17 ms·

The price of individualism has proved to be the loss of privacy

125 points by freddyym 5y ago

indymike 5y ago
I think this article is best summed up with: "Author exhausts arms hand waving."
EGreg 5y ago
I wrote this a long time ago and it’s still true today: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169
JDEW 5y ago
Another way to think about it: privacy stayed constant over time, it just shifted from the family, local communities, and the social oversight (“eyes on the street”) that came with it, to big tech and government.
- the_other 5y ago
  Could you explain how that describes a “constant”?
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Not the parent but I read it as you've always only had a limited degree of privacy but the "what people know about you" has expanded from a small in-group to a much larger population. Which, very broadly speaking, seems reasonably true.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  1) The amount of information that big tech companies have about individuals is enormous compared to the most nosy neighbor. Search engine usage, email contents, phone location, IM metadata tell quite a story. 2) In the any tight knit community or town privacy is equal and non hierarchical. I know about you and you know about me and everything is good or at least tolerable. This is not comparable in any way to the completely asymmetrical big tech/government surveillance (and consequently manipulation) that is happening. Information is power and asymmetry of power is domination.
- fithisux 5y ago
  You are right. It has been productionized.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
This is a very wordy article with a lot of non sequitur. A lot of big claims about surveillance states and behavior modification, but then the only practical examples are things like people installing doorbell cams to catch package thieves instead of “the prying eye of their neighbors” or traffic cameras catching red light runners. The article then veers toward complaints about “cancel culture”, albeit with very flowery language: > Used to purge public life of these individuals, social media enables the construction and enforcement of intellectual and political orthodoxy. Is it really surveillance if people are responding to public social media posts that someone deliberately uploads to a website for the purpose of public discussion? I read the whole article but struggled to get anything useful out of it. The author’s entire premise seems to be built on a “good old days” vision of the past that has been idealized as a sort of utopia where everyone behaved well because their neighbors were constantly watching them, which is an ironic premise for an article that also complains about cancel culture on social media: > Omnipresent surveillance, a technical fix for social disorder, is a surrogate for the communities a post-Enlightenment world has destroyed.
- bsedlm 5y ago
  it's just that now, your nosey neighbors softly keeping an eye on you are not limited by the geography of neighborhoods. it's now limited by the scaling capabilities of the entire internet (i.e. unlimited)
- sixothree 5y ago
  There are other examples author could have used - google tracking location of every android user at all times, to improve maps of course.
  - elurg 5y ago
    This is easy to disable. I enabled it after covid struck and found that nowadays the data has extremely low granularity.
    - mindslight 5y ago
hammock 5y ago
If I understand, in essence the relevant control/surveillance surface is whatever the agent is. If that's a head of household, then you surveil him - and the principals (individuals in the family/household) preserve privacy. If every individual has agency, then every individual tends to get surveilled. If you think about this from a marketing/sales POV, you want to understand the primary purchaser, not necessarily anyone else.
- andrewljohnson 5y ago
  I’d follow you on Twitter. Are you there?
- mindslight 5y ago
  Except what is the motive to not surveil anyone besides the head of household? Sure, it becomes harder because the head of household is generally more legible (in the ribbonfarm sense), but it's not like the surveillers just give up on everyone else. In fact targeting children has always been quite lucrative, for example "Go get your phone and hold it up to the TV to talk to Santa Claus ... <touchtones for 900 number>" Approaching from another direction, how can I delegate surveillance of myself to another third party who interacts with the system? It's certainly possibly for specific aspects (eg nominee deeds, LLCs with professional managers, etc), but being able to do so in general is not possible (eg many counterparties won't accept interacting with an LLC and will demand to know the beneficial owners). Surveillance systems are fundamentally totalitarian in that they assert having in-depth knowledge about your existence, regardless of what you've actually leaked to them.
  - amalcon 5y ago
    The motive is precisely because it is less lucrative/useful, and surveillance costs money. The 900 number thing is only lucrative because anyone, even a small child, with physical access to a phone has enough agency to bill arbitrary things against that phone number. The dialer (or their guardian) can be forced to repay that bill in some cases, but society obviously lets them incur it. The way you would delegate surveillance of yourself to another party is to give everything you own to that party in exchange for the ability to live on their property and never interact with the rest of society. Giving up all agency does not look like creating some legal fictions, it looks like withdrawal from society. I'm not sure I agree with grandparent's assessment, but I don't think these are the strongest arguments against it. I think a better argument would appeal to incidental surveillance: my car has no agency, and nobody is interested in tracking the car for its own sake, but it is surveilled as a way to watch me.
roenxi 5y ago
Creeping surveillance has nothing to do with philosophies or control systems. The technological era has made it really cheap to spy on people. It is going to take some real bloodbaths for principles to win over that sort of economic pressure. Hopefully we never really feel the bite of cheap surveillance, but realistically? The Nazis weren't even a century ago. The next 100 years will be rough.
- jackcosgrove 5y ago
