Emily Horne

The Best of A Softer World. Over 200 comics from the critically acclaimed series, including many that have never been printed before. Today is a good day to just start over. Be wary of saving too much money, because disaster could strike at any time, and I'm pretty sure heaven is just you sitting there wishing you'd bought an Xbox because it turns out you can take it with you but there's nothing to buy in the great beyond. Be on the lookout for new love! Everyone has kisses. Who is going to slip one into your pocket when you aren't looking? Your lucky numbers this week are: 1,2,3 all the way up to infinity, I am just saying. Good times are on the way. Open your mouth! Get Ready! A Softer World started in 2003, and ended in 2015, and will live forever in this book, and on asofterworld.com

In 1787, British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham conceived of the panopticon, a ring of cells observed by a central watchtower, as a labor-saving device for those in authority. While Bentham's design was ostensibly for a prison, he believed that any number of places that require supervision-factories, poorhouses, hospitals, and schools-would benefit from such a design. The French philosopher Michel Foucault took Bentham at his word. In his groundbreaking 1975 study, Discipline and Punish, the panopticon became a metaphor to describe the creeping effects of personalized surveillance as a means for ever-finer mechanisms of control. Forty years later, the available tools of scrutiny, supervision, and discipline are far more capable and insidious than Foucault dreamed, and yet less effective than Bentham hoped. Shopping malls, container ports, terrorist holding cells, and social networks all bristle with cameras, sensors, and trackers. But, crucially, they are also rife with resistance and prime opportunities for revolution. The Inspection House is a tour through several of these sites-from Guantanamo Bay to the Occupy Oakland camp and the authors' own mobile devices-providing a stark, vivid portrait of our contemporary surveillance state and its opponents. Tim Maly is a regular contributor to Wired, the Atlantic, and Urban Omnivore and is a 2014 fellow at Harvard University's Metalab. Emily Horne is the designer and photographer of the webcomic A Softer World.