of resistance. They become their own jailers forced into facility by clever construction techniques. With such conditions persuading the prison's charges to self-discipline, fewer paid guards would be needed. It was also Bentham believed a less cruel solution to the alternative. In a classic win-win pitch, he argues that the panopticon would reduce the cost of running the place, because perfect security would allow you to get by with the thinnest of walls, while ending the need for restraining mechanisms like chains and irons. And now this is Bentham. If you were to be asked who had most cause to wish for its adoption, you might find yourself at some loss to determine between the malfactors themselves and those for whose sake they are consigned to punishment. In this view, I am sure you cannot overlook the effect which it would have in rendering unnecessary that inexhaustible fund of disproportionate too often and needless and always unpopular severity, not to say torture, the use of irons. Confined in one of these cells, every motion of the limbs and every muscle of the face exposed to view, what pretense could there be for exposing to this hardship the most boisterous malefactor? So he thought the panopticon was going to be more efficient in terms of labor costs and building costs, but he also thought that this would prevent abuses in the prison, specifically that the panopticon, the panoptic prison would be very easy to inspect. So if an outside inspector is coming in, presumably in a regular sort of dungeon-like prison situation, you could, the warden could go and clean up certain areas while the inspector was looking at other parts, but you can't do that in the panopticon. Once you're in the tower, you can see everything all at once. So he really was trying to reduce the abuses he was seeing in the prison system of his time. So he's a complicated figure. It's not as simple as we thought, because we came to Bentham through Foucault. So we had this idea of what he was going to be like. And that made us think about other complicated figures. So I'll do this one. You want to do that? You got it. OK. So the other thing we do in the book is we do little mini chapters, because we had a lot of ideas that we didn't have time to talk about in detail. But this is what we wanted to talk to you guys about. So one of our mini chapters is called Panopticon Valley. There are times when Bentham's work on the panopticon gives off a strong odor of crank. The letters swing wildly from big ideas and hand-waving to obsessive concern with Moshe, which is very Steve Jobs. When he's explaining the overall layout of the building, he leaves it in the hands of architects to work out what materials will allow the shape he has in mind. But then later, he spends several pages working out a system of gears and tubes that would allow jailers to speak and signal to their charges with voice and remote operated flags. Bentham's uneven obsessiveness reminds us of Jobs, notoriously detail-oriented. Jobs famously spent considerable time, for example, ensuring that the scroll bars on OSX worked the way he wanted, or having opinions about it and specifying the precise number of screws in a laptop case, all while he was best known publicly for his big pronouncements about the future of computing. Jobs was quite secretive, but his competitors have plenty of Benthamite opinions about surveillance. See if you can spot the difference between Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeremy Bentham. So play a little game. Hope number one, if you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And it's important, for example, that we are all subject to the United States, in the United States of the Patriot Act. It's possible that the information could be made available to the authorities. Quote number two, the day of you having a different image for your work friends or coworkers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of lack of integrity. Quote number three, supposing myself to have no forbidden enterprise in view, nor will I forbore such enterprises any abuse of power to apprehend, the idea of an inspector's presence would, in the one case, be a matter of indifference. In the other case, even of comfort. One of the major differences between Bentham and these titans of industry, of course, is that they had full access to deep pockets, whereas he struggled to get financial support for his ideas. Is it possible that the fine line between a brilliant designer and a crank might just be defined by adequate financing? After all, though Bentham's exact design was never built, it was an early conceptual success in disruptive crowdsourcing for a notoriously labor-intensive industry. So we feel like Bentham was genuinely trying to help. Arshmit and Zuckerberg also genuinely tried to help. Are we giving them the same benefit of the doubt? It's really easy, and it's very common when we have debates about surveillance to just take it as red that it's a bad thing. And the difficulty, and we tried to get at that a little bit in the introduction, is that your opinions about surveillance tend to vary a great deal by your opinion of the person or entity doing the surveying. Most of us, in order to get anything done, do a fair bit of self-discipline. So you make to-do lists, or you make agreements with people, and then you check in with one another about making sure that it gets done. And more and more people are making tools to make that easier by making it automatic. And more and more, as they're doing that, they're also automatically collecting and storing that information. And these guys aren't trying to cause a terrible, brutal, awful breach, but neither was Bentham. And Facebook didn't get to a billion people by being an uncomfortable, awful place to be. And yet, once it gets to a billion people, there's a lot of pretty awful consequences. And so we've been thinking a lot about that. And the sort of the tendency, especially in technology, or the way that things change when you get to scale, the way things change when instead of you and a few friends checking in on one another, it's you and a few hundreds of thousands of people being checked in on, and how that shifts things. And we've been thinking a lot about my friend Deb Chatron talks about Ursula Franklin's book, The Real World of Technology, and about how there's tools, technologies that get invented that are individually empowering, for example, the sewing machine, that when it gets to scale, have very negative social consequences, like sweatshops. And so we've been thinking about that in terms of social media and technology. And obviously, if you're wondering, because we just spent the last half of our talk talking about prison technology, what that might have to do with this other stuff, we're interested in thinking about the motivations and the disconnect between the motivations and the consequences. You want to read the last reading? Sure. Did you want to talk about this or after that? Yeah, let's do it the other way. So this is a reading from the last of the seven major chapters, which is the one where we examine our own phones, which both happen to be iPhones. Columbia University professor Eben Moglen likens the situation to an ecological disaster resulting from rampant littering. No single piece of trash just arrives in an environment, but when everybody does it, and this is a quote from him, the problem is caused by people who would like a little help spying on their friends. And in a gentile way, that's what social media offers. They get to survey other people. In return for a little bit of the product, they assist the growth of these immense commercial spying operations. The commercial spying operations are used to empower people who have lots to get more from people who have less. Oh, right, people who have lots to get more from people who have less. There we go. I can read a book. That's the end of our quote from him. Moglen's analogy here isn't quite right. His focus on social networks as an ecological disaster implies an otherwise pristine environment. This is hardly the case. Much of the intelligence and advertising community's collections activity involves telecoms that have very little to do with social media.  Although it is convenient to conceive of power as a monolith, it is not. Our phones are one user interface of a huge network that is required to make such surveillance possible. Global positioning satellites, RFID tags, drones, and CCTV cameras are other physical points in this network. And a great deal more exists only in virtual space, i.e. vast warehouses of computation located wherever power is cheap and or internet is vast. This network is populated by a riot of factions and powers, with interests sometimes aligned and sometimes at odds. In our very small way, we too are nodes in this network watching and being watched. Looks good. We can go to questions. It's really difficult for us to end on a high note. We've been finding. So there are microphones, which if you would like the internet to hear your question, you should speak into. So if you raise your hands, Dan will come to you. Hi, my name is Jennifer. I'm a second year student at the law school. I'm curious if, through the course of writing this book, and if your own personal habits have changed with respect to how you approach your phones, your social medias, things like that? Or if it's mostly the same as it was six months ago or whatever? That's a really good question. I bought a new phone. New phone, same as the old phone. Which I guess means sort of no. I had already canceled my Facebook account before, but I'm still on Twitter. I keep getting emails from LinkedIn, so I guess I'm still on LinkedIn. I don't think it's changed my habits in any significant way. I think that it's helped me a little bit to think through what those habits are. But there's some degree to which, for me, I actually, I don't think the social, my corner of social media and being surveyed by it like it's not, it's like the least of my surveillance problems. I recently immigrated to the United States. I have a green card now. I did not have a green card before. And the amount of attention that I have undergone from that stuff and the sort of the danger, I don't know how real that ever felt, but what felt at times like the very real possibility that I might be sent away has weighed on me far more, I think. We spend very little time in the book on social media because of that, because I think that there are things that are really important and that are really spectacular in the way that CCTVs are really spectacular, but that there's a whole other underlying things of which the sort of social media surveillance is a symptom, I think. And so I think we spent more of our book looking at history, and there hasn't been a lot of social media recognizable as social media for most