The computer may be the best tool tyranny ever had
When I saw this news story about a Biden administration proposal for the feds to monitor “all business and personal accounts from financial institutions, including bank, loan, and investment accounts,” it struck me – and certainly not for the first time – that the internet has enabled a degree of governmental control heretofore only dreamed about.
Orwell envisioned telescreens constantly monitoring the public. But in his dystopia, the telescreens had to be manned by humans. That would be labor-intensive, to say the least. But now things like that can be automated, and computers can do a comprehensive job through AI. Any tyranny that manages to put such practices into law would be able to keep a much tighter grip on the public in terms of surveillance. It can put the “total” into “totalitarian state.”
China has gone in that direction with social credits. We are trending that way, too. Civil disobedience and backlash can occur, but I’m not at all sure how many people are troubled by these developments and these possibilities. So many people seem to have the extremely worrisome attitude that if surveillance is done for a cause they consider good, it’s okay.
If you’re seen the movie “Idiocracy,” you probably recall that each citizen had to be tattooed with an ID that could be scanned. That movie, which is a satire and a comedy, unfortunately seems more and more relevant as a serious forecast as time goes on.
Here’s the scene in which the main character – a man of our time who accidentally is catapulted into the Idiocracy future – receives his tattoo:
How many citizens would be content to live without the convenience of a smartphone, the finest friend ever to any totalitarian regime? According to various reports, there exist two well-known public figures who apparently own no such device (Steve Hilton of Fox and young Sabrina Pasterski, who has a PhD from Harvard in physics and is now a postdoc at Princeton), but there cannot be many Americans who would be willing to do without the sine qua non of full surveillance and fully efficient tyranny.
The City of Lincoln has a community reading project. I suggested they read, “1984.”
My kids had summer reading books in high school. All worthless liberal crap.
It turns out that “1984” is one of the most important books of the last 100 years. It is amazing how much Orwell got right.
Cornhead:
Orwell was a genius.
I read that book when I was about 12 and it made a VERY deep impression on me.
I find it interesting that the Left always claims that the Conservatives want to do this sort of thing, but the Left are always the ones who actually do it.
This $600 deposit notice to the IRS is pure insanity. And I’d bet that fewer than 5% of Americans even know about it.
It adds another costs on banks, but the big thing (if it passes) is that it will drive more people into crypto.
What this really shows is the Dems desire for control.
The book I’m still awaiting to see written:
“Computer phobia: The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of Information Tyranny.”
The old fear was driven by centralized knowledge as power. Until is was shown that monopoly power was like the phone company monopoly: a paper tiger (eg a 1960s comedy, “The President’s Analyst”).
Then the Personal Computer or PC made info seem friendly. And from friendly, to benign.
What reversed this? Supercharging human behavioral analytics with drug like powers.
Plus, as in China, there’s the Social Credit System. You are Nobody without it.
“I find it interesting that the Left always claims that the Conservatives want to do this sort of thing, but the Left are always the ones who actually do it.” [SCOTTtheBADGER @ 4:32]
Projection. Leftists have been doing this for years. Antifa is a case-in-point.
“When I saw this news story about a Biden administration proposal for the feds to monitor “all business and personal accounts from financial institutions . . . .”[Neo]
I remember when the govt began putting magnetic threads in money. Some people at the time spoke of this as a threat which would allow the govt to monitor a person’s spending habits and perhaps even track them. They were laughed at.
“It adds another costs on banks, but the big thing (if it passes) is that it will drive more people into crypto.
What this really shows is the Dems desire for control.” [Cornhead @ 4:33]
And far from eliminating black markets by making every bill traceable, IMO it is greater incentive to create black markets and keep money outside of the system (i.e., crypto). As an example note that the black market for marijuana sales never disappeared with legalization, the justification changed; illegal dealers still balked at paying taxes. Whooda thunk it?
The way to combat a computer surveillance State is to eliminate its agents. Ironically, to identify its agents would require hacking into its personnel database. Happily, there’s no shortage of hackers.
Tyranny cannot be reasoned with, it is the equivalent of rabies and there’s only one cure for a rabid dog.
Those who’ve seen the Will Smith movie “Enemy of the State” will remember that the threat to Smith is not ended until the mafia thugs kill the rogue NSA agents.
You don’t fight an enemy on the ground of their choosing.
I’ve been learning about crypto currency and BitCoin, etc and it is a technology that might be helpful in supporting an individual’s economic independence.
