Comment by Santosh83

1 day ago

I think you may have got it backwards? Technology seems to be greatly facilitating fascist control rather than weakening them...

6 comments

Santosh83

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mystraline  1 day ago

I think you hit the nail on the head.

The original problem with The Panopticon was that it was 1 person in the center observing X amount of people. And at best, was a probabilistic 'am I being watched right now? ' with the answer of very low probability. For complete surveillance, you'd need a surveiller per watched.

Enter technology.

Now the surveillance isn't a person, but a set of computer programs. And, optimizing and analyzing the limited data flow out of a user is doable.

And you then have computational spies everywhere. Most of them are limited to specific usecases. However the more data is shared, the tighter fascist control can be maintained. Then it just comes to 'detected event' and 'summon the secret police'.

  • wing-_-nuts  1 day ago

    Not only that, a fascist state can identify people who are 'politically undesirable', then go back through the mountain of data held by private companies (facebook, google, chatbots, etc), trawl it to automatically create a dossier of kompromat, and apply pressure, repress voter turnout, etc.

  • bratwurst3000  1 day ago

    this is on point. I tell this people since years. "if you share more data they have easyer acces to controll you"

Xeoncross  6 hours ago

Perhaps my last sarcastic line was a bit obtuse. Technology is certainly making it easier to enact control and with a tighter feedback loop.

Rabbit trail, it's interesting how the modern western evil is now branded as "fascist control" as opposed to the other forms common throughout history. I wonder if it's related to calling everyone "toxic". It seems culture is moving towards more vague definitions of evil/wrong instead of pin-pointing the actual faults. Perhaps this is an important part of "newspeak" that we're suffering from.