of the duration of these kinds of industrialized mass surveillance systems. I feel like our conclusions, especially in the final chapter about our phones, were so, well, in as much as we had conclusions at all, they were so ambivalent in the classic definition of that word, we had very positive feelings and very negative feelings, and they roughly were equivalent to one another, that I felt like the compromises I had already made were going to remain as they are. I wasn't really, I haven't certainly changed my habits that much, although speaking of immigration, it was very interesting when I went through customs to come to the United States from Toronto where I live, and they asked me what I was coming here for, and I said I wrote a book about surveillance. Ah! Ah! So whatever lists I wasn't on, now I'm on them. We'll see how easy it is for me to get into the States next time. Sarah Watson, a fellow at the Berkman Center. I'm really interested in the field guide approach to the book, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about what you guys mean by field guide and what that means, both practically on the ground and also just like for the concept of the book itself. I think a good part of the field guide is because we knew we weren't going to be able to talk about everything. This book is part of a series, and the series by definition are all short. They're supposed to be like longer pieces, non-fiction pieces that are longer than a magazine article but shorter than a full non-fiction book. And so we knew we weren't going to be able to touch everything. So we felt like field guide was a way for us to be able to pop in and pop out and speak about things in a limited way and acknowledge that limitation while we were doing so. So it's partly a way for us to sort of protect ourselves from feeling like we didn't get into anything as deeply as we would like to. But another part is that we wanted it to have a sort of interactive feel, and a field guide is something that you take with you and you consult regularly, and we wanted the book to have that kind of feeling, that it could be something that could be dipped in and out of. It's also a joke because we actually physically went to 0% of the sites that we describe. I've never been to Guantanamo Bay. I think I hope to never be in Guantanamo Bay, et cetera. So it's the field, the terrain, and we do cop to that in the introduction, Bruce, so I haven't ruined it. Is more of a guide to a conceptual terrain, right? A lot of our work, we spent more of our time instead of wandering around these spaces, we spent our time wandering through the official reports and committee meeting notes and work by other academics, and like investigative journalism, and in New York in particular, a bunch of really funny Inspector General's reports about just like malfeasance and corruption.  And then Foucault spends all of his book talking as if he's talking about real architecture, but never actually specifying places. He just sort of talks about the school in general, the idea of the school or the factory. And so we followed in their footsteps in that way. Hi, my name's Yula, I'm unaffiliated. I'm an alumna of GSAS though. So I have a question around, I don't know if you address this in your book, around the issue of secrecy and privacy, which has changed so much during the 18th and into the 19th century, the notion of privacy that the Victorians had and how that was changed with the yellow press and public divorce courts and all that kind of thing, and how possibly, and I'm really asking this as a question, Bentham's panopticum late 18th century was built for people who didn't have any rights to privacy or secrecy, and how that might now be deflected or changed in our current age, where we have again different conceptions of privacy and secrecy, where people willingly go and spill everything and go on reality TV and talk about, I don't know, whatever dysfunction they have. And I think we're really struggling with what is supposed to be secret and what's supposed to be private. So. Yes. I don't think we really got into the issue of privacy particularly, especially, but it's one of the many streams that we could have followed and maybe would have liked to, but we were restricted by time and abilities. You're right. I was flipping through to see if I could find it and I can't find it quickly, but there's this amazing moment in the book where in the many benefits of the panopticon, one of them is that people of higher station won't need to spend so much time visiting. Like it's one of the worst parts of being a magistrate is that you have to go to these prisons to make sure they're not abusing the prisoners. But in the panopticon, you don't need to go to every single thing, you just go into the middle tower and that will ease your burden of having to look at the pores for too long. Which like, it's easy and fun to pick out hypocrisy. So I'm gonna do it for a second. When you watch Zuckerberg and Schmidt and a lot of Silicon Valley people really think that the age of privacy is over except for them. We're not allowed to know where his house is, but does that betray a lack of integrity? I don't know. And trying to figure out, especially on things like Twitter, right now we're seeing an explosion of it on Twitter of where you are there and you're talking to one another. I'm gonna back up for a second. So Christopher Alexander has this great set of divisions for public and private space and he goes from the street to the cafe, to the front step, to the living room, to the bedroom. Right. And the idea being that there's not just this is private, this is public. Like there are, if you were at a cafe and you are like listening to somebody have a conversation where they're like, relationship is falling apart. Like it's not a normal thing to go over and like be like, tell me more. You sort of, but on the other hand, if you're in the living room and that sort of thing starts to happen, will you've already been invited to their home and so maybe you do because probably you have a different relationship with those people and whatever else. But the weirdness of Twitter is that you think that you're having a conversation with someone in the living room and then like Buzzfeed thinks it's funny and suddenly they like drag it into the street and we don't have, and I don't know how you would design a solution to that. But this is a book about a whole lot of different people who think that that's how you do things, right? Bentham thinks that by building the right kind of architecture you can get people to behave in the right kind of way. And all of the A, B testing that all of these mega companies do is a fundamental belief that if you build the right kind of architecture you can get people to behave in the right kind of way, right? Like if only we had the right kind of tools we could fix trolling on Twitter. If only we had the right kind of tools we could get people to give up more of their personal data which would make it easier to sell them personally relevant advertising. But I think we should be skeptical of the architectural approach because that's not what happens, right? Like there are the number of prisons that have been built around these things and there's plenty of surveillance cameras which behave in a panoptic way, right? The idea of a surveillance camera is you don't know if anyone's watching or not, anyone could be. So you're gonna behave as if you're being watched by the cops but that's not what happens, right? Riots still occur. Sometimes over pumpkins, sometimes over dead teenagers. And so the architectural analysis is often really weak. Yeah. Actually it's not even necessarily just the architecture. My question was prompted by a book about privacy and secrecy in the 19th century. And in the 19th century it was in Victorian England it was almost impossible to get a divorce. And so these divorce courts were finally instituted and the idea was that if people had to go there was no such thing as no fault divorce, right? If people had to go to the court and basically air their dirty laundry in court as to the reasons for why they were seeking a divorce it would make people behave like that. So it's the law actually not architecture. The law coming in and thinking it'll make people behave and they won't want divorce but it married at the same time with the formation of the yellow press. And so these divorce courts became one of the most popular things for everybody to go to to see what was happening. And then it was spread all over the press, right? So it seems like we get these ideas that if we survey people or if we make them tell all they'll behave and yet history has shown that that's not gonna be the case. And really the goalposts just move. So if you previously thought that the details of your marriage were private and then they're not anymore then that is going to be the case for everyone who comes after you. It's a, I mean it's not an immediate process but yeah, over time that those things do change. Yeah. What's the book by the way? It sounds really interesting. I'll think of it now. Okay. Hi, I'm Saul Kahnemem, a local blogger and activist. I wanna sort of turn this around for a second. You were reading Inspector General's reports and other things which are effectively surveillance of institutions of power and governance. And you've just said to be, you're skeptical of architectural approaches. And when we talk about trying to understand these sorts of institutions, we talk about transparency which is fundamentally an architectural approach. If an architectural approach like transparency is an effective based on what you've done to try and understand these institutions, et cetera, what do you think works better? If anything, stand on the down note. So I wanna tell you a little bit about the Inspector General's report because it's amazing. So Marlon Brando, his Oscar-winning role on the waterfront is a story from the 1950s about corruption on the docks and piers of New York and New Jersey, based on real problems. And around that time, they set up the Waterfront Commission. And the Waterfront Commission's job is to root out the organized crime made famous by Marlon Brando. So in 2009, the Inspector General of New York releases the first of a series of reports about how the Waterfront Commission is doing. And they're not doing well. It, the things, the malfeasance ranges from lower level employees of the Waterfront Commission being asked to get to work before their shift starts to hold parking spots so that their superiors can have good parking. All the way up to family members of convicted organized crime having union positions that by law they should not have been able to have, right? So the Waterfront Commission has failed utterly. And so it doesn't, so that's just a background of that particular little, and so there's