panopticon bingo
Last updated: 3 November 2026
Walk from a train or bus stop to the office and count the things that can see you. A dome camera over the pharmacy door. A plate reader at the car park barrier. A doorbell camera on the corner house, aimed at the footpath rather than the door. A tap point on the bus, a sensor behind the glass of an advertising screen, a guard with an earpiece. None of it is remarkable. All of it is infrastructure.
Panopticon Bingo is a card for that walk.
how to play
Print a card and go somewhere ordinary: a high street, a railway station, a shopping centre, a university campus. Tick a square when you see the thing. Five in a row wins.
Two house rules.
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A working camera with no sign at all is a wild, so tick any square you like. In the EU, somebody pointing a camera at a space the public uses is meant to tell you that it is there, who is running it, and why, which is why “data-controller details on CCTV sign” is a much harder square to tick than “CCTV dome camera”.
The prevalence or lack thereof between those two squares reinforces the point of the game, and if the wild rule makes it too easy where you live, that is worth noting too.
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The second rule is simpler: play it with your eyes. Do not photograph people, and do not photograph into anybody’s home.
Each card draws twenty-four squares from a pool of sixty-four, tiered by how hard they are to find: eight easy, ten medium, six rare, then shuffled. The centre square is free, because somebody within ten metres of you is holding a smartphone.
the title is a joke
Bentham’s panopticon runs on uncertainty. You cannot tell whether the inspector is looking, so you behave as though he always is. A street full of cameras is not that. A good deal of this equipment is badly sited, unmaintained, or recording to a disk nobody will ever open. A decoy camera with no cabling and the wrong mount is a real square on the card, because decoys are genuinely common. The apparatus is enormous and it fails to see all the time.
What a card surfaces is duller than Bentham and more useful. It shows you how much of the apparatus carries no notice at all, how seldom it names whoever is running it, and how completely we have stopped looking. The game is relatively easy to win. That is a finding.
three cards
| Camera with a visible microphone | Parking meter or pay-and-display machine | Card terminal asking for a receipt by email | Numbered CCTV camera (an ID painted on the housing) | “Smile, you’re on camera” sign |
| RFID / NFC badge reader | Small cell / 5G node on lamppost | QR code on a table, poster, or menu | Footfall counter at shop entrance | Thermal or infrared camera |
| Intercom with camera | Leap card / contactless tap point | free (smartphone in someone’s hand) | Smart bin or smart bench | “CCTV in operation” sign |
| ANPR / plate reader at barrier | Dashcam in a parked car | Turnstile or speed gate | Time-and-attendance clock in a back office | Body-worn camera (security / Gardai) |
| Unattended badge on lanyard | Ad screen with embedded sensor | “This call may be recorded” notice | Camera pointed at a doorway from inside a shop | Electric car charger with a screen |
| Bus or train ticket inspector with a handheld scanner | Doorbell camera | Ad screen with embedded sensor | Laptop screen legible from behind | “CCTV in operation” sign |
| Public Wi-Fi captive portal sign | Camera on a construction hoarding | “Smile, you’re on camera” sign | Bluetooth beacon (shelf-edge) | Self-checkout with overhead camera |
| Drone in flight | Electric car charger with a screen | free (smartphone in someone’s hand) | Camera pointed at a doorway from inside a shop | PTZ camera (visibly articulated) |
| QR code on a table, poster, or menu | Visible alarm box on a building | Air-quality or traffic sensor box on a pole | Gunshot or noise-detection sensor | CCTV sign with a phone number on it |
| Dashcam in a parked car | “This call may be recorded” notice | Leap card / contactless tap point | “Bag checks in operation” sign | Window sticker for a monitored alarm firm |
| Biometric reader (finger / face) | Numbered CCTV camera (an ID painted on the housing) | Camera housing with a bird’s nest in it | “Bag checks in operation” sign | “CCTV in operation” sign |
| Bullet camera on pole or wall | Decoy camera (no cabling, wrong mount) | Bike-share dock | RFID / NFC badge reader | Contactless payment terminal |
| Hostile architecture (spikes, sloped bench) | Camera with IR illuminator ring | free (smartphone in someone’s hand) | Self-checkout with overhead camera | Doorbell camera |
| Dashcam in a parked car | Camera cable disappearing into a ceiling tile | Public bin with a sensor or fill-level indicator | Footfall counter at shop entrance | CCTV dome camera |
| Public Wi-Fi captive portal sign | Privacy screen film on device | Window sticker for a monitored alarm firm | Someone photographing strangers | Camera with a visible microphone |
Those three print reasonably from the browser. For a proper set there is a printable PDF of all four cards, one to an A4 page (10 KB).
the script
generate_bingo_cards.py is about a hundred and sixty lines of Python and
reportlab. The pool of squares and
their difficulty tiers live at the top, the draw is eight easy plus ten medium
plus six rare, and the seed defaults to 1984, which is the only joke in the
source. A plain run therefore produces exactly these four cards. Pass
--seed for a different set, --cards for more of them, and edit the pool
for wherever you live.
The code is on GitHub at sarahnovotny/panopticon-bingo.
It was written for a digital arts module in Dublin, where I had expected to spend the term thinking about what public space can see, and, in part, spent it on how badly it sees.