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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 vacuum that was filled by surveillance.

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.

Historically, the police department in San Francisco enforced very different norms from the police in Amarillo.

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).

> 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.

A bunch of Karens hahaha. In Spanish we say "charos". Una panda de charos. Funny hahahaha.

IMO there’s a secondary effect where individualism has been twisted to say “my individual freedom to meddle in your life shall not be infringed”.

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.

It depends what kind of individual freedoms you care about. I've seen surveillance capitalism expressed as the freedom of people to enter into agreements where they get free cell phone games in exchange for a trove of personal data.

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.

Well, first, it's "to enter into implicit agreements..." — I think it's an important detail. Second, you always pay for "cell phone games" with some amount of money (ranging from $0 to infinity) plus a trove of optional data; the option to pay with just money simply is not there.

> the option to pay with just money simply is not there.

You seem to be confused about the concept of consent.

Honestly I think individualism is inherently in conflict with populations in the hundreds of millions. The more people you have, the more your chasing a local maximum contributes to a tragedy of the commons situation.

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.

I think the opposite is the case. The larger the population, the more infeasible central control becomes. Also, individualism doesn't support polluting commons. To the contrary, I have no moral right to pollute another individual's space or air under individualism.

Moral right or not, you have to violate individualism on some level to enforce any action about it. Individualism need not be curtailed by a central authority; cultural norms can do just as good a job.

And for too many people, “individualism” really just means “other people should be free to be like me”.

Every individualist I know, including myself since I consider myself one, believes that a state is necessary to resolve and mediate disputes between individuals. So I don't think this is a violation of individualism. Even Objectivists believe in the courts and police. The key is that the state is there to protect individual rights, that's it.

I think you're exactly right, another poster raised the interesting point of whether where those lines are drawn is inevitable based on the circumstances or if we have a lot of collective control.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

Why so many people want to be baby sitted? You do not want something just discard it.

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.

> 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.

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.

I find your statement factually correct.

Yeah, but that's a bad thesis, don't you think? There's a much easier explanation than the twist on freedom is slavery the author is pitching: surveillance state is easy and it makes greedy people rich.

but it's more complicated that "makes greedy people rich"

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)

> autonomous money, as I half-jokingly think of them

I don't think that is a joke. Corporations are old-school AIs. They still mostly run on meatware, but that's changing.

I love a quote from Milton Friedman that talks about greed when he was asked. It is from the top of my head but it is very close I think:

"Some say people are greedy. Of course it is never ourselves it is always our fellows who are greedy."

But why does it make them rich? Because enough consumers want a surveillance state. The market wants a surveillance state.

The market wants to not think about it.

There's no such thing as a bad thesis. It may be argued poorly but the thesis can't be bad. You're conflating the two.

You are restating what the article says but I don't see any evidence presented nor is a mechanism that would cause this link presented. It sound to me like no more than idle speculation. 'Individuality created a vacuum that was filled by surveillance'. What does this even mean? Why are these two things related? Correlation does not equal causation.

I'm restating the article in response to a comment that I thought misunderstood the article at a fundamental level.

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 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.

I'm not clear on why this vacuum must exist and more importantly, why it must be filled.

I don't know either.

We live in a society.

Yes, a society ruled by laws. We're not talking about a vacuum of laws.

I think the idea is that the increased size and density of society has led to more complex social structures that prior laws were not able to catch up to. See your sibling comment about the consolidation of populations into cities and the creation of modern policing. Technological advancement also leads to more issues- contrast the multitude of free speech/censorship fights over online content vs. AOL chat rooms having blanket moderator policies two decades ago. As society grows, so does the vacuum created by places the law is hazy on. And so does the number of bad actors, from thieves snatching Amazon packages off doorsteps to jihadist suicide bombers.

> As society grows, so does the vacuum created by places the law is hazy on. And so does the number of bad actors, from thieves snatching Amazon packages off doorsteps to jihadist suicide bombers.

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.

From a less philosophical and more partisan read of the situation, I'm inclined to believe that 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror gave the premier national government the carte blanche to pursue surveillance, widely supported or tacitly consented by the majority of the populace. And because such surveillance was normalized, large corporations, themselves experiencing several decades of increased free rein thanks to deregulation, also began engaging in profitable surveillance activities.

Perhaps this all would not have been so inevitable if we were living under a different sociopolitical climate.

How can individualism harm privacy? I mean, what is the alternative? Is that alternative more privacy and less surveillance? I do not think so.

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...