Joanna Kavenna selects her favourite books that reveal how we are scrutinised – including a history of black slavery and classics by Atwood and Orwell

With immaculate irony, Facebook announced its new cryptocurrency, hoping to bring the financial transactions of its 2.4 billion users on to its platform, in the year that marks 70 years since the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The digital revolution has dramatically altered the way we live and how we are observed, nudged and guided. But who owns all this knowledge and what do they want it for? Why is this interventionist reality watching us so intently, if it only wants to be our friend?

Knowledge is power – a phrase supposedly coined by Francis Bacon in 1597. Two centuries later, Jeremy Bentham advanced the concept of the panopticon: a prison where “by blinds and other contrivances” a single guard would be concealed, having “the most perfect view of every cell”. In reality the guard couldn’t watch everyone all the time, but in his Panopticon Writings Bentham argued the mere possibility of surveillance was enough to alter a prisoner’s behaviour and therefore ensure “power of mind over mind”. Bentham thought this was a great idea; Michel Foucault begged to differ, suggesting in Discipline and Punish that knowledge linked to power not only assumes the authority of “the truth” but has the power to make itself true.