a like, like, oh, there's a problem. We should have another, like there should be an oversight committee, right? Cause those work all the time. Waterfront Commission actually not produced a single annual report in its history until the Inspector General like started paying attention to it. So, I mean, I don't know the answer. I know that, but I have some suspicions and some of those suspicions are that it's like, it's not actually the systems, but it's the running of the systems, which is a much more tedious and harder thing to get going and to do and to do well, and it's not the tool that the people who are called upon to fix these things have, right? The tool that you have if you see like rampant corruption is you can pass new laws, generally we turn to legislators to fix these problems. And the only tools that they have are committees and laws. It's not totally true, but it's true enough for me. So that's what happens. But the other people are also working very hard, right? The bit that Emily read about the riot of different forces, right? So there's not actually one power. There's a lot of different power there in conflict. But like, hey, everyone should like work harder at making the world a better place. It's not a really good answer either. Cause first of all, there's probably not 100% agreement in the room about what would make the world a better place. And this is a relatively homogenous room. Do you have a better answer? Oh, that was terrible. I don't think that we ever came up with any real thoughts about what the best possible solution is. This is definitely not a book of solutions. That we will leave to better people than us. I mean, but I guess our argument for today is that we know it's not one size fits all solutions, right? Those are really appealing. Learn to code. But actually, no, like it doesn't end, but they're really appealing. And so they kept, keep getting tried. Cause it's a really easy story to tell. Like, oh, I, like I have found one weird trick to make prisoners behave. Let's put a tower in the middle. David Arshell, Brooklyn Center. I was struck in the original description of the Panopticon, the idea that it would also be sort of a way of holding the people running the prison accountable for external inspectors and stuff. And I'm sort of like, it reminded me of some of the friends from the Snowden interview yesterday in which he said that like part of the problem was just sort of institutional corruption and lack of accountability. And so I'm wondering to what extent do you think these sort of Panopticon like surveillance systems kind of in order for them to work the way we think they were going to have the social effects we want, we sort of need an external system in sort of a way of having people be held accountable and you know, sort of having, not having sort of like the, the sort of the watcher class and everybody else but having everybody being watched, including the watchers. One of the things that Bentham talks about is not just, as I was saying earlier, the idea that inspectors could come in more easily. So they would be checking the prisoners and they're checking the work of the wardens of the jail to make sure they're doing their job. But that the public should be able to come in. So it's not, there are a couple of layers of watchers watching the watchers. You have the people who are hierarchically above them but then in theory the public should be allowed to tour through as well. And because he never built it, we don't know whether that ever would have happened but I have a feeling that that, that it wouldn't have been a popular like Sunday afternoon diversion to take a little stroll down to the prison. And I guess the question is, are, is there any, is there any mechanism by which the broadest possible public can hold these companies, for instance, to account? We may have at least a rough patchwork of reports and commissions and laws that are looking at what's going on from that hierarchically higher position but is there any mechanism that would allow the rest of us to participate in that? And there's like, and we should be suspicious of that too because, we used to preserve everything. Because like, thinking about the dignity, I mean the prisoners are already in a pretty undignified position being trapped alone in cells with people able to watch them and not watch the other way. So adding the public being able to come in and gawk at you is not an necessarily improvement to their lot. Like oh, it's fine, the public's gonna look at you and but I'm sure there won't be a yellow press about what happens to prisoners, right? Like there won't be any, there's no like bloodlust leering-ness about the public, right, that should be fine. And so Foucault spends a bit of time in his book talking about what came before, right? He makes a distinction between the Ancien d'Augine and the carceral and panoptic institutions that he sees everywhere today. But one of those, one of the stories he tells is about how this, so they had this like public executions and public torture, right? That was the thing that happened and it was supposed to sort of terrify the population into behaving well. Like don't be, do bad things, look what happens. But what actually happens is sometimes that happens but sometimes like the execution goes wrong and the sympathies of the crowd switch to the side of the person being killed. Sometimes like the crowd riots and rescues the person and there's an uprising. It's very unpredictable what happens when you have these other kinds of oversights. And it's really hard to argue for less surveillance, right? Like there's all this corruption, we should just watch them more. Like oh, if only we were watching people more then the corruption would go away. But I don't think the evidence is there. But like to say like, like the NSA is watching people too much and they've overstepped their bounds but the solution is not to like reel them in somehow by watching them seem like very difficult to conceive of what else you might do. Which like, we spent a bunch of the end of the book being skeptical about to what degree Foucault's seen panopticons everywhere is true. But like that moment, if like it's difficult to even conceive what else you might do to the NSA aside from more oversight on their activities is I think an argument for maybe where like the surveillance is so utterly winning that it's hard to think outside of surveillance for our solutions to the surveillance problem. That's terrifying. This is a book full of terrifying things but we're funny when we scare you. There is one other approach to holding the watchers accountable. And since this is a law school might I suggest making the watchers legally liable for taking appropriate actions based upon what they see or what they're recording. And I wanna tie this into two articles from yesterday's New York Times. Apparently there had been some cases in New York State where hackers were hacking into the telephone exchanges of small businesses and using them to make lots of calls to 900 numbers in Somalia and the Mildives and other places and billing it to in some cases over $100,000 in one weekend to the company. And according to current law, those companies were liable for that. The local phone companies were not refunding the money even though they had the capacity to observe what was going on. It's actually within the prerogative of the FCC to hold these local phone companies liable, just as one example. And the second article was actually someone at the law school here was interviewing Ed Snowden about the various surveillance and apparently in his view, the NSA was observing Cernaev as he was planning the marathon bombing. Shouldn't there be some obligation on the part of these observers to use whatever information they collect in some responsible manner? And so by making them accountable once they collect information to collate it and make it available for appropriate purposes and legally responsible for the damages, if not, this would be a potential way of holding these organizations more accountable. So Bentham would agree with you. He takes a liability approach. So his design for the prisons, he spends about half the time on the surveillance aspects of it and the other half the time on the economic mechanism by which the prison he's designed would fund itself. And so how do you deal with the problem of like people, what if the jailers are terrible people and they abuse and the prisoners die and whatever else? And so he proposes that jailers will be liable for whatever happens to the prisoners under their watch.  So liability is one approach. I had a second half of the thought and I've lost it. Oh, here's the second half.  The city gets sued and the city has to pay, which is to say all of your fellow citizens pay, right? The cops don't pay. Well, or do they? Like money is fungible. And so it comes out of the municipal budget in some way. Are there ways to improve the incentives in those interactions, right? This is the argument now around police liability is. So if the police are involved in assaulting someone and we decide that they shouldn't have and they go to court or it's settled. Generally, the police officer is put on paid leave, right? And so like the activist complaint is, well, they're getting vacation. Like you get vacation for assaulting youths. That doesn't seem good. But it's difficult to, this sort of cascading series of unintended consequences that would fall out of that if individual police officers were liable for their oversight are very difficult to pick through. And I suspect that it would be the same for businesses being required to protect their, because I don't know, you launch a series of insurance schemes to protect your business against the liability. Does anybody have a better answer? Like are there any laws? I have a worse answer. Which is, so bouncing back to both of these comments about the question of liability slash the rule of law, if we wanna expand it more, I think you, Tim, brought up a question of strict liability. Of is it like, do we base it, your examples were we know you knew, if you knew and could have seen it's your fault. So vicarious or whatever, however you wanna expand that to a category or this thing happened, we're just gonna make you responsible. And I think the strict liability approach is the only one that cuts down on surveillance still being the answer. We still need to know though. We still need to know that it happened and we still need to be able to say there's this entity is responsible.  