The only way to fight surveillance is to make all secrets of every state and every single individual on the planet public knowledge. Total surveillance of everybody at all times available to anyone who wants it. To completely destroy the concept of being alone. That way there is perfect alignment between elites, people, corporations, and governments as to their attitude and thereby policy toward surveillance. We need to hack this and make this a reality. Hackers of the world unite!
Middle ground: inverse relation between power and privacy.
If information magnifies power relationships, then require the powerful (governments, corporations, the wealthy), as well as those who've violated social contracts (criminals).
Which is fairly much how Europe's Right to be Forgotten is working in practice (as some of us predicted).
The hard power is - more so than at any other time in history - in the hands of central governments.
Governments used to have to go begging to private wealth to finance themselves, during panics, at times of war, etc. Today Bill Gates is hilariously undersized compared to the US Government (as are all corporations); 120 years ago, Rockefeller by himself towered over the US Government. During the 19th century governments of Europe had to beg for private financing for wars and bailouts.
What corporation, anywhere on earth, has any meaningful hard power? Tanks, jets, machine guns, aircraft carriers, cruise missiles, nukes, legal surveillance capabilities, thousands of soldiers, transports, military bases, the legal right to knock down your door and arrest you, the ability to put you in prison for 15 years with minimum sentencing laws, the legal ability to steal your property at gun point through civil asset forfeiture with no compensation, the right to arrest you for smoking pot, and on it goes.
Name a few corporations with anything even resembling those powers.
All real control over currencies today rests with central governments and their proxies (eg the Fed). That was not the case prior to the global establishment of the modern central banks in the last century. A little over a century ago, JP Morgan ruled the financial markets, and was vastly more powerful than the US Government in financial matters. Today, one month of QE is bigger than the entire fortune of the world's wealthiest man.
At what other point in world history, other than the last century, have governments been singularly all-powerful when it comes to military might? No domestic entity even remotely dares threaten the big governments of today. See: China, Russia, US.
I think the comment parent was not referring to hard power in the geopolitical sense, but rather real power or decision power in the more abstract sense.
No corporation can arrest you for smoking pot, but corporations could decide for smoking pot to become legal overnight. No corporation can launch a missile, but they can arrange for the missiles to be bought, installed, etc..
That said, I would soften your statement that governments are singularly all-powerful: ISIS, al-Qaeda, the iraqi insurgency writ large, MEND, and other non-state groups have been able to quite successfully go toe-to-toe with nation states and make out quite handsomely.
This comment does not counter your larger point but point out a couple of exceptions.
The Federal Reserve is not a government entity. Though the Fed's President is appointed by the government, candidates suggested by the member Banks who hold shares in the organisation.
i cant upvote you enough. people blaming corporations for controlling everything is lame. the politicians who are elected have the free will to choose, the electorate can easily review the politician's record if they like. just because huge numbers of them are corrupt isn't the fault of the corporations...
This is orthogonal to the topic of corporations, but I don't believe elected politicians have "free will to chose". Frankly, I think that politics is the place where you literally lose free will as you move up the chain. You can't really have much agency where every decision you make is necessarily based on all the little deals, agreements and power plays you've had to get embedded in to garner support. This is really a systemic problem, I find it increasingly hard to blame particular politicians for it.
That actually brings up an interesting thought. Corporations are able to be ruthlessly competitive with each other in some part because they keep things secret when they can.
Is it plausible that one of the reasons that major corporations have so much power now is because the government was TOO open for enough decades that the corporations were able to out compete?
I think this would only work if everyone also had perfectly equal power to abuse the resulting information flood. In the U.S., it's common knowledge (or at the very least, common belief) that the majority of politicians are corrupt and routinely do things that would land the rest of us in prison. Despite that knowledge, we generally have no power to do anything meaningful about it because they make the rules.
I don't want a world where every move I make is being watched and I'm subject to arbitrary action by people who have power. I think total surveillance, even if it includes the powerful few, would be a disaster for human rights and freedom in general. So what if the dictator is impeccable in his daily routine, if he's watching every move of a population and subjecting them to unequal treatment under the law?
> The point is that hypocrisy would eventually cause a change, but there would be a period where things would work the way that you describe.
That may be possible, but it's also possible that total surveillance would result in a permanent entrenchement of whoever manages to gain (or maintain) power through the transition. It's very hard for a competing ideology to rise in prominence if it's possible to detect and crush every individual who starts to disagree, before they can even communicate it to anyone else. I think it's likely that with total surveillance we'd soon see the rise of rapid automated enforcement, which would be a incredible impediment to any attempt at changing the status quo.
Don't even pretend like we're not 100% there right now. You are describing reality as it exists currently, nothing more. The tolerance of ideological debate is at the pleasure of those in power, but try to take it any further than you will be visited by various systems of control.
"I don't want a world where every move I make is being watched"
That's already the case. There is (near) total transparency for the population. The only way to fight back, is to have total transparency for the powerful few too.
But they make the rules, and have the money and the power, so this ain't happening.
> The human psyche simply cannot handle that scale of unforgetting, unrelenting, unforgiving violation.
I don't like it either, and it's completely foreign to my (and almost everyone's) current way of living, but there are a lot of things about the current way of living that would have been completely foreign to anyone a century ago. (Imagine how previous generations would have felt about the quantity of information we make public, intentionally and un-, on social media!)
I am not defending or supporting this, but I think that it might be overambitious to declare (presumably without evidence beyond emotional reaction) what the human psyche can or cannot support.
Two centuries ago, the kind of thing that we post today on social media was common knowledge, passed from person to person as gossip. People that didn't have that trail of information were viewed with suspicion.
I know that the "oh noez social media" attitude that I might have seemed to be promulgating can be overblown, but I don't think that this response doesn't get at the heart of it. It's true that people in your community likely knew about you, and newcomers to a community would have had to build up that background of trust; but I think that there's a huge difference between the sort of reciprocal information sharing that goes on in physical communities, and the undifferentiated, omni-directional outward flow of information that social media makes possible.
I totally agree with this. Privacy is a lost war. We have to turn this on its head. Seems paradoxical, but anyone who doesn't like the surveillance state, having lost the war for privacy, should be FOR surveillance and accessibility to it for all. Equalize the power.
