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Was expressing this fear to my wife and kids the other day. Ubiquitous cameras everywhere (like in the UK for many years) and other surveillance technology has always been a concern but had scaling limits -- but when you combine it now with the cheap ease of machine learning technologies we have a serious problem.

And then consider drones, mobile devices. And then mass disinformation and/or disruption via LLMs.

As a long time advocate of old school mass action, and a believe in active protest movements as part of a healthy democracy, I have a strong feeling of unease. I've had it since about 9/11, but it's now really bad.

e.g. if you know, with certainty, that heading out to a protest could lead to your instant termination from your job because a drone passed over and took a photo and identified all 100,000 people in the crowd instantly.. would you still go?

Or if having been identified, some malevolent actor could just turn around and mass produce fake content from you and others in the crowd, to discredit you?

Shivers.

AI also has the potential to detect your every unique tic in a way that humans would be incapable of doing. You could be masked but your gait and other body movements will give you away, or at least place you in a statistically likely pool of suspects.

"Walk without rhythm and it won't attract the worm."

Anti Walking recognition techniques have been under development for decades though..

https://youtu.be/iV2ViNJFZC8?feature=shared

> e.g. if you know, with certainty, that heading out to a protest could lead to your instant termination from your job because a drone passed over and took a photo and identified all 100,000 people in the crowd instantly.. would you still go

The funny thing is that most people see this as a feature rather than a bug. Before the 2024 election the policies of most surveillance platforms roughly matched the culture of upper-middle-class Californians, so the argument was "if abusive technology is used to shut down opinions I don't like, I don't see a problem with that". Good luck explaining why such an attitude is a problem.

"If guns are used to shut down crime, I don't see a problem with that."

Is kind of a cogent argument.

In this philosophically exaggerated isomorphism, you seem to be implying that either criminals and crime fighters should both be equally armed or that crime is largely subjective and therefore enforcement is wrong.

It seems like you're ultimately arguing for anarchy (nobody should have abusive technology -- guns), and therefore no institutions are worth protecting with force. It seems equivalent to believing that everyone will respect the commons in the tragedy of the commons without an enforcing mechanism.

Regardless of how you answer, you have run headlong into the paradox of tolerance, and the problem of what to do when people violate the social contract (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract), which is at the very core of what this country was founded on.

What "opinions I don't like" are you referring to? It's also worth reflecting on that you're writing on a platform where shutting down opinions you don't like is a major part of it, in order moderate extremism and promote curiosity.

Many events we celebrate as major achievements can be traced back to a group of people consciously violating the social contract, and succeeding to establish more rights for themselves using force.

I honestly don't know how to answer, because if you think long enough, you'll come to the conclusion that all rules are arbitrary, and everything could be questioned. Yet at the same time in practice we can agree on at least some basic principles of how the society should function. It's just incredibly difficult to formulate these principles in a manner that would be useful for logical reasoning.

I think what actually irked me was that many people say they believe in freedom of speech, but actually define it as "seeing others agree with me". I think that Reddit's "unpopular opinion" community is prime example of such attitude, where people say they value unpopular opinions, but actually promote popular ones.

> we now have 3 countries with the ability to erase entire cities or make the world functionally uninhabitable by humans

If we're talking the Russia, the US and China then they certainly have the largest arsenals, but there's an order of magnitude difference between the stockpiles of the first two and the third. China doesn't have that many more nukes than France, and only has about double the number of warheads of the UK (though it is questionable how independent from the US the UK's capability is).

And then there's Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea.

(https://www.icanw.org/nuclear_arsenals)

Chinese nuclear weapons, 2025

from: Nuclear Notebook, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

~ Hans M. Kristensen, Matt Korda, Eliana Johns, Mackenzie Knight | March 12, 2025

  The modernization of China’s nuclear arsenal has both accelerated and expanded in recent years.

  In this issue of the Nuclear Notebook, we estimate that China now possesses approximately 600 nuclear warheads, with more in production to arm future delivery systems.

  China is believed to have the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal among the nine nuclear-armed states; it is the only Party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons that is significantly increasing its nuclear arsenal.

* https://thebulletin.org/premium/2025-03/chinese-nuclear-weap...

Also, the threshold laid out above was "erase an entire city" OR "make planet unihabitable".