But nation-state digital currency will add a huge lever of Big Gov control to the mix. They can shut you down. They can monitor or deny your purchases. China is pretty far along this path. Other countries are considering following them.
It’s not anonymous like cash. There may come a time when all of us under suspicion and would be grateful to be able to buy something with paper money.
My kids had summer reading books in high school. All worthless liberal crap.
I’m hoping you sent the schools principal and others a point by point critique and a suggestion of alternatives.
While “1984” is a good example of what our society is becoming, I would like to put a word in for “Brave New World.” Huxley did not anticipate the birth control pill but he is pretty good on the clueless entertainment society. As I recall from reading it years ago, the “normal” humans eventually ended up in the southwest. For that reason I moved to Arizona five years ago.
But some of us remember the earlier promise of personal computers.
Here’s the iconic Apple commercial showing a beautiful hammer thrower breaking the big television screen representing IBM or Bill Gates or whatever one’s preferred source of oppression.
___________________________________
On January 24th,
Apple Computer will introduce
Macintosh.
And you will see why 1984
won’t be like “1984.”
–1984 Apple’s First Macintosh Commercial”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8
___________________________________
Heigh-ho.
Halcyon days.
On the other hand…computers + the Internet have made it possible to communicate with a significant audience without going through media gatekeepers. As represented by this blog, for example.
If you wanted to express your political opinions to an audience in, say, 1985, you could write a letter to the editor. Which might or might not be published, and if it was published, could be edited at the discretion of the publishers.
Yet on the *other* other hand….at least in 1985 most conversations with friends, about politics or anything else, were conducted in person or by telephone, and hence weren’t subject to mediation by a Hall Monitor, or (in general) to recording to become a part of your Permanent Record.
So the Unabomber was Right.
There is one difference between Social Credit in China and in the West. Chinese social credit system will push people toward not littering in their streets and toward not dodging their contractual obligations toward each other — in other words make society more livable.
Your social credit system will punish you for not living next door to Haitians, not getting abortions, not offering your children up as sex-change sacrifices.
Both are Tyrannies, make no mistake. The question is whether or not the Tyranny is out to get you or is merely there to keep you in line.
@DavidFoster:
More than ironic that ones Permanent Record really is now Permanent and distributed and backed up and archived up the wazoo.
That’s a Problem.
Even more of a problem is that all this data can be revisited at any time in the future as policies and politics change and as new developments in data-mining / AI occur, not to mention whenever passing political fads arise.
And Mistakes Will be Made. I mean if you gott FEMA’d into a pit because some FedBot model was badly implemented or overfitted, well that would just suck.
There is a very interesting novel from 1954, set in a then-distant future of 1990 in which the US is controlled by people who rule by managing the communications system to get the people to believe what they are supposed to believe….in some ways, a closer mapping to our current situation than either ‘1984’ or ‘Brave New World’. I reviewed it here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/64491.html
Tired: Sentiment Analysis and Muh Social Graph.
Wired: Injecting the right sentiments at the right nodes in the right people’s social graphs.
Memory is a funny thing, not flash, ram, rom, whatever, just the selective memory applied to the CCP and the west. All those murdered by the population control policies imposed by Beijing/Peking in the last century? Memory holed. Not that a CCP social credit score could, would, is being used for just as benign purposes as Mao’s methods?
Surely improbable.
Yo Om.
Today and tomorrow interest me. You seem a bit stuck in the past.
You repeatedly fail to get that I’m not an uncritical fan of the CCP. I merely point out that they hate *most* of their own people less than your own tyrannical rulers hate you.
Chinese are bit sick of internal fratricide — having eaten more than their self-inflicted fill of it in years passed. You guys are just getting started. Got some catching up to do. That’s why I’d focus my concerns closer to home, were I you.
I have a country. The CCP has a past too and a state sponsored social credit system today, but they love, don’t hate the FaLoGong (sic) or Uighurs. Who is living in the past and who is ignoring it and the now?
Shill for Xi.
“I have a country.”
Incorrect. Your Government has You. The contents of your head might disagree with this formulation, but FEMA will neither notice nor care. Until and unless things go kinetic, Freedom is a LARP.
Sorry, but you are the expat.
Sucks to be you in the real world.
I don’t get the Zaphod hate. You don’t have to agree with him, but it seems to me that he makes a couple of statements pretty consistently on each thread. Neither are beyond the pale in my view.