We're designating someone in the Panopticon, in the prison, in this jurisdiction is under your care, you're responsible. I think that's the only one that actually cuts down on surveillance because even if we're saying there's a law that makes you liable, the phone company example, can only say that there's established liability because we know the phone company knew, we can see what they're doing, we can trace through the electronic records. Electronic, I don't know how phones work. That we can attribute knowledge through watching, through records being available. I mean, the Snowden example is we know you were watching, we're in a high enough position to watch you. So I think law, I love, I mean, I think we can generally say most people in this room have some sense of affinity towards looking at the law, if not liking how it operates. But I think we forget that it still requires people to enter all their data, their wants, into a system to be applied somehow, which isn't necessarily distinct from surveillance. Is this working? Yeah. I was along similar lines, struck really by the picture of the Panopticon that you put up as an instantiation in physical architecture of basically a system of information flows among the participants. But it strikes me that there were a number of characteristics of the information flows that were implicit in that drawing and only one of them was that the central person could observe all the people. There were other two critical ones, which you mentioned. Well, one which was implied and one which you mentioned. First, in that architecture, all of the people can see the watchers. But the critical thing is in that architecture, none of the prisoners can speak to each other. And that, when we look around about the world as it exists now and apply this as a metaphor, it's a critical thing that's not true anymore. We're talking about the NSA today. So I wonder to what extent you think the fact that if you took down the walls in the Panopticon between the prisoners and allowed them to talk to each other, number one, and if you made the observers position subject to the collective decisions in some sense of the participants, i.e. their presence as observers, what they're allowed to do, what they're not allowed to do. If that was all subject to communications between the participants, how do you think this would change the dynamics of the system which resulted? That's sort of what we come to in the last chapter, actually. One of the things that we kept thinking about over and over again, while we were using using Bentham and Foucault to look at these particular seven sites today is the Panopticon even the right metaphor? Because it's especially clear that the prisoners are not isolated from one another anymore. The visibility thing is interesting. That image doesn't show it, but Bentham spends a lot of time talking about this complicated, he loves complicated systems, complicated system of grating and lights so that the cells would be lit but the tower would be unlit. So this is one of the reasons why he would love CCTV because you don't have to have all of these complicated systems. You just have an electronic solution to that problem of one person being able to see in and the other person not being able to see out. But yeah, we are not in a world where we are isolated from one another. Nowhere you want to think of it. We did an event in Chicago two days ago and had a very similar discussion. One of the audience members whose name I've forgotten or I would credit you is was, he suggested that the degree and the kind of communication occurring can themselves be a kind of isolation. So his, this is the distracting ourselves to death argument, like yes, we are all connected and we are all connected about things that don't matter. It's a very standard argument made by people who feel like if only people paid attention to my cause, it would get solved, right? So that's the argument there. Is it like we may be connected but we may not be meaningfully connected, right? If you take down the walls but you fill the prison with like cowards who aren't going to rush the guards, then you can still keep them. Like they can talk to each other all they want about how they're going to rush the guards but if no one's willing to take the risk then it's not gonna happen. So maybe that's what we've got. Would that at least suggest a different kind of intervention than the other? Yeah, and yet we like, people making security keep building, thinking they're building penopticons, right? They keep putting up increasingly complicated surveillance mechanisms on the idea that like if only, and the visibility of the potential visibility of the watchers is really important to the penopticons, right? So you need to know that you could be being watched but not know whether you are being watched. And so that visibility of the watchers is really important and there's this funny way where like Snowden's revelations, unless they lead to substantial change, actually increase the NSA's power. Because now, we all, now think that we know that we're being tracked. And that's a much scarier and therefore more suppressed position to be in than like a suspicion that you might be being tracked. Or not total ignorance that you might be being tracked. Does, do you discuss in your book at all, what I might call popular or bottom up surveillance, things like people filming the police, making arrests in their neighborhood? Briefly, yeah. We talk a little bit about it in our Oakland chapter, because the focus of the Oakland chapter is both the Domain Awareness Center, which is, by the way, the most amazing name of anything that has ever existed, which is the city's surveillance operations. And Occupy Oakland, and one of the things that was happening at Occupy Oakland as with many of the other Occupy camps is that there was a lot of filming of the police. And one of the techniques the police had to solve that problem was bursts of light that would blow out the whole scene in the images or the videos that were being taken. So there is counter-surveillance going on, but there are tools that the original watchers are using to make sure that those images don't happen or aren't readable. We also, very briefly, this is definitely a cutting room floor type thing, touch on the peer-to-peer surveillance of the way that watching one another in a room or in a tool like Facebook, the way that those can get groups of people in alignment or in discipline. And the positive version of that is self-organizing movements and the negative version of that is peer pressure and light, right? So, well, we don't spend a lot of time on that. And sometimes self-organizing movements too. Right, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. You can be on either side. Matt Jones from MIT. I have two comments just to follow up with what you guys were saying about the Panopticon and what you were saying about the prisoners communicating with each other. Well, that's also a currency of control, potentially. It's not only a good thing. The prison might encourage prisoners to communicate with each other and break down the walls if that meant they could have greater control, some of which I think we do see going on commercially and in government. And what you just said about the counter-surveillance with the police and the things we saw in Ferguson, for instance, I think is really interesting because I feel as though there's been some sort of flip upside down that happened where when there was an invention of a technology or something like that, whether it was assault rifles or something, by default it was legal until we did something about it and what I see happening right now is there's new technologies coming online but the government by default has all the power to use that for surveillance until we try to do something about it so that new things coming online give more power for them. There's also a greater and greater tradition of secrecy so that we don't know what they're doing, whether it's surveilling us or going to war or whatever it is. So every new technology that comes online work weaker and they're stronger. I don't know if you could comment on that, that idea. I mean it depends on how those stories about technology happen. Depends a lot on who gets their hands on it first, right? It's a very long time, very long time. The internet hasn't been around that long. For as long as I, like for a good chunk of my life as a person involved with the internet, the kinds of surveillance and connections made possible by the internet were understood to be destabilizing to centralize power and over the last few years that understanding has evaporated dramatically, right? It's not that long ago that we were patting ourselves on the back for overthrowing autocracies in the Middle East thanks to Twitter, which is like such an over-simple, glad Dali's not here, she might be screaming right now because it's not true, right? Like people who know about what's happening there know that that wasn't true, but it was a story that fulfilled a myth that we had told ourselves about these technologies for decades. And that's the speed at which that's happened and the rapidity with which in at least the rhetoric I've been around that that's been forgotten and it's getting, like you can watch it be forgotten that we thought that surveillance, we, some large group of people, which I was a member of, thought that these tools would be destabilizing to centralize power instead of reinvigorating centralized power has been really interesting to watch and kind of alarming, which I hope makes doing history that goes even deeper because like the degree to which I discover like things that my peer group thought were brand new were not at all brand new, like we do a chapter on prison labor and we found like 300 years of people having the exact same debate about prison labor. Using the exact same arguments. And that stuff cycles and then, then you don't wanna go too far into like, oh, all of this has happened before because that's also not true. And so trying to figure out how to sit between those two positions of like, this is a singular age and it's never been like this and this is the most extreme kind of surveillance that's ever happened in like the, and like, ah, this is all, it's always been surveillance. You kids, calm down. Like neither of those is a productive position to stand from, but it's been really hard to try to find a third, a third place to stand. I think we're on our last question. If we have time for one last question, comment. If anybody has one or a last word from you guys if you would like to say anything. Bye.  Yeah, stay in school. Great, so please join me in thanking Emily and Tim and just a reminder that there's books for sale too, so. Thank you. Yeah. I'll just leave that up.


