Seldom does a book predict its imminent descent into textual illegibility, but Cairo Smith’s Scenebux ends with an interesting flourish I have yet to see in other similar works — an afterword containing a lengthy list of references that are “extremely specifically situated in time from the death of Pope Francis to mid-July of 2025.” The effect is to create a map-like web of ephemeral signposts and hyper-localized cultural references, sufficiently layered such that even the Extremely Online reader will find it hard to catch all or even most of them.

What do you need to build a panopticon? If you ask the ghost of Jeremy Bentham, who originated the concept in the late 18th century, he’d say something like the following: you need a circular building with a central observation tower staffed by a single guard. You need the ring of the building to be built with cells filled with prisoners who are being observed by the guard in the tower. If you ask the contemporary liberal subject — the citizen of a free society — you’d receive a more complicated answer. The modern concept of a panopticon isn’t confined to a single building, but expands into the more sprawling, networked, and technologically sophisticated notion of the authoritarian surveillance state.