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I disagree that people are complacent. What we are seeing today is the same thing East-germany saw under The Stasi. The primary issue is that there is no means

I disagree that people are complacent. What we are seeing today is the same thing East-germany saw under The Stasi. The primary issue is that there is no means to correct the situation non-violently. When you have people as a group lie for profit, and they corrupt your representatives and there is no one to hold them to account. They don't give you the choice, and you can't hold them accountable first because you find out about it later, but you still have no choice and you reach out to the people whose job it is to solely represent you in government and they do nothing, and the courts are inaccessible so you have no means. At that point, despite declarations, there really isn't a rule of law then, it along with most of what people think of as their rights were taken by collusion gradually and quietly. When that type of problem occurs, every citizen has a choice based upon the individual risk. Totalitarian governments kill people, or lock them up from kafka kangaroo courts (before they kill them) to give a semblance of legitimacy when that legitimacy has already passed. You show me the person, I'll show you the crime; is a famous saying. When feedback systems fail, and can no longer respond, things will get worse until people will do something, and that will be destructive. The only choice they are given is when. Totalitarian governments make no distinction between peaceful protests, they may not go after you initially, but collecting all the information upfront of everyone that does to black bag you later; or keep you under their thumb through enhanced coercion (given the systems) and harassment from every direction is not unheard of. The moment you start surveilling peaceful protests is a known indicator that you are in fact in a totalitarian government. Its not the people who are the problem. Its the fact that feedback mechanisms have been corrupted and are now broken. Privacy is a necessary and requisite element for any insurgency in its beginnings, so by eliminating it no corrective action can take place and abuses will continually get worse. You've had agency stripped from you without your consent and told all your life you live in a world that doesn't exist while misleading you at every step. These situations historically always cascade, which is why we almost certainly will have a violent civil war in the near future. Its destructive, but that is the inevitable outcome when feedback systems are interfered with to the point where they can no longer function to keep people within reasonable bounds.

advael 2y ago
There's a lot to fear from revolutionary uprising, and I think people are very risk-averse, so this becomes a coordination problem even when there's perhaps widespread discontent I agree with your conclusion that most rich countries are totalitarian in character, and it feels so fundamentally absurd that a lot of how we got here was merely developing the capability and not doing enough to prevent it However, I don't think any kind of uprising is actually inevitable. One of the most powerful uses of these panopticons is the pre-emption and disruption of coordinated resistance efforts. Is an effective uprising even feasible if not supported by some faction of the extant powerbrokers? Hard to say to be honest. A lot of these capabilities are unprecedented, if not in nature then certainly in responsiveness and scope
- trod123 2y ago
  > However, I don't think any kind of uprising is actually inevitable. Certainly not yet, but with history you have to deal with things in a much wider time horizon. The mistakes most people make are having too narrow of a time horizon. The natural dynamics of people-based feedback systems have pulls in multiple directions to keep it in equilibrium. This served us well until perception was broken around the 1950s. When the feedback system pulling us away from the cliff, in the opposite direction, are no longer functioning, inevitably (as a matter of time), the forces pushing us toward the cliff will push you over the cliff. This is seen historically as escalating unrest, whose underlying cause is ignored, increasing violence, increasing coercive pressure, shortages, ceding of rights until you have none and its arbitrary. The point of break is the moment a feedback system can no longer respond to stimuli to correct its equilibrium action. It is broken. The dynamics running up to catastrophe (as a system) almost guarantee it. In captive systems where changes are done by the people who are incentivized to not solve the problem they simply have to sit back and do nothing and can enrich themselves (front of line blocking). What, after all, can people do about it given the differential of power and broken systems for feedback that would push back? To answer your question, without privacy you can't organize. This is well documented since shortly after WW2 with regards to insurgency and counter-insurgency circles (i.e. how we fought against the Nazi's during WW2), and further examined with regards to modern day China. When the mere hint of someone not doing their best for the party is sufficient to punish them (and its arbitrary), people fall into menticidal spirals. If not corrected, eventually, those in power will out of fear silence the dissenting voices under convenient accidents or limit their opportunities (social credit). Left unchecked it creates a environment where there is no hope for the future, and people stop having children. They may kill their own children to forgo the suffering (this was documented in The Wealth & Poverty of Nations with regards to Natives under the Spanish). Already the manipulation of the currency has put the average person's ability to make enough to cover the expenses of having children in danger. As the people who would seek reasonable conditions (not disadvantaged) most likely would be in the cohort of rational people, those leaders undermine their own power base of a strong citizenry (against foreign threats). This is well known structure in the fall of empires. Additionally, when you have selection pressures towards the meek and irrational thinker, you sieve and eventually get a mono-culture of thought, which gets wiped out when they eventually come up against an existential crisis that requires the flexibility they killed off. There are many examples in history of artifacts where cultures died off and no one knows much about those cultures. What the Stasi systems were capable of was about 1 generation behind our current disclosed systems. Its scaling faster as well with time. Its a very worrying time for the rational person to be alive.

