Eventually toll cameras and a consortium of private businesses will have this tech and then game over. Better to use this energy and legislate the behavior you want. Never let the enemy decide the terms.
This is just my thought with nothing to back it up, but I believe it's valid. I also believe we'll see widespread actions of this type within the next decade.
Civil disobedience, in perspective, has by comparison been incredibly ineffective historically.
Books are written to glamorize remarkable exceptions, not the mundane reality of the facts we expect in every day life. The majority by far were punished or executed and forgotten.
Voting has plenty of impact. But most people don't and they're really easy to manipulate into free advertising to garner support for an otherwise unpopular cause at the expense of their own well-being.
It's far better to ask yourself if your cause might not be popular or even just before you run out and change the world. With very, very few exceptions that you're not likely to be able to recognize through mere self reflection.
It will be easier to negotiate for legislation as well if the economic risk of installation increases because of vandalism.
If someone represents me, then logically I should have the right to vote directly instead of him, or remove him at any point.
Representational democracy is far superior. Decisions need to be weighed against both their popularity and their effect with input from experts and other affected parties.
That isn't to say we should use something other than representative democracy. I believe the best option is to fix the system rather than replace it. However, it does explain why people currently feel they have very little power of the laws that affect them.
I'd like to see more separation. If we are to keep indirect democracy, at least have separate representation for criminal law, economic decisions (taxes, healthcare, ...), social decisions (abortions, marriage, ...), etc. But even where to draw the lines is difficult. I think that too should be in some ways decided by voters.
Of course, in a country which can't get rid of FPTP/plurality, despite being objectively the worst voting system[0-3], that's never gonna happen. If you need to explain math to people to convince them, you've already lost, because people are not smart enough and definitely not educated enough.
[1]: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-...
Oh and Switzerland has 7 presidents (effectively). No kings, no dictators.
And the pilot is not a random guy from the street with no education or at best a completely unrelated degree. And he's probably not 90 years old. And he's the engineer, mechanic, ATC, pilot, stewerd, advertiser, accountant and TSA in one person.
Direct democracy shouldn't be the only change, obviously. As you correctly point out the issue is when uninformed, uneducated and not sufficiently intelligent people make decisions for everyone.
The issue with direct democracy is that you're describing a highly dimensional vector (your opinion) by picking one of a small set of predefined points (the political parties). Some countries only have 2. That's obviously stupid.
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For example we should weight votes by how informed they are. How to determine that? That's a difficult question. But shooting down the idea does move us closer to a solution.
Making voting indirect only has the effect that all nuance is lost. You still get dumb people voting for populists, fascists, narcissists, rapists, etc.
Campaign finance reform would be the foundation for this, otherwise we will continue with legalized bribery.
The other need is for daylight and accountability. As much as I loath the Web3 cryptocrowd, having some sort of public ledger of government operations would be incredibly valuable. Anything and everything related to government actions should be public record with the small exception of sensitive information (which itself should have oversight on not being abused).
This is an easy problem to solve (on a technical level), but the established political base will always fight against it they like things the way they are.
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It's impossible for every person to have a well-researched opinion on everything. Opponents of direct democracy use this to shoot it down. But it applies to indirect democracy too.
The real issue we need to solve is how to make sure people (whether all citizens or representatives) only vote on what they actually understand.
I think votes weighted based on the score of a knowledge test would be a good start if the test is well-designed. But we need to figure out how to decide what the questions are (what is relevant, what is enough in-depth, what is too specific, etc.) and what the correct answers are (some topics are still a matter of debate even among experts). And that's hard.
It's hard in a cooperative environment (e.g. engineers deciding which factors are relevant to their proposed solution) and it's even harder in an adversarial environment like politics.
This is all Internet logic. It's fun to talk about destroying cameras as a vector for public policy, ergo, by the First Law of Message Boards, that must be a viable strategy. Reader, it is not. Nobody's going to blink at these costs, but residents who supported or were on the fence about the cameras are now negatively polarized against doing anything about them.
The cringe-ier thing here is the clear message being sent by many commentators, incl. the author of this post, that nobody's ever thought of breaking surveillance cameras before. Y'all, this is literally a meme.
That being said, Ring cameras creep me out and I feel they have a powerful anti-social effect.
How long will it take the three of them to talk with leadership of those churches? Are they allowed to bring up off topic concerns at PTA meetings where they can tell parents to be aware of the bot farms? Did they already knock on some neighbors’ doors?
All of this is really hard and really time-consuming. The alternative is for those three people to start smashing cameras and we know they won’t finish with their freedom. The uphill battle is the one we must fight.
The reality is the vast majority of social progress in the last millenium was achieved with force and threat of force. I find this weird revisionist "violence is never the answer" trope recited as a fact that needs no justification to be incredibly weird and unreliable.
By the way -- Where do you stand on throwing tea into the harbor? And where do you stand on the legitimacy of publicly discussing throwing tea into the harbor?
Let’s not call breaking a camera “violence”.
But why smash'em when you have the right to bear arms? I'd do target practice instead. Improve your shootong skills while getting rid of surveillance. Win-win.
Someone shoplifts $50 worth of stuff from Wallyworld and the cops come a runnin' (if they're not already there, because they station a cop full time there.)
Someone steals your $500 bicycle and cops tell you not to bother filing a police report because nothing will happen.
How did we start tolerating public employees not only discouraging people from making them do their jobs, but them justifying it by saying they're incompetent and nothing will happen?
And before someone screeches that wallyworld has cameras: so do many people now, too. The cops won't do anything even when a tracker like an airtag shows the bike is in a specific house. Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp and other forums are chock full of obvious stolen bike listings and people are easily tracing them to lost-bike posts.
There's a huge encampment under a bridge in my city that is known as the regional bike 'chop shop' where tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of bicycles are being cut up for their parts and the parts sold through fences and the frames et al going out for scrap metal.
The cops do not give a shit.
Had France not been willing to subsidize an insurgent campaign to distract the British, it's incredibly likely those Acts would've remained in place for some time.
People who rush to using violence as an answer frequently do not consider the outcome if they've misjudged their opponents' capacity for it.
It's part of the fun of being an internet revolutionary. Eventually, though, most end up thinking things through.
I mean, that it... quite literally did?
Yeah, you can externalize enforcement of sanctions against you to drag other people into a conflict with you, but I wouldn't suggest getting caught making that argument.
The difference is so staggering I have trouble believing anyone who has spent more than about 90 seconds thinking about the issue could believe in good faith that they're in any way comparable. Happy to be proven wrong, though.
You do not have the right to own and operate something that infringes on my rights.
the behaviour most people seem to want is to have a polis driven by the will of the people at large, rather than a small cadre, of -for lackof a better word, liars.
They are very different skill sets.