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Comment by ohazi | Hacker News Reader

So this surveillance technology started in the military to track insurgents, expanded to law enforcement and government to track suspects and the general public, and is now expanding to corporations to monitor customers.

This pattern makes it seem like the cat is out of the bag, and that pervasive expansion and abuse of this technology is all but inevitable.

Let's extrapolate a bit and start thinking about what society will look like when this sort of surveillance is made available to the general public. Imagine a free, Google-Maps-like application that allows you to see individual people and rewind with half second resolution.

This would be such a massive wrench thrown into the gears of society that I'm having trouble coming up with anything coherent.

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It seems like something many wealthy people will opt out of by living in communities that are organized around an interest in avoiding it/disallowing it.

I’m imagining planned communities that have much higher privacy standards even in their public spaces like shops and parks.

Are you thinking a technological solution to the wide net surveillance or policy?

More likely policy and reliance on the community being composed of like-minded people.

I think one of the author's main points is that just as much about the development of wide surveillance was contingent, we're still at a point where we could choose not to have this become more pervasive, and it would be a mistake to assume that that's inevitable:

"For the masses, the feeling that technology develops along an inevitable path reflects their lack of agency — the fact that the crucial decisions about the technological conditions of society will be made by a largely self-regulating confraternity of elites. For engineers and scientists, technological development appears to be driven by a combination of what they can imagine, what is technically feasible, and what governments or markets demand. Even those whose particular genius produces the breakthroughs feel this as an inevitability, as if they are possessed by some inner logic that is the real force ushering in this new world."

software is transforming humanity's culture and society on a scale comparable with the invention of written language. This has just begun. We ain't seen nothing yet.

First thought... canopies, entire communities with public spaces covered with walkways, pools, parks, all under tent-like construction. Garages fully connected to houses, parking garages with interior building access preferred.

Do we have disruptive tech for larger public areas like parks, beaches, etc? Vapor or EM or even air curtain-like heat shimmer generators, anything that obscures line of sight...

Or maybe the next wave of disruption is cheap anti-sat missiles and mid-altitude AAA. Nasty future that, a half step toward Skynet scenarios.

Yuck.

I get the draw of an "Eagle Eye" type capability but too easily it turns into Project Insight and it's Hail Hydra time.

> First thought... canopies, entire communities with public spaces covered with walkways, pools, parks, all under tent-like construction.

It won't matter because of all the cameras under the canvas. Cell phones will continue to track every person's location in real time. You can try to hide from the satellites and drones, but you can bet that your every movement will still be tracked somehow.

Yeah, privacy in meatspace is a lost cause. Cameras everywhere. Around us. Carried by us. Overhead. Plus DNA sampling. Total surveillance.

Even so, here in my office, there are no cameras. And only heavily draped windows. And no audio, for anything that's private.

And so it's only my online activity that can be at all private. What a strange world.

> Vapor or EM or even air curtain-like heat shimmer generators, anything that obscures line of sight...

I’m reminded of The Diamond Age, where nanomachines form barely-visible curtains to keep other nanomachines out. A dome of them could work as a two-way mirror of sorts, letting insiders look out but blocking things from looking in.

You just described Life360, which is running on my phone right now.

Also, corporations monitoring customers is not as scary as you make it out to be with your connection to the military. Yes it sucks. But you can choose which company to be a customer of. With the rise of corporate surveillance, the choices we all make about consumption just got another layer of importance.

With the rise of pervasive surveillance, I think the choices we all make are going to cease to be important. We can be micromanaged into making the "right" ones. We truly become cogs in an uncaring, world destroying machine, with no more agency than rats in lab experiments. For people with a strong conformity streak, this may sound fine. If you don't like being told what to do, and don't like the direction of society in general, it's pretty dismal.

In retrospect this comment is hyper cynical even for me, and doesn't make a lot of sense that our choices wouldn't matter. I just can't get past the idea that my whole online life is there for someone with sufficient privilege to dig through. I feel so violated by the betrayal of mass surveillance because I invested most of my life into the internet thinking it was actually intended to be safe and egalitarian, not a spy machine and a tool for social control.

> you can choose which company to be a customer of

This is a false choice. This claim is either naive or disingenuous.

> But you can choose which company to be a customer of.

True, but I can't choose which corporations are spying on me. There are many corporations that spy on me at every opportunity despite the fact that I don't do business with them.

Extrapolate a bit more. Imagine a Maps app that allows you to see individual people and forward predict their interactions with the world with half second resolution, conditioned on the personalized stimuli you feed them through their electronic devices.

So, pokemon go, providing incentives for individuals to "achieve" certain locations?

24/7 pokemon go.

TRUTH!

In other words the Apocalypse, literally meaning TEOTAWKI (the end of the world as WE know it) by finally removing the veil from reality.

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