  I think the article misses the mark attributing surveillance to a social need to control behavior that was a vacuum because of the dissolution of traditional communities. Immediately before the surveillance era, at least in the US, crime rates had been declining for many years indicating no unraveling of social order. Meanwhile community dissolution had been going on for decades. I think the obvious answer is correct: mass surveillance became possible and cheap, and states adopted it as soon as they could. I think the motivation for the article is a hope for a kind of society where information technology can coexist without surveillance, and the author errs by misdiagnosing the shape this society could take. It won't be one where we revert to traditional community control which the author supposes, or one where people can outrun surveillance with savvy use of technology which seems to be the default position of many tech-savvy people. Rather the solution is to apply democratic control to information technology. Democratic control is the best way to mitigate concentrations of power such as the military, courts, taxation, etc.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    I think there is another factor that has to be considered: An increasingly risk aware or risk intolerant population. I believe that the general population is more fearful of threats, and therefore more willing to sacrifice privacy for perceived security. As you say, crime rates are declining, but technology has enabled the population to be informed of every crime in every community, so the threat perception is greatly increased.
germandiago 5y ago
I have lived in a communist country where they use both the traditional and the technology methods for surveillance. Way more than any capitalist country and censorship (though also there is to some extent in westerner world but softer). I fail to see how the headline matches the fact that in capitalist countries there is surveillance with technology as a difference with where I lived.
talkingtab 5y ago
Confuses cause and effect. The loss of privacy, aka tracking people for what is euphemistically called "advertising", causes individualism. Or more simply, if you destroy the ability to communicate and discuss collaboratively, communities cannot be created. CAS.
elurg 5y ago
The idea that shifting "norm enforcement" from local communities towards impersonal institutions is somehow "bad" is extremely wrong and harmful. Large impersonal institutions are much easier to hold accountable than local communities. In small groups all sorts of abuse can be hidden and sometimes even outright accepted in the name of "cohesion". Small communities with informal power dynamics can be extremely toxic in a way that is far more harmful than google knowing what videos you watch. Small town may seem idyllic but they are often hell for that one gay resident.
- AutumnCurtain 5y ago
  >Small town may seem idyllic but they are often hell for that one gay resident. Precisely. And that enforcement of the orthodoxy often takes far more severe forms than online criticism.
- xondono 5y ago
  > Large impersonal institutions are much easier to hold accountable than local communities. It’s clearly easier to get CocaCola to change course than say, my local butcher. /s
- titzer 5y ago
  > Large impersonal institutions are much easier to hold accountable than local communities. I think this is exactly backwards. > but they are often hell for that one gay resident. Contrarily, people are way more likely to accept a person once they know them personally as part of their community. Small towns don't operate like high school locker rooms.
  - elurg 5y ago
    > > Large impersonal institutions are much easier to hold accountable than local communities. > I think this is exactly backwards. No it is not. States and corporations are bound by law and to a great extent by public opinion while smaller communities are much freer to tyrannize their members. Being part of the same "community" didn't stop school segregation in the south, the federal government did.
sysadm1n 5y ago
> we are seeing an increased reliance on technologies of surveillance. For example, front-door cameras now protect homes from burglars, and internet-connected videos inform absent residents when packages are delivered I'd like to re-frame this positively. Putting minor surveillance powers in the hands of everyday folk is a net win. I don't know about you, but I like to see who is poking around my premises. Oldskool neighborhood watch initiatives don't cut it anymore. I can see there would be a problem if your IP camera got accidentally broadcasted to the public facing Internet and criminals could see your house was empty, but the onus is on the user to lock down their equipment. Not the manufacturers.
- feanaro 5y ago
  > but the onus is on the user to lock down their equipment. Not the manufacturers. Huh? Why? I mean the user needs to have responsibility for the equipment they use, but it is absolutely also the manufacturers responsibility to produce reasonably locked down equipment.
  - sysadm1n 5y ago
    I meant that these devices come with security features that the users don't even research beforehand, and blindly stick them on the Internet without even changing the default password. Google for 'public IP camera directories'. There's people monitoring the growth of their cannabis plants in their 'secret' attic, all public for everyone to see (including law enforcement).
    - neon_electro 5y ago
      The design of the device shouldn't allow the user to place it in an operational state without doing obvious security checkup items like changing the default password; this is an onus on the manufacturer.
- mindslight 5y ago
  You've got a point (individually-run surveillance is much less concerning that societal-level surveillance), but you're completely ignoring that the most popular brands of cameras rely on sending video to centralized conglomerates.
helen___keller 5y ago
This could be summarized: in the west, technology has empowered populism and in the east, technology has empowered totalitarianism; often to the same ends.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  You missed the argument against accountability for ones own words (aka "cancel culture"). To be fair, though, it was kind of shoehorned in. I wonder if it was the original point of the article?
  - helen___keller 5y ago
    I do think the author made a mistake here: the author credits western 'social controls' to so-called "Neo-paternalist nudge theories", i.e. as if there's some western illiberal thinkers out there that have decided for us that we should collectively police each other socially for the greater good. This couldn't be further from the truth. Those thinkers exist, but they have no power anyways. Cancel culture and other "illiberal" modern activity is actually emergent behavior from strongly connected social networks. It's pure populism. It's just that millions of people go on the internet for the purpose of feeling angry at somebody else on twitter or facebook, and this via the free market results in people losing jobs, people being ostracized, or even the formation of real-life protests and riots.
    - threatofrain 5y ago
      I wouldn't call social media viral phenomena as strongly connected as opposed to broadly connected. Viral media does not require strong connections (people reacting over Twitter or Reddit hardly know each other), and neither is virality obviously boosted by strong connections.
- 1337shadow 5y ago
  Populism being the point of democracy or am I missing something? How can that be "often to the same end" than totalitarism?
tomohawk 5y ago
