The price of individualism has proved to be the loss of privacy
noemamag.com
noemamag.com
Their example of doorbell cameras especially falls flat to me, because most people (including myself) are motivated to have a doorbell camera due to our own individual issues and not to support police dragnet surveillance. Some folks, myself included, even have made the effort to use doorbell cameras that are not cloud connected and record video locally on NVR so that this data can't be shared without our explicit permission. There is nothing about these situations that /requires/ a loss of privacy, and the causal link assumed in this article is not established within. It's simply the case that every major tech company is incentivized to create systems that destroy privacy because they can more effectively monetize on our data and government agencies turn a blind eye because they also benefit from the loss of privacy in the private sector. It takes technical acumen and effort to ensure your privacy while still taking care to utilize modern technology, and the majority of people, even in the tech industry, do not have the necessary technical acumen to do so.
This is clearly a problem, but it's not a trade-off between individualism and privacy, it's a trade-off between the greed of dystopian multi-national megacorps and privacy.
The argument was that getting rid of the informal, localized social norm enforcement mechanisms (your nosy neighbors, a meddlesome priest, etc) that used to prevent people from fully expressing their individuality created a vaccuum that was filled by surveillance.
Your nosy neighbor used to judge you for things we don't think ought to be judged anymore, but they also noticed if you were drinking too much or stopped going to work because your mental health was declining. Since society still needs to work and not drive drunk, surveillance by states and large corporations has stepped in to fill the gap.
So, according to the author, the individualistic ethos brought us to the point where some machine will silently judge me for this post.
The surveillance state will exist in the absence of regulation because there’s a lot of money to be made surveilling people. Basically, my right to spy on you trumps your right to not be spied upon.
Like you I would welcome some state intervention here, but I have to recognize that this is me lessening my commitment to the values of individualism.
You seem to be confused about the concept of consent.
This works across a whole bunch of smaller geographic or even ideological alignment. Eventually you have to draw a line on individual freedom when it oversteps the values of the society, and you have to draw more of those lines the more edge cases you have to accommodate.
And for too many people, “individualism” really just means “other people should be free to be like me”.
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.
It is our fault let us not blame the others.
When was the last time you opened FB or similar? I try to keep it to a minimum. Probably less than once a year my wall.
Is it though? Do you consider state intervention to eliminate slavery/indentured servitude to be a similar reduction in commitment?
The question, when trying to maximize individual freedom, is what exactly you're maximizing. You can take approaches that maximize the freedom of those already most free (those with wealth and privilege), or you can try to increase the average (mean) freedom, or the median freedom, or increase the freedom of those who are least free by establishing a floor.
Most of the approaches other than the first involve curtailing the freedoms of the most free in some way.
Wanting to increase the median individual freedom by limiting the ability of individuals to enter into agreements with corporations that trade away their privacy in this way doesn't necessarily signal a lessening of commitment to individualism.
this "greedy people" are humans embedded in social circles too. Many are in situations (social circumstances) in which they are not really free to not be greedy. Further, many of these "greedy people" are not even individuals but corporations (autonomous money, as I half-jokingly think of them) i.e. businesses large enough that all the decisions are systematically directed to increase stockholder value (if they don't 'beat the market' their investors are loosing money)
I don't think that is a joke. Corporations are old-school AIs. They still mostly run on meatware, but that's changing.
"Some say people are greedy. Of course it is never ourselves it is always our fellows who are greedy."
It's idle speculation but sometimes idle speculation is interesting. Should everyone wait until they have conclusive evidence from prospective randomized controlled trials before writing?
The argument that localized social norm enforcement has disappeared is old, and goes back to the creation of cities. The vacuum was filled long ago by the creation of organized city police departments. Robert Peel, who organized the London police, was explicit about the police as enforcers of social norms. See Robert Peel's principles of policing.
Large scale surveillance is relatively new. Where it fits is an issue, but it's hard to argue it arose out of that old problem.
Now with increased mobility and the distance-collapsing features of the Internet, there is a felt need for norm enforcement at the national or international level. This is where the surveillance comes in. Organizations like the FBI or Interpol chase big norm violators, but they don't touch the stuff that the neighborhood patrolman would tackle (in the Robert Peel view of policing).
