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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

We have advanced weaponry, but we don't spend life at the point of a gun. Decisions have been made to apply technology in this way and to allow technology to be applied in this way.

We're not surrendering to some sort of technological determinism, but to government contractors, Congressmen, judges, the unitary Executive, and a short list of private companies and individuals.

The government always had the ability to monitor all of our phone metadata, they just weren't allowed to. That we can't get back to that state is a failure of national character, not an advance in technology.

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"We have advanced weaponry, but we don't spend life at the point of a gun."

Weapons are not reducing in cost and size every year. It's possible in principle to know if someone has a weapon, and to exclude them from a given small area. Weapons have only a few specific uses (defense, hunting, target shooting or sparring, crime), and don't gain hundreds of new kinds of uses every week.

The soaking of our society in computing power and recording is proceeding rapidly, and I don't think it can be stopped in any given jurisdiction without severely impacting the ability of that jurisdiction's business to compete economically. The ability to enforce arbitrary restrictions on what individuals can record implies a police state, even if the police are kindly for now.

I notice that people now calmly mention that they partially disagree with Brin, rather than dismissing his transparent society as completely beyond the pale.

> We have advanced weaponry, but we don't spend life at the point of a gun.

That's kind of the point though. After the Cold War we gave the military every capability needed to oppress us 1000x over without too much fretting about police states, trusting that the government would not force us to live at the point of a gun. We didn't simply forbid the military from having missiles, which is the proposed equivalent here.

> The government always had the ability to monitor all of our phone metadata, they just weren't allowed to.

Sure they were, ever since Smith v. Maryland, and for all the years before Katz v. United States. Any prohibitions on what government could look at regarding business records or on the wire were imposed by Congress, not by the Constitution.

but we don't spend life at the point of a gun.

Don't we? I guess it varies depending on the neighborhood, but there are more guns in the U.S. than cell phones, and it's not just the government that's armed to the teeth, it's everyone from your local mugger to your local teenager (and I'm not just talking about school shooters, I'm talking about adults under 20 who legally hold as well as the range of kids illegally blasting themselves and others in the streets).

This is all to say, I agree with the parent; you can't close Pandora's box. Mass surveillance is quickly becoming too cheap not to be inevitable, not to mention that most people voluntarily crowdsource the surveillance behemoth by uploading their entire lives to facebook and passing everything else into google. One might argue that mass surveillance is already here, if it's a true dystopia remains to be seen.

https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/

It's not like that in all countries, though. If the technology was inevitably reaching everybody, then guns would be readily available independently of cultural and political frame.

Well no, guns aren't as ubiquitous around the world as they are in the U.S, but they're pervasive enough that every single despot around the world employs guns to the effect of realizing modern dystopias for the unlucky humans who are born into violent oppression. The "inevitability" phase of guns has long passed.

The fact that guns are ubiquitous in the US means that an oppressive regime cannot use their monopoly on guns against the people. I'll take that side of the bargain any day.

I've never quite understood this argument. I hardly think a Colt and a Wingmaster are going to help stop trained soldiers, drones, jets, tanks etc. It is ridiculous and ignorant of reality.

It's all the more absurd when you realize there were plenty of guns in Iraq under Saddam Hussein.

I'll also note that a high number of guns per inhabitants is not always correlated with a large number of firearms crimes (see Finland or Switzerland). On the other hand, you have enough examples of lunatics killing a large number of people with modern firearms that I feel a lot safer in a place with tight gun laws than I would feel elsewhere.

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