There is no distinction between so called "surveillance capitalism" and the state that uses it for their purposes.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  Agreed, I get the sense people are still sounding it out from the bottom up, as the collusion of the state with industry to dominate a nation was the original definition of fascism. The difference from early 20th century models and later and into the new century is that both fascism and communism were mere national movements. The necessary condition for totalitarianism as described by Arendt is it was by definition not limited to or part of the mere nation state, but rather a movement that leveraged other movements to prey upon and absorb nation states under its system of dominion, using directed chaos against atomized people. This is what made totalitarianism a meta level system, and not just a left/right thing. The sufficient and necessary condition is that it aims to become post-national as a means to dissolve the nation state into atomized/neutralized individuals under totalitarian rule. (critics of both capitalism and socialism should recognize this, but if you don't, the deception is by design.) North Korea and Singapore because they are still nations are still just mere national tyrannies and surveillance states, whereas China, the US, Britain, and even to a greater extent, Australia and Canada are becoming totalitarianized because they are already the compromised vassals for a post-national movement that seeks to effectively dissolve all physical, sexual, familial, religious, tribal, regionalist, nationalist, and obviously, racist, identities. One liquid humanity under managed technocratic rule. If one is to be anti- something, anti(surveillance capitalism) is perhaps the only accurate anti-fascism of this era, as it is to be against the collusion of the state with surveillance capitalists to dominate your countries, but if you are really looking to fight the good fight of today and not baited with disctractions into relitigating ideas from 100 years ago, I would suggest turning your attention to how surveillance is used to totalitarianize nation states and dissolve them, as whether we are right or left, when we are against the anti-human deception and evils of totalitarianization, we are very much on the same team.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
mark_l_watson 5y ago
The actual title of the article is “Surveillance Capitalism Vs. The Surveillance State.” I could be very wrong about this, but, I worry more about corporate surveillance than government surveillance. That said I worry about both. When the government and corporations know much more about us than we know about them then they have a tactical advantage in every interaction.
- germandiago 5y ago
  I worry about both. But a corporation will never have the level of power of a state as we know them today. The state on top of f*cking you they extract you money so they end up abusing you with your money. If they feel uncomfortable they regulate against you if they see a chance and do not forget they have the legal monopoly of force. It is not that I favor one or the other. Is is just a bigger threat power in a State, which remember, are managed by imperfect humans also, such as corporations, than corporations. Because corporations cannot become monopolies easily (in deregulation I would say that they cannot by definition) and do not have power to regulate (at least not in theory, we all know crony capitalism, right?).
OneTimePetes 5y ago
Sigh, read it and abandoned it. The true price is never discussed. He who feeds the data dragon, supplies a Interface for Social engineering on a unprecedented scale. Facebook or Google could cook subtle social control schemes up in a cognitive blindspot and we could not even observe or discuss them, because they would seem natural to us. Like a synthetic religion and cults, just replacing the old religions & communitys, easily accessible for manipulation via the social networks.
fithisux 5y ago
Very insightful document uncovering what is happening right now.
tristor 5y ago
This article draws conclusions not in evidence, and thinking about this more broadly there is nothing about individualism that requires a loss of privacy. On the contrary, I myself, as most staunch individualists, are also privacy advocates, and we structure our lives to both preserve our individuality and freedom, and privacy is a central point of that. What external structures do not know about you cannot be used to manipulate or control you, so privacy is a bedrock cornerstone of individual liberty and the individualist movement. Their example of doorbell cameras especially falls flat to me, because most people (including myself) are motivated to have a doorbell camera due to our own individual issues and not to support police dragnet surveillance. Some folks, myself included, even have made the effort to use doorbell cameras that are not cloud connected and record video locally on NVR so that this data can't be shared without our explicit permission. There is nothing about these situations that /requires/ a loss of privacy, and the causal link assumed in this article is not established within. It's simply the case that every major tech company is incentivized to create systems that destroy privacy because they can more effectively monetize on our data and government agencies turn a blind eye because they also benefit from the loss of privacy in the private sector. It takes technical acumen and effort to ensure your privacy while still taking care to utilize modern technology, and the majority of people, even in the tech industry, do not have the necessary technical acumen to do so. This is clearly a problem, but it's not a trade-off between individualism and privacy, it's a trade-off between the greed of dystopian multi-national megacorps and privacy.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jrumbut 5y ago
  I thought it was pretty well established. The author wasn't saying that people who value individualism don't value privacy, rather that the pursuit of individual over community values caused an erosion of privacy (regardless of anyone's intentions). The argument was that getting rid of the informal, localized social norm enforcement mechanisms (your nosy neighbors, a meddlesome priest, etc) that used to prevent people from fully expressing their individuality created a vaccuum that was filled by surveillance. Your nosy neighbor used to judge you for things we don't think ought to be judged anymore, but they also noticed if you were drinking too much or stopped going to work because your mental health was declining. Since society still needs to work and not drive drunk, surveillance by states and large corporations has stepped in to fill the gap. So, according to the author, the individualistic ethos brought us to the point where some machine will silently judge me for this post.
Causality1 5y ago
If I had a rubber stamp of [citation needed] I would wear it down to the nub on this article.
jollybean 5y ago
