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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 ex

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
    It's easy for any individual user who is reading HN and cares enough to spend time setting up their own device (possibly including installing a custom ROM if you don't trust Google's checkboxes). It's not easy to get most everyone to disable it such that it is no longer the societal condition. Since that is the level at which we're discussing things, that is what is important.
    - jjk166 5y ago
      It's easy enough for any individual who cares. Even if you personally struggle with that sort of thing, it's not hard to find someone to do it for you. But the fact is most people don't care because some corporation who knows me only as user #24601 having location data indicating I spent 20 minutes in or around a Barnes and Noble doesn't negatively affect me the way that my neighbor taking pictures of me while I shower does.
      - mindslight 5y ago
        This is a blind assertion that conflates "caring" with knowing enough to act, and has become less compelling as time goes on. The only way we could unbiasedly poll whether people "care" is if the phone setup process popped up fully-informing Yes/No questions. As it stands, defaults are powerful and people simply do not know how they can control their data being leaked - the average person thinks that GPS satellites track their location.
        jjk166 5y ago
        On the contrary, it is a blind assertion that those who do not act only do so specifically out of a lack of knowledge. If people cared about a problem, they could look up solutions, or look up people who could solve it for them, or people who could solve it for them would come knocking on their door, offering to solve their problem for them with the expectation they'll say yes. Talk to 1000 random people, take all the time you want, bring any supporting material you want, how much of their hard earned money could you convince them, on average, to pay you to solve this problem for them? What is the value of having this issue magically disappear? For the vast majority of people, I doubt they'ed be willing to pay much if anything, which is equivalent to apathy.
AutumnCurtain 5y ago
>social media enables the construction and enforcement of intellectual and political orthodoxy. You hit on it, but this is the crux to me - what makes them think this wasn't possible before? Or, if they did think it possible before, how does voluntary sharing to a community compare with, say, church-driven enforcement of intellectual and political orthodoxy? I agree, there were no good old days on this topic.
- mrandish 5y ago
  > ...church-driven enforcement of intellectual and political orthodoxy It's interesting you noted that line. When I read it, I was thinking of the legendary Saturday Night Live "Church Lady" skits. The character Dana Carvey created perfectly captured the judgemental, moralizing environment I saw in church communities as a child. The skit was so funny because it reflected a reality barely hidden beneath a thin-veneer of faux-friendliness.
- notsureaboutpg 5y ago
  I think you are deliberately missing the point. One example: Kevin Hart had to step down from hosting the Oscars because 10-20 years ago he made a joke about how his kid would never be gay and if he were he would hit him with his dollhouse (the joke being that Kevin is oblivious to how gender-bending the kid already is). That's only really possible because of social media. In the good old days if such a comment surfaced, there wouldn't be horses of randos calling for consequences for such a thing from so long ago. The preservation and immediateness of long ago comments enables this. Church driven orthodoxy was about what happened now. You could be forgiven if you took back what you said or you apologized. Churches didn't go back 20 years to your tweet history and inquisition you over it. Social media enables such things literally by keeping a record of all your comments from years ago (which didn't exist back then) and also by allowing people now to interact with such comments from years ago, right now.
- warkdarrior 5y ago
  This was possible before social media, but social media (like most technology) allows it to happen faster, on a larger, scale, and cheaply. Before you had to rely on neighbors' gossip. Now you have Facebook, where your "neighbors" from two continents over tell you things are wrong in your neighborhood.
mindslight 5y ago
The article never tries to make a direct case for causality. Every time it gets close, it completely ignores any underlying motivation (say authoritarianism). Including such a reference, the article's thesis would be something like since smaller-scale systems of control have been undermined by individualism, authoritarian desires have come to rely on surveillance. Which does not supply that less individualism would cause less surveillance (eg China), despite that being what the article wants to imply. Modulo that, we're left with a pretty bland idea that as mobility has increased, the desire to know more about newly-met people has increased. Back in the day, a newcomer to town wouldn't be trusted until they had established a reputation. Now you can fly across the country and open a bank account on the same day. I don't particularly enjoy having global identification and surveillance databases like that. But it's hard to ascribe this to individualism per se as opposed to the ease of travel regardless of the strength of communities you're traveling between. We don't attribute the adoption of time zones as a consequence of individual communities failing to keep their "local time", but rather the need for consistency across a wider area caused by train travel. Flipping the script can be useful to discover blindspots in conventional wisdom, but nothing in this article made me question individualism as being a strong counter to surveillance.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bsedlm 5y ago
  > nothing in this article made me question individualism as being a strong counter to surveillance. as I understood it, that has nothing to do with the point of the article. On that level, I'd say the point of the article is how both east and west are converging towards a similar amount of individual surveillance (while most of the article deals with why this may be the case)
mrandish 5y ago
The article's headline seemed interesting enough to maybe take a look. Your concise review saved me trying to parse through it. The quotes you posted clearly show it's the kind of overly-intellectualized prose that's too often just window-dressing trying to inflate a handful of unremarkable ideas.
- bsedlm 5y ago
  > inflate a handful of unremarkable ideas. some of these ideas you swiftly qualified as unremarkable are: freedom, liberty, privacy, and individuality.
  - throwawaygh 5y ago
    The person you're responding too isn't passing judgement on the ideas expressed per se, but rather than the amount of prose used to express them.