Nor should they.
But this doesn't stop a bunch of Karens in some gated community in LA from getting their panties in a knot over what some wackos in da yoop are up to and thanks to the internet the former has plenty of stuff streamed right to their iphones in 1080p to get pissed off about.
Norms don't generalize to a national level except for very broad norms and very small nations.
And I talk from the experience of having lived for long in a non-capitalist country.So I do not know what the hell that headline is doing there as if capitalism or individualism was to be blamed of worse privacy. Not at all. I can give countless examples myself. It is not related to any of those things. In fact, I think they track people even more where I was...
I'm not clear on why this vacuum must exist and more importantly, why it must be filled.
I'm pretty sure the law is not hazy one bit on either of those issues.
The original claim was that social norms was enforcing some kind of behaviour, and that individualism has eroded those norms thus permitting previously forbidden behaviours, and therefore led to us deploying surveillance to "pick up the slack" to enforce such behaviours.
I'm still not clear that those norms were necessarily good, that eroding them was necessarily bad, that all of those behaviours should be forbidden, and that therefore this is why surveillance arose. Presumably, surveillance is used to go after those breaking the law, not those breaking social norms, so this just seems like an elaborate non sequitur.
Perhaps this all would not have been so inevitable if we were living under a different sociopolitical climate.
That may be true, however, individualism may increase the probability that you'll lose it, just not to 1.
> On the contrary, I myself, as most staunch individualists, are also privacy advocates, and we structure our lives to both preserve our individuality and freedom, and privacy is a central point of that.
What you advocate for isn't necessarily what you get.
> Their example of doorbell cameras especially falls flat to me, because most people (including myself) are motivated to have a doorbell camera due to our own individual issues and not to support police dragnet surveillance. Some folks, myself included, even have made the effort to use doorbell cameras that are not cloud connected and record video locally on NVR so that this data can't be shared without our explicit permission. There is nothing about these situations that /requires/ a loss of privacy, and the causal link assumed in this article is not established within.
Aren't everybody else's doorbell camera's the privacy issue? The ones the staunch individualist has no control over?
Maybe. There's nothing that prevents other people from having a doorbell camera that doesn't violate privacy, except for the greed of large companies. Certainly most people do not install a doorbell camera with the intent to violate privacy, so it doesn't logically follow for me that doorbell cameras necessarily cause a privacy issue, not the least of which because I was able to set one up that does not cause a privacy issue.
The privacy issue here isn't caused by your neighbors possibly having a recording of what you do on the public street, it's caused by a random person and a law enforcement agency and a data broker company in different parts of the world and with no relationship to you having a recording of what you did on the public street. The doorbell camera alone is fundamentally no different from your neighbor peering out the window or checking their peephole in the front door. The difference comes from the companies building systems /explicitly/ on the basis of capturing and trading/selling that data and embedding this in the products they offer to consumers. It does not have to be this way, and indeed there are product offerings that don't upload live streams of the all their video to the cloud to be snarfed up my data brokers, voyeurs, and police agencies.
Remember, these are cameras pointed at a public street, so while there is a reasonable expectation that you have privacy from non-involved/non-present parties to your actions there, there is no such expectation of privacy from those who could reasonable observe you. Individuals who wish to keep their actions secret don't do them on the public street in broad daylight, and that has been true for millennia.
Most people will install a doorbell camera that gives them the most functions for the least amount of money. Does the doorbell cot me $10, but give me good quality video? And a way to replay video from last week? And a way to corroborate the video with neighbors video to catch repeat offenders? And a way to share the video with police? Great, I'm sold.
Your privacy? What privacy? It stops where you get too close to my house, I'm a true individual and need to control and protect my house/"castle".
The difference between
a neighbor looking out their window or sitting on their porch as you pass, and
a tiny device watching 24/7, saving everything it observes, and making the recording available to third parties including the police*, without either the owner or you being informed
is gigantic. There is no comparison here: these cameras are different in kind (not degree) from the normal human lack of privacy on the sidewalk.
