I went on holiday for a week, and when I next came into the little office I rent, I found that three cameras had made it their home too. One is square and thin and pinched-looking, and hunches like a crane watching people’s ears as they pass into the courtyard. The other two are like the photo – spherical shiny things squatting in a functional white plastic housing with a small antennae, like a Victorian gentleman’s collar that has been fitted for etheric transmission, or one of Ming the Merciless’ courtiers in a remake that can’t afford the red and gold trimmings.

The office is a ‘co-work space’, one of many that have sprung up in Singapore like mushrooms on a wet morning. When I joined there were three of us, working in our headphones on the top floor of a Joo Chiat shophouse, but now I am the only one left. The owners use the space below to run their other companies, and sometimes I sit above boisterous strategy meetings where they talk about user engagement and targeting audiences while showing each other the results of google searches, but after these moments of entrepreneurial vitality a natural calm reasserts itself, and I’m left with the wooden floors and the soft white noise of the fan.

It’s a bit odd, to be honest, being the only subject of CCTV surveillance. I suppose that’s the hope, that the cameras never capture anyone else, at least until their co-work offer becomes more attractive. I haven’t had to change my behaviour, really, though on hot days when I came in I would unbutton my top shirt and take my shoes off, and now I am reluctant to be caught looking so unbusinesslike. It’s a casual sort of establishment but I wouldn’t like to be thought to be treating the place like my bedroom. So now I am in what Foucault called a “state of conscious and permanent visibility”¹, sitting in my panopticon of one, wondering if the cameras are even turned on, where the inspector might be sitting and whether they might just be an algorithm in a server farm somewhere. It’s a much more efficient arrangement than Bentham originally envisaged, ultimately involving just a single human mind that knows about the internet, a technological update that bears out Foucault’s notion that the power produced through the internalisation of the subject-inspector relation “tends to the non-corporal”, and becomes more profound as it does so. Though I am a little ashamed to be such a perfect example. Tomorrow I will do something outrageous and see if they cancel my contract.

Perhaps I am overthinking this whole thing. After all, even robots have to work somewhere.