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Comment by teamonkey | Hacker News Reader

It is weird though.

I’m British, but coming back to the UK after some time living abroad was a shock: how many cameras there are monitoring every moment of your life and how many signs there are telling you what to do, what not to do, how to behave, keep off the grass, stand to the right, report all wrongdoings, no loitering, no waiting, wait here (1 hour max).

When first encountering it it feels dystopian, oppressive. You get used to it living here, to the point you don’t notice it, but it’s not normal.

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Early stages of a police state or totalitarian regime. Consider the mass surveillance of all our communications, that's an absolute hallmark[1] of a police state. And getting people to rat each other out as well, that's shocking. Even worse is how people have accepted this as "normal" and necessary for their safety.

Well, if they will imprison you for the act of reading certain texts and/or web sites here in the UK, then what do you expect, that's a de facto police state, and if the public finds it acceptable or necessary, it shows how much the frog has slowly boiled over the decades.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance "It is the single most indicative distinguishing trait of totalitarian regimes."

And not just surveillance, but also direct involvement of the police.

There was a video clip about russia arresting people for stuff on social media, and how supposedly 400 people got visited by police 'that year' which seems a lot, but in comparison, 3300 got visited by the police in UK.

(this got posted to skeptics stackexchange, where it was established that the year in question was 2016: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/54123/were-over... )

Yes, though a ‘visit from the police’ in the UK is not the same as an arrest. It can be to give a warning, or simply be to help the police with their inquiry. Certainly can be used as a threat though.

I wouldn’t say it was early stages. The technology is new but every other country has that technology too. There is something deeply embedded in British culture that enables it.

Orwell’s 1984 was a commentary in 1948, not a piece of speculative fiction.

Early stages? The UK still has a king with legal powers.

What do you mean by "still"? It's a quite recent development. They didn't have a king for decades.

They had a monarch with the same powers.

> And getting people to rat each other out as well, that's shocking

Is it though ? Shocking was when the nazis did it. Now it is _normal_.

I felt this back in the late 90s after only a month in SE Asia. That authoritarian edge, with stern demands to conform-or-be-noticed, becomes really obvious when you spend some time out of the country.

I thought this was great writing with some very telling observations.

Then I got to the Subscribe Here part. I suppose it was inevitable and more credible than "Send me a fiver through the post and I'll send you home-printed and photocopied articles every month or so."

Cognitive dissonance, even so.

But is it even possible to have a disintermediated digital economy? Bitcoin was supposed to be that, and look at how quickly that aped[1] corporate ethics.

[1] Ha.

> how many cameras there are monitoring every moment of your life

In some areas, they get local curtain twitchers to volunteer and watch: https://www.hu17.net/2017/05/11/volunteers-wanted-cctv-syste...

That's the real difficulty with these systems. A decade or so ago Atlanta had the most surveillance cameras per capita in the western world but inevitably each time there was a crime near one, it would turn out that the video wasn't available. Sometimes because the cameras were broken and never fixed. Sometimes because the feeds aren't recorded and no one was watching them. Sometimes the recording equipment was broken. They had endless cameras everywhere but hardly anyone was watching them. It was another case of a government that loves new initiatives that lets them spend a bunch of capital but then doesn't allocate the required operating funds to keep things going.

Companies like Ring already use machine learning and related buzzwords to help filter doorbell camera feeds. That might be the big thing that these huge networks of government cameras in public areas need to meet their full potential (good or bad).

Well put

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