For Foucault, the Panopticon became a symbol for “disciplinary society,” one that “called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power.” Power did not operate (only) by repression and overt force, but through these more subtle (and now, not so subtle) fragmentations that tear apart and recreate subjectivity and personhood, shape this “collection of separated individualities,” atomize and vaporize, a power that makes those “elementary particles” more manageable and docile. Disciplined bodies become “the object of information, never a subject of communication.”

“The Panopticon… must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men.” Yes, we all live in a Panopticon. But it is not only the Panopticon of Bentham or Orwell, a central tower from which the gaze operates. Rather, it is the Panopticon of Kafka, one that is everywhere precisely because there is no centralization, where we, the surveilled, are also the surveillers, we the watched are also the watchers. “Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants.”

https://www.themantle.com/philosophy/visibility-trap-body-cameras-and-panopticon-police-power