> Certainly most people do not install a doorbell camera with the intent to violate privacy
But they do, in fact, in actual practice. Just as a hunting accident may not have been intentional but still has an effect.
---
* If you give me six minutes of video of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. – Cardinal Richelieu, probably
However, what percentage of people who want a doorbell camera are going to go through the work of setting up a local NVR. It is practically zero. I think the other issue is that if everyone else in your neighborhood does have a Ring, how does that not affect your privacy? Of course, Ring's business model is fear mongering and I'm not absolving them. But people will generally choose the path of least resistance. The fact that people want a camera to prevent a package from being stolen not because they want to create a police dragnet means almost nothing when the result of the camera sales creates an abusable police dragnet. And to be clear, some people actually do want to create the police dragnet because "other people" are scary. Spend 10 minutes on NextDoor and you will see lots of this.
Even if you did setup a local CCTV monitoring system, how would I know you did that? It's completely fair to assume at this point that any camera watching you is syncing all of it's data with The Big Scary Cloud.
I'm deeply offended that, even as I write this post, my office cameras are staring me in the face. We SHOULD NOT stand for this bullshit.
Well, if a crime is committed in an area the police think your doorbell is viewing and you refuse to turn over any footage then they cops will serve you a warrant.
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.
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.
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.
Articles condemning big tech are popular for a reason. Apple's anti-surveillance developments are popular for a reason. Movies about surveillance dystopias are popular for a reason. People like their autonomy while having a hard time imagining all the ways surveillance data can be abused. This narrative that surveillance subjects are fully informed willfully consenting participants is surveillance industry propaganda, and its ridiculousness becomes more apparent by the year.
Most people have very little idea of the myriad ways they are being tracked (they know that it’s happening in general, but not the specifics), so they don’t go digging around in their phone settings to figure out how to make these changes.
The numbers on Apple’s “ask app not to track” usage demonstrate that the “people just don’t care about their privacy” crowd have serious blind spots.
The fact is this privacy protection industry does not exist because even after thoroughly explaining the issue to people, they generally still don't care. At the end of the day, it's not a real pain point - I suffer no measurable damage from corporations having my personal data, indeed I derive some small but non zero benefits. It might feel weird or even unethical to you, but that's just like your opinion man, and people with other value systems will not necessarily feel the same way. These people aren't dumb and blind, just apathetic.
I think for the most part people just aren't aware of the consequences of corporate surveillance.
The largest consumer hardware company in existence (Apple) makes privacy a significant part of its marketing. I’m not sure where you’re getting this idea from.
You state that there is no real pain point, but I would posit that the pain point is simply non obvious. People are definitely weirded out when they have a conversation with someone about a product that they’d never heard of and then it suddenly shows up all over their phone. They simply don’t comprehend how much the bits of data they are shedding could lead to that kind of prediction behavior from Google/facebook et al. And to be fair, I doubt that the engineers behind that could explain the behavior with exacting precision.
At the end of the day there’s no good lever for the typical consumer. It ends up being framed as a all or nothing decision, and so they throw their hands up and say they have no interest in living as a hermit.
You're starting out with the assumption that prediction behavior is objectively a problem. Most people are well aware that they are shedding tons of information, but so what? When people get weirded out when their phone listens to them do they seek out someone to solve this problem for them, or do they shrug their shoulders and ignore it?
The world is full of complicated but nevertheless clearly problematic issues where the how is challenging to explain but the why isn't. With corporate surveillance the how is easy to explain but the why is not. There isn't some measurable harm inflicted, and most concerns are hypothetical in nature. Just because something feels vaguely weird doesn't mean it must be a problem, it just means you're not used to it.
It's like if you're arachnaphobic, you could conjecture that everyone who doesn't take precautions against spiders is simply ignorant of just how many spiders are around them, and indeed its true most people are not experts on spiders, but the fact is most people legitimately don't have a problem with spiders, and in the vast majority of cases they shouldn't as most spiders do no harm.
I pointed out that Apple depends significant marketing, pr, and development resources towards positioning its products as a privacy preserving option. But because of your informal polling of people you know that all goes out the window?
