Maybe billionaires should be filmed and streamed continuously, since their behavior has such a big impact on the world. If they don’t like it maybe we shouldn’t allow them to control such incredible assets. I’m sure billionaires have nothing sketchy to hide, right? What we will see is probably how they are hard working people who are not at all detached from normal folks. Right?
And I guarantee that billionaire Larry Ellison blithely believes that he’ll be exempt - that all of this surveillance will just be used against the little people. And he’s almost certainly right.
He will be exempt. The areas that he lives in and the things that he does will not be tagged as “criminal” on the data system that he has the contract to administer.
That’s always how these systems work. You don’t worry about getting dragged into the Saudi Consulate and bonesawed to death by intelligence officers when you’re MBS, because you’re the boss and the guy getting bonesawed is your employee.
For the same reason, you don’t worry about getting spied on when you’re the one who owns and operates the big surveillance infrastructure because it exists for your benefit.
billionaires who talk like this should immediately be committed. he’s clearly far gone, just fucking take him away.
“citizens on their best behavior” “big brother is always watching”
Don’t sound very different to me
So the Panopticon. The hypothetical prison that even people in the 1800s thought would be a human rights violation to build because it was such an extreme form of psychological torture.
Well, we already experience that psychological torture. After 2002/2003, and then especially after 2012, this concept has already burdened our everyday behavior. Browsing behavior, phone calls, texts, emails…every single way we communicate, even face to face meetings with phones in our pockets are open to surveillance. And it’s been shown that it’s been used. Over a decade ago, thanks to Snowden. Now? Things have surely gotten worse and I would bet the farm on behavior very much having changed due these facts.
And not for the better. I think people are actually much less kind to each other when they are aware of being observed. Or worse, deliberately performing for content.
Yeah, another factor I didn’t even mention. The voluntary surveillance.
Clarissa-Jan Lim wrote a great article which called it ‘Panopticontent’. That phrase lives in my head forever now.
He’s voicing what every billionaire and government official already thinks. Call me pessimist but I believe it’s unavoidable. VPNs are seen as “tools to overcome government bans to access illegal websites” in so many countries, hence getting banned. Access to mainstream websites also getting harder and harder when on VPN. People hosting Tor exit nodes are living in fear of police raids.
Even with some little amount of privacy protecting measures, websites start to act strangely or do not work, and the amount of websites like this increases every day. As protecting our privacy becomes a bigger and bigger effort, more people will give up, strengthening the arguments against it. Eventually we’ll hit big brother levels.
Eventually we’ll hit big brother levels.
As someone who was born before the age of surveillance capitalism, I can tell you we’ve hit that level a long time ago. Anybody who thinks society has been running normally for at least the past 15 years is too young to have known what a normal society is.
Exactly. I am elder millennial, and I grew up in Dubai. Back in the 80s and 90s in Dubai the only security cameras that existed were in malls and some supermarkets, and public CCTV by police did not exist. Traffic light cameras to catch people speeding and/or running a red light only got started in the early 2000s. This is one thing that I honestly say that really demarcates the early 2000s from previous times is the fact that the possibility of mass surveillance became a reality only back then. Before that surveillance was mostly disjointed and not at all interconnected. If you had security cameras, then they were on VHS tapes and unless you had the budget to get new tapes regularly, most people would just rewind the tapes and tape over and over, meaning they will degrade fairly quickly, and since most places didn’t keep an archive for too long, if something ‘suspicious’ happened a few weeks prior that you weren’t informed about until today, it would be lost since those tapes were likely overwritten, and there is no way to recover that.
The 90s were far from perfect for me. I had a fairly hard time growing up. But I honestly just wish for the dignity of not being on camera 24/7. My apartment building has cameras on all floors and I cannot exit or enter my own apartment without being caught on camera. That is if those cameras are real and not fakes.
Here’s a little story that shows how much society has become dystopian:
Back in the 90’s, I worked in France for a while. When I was there, a case was brought up against the state that had violated a CNIL rule: some dude was cheating on his taxes by claiming he lived at some address. Tthe French fiscal administration sued him because they obtained a file from the electricity company and another from the water utilty company showing that the consumption of both electricity and water were so low it wasn’t consistent with the dude actually living there.
The case was thrown out, the dude walked and the state was fined because it had violated a rule that clearly stipulated cross-referencing files for the purpose of extracting secondary information that wasn’t available in each single file was a violation of privacy and civil liberties.
I shit you not. This used to be a thing.
Can you imagine this today? All the Big Data sonsabitches cross-reference billions of files ALL THE TIME and nobody bats an eyelid anymore.
If you’re old enough, you remember sovereign states taking privacy seriously. If you’re not, you don’t. And that’s how Big Data gets away with what they do today because fewer and fewer people remember a time when it was unacceptable.
This is why libertarians and many modern authoritarian LOVE corporations. Unlike governments which have some accountability (that has seriously been dwindling) corporations can basically do what they want. Laws are effectively written by corporations so that anyone in any position of authority is never thrown in prison or even needs to worry about that (ultra low level workers can be thrown to the dogs to placate the public every once in a while) and meanwhile the right of protestors has been so seriously curtailed that soon even in formerly first world countries they might be able to break out the machine guns like they did in central America in the 1910s and 1950s. In Britain protestors are being sentenced to record prison terms that were formerly reserved for rapists and muggers.
There is little question that corporations are behind them all.
By “citizens” he means poor people, naturally, and by “best behaviour” he means obedience to authority.
“People behave themselves in a panopticon”-rich people
Firstly no, people don’t. Second, they go crazy in one. And third, this basically breaks down the threads of both community and individualism to create a miserable nightmare
Breaking community and individualism is kinda a big thing billionaires want because that way people can’t organise to rise up against them.
Guy has been a fed since day one. Involved in early CIA projects. Bunch of the early contracts he got for Oracle came directly from the CIA. It made the company. They’ve been pally ever since. Ellison is just the CIA with all the social tact of a tech billionaire.
Owner of Cloud company that sells AI services tells governments that AI-powered surveillance is good.
governments and surveillance, name a more iconic pair
Corporations and surveillance?
Which is far worse. Governments are, to a large extent (even dictatorial governments) still have some accountability to the people. Corporations NEVER have that. The greatest propaganda trick that corporations did is that somehow they are better than governments and the less restrictions on them, the ‘freer’ and ‘richer’ the average person will be.
But only citizens; the elite will carry on doing what it has always done.
billionaires and their super important opinions eh? having money is a personality trait apparently
1984
Larry, AI didn’t stop you from stealing an island from the people of Hawaii
I aim to misbehave