There isn't even a remote equivalence between 'a few doorbells which may, in some cases be used by police' to the 360 information control that the CCP has implemented. 'Surveillance Capitalism' of the Facebook type is equally as mundane: nobody is actually harmed by the fact that Facebook knows a lot about you. Facebook feeds people garbage information, which is arguably harm, but they'd do that anyhow. If Facebook's was only allowed to collect a fragment of information relative to what they do today - nothing would change. The world wouldn't skip a beat. Meanwhile, the failure of CCP's information controls, would probably mean regime change within 5 years.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
disneygibson 5y ago
You can think of it as a hollowing out of the middle. As people have become more individualistic, they’ve lost interest in the “middle range” of power: neighborhood, town, city, state. This power structure has collapsed almost entirely, flushing all of it to the top, centralized federal level. This is also why an urbanite in Brooklyn is more similar to one in San Francisco than to those a hundred miles north in upstate New York. Local identities have been replaced entirely by national and increasingly international ones.
- WC3w6pXxgGd 5y ago
  This has nothing to do with individualism and everything to do with the internet creating "global communities."
- mbg721 5y ago
  I wouldn't chalk that up to individualism as much as to the idea that the Internet has caused people increasingly to identify with groups that don't correspond to physical proximity.
  - disneygibson 5y ago
    There is much more homogenization today which goes far beyond your point.
srcreigh 5y ago
Why is the submission title different from the article title?
s1artibartfast 5y ago
Loss of privacy is not driven by individualism, but by an increasingly risk intolerant society. Individualism is not directly in conflict with privacy, but rather both are in conflict public safety and compliance. The article posits that increased individualism and breakdown of communities has led to a loss of privacy, but this was not a given, but a choice. A society can simply choose to reject the loss of privacy and accept the costs that may come with individualism & privacy. Further, the entire argument that community surveillance was effective and required replacement is suspect. For example, murder rates were higher and case closure was much worse in the past under the community surveillance model. Crime rates were dropping at the same time that communities were disintegrating, all before the advent of mass surveillance.
- gelotar 5y ago
  A society cannot "simply choose" to reject corporate and government mass surveillance. There was no public vote I'm aware of to decide whether to install cameras and sensors on every street and highway. Shall we vote to take them down now? Before 2013, only lunatics were concerned with mass surveillance. Look how far we've come. Now the media gives lip service to "privacy advocates". And the result of all this "privacy advocacy" is a giant popup window reminding you that you must submit to tracking if you wish to engage. Engineering consent. Maybe we can meet up in the metaverse to organize a revolution.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    >A society cannot "simply choose" to reject corporate and government mass surveillance. There is absolutely choice. Both are are supported by continuous choices choices people make every do. The choices are different between government and corporate surveillance. On the government surveillance side, people can choose to vote for politicians that support their privacy and lobby their representatives. They can also start public propositions, make donations, or run for office. On the corporate side, people can choose to refuse to use products, websites, or stores that sell their data. People can take actions to anonymize themselves. People make these choices every day. Often people choose not to support privacy because they value something else more, e.g. convenience, money, time, safety, ect.
SyzygistSix 5y ago
I think the biggest driver for loss of privacy is mass consumerism and the popularity of FAANG-like products, which have little to do with individualism. I think advertisers have done a great job of equating individualism with consumer choice in many people's minds but that doesn't make it so.
Aidevah 5y ago
It's always good to see John Gray's writing getting attention, in my opinion he is one of the most perceptive writers out there. However, the title of this submission should probably changed since the conversation is getting sidetracked. The original title of the article is "Surveillance Capitalism Vs. The Surveillance State" with the tagline "Surveillance technology is the surrogate for the communities Western capitalism has destroyed". The comment about individualism and privacy is a single sentence in the middle. The main drive of the article, as suggested in the original title, is about the convergence of both West and East in terms of mass surveillance and internet monopolies. Considering the vast gulf between their histories and cultures, surely this convergence is an interesting (and not at all inevitable) phenomenon.
Ginden 5y ago
> the logic of Enlightenment values has led to increased social control. Despite that, fundamentalist Christian communities, closest surrogate for "good days before Enlightenment", espouse much stricter social control than mainstream society.
godelski 5y ago
Alternative explanation: rise of authoritarianism in the west leads to more loss of privacy.
chiefalchemist 5y ago
The article has a minor flaw that should be highlighted. Per "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" the issue isn't the surveillance per se. It's how that awareness is used against us. That is, the Surveillance Capitalist isn't simply watching, there's a feedback loop that allows them to influence. Influence where to go. Influence what to buy. Ultimately, influence what to think. It's not about surveillance. It's about control. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw
cblconfederate 5y ago
False dichotomies there. Collectivism is not lacking surveillance, it's just that the surveillance is distributed and decentralized, you have citizens snooping on other people's business and ratting them out for their political beliefs (a behavior common in former soviet countries). Individualism does not require surveillance. The existence of the state does though, and if the preference of the citizens is for individualism, they delegate their collective surveillance duties to the police/army/secret services etc. Individualism is possible without a state, collectivism is not.
nitwit005 5y ago
> In Western countries, globalization and rapid technological change have dissolved the communities that grew up around industrial centers in the past. As these communities have crumbled, the systems of informal monitoring by neighbors and peers that maintained order within them have ceased to be effective. I've never previously seen someone try to portray early industrial cities as lacking in crime. A strange form of rose colored glasses.
raxxorrax 5y ago
Pretty much the opposite is true, the dichotomy is just wrong-