four, three, two, one, and we're live. Welcome, everybody back to Segal Talks, our weekly programming during the weekdays, where we do focus on artists' voices from around the world, global voices. It is a time where we need to hear from artists, listen to artists, and perhaps also realize that might be artists' voices that will be heard stronger now, and that their voices reach people's minds and ears and eyes. It's a difficult time you live in, a complicated time. There are studies that just came out yesterday that perhaps the amount of dead people in the New York state that doubled might be 20,000 people. It's just unprecedented. It's still everything is closed. Theaters are closed. Restaurants, businesses, they are doomed to stay prediction. A third of all nonprofits will close. And if art ever had anything to say, this is also a moment where we have to think about what are we going to say. Maybe it's a bit about thinking to give meaning. And artists have been on the right side of social progress, of justice on the good side of the history of the world. And I think also, again, they are here. And now in this space, the Seedle Talks is a space where we do listen to the artists. And with us today, we have a special guest every day. But today, we are really proud to have with us the great Peter Sellers, an internationally renowned director of theater artists, curator, producer, and who has been creating transformational work in America and Europe and around the world. Peter, welcome. Thank you, Frank. Thank you, thank you.  You are professor of art and culture at UCLA and next to all your work. It's stunning to see how much you do. So where are you now? And how does it feel to not be able outside in the world where you normally move so fast and so much? Well, I think the message from our teacher of the virus is to be quiet, is to stop. I think the world was running like a crazy pace. The world was running out of control. Everybody was too busy to really notice anything. And this incredible speed and acceleration that was running the planet and making the economies go crazy, making a whole series of injustices that nobody had time to stop and say, wait, this is wrong. And then they start being accepted. And then they start becoming something you can't even, you can't take apart again. It has its own nightmare momentum. I mean, for example, just the founding of something in this country called Homeland Security, which happened in an emergency overnight. And you want to say, stop, hold it. And suddenly it's permanent. It's part of everything. The drug war suddenly got funded and is unstoppable. All these things that happened with the accelerator on. And what does it mean, a message to the whole human race, stop right now? Just stop. And we don't even know how to do that, because our metabolisms are so geared to this craziness. And what does it mean to stop and turn the gaze inward and say, what are we doing? What are we doing to each other? What are we doing to the planet? And what happened to those skills of taking care of each other, of recognizing that we're living in a really intricate ecosystem that is being violated in ways that make life impossible.  And so to me, the virus is sending this message. I've never been at home this long, I think, in my life. It's incredible not to get on an airplane. It's incredible to be quiet. It's incredible not to have an opening night. It's incredible to really stop being productive and really learn something in the quiet. And I think theater frequently can just try to keep the wheels moving and the kind of entertainment going. And now what's powerful is to be in a moment where entertainment is not the point. But creating a space of focus, a space of concentration, a space of meditation and contemplation, where the heartbeat is much slower and the thought process is much more intense and charged with another kind of emotional weight. And I think a lot of theater responded to television and film just trying to get it everything faster, not bore anyone. And of course, now we're in that state where boredom is the only way we're going to learn anything. And the only way our thought opens to other possibilities. And the only way we live with something and realize we should not be living with it. We should not accept a whole series of things that have happened in the last 50 years that are moves down the wrong road in the wrong direction. And our societies have gone very far. And we have to stop, turn the car around, and walk back and start over on so many questions. So for me, this is a really incredible moment of learning. And I hope a moment of different types of solidarity. I mean, what's so very moving is all of the people that have stepped forward to volunteer, all of the people who have stepped forward to help, the schools that are closed, but the school cafeterias that continue to feed children, and the level of international cooperation that we were told two months ago was impossible when it was about working to solve the climate emergency. And suddenly, with this virus, there's global cooperation occurring at this incredible and truly unprecedented level. And so I think suddenly in this period, a lot of things are possible that were not possible just a few weeks ago.   And at the same time, human beings don't get serious until people are dying, until there's blood on the altar. And so I think our line of work in the theater is we deal with tragedy. And tragedy is about not pointless suffering, but that this is here so we learn something. And so the question is, what are we learning? And what do we take from this tragedy? What is the message of this tragedy? What is this tragedy trying to tell us? And what does it mean that the planet has climate emergency? Human beings couldn't figure out that this was really serious. And so the virus had to be engaged to come and say, no, no, you don't understand. The planet is unlivable. And you people are poisoning not just the future of the forest and the ocean, but your own future. And the virus is here to deliver this message. And how we listen and hear, how deeply we hear, how deeply we listen to a tragedy and say, what do we take from this? What is here for us to learn? Is what's in front of us right now? And again, it's so strange that when one of the largest crises in human history occurred three months ago, the first thing that happened was all artists are out of work. And you're like, we don't need you. I think it's probably good for the artists in one way. In one way it's terrible because nobody has income, of course. And very few people have life savings. Everybody's living on the edge, week to week, moment to moment in our line of work. But OK, I think maybe artists do need some time to be quiet and do need some time to reflect and do need some time to get off the merry-go-round and really find their footing again. Find what it means to stand still and on your own two feet and know where you're standing. And I think the power right now is going to be with people who can lead with some vision and make sense out of tragedy and say that tragedy is not the end of the story. Tragedy is the beginning of a set of stories. And of course, there's huge pressure from the business community and from people who are going crazy in isolation to just get everything back to normal as quickly as possible. And of course, that would be a crime to have learned nothing from the hundreds of thousands of deaths and the depth of courage of people who stepped forward to help in the medical, overrun hospitals, in home care, in all kinds of ways where people have stepped forward to help. If we just go back to normal, we didn't learn anything. And meanwhile, we're not going to get the idea that we should live differently from business or from politicians. And therefore, I think artists have to be the class of people who have to become, first of all, deep in our level of wisdom and insight, which means that we have to be associating with people who are not like us, who are scientists, are people who have larger ways of understanding what's going on environmentally, what's going on medically. And then to come back to our original roles, which are communicators of difficult subject matter in a society and create new models, new working models of other ways of living and demonstrating what needs to happen. And most people can't imagine anything because they haven't. They've only seen what's around them, and so they can't imagine something else. And our job is to help imagine something else and to not just theorize it, but to embody it, to step into it with our bodies. And it's the bodies that are speaking in the COVID crisis. It's the dead bodies.  It's the struggling bodies. And I have to say, for artists, it's leading with your own body and putting our bodies on the line and demonstrating in our bodies what we're trying to hope for as another way of living in the 21st century. Anyway, so for me, it's a really incredibly rich, intense period, and I think I want to try and create a couple of ways in which artists can begin to talk together, to gather ideas and to say, yes, we have to move forward differently on so many levels, one of which is, of course, with the arts economy, that the arts economy just went out of business instantly when there's a crisis. I think that's completely upside down. We have to figure out a way in which the arts are a meaningful part of every progressive action in a society. And for that matter, every regressive action that the presence of artists in situations of difficulty creates a different way of understanding and reading those situations and a different way of gathering people to come forward with collective solutions that have a deeper solidarity and a deeper sustainability. And to me, theater is about gathering people even virtually but emotionally and with a sense of experiential consequences and to begin to find points of shared agreement or understanding. And of course, in this period where in most societies we're at such astonishing and violent, divisive positions, what does it mean to share space? And theater is just shared space. Theater is a group of people sharing space. The space belongs to all of us in this space right now. What does that mean in divided India for a Muslim population? What does that mean? How do we share the space? And then how do we share the resources? How do we share the water? How do we share the air? And how do we share responsibility? And to me, the 21st century is just this project of sharing the planet. And theater is fundamentally about one topic which is sharing. So to me, it's about now how many ways can we rethink and reimagine theater as shared in as many dimensions as it's possible to share and giving human beings practice and exercise in sharing? You know, one of the things that's just not been good in our culture for the last two generations and take muscles that human beings have actually had for millennia but have not been exercised and say, let's take these muscles of sharing and give them some exercise. Anyway, sorry. That's a little bit of what I'm sitting in my home in California thinking about right now. No, this is actually what we need to hear. What we also want to hear from you. So are you stopping? Do you stop? Well, I have no scheduled work for another year because everything's been canceled or postponed. And I just put up an exhibit in the Hammer Museum here in Los Angeles about 60,000 refugees trying to come north from Salvador and Honduras and Guatemala and all of whom are caught at the Mexican border and many of whom are in these nightmare detention centers with parents separated from children. We had just opened this exhibit when suddenly everything shuts down. So how we move this kind of activism through other channels becomes very, very important. And this kind of social awareness that, again, goes inevitably under-reported of what's really happening in the world. And again, even the most compelling article still in our newspaper doesn't actually take you into the experience. And I think in questions of equal justice and questions of, again, what it means that the virus does not respect borders. You can build the biggest wall you can imagine and it will not stop the virus. And the virus is moving across every border on Earth. And in this period to have built prisons instead of hospitals and schools, you can see it's criminal. And now all over the world, societies are so weakened because of the absence of serious and sustained infrastructure, which has all been ripped out or underfunded for at least a generation, while prison security and border patrols have been stepped up. And we see that all of that security and all those border controls have made no one safe right now.  