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Comment by oakpond | Hacker News Reader

I love tech in general but it's a bit disappointing to discover that perhaps its primary role in modern society is enabling mass surveillance.

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Primary role?

Tech does a lot more than that.

Sure. But does that matter if the surveilance part shifts power dynamics enough to endanger the rest?

How could any shifts 'endanger' electricity use, or the thousands of other major technological inventions accumulated throughout human history?

This is a good point. When has surveillances ever stopped anybody from doing anything? It’s not like imprisonment or death reduces people’s electricity use (the best known measure of technology)!

Reducing the number of users is not the same as 'endangering' the technology itself.

No technology was 'endangered' by WW2.

In fact, it enabled many new technologies.

This is a good point. Nobody has ever stopped doing research or developing technology because of something so petty as being surveilled, imprisoned or murdered.

I applaud the confidence with which you have reached back through time and chosen world war 2 as an event wherein nothing of intellectual value was lost. To wit, survivorship bias is not a real thing, and while I’ve heard of object permanence, nobody has proven to me that my mom doesn’t cease to exist when she puts her hands in front of her face.

Do you really think this kind of sarcasm laden commenting style, while attempting to deflect substantive points in a mocking tone, will be well received on HN?

I’m not sure what you’re talking about, I am simply agreeing with your deft analysis that millions of deaths around the world had exactly zero negative effect on technological advancement in any field. It certainly is not the single most asinine thing I’ve ever seen anyone post on this website, and I’m not chuckling at all.

> I’m not sure what you’re talking about, I am simply agreeing with your deft analysis that millions of deaths around the world had exactly zero negative effect on technological advancement in any field.

If you think there's a substantive argument to be made here, then using this boorish tone, that most passing readers can probably detect in seconds, is bizarrely self-discrediting.

If your dead set on going down this path, my advice would be that maybe some sort of super-genius could impress and bamboozle HN with this kind of writing style, but that's hardly possible at a lower competence.

The collapse of the electoral grid in South Africa is a perfect example where decline becomes a self reinforcing. They are facing regular blackouts not because the expertise to generate electric was suddenly lost but because of a failure of the underlying social systems. Society is surprisingly fragile in unexpected ways when people don’t understand the underlying inertia that keeps things operating.

Mass surveillance is corrosive in ways that’s don’t directly destroy infrastructure but can both indirectly do so and prevent the investment in it. Someone acting alone can cause hundreds of millions in damage fairly easily. Society can’t survive even a small fraction of people going down that route.

You build resilience not through law enforcement but by reducing the need for it.

Most modern democracies are finely balanced systems of how to organize power in ways many could potentially profit from it.

Now that doesn't always work as intended, but if we are unhappy with a particular government we can usually vote them out without a bloody revolution, which has some value in itself.

Throughout history there always has been a number — the fraction of the population you need behind you in order to stay in power, or vice versa how big of a populations will you can go against. Certain social practises and technologies can lower that number. Surveillance is one of them unless we are also surveilling our betters, but the trend is that politicians and corporations are becoming more and more intransparent while the little people are more and more transparent.

Many AI driven surveillance also suck at detecting relatively rare occurances like terrorism, but they are really good at detecting demonstrations and helping you to identify the participants after.

Simple. Surveillance helps a certain dictator to maintain absolute control of his country, which allows him to go to war and bomb the power stations in a neighboring country. Which country, in retaliation, bombs power stations in the dictator's country.

>Tech does a lot more than that.

You can do a lot of things and still have your primary role be something different from those things...

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