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
  It's easy for any individual user who is reading HN and cares enough to spend time setting up their own device (possibly including installing a custom ROM if you don't trust Google's checkboxes). It's not easy to get most everyone to disable it such that it is no longer the societal condition. Since that is the level at which we're discussing things, that is what is important.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    It's easy enough for any individual who cares. Even if you personally struggle with that sort of thing, it's not hard to find someone to do it for you. But the fact is most people don't care because some corporation who knows me only as user #24601 having location data indicating I spent 20 minutes in or around a Barnes and Noble doesn't negatively affect me the way that my neighbor taking pictures of me while I shower does.
    - mindslight 5y ago
      This is a blind assertion that conflates "caring" with knowing enough to act, and has become less compelling as time goes on. The only way we could unbiasedly poll whether people "care" is if the phone setup process popped up fully-informing Yes/No questions. As it stands, defaults are powerful and people simply do not know how they can control their data being leaked - the average person thinks that GPS satellites track their location.
      - jjk166 5y ago
        On the contrary, it is a blind assertion that those who do not act only do so specifically out of a lack of knowledge. If people cared about a problem, they could look up solutions, or look up people who could solve it for them, or people who could solve it for them would come knocking on their door, offering to solve their problem for them with the expectation they'll say yes. Talk to 1000 random people, take all the time you want, bring any supporting material you want, how much of their hard earned money could you convince them, on average, to pay you to solve this problem for them? What is the value of having this issue magically disappear? For the vast majority of people, I doubt they'ed be willing to pay much if anything, which is equivalent to apathy.

AutumnCurtain 5y ago

>social media enables the construction and enforcement of intellectual and political orthodoxy. You hit on it, but this is the crux to me - what makes them think this wasn't possible before? Or, if they did think it possible before, how does voluntary sharing to a community compare with, say, church-driven enforcement of intellectual and political orthodoxy? I agree, there were no good old days on this topic.

mrandish 5y ago
> ...church-driven enforcement of intellectual and political orthodoxy It's interesting you noted that line. When I read it, I was thinking of the legendary Saturday Night Live "Church Lady" skits. The character Dana Carvey created perfectly captured the judgemental, moralizing environment I saw in church communities as a child. The skit was so funny because it reflected a reality barely hidden beneath a thin-veneer of faux-friendliness.
notsureaboutpg 5y ago
I think you are deliberately missing the point. One example: Kevin Hart had to step down from hosting the Oscars because 10-20 years ago he made a joke about how his kid would never be gay and if he were he would hit him with his dollhouse (the joke being that Kevin is oblivious to how gender-bending the kid already is). That's only really possible because of social media. In the good old days if such a comment surfaced, there wouldn't be horses of randos calling for consequences for such a thing from so long ago. The preservation and immediateness of long ago comments enables this. Church driven orthodoxy was about what happened now. You could be forgiven if you took back what you said or you apologized. Churches didn't go back 20 years to your tweet history and inquisition you over it. Social media enables such things literally by keeping a record of all your comments from years ago (which didn't exist back then) and also by allowing people now to interact with such comments from years ago, right now.
warkdarrior 5y ago
This was possible before social media, but social media (like most technology) allows it to happen faster, on a larger, scale, and cheaply. Before you had to rely on neighbors' gossip. Now you have Facebook, where your "neighbors" from two continents over tell you things are wrong in your neighborhood.

mindslight 5y ago

The article never tries to make a direct case for causality. Every time it gets close, it completely ignores any underlying motivation (say authoritarianism). Including such a reference, the article's thesis would be something like since smaller-scale systems of control have been undermined by individualism, authoritarian desires have come to rely on surveillance. Which does not supply that less individualism would cause less surveillance (eg China), despite that being what the article wants to imply. Modulo that, we're left with a pretty bland idea that as mobility has increased, the desire to know more about newly-met people has increased. Back in the day, a newcomer to town wouldn't be trusted until they had established a reputation. Now you can fly across the country and open a bank account on the same day. I don't particularly enjoy having global identification and surveillance databases like that. But it's hard to ascribe this to individualism per se as opposed to the ease of travel regardless of the strength of communities you're traveling between. We don't attribute the adoption of time zones as a consequence of individual communities failing to keep their "local time", but rather the need for consistency across a wider area caused by train travel. Flipping the script can be useful to discover blindspots in conventional wisdom, but nothing in this article made me question individualism as being a strong counter to surveillance.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bsedlm 5y ago
> nothing in this article made me question individualism as being a strong counter to surveillance. as I understood it, that has nothing to do with the point of the article. On that level, I'd say the point of the article is how both east and west are converging towards a similar amount of individual surveillance (while most of the article deals with why this may be the case)

mrandish 5y ago

The article's headline seemed interesting enough to maybe take a look. Your concise review saved me trying to parse through it. The quotes you posted clearly show it's the kind of overly-intellectualized prose that's too often just window-dressing trying to inflate a handful of unremarkable ideas.

bsedlm 5y ago
> inflate a handful of unremarkable ideas. some of these ideas you swiftly qualified as unremarkable are: freedom, liberty, privacy, and individuality.
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  The person you're responding too isn't passing judgement on the ideas expressed per se, but rather than the amount of prose used to express them.