Any nation or group with a first gen atomic weapon can erase a city .. exercising that ability can potentially lead to a greater nuclear exchange between others, particularly if it's unclear what happened and what might be about to happen.

Fair enough, thanks :)

I imagine France is now starting to polish everything up more fervently as well, after Macron's speech about putting the nation onto a wartime economy last week, and there are other nations now talking about wanting to be under the French nuclear umbrella...

We certainly live in interesting times, to abuse that old chinese curse.

China is growing their arsenal quickly. And frankly, more of their warheads may actually work than Russia's.

Are they?

I'm not especially up on this stuff, but I haven't seen much about their nuclear arsenal lately. It's not that I doubt you - it would be entirely consistent with their general move to throwing their weight around, sending their warships provocatively near to other nations etc etc.

Even so, when we have a distribution that's roughly - 5k, 5k, 400, 300, 200, 200, 150, 90, 30 - it seems a little odd to draw the line of who could make the planet uninhabitable after the 400!

I think this is the last chance for the people in power to stop messing around before US, the people with knowledge, get pissed off and take them down with force, using the technology WE make for THEM.

They already know words are meaningless and don't count for anything. Democrats have been trying to use words to get their way or even compromise and republicans fully understand they don't have to pay attention to them at all. Threats are laughable. If democrats had any power they would have used it. Their inaction is proof of their impotence.

Words don't matter, only actions matter. "upvotes don't count."

A street presence can barely be mustered.

Also if you start learning about history, you'll learn that "intellectuals" are the first people totalitarians crack down in precisely because of this threat you just made. So by the time you realize you need to make good on your threat, chances are it will be too late. Don't read about the Khmer Rouge killing fields or the Indonesian "communist" purge if you want to have a good day. American exceptionalism is fueling a "can't happen here" attitude that's fueling people's denial about our many potential futures. Inaction means that we aren't influencing what that future is. We are at someone else's whims. History doesn't tell you what will happen, but it tells you what can happen.

You're saying right now you're speaking softly, but carrying a big stick, so they better listen. I don't think you're carrying one, and the republicans purging the old guard and replacing them with loyalists don't think you are either. You're just speaking softly. We all seem to be.

to paraphrase another person: if you're posting it online on a public social media channel, it doesn't matter.

the stuff that's going to change the government, for the better or worse, is going to get the FBI and Secret Service on you, and you're not saying on that on the front page of reddit.

every twitter meme that makes the rounds, every sneering HN post is a sign of impotence. if there was real opposition DOGE would be afraid to go to offices. the best the US Dems can do is spray painting a few Tesla offices (save for one in Oregon that had some bullet holes, done well after closing).

The Jan 6th rioters were fascist rubes, but at least they had the balls to go.

It drives me crazy that none of the people targeted by DOGE have locked themselves in their office and called WaPo and CNN. If you want to keep your job, the image of jackbooted thugs dragging you out can't be better for raising alarms and drawing sympathy. Everyone is complying in advance.

Someone made the comparison between SK politicians shoving their way past guards to impeach their corrupt president, and Congressional Dems who let themselves get turned away. It's either theater or they're completely feckless (or both). How has there been not one Profile in Courage, with everything going on?

I don't know why people still think yelling and waiving signs around is going to do a single shred of good. Protesting means "doing nothing, loudly." You're not going to change anything, you're just doing performance art.

> It drives me crazy that none of the people targeted by DOGE have locked themselves in their office and called WaPo and CNN.

Nobody who is capable of opposing DOGE is willing to even lift a finger. As a flaming liberal, the most infuriating thing I've seen in the news all year was: Democrats sitting there impotently waving their stupid little signs during the President's address to Congress. Yea, your little sign saying "Save Medicaid" is doing next to nothing. Thank you, my elected representative, for being totally useless.

I just realized that capitalizing the word "us" sounded like United states :facepalm:

> but we now have 3 countries with the ability to erase entire cities or make the world functionally uninhabitable by humans

Only 3?

> we now have 3 countries with the ability to erase entire cities or make the world functionally uninhabitable by humans

Nuclear war is horrible enough without requiring hyperbole. Each of the U.S., Russia and China have the ability to functionally end industrial civlisation as we know it. None has the power to make the Earth uninhabitable by humans (outside hypothetical asteroid redirect capabilities).