1) China’s rulers hate their people less than the Swamp hates us. You can argue (and should if you disagree) but it’s not an obvious falsehood. I’m a chess player and I recall reading the story of the Chinese women’s team playing (I think) Armenia. The night before they got together and boosted each others’ spirits “We have to do our best for the nation!” Sounds hokey? I’ve met a number of mainland Chinese, some still living there and some living abroad. They have many justified complaints but they are also noticeably patriotic. They are proud of their country escaping miserable poverty. They feel loyalty to each other. They know that many bad policies were followed. They know that a horrific price was paid and is still paid. But they thrill at what their country has become.
What American do you know, Left or Right, who loves their country? What Americans do you know who feel a straightforward, unqualified pride that they share with nearly everyone they pass on the street? We are way too nuanced, way too complicated and sophisticated to have such primitive viewpoints.
In my experience a typical Chinese person is well aware of China’s flaws. But if you put two Chinese together they will look each other in the eye and say “Geez Louise, we’ve come a long effin’ way”.
2) Zaphod often makes a claim that is repugnant to some. He argues, if I understand correctly, that we will not get out of this by holding bake sales and being noble. We will need to drop down into a more primitive, violent and vicious mode of humanity, or we will surely lose. Indeed, there is no sign of us achieving this and every sign points to the Left successfully boiling the frog.
There are a lot people here who don’t accept this. But, if you’ve read history you must have at least a nagging feeling that he could be right. It’s like someone who’s lost their “blink” response from wearing glasses too long. After living in a safe world created by America’s “greatest generation” there are plenty of us who assume we can surely get a happy ending without being nasty.
Maybe I’m seeing this incorrectly?
“Zaphod often makes a claim that is repugnant to some. He argues, if I understand correctly, that we will not get out of this by holding bake sales and being noble. We will need to drop down into a more primitive, violent and vicious mode of humanity, or we will surely lose. Indeed, there is no sign of us achieving this and every sign points to the Left successfully boiling the frog.”
Really, I’m on the Side of the Angels. It’s not like the Stern Gang, the Irgun, and Ariel Sharon were vile vicious devils.. Were they? Nope. Given circumstances obtaining at various times, they Did the Needful (as far as they and theirs were concerned) as one says in Indian English.
The Cuckservative Right has a very childish understanding of History which seems to require them to lose politely forever. The Eternal Solipsists… they have a special ‘Because Reasons’ Get Out of Jail Card. Let them keep it — arguably they did earn it the hard way. But can the rest of us please, pretty please photocopy it?
David Foster,
Alexsander Solzhenitsyn was sent to the gulag for 9 years for A LETTER he wrote to a friend mildly criticising Stalin’s conduct of the war.
Art Deco responding to Cornhead,
‘I’m hoping you sent the school’s principal…’ LOL! Repeat the magic words after me; Home school, home school, home school…
JimNorCal,
We don’t hate Zaphod. Can’t hate a predictable bore.
Bitcoin? Crypto? ! You boys have got to be kidding me. Gold, (I have my eye on some nice bracelets I could take apart link by link) ammo, and meds. Heavy on the antibiotics, I have my principles, after all.
@JimNorCal:
Agree Re Chinese Patriotism. There’s more to it than cartoon brainwashing and propaganda. One sees the same thing in Indonesia and Thailand. All of these countries… All countries have foundational myths which wallpaper over a lot of messiness, but still I’ve come around to the point where I now envy this simple uncomplicated love of country and sense that “we’re all in this together at some level”… even though all of the above do tend to litter their homelands more than one would prefer!
Do you follow John Derbyshire? The story of how he met his wife while teaching in China in the 1980s and the hurdles they had to jump to get married is quite something. Having a bit of a thing for the Chinese Female Form, and having some sympathy for the Chinese in general, I have to draw a line when it comes to elements of the reactionary Right who object to Derbyshire as having strayed too far off piste in the marital stakes… fortunately those sorts tend to be the less useful idiots who probably couldn’t point a Claymore the right way.
Molly+Brown:
“We don’t hate Zaphod. Can’t hate a predictable bore.”
Always happy to oblige! Happy Warrior, and all that.
