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For me -- apart from dreams of a society where we treat ourselves and each other with honesty instead of sleaze, and what synergistic effects that might have --

For me -- apart from dreams of a society where we treat ourselves and each other with honesty instead of sleaze, and what synergistic effects that might have -- the main issue by far is that once the data is there, once the channels are established, it takes very little to use them for other things. I can't find it right now, but reading either Hannah Arendt or Sebastian Haffner I stumbled across a bit where it's pointed out that the dream of a Gestapo officer would be a map that shows the relations between people. Maybe I misremember it a bit, but not much.. it was something that really was uncanny and creepy, because it wasn't written with future technology in mind, the kind we already have spanned the planet with. It showed out that we're far beyond what even the people worried about Nazism 2.0 could dream of. Yay, what a treat for us. The current state of things is a wet dream for for totalitarians in some ways, you can simply record everything now and then use whatever algorithms you like on it later. Some of the people who warned about the technology and our apathy even back then might say it's way too late now. The fact that we now say "Is it even a problem? Why worry about something that might not happen?" kinda shows something doubleplusungood is going on. Once the only thing between you and a totalitarian hell is how the wind blows, with no other recourse than hoping for the best... well, that's kind of a vacuum, nature abhors and is filling it.

PavlovsCat 10y ago
Found it. > Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
- vithlani 10y ago
  And this is the thing we should be very worried about, not the advertising and attempts to profile the population using you data as a contributing point.

PavlovsCat 10y ago

Found it. > Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all. -- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

vithlani 10y ago
And this is the thing we should be very worried about, not the advertising and attempts to profile the population using you data as a contributing point.