Admiral Rickover, the father of the American nuclear navy, testified to congress that he thought we would probably destroy ourselves and hardly anyone is more expert than he was.

  Senator PROXMIRE. What do you think is the prospect, 
  then, of nuclear war?

  Admiral RICKOVER. I think we will probably destroy 
  ourselves. So what difference will it make? Some new
  species will arise eventually; it might be wiser 
  than we are.

https://www.jec.senate.gov/reports/97th%20Congress/Economics...

Rickover said that in 1982, four years before our global nuclear stockpile peaked at 70,000 warheads [1]. Today, that number is closer to 12,000 [2].

If we'd continued accumulating nukes at the rate we were in 1982, yes, we might today have the power to render the Earth uninhabitable to human life.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2968/062004017

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-weapons

And the fact that authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere means the ruling oligarchs KNOW it.

The silicon valley elite are practically going insane over the prospect of total authoritarian control of the "lessers" ... of course couched in pure libertarian nonsense about unrestained freedom of the ultrarich to do as they please to them.

>it's likely the last era of humanity

No. Just no. No matter what what the thing is. It just isn't.

That's not a reason to NOT protest/fight unchecked power. It just isn't the reason to do it.

One thing is for sure. These technologies don't make protest or revolution any easier. They give asymmetric power to whoever wields them (the state) against whoever doesn't (a loose collection of angry people on the street without the same tools).

This isn't the 1800s anymore where the most powerful tool was a gun, and you could distribute these symmetrically across state and people to keep the state in check.

Surveillance, crowd control weapons, access to banking, control over media, eventually AI and widespread robotics, have properties that empower the state. In the context of mass protest, the status quo gets harder and harder to dislodge.

None of this matters much while democracy is still existing, but it's a risk that's there. It makes the fall of democracy more of an absorbing state that you can't escape from.

The encryption gives asymmetric power to the people. Tor and Matrix for communications that can't be broken by the rich, no matter how powerful. Bitcoin for free transactions, vpn and torrent for the media etc.

You have a lot more faith in technology than me. There is a strong history of compromising data at rest (such as in phone backups) and getting metadata either directly or through side channels. It's not very hard for me to imagine a system that tells you who is talking with who, when, and with what IPs no matter how anonymized you think you are. That all assumes good opsec too.

My understanding is that Tor was compromised several years ago.

Pegasus alone means that once you become a target, you're done.

It also means these "defenses" are only generally available to the technically savvy.

It's easy to encrypt the backups (don't use g$$gle or apple clouds, of course).

That well might be true. But what about the people upu communicate with? They have messages from you, and probably don't have airgapped backups. So your ironclad backups don't matter much.

What I like in Telegram (though I don't use it), you can force delete messages on your interlocutor's device, at any time.

Telegram is Russian owned and run out of a monarchy. Telegram is not anyone's friend. "delete" is also not a black and white concept. There are many degrees of deletion.

Telegram used to be very hands-off with messages, no matter how criminal, unless they were hurting Telegram itself (spam). Then its owner got arrested for having actual knowledge of criminal activity and still not stopping it. Now it cares about reports, bans criminals and reports them to the police. There are rumours it uses keyword scans to find things that are not reported. Remember it has your phone number which is linked to your ID card.

There is a way to sign up without phone number, albeit rather convoluted. Certainly doable for a determined criminal :)

I'm far from a security expert, but I also have direct security expertise, and from the way you talk, I am highly confident that there are a lot of things you don't know you don't know and I think you've failed to imagine the wealth of information available to institutional powers.

The original MS Blaster writer was found because Microsoft uploaded a memory dump when the author was creating their proof of concept. Room 641a is the connection based data reception we know about. Snowden's PRISM showed a high level of corporate <-> government intelligence collusion. Pegasus is generally considered an intelligence "I win" button.

Compromising someone's security is not a matter of ability, it is purely a matter of resources and will, and as the ruling regime changes from protecting rights, to protecting itself, the "will" for invasive mass surveillance will become much much stronger and your ability to remain anonymous will wane into nothingness. Corporations will increasingly have little choice but to compromise their users.