125 points by freddyym 5y ago

I think this article is best summed up with: "Author exhausts arms hand waving."

I wrote this a long time ago and it’s still true today: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169 http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169

JDEW 5y ago

Another way to think about it: privacy stayed constant over time, it just shifted from the family, local communities, and the social oversight (“eyes on the street”) that came with it, to big tech and government.

the_other 5y ago
Could you explain how that describes a “constant”?
- ghaff 5y ago
  Not the parent but I read it as you've always only had a limited degree of privacy but the "what people know about you" has expanded from a small in-group to a much larger population. Which, very broadly speaking, seems reasonably true.
goodpoint 5y ago
1) The amount of information that big tech companies have about individuals is enormous compared to the most nosy neighbor. Search engine usage, email contents, phone location, IM metadata tell quite a story. 2) In the any tight knit community or town privacy is equal and non hierarchical. I know about you and you know about me and everything is good or at least tolerable. This is not comparable in any way to the completely asymmetrical big tech/government surveillance (and consequently manipulation) that is happening. Information is power and asymmetry of power is domination.
fithisux 5y ago
You are right. It has been productionized.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

This is a very wordy article with a lot of non sequitur. A lot of big claims about surveillance states and behavior modification, but then the only practical examples are things like people installing doorbell cams to catch package thieves instead of “the prying eye of their neighbors” or traffic cameras catching red light runners. The article then veers toward complaints about “cancel culture”, albeit with very flowery language: > Used to purge public life of these individuals, social media enables the construction and enforcement of intellectual and political orthodoxy. Is it really surveillance if people are responding to public social media posts that someone deliberately uploads to a website for the purpose of public discussion? I read the whole article but struggled to get anything useful out of it. The author’s entire premise seems to be built on a “good old days” vision of the past that has been idealized as a sort of utopia where everyone behaved well because their neighbors were constantly watching them, which is an ironic premise for an article that also complains about cancel culture on social media: > Omnipresent surveillance, a technical fix for social disorder, is a surrogate for the communities a post-Enlightenment world has destroyed.

bsedlm 5y ago
it's just that now, your nosey neighbors softly keeping an eye on you are not limited by the geography of neighborhoods. it's now limited by the scaling capabilities of the entire internet (i.e. unlimited)
sixothree 5y ago
There are other examples author could have used - google tracking location of every android user at all times, to improve maps of course.
- elurg 5y ago
  This is easy to disable. I enabled it after covid struck and found that nowadays the data has extremely low granularity.
  - mindslight 5y ago

hammock 5y ago

If I understand, in essence the relevant control/surveillance surface is whatever the agent is. If that's a head of household, then you surveil him - and the principals (individuals in the family/household) preserve privacy. If every individual has agency, then every individual tends to get surveilled. If you think about this from a marketing/sales POV, you want to understand the primary purchaser, not necessarily anyone else.

andrewljohnson 5y ago
I’d follow you on Twitter. Are you there?
mindslight 5y ago
Except what is the motive to not surveil anyone besides the head of household? Sure, it becomes harder because the head of household is generally more legible (in the ribbonfarm sense), but it's not like the surveillers just give up on everyone else. In fact targeting children has always been quite lucrative, for example "Go get your phone and hold it up to the TV to talk to Santa Claus ... <touchtones for 900 number>" Approaching from another direction, how can I delegate surveillance of myself to another third party who interacts with the system? It's certainly possibly for specific aspects (eg nominee deeds, LLCs with professional managers, etc), but being able to do so in general is not possible (eg many counterparties won't accept interacting with an LLC and will demand to know the beneficial owners). Surveillance systems are fundamentally totalitarian in that they assert having in-depth knowledge about your existence, regardless of what you've actually leaked to them.
- amalcon 5y ago
  The motive is precisely because it is less lucrative/useful, and surveillance costs money. The 900 number thing is only lucrative because anyone, even a small child, with physical access to a phone has enough agency to bill arbitrary things against that phone number. The dialer (or their guardian) can be forced to repay that bill in some cases, but society obviously lets them incur it. The way you would delegate surveillance of yourself to another party is to give everything you own to that party in exchange for the ability to live on their property and never interact with the rest of society. Giving up all agency does not look like creating some legal fictions, it looks like withdrawal from society. I'm not sure I agree with grandparent's assessment, but I don't think these are the strongest arguments against it. I think a better argument would appeal to incidental surveillance: my car has no agency, and nobody is interested in tracking the car for its own sake, but it is surveilled as a way to watch me.

roenxi 5y ago

Creeping surveillance has nothing to do with philosophies or control systems. The technological era has made it really cheap to spy on people. It is going to take some real bloodbaths for principles to win over that sort of economic pressure. Hopefully we never really feel the bite of cheap surveillance, but realistically? The Nazis weren't even a century ago. The next 100 years will be rough.