And we just got it very wrong. We got it exactly backwards. So how we, again, emerge from this, but also have to then understand very deeply the priorities have to shift and have to turn. And it's incredible because there's very little political traction. And I think this is what makes this virus feel so biblical is that when on the ground, you wish there was more political call for let's tear down all these walls and stop this crazy thing about migrants and let the earth open and breathe. And well, the virus is here to say it's time. And the virus is sending a message you can't ignore. Like human beings, gifts for denial are prodigious. So I think what we have to do again as artists is to really hold these insights and these messages that are coming from the planet itself in front of people in a way that we can't just move on. We have to really, really stop and address these questions. This is so very, very true. And as a question for you, I do know that you also practice sin, you're close to Buddhism. And on the other hand, you also have a call to action, where you have to do something. How do you connect these two strands of the silence and the speaking out? Well, I think, again, that's the beauty of theater is you're trying to create and deepen inner space. And the inner space is the space of reflection, the space of understanding, the space of contemplation, the space that understands that reality is deeper than the world of appearances. And so we're trying in theater always to represent the world, but not just on the surface. But to say behind this story, there are many other stories. And to say we have to look much deeper till we arrive at the story that's underneath this story, till we arrive at what does not meet the eye, till we arrive at what didn't appear in the newspaper article, till we arrive at what this family has never admitted about itself to itself. Theater is always about digging and digging and digging until we can get to this other levels of reality that are really shaping what's going on. And so this inner space is extremely important in this inner space, which lets you be honest with yourself before you can attempt to be honest to anyone else. Theater is about letting that space open and breathe and meet itself more regularly. Because the one thing we're not good at is listening to our own voices, our own inner voices, which know much more than most of our outer exclamations. Anyway, so theater is constantly trying to hold in balance this question of our inner voices and our outer behavior. And so that's, I think, the job description. And of course, theater also has to have that compelling sense of urgency and of flair and the image that stuns you and that you leave the theater. And 30 years later, you can still remember that image. And we have to craft those images in a way that, as people reflect on that image, many years later, content is still emerging from that image. That image remains rich and charged and filled with content. So that's part of our craft as theater makers. And that moment of emotional flashpoint or moment of sudden open, open, open, open conversation or silence charged with meaning that people can recall years later. And what we're trying to do is plant these seeds that will grow across a generation. And if those seeds have any kind of water and sunlight, they will become trees. I mean, I see the sun going up in California. I think it's 9 o'clock in the morning where you are. Do you feel something has changed for you in these weeks when I don't know how many you are in quarantine? Is it different or is it a confirmation of what you already thought or has something happened? Well, all the things that we're talking about, we've known for a long time, but delayed acting on. And I think the virus, together with the climate emergency, creates the urgency of acting now. Creates saying, you can't not respond. You actually have to now respond. And so that's what's changed. But of course, again, for me, Donald Trump is, of course, but everything Donald Trump is doing has been in America for a very long time. And most of the very destructive behavior and structures have actually been here for a long time. And so for me, it's very rarely that today's headlines change what we're dealing with. These things have been here forever. And they've been sitting there either latently or unacknowledged because this kind of violence against women has been going on a long time. This kind of violence against the environment has been going on a long time. These are choices that were made in a society that, again, agreed to accept all of this as moving just under the surface. We've been building prisons a long time. There's been appalling police action a long time. All these things have been going on a long time. So again, I think one of the hardest things is to uproot something that's so much part of what people have accepted as a normal part of the landscape. And to say, well, no. So I try not to react to everything as if, oh my god, look at this morning's headline. And you try and say, well, wait a minute, where did this start? How long has this been happening? And where are the sources of it, of course, is what we're really trying to look for, not what is the latest symptom of the disease, but what is the motivating cause? And I think, again, to talk about theater, we're constantly in a world where politics is about effects and where art has to be about causes. And we have to constantly deepen the political question by saying, well, what's the cause of this? And we have to focus at those causal points that are the only possible points of intervention so that you have a way of intervening before it's too late. Because if you intervene at a later point, it's hopeless. So getting that kind of thinking and those kind of ways of understanding our own behaviors and then also trying to not just critique, but give a positive set of examples. And because, again, I just find this is, yes, it's a period of widespread disaster economically and so on, but it's also a period where so many people have stepped forward in such beautiful ways. And there's new solidarity that was never previously imagined. So I don't just want to dwell on the negative. And I think that's really, really important, is how we can really create positive and inspiring models. And just so to say, to answer your question finally, earlier this year, I've started on a project which I will now really continue and deepen of staging a Buddhist sutra from the first century called the Vimalakirti Sutra. And the subject of this sutra is illness. And it's a really, I mean, the first century is already a pretty interesting century. But it's a real moment of transition for Buddhism, where Buddhism moves from a primarily monastic culture literally into the streets in a democratizing way. And this Vimalakirti Sutra, I think, was intended for performance before a literate public, like in a marketplace. And it has a lot of comedy, a lot of amazing transformations, theatrical, stunning theatrical moments in it. It's all, of course, in dialogue. And I think it's, from what I can tell, the first statement in the literature of the equality of women, gender equality. And its primary figure is this businessman named Vimalakirti, who is ill. And Buddha tells his disciples to go visit this person who's ill because they could learn something. And they're all afraid.    And then their lives begin to change. And it's a very, it's incredible, amazing text. And I've started working on it in last May. And now I will really, I will work further. And just to say the theatrical form of it is one dancer and one singer. The singer is from South India. The dancer is from US by way of Frankfurt and Amsterdam. And it's two people holding a stage. But, and I project just the text of the sutra. But it's just two people creating a universe and a universe in dialogue between a man and a woman. And it's theatrically not about props and not about spectacle, but about what is possible with two people. And of course, the text itself is a revelation with incredible lines in the text like holy liberation is the equality of all things. And if we can create the theatrical space where those words become actual, that's very, very powerful. Another beautiful line is evil spirits have power over fearful men but cannot disturb the fearless. If we can take these words and open them into multiple realities, that's worth doing. So a little bit right now, I'm working on some very, very basic, basic texts and, again, away from the headlines and trying to deal with something of a more ancient level of understanding. And at the same time, as always, what's powerful about stepping into the words and into the bodies of your ancestors is to say, OK, now, where are we in these deeper contexts? So anyway, that's a little bit what I'm thinking about right now as next steps. But the other thing, of course, as I mentioned earlier, I really have in mind is trying to create some process of convening artists on a global basis, a lot like your beautiful program here, and having a real exchange of ideas for a year of what are the paths that we have not taken and what are the paths that we need to open into this next period? And in what way can we support each other? In what way can there be a different ecology that holds the arts in some kind of other economy where the necessity of the arts and the role of the arts, which is, in my mind, at least not about making a brilliant art world. I mean, for me, art is here to make everything else work. It's the thing that allows the justice system to work. It's the thing that allows everything else to work is that you have this maintenance facility, which are the arts, which remind you of what a healthy state looks like and feels like, and is courageous enough to go into difficult places where things are not working and reimagine and reinvent what's going on. But also, report. That's something we really should listen to and think about. So your suggestion, we quote a bit Brecht, saying that what he said that new times need new forms of theater in your suggestions. So let's actually go back 2,000 years in a way like he did with his distancing, by the way. This idea of distance, he went back to Chinese theater. But so you say, let's listen to texts of early mankind.  