PANOPTICONS OF THE DIGITAL AGE: SURVEILLANCE, BIOPOWER, AND THE POLITICS OF VISIBILITY IN ORWELL'S "NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR" AND EGGERS' "THE CIRCLE"

This paper examines how surveillance regimes have transformed, as presented in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949/2015) and Dave Eggers' The Circle (2013). It situates both books within a Foucauldian framework of panopticism and biopolitics and incorporates modern approaches to the analysis of digital capitalism. Through close textual examination, the research shows that surveillance is not just a tool of observation but an operation that creates comfortable, self-regulated, and extractable subjects economically. An example of authoritarian panopticism can be found in Orwell's dystopia, where fear, coercion, and ideological control internalize observation, control bodies, and shape thinking and feeling. By contrast, the corporate-digital panopticon described by Eggers normalizes visibility based on moral imperatives, social incentives, and algorithmic governance, and reduces Participation, attention, and social measures to the state of digital capital. In comparative analysis, it is possible to see continuity and change: the logic of disciplinary internalized observation remains the same over time, but the digital economy commodifies visibility, turning self-observation into work and value. It also examines the necropolitical aspects of the two, illustrating how a lack of compliance or opposition, whether politically or socially mediated, renders some subjects expendable. This study combines literary analysis, media theory, surveillance studies, and political economy to shed light on the structural processes of convergence among visibility, subjectivity, and power. It presents a critical paradigm that comprehends the politics of surveillance in the past and the present. The results highlight the ability of literature to anticipate and challenge technological and socio-economic regimes that define human life, behavior, and autonomy.