jackcosgrove 5y ago
I think the article misses the mark attributing surveillance to a social need to control behavior that was a vacuum because of the dissolution of traditional communities. Immediately before the surveillance era, at least in the US, crime rates had been declining for many years indicating no unraveling of social order. Meanwhile community dissolution had been going on for decades. I think the obvious answer is correct: mass surveillance became possible and cheap, and states adopted it as soon as they could. I think the motivation for the article is a hope for a kind of society where information technology can coexist without surveillance, and the author errs by misdiagnosing the shape this society could take. It won't be one where we revert to traditional community control which the author supposes, or one where people can outrun surveillance with savvy use of technology which seems to be the default position of many tech-savvy people. Rather the solution is to apply democratic control to information technology. Democratic control is the best way to mitigate concentrations of power such as the military, courts, taxation, etc.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  I think there is another factor that has to be considered: An increasingly risk aware or risk intolerant population. I believe that the general population is more fearful of threats, and therefore more willing to sacrifice privacy for perceived security. As you say, crime rates are declining, but technology has enabled the population to be informed of every crime in every community, so the threat perception is greatly increased.

germandiago 5y ago

I have lived in a communist country where they use both the traditional and the technology methods for surveillance. Way more than any capitalist country and censorship (though also there is to some extent in westerner world but softer). I fail to see how the headline matches the fact that in capitalist countries there is surveillance with technology as a difference with where I lived.

talkingtab 5y ago

Confuses cause and effect. The loss of privacy, aka tracking people for what is euphemistically called "advertising", causes individualism. Or more simply, if you destroy the ability to communicate and discuss collaboratively, communities cannot be created. CAS.

elurg 5y ago

The idea that shifting "norm enforcement" from local communities towards impersonal institutions is somehow "bad" is extremely wrong and harmful. Large impersonal institutions are much easier to hold accountable than local communities. In small groups all sorts of abuse can be hidden and sometimes even outright accepted in the name of "cohesion". Small communities with informal power dynamics can be extremely toxic in a way that is far more harmful than google knowing what videos you watch. Small town may seem idyllic but they are often hell for that one gay resident.

AutumnCurtain 5y ago
>Small town may seem idyllic but they are often hell for that one gay resident. Precisely. And that enforcement of the orthodoxy often takes far more severe forms than online criticism.
xondono 5y ago
> Large impersonal institutions are much easier to hold accountable than local communities. It’s clearly easier to get CocaCola to change course than say, my local butcher. /s
titzer 5y ago
> Large impersonal institutions are much easier to hold accountable than local communities. I think this is exactly backwards. > but they are often hell for that one gay resident. Contrarily, people are way more likely to accept a person once they know them personally as part of their community. Small towns don't operate like high school locker rooms.
- elurg 5y ago
  > > Large impersonal institutions are much easier to hold accountable than local communities. > I think this is exactly backwards. No it is not. States and corporations are bound by law and to a great extent by public opinion while smaller communities are much freer to tyrannize their members. Being part of the same "community" didn't stop school segregation in the south, the federal government did.

sysadm1n 5y ago

> we are seeing an increased reliance on technologies of surveillance. For example, front-door cameras now protect homes from burglars, and internet-connected videos inform absent residents when packages are delivered I'd like to re-frame this positively. Putting minor surveillance powers in the hands of everyday folk is a net win. I don't know about you, but I like to see who is poking around my premises. Oldskool neighborhood watch initiatives don't cut it anymore. I can see there would be a problem if your IP camera got accidentally broadcasted to the public facing Internet and criminals could see your house was empty, but the onus is on the user to lock down their equipment. Not the manufacturers.

feanaro 5y ago
> but the onus is on the user to lock down their equipment. Not the manufacturers. Huh? Why? I mean the user needs to have responsibility for the equipment they use, but it is absolutely also the manufacturers responsibility to produce reasonably locked down equipment.
- sysadm1n 5y ago
  I meant that these devices come with security features that the users don't even research beforehand, and blindly stick them on the Internet without even changing the default password. Google for 'public IP camera directories'. There's people monitoring the growth of their cannabis plants in their 'secret' attic, all public for everyone to see (including law enforcement).
  - neon_electro 5y ago
    The design of the device shouldn't allow the user to place it in an operational state without doing obvious security checkup items like changing the default password; this is an onus on the manufacturer.
mindslight 5y ago
You've got a point (individually-run surveillance is much less concerning that societal-level surveillance), but you're completely ignoring that the most popular brands of cameras rely on sending video to centralized conglomerates.

helen___keller 5y ago

This could be summarized: in the west, technology has empowered populism and in the east, technology has empowered totalitarianism; often to the same ends.

notreallyserio 5y ago
You missed the argument against accountability for ones own words (aka "cancel culture"). To be fair, though, it was kind of shoehorned in. I wonder if it was the original point of the article?
- helen___keller 5y ago
  I do think the author made a mistake here: the author credits western 'social controls' to so-called "Neo-paternalist nudge theories", i.e. as if there's some western illiberal thinkers out there that have decided for us that we should collectively police each other socially for the greater good. This couldn't be further from the truth. Those thinkers exist, but they have no power anyways. Cancel culture and other "illiberal" modern activity is actually emergent behavior from strongly connected social networks. It's pure populism. It's just that millions of people go on the internet for the purpose of feeling angry at somebody else on twitter or facebook, and this via the free market results in people losing jobs, people being ostracized, or even the formation of real-life protests and riots.
  - threatofrain 5y ago
    I wouldn't call social media viral phenomena as strongly connected as opposed to broadly connected. Viral media does not require strong connections (people reacting over Twitter or Reddit hardly know each other), and neither is virality obviously boosted by strong connections.
1337shadow 5y ago
Populism being the point of democracy or am I missing something? How can that be "often to the same end" than totalitarism?

