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Comment by card_zero | Hacker News Reader

> afraid something will happen to them

Because of what, the decrease in crime?

Massive wealth aside, I would argue that any decrease in crime is nullified in recent years by the increase in sensationalization of specific crimes. That is, reading "crime rates in <city> drop to historic lows in 2025" does not have as much emotional weight as seeing a social media video of a violent crime happening near one's home, even if the statistic is true.

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.

Imo, what is actually happening is fear of crime far away - like rural people being almost terrified of cities and entirely on board with sending army there.

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.

Who knows, you'll have to go to their leaked private chats to see the madness they're conjuring there.

OK, a second theory: the situation is messy and complex. Society tolerates the use of physical force less, and has higher standards of health and safety, and more suing and seeking compensation. The police and security then favor electronic methods over potentially injuring themselves or anybody else. Then there's more potential to be bad in small ways because nobody's going to grab you by the collar. Meanwhile, there's opportunities for internet crime, or electronic organized crime, or just mobs and riots. Then the shift in emphasis to electronic control spills over into the private sphere, and the public kind of support it while resenting it at the same time.

In summary, everybody has started liking doing everything in a hands-off way via the internet, but also everybody hates it.

It’s partially that for sure, but I think it’s also a kind of “common sense” feeling of the public that if people use technology to commit a crime, there must therefore be a record of that crime and therefore the police should be able to use that record to easily stop technology-crime. See: every police show ever.

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.

Crime stats, especially for violent crime, are relevant to us, not them. Their wealth, status, and/or insurance policies generally require security details and precautions that insulate most “public” activity from random acts of violent crime. However, the former UHC CEO’s death is an example of the sort of singular, and targeted, crime that does strike fear. However, the comment you’re replying to is alluding to the historical collapses of societies (a.k.a a complex system) where economic inequity exceeds a tipping point leads to system collapse (“heads roll”). “Clamping down on peasants”—social credit, pervasive surveillance, collating movements/associations, uh, Palantir—enables evasion of the tipping point and adds resilience to the system.

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.

E.g. if you genuinely believe that AI will result in mass unemployment, it's not a stretch to believe that at least some of those newly unemployed will not take it kindly.

Because of the increase in wealth inequality and increase in peoples' desperation.

On the topic of social credit, I wonder if credit inequality bothers you more. Markets chase after desirable customers who are economically active. The super-rich with yachts aren't affecting me, because they're away being fleeced in Monte Carlo and not competing with me for the basic peasant stuff that I want. But the desirable customers/tenants/employees, who might have debts, and less money than me, but have great prospects and a drive to keeping moving up and circulating cash, and who tick boxes as reliable and enhance the general tone of the business or area and help promote it - those are monsters.

It's not logical; this is why "deranged" has become a necessary prefix to "billionaire" in most cases.

Because more people are waking up to the fact that the entire system is rigged against them.

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