What are your thoughts of online production or doing something for the screen by theater artists but artists now too?  But young people, truly, this technology, I mean, they're looking at three screens simultaneously, all day with no big issue. Young people live in this screen life and have a certain, not only facility, and competence, but genuine ability to catch things in this amazing environment of multiple screens. And so a younger generation is already on this and is already doing this and has been doing this for already a couple of decades. And the proliferation of screens and screens that can deliver lots of levels of content with lots of layers. It's very exciting. And for me, this question of Sammilton 80, which is what theater is, theater is this live moment. And this idea that there's a live moment in multiple geographies that suddenly converge is super theatrical. And that one screen is somebody in Brazil and on one screen is somebody in Bangladesh and in one screen is that kind of thing. And there's some electrical charge happening at this moment in all those places that it's meeting. That's exhilarating. At the same time, there's this other issue which is video is so bad at sensing emotion. And video is so clueless spatially. There's the space stays so flat. And again, this project for me of sharing space, what it means that nobody owns, there's not single ownership of a space, but that we're recognizing that we all own and participate in the space. And that we all bear responsibility for this space. And if I could borrow the term from Samoan culture in the Pacific Islands of, they have an idea of space is the va. The va is the thing we all share. And when you're behaving badly as a kid, your mother says, stop, protect the va. That we all have to protect this space we're in, the space that belongs to all of us and we're all responsible for equally. And video is not so good at comprehending what the space is. But I have a feeling again, the technology is, it's like a pencil, it will change, it will become whatever it needs to do to become, to be effective. And so I'm, there's no point in saying no. There's, the point is to say, yes, let's have richer and better and deeper technology. And again, just treating technology as a pencil, let's get better at drawing. Let's actually lift our level of skill and deepen our level of content. Peter, are you back? I'm back, hello. Yes, hello, I am, I am sorry if I lost you or you lost me. Yes, I lost you for a bit, but now you hear you. This is great. Yes, yes, we were talking about the va and that in a way we share that space, but we also responsible for it to keep it up. It's not there on its own work, it's participatory. Yes, yes. And to me, that's that, that is the energy of theater. And that is again, why all over the world, cultures create ritual and ceremony because we all need practice in how to create deeper relationships and how to create human, the way in which all of us have a part to play in these bigger questions. And so most societies absolutely survived by centralizing ritual. And ritual is not just a performance where you're a spectator, it's where everybody is there to participate. And that's a, I think if anything, that's something we need to elaborate and deepen because we've created in the last two generations a real spectator culture. The idea that someone else will handle this and the society of spectacle. And so the way in which we deepen the participatory content, I think is really, really crucial. Yeah, yeah. So one way is a socially engaged participatory art. The one Claire Bishop also writes about the one which you can buy actually, you can see often it's free, it's outside and where not the artist like the Andy Warhol or Joseph Boyce who were still in the middle of it. No, the perhaps what is all about is about the people who are participating and there'll be questions. What are those spaces? What will they be? Are they like New York where they built the new gigantic spaces and people are trying to fill the 1,000 seats or maybe to celebrate life, to celebrate art, to celebrate our being alive, the vow. Maybe it has to be in different spaces also. What do you think about theater and space? Well, I think most of us have had our, some are most memorable experiences of theater, not in a theater. And theater is designed to theatricalize and hide and deepen the spaces that we're living in. And so so much theater that's memorable are performance that are taking place in people's neighborhoods or in a site that already has a very charged history or in a space that has multiple levels of ownership. And to me, we're already past that point of trying to get people to come to our theater. Please hear some tickets. But what does it mean to do our work where people live? Do our work where people are? And to actually again use theater to elevate and improve those spaces. I mean, I think one of the most memorable things for in the 90s when we were making the Los Angeles festival was, we made the 1993 festival in the, just the year after the LA uprising. And we made a five week festival with 400 events in the, right in the neighborhood where the first fires were lit in the LA rebellion after the Rodney King beating. And most people were afraid to go into that neighborhood. And but because we were artists, we could go there as a festival and go to the city council. When we toured that neighborhood, of course the street lights were broken. There was trash everywhere. The fountain had never been turned on in the park. And we could go to the LA city council and say, the New York times will be here in three months. We need the fountain turned on.  We need the lights to be working. And it happened. And it happened because of an arts project. And I think, again and again, the presence of the arts allows things that wouldn't happen in the normal course of events to happen. It creates a point of attention, a point of focus and also a point of renewal, a point of new energy coming into a situation and interrupting what is quote unquote normal and what has become accepted as normal. And instead it creates a moment of the unusual. And to me, the world moves forward not in what's expected happens, but what is unexpected happens. When it's unexpected that Nelson Mandela will step out of 26 years in prison and become the next president of South Africa. And it's the unexpected that is incredible. And so for me, creating a theatrical event in a neighborhood or in a institution or is that the theatrical event gives everyone involved permission to go beyond what's expected, beyond what has been normal, beyond what has been accepted. And to say, well, wait a minute, what else could we imagine? What else could happen here? What could this look like? What could this feel like? What could this be? And that act of, again, bring to bear people's imagination and giving everyone permission to imagine something else and something better and let it be not just one person or a little group of imagining it, but creating the way in which a whole group of people re-imagined their future and can participate in building that future. Well, that's really exciting. And that said, that's amazing. Talking about that in powerful images, what is the first piece of theater you ever remember? What did you see? Well, I have a bizarre thing in my life because I apprenticed at a marionette theater beginning when I was 10 years old. And I really had no connection to theater before that. So I already started in a way backstage. And of course, what was beautiful about puppetry was puppets do everything people can't do. Puppets can fly, puppets can transform, puppets can do all these miraculous things. And so you actually believe in the presence of miracles and transformation and you get that nothing is what it looks like.  And you begin to realize that there's many, many layers of reality that are going to surprise you, that nothing needs to be what you thought it was. And so that sense of the miracle of a puppet is pretty strong in my life. And this theater that was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was one of the most polluted cities in America and a steel town, a coal town, industrial town, and which cleaned itself up, which really was one of the first cities in America to realize this was an ecological crisis. But that sense of transformation was in the puppets. Of course, still is with me. And that theater also did plays that puppets could do better than people. I mean, they did the usual fairy tales, but they also did plays by Cocktoe and Beckett and the French surrealists and kind of the theatrical avant-garde where the playwrights were challenging theater to do the impossible. And puppets could step into that zone. And again, for me, one of the most powerful things about avant-garde art is that it is constantly asking for the impossible. And I think that's what we have to be responding to every day. And we have to get really good at realizing the impossible. And... So what was the last piece? If you go back, how many weeks are you now in confinement or in insulation? What is the last thing you saw on the stage? Oh, that is a deep question. Oh, my goodness. Well, I have to say, I just, right as the week the virus was beginning to move outside of China. Well, we don't know which week that is now anymore. The new research is telling us is moving that date back, but I spent February in the first week of March in New Zealand, which is, of course, an amazing country and a country where the political leadership is just incredibly impressive. And to see them responding in the early stages was very, very inspiring. But I was part of a festival organized by Lemme Ponofazio, the great Pacific artist, Samoan artist, in fact, who programmed this festival to appear one year after the Christ church massacre in the mosque and was designed as a response