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I’m sure China thinks this is a really great idea, but seriously, what a waste of resources. This goes against the very existential reason for organizing into c
by wizardforhire 8y ago
I’m sure China thinks this is a really great idea, but seriously, what a waste of resources. This goes against the very existential reason for organizing into complex societies in the first place, and second if the powers at be were students of philosophy and especially history they would know that this kind of behavior never ends well for the ruling class.
- traderjane 8y agoWhat's the existential reason for organizing complex societies? -_-a
- thaumasiotes 8y agoDefense against other complex societies.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wizardforhire 8y agoQuality of life
- coldtea 8y agoI'm not sure the tons of 18th-19th century working poor brought in from their rural towns and farms to industrial London (by laws that purposefully made their old trades deprecated), working and living under hellish dickensian conditions would agree...
- skim_milk 8y agoWhat? Other cultures also want to protect their identity? I thought only mine was allowed to.
- jpalomaki 8y agoI don’t think we have seen anything like this in history. In past it was different, because your possibilities for collecting and processing information were much more limited. Also the security apparatus had to employ huge number of people, making it harder to control and less reliable.
- evrydayhustling 8y agoAgree that we've never seen anything like current surveillance capabilities, but there have been big jumps before. For example, IBM famously supplied equipment that made it possible for WW2 Germany (did I dodge Godwin's law?) to collate evidence of ethnicity at a scale not known before, with disastrous results [1]. I think that to some, surveillance often looks like a way to get the efficiency of distributed decision making while keeping central control (which has definitely been the philosophy behind China's economic experiments of the past 30y). But historically, it has arced towards enforcing centralized organization for reasons that have nothing to do with the efficiency of the tech involved - and that pattern has proven both bad for a population and self-defeating for regimes. [1] http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/first/b/black-ibm.html http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/first/b/black-ibm.html
- jdjdhdhhhdshhs 8y agoToo bad about that New York Tims link, though.
- bigmonads 8y agoDefinitely. Remember when the Snowden documents disclosed the Utah facilities keeping ~5 years of every communication record of every person, processed into the most actionable metadata, and the related capabilities to search and correlate the content, interrelationships, and signals implicit across those communications? This is something that could only be targeted decades ago. Now its cost-admissible to run at scale - and to do so adaptively to improve the methods.
- viivaux 8y ago
- ajmurmann 8y agoI think dictators have learned a lot and technology has the possibility to be a real game changer. A few years ago I watched The Red Chapel which is a documentary on which the director and two comedians visit North Korea under the pretence of performing a comedy show there. At one point it got clear that people there even have to keep their basic emotions secret. How do you overthrow the government if it had become that controlling and good at monitoring? I'm afraid it might not be possible. Even more terrifying is the thought that if my above fear that this now might be a one-way road is true, is eventually every country going to become a oppressive dictatorship? On top of that we've seen the last year or so that we now have propaganda warfare on social media. Having free speech and little internal propaganda is clearly a weakness... Edit: formatting
- bigmonads 8y agoI'd genuinely love to hear your analysis of the American surveillance state.