For the record, the relative privacy of iOS over android was a significant consideration in my most recent buying decision. I say relative because it’s obviously not “perfect privacy”. But in any case you have heard now from at least one person that based their decision on that fact.
You’re quite clearly working backwards from a pre established conclusion. Do some, many or even the majority of people not care about privacy? I’d concede that point. But the narrative on HN that has last for years that regular people just don’t care at all is very much over confident.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/duckduckgo-android-app-tracking-...
I don't know of a single survey that demonstrates end users understand they are under constant surveillance. Can you point to one? Otherwise this argument seems like a complete distraction.
You are the one claiming that people lack understanding but nevertheless care. Show me the survey indicating that claim to be true.
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.
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.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/suicide-of-the-l...
They lived in meat Twitter a hundred years ago.
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.
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)
some of these ideas you swiftly qualified as unremarkable are: freedom, liberty, privacy, and individuality.
Large impersonal institutions are much easier to hold accountable than local communities. In small groups all sorts of abuse can be hidden and sometimes even outright accepted in the name of "cohesion".
Small communities with informal power dynamics can be extremely toxic in a way that is far more harmful than google knowing what videos you watch. Small town may seem idyllic but they are often hell for that one gay resident.
I think this is exactly backwards.
> but they are often hell for that one gay resident.
Contrarily, people are way more likely to accept a person once they know them personally as part of their community. Small towns don't operate like high school locker rooms.
> I think this is exactly backwards.
No it is not. States and corporations are bound by law and to a great extent by public opinion while smaller communities are much freer to tyrannize their members.
Being part of the same "community" didn't stop school segregation in the south, the federal government did.
With your reasoning, feudalism is the most accountable form of government, safest for minorities.
It's not clear why you brought up feudalism but systems in which a local lord is responsible for dispensing justice allow for far more abuse that those with centralized legal systems. It is always better for judges to be as far removed from the outcome of the case as possible.
In theory. In practice, corporations do risk analysis and compute liabilities and flout the law all the time. Particularly environmental laws. One disaster after another. Coverups, bribery, corruption, evading accountability. You're living in an alternate universe, because this one is full of malfeasance and screwups from huge organizations with zero consequences.
In that case, doesn't the institution become the totalitarian state?
On the one hand we have endless accounts of people deathly afraid of coming out, even to families that "know them personally" (and grave consequences in cases where the truth inadvertently comes to light), even when the larger community/law explicitly protects them. On the other we have your vague assertion that it'll be all right. I doubt "just get to know the other" works outside of specific constraints that are absent from most "organic" threats to the local orthodoxy.
Precisely. And that enforcement of the orthodoxy often takes far more severe forms than online criticism.
I treat original post as a relative comparison, not an absolute claim.
It’s clearly easier to get CocaCola to change course than say, my local butcher. /s
Governments are also unaccountable when it comes to invisible breaches to citizen's privacy. See Snowden's revelations.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Prohibits the Department of Defense or Department of Education from doing a form of norm enforcement. Prohibits the states of Alabama or California from doing a form of norm enforcement. Good.
Laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race/sex/religion/etc.
Prevents the CEOs of Walmart or Apple from doing a form of norm enforcement. Good.
The things done by China or the USSR to people with the wrong ideas. Direct norm enforcement by a large institution. Serious candidate to be the worst thing ever.
For example, that same amendment makes it illegal to prevent a church to subjecting gay minors to various forms of norm enforcement.
Size seems like a misnomer here.
2. There's nothing stopping private citizens from exerting social pressure on large corporations either.
Again, institutional size is a red herring in this conversation. Every argument that small is better than large or vice versa works symmetrically with plenty of real world examples. It's almost like size is a totally orthogonal issue.
Yes, the difficulty of escaping a norm enforcing institution is an important desiderata. More important than size.
The social dynamics of cults are a (politically acceptable) counter-point. Leaving a small and insular community is rarely so trivial.
> If you're openly gay and the USSR hates gay people, you're probably gonna get murdered.
This conversation started with a discussion of large social media sites and you keep bringing up authoritarian governments to prove "big = bad".
