I was musing over something, though. We have creeping Orwellian things like face recognition and the policing of chat histories. But some of this is private, as in, not done by the state. Even when done by the state, it isn't in most places to prop up the regime and prevent dissent. It's big brother mechanisms without a Big Brother. I speculate that it's genuinely motivated by preventing disorder, because (is this true?) over the last couple of decades people have got more disorderly in petty ways to do with thieving and harassing and scamming one another. Then the people don't like it, and so the people politically demand heavy-handed policing of the people.
Because of what, the decrease in crime?
In summary, everybody has started liking doing everything in a hands-off way via the internet, but also everybody hates it.
That was never possible before. Historically, conversations didn’t leave records, and when they did, they were trivially burned. There was no sense that the police should have access to the records because there were no records.
The technical and ethical problems of this “common sense” are far from obvious to most whose primary exposure to and mode of thinking about policing and technology is what we see on TV.
Consider how many children were terrified to swim in the ocean after seeing Jaws for the first time... statistics do very little to allay existing (irrational) fears for most people.
People are not afraid of sensational crime next door. They want crime to be happening where political opponents live, so that they can feel good about punishing them.
Tl;dr: violent crime doesn’t mean anything when you have billions, but instability in the system does. Surveillance state tropes exist for a reason, and that’s b/c they add resiliency to a system that would otherwise collapse.
The mobile phone created an occupation for people who would otherwise be on the street committing crime. It paced people, even common kids, adults, we commit much, much less crime than the previous generation, and even less in unreported crime (bar fights, revenge against a neighbor, etc.). The boomers used their hands!
But the problem is: If you follow the average strength and fight training of citizen from 1970 to today, violence should have been practically zero. It is much higher because some subsets have abnormally high rates.
You claim the average is going down. OP claims it’s going up. Both are right. Violence wins.
I don't know in which world you're living so here are officials, likely downplayed, numbers for the EU, from an official EU website to get you back to earth:
"In 2023, sexual violence offences, including rape, continued to rise in the EU."
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Rape numbers are through the roof in France (nearly 40 000 a year now): they went x6 in 20 years.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1072770/number-of-rapes-...
"The number of violent crimes in Germany increased in 2024 with a sharp increase in rapes and sexual assaults.":
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-sees-rise-in-sexual-violence-a...
Thefts and violent thefts are on the rise all across the EU. When I was young I didn't hear about being stabbed to death so that their Rolex could be stolen.
In the city were I grew up in now people firing full-auto AK-47 is a weekly occurrence.
Someone who walks into a major EU city and tells me its safer than it was 20 years is very blind.
Meanwhile the risk of my daughter getting raped is very real. And the fault is as much on the rapists as on the ones who try to refute irrefutable numbers.
> When I was young I didn't hear about being stabbed to death so that their Rolex could be stolen.
Exactly, you didn't hear about it, such violence was quite common in some places, but there was no 24/7 online reporting backed by immediate social media outrage. Things are much much more hysterical now.
Big Brother does exist: it's money. If there were some single named entity, people would rebel against it, so it's diluted and realized through financialization of one's interactions with other humans. Big Brother is invisible to individuals because it's us, and no individual thinks “I'm Big Brother” when it's their point of view looking out. It's an illusion that creates and enforces scarcity but only works if everyone else also believes (power word: “Full Faith and Credit”).
Check out “Wishes and Rainbows” from The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston for a primer on our road to rootα: https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/economic-education/wi... (favorite panel, top-right on page fifteen: ◀ 1̵1̵ + 9 ／ = 20 ▷)
Then in most places it's increasingly scarce in presence and continue to exercise influence on a very tiny part of the population.
Total Surveillance but fractional. We live in a society but people only see parts of the whole. No one has all the interactions
The US constitution not extending government limitations to society-scale corporations is a very convenient loop hole. Similar situations exist in other liberal-on-the-book countries.
But yeah it's better than some capricious bureaucrat just pulling decisions out their ass with no serious recourse, except all those cases there the process is just that.
The whole and entire point of all of this, is fairness and reasonableness.
The fact that mistakes are sometimes made, even corruption sometimes, does not really change things. If corruption becomes common the system starts to fail and either reforms are made or the system decays into authoritarianism.
If you had to move across the country to leave your bad name behind, you used to be able to. And just like bankruptcy you’d start with nothing so it wasn’t exactly easy but it was at least an option. Now what recourse do people have?
Is it easy? No, but neither is declaring bankruptcy or moving across the country.
> "If you weren’t born and raised here, you’re an outsider even though you’ve lived here for thirty-five years. That’s just kind of typical in small communities." https://dokumen.pub/small-town-america-finding-community-sha...
Contra: "Wherever you go, there you are." (i.e., you don't stop being an asshole just because you move.)
We would need some kind of legislation around this. No company is looking to decay scores over time unless there is some profit motive to be exploited (like there is with credit scores).
Bear in mind that you can mitigate a lot of risk by operating as a business instead of establishing a relationship in an individual capacity.
And people, much like businesses, need disaster recovery plans. We advise people to have escape plans from their homes; similarly, they should have escape plans for their critical information. Almost nothing in this world is risk-free.
Depends how deep you got. I for one would lose access to my mobile phone (Google Fi) and email, so it would be very hard for me to get access to anything that uses my phone number for 2FA. Or the email address for any kind of account recovery. Huge nuisance but maybe no financial consequences, except maybe an involuntary trip to the bank's branch to access the account.
This is accurate. And taken for granted in the US.
Someone once remarked to me: "I think it's cool you can just pick up and go anywhere (on a huge scale)" - They were from the Netherlands.
Oh and also remember that the EU has freedom of movement for labour, not necessarily people. If you don’t have enough money, you can’t just move to another EU country and hope things work out.
I mean, I think you could pick up and move but it was much harder, and how far you could reasonably move when you did move was limited pre-modern era. If you can't move that far, the likelihood of someone knowing you or word spreading is probably higher.
Although I remember seeing an article here on movement of serfs a while back, I think the conclusion was that they were more mobile than one might think.
This had pros and cons depending on who you were. For example, thieves loved it as you could drop you criminal record simply by moving somewhere that no one recognized you. On the other hand, there were documented cases of mistaken identity and people being prosecuted just because they looked like someone else. Then there is the case of William West which is better understood by looking at the pictures of two men names William West [1]
Contrast that to today where it doesn't matter which town in the US you live in, there is always a credit record that is tied to you.
1 - https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/will-william-west-case-fing...
Hahah... You never offended a bartender for sure.
The big ones (credit score and criminal history) are strongly tied to you, but have recourse to challenge mistakes and remove strikes from your record. The sufficiency of those recourses is open for debate though.
However, all of the private company's social credit systems have a much looser coupling to your actual ID. Often you can just make a new account. If you first get a new credit card, phone, phone number, internet connection, and address, most companies would completely fail to correlate you to their previous profile of you.