Most alarmingly, many of the fruits of SV can be used to make dictatorships even more capable in crushing dissenters and extending the aegis of state into everyday life. Technology is morally neutral, it can be used for ill as well as good, and our worship of it as a panacea has blinded us to this possibility
It is worse than that: the most efficient way to make money in SV is to make the tools for enabling totalitarianism while covering them in a twee veneer of folksiness so people don’t notice.
You mean the Unabomber was right? Technology inevitably leads to totalitarianism?
Cars are not inherently tools of government, it's just they've been regulated such that that is their direction of development. Personal computers were similarly not that way either.
The key problem in both cases is imposing the requirement to be connected to the internet, after which it's game over.
> key problem in both cases is imposing the requirement to be connected to the internet, after which it's game over
My point is we can do this for anything. Clocks enabled capitalists to exploit workers. Lights took the night from rebels. Steam engines took farmers out of the daylight and put them in mechanised factories. Hell, agriculture enabled modern civilisation but also created such a wave of oppression and anxiety we're still worshiping the gods we invented to save us from it.
None of those statements is wrong. But they're also incomplete.
Clocks did not succeed because of their ability to exploit workers (they were way more useful on ships), nor lights because of rebels, but SV companies do succeed, spectacularly, once their utility for totalitarianism has been demonstrated. For example, the price of nVidia over time, the TikTok hysteria, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Palantir, Tesla, even Figma is like in a secondary market of helping to provide the veneer.
Conversely, if you are of no use to such a regime you will not get very far. The only meaningful question here is how organic this phenomenon is.
nVidia - existed for years before most people noticed just what they were up to, and their change in valuation reflects that. For them AI was the point from the start, games was just the bootstrapping mechanism. Prior to the AI explosion they were a decent business but not a spectacular success.
Facebook - succeeded where almost every other social media app failed before by enabling data gathering and narrative control for the most important demographics in society (MySpace, for example, did not)
Google - a gov funded research project to organise and index information
Tesla - people dependent on the electrical grid are far easier to control than those dependent on gasoline.
I live in Quebec where the gov electricity monopoly (Hydro Quebec) now insist that new homes have smart meters in, where they can remotely control your thermostat, while simultaneously campaigning to make all alternatives illegal. Curiously we're also a big Tesla market because of the cheap electricity, which is also the reason for the thermostats: they want to turn the heating down in Quebec so they can sell the same electricity for more south of the border.
> Tesla - people dependent on the electrical grid are far easier to control than those dependent on gasoline.
Where do you think gasoline comes from exactly? I can rechange an electric car completely off grid with solar/wind. I'm still working on my off-grid oil drilling and refinery operation.
Unless there is a revolution in batteries (which we all hope there is) you won't be able to store or transport electricity with anything like the ease you can gasoline.
If you try charging a car from a solar panel you aren't going to be going very far in a hurry.
For anyone doubting this, recall that OpenAI is already loosening it's "principles" with regard to the use of it's products for surveillance of innocent civilian populations that have not committed crimes, and yet who's behaviors are being monitored and recorded, and analyzed, not the least of which is Israel's current use which is open, naked oppression and targeting.
And despite the fact that OpenAI has incredibly low adoption everywhere outside of that, it is still worth tens of billions of dollars. Do you really think that valuation comes from being able to remove people from fuckin cellphone pictures with a tap, or generating royalty free images?
I remember running into a programmer at a MacHack conference (so you know it was a long time ago).
He was an Australian contractor, working for the UAE.
He was working on a database system, for tracking citizens. He flat-out told me it was a tool for their monarchy, to wield power.
In the US, people keep talking about the Second Amendment, as some kind of guarantor of liberty, but their eyes glaze over, when I tell them that the computer database is the biggest threat to human rights in history, and now, AI will make it much worse.
At the end of the day, someone has to do the actual enforcement though right? I'm not saying a government super database that knows everything about you isn't a threat to human rights as you say, but the biggest threat? I would have to disagree.
They don't threaten you per say but really they absolutely hamstring the one ability that matters if your incentive is to hold the seat of power: the ability to organize the population and form a new government or at the very least claw back some power that has been granted to certain individuals and groups. 1776 would be impossible today.
This NYT article had an article with some interesting history of one of the character who saw that opportunity.
I see almost all tech focused on advertising as an unfortunate continuation of this trend. And it feels like people are fooling themselves to say it will not be used for restrictive purposes. But maybe I'm wrong.
Well Nazis had like ~30% support in Germany so that's probably enough to monitor the remaining 70% (1 person to monitor ~2 others)
However, if your regime is even smaller like 5% or 10% it's going to be extremely difficult to manage the remaining 95% without more advanced technology than pen and paper.
Yet, they killed the Jews in occupied countries as well. Shockingly, the Nazis were the least efficient at doing their genocide at home where the support was highest.
I'm not sure that's accurate. By sheer numbers, it's pretty much Poland taking the lead and that's because the rest of Europe killed/displaced their jews in previous events (turns out hating jews is basically an European tradition).
Statista agrees you with in that comparing the deaths by country to its initial population by country shows Germany around 32% while say Poland is 75% [1]. But the big problem with that is it omits emigration; I would suspect jews in Germany saw the writing on the wall and left. The Germany jewish population dropped from 525k to 37k [2] (with 165k dead [1]) which means 323k jews must've left Germany while Hungary dropped from 445k to 190k (with 270k dead) which means -25k jews emigrated (aka 25k jews immigrated).
So it just appears that Germany is less efficient because the local jews emigrated to other countries where they were then killed juicing those countries stats.
People getting back to 2nd amendment are a funky bunch, they talk about need for automatic weapons to defend against government, when in reality they would be bringing say ar-15 to a drone fight.
If war in Ukraine showed anything its that armed single guy, or bunch of them, are meaningless against any modern threat. Other, say SHTF scenarios, are just wet fantasies of big kids doing some obscure form of LARP.
Not the OP, but the US has a shitton of laws that make basically everyone a felon [0] and only the sheer impossibility of tracking everyone everywhere makes ad-hoc prosecution complicated/impractical.
The advent of AI may bring down this last obstacle.
I get your point but suggest finding better source material. Harvey Silverglate has made a great living out of telling just-so stories with lots of emotional activation, that fall apart on closer examination. For example he'll tell a sob story about someone being charged for collecting oysters on a Sunday, only it turns out that it's a large commercial operation that ignores environmental or employment regulations and has been defying regulators for years on end.
I don't think it's the lack of tracking. It's that almost all of those "3 a day" violations are only technically violations. If you try to actually charge someone in front of a jury, they're going to return something along the lines of "not guilty because the prosecutor is an idiot".
That's assuming that the judge doesn't find a way to throw it out long before it ever sees a jury. Courts don't like wasting their time on stupid stuff.
Most trials in the US never go to jury, right? The risk of receiving a crushing sentence is just too big, so almost everyone accepts a plea bargain.
Notoriously, Hans Reiser (who is guilty, never doubted that) refused a rather low plea bargain of IDK six? years, tried his luck with a jury trial, and got life.
Assuming I don't want to pay money for that book, can you give me a single example of a law that your average American is likely to feloniously violate by accident?