Yes, escaping a nation-state is difficult. But if you're on a political extreme and don't like a social media site's speech rules, just don't use that social media site. And deleting a social media account is infinitely easier than abandoning the social group / town where you grew up.
So here we are again.
This game is becoming a bit silly, so let me unroll an infinitely long thread by providing a template for the next 5,000 replies:
you: "X1 is small and X1 is good but X2 is big and X2 is bad."
other commenters: "X3 is big and X3 is good but X4 is small and X4 is bad"
occasionally: "Nuh-uh X{$n} is not so bad"
me: "X5 is small and bad, X6 is big and good, X7 is small and good, X8 is big and bad. It's almost like there are features other than size that better unify toxic norm enforcing communities."
This is wrong on two levels.
1) Norm enforcement implemented by a faceless institution does not make the neighbor less bigoted.
2) The institution can implement discriminatory behaviors just like the neighbors, but with the power to capture and kill people from being part of some unwanted minority.
Look at all the congregational hearings about Facebook and other large tech companies, or the endless anti threats against google. they all amounted to nothing. Twitter can arbitrary ban anyone from its platform, sometimes for politically motivated reasons, without any recourse for whoever was banned. Same for YouTube.
Large, modern and democratic institutions and the rule of law are a blessing.
Sure, Google/Coca-Cola/BigCorps are hard to change course.
But small communities can be far, far nastier to an outsider / different person and sometimes far more insidious / damaging / harder to influence.
And it can be difficult to see.
My wife has joined a Mommy's group at a neighbouring church; she's gushing how open and welcoming and friendly they all are. Then I asked to consider that a) She happens to be a nominally-christian white middle-class straight anglo-saxon white-collar mother with kids b) How do you think somebody without those characteristics would be welcomed at the church? How many characteristics would have to change for environment to transform? We then read the church's website, attended an actual sermon to see what they heard, and boy oh boy, has her perception of friendly welcoming fellow mommys changed :<. It's all smiles and friendliness until/unless you cross some cultural/instilled/assumed line and norm.
Individualism is not directly in conflict with privacy, but rather both are in conflict public safety and compliance.
The article posits that increased individualism and breakdown of communities has led to a loss of privacy, but this was not a given, but a choice.
A society can simply choose to reject the loss of privacy and accept the costs that may come with individualism & privacy.
Further, the entire argument that community surveillance was effective and required replacement is suspect. For example, murder rates were higher and case closure was much worse in the past under the community surveillance model. Crime rates were dropping at the same time that communities were disintegrating, all before the advent of mass surveillance.
Before 2013, only lunatics were concerned with mass surveillance. Look how far we've come. Now the media gives lip service to "privacy advocates". And the result of all this "privacy advocacy" is a giant popup window reminding you that you must submit to tracking if you wish to engage. Engineering consent. Maybe we can meet up in the metaverse to organize a revolution.
There is absolutely choice. Both are are supported by continuous choices choices people make every do. The choices are different between government and corporate surveillance.
On the government surveillance side, people can choose to vote for politicians that support their privacy and lobby their representatives. They can also start public propositions, make donations, or run for office.
On the corporate side, people can choose to refuse to use products, websites, or stores that sell their data. People can take actions to anonymize themselves.
People make these choices every day. Often people choose not to support privacy because they value something else more, e.g. convenience, money, time, safety, ect.
What you're doing is like saying citizens of North Korea are "choosing" to live under the Kim regime because they could technically try to overthrow him if they wanted to. You have to consider the costs of doing so and the likelihood it would succeed.
On the contrary, many of these are collective choices made by society, especially when it comes to the law.
>What you're doing is like saying citizens of North Korea are "choosing" to live under the Kim regime because they could technically try to overthrow him if they wanted to. You have to consider the costs of doing so and the likelihood it would succeed.
I actually think this is the most insightful and humane way to think about those who live in NK under the Kim regime. They are born into an awful situation where their choices are very limited. They can collaborate, resist, or try to flee and all have unattractive consequences. I wouldn't disparage someone for choosing any of the above given such poor options. The plight of these people is defined by their lack of attractive choices, for example, they can not choose to emigrate from NK, or vote in free elections.
