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Anne Applebaum's "Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956" documents the process of imposing authoritarianism. Particularly important is the com
by cproctor 8y ago
Anne Applebaum's "Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956" documents the process of imposing authoritarianism. Particularly important is the combination of surveillance and the threat of violence. You can't have a thug with a baton on every street corner, but with enough information, you can credibly extend the threat of violence far beyond the number of thugs available. The number of nodes in a tree grows much faster than its depth.
How should we compare this kind of upstream oppression--heading off free expression, movement, association before they happen--with more localized forms of assault? More concretely, what should we make of the software developers, designers, salespeople, and managers who collaborate in building these kinds of systems?
- maxxxxx 8y agoI don't even want to consider how the world would look if Stalin or the Nazis had had current technology. I think they would have succeeded.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 8y agoPowerpoint would have tipped the scale?
- RightMillennial 8y agoNot PowerPoint but the ease of near total surveillance that's available now.
- notMick 8y agoThere are a lot of people right now who want to stifle free speech. "Have a different opinion, that's abuse - or a beating". While not restricted to antifa, there seems lately a surge of "little Stalinists", who seem intent to crush or silence any dissenting opinion. In short, history repeats itself, and "experience is recognising a mistake the second time you've made it."
- jschwartzi 8y agoThe naive part of me hopes that experience is recognizing a mistake the second time you're making it.
- maxxxxx 8y agoThere is the saying "History Doesn't Repeat, But It Often Rhymes".
- woolvalley 8y agoThe old people die, and the young can repeat the actions of the old. Sometimes they make new good things, sometimes they repeat bad old things. I call it social mutation.
- magduf 8y agoYep, this is why we need to medically eliminate aging and achieve biological immortality. The conventional wisdom is that a society needs aging and death to eliminate old ideas and impediments to adopting new ideas and adapting to change, but this I believe is wrong. Young people fail to learn the lessons of the past because they never lived it, and so history goes in cycles; we keep making the same mistakes over and over. Eliminating this natural cycle should help society have a much longer memory, and medically fixing the problem where peoples' brains fail to be as good at learning and adapting with old age should fix the problems caused by older people being irrationally resistant to change and new ideas.
- woolvalley 8y agoSeeing how badly a 'hegemony of the aged' cements in most places in the world in the form of wealth and political power, a lot of social problems and systems will have to be 'fixed' before that would be a net benefit. Just go to you local city council planning meeting and see how gray haired and crazy the NIMBYs are, and they dictate local housing policy.
- 8y ago
- wu-ikkyu 8y agoIBM's state of the art computer technology was crucial to the efficiency of the Holocaust. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
- gowld 8y agoLook at China and hope that someone like Mao never returns to power....
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago> More concretely, what should we make of the software developers, designers, salespeople, and managers who collaborate in building these kinds of systems? That's too simple. Good systems have potential (good and bad). For example, "It went from looking for bad guys to monitoring underground pipes." -https://www.npr.org/2018/05/08/609493403/these-smart-sewers-are-part-of-a-growing-trend-connecting-infrastructure-to-the- https://www.npr.org/2018/05/08/609493403/these-smart-sewers-... Were you going to suggest we surveil people who collaborate in building these kinds of systems?