<div class="header-image"></div> <table class="table-header"> <thead> <tr> <th colspan="2"></th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>2024-10-06</td> <td style="text-align: right;"><a href="About.md" class="internal-link">About</a></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> # Recipe for a Police State  ### My Cynicism is Winning Out over my Optimism I used to believe that the craziness of online discourse was just a fun sideshow. It didn't need regulation, and *shouldn't* be regulated because it was meaningless. The Internet was just a place to let down your hair and have some fun. Make jokes that are a little too dark for telling at the office, or maybe even talk a little politics &mdash; you know, the sort of politics you wouldn't bring up at the dinner table because it would just start arguments and ruin dinner. Of course, I'm talking about the Internet of the early to mid 00s. Before things started to go kinda crazy. Maybe it was my own naivety, but I really had this impression of the Internet all the way up to just a few years ago. I mean the arguments online had definitely taken on a different tone: the humour was gone, the conversation much more angry and self-righteous. It had taken on a very authoritarian bent; everyone was scolding each other. It wasn't fun any more. But it was all still just online discourse. One day I was in the car with a couple of friends &mdash;parents&mdash; and they were talking about a protest that happened at their kids' school. It was a protest against "trans ideology" or some crap. Some parents of the kids had actually joined in (not supervising it; *they were actively protesting themselves, alongside the kids*). It culminated with a trans kid getting beaten by some of the protesters. This was in my own city, and served as a bit of a wake-up call for me. This online stupidity was spilling over into real life. I've been concerned with web trackers for over a decade. I installed the Ghostery extension in Firefox before Chrome even existed as a web browser. What I didn't consider was the inevitability of addiction algorithms being employed as a result of data collected by these trackers. My mind never went beyond "I don't want companies monitoring what I read and purchase, and I certainly don't want this information stored in any capacity that could, for whatever reason, be subpoenaed." I never imagined, at the time, that these trackers would be building profiles on people, and using this information to manipulate them on an individual basis, purposely forming addictive habits to use them as assembly-line-style ad-viewers. Penny-earners. The profiles built up for all of us are assembled by a form of AI. There isn't a person behind all of these profiles; a program is doing it. And that program is becoming more sophisticated by the day. Entire data centres are dedicated to it. Combining the knowledge of these profiles, with the abundance of live camera footage in city-centres, we will have a computer-controlled surveillance system that rivals any Orwellian prediction ever made. This brings me to Oracle and their plans to help police forces worldwide to monitor the goings on of everyone, including their own officers. The psychological shortcomings of most people in society will keep them glued to their smartphones via algorithmic marionette strings, and so, little more surveillance tech is necessary. The people are surveying themselves, and posting it online. But for those that are a little more careful, the endless cameras constantly filming public areas will fill any gaps. And very soon (if not already), the data from these cameras will be sorted and tagged by AI, contrasting the information with social media posts so that the videos, and people in them, are easily searchable by name, demeanour, political affiliation, etc. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, [recently gave a Q&A at a financial analyst meeting](https://www.oracle.com/events/financial-analyst-meeting-2024/?bcid=6361899206112) (timestamp 1:08:00) where he envisioned "Citizens will be on their best behaviour because we're constantly recording and reporting" with drones, cameras, and other surveillance equipment. And, of course, [Oracle will provide the platform](https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/16/oracle_ai_mass_surveillance_cloud/) for this Brave New World of mass surveillance. There are two things that occur to me with this. One is that it is more Orwellian than even Orwell himself envisioned. One thing he pointed out in <u>1984</u> was that while there was always the possibility of being watched through the telescreens, you could never be watched *all* the time. With the technology Ellison is talking about, everyone *absolutely will* be watched all the time, by AI applications that can alert people to review footage as necessary. The second is that this strategy is so fucking human. Permit me, for a moment, a little comparison: In the movie The Fifth Element, the cities are wracked with pollution, and the smog is so bad that driving and getting around is impossible because of the obstructed vision, not to mention the consequences to people's health. The solution to this problem was not to actually clean up the pollution, but to build over top of it. So the problem isn't so much fixed as just avoided. In regard to the real issue of continual civil unrest in our cities, the solution we're coming up with isn't to do something about the social media algorithms and predatory advertising that's causing it. The solution is to take away our freedom and right to privacy. It's not just to embrace the immediacy and clamp down on the current state of things. It's to give unreasonable power to those in authority and create a police state, without concerning ourselves with the addictions causing it all. The issue driving people mad will remain because it makes too much money--money given to politicians and election campaigns. This is a situation that will not improve. We are going down a path that is being closed behind us. The only thing anyone can do now is stay ahead of it. [Avoid the algorithms](../Blog/2024-09-08%20Social%20Winds%20and%20Social%20Media.md). If possible, stay out of the cities. Own your media, and consume it locally or self-host it. Avoid digital subscriptions. Separate yourself from online discussions. If you must use social media use all the tools available to curate your feeds. Mute words, phrases, and people. And put the phone down if you feel your blood pressure going up. Think before responding, and stay anonymous. I don't mean to say these are all hard rules everyone should be following. I break them myself sometimes. But I do my best to follow these rules generally. Sometimes I get sucked back in. (Look at my recent Twitter timeline. It's embarrassingly full of the Israel/Palestine/Hamas/Lebanon/Hezbollah/Yemen/etc. bullshit, and caused me to delay my blog posts for almost a month!) But I've learned to recognise it in myself. It's important to learn to know when you're beginning to get sucked into an algorithmic rabbit-hole. Recognise the blinders it puts on you. And for god's sake, stay away from protests. Even for curiosity's sake. Don't let cameras put you at the scene. You risk becoming associated with craziness. Remember that today's <u>Next Big Thing&trade;</u> is tomorrow's reason to cancel people.