Comment by stego-tech | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stego-tech | Hacker News Reader

The reality is that the current AI boom is just supercharging a longstanding trend of massive surveillance. Governments and the monied classes distrust everyone else by default, and continue instituting surveillance to protect their interests at the expense of everyone else.

It’s also everywhere:

* Academia has seen a glut of sensors and tech to surveil labs, classrooms, students, and faculty

* Retail and service workers are tracked via camera or phone and yelled at remotely by the boss if they’re not appropriately productive in any given moment

* Small businesses often leave telemetry and default data collection policies in place, letting private companies monitor their staff and business

The only tools available to us at this point are sabotage, awareness, and resistance. We need to build a society where people trust each other by default again, instead of assuming harm until proven otherwise. We also need governance and regulations at every level stating that surveillance of any sort must be as narrowly scoped as possible, that data retention is limited to as little as practicable, and that sharing of surveillance data with any party other than those compelled by law and warrant is illegal.

We’re in an era of peak productivity and flat wages, with the largest wealth pumps in human history funneling more money into fewer hands. This kind of surveillance isn’t just offensive or unacceptable, it’s grotesque in its treatment of our fellow humans.

The surveillance proliferation reflects a fundamental workplace cultural transformation driven by counterculture influence on professional norms.

Traditional workplace governance relied upon internalized behavioral standards eg duty, shame, professional integrity, functioning as self-regulating mechanisms. The systematic erosion of these cultural guardrails necessitated external monitoring systems substituting for previously internalized accountability.

The “trust but verify” approach emerged from practical necessity of maintaining organizational functionality within a workforce increasingly disconnected from traditional concepts of professional duty and self-accountability.

> The “trust but verify” approach emerged from practical necessity of maintaining organizational functionality within a workforce increasingly disconnected from traditional concepts of professional duty and self-accountability.

This sticks out in my head as completely divorced from the practical reality of the modern workplace circa the past fifty years. Every single KPI has gone up: productivity, imports, exports, revenues, share price, deliverables, margins, you name it.

The counter-culture cited to justify these sorts of highly invasive spyware deployments is merely the reaction of a workforce to stagnant wages and deteriorating standards of living in the face of an economy that has left them behind, a monied class that loathes their existence, and governments who can’t be bothered to listen to their grievances over the sound of a $25k-per-plate fundraising dinner. Workers aren’t the problem, here, and surveillance does nothing to actually improve things for the majority of society.

To suggest “counter-culture” is the issue is akin to suggesting queer people are responsible for military overspending as opposed to unaccountable defense contractors and PMCs, or that the National Debt is the fault of immigrants as opposed to a government apparatus that fails elementary school maths. There is no “counter-culture” causing a problem in the workplace requiring surveillance, it’s a handful of people at the top of the organization trying to keep as much for themselves as possible demanding said surveillance to protect their own positions and interests - which conveniently happen to be directly opposed to the needs and demands of their workers.

Kpis up b/c of tech.

> counterculture influence on professional norms

> disconnected from traditional concepts of professional duty and self-accountability

I wonder what world you think used to exist.

"I don't want to X, but this time it's different and my hand is forced." That's a millenniums-old cope for doing shit you always wanted to do, but needed a way to not feel bad about.

> The “trust but verify” approach emerged from practical necessity of maintaining organizational functionality within a workforce increasingly disconnected from traditional concepts of professional duty and self-accountability.

This shift in workforce attitudes is because companies have shifted their view of labor. Labor is now fungible, and labor is not an investment, it's a necessary evil.

In order to have self-motivated employees you need to reward loyalty and build incentives where employees do their best because that ends up being what's best for them. Companies, pretty much all of them, decided this was both too much work and too expensive. So they gave up.

The reality is that workers don't give a flying fuck because not caring is the best way to progress your career. Job hopping, resume building, lying - these strategies work. Being a leader, shaking things up, even being honest - these backfire.

Companies don't want good workers. They want yes men, warm bodies, people who don't think too much. And they got that. So, everyone should be happy.

> In order to have self-motivated employees you need to reward loyalty and build incentives where employees do their best because that ends up being what's best for them. Companies, pretty much all of them, decided this was both too much work and too expensive. So they gave up.

Agreed. In the end, the public’s revealed preference for “cheap” made it hard for companies to justify the cost of investing in employee motivation.

You have a point, but I think the distrust was initiated by the Thatcher/Reagan neo liberal turn.

In the early 80s, I remember mass layoffs in the headlines every day. Often older, long term employees, who were more expensive. And company share prices would go up on those announcements.

When I started my professional career in 1986, I was fully aware I was an expendable cog. It didn't make me less professional, but it did make me less loyal. I wasn't planning to work for the same company for 40 years.

Sure enough, 5 years later, the company was acquired and virtually every employee fired. 2000 people. Many of whom had given 20 years to the company.

The acquirer just wanted our customers.

Don't worry. Just monitor the rate at which data breaches are happening.

And the rate of the rate.

And trade in the derivatives.

It's just the continuation of the same cycle of creating insecurity, dependency on more powerful economic interests, and insuring exploitation starting with the Acts of Enclosure in the 17th and 18th centuries.

It sucked being a feudal peasant, but at least you could eat turnips.

For us to build a high trust society again, we must enforce the law uniformly and consistently through unscalable and “legacy” means like police walking the beat and doing actual human investigative police work. Though murder is down, there is an uptick in property crime, and especially an uptick in people believing that property crime should not be prosecuted at all if the perpetrator is any less wealthy than a billionaire.

I don’t think most folks - even us ACAB folks - are opposed to the law being evenly enforced and applied. Nor are we opposed to law enforcement building stronger community ties and doing investigative policing instead of militarized response.

The latter half of your statement does reflect a sort of ignorance of reality: when we push for lowered persecution of, say, shoplifting under a given amount or of necessities, it’s because we understand those are often crimes of desperation better solved through social programs, food banks, or job guarantees. I’d love to see cops get off their ass and go after the actual shoplifting gangs and train raiders instead of tasering someone to the ground for stealing a couple bucks of food, but they won’t unless prosecutors are given public mandates of what they should be prioritizing (say, home invasions and vehicle break-ins instead of speeding tickets). Start with the big items and work down, as opposed to the disproven “broken windows” policing style of the NYPD.

We should absoultely and aggressively enforce property crime.

With that said, I'm leery of mass surveillance. It might seem egalitarian but there is something to be said for a police officer having the discretion to not enforce a law.

I think I prefer that even if it means some will abuse that power.

"an uptick in people believing that property crime should not be prosecuted at all".

Really? Do you have evidence??

> especially an uptick in people believing that property crime should not be prosecuted at all if the perpetrator is any less wealthy than a billionaire.

... and a probably-equal uptick in people who advocate for extrajudicial murder of people accused of (or just suspected of) property crime (look at the way people on the right talk about homeless folks, immigrants etc). the loudest online are not representative of the majority opinion.

Rest Of World, where this article is from, is a site about news outside of the West. Your talking point about high trust societies seems to be related to the West and is both orthogonal to this article and the start of its own passionate discussion that can probably derail this thread.

The parent comment also seems to be discussing the west, in many of the countries described in the article, a high trust society has never really existed at scale until fairly recently

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