Similarly, this framing showcases the bravery and optimism when people choose to do make hard choices, like to be a resistor in NK, despite the tremendous cost and low chance of success.
To me, saying people have no choice is dehumanizes those both those who suffer or secede based on their choices.
If that's a head of household, then you surveil him - and the principals (individuals in the family/household) preserve privacy.
If every individual has agency, then every individual tends to get surveilled.
If you think about this from a marketing/sales POV, you want to understand the primary purchaser, not necessarily anyone else.
Approaching from another direction, how can I delegate surveillance of myself to another third party who interacts with the system? It's certainly possibly for specific aspects (eg nominee deeds, LLCs with professional managers, etc), but being able to do so in general is not possible (eg many counterparties won't accept interacting with an LLC and will demand to know the beneficial owners). Surveillance systems are fundamentally totalitarian in that they assert having in-depth knowledge about your existence, regardless of what you've actually leaked to them.
The way you would delegate surveillance of yourself to another party is to give everything you own to that party in exchange for the ability to live on their property and never interact with the rest of society. Giving up all agency does not look like creating some legal fictions, it looks like withdrawal from society.
I'm not sure I agree with grandparent's assessment, but I don't think these are the strongest arguments against it. I think a better argument would appeal to incidental surveillance: my car has no agency, and nobody is interested in tracking the car for its own sake, but it is surveilled as a way to watch me.
I don't disagree and I've been on both sides of such agent relationships. But I feel like we are ultimately bickering over framing, due to the original article's terrible framing that fails to address underlying causes. It's not so much that I disagree with the original comment as that I don't think it fosters actionable conclusions.
Performing mass surveillance doesn't cost that much, demonstrated by the popularity of collecting "big data" - ie "we'll find a use for this some day". Rather than saying that surveillers decide to only collect data on the subjects with agency (because doing so to everyone would cost too much), it's more productive to talk in terms of surveillees taking steps to prevent the surveillers from having access to that data in the first place. Like sure if I turn my phone off to prevent my location from being tracked, the phone company could technically dispatch a costly private investigator to follow me around until I turned it back on. But that's outside the scope of what we're practically discussing.
2) In the any tight knit community or town privacy is equal and non hierarchical. I know about you and you know about me and everything is good or at least tolerable.
This is not comparable in any way to the completely asymmetrical big tech/government surveillance (and consequently manipulation) that is happening.
Information is power and asymmetry of power is domination.
Individualism does not require surveillance. The existence of the state does though, and if the preference of the citizens is for individualism, they delegate their collective surveillance duties to the police/army/secret services etc.
Individualism is possible without a state, collectivism is not.
I've never previously seen someone try to portray early industrial cities as lacking in crime. A strange form of rose colored glasses.
Facebook or Google could cook subtle social control schemes up in a cognitive blindspot and we could not even observe or discuss them, because they would seem natural to us. Like a synthetic religion and cults, just replacing the old religions & communitys, easily accessible for manipulation via the social networks.
Either way, "the same end" referring to massive surveillance, social controls, etc.
In China obviously the CCP does all that
In the West, it happens more or less organically through populism: communities all installing ring cam, cancelling people on twitter, etc. It's driven by populism instead of totalitarianism.
And that's not even to say it's all bad either, if the vast majority of people want to see a neo-nazi lose their public service job, is cancel culture really that bad in this situation? Like you mentioned, that's essentially democracy.
However, it can get out of control when it's gone unchecked. Every now and then you see one of those "cancel culture gone wrong" articles upvoted to the top here, where one quote out of context gets amplified on social media and ends in lost jobs and death threats.
The real problem is that there is no mechanism to keep the overwhelming power of modern populism in check. The country wasn't designed in an era where a million people could start a shit storm together from separate geographies. In the 18th century, you needed to get enough angry people in one location to form a mob. That only happened in rare and exceptional circumstances. It was self limiting, in a way. The internet has changed the rules, so societies are still learning to adapt.
This couldn't be further from the truth. Those thinkers exist, but they have no power anyways. Cancel culture and other "illiberal" modern activity is actually emergent behavior from strongly connected social networks. It's pure populism. It's just that millions of people go on the internet for the purpose of feeling angry at somebody else on twitter or facebook, and this via the free market results in people losing jobs, people being ostracized, or even the formation of real-life protests and riots.
