THE PANOPTICON WHERE THE GUARDS ARE THE THIEVES

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What follows is my English translation of an article, originally in Italian, published on Comidad.org on Thursday 13th August 2026. (All emphasis and footnotes mine).

Until a few decades ago, Carl Schmitt1 was a subject for specialists, but for some time now he has become a “popular” author, albeit still known mainly for the usual quotations. In this age of chronic emergency-mongering, a quote from a 1922 text has become particularly widespread, in which Schmitt asserts that the sovereign is the one who can declare a state of exception – that is, suspend the law in order to adopt measures suitable for dealing with an emergency. Some fifty years later, Michel Foucault2 remarked that political science had not yet “beheaded the king”, and that people were still wondering who the sovereign actually was. Another fifty years have passed, and indeed the question of sovereignty – whether to reclaim it or cede more and more of it – seems central to the political debate; yet reality is moving in a different direction. To attempt to describe this situation, one might combine Schmitt with Foucault, inventing a “hard-boiled” version of Carl Schmitt; a phantasmal “Karl Schmidt” who proposes the strange oxymoron of a permanent state of exception, which has become the norm, and which reproduces itself automatically, without there being a “sovereign” – a specific institutional figure – to decide it. This dissolves not only the category of legal-rational power established by Max Weber3, but also the notion of “knowledge” functional to the system of “surveillance and punishment” described by Foucault, for which he found a paradigm in the Panopticon4, the system of absolute surveillance designed by Jeremy Bentham5 in 1791.

Today, it is the company Palantir Technologies that is regarded as the heir to the Panopticon; but the issue concerns the origins of this company and also the way in which it has established itself. As is well known, Palantir was founded by the CIA in 2003; not directly, but through In-Q-Tel, which is an investment agency of the CIA itself. In-Q-Tel is a non-profit organisation; which simply means that it does not pay tax.

Palantir, on the other hand, does make a profit, and it does so through government contracts secured for it by the CIA. Such generosity is rewarded by the fact that officials from the CIA and other government agencies frequently move on to Palantir, where they find well-paid careers. The conflict of interest is all the more glaring when one considers that Palantir is a public limited company, and that the CIA is a dominant entity in the field of classified information, and therefore fully capable of manipulating the market.

It is therefore a system that formalises the conflict of interest and the revolving door between careers in the public and private sectors, as well as the manipulation of the stock market. Such a system can be described in various ways: legalised corruption, a system of privilege, kleptocracy. It does not seem to be what Bentham had in mind when he conceived his utopia (or dystopia) of absolute control. One might argue that the regime of control and the system of personal enrichment are not incompatible, and that the CIA and Palantir can pursue both.

Indeed, they are not entirely incompatible, but the balance of priorities always tends to shift towards personal enrichment; as a result, not only does surveillance become a pretext, but, above all, nothing guarantees order any longer, so that those who ought to be the “guardians” organise themselves into bands of marauders to pursue the goal of enrichment by any means necessary.

And there are many examples of this. Even in our much-maligned little Italy, we have a home-made, makeshift version of the Panopticon: the 41bis prison regime6, in which the prisoner is not only isolated but also constantly monitored. We recently discovered that the Under-Secretary of State for Justice, Andrea Delmastro, who acted as the administrator and apologist for the 41bis regime, had been in business dealings with a front man for a crime boss imprisoned under the very same 41bis regime. The 41bis prison regime is regarded as a national pride (they envy us abroad!) and so the judiciary and the opposition, apart from a bit of posturing, have been careful to avoid making any specific objections.

Things are no better when it comes to determining so-called “competence”. Whilst this term should always be taken with a pinch of salt, here there is absolutely nothing to grasp, because in a system that institutionalises conflicts of interest and the revolving door, proof that you are “competent” becomes self-referential – that is, it lies precisely in the fact of having a hand in things on multiple fronts.

In the climate of emergency following 11th September [2001], in the name of national security, the US was able to do whatever it wanted. The sense of alarm and danger was heightened by the anthrax letter attacks, which claimed five lives. At the time, the bioterrorist attack was attributed to Saddam Hussein; not because there was any evidence or circumstantial evidence to support this, but simply because believing it was useful for securing more funding. In 2008, investigations by the FBI established that the anthrax used in the attacks actually originated from Defence Department laboratories. Biological researcher Bruce Ivins was investigated as the perpetrator of the attacks, but his providential suicide – and his equally providential history of mental health issues – allowed the investigation to be closed without anything being clarified. The only certainty is that the anthrax attacks led to the allocation of huge sums of funding for research into “defence” against biological weapons. When you give someone the means to defend us against a threat, you are, in effect, also giving them the means to create that very threat.

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