Ted Kazcynski had somewhat of a point - I say somewhat because he was a leftist hater and I think a bit off the rails. Technology is already way out of control, I don’t think most people understand that if there were to be a socialist revolution in a 1st world country any time soon, just how much of an advantage the state has over the people due to it’s surveillance network. Privacy for all intents and purposes is practically gone already if you’re of interest to the intelligence agencies and around anything with a connection and/or even just standing outside thanks to satellite imagery. And that is just the technology which we know of, it’s horrifying to think about the possibility of tech that remains classified.
I agree with your main point, but I do want to criticize
I think he was a bit off the rails and a leftist hater.
This is an understatement. He was an ecofascist in all except name. In Industrial Society and Its Future, his critiques of the right basically boil down to “they’re bad at optics” and his critiques of the left basically boil down to “they care about animals, [slurs], and women.” He was the archetype of “claim to be centrist because I know how unpopular my actual opinions are.”
That being said, I also want to shed light on a little glimmer of hope hidden inside the surveillance state:
if there were to be a socialist revolution in a 1st world country any time soon, just how much of an advantage the state has over the people due to it’s surveillance network.
A few counterpoints to this:
A point I learned from a movie of all places, no less poignant that it was a movie about resisting the surveillance state (Enemy of the State): one of the primary principles of Guerilla Warfare is to use your opponents biggest strength and turn it into their weakness. This leads me into my next point:
There is way too much data. A major part of the push for AI is because it can emulate human decision making while parsing orders of magnitude more data. Trying to find a person in Petabytes worth of video and imagery and metadata is like finding a needle in a hay-planet. Sure, they may have all that surveillance, but most of the signal gets lost in the billions of times more noise.
The government is not a monolith. The 50-agencies-in-a-trench-coat may try to pass themselves off as a unified entity, but when push comes to shove, they’re a bunch of organizations that all have their own agenda, and each organization is just a bunch of people that all have their own agenda. Push hard enough, and you’ll start to see the cracks form. Talk to any government employee and you’ll soon realize their org is just as susceptible to all the internal bullshit squabbles that any private company is.
Piggybacking off of 2 and 3: they need manpower that they don’t have. When we talk about “the state” or “the government,” we can lose sight of the fact that these organizations aren’t composed of countless, faceless people. Instead of 10% of all civilians, it’s less than 1%. This number may still be huge compared to the size of local leftist org chapters and lemmy communities, but it’s only like 1.3% of the working class.
Combining 3 and 4: the large majority of those government employees are also part of the proletariat. Their loyalty to the government only extends as far as their paycheck, and if any kind of class revolution were to kick into full swing, there would be a mass exodus of labor. There would also be hundreds of thousands of workers who are sympathetic to the cause on the inside, throwing wrenches in all kinds of cogs.
So yes, things are pretty bleak with the state of privacy in this day and age. No, there is no magical solution where an authoritarian government just willfully cedes its power to control its populace. No, there won’t be any way to altogether avoid revolutionaries being incarcerated or worse. No, it won’t fix itself, nor will somebody else take the reigns while we can comfortably be bystanders.
Such a beautiful reply, I wish I was as educated with my research & analysis as well as so articulate with my points as you are - instead of my typical half-assed rambling lol. Thank you and sorry for being overly pessimistic!
Ted Kazcynski had somewhat of a point - I say somewhat because he was a leftist hater and I think a bit off the rails. Technology is already way out of control, I don’t think most people understand that if there were to be a socialist revolution in a 1st world country any time soon, just how much of an advantage the state has over the people due to it’s surveillance network. Privacy for all intents and purposes is practically gone already if you’re of interest to the intelligence agencies and around anything with a connection and/or even just standing outside thanks to satellite imagery. And that is just the technology which we know of, it’s horrifying to think about the possibility of tech that remains classified.
I agree with your main point, but I do want to criticize
This is an understatement. He was an ecofascist in all except name. In Industrial Society and Its Future, his critiques of the right basically boil down to “they’re bad at optics” and his critiques of the left basically boil down to “they care about animals, [slurs], and women.” He was the archetype of “claim to be centrist because I know how unpopular my actual opinions are.”
That being said, I also want to shed light on a little glimmer of hope hidden inside the surveillance state:
A few counterpoints to this:
A point I learned from a movie of all places, no less poignant that it was a movie about resisting the surveillance state (Enemy of the State): one of the primary principles of Guerilla Warfare is to use your opponents biggest strength and turn it into their weakness. This leads me into my next point:
There is way too much data. A major part of the push for AI is because it can emulate human decision making while parsing orders of magnitude more data. Trying to find a person in Petabytes worth of video and imagery and metadata is like finding a needle in a hay-planet. Sure, they may have all that surveillance, but most of the signal gets lost in the billions of times more noise.
The government is not a monolith. The 50-agencies-in-a-trench-coat may try to pass themselves off as a unified entity, but when push comes to shove, they’re a bunch of organizations that all have their own agenda, and each organization is just a bunch of people that all have their own agenda. Push hard enough, and you’ll start to see the cracks form. Talk to any government employee and you’ll soon realize their org is just as susceptible to all the internal bullshit squabbles that any private company is.
Piggybacking off of 2 and 3: they need manpower that they don’t have. When we talk about “the state” or “the government,” we can lose sight of the fact that these organizations aren’t composed of countless, faceless people. Instead of 10% of all civilians, it’s less than 1%. This number may still be huge compared to the size of local leftist org chapters and lemmy communities, but it’s only like 1.3% of the working class.
Combining 3 and 4: the large majority of those government employees are also part of the proletariat. Their loyalty to the government only extends as far as their paycheck, and if any kind of class revolution were to kick into full swing, there would be a mass exodus of labor. There would also be hundreds of thousands of workers who are sympathetic to the cause on the inside, throwing wrenches in all kinds of cogs.
So yes, things are pretty bleak with the state of privacy in this day and age. No, there is no magical solution where an authoritarian government just willfully cedes its power to control its populace. No, there won’t be any way to altogether avoid revolutionaries being incarcerated or worse. No, it won’t fix itself, nor will somebody else take the reigns while we can comfortably be bystanders.
But it’s not already a lost cause.
Such a beautiful reply, I wish I was as educated with my research & analysis as well as so articulate with my points as you are - instead of my typical half-assed rambling lol. Thank you and sorry for being overly pessimistic!