>
It's crazy that all the things we considered the worst of dystopia in the 80's, thinking nobody would be stupid enough to do, and that those societies in SF books were only distant fictions, are things we are actively seeking now.> What the hell is going on?
Because they weren't all that dystopian? Maybe people had the good sense of being able to see the amazing aspects of those future technologies even when the authors tried to paint them darkly? Or maybe we rightly all realized - even if just at subconscious, emotional level - that those fictional dystopias are thin, simplistic narrative devices, and "no one would be stupid enough to" actually implement them?
What we didn't predict was adtech. For all the anti-corporate fiction that was part of, or adjacent to, science fiction of that era, the western culture is still obsessed with self-made people, glorifying entrepreneurship, making money. Well, turns out there's hardly a difference between small businesses and large corporations. The incentives are the same regardless of size; sole proprietorships and multinationals aren't some sworn enemies, they're just different size of the same thing.
What we didn't realize - and many still don't - is that, while no one may be stupid enough to implement the techno-dystopia outright, many will happily do whatever it takes, no matter how unscrupulous and underhanded, to secure their income. We didn't realize that glorifying "business sharks" means creating an entrepreneurship culture where customers are resources to be exploited, not human beings. Iterate on it enough, and we get to techno-dystopia indirectly, with no stupid steps made on the way - just plenty of exploitative ones.
Perhaps the memory of the first 3/4 of the 20th century has us put too much focus on the governments, and blind to private interests. A particular pet peeve of mine, for example:
> My German ex was born in East Germany, 11 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. She thinks people are mad to believe that tracking is not going to be abused.
Yes, and at least some people who think alike also like to bring up Nazis pulling census records to make their purges more efficient. But frankly, I don't think this is a good argument against censuses, or contact tracing. It's not the census that put minorities in concentration camps, it's the Nazis. They wouldn't have stopped if that data didn't exist, they'd find some other proxy or just do it systematically, like they did elsewhere.
A better argument is to perhaps not collect data you don't need. A census without religious affiliation would be less useful to Nazis and the like, and it's questionable how useful having this information was for the purposes it was collected. But my ultimate point is, when your government turns evil, you're screwed anyway. We need to try and prevent it from going bad in the first place. It may indeed involve fighting against badly justified surveillance overreach, but trying to take away tools that an okay-ish government uses for good, only because they'll be used for bad things when the government turns evil, is just self-destructive behavior.
I mean, you could argue that teaching a person how to grow strength and keep a healthy body, how to read, write, plan, think, negotiate, convince, are all bad because what if that person becomes a criminal or a dictator? Yes, it would be much better if murderers and tyrants didn't know how to use a knife or a gun, or how to talk people into helping them. But we consider that risk to be worth it because of all the good it brings to everyone else, continuously.
And yeah, we're all so focused on the idea of governments going full-Nazi again, that we've ignored the gradual overreach of private interests, which at this point not only actively screws with our everyday lives all the time (hello advertising industry), but also undermines our governments too. Even worse, all the "dual-use" tech and data private interests have, that okay-ish governments would love to access but have good sense to refrain themselves, sits there gift-wrapped for any evil government willing to reach for it. We ended up choosing the worst option of all: all the downsides of tech being abused by private interests now and evil governments in the future, with none of the upsides of okay governments using it for good today.
So perhaps we should concentrate less on things like AirTags being potentially deadly in hands of the next Stalin, and focus more on fighting private and public attempts at abusing them early, while maximizing the benefits society can get from such technologies.
Or, in short, let's pay less attention to how some tech could be abused in principle, and more attention to people who are trying to abuse others.