In your list of security features you listed a what's what of "social media" based security offerings/"solutions" in which the security providers "profit" from you believing they provide security.

Tor was compromised. Matrix is Europe wanting their own messaging platform. Bitcoin is literally profitable for providers, I don't think it's generally considered private, and mostly it's a hedge against inflation based theft. Your browser directly betrays large amounts of information and finger printing is largely considered doable regardless of your configuration, which makes VPN's questionable security, not to mention there are whole lock down configurations required and many browsers upload browsing history to the cloud by default. Torrent is very not private.

If you haven't heard the phrase "bits of entropy" and can explain what that means and why that's an important concept, then you are speaking far beyond your level of knowledge.

> Bitcoin is literally profitable for providers, I don't think it's generally considered private, and mostly it's a hedge against inflation based theft.

This is not what Bitcoin "mostly is".

How not?

You've read too many cheap spy novels.

Take my warning or not. You are definitely out of your depth.

Here's an entropy primer: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/primer-information-the...

your naivety is almost endearing

Communication does not cause change. There are two factions at war. One has uncensored communication (but has been conditioned to only use censored forms) and the other has unlimited access to guns, bombs, and napalm, as well as uncensored communication on all platforms, including the most popular ones where it censors and gaslights the other faction. Which one wins the war?

It's a trick question. The former group have been made complacent. No war occurs. It was won before it started.

That is a pretty disingenuous quotation, you cut it mid sentence destroying the context:

> It's the most important time in human history to protest/fight unchecked power because it's likely the last era of humanity that we are going to be able to.

I cut the context because the context doesn't matter.

Anyone making the claim that this likely the last era of humanity that anything is just wrong. The future (even just the future of humanity) is longer and weirder and wilder and more filled with unknowns than anyone alive now can imagine.

This is not the last era of humanity that anything.

We should still be protesting/fighting unchecked power.

There have been many last eras of humanity of things. The last era of gas lighting (lighting powered by gas, not the manipulation tactic). The last era of information being passed down orally. The last era of monarchs. The last era of human computers. I understand that you are saying there are no last eras of anything so this can't be the last era of something, and that's incorrect.

The post I was replying to was not worded as "the last era of X". It was worded as "the last era of humanity". Certainly things, practices, places, peoples, beliefs come and go. Humanity likely will end at some point, but that's not about to happen in any predictable way in the currently foreseeable future.

Incorrect. It was worded as "the last era of humanity doing X". It parses as "the last era of {humanity doing X}" and not "{the last era of humanity} doing X" (which isn't something that makes sense anyway).

> it's likely the last era of humanity that we are going to be able to

Athenians were saying this in respect of writing.

I don't think they were?

> don't think they were?

Yes [1].

[1] https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/

I'm very familiar with that argument, it's almost a trope at this point; however it is completely logically unrelated to the OP's take.

Unless you think hayst4ck was lamenting the plight of the dictators who have it too easy these days and won't learn to properly internalize the fine essence of clearing peaceful protests the old-fashioned way, when it needed riot shields and teargas?

> it is completely logically unrelated to the OP's take

The point is people have been arguing that their era is the last for freedom because after the invention of writing or phalanxes or cannons or blue-water navies or industrial warfare or nuclear weapons or AI and drones the powerful will have all the chips. It's not true, and you'll almost always find a balancing meme around how those same technologies are going to empower anarchists.

Drones, AI and all of the aforementioned technologies make projecting power easier. That says nothing about who holds that power. The same surveillance tools that make identifying protesters easier also make e.g. determining where particular riot police live possible.

Plato's argument wasn't that his era was the last for freedom, it was that writing would spoil people's ability to memorize their oral traditions when they have the comfort of reaching for their notes. And in fact he was probably right about that, and we experience the continuation in the extreme today with the convenience of Wikipedia, and I can hardly find my way downtown when my phone battery dies and I can't check Google Maps.

New technologies do change the world, and society, usually in irreversible ways. In many aspects for the better, but in some aspects for the worse. To argue that because Plato was wrong about writing, therefore the things you value about society will continue as always, is to bury your head in the sand. Freedom, anonymity, and the vulnerability of the few and powerful to the disgruntled many are all things that can disappear with the shifting sands of time and technology. An argument that they will or won't must be grounded on the merits of the particulars.