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To be fair dictatorial regimes are terrible even without advanced technology. Ask someone who lived in the USSR, East Germany, Lybia, Syria, et... Maybe your ph

To be fair dictatorial regimes are terrible even without advanced technology. Ask someone who lived in the USSR, East Germany, Lybia, Syria, et... Maybe your phone does not snitch on you but your neighbors can

Ma8ee 5y ago
Yes, but technology makes the dictatorial regimes more efficient, and increases their reach. Now just imagine a slightly different timeline than our own, in which the coup in January succeeded. Now President for Life Trump takes all Alexa files (and similar from Google and Apple) in existence and scan them for people calling him an asshole. Those people will never get a government job again. If you happened to have called his regime illegal, you get some people in uniform knocking on your door.
Mordisquitos 5y ago
That being true, there is a radical difference in scalability and speed of implementation of an old-fashioned dictatorial regime and the potential that could be achieved with the current ubiquitous technical oligopoly of devices with potential access to voice recordings. Getting a significant proportion of the population loyal or scared enough to snitch on their neighbours takes time and effort, and that's without counting the infrastructure needed to handle and process the reports. Do the snitches phone a government snitchline, write an email, talk to the officer in charge of their sector? How is the specific identity of the people they are snitching on determined? Which bureaucratic level makes the decision to act on a report, are the reports triaged, can you coalesce the data? Now compare that with how comparably fast an authoritarian regime with unlimited access to home recordings could keep control of a population, together with the power of large scale voice recognition and data analysis. What's more, under the right circumstances, it could even be implemented with plausible deniability that the regime is even using this data, in the same way that the British Government (if you forgive the unfortunate analogy) was able to make use of the intelligence gathered by Bletchley Park without the Germans ever suspecting their cryptography was being cracked.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Exactly. Saddam ruled Iraq with an iron fist and that took a ~20% minority on his side. Now imagine how small that minority needs to be with modern tech.

Ma8ee 5y ago

Yes, but technology makes the dictatorial regimes more efficient, and increases their reach. Now just imagine a slightly different timeline than our own, in which the coup in January succeeded. Now President for Life Trump takes all Alexa files (and similar from Google and Apple) in existence and scan them for people calling him an asshole. Those people will never get a government job again. If you happened to have called his regime illegal, you get some people in uniform knocking on your door.

Mordisquitos 5y ago

That being true, there is a radical difference in scalability and speed of implementation of an old-fashioned dictatorial regime and the potential that could be achieved with the current ubiquitous technical oligopoly of devices with potential access to voice recordings. Getting a significant proportion of the population loyal or scared enough to snitch on their neighbours takes time and effort, and that's without counting the infrastructure needed to handle and process the reports. Do the snitches phone a government snitchline, write an email, talk to the officer in charge of their sector? How is the specific identity of the people they are snitching on determined? Which bureaucratic level makes the decision to act on a report, are the reports triaged, can you coalesce the data? Now compare that with how comparably fast an authoritarian regime with unlimited access to home recordings could keep control of a population, together with the power of large scale voice recognition and data analysis. What's more, under the right circumstances, it could even be implemented with plausible deniability that the regime is even using this data, in the same way that the British Government (if you forgive the unfortunate analogy) was able to make use of the intelligence gathered by Bletchley Park without the Germans ever suspecting their cryptography was being cracked.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Exactly. Saddam ruled Iraq with an iron fist and that took a ~20% minority on his side. Now imagine how small that minority needs to be with modern tech.