Dr Phil Baker Email & Phone Number

On the back of my PhD, my current research is focused on 15-minute cities and the surveillance state. Core to this analysis, is the erosion of the social contract and the demise of liberal-democracies.Paradise City: - Jungle Justice, Bongo Fury, & a Little Touch of JumanjiAbstract:The brilliance of Foucault enables us to view the pandemic as an exercise in “social engineering,” and the subsequent emergence of the 15-minute city as a replica of Bentham’s “Panopticon.” Foucault (1975) cites the Panopticon in ‘Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of a Prison,’ as a model of surveillance to monitor the optimum number of prisoners with the fewest guards. Foucault interprets the Panopticon as a form of “Disciplinary Punishment” that involves power and knowledge to discipline and subjugate a body of individuals (i.e.: inmates), whereby inmates self-regulate to comply with the imposed institution, even when they are not being monitored. In a similar fashion, the concept of a 15-minute city is a larger replication of a state-imposed surveillance system, with drones, satellites, cameras, police, etc, monitoring a body of citizens in a bordered-community. Foucault’s notion of self-regulation and the surveillance state is nothing new, but the scale and application is. Thus, 15-minute cities can be viewed as a contemporary Panopticon, designed to surveil and subjugate the social body (i.e.: it’s subjects), with the fear of swift disciplinary punishment driving individual compliance through self-regulation. However, the ultimate system of subjection is AI and the emergence of the "Digital Panopticon."Welcome to the Jungle.