by artists one year later to the deaths of 50 people and that active racist hatred. And so I had three of my productions there and I was seeing work by Lemme Ponofazio, which was an astonishing piece that he did in late February, which was about somebody dying of a disease and being quarantined off and the society around having no idea how to respond, but he used these incredible images from Pacific Island Ritual and the work of Faust and Linyakula, which was, of course, coming from Eastern Congo and work that came from the early days of the genocide that happened in Kisangani, where more than one million people were killed, every family lost people and what it meant to live through this time of death and sacrifice. And those were the last performances I saw and I have to say the power of performance, of people living through death, which is what happens in theater is you also come out the other side and you come out with a community. You went in as an individual and you came out as a community. Quite, quite amazing these pieces, how all of a sudden they're meaning the additional layers, as you said, you know, we're opening up and their engagement with the world and what we should pay attention to. So how do you spend your day now? Maybe you walk us through, but if you don't get an early call at nine o'clock from the single center, by the way, we are here at the Graduate Center CUNY at the City University of New York, I think as far as we know, we're the only theater institution in the United States doing creating new meaningful program every day. And so what do you do in, how does your day look like? How does Peter Seller's day look like? What do you do? Well, in California, you get up early because the early mornings are so beautiful here. So... What's early? Well, I'm usually up, you know, five or 5.30 because also the phones to Europe and Australia and so on and it's all, that's the prime time. And even to New York. And I start the day with a long walk and then I'm reading, I'm reading a lot. I'm talking to a few friends and I'm really mostly very quiet. And again, this period of moratorium is a very deep thing. And so I'm trying to respect it.  And so you're always making decisions very quickly and, you know, kind of on the run. For me, I'm not making any decisions. I'm just really trying to stop and really get quiet and let the quiet itself lead me into the next phase of what needs to happen. Yeah. And then it's okay also not to produce, which is hard, right? To... Well, at the end of the day, when I go to bed, I say I had accomplished nothing today.  And right now, you know, our crazy consumer society of overproduction to just back away from all of that is actually very, very healthy. Yeah, and day after day and without knowing how long into the last.  This is, of course, a total illusion, but at least now that illusion is dispelled. Everybody knows you have no idea what will happen tomorrow, please. And that is very healthy. That is true, that is true. So what are you reading? If you say what are you reading? What are you listening to? You're such a great, so close to music through your work directing and working with these truly extraordinary artists. But what are you listening to and what are you reading that you would like to share? Hmm, my goodness. Well, I'm reading several things. One is I read all the novels of the Libyan author Haisham Matar, M-A-T-A-R, which just gripped me and I just read them straight through for four books and he's just a beautiful author. I started with the most recent book, which is called A Month in Siena. Haisham lost his father and, well, his country. I mean, Libya, he had to leave when he was eight. The Gaddafi regime was, of course, one of the most famously violent and brutal of fascist regimes. And, but this account from a family that was right in the middle of it is very powerful. And at one point, as the country was opening but also the Civil War was underway, he went back, not having been there since he was eight to find his father, who was in some prison being tortured. And he knew already going there that he would need some recovery space. So he planned with his wife upon leaving Libya to go to Siena and look at paintings for one month. And this book is very moving called A Month in Siena because many art historians don't have very big issues in their lives. And so therefore when they look at paintings, they're not seeing very large issues. And when somebody who's lost their country, their father, a whole human rights campaign, stands in front of a Sienese painting and sees a lot. And what it means to look into a painting when in fact all these things are going on in your life and what the painting then comes back to you with the way the painting speaks is very powerful. It's very beautiful. Anyway, then I said I have to read all of his books. So I'm also reading the Flower Ornament Sutra, which is of course the longest of the Buddhist sutras. It's about five times longer than the Bible. And it was the most read book in China for about 600 years. And it's, you know, if you're lucky, you can do three pages a day. It's so intense. But it's the, what can I say? It's the most transcendent and breathtakingly beautiful of the sutras because it just goes into infinity. You know, human beings only think in terms of limitation.   How many flowers are there in the world? How many flowers bloom, die? Bloom, die, the flower falls, and of course becomes part of the next flower, you know, one generation later. And this idea that everything in the universe is cosmically regenerating and that, you know, and that everything blooms, falls, and then feeds the next generation. And so that life of sacrifice, that life of regeneration, and that life of flowering. Well, of course, that's the heart of no theater. All of Xiami's essays are about the way that flower blooms. So the Flower Ornament Sutra is what's inside of all of those images. And most of Chinese theater, you know, all the actor is called the flower. And the hand gesture is a flower blooming. And every gesture in Cambodian dance is the way a flower, you know, emerges from a seed into a stalk, into a blossom, into a fruit.  And I've been trying to read it for 20 years and I've read maybe half of it. And so I decided this time, I'm really going to read the whole thing. And so that's part of every day. And I'm reading about Stravinsky in the 30s and Paris Theater in the 30s, in this crisis point after 1933, European crisis point of the rise of fascism, the after what has already happened in Germany and the way that's affecting France. And meanwhile, the world becoming aware of the Stalin death camps and the show trials, this moment in time that is so charged and what's in front of artists, which do they choose?  And at the same time, this avant-garde figure of some kind of liberation, what is at stake? And so, yeah, that's what I was reading a bit last night. And, you know, a lot of stuff, as you can see in my house is mostly books. So I have a lot to read. Fantastic. I mean, it's great that this is fantastic. So we are coming close. I'm tuned in and some of our listeners did sending questions, I tried also to incorporate them.  So what do you say? As Rilke wrote, you know, the letters to the young poets and well, maybe also for our listeners, what do you think, you know, they should keep in mind in these times and what is our significance? What is really important participation? You know, as they say in the community organizing, business show up and speak up and be present and just presence. I mean, it's really a time for presence and presence can take lots of forms. And I think we're all finding that in our era of uplinks and the internet.  My mother is in an institution where, you know, nobody can enter because of the, you know, the seriousness of the vulnerability of older people right now. And so I can at least see her every day on FaceTime and we can be together and we can feel each other emotionally. We can understand each other. We can make a deep connection, even though we're not in the same room and she's very upset that we're not in the same room, but how come we have FaceTime? That's incredible. That's a gift. It's a miracle. And so, you know, finding how presence works and being there for other people. And I think sometimes with my mother, I've just put FaceTime on and we sit there for an hour and a half and don't even say that much, but just that she's not alone in some important way.  None of us are outnumbered is that actually all of us, it's all about solidarity. It's about the ways in which we find and deepen and acknowledge and demonstrate solidarity. And here we are. And this is the century for solidarity. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. And that's really something to keep in mind and also to take a very serious, all you said, but really thank you for sharing your experience that of course, in a way as for all of us, it is existential and it is important to hear from you and it feels less alone. It feels that we are connected. And also you have seen a lot along the way. You're one of the great artists of your generation. So for to hear that from you, of course carries additional value. So thank you for participating. Tomorrow we will hear from Oscar Eustis who runs the Public Theater in New York City. Fantastic. That's beautiful. And then together with Tony Torn who runs out of his tiny home from his father, Rip Torn, who left us. We love Tony a lot. Yeah, he has like 20, 30 people in his theater in Rip Torn and the page space. So it will be interesting to give a snapshot of New York and what's up and what we have to think about. So thank you. Thank you again. And I hope you didn't... I love to all those people. Yes. And I hope you didn't have to shorten your walk too much this morning to be with us. Thank you so much. And thank you for Julia for helping us to put it together. Also the great Norm Fresh, you know, who sent the mail. This is important. Reach out. And I'm sure he's listening to you now. And again, tune in next week. We will have artists from Argentina, Romania, from India, from Hungary. The situation Hungary is at higher and then also from New York. So tune back in. But the big important thing is stay safe. And yes, do think about participating of being part of a community and also to listen as we did today. Thank you. Thank you. Fantastic. Thank you so much. This is very, very powerful. Thank you.


Hi, so I would like to share my story. I had this course in my BTEC curricula Control Systems which I was not able to follow that much and then I came across this course being offered at MPTEL by a prof from IIT Delhi. This course was taught so well that I not only excelled in my exams but also developed a keen interest in it and now here I am happily pursuing my masters at IIT Madras in this domain Control Systems.