Overview
- Commentators are marking Michel Foucault’s centenary by applying his panopticon idea to today’s surveillance landscape where cameras, platforms and algorithms create many invisible observation points.
- His concept of biopolitics is being used to describe how fitness trackers, sleep monitors and menstrual and fertility apps turn bodily functions into data that produce norms and self‑regulation.
- Experts praise Foucault’s method of questioning taken‑for‑granted truths and his insistence on the risk of speaking truth to power as a lasting tool for critique.
- The celebration is complicated by unresolved allegations reported in 2021 that have not been legally proven and by renewed scrutiny of his past positions on age‑of‑consent reforms.
- The centenary moment is likely to influence public debate and scholarship on tech regulation, data practices and consent by linking long‑standing critiques of institutions to concrete digital practices that affect daily life.