What’s the overlap between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Charlotte Latin School, and singer Peter Gabriel? The ambitious and groundbreaking project Panopticom, unveiled yesterday at Fab Mexico, the twentieth International Fab Lab Conference and Symposium, held at the Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla in Mexico — and Charlotte Latin student Adam Stone ’25 is at the center of it.

In January 2023, musician and humanitarian activist Peter Gabriel, famous for hits such as “Sledgehammer” and “In Your Eyes,” released the single “Panopticom.” The title of the song was an updated version of “panopticon,” an 18th-century idea for a prison where one warden could watch numerous inmates. In Gabriel’s conception, however, it would benefit all citizens of the world: “we reach across the globe / we got all the information flowing,” he sang.

Gabriel wrote on his website of his ambitions for a real-life Panopticom: “The Panopticom platform is a constantly changing satellite fed globe which will be the central tool that allows people to upload and monitor appropriate and meaningful, personal, social, economic and political data along with all manner of scientific and environmental information. It should allow the world to see much more of itself.”

Adam, meanwhile, completed Fab Academy in his sophomore year and then coded a project called the Expert Network Map, which helped sort through the documentation made by other Fab Academy students, classifying their work by subject area and making it easier to find resources. “A big part of this course is building off each other’s work and not reinventing the wheel,” he said. Because of that work, Professor Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms and Fab Lab creator, connected Adam with Peter Gabriel to make the Panopticom a reality: with Gershenfeld’s guidance, Adam programmed the global visualization for the Panopticom prototype. “I learned a lot about creating 3D visualizations,” he said matter-of-factly of his coding work.

The Panopticom shows the global flow of information, ranging from expertise in 3D printing to the mood of local radio stations to the effects of melting glaciers in Bangladesh. “The panopticon is all about surveillance and control, but Peter Gabriel’s version is the flipside of that,” Adam said. “Everyone can benefit from it. That’s how he described it, showing the world to itself as a collective community.”