advael 2y ago

There's a lot to fear from revolutionary uprising, and I think people are very risk-averse, so this becomes a coordination problem even when there's perhaps widespread discontent I agree with your conclusion that most rich countries are totalitarian in character, and it feels so fundamentally absurd that a lot of how we got here was merely developing the capability and not doing enough to prevent it However, I don't think any kind of uprising is actually inevitable. One of the most powerful uses of these panopticons is the pre-emption and disruption of coordinated resistance efforts. Is an effective uprising even feasible if not supported by some faction of the extant powerbrokers? Hard to say to be honest. A lot of these capabilities are unprecedented, if not in nature then certainly in responsiveness and scope

trod123 2y ago
> However, I don't think any kind of uprising is actually inevitable. Certainly not yet, but with history you have to deal with things in a much wider time horizon. The mistakes most people make are having too narrow of a time horizon. The natural dynamics of people-based feedback systems have pulls in multiple directions to keep it in equilibrium. This served us well until perception was broken around the 1950s. When the feedback system pulling us away from the cliff, in the opposite direction, are no longer functioning, inevitably (as a matter of time), the forces pushing us toward the cliff will push you over the cliff. This is seen historically as escalating unrest, whose underlying cause is ignored, increasing violence, increasing coercive pressure, shortages, ceding of rights until you have none and its arbitrary. The point of break is the moment a feedback system can no longer respond to stimuli to correct its equilibrium action. It is broken. The dynamics running up to catastrophe (as a system) almost guarantee it. In captive systems where changes are done by the people who are incentivized to not solve the problem they simply have to sit back and do nothing and can enrich themselves (front of line blocking). What, after all, can people do about it given the differential of power and broken systems for feedback that would push back? To answer your question, without privacy you can't organize. This is well documented since shortly after WW2 with regards to insurgency and counter-insurgency circles (i.e. how we fought against the Nazi's during WW2), and further examined with regards to modern day China. When the mere hint of someone not doing their best for the party is sufficient to punish them (and its arbitrary), people fall into menticidal spirals. If not corrected, eventually, those in power will out of fear silence the dissenting voices under convenient accidents or limit their opportunities (social credit). Left unchecked it creates a environment where there is no hope for the future, and people stop having children. They may kill their own children to forgo the suffering (this was documented in The Wealth & Poverty of Nations with regards to Natives under the Spanish). Already the manipulation of the currency has put the average person's ability to make enough to cover the expenses of having children in danger. As the people who would seek reasonable conditions (not disadvantaged) most likely would be in the cohort of rational people, those leaders undermine their own power base of a strong citizenry (against foreign threats). This is well known structure in the fall of empires. Additionally, when you have selection pressures towards the meek and irrational thinker, you sieve and eventually get a mono-culture of thought, which gets wiped out when they eventually come up against an existential crisis that requires the flexibility they killed off. There are many examples in history of artifacts where cultures died off and no one knows much about those cultures. What the Stasi systems were capable of was about 1 generation behind our current disclosed systems. Its scaling faster as well with time. Its a very worrying time for the rational person to be alive.