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Comment by harryf | Hacker News Reader

The premise of the article...

> A key product of ubiquitous surveillance is people who are comfortable with it

I think comfortable is the wrong word here. Perhaps "people who have no choice but accept it" is more accurate.

If you do the math, it's basically;

1. is this issue important enough to your daily life to want to make sacrifices to fight it 2. how would I effectively fight it and not just waste effort?

And a significant minority DO care - I've commented before here like the impact on sales of a secure messaging app when WhatsApp was bought by Facebook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18840587

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There is that concept that people are comfortable with surveillance, even want it. A maybe somewhat fringe pop cultural reference to that is in Deus Ex (2000), the best video game made so far:

> JC Denton: "Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance."

> Morpheus: "The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."

> JC Denton: "Electronic surveillance hardly inspires reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence."

> Morpheus: "God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary."

> JC Denton: "No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera."

> Morpheus: "The human organism always worships. First, it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment."

One can watch it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-bijO3uEw, but it's stronger when experienced as part of the game.

21 years. Still relevant. A masterpiece of a game.

I agree in principle but also this feels like retroactive justification for the current state or affairs.

I think it’s safe to assume that the “actors” that created the “surveillance state” weren’t acting from some profound philosophy of mass control but rather some more immediate KPIs be it “increased user engagement” or “reduction of terror threats” that seemed important at the time.

In other words we stumbled into this mess and now we need to figure out how to stumble out again.

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