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Comment by dyauspitr | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, the pro surveillance people are many times just rural folk that are extremely right wing. They think that these technologies will narrowly be applied to whatever minority they dislike while having a huge blind spot about how this will directly apply to themselves as well over a longer time span. That exact scenario is how it also plays out currently with social welfare where they will demonize minorities that use social welfare while sucking on the teat of the government for everything from their farms to their healthcare.

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That's sort of wildly stereotypical.

You can find a ton of urbanites/suburbanites who want surveillance to ticket speeders, reckless driving, loud exhausts, etc. And they're out buying Ring cameras and alarm systems because they're worried about house/car break-ins and theft.

And if you take a radical online urbanite leftist and start talking about right-wingers sending rape and death threats to women/minorities, and the kind of online communities that breed those kinds of people, you will likely find sudden enthusiasm for surveillance.

I tend to assume that regardless of political affiliation, pro-surveillance mindset comes from blind trust in the institutions doing surveillance, whether that's the government or google. This is often driven by ignorance and/or a failure to reason about implications of large-scale systems, rather than any particular political ideology. I think at least in the US, the cold war and our electoral system and culture's totalizing nature has conditioned us into drastically overemphasizing ideology as a factor in people's decisions and reasoning, especially of our outgroups. This tendency, kind of a groupwise variant of what's called the Fundamental Attribution Error, is a common failure of human reasoning, but this culture has exacerbated that tendency to a large and I think detrimental degree. It's why you see so much propaganda focused on painting various preferences, beliefs, and even inborn traits as inherently ideological in nature

I don't know that it is blind trust in institutions.

I think the problem is primarily what you wrote about "outgroups", where once it is the "other" that is targeted, then people support it. They just don't do the math about how that is happening, what institutions are doing it, or how those policies and methods could eventually be turned against them.

And yeah, there's Fundamental Attribution Error at work. Still, I think there's some more narcissism-spectrum-related logic at work where people don't have the self-reflection to consider that conditions they impose on others could wind up getting imposed on them.

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