tomohawk 5y ago

There is no distinction between so called "surveillance capitalism" and the state that uses it for their purposes.

motohagiography 5y ago
Agreed, I get the sense people are still sounding it out from the bottom up, as the collusion of the state with industry to dominate a nation was the original definition of fascism. The difference from early 20th century models and later and into the new century is that both fascism and communism were mere national movements. The necessary condition for totalitarianism as described by Arendt is it was by definition not limited to or part of the mere nation state, but rather a movement that leveraged other movements to prey upon and absorb nation states under its system of dominion, using directed chaos against atomized people. This is what made totalitarianism a meta level system, and not just a left/right thing. The sufficient and necessary condition is that it aims to become post-national as a means to dissolve the nation state into atomized/neutralized individuals under totalitarian rule. (critics of both capitalism and socialism should recognize this, but if you don't, the deception is by design.) North Korea and Singapore because they are still nations are still just mere national tyrannies and surveillance states, whereas China, the US, Britain, and even to a greater extent, Australia and Canada are becoming totalitarianized because they are already the compromised vassals for a post-national movement that seeks to effectively dissolve all physical, sexual, familial, religious, tribal, regionalist, nationalist, and obviously, racist, identities. One liquid humanity under managed technocratic rule. If one is to be anti- something, anti(surveillance capitalism) is perhaps the only accurate anti-fascism of this era, as it is to be against the collusion of the state with surveillance capitalists to dominate your countries, but if you are really looking to fight the good fight of today and not baited with disctractions into relitigating ideas from 100 years ago, I would suggest turning your attention to how surveillance is used to totalitarianize nation states and dissolve them, as whether we are right or left, when we are against the anti-human deception and evils of totalitarianization, we are very much on the same team.
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mark_l_watson 5y ago

The actual title of the article is “Surveillance Capitalism Vs. The Surveillance State.” I could be very wrong about this, but, I worry more about corporate surveillance than government surveillance. That said I worry about both. When the government and corporations know much more about us than we know about them then they have a tactical advantage in every interaction.

germandiago 5y ago
I worry about both. But a corporation will never have the level of power of a state as we know them today. The state on top of f*cking you they extract you money so they end up abusing you with your money. If they feel uncomfortable they regulate against you if they see a chance and do not forget they have the legal monopoly of force. It is not that I favor one or the other. Is is just a bigger threat power in a State, which remember, are managed by imperfect humans also, such as corporations, than corporations. Because corporations cannot become monopolies easily (in deregulation I would say that they cannot by definition) and do not have power to regulate (at least not in theory, we all know crony capitalism, right?).

OneTimePetes 5y ago

Sigh, read it and abandoned it. The true price is never discussed. He who feeds the data dragon, supplies a Interface for Social engineering on a unprecedented scale. Facebook or Google could cook subtle social control schemes up in a cognitive blindspot and we could not even observe or discuss them, because they would seem natural to us. Like a synthetic religion and cults, just replacing the old religions & communitys, easily accessible for manipulation via the social networks.

fithisux 5y ago

Very insightful document uncovering what is happening right now.

tristor 5y ago

This article draws conclusions not in evidence, and thinking about this more broadly there is nothing about individualism that requires a loss of privacy. On the contrary, I myself, as most staunch individualists, are also privacy advocates, and we structure our lives to both preserve our individuality and freedom, and privacy is a central point of that. What external structures do not know about you cannot be used to manipulate or control you, so privacy is a bedrock cornerstone of individual liberty and the individualist movement. Their example of doorbell cameras especially falls flat to me, because most people (including myself) are motivated to have a doorbell camera due to our own individual issues and not to support police dragnet surveillance. Some folks, myself included, even have made the effort to use doorbell cameras that are not cloud connected and record video locally on NVR so that this data can't be shared without our explicit permission. There is nothing about these situations that /requires/ a loss of privacy, and the causal link assumed in this article is not established within. It's simply the case that every major tech company is incentivized to create systems that destroy privacy because they can more effectively monetize on our data and government agencies turn a blind eye because they also benefit from the loss of privacy in the private sector. It takes technical acumen and effort to ensure your privacy while still taking care to utilize modern technology, and the majority of people, even in the tech industry, do not have the necessary technical acumen to do so. This is clearly a problem, but it's not a trade-off between individualism and privacy, it's a trade-off between the greed of dystopian multi-national megacorps and privacy.

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jrumbut 5y ago
I thought it was pretty well established. The author wasn't saying that people who value individualism don't value privacy, rather that the pursuit of individual over community values caused an erosion of privacy (regardless of anyone's intentions). The argument was that getting rid of the informal, localized social norm enforcement mechanisms (your nosy neighbors, a meddlesome priest, etc) that used to prevent people from fully expressing their individuality created a vaccuum that was filled by surveillance. Your nosy neighbor used to judge you for things we don't think ought to be judged anymore, but they also noticed if you were drinking too much or stopped going to work because your mental health was declining. Since society still needs to work and not drive drunk, surveillance by states and large corporations has stepped in to fill the gap. So, according to the author, the individualistic ethos brought us to the point where some machine will silently judge me for this post.