Solzhenitsyn was sent to the Dog House after his 1978 Harvard Commencement Address when he didn’t butt-smooch Western Liberalism as expected. Have you read this speech? You should.
https://thesaker.is/alexander-solzhenitsyns-harvard-address/
Then he got unpersoned further for penning Two Hundred Years Together. You should read that, too… In Russian. It’s kind of experiencing publication difficulties in English. Because Reasons.
https://www.solzhenitsyncenter.org/his-writings/large-works-and-novels/two-hundred-years-together
Mucho editorializing, sanitizing and contextualizing and nuancimizing and all-round three ring circus necromancy will accompany this wondrous event when it appears in English in 2024 — if we’re lucky.
Feeling all warm and fuzzy about Stalin now? 🙂
JimNorCal – I think you have the right of it. Zaphod can be extremely tiresome and over the top. Most of the time I just skip over his comments as I am in no mood to be insulted. I get enough of that already. However, the two examples you give are on the money.
Regarding #1, having lived and worked with the Chinese on remote sites for 8 years I can attest to what you point out. The Chinese are immensely proud of what they have and continue to accomplish – deservedly so. It is a sad fact that we in the west have had pride of accomplishment and patriotism “schooled out” of us.
Regarding #2, correct again, to know the Chinese is to know that they have little regard for the welfare of the individual. No individual is allowed to interfere with the goal. They may not like it but no one will outwardly buck the system. Happy endings are not important in their system.
JimNorCal,
We will not have to descend into the gutter to survive. We will just have to live in truth. That is how American was made and that is the only thing that will ‘save’ America. And that would make some people VERY uncomfortable.
Zaphod,
Yes, I have read the Harvard Commencement speech. I read it when he gave it and dismissed him then as an old curmudgeon. Not any more.
Have you read his address on receiving the Templeton Prize? Men Have Forgotten God. When they write the obit for the USA they can just copy that. And maybe add on De Tocquville, ‘American is great because she is good, and if America ceases to be good she will cease to be great.’
Unless, of course, we ‘make a determined quest for the warm hand of God.’
There is nothing new under the sun.
“…The best tool for tyranny…”
How it’s done:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/greenwald-definitive-account-ciamediabigtech-fraud-over-hunter-biden-emails
(Of course, one has to WANT to do it…)
In addition to Orwell, I would add to my reading list Hayek’s Road to Serfdom.
Stu-I agree about The Road to Serfdom.
I expected a difficult slog—not at all.
‘So many people seem to have the extremely worrisome attitude that if surveillance is done for a cause they consider good, it’s okay.’
No: their brains are so addled with social media addiction and all that it entails they have the same million justifications to hold onto their habit. At this point neural pathways have been rewired.
I only made it half way through The Road to Serfdom a long time ago. I’ll have to try it again.
One of Hayek’s big points is that free and self organizing societies require vast amounts of information flying around between millions of individuals for its proper or best functioning. Economic pricing information is one of those elements.
So he concludes that top-down autocratic command and control societies always screw up because they can’t handle that information quantity and timeliness of flow. But Hayek never envisioned a server site with 10^20 bytes of storage. (Have we hit Avogadro’s number yet?) And timely distribution of info. to millions? Smartphone. (No I don’t own a “please surveil me” device. Eventually, that won’t be an option.)
Note that autocratic societies can screw up for a long time without failing, if they impose enough tyranny on their citizens.
Molly Brown…”Alexsander Solzhenitsyn was sent to the gulag for 9 years for A LETTER he wrote to a friend mildly criticising Stalin’s conduct of the war.”
We’ve never had that level of postal censorship in the US, though…and social-media communications, which are in text, can be surveilled for Unapproved Opinions far more easily than can written letters.
An outstanding book on the realities of centralized economic planning is Francis Spufford’s ‘Red Plenty’…part nonfiction, part novel. The characters include factory managers, economic planners, mathematicians, computer scientists, and “fixers.”
Lenin believed that Soviet society was conceptually ‘one factory, one office’, and that this would permit much better economic performance than the West’s decentralized systems. Circa that 1960s, the idea was also promoted that mathematical optimization techniques (such as linear programming) could have much more of an impact in the Soviet society than in the capitalist countries.
My review of Spufford’s book here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/60918.html
Some have been claiming that the wheels are falling off for the Democrats.
(But what if they don’t NEED any wheels?…)
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/09/22/its-all-falling-apart-for-biden-and-democratic-leadership-in-d-c-n1480604
david foster,
Nice. I copied the book ref. for a look.
