If you scroll to the very bottom of this website, past the navigation links and the little green seedling emoji, you will find a quote by the 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault:
“The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”
I didn’t put that in the footer just because it sounds intellectual. I put it there because it is the foundational thesis of why this website exists.
When I sit down at my desk to tinker with this site’s Astro code or adjust Tailwind utility classes, I am doing something increasingly rare on the modern internet: I am controlling the architecture of my own identity.
Most of the digital world is not built for this. We live in an era obsessed with the idea of the “authentic self.” We are constantly told to “find out who we truly are,” as if our identity is a hidden treasure buried deep inside our chest, just waiting to be excavated. Once we find it, our job is to project a consistent, easily digestible version of that identity onto Instagram grids, X (Twitter) feeds, and LinkedIn profiles.
Foucault thought this idea of a hidden, static “true self” was a complete illusion. He argued that we do not discover ourselves; we are constructed by the power structures and institutions around us.
To understand how radical this idea is—and how profoundly it applies to our modern digital lives—we have to look at prisons, power, and the concept of the Panopticon.
The Myth of the Sovereign Subject
Before Foucault, the prevailing philosophical belief (championed by thinkers like René Descartes and Immanuel Kant) was that humans were “sovereign subjects.” We were rational, independent agents who could look at the world objectively and make entirely free choices.
Foucault, heavily influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, took a sledgehammer to this idea.
In his historical analyses of madness, medicine, and the penal system, Foucault argued that the “self” is actually a byproduct of Discourse and Power.
When Foucault uses the word discourse, he doesn’t just mean “conversation.” He means the underlying rules, vocabularies, and institutional practices that determine what can and cannot be said in a given era. Discourse defines what is considered “normal” and what is considered “abnormal.”
Think about the concept of mental illness. How society defined, categorized, and treated someone experiencing a mental breakdown in the 16th century is radically different from how a clinical psychologist diagnoses them today. The truth of who that person is changes based on the institutional discourse of the time.
Power, for Foucault, isn’t just a king holding a sword or a government passing a law. Power is a diffuse, invisible web. It is everywhere. It shapes our desires, our habits, and our self-conceptions. And its most brilliant trick is making us police ourselves.
The Panopticon: The Architecture of Paranoia
To illustrate how modern power operates, Foucault turned to an architectural design from the late 18th century. In his seminal book Discipline and Punish, he resurrected a forgotten prison blueprint created by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham: The Panopticon.
The Panopticon is a circular prison. The inmates’ cells are arranged in a ring around the outside edge. In the dead center of the ring stands a single guard tower with large windows.
The genius—and the horror—of the design lies in the lighting. The inmates’ cells are backlit, meaning the guard in the central tower can see every move an inmate makes. However, the guard tower itself is shielded by blinds and complex lighting. The inmates can never see into the tower.
Therefore, an inmate never actually knows if they are being watched at any given second. The guard might be looking at them, or the guard might be asleep, or the tower might be completely empty. Because the inmate might be watched at any moment, they must assume they are being watched at all times.
What is the result? The physical guard is no longer necessary. The inmate internalizes the gaze of the guard. They begin to police their own behavior. The power structure is successfully downloaded into the inmate’s own mind. They become their own warden.
“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.” — Michel Foucault
The Digital Panopticon
Foucault died in 1984, long before the invention of social media, smartphones, or algorithmic feeds. But his description of the Panopticon is the most accurate diagnostic tool we have for the modern internet.
When you post on a social media feed, you are stepping into a digital Panopticon. You do not know exactly who is watching. You do not know if the algorithm will show your thought to ten people or ten million people. You do not know if a future employer, a judgmental peer, or a stranger will dissect your words.
Because you are perpetually visible to an unseen, generalized audience, you begin to internalize their gaze. You alter your behavior. You curate your opinions to align with the dominant discourse of your chosen tribe. You smooth out your rough edges. You suppress the weird, contradictory, or evolving parts of your personality because they might be deemed “abnormal” by the unseen judges in the central tower.
The tragedy of the digital Panopticon is that it forces us to adopt a static, branded identity. We become terrified of changing our minds, because changing our minds looks like inconsistency, and inconsistency is punished by the algorithm and the crowd. We become trapped in the identities we constructed to survive the gaze of the tower.
”Technologies of the Self”
This brings us back to the quote in my footer.
If we are constructed by power, and if we live in a Panopticon that forces us into rigid boxes, are we entirely doomed? Is free will completely dead?
In his later works, particularly The History of Sexuality, Foucault shifted his focus. He realized that while power acts upon us, we also have the capacity to act upon ourselves. He called this “Care of the Self” or “Technologies of the Self.”
Foucault studied the ancient Greeks and Romans, observing how they treated their own lives as works of art. They used journaling, meditation, physical discipline, and philosophical dialogue not to “discover” an authentic self, but to invent a new one.
Freedom, for Foucault, isn’t breaking out of society to live in the woods. Freedom is the active, deliberate refusal to remain the person that institutions and power structures want you to be. It is the conscious project of continuous self-creation.
“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.” — Michel Foucault
The Digital Garden as an Act of Resistance
This is why a digital garden matters. It is a modern “technology of the self.”
When I write an article about theology, or document a strategy for a video game, or complain about my Volkswagen Tiguan’s engine block, I am not trying to build a cohesive “Personal Brand.” I am not trying to perform for the algorithm.
A digital garden is inherently anti-Panopticon. It is un-optimized. It is chronological chaos. Seeds are planted, some grow into massive essays, and others die as half-baked thoughts. It allows for contradiction. It allows me to look at an essay I wrote two years ago and say, “I completely disagree with who I was when I wrote that.”
To build a space like this—to own the code, to own the domain, to reject the feed—is to embrace the messy, beautiful work of becoming someone else. It is an acknowledgment that the self is not a static object to be discovered, but a lifelong project to be cultivated.
We are not supposed to remain the same.
📚 Further Exploration
If you are interested in how philosophy intersects with power, institutions, and our digital lives, these are the best places to start:
Books:
- “Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison” by Michel Foucault - The absolute masterclass on the Panopticon, surveillance, and how modern society creates “docile bodies.”
- “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff - Zuboff essentially takes Foucault’s concepts and applies them directly to Google, Facebook, and the modern data economy. A terrifying, essential read.
- “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” by Jenny Odell - A beautiful, practical look at how to pull your identity out of the digital panopticon by reconnecting with physical space and slow, deliberate attention.
Sources & Citations:
- Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995.
- Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Pantheon Books, 1972.
- Foucault, Michel. “Technologies of the Self.” Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin et al., University of Massachusetts Press, 1988, pp. 16-49.
- Bentham, Jeremy. The Panopticon Writings. Edited by Miran Bozovic, Verso, 1995.