Causality1 5y ago

If I had a rubber stamp of [citation needed] I would wear it down to the nub on this article.

jollybean 5y ago

There isn't even a remote equivalence between 'a few doorbells which may, in some cases be used by police' to the 360 information control that the CCP has implemented. 'Surveillance Capitalism' of the Facebook type is equally as mundane: nobody is actually harmed by the fact that Facebook knows a lot about you. Facebook feeds people garbage information, which is arguably harm, but they'd do that anyhow. If Facebook's was only allowed to collect a fragment of information relative to what they do today - nothing would change. The world wouldn't skip a beat. Meanwhile, the failure of CCP's information controls, would probably mean regime change within 5 years.

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disneygibson 5y ago

You can think of it as a hollowing out of the middle. As people have become more individualistic, they’ve lost interest in the “middle range” of power: neighborhood, town, city, state. This power structure has collapsed almost entirely, flushing all of it to the top, centralized federal level. This is also why an urbanite in Brooklyn is more similar to one in San Francisco than to those a hundred miles north in upstate New York. Local identities have been replaced entirely by national and increasingly international ones.

WC3w6pXxgGd 5y ago
This has nothing to do with individualism and everything to do with the internet creating "global communities."
mbg721 5y ago
I wouldn't chalk that up to individualism as much as to the idea that the Internet has caused people increasingly to identify with groups that don't correspond to physical proximity.
- disneygibson 5y ago
  There is much more homogenization today which goes far beyond your point.

srcreigh 5y ago

Why is the submission title different from the article title?

s1artibartfast 5y ago

Loss of privacy is not driven by individualism, but by an increasingly risk intolerant society. Individualism is not directly in conflict with privacy, but rather both are in conflict public safety and compliance. The article posits that increased individualism and breakdown of communities has led to a loss of privacy, but this was not a given, but a choice. A society can simply choose to reject the loss of privacy and accept the costs that may come with individualism & privacy. Further, the entire argument that community surveillance was effective and required replacement is suspect. For example, murder rates were higher and case closure was much worse in the past under the community surveillance model. Crime rates were dropping at the same time that communities were disintegrating, all before the advent of mass surveillance.

gelotar 5y ago
A society cannot "simply choose" to reject corporate and government mass surveillance. There was no public vote I'm aware of to decide whether to install cameras and sensors on every street and highway. Shall we vote to take them down now? Before 2013, only lunatics were concerned with mass surveillance. Look how far we've come. Now the media gives lip service to "privacy advocates". And the result of all this "privacy advocacy" is a giant popup window reminding you that you must submit to tracking if you wish to engage. Engineering consent. Maybe we can meet up in the metaverse to organize a revolution.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  >A society cannot "simply choose" to reject corporate and government mass surveillance. There is absolutely choice. Both are are supported by continuous choices choices people make every do. The choices are different between government and corporate surveillance. On the government surveillance side, people can choose to vote for politicians that support their privacy and lobby their representatives. They can also start public propositions, make donations, or run for office. On the corporate side, people can choose to refuse to use products, websites, or stores that sell their data. People can take actions to anonymize themselves. People make these choices every day. Often people choose not to support privacy because they value something else more, e.g. convenience, money, time, safety, ect.

SyzygistSix 5y ago

I think the biggest driver for loss of privacy is mass consumerism and the popularity of FAANG-like products, which have little to do with individualism. I think advertisers have done a great job of equating individualism with consumer choice in many people's minds but that doesn't make it so.

Aidevah 5y ago

It's always good to see John Gray's writing getting attention, in my opinion he is one of the most perceptive writers out there. However, the title of this submission should probably changed since the conversation is getting sidetracked. The original title of the article is "Surveillance Capitalism Vs. The Surveillance State" with the tagline "Surveillance technology is the surrogate for the communities Western capitalism has destroyed". The comment about individualism and privacy is a single sentence in the middle. The main drive of the article, as suggested in the original title, is about the convergence of both West and East in terms of mass surveillance and internet monopolies. Considering the vast gulf between their histories and cultures, surely this convergence is an interesting (and not at all inevitable) phenomenon.

Ginden 5y ago

> the logic of Enlightenment values has led to increased social control. Despite that, fundamentalist Christian communities, closest surrogate for "good days before Enlightenment", espouse much stricter social control than mainstream society.

godelski 5y ago

Alternative explanation: rise of authoritarianism in the west leads to more loss of privacy.

chiefalchemist 5y ago

The article has a minor flaw that should be highlighted. Per "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" the issue isn't the surveillance per se. It's how that awareness is used against us. That is, the Surveillance Capitalist isn't simply watching, there's a feedback loop that allows them to influence. Influence where to go. Influence what to buy. Ultimately, influence what to think. It's not about surveillance. It's about control. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw

cblconfederate 5y ago

False dichotomies there. Collectivism is not lacking surveillance, it's just that the surveillance is distributed and decentralized, you have citizens snooping on other people's business and ratting them out for their political beliefs (a behavior common in former soviet countries). Individualism does not require surveillance. The existence of the state does though, and if the preference of the citizens is for individualism, they delegate their collective surveillance duties to the police/army/secret services etc. Individualism is possible without a state, collectivism is not.

nitwit005 5y ago

> In Western countries, globalization and rapid technological change have dissolved the communities that grew up around industrial centers in the past. As these communities have crumbled, the systems of informal monitoring by neighbors and peers that maintained order within them have ceased to be effective. I've never previously seen someone try to portray early industrial cities as lacking in crime. A strange form of rose colored glasses.

raxxorrax 5y ago

Pretty much the opposite is true, the dichotomy is just wrong-