It took me a couple sentences to understand the meaning of “shadow prices” as being manipulated by a computer program in order to simulate variable pricing in a society that only has fixed prices.
I especially like the part about how the understanding and data going into the computer program is suspect; “But the program should still work.” Ha!
Having talked to many researchers who have worked with massive computer models I’ve gotten the impression that the confidence in these models is roughly proportional to the amount of time, effort and lines of code invested in them. Well, confidence is what they advertise to the outside world, but a desperate attitude of “there is no alternative” is what they might communicate in private over a couple beers.
Molly+Brown: I was studying Russian at the time, so watched (and later read) Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 address at Harvard. It was clear that it was not what the audience was expecting.
“The warm hand of God”–perhaps. But it wasn’t the warm hand of God that defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. It was B-17s, B-29s, lots of ordnance, the atomic bomb, and air-sea-land combat that killed almost 500,000 Americans. Faith is good. Ammunition is essential. Here’s an imagined dialogue between the fictional Eugene Sledge and the fictional Robert Leckie on that very topic, from the HBO miniseries “The Pacific”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI8TzsQfRm4
Zaphod: I’m familiar with Solzhenitsyn’s views on Russian-Jewish relations. I’m also familiar with Dr. Kevin MacDonald’s views on Jews and their (in his opinion) baleful influence on Western civilization. My quick take AAJ (As A Jew), echoing Barry Meislin’s comments in another thread: left-wing Jews have done a lot of damage to this country and other countries, including your former country (the Slovo-Suzman Effect). Furthermore: left-wing Jews are incorrigible. They are impervious to argument and evidence. Finally, they are relentless. So: what to do? There are actually answers to this problem that stop short of a bullet to the back of the head or one-way helicopter rides. We applied them as a country in the 1940s and 1950s, just as we addressed illegal immigration around the same time through Operation Wetback and similar roundup-and-deportation programs. The question is, Can we muster the cultural confidence and other forms of grit to do so again? You seem to think not. I’m somewhat more optimistic.
David Foster: thanks for the reminder re: “Red Plenty”. I bought it a while ago. Read the first chapter and liked it, but set it aside for other things. Will pick it up again.
Relying on AI is a weakness as much as a strength. In “1984” the Party’s surveillance state was motivated by the desire of humans to exercise power over other humans. But if AI is brought in then the humans exercising the power don’t really; they are much slaves to the algorithms or neural nets or whatever as much as anyone else. Everyone is just doing what the magic boxes tell them, and watching what the boxes tell them to watch, and punishing who the boxes tell them to in the way the boxes tell them to and no one will understand the why of any of it.
Instead of “1984” we end up with “That Hideous Strength” where the people pulling the wires do so at the behest of a possessed, reanimated, decapitated head (sorry about the spoiler if you didn’t get around to reading it in the 60 years it’s been out).
Came across this in a Twitter-thread and it relates to the Sussman indictment and the topic here.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1441094231854968835.html
Since Neustar has/had access to the metadata of all mobile calls and texts in the US since 1977, they were who law enforcement would query when they wanted records on someone’s calls and texts. That would give Neustar a database of just who every law enforcement officer and agent was investigating and who the officer/agent was who was doing the investigation. That’s a powerful database to have.
}}} I find it interesting that the Left always claims that the Conservatives want to do this sort of thing, but the Left are always the ones who actually do it.
SCOTT:
This is what Viva Frei refers to as “Confession through Projection”.
😉
geoffb, that is one incredibly powerful thread.
Another “mother-lode” twitter-roll that adds several more layers of complexity—and anxiety—to the elaborate scheme.
Thanks…
}}} There is a very interesting novel from 1954,
Even more interesting, David, is that you submitted that review the day before Jan 6th.
:-/
I wanted to go all French/Russian revolution on the Left in 1990. People said, oh, Eris, you’re over reacting. Since I never wanted to be a lone gunman, I waited. Now it’s too late.
You thought you could have [public homosexuality | feminism | socialism | …] and [ free speech | freedom of religion | freedom of assembly | …] you can’t.
How many citizens would be content to live without the convenience of a smartphone, the finest friend ever to any totalitarian regime?
I’m not a technological fatalist. Just because writing exists doesn’t mean all governments must make lists of enemies to send to camps. Just because boxcars exist, governments aren’t compelled to round up Jews. We humans decide to use these tools these ways. I have enough optimism about human nature that communism/fascism/CRT/BLM isn’t inevitable.