Comment by stereolambda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stereolambda | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the better articles on the subject, not written in inside-tech-bubble terms. I think they also describe something we may call "obfuscation of power": formally you can opt out, in practice you cannot, and people who have power over you are lost in a soup of legal entities. So first, you are alienated to face surveillance alone as an individual, taking all blame for losing your freedom because you "chose" it. Second, it's hard to even name the surveillers (one of the 500 "trusted partners"?). There's now a parallel discussion on AI black boxes which can further serve similar purposes. ("It was not our decision, some AI did it".)

The sooner it will be commonly framed as a question of freedom (i.e. absence of arbitrary power of other people above you [1]), and as a question in the interest of society as a whole, the better.

[1] I'd take the opportunity to plug Quentin Skinner's "How should we think about freedom", "A genealogy of liberty" or a similar talk, where he challenges the tradition of understanding freedom as absence of direct interference. I think this stuff would be beneficial for politics nowadays.

I'm reminded of Foucault's work, Surveiller et punir. He discusses this obfuscation of power, specifically that we are being conditioned by unseen entities in our daily lives in ways which are entirely unnatural. He contrasts the more modern (and arguably unnatural) levels of discipline imposed by surveillance (specifically with respect to panopticism) to those imposed by the fear of bodily harm that existed in the days of executioners.

When we held public executions, we could at least see who was wielding the power, by whom we were being conditioned, and what there was to fear. Yes, the body was being tortured, but the soul remained intact. In the surveillance age, we are subjugated by forces we cannot untangle, see, or fully understand. We discipline ourselves in fear of these unseen entities who may or may not be constantly watching; what they do with our information remaining a mystery

For regular folk, the book is Discipline & Punish in English translation

You're explanation is fairly academic and I think we can be a little more concrete. Focault's point is really that discussions of power in the West tend to revolve around law and right, jurisprudence, when in fact the exercise of power qua something that alters your behavior is in almost every relationship we enter into with other human beings, no matter how anonymous: when we go to school (which is modeled on factories), when we go to work at the factory (where they wanna know how long you take having a piss) or (as many of us here are familiar with) the office, when we pack onto the train for the commute (which to me is a place where our behavior definitely meets up with the practical definition of panopticism, e.g. we act as if everyone is watching everyone else), when we "come out the closet" (despite being a 'practicing homosexual', for lack of a better term, Foucault was not comfortable being labeled gay, and its speculated that the conditions around his death by HIV were exacerbated by this; as well, I find sexuality to be strongly policed on all sides in America).

None of this is new in history, but modernity ramped up the scale and intensity to previously unseen levels (much like everything else)

"when we go to school (which is modeled on factories)"

I thought they were modeled on prisons.

Both, but the similarities in the three can be striking regardless of ordering.

But framing things differently has been done, yet we have smoking, drinking, gambling, mcd and coke.

To me it fells like certain people (a percentage of any population) are just wired to exploit human weakness.

Sometimes they are unconsciously doing it and when made conscious don't know how to exit that path. And society needs to make it simpler for exits to happen.

Those that are consciously doing it...well we are just stuck with them like we will always have bugs in code.

...which is the value of robust systems designed to limit the impact these people can have.

This is precisely why mechanisms like separation of powers and whistleblower protections matter. This is also why social conventions around honesty, reciprocity, fairness, etc. matter.

When these mechanisms and conventions operate smoothly, you get a sort of "security in depth" against abuse and exploitation. People acting in bad faith find their worst impulses thwarted, both by societal / legal systems and by average citizens who are empowered to help hold them to account.

When they don't, you get dangerous patterns of corruption and indifference; these weaken trust in the system, making it harder to fix over time.

"To me it fells like certain people (a percentage of any population) are just wired to exploit human weakness."

A theory is that all humans do it in various nuanced situations whose categorizations are specific to each individual. Sometimes its as simple as getting in physical fights when you know you are stronger, or playing political games at work to get ahead. Sometimes its as nuanced as choosing to run an ad campaign to make people feel bad for being fat so they buy your product. Sometimes its negging, or sussing out if an employee might get pregnant soon, or choosing to make tests for ovarian cysts not covered by health insurance.

I would rather blame the systems we all create and enable. Our reward systems in particular. These are the systems that make the exploitation so enticing and irresistible.

>The sooner it will be commonly framed as a question of freedom (i.e. absence of arbitrary power of other people above you [1]), and as a question in the interest of society as a whole, the better

I agree but I don't think I'd use the word "soon"

There's a reason this is an opinion piece by a person who specifically cares about these issues and not an article.

Things are going to have to get worse before they get better. Right now the slices of society closest to these issues (tech and academics) don't seem to care at all as long as it's not overtly being used to oppress the poors or some specific minority. Said slices of society are also mostly wealthy enough that they can comply with most laws most of the time, they're not gonna get robo-tickets for not having their car inspected. Nobody's gonna care until it hits them personally or has the potential to do so imminently.

>Nobody's gonna care until it hits them personally or has the potential to do so imminently.

It's for this reason that I really, really want the US to implement some kind of formal, stated facial recognition across the board. I honestly don't think we'll see any mass movement on privacy issues from regular folks until something that big happens.

I think you’re overestimating what the public response to such an event would be. The vast majority of the public doesn’t care if their privacy is utterly violated by the government as long as there’s some flimsy justification for it catching bad guys or saving children.

Just, Devil's Advocate - but what happens if you allow such a program to go forward, and no one outside the usual suspects objects? How would you reign it back in?

I believe it would be best not to allow such a program in the first place, because counting on the population to be opposed to it is, well, let's just label it "unwise".

Naive to think our entire online and physical location data isn't already indexed by name, phone, email ids. Snowden said as much. The accelerometers on your phone already give gait.

The few privacy laws we do get are usually way off target.

It used to be easy to deal with medical things. You could ask about your spouse or parent or sibling, and you would get an answer. Now a family gets treated like random strangers who lack any sort of relationship with each other.

It used to be that grades were publicly posted. This was a powerful incentive to do as well as possible.

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