Skip to content

Comment on The Age of Mass Surveillance Will Not Last Foreverparent

Comments

What I'm going to watch closely is where wide-spread surveillance and hard law & order measures will be implemented and how people react. The typical scenario is lawlessness that then leads to people voting for a strongman that enacts authoritarian policies. But I can absolutely see people voting for more public surveillance and law & order from a position of wealth as a replacement of social control / delegation of control to the state. Basically: you no longer have the grandmother on the window sill keeping an eye on the street and informing the parents of misbehaving kids, you'll have a camera.

I can certainly see the allure. I wonder how a competition within the Western System between surveillance and anti-surveillance locations will fare. Techno-authoritarianism can be very efficient, and even more so when it's not used to keep a corrupt system from toppling over (this is where somebody might jump up and say that that's exactly what it's doing in Western countries, but that's besides the point for local surveillance), and the question becomes how much more efficient it would be and how willing people are to trade privacy for comfort.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.