Hopefully we never really feel the bite of cheap surveillance, but realistically? The Nazis weren't even a century ago. The next 100 years will be rough.
Immediately before the surveillance era, at least in the US, crime rates had been declining for many years indicating no unraveling of social order. Meanwhile community dissolution had been going on for decades.
I think the obvious answer is correct: mass surveillance became possible and cheap, and states adopted it as soon as they could.
I think the motivation for the article is a hope for a kind of society where information technology can coexist without surveillance, and the author errs by misdiagnosing the shape this society could take. It won't be one where we revert to traditional community control which the author supposes, or one where people can outrun surveillance with savvy use of technology which seems to be the default position of many tech-savvy people.
Rather the solution is to apply democratic control to information technology. Democratic control is the best way to mitigate concentrations of power such as the military, courts, taxation, etc.
I believe that the general population is more fearful of threats, and therefore more willing to sacrifice privacy for perceived security.
As you say, crime rates are declining, but technology has enabled the population to be informed of every crime in every community, so the threat perception is greatly increased.
'Surveillance Capitalism' of the Facebook type is equally as mundane: nobody is actually harmed by the fact that Facebook knows a lot about you. Facebook feeds people garbage information, which is arguably harm, but they'd do that anyhow.
If Facebook's was only allowed to collect a fragment of information relative to what they do today - nothing would change. The world wouldn't skip a beat.
Meanwhile, the failure of CCP's information controls, would probably mean regime change within 5 years.
Way more than any capitalist country and censorship (though also there is to some extent in westerner world but softer).
I fail to see how the headline matches the fact that in capitalist countries there is surveillance with technology as a difference with where I lived.
Despite that, fundamentalist Christian communities, closest surrogate for "good days before Enlightenment", espouse much stricter social control than mainstream society.
I'd like to re-frame this positively. Putting minor surveillance powers in the hands of everyday folk is a net win. I don't know about you, but I like to see who is poking around my premises. Oldskool neighborhood watch initiatives don't cut it anymore. I can see there would be a problem if your IP camera got accidentally broadcasted to the public facing Internet and criminals could see your house was empty, but the onus is on the user to lock down their equipment. Not the manufacturers.
Huh? Why? I mean the user needs to have responsibility for the equipment they use, but it is absolutely also the manufacturers responsibility to produce reasonably locked down equipment.
North Korea and Singapore because they are still nations are still just mere national tyrannies and surveillance states, whereas China, the US, Britain, and even to a greater extent, Australia and Canada are becoming totalitarianized because they are already the compromised vassals for a post-national movement that seeks to effectively dissolve all physical, sexual, familial, religious, tribal, regionalist, nationalist, and obviously, racist, identities. One liquid humanity under managed technocratic rule.
If one is to be anti- something, anti(surveillance capitalism) is perhaps the only accurate anti-fascism of this era, as it is to be against the collusion of the state with surveillance capitalists to dominate your countries, but if you are really looking to fight the good fight of today and not baited with disctractions into relitigating ideas from 100 years ago, I would suggest turning your attention to how surveillance is used to totalitarianize nation states and dissolve them, as whether we are right or left, when we are against the anti-human deception and evils of totalitarianization, we are very much on the same team.
Per "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" the issue isn't the surveillance per se. It's how that awareness is used against us.
That is, the Surveillance Capitalist isn't simply watching, there's a feedback loop that allows them to influence. Influence where to go. Influence what to buy. Ultimately, influence what to think.
It's not about surveillance. It's about control.
I could be very wrong about this, but, I worry more about corporate surveillance than government surveillance.
That said I worry about both. When the government and corporations know much more about us than we know about them then they have a tactical advantage in every interaction.
It is not that I favor one or the other. Is is just a bigger threat power in a State, which remember, are managed by imperfect humans also, such as corporations, than corporations.
Because corporations cannot become monopolies easily (in deregulation I would say that they cannot by definition) and do not have power to regulate (at least not in theory, we all know crony capitalism, right?).