This article draws conclusions not in evidence, and thinking about this more broadly there is nothing about individualism that requires a loss of privacy. On the contrary, I myself, as most staunch individualists, are also privacy advocates, and we structure our lives to both preserve our individuality and freedom, and privacy is a central point of that. What external structures do not know about you cannot be used to manipulate or control you, so privacy is a bedrock cornerstone of individual liberty and the individualist movement.
Their example of doorbell cameras especially falls flat to me, because most people (including myself) are motivated to have a doorbell camera due to our own individual issues and not to support police dragnet surveillance. Some folks, myself included, even have made the effort to use doorbell cameras that are not cloud connected and record video locally on NVR so that this data can't be shared without our explicit permission. There is nothing about these situations that /requires/ a loss of privacy, and the causal link assumed in this article is not established within. It's simply the case that every major tech company is incentivized to create systems that destroy privacy because they can more effectively monetize on our data and government agencies turn a blind eye because they also benefit from the loss of privacy in the private sector. It takes technical acumen and effort to ensure your privacy while still taking care to utilize modern technology, and the majority of people, even in the tech industry, do not have the necessary technical acumen to do so.
This is clearly a problem, but it's not a trade-off between individualism and privacy, it's a trade-off between the greed of dystopian multi-national megacorps and privacy.
I thought it was pretty well established. The author wasn't saying that people who value individualism don't value privacy, rather that the pursuit of individual over community values caused an erosion of privacy (regardless of anyone's intentions).
The argument was that getting rid of the informal, localized social norm enforcement mechanisms (your nosy neighbors, a meddlesome priest, etc) that used to prevent people from fully expressing their individuality created a vaccuum that was filled by surveillance.
Your nosy neighbor used to judge you for things we don't think ought to be judged anymore, but they also noticed if you were drinking too much or stopped going to work because your mental health was declining. Since society still needs to work and not drive drunk, surveillance by states and large corporations has stepped in to fill the gap.
So, according to the author, the individualistic ethos brought us to the point where some machine will silently judge me for this post.
The argument was that getting rid of the informal, localized social norm enforcement mechanisms (your nosy neighbors, a meddlesome priest, etc) that used to prevent people from fully expressing their individuality created a vacuum that was filled by surveillance.
The argument that localized social norm enforcement has disappeared is old, and goes back to the creation of cities. The vacuum was filled long ago by the creation of organized city police departments. Robert Peel, who organized the London police, was explicit about the police as enforcers of social norms. See Robert Peel's principles of policing.
Large scale surveillance is relatively new. Where it fits is an issue, but it's hard to argue it arose out of that old problem.
Historically, the police department in San Francisco enforced very different norms from the police in Amarillo.
Now with increased mobility and the distance-collapsing features of the Internet, there is a felt need for norm enforcement at the national or international level. This is where the surveillance comes in. Organizations like the FBI or Interpol chase big norm violators, but they don't touch the stuff that the neighborhood patrolman would tackle (in the Robert Peel view of policing).
> but they don't touch the stuff that the neighborhood patrolman would tackle (in the Robert Peel view of policing).
Nor should they.
But this doesn't stop a bunch of Karens in some gated community in LA from getting their panties in a knot over what some wackos in da yoop are up to and thanks to the internet the former has plenty of stuff streamed right to their iphones in 1080p to get pissed off about.
Norms don't generalize to a national level except for very broad norms and very small nations.
IMO there’s a secondary effect where individualism has been twisted to say “my individual freedom to meddle in your life shall not be infringed”.
The surveillance state will exist in the absence of regulation because there’s a lot of money to be made surveilling people. Basically, my right to spy on you trumps your right to not be spied upon.
It depends what kind of individual freedoms you care about. I've seen surveillance capitalism expressed as the freedom of people to enter into agreements where they get free cell phone games in exchange for a trove of personal data.
Like you I would welcome some state intervention here, but I have to recognize that this is me lessening my commitment to the values of individualism.
Honestly I think individualism is inherently in conflict with populations in the hundreds of millions. The more people you have, the more your chasing a local maximum contributes to a tragedy of the commons situation.
This works across a whole bunch of smaller geographic or even ideological alignment. Eventually you have to draw a line on individual freedom when it oversteps the values of the society, and you have to draw more of those lines the more edge cases you have to accommodate.
I think the opposite is the case. The larger the population, the more infeasible central control becomes. Also, individualism doesn't support polluting commons. To the contrary, I have no moral right to pollute another individual's space or air under individualism.
Moral right or not, you have to violate individualism on some level to enforce any action about it. Individualism need not be curtailed by a central authority; cultural norms can do just as good a job.
And for too many people, “individualism” really just means “other people should be free to be like me”.
Every individualist I know, including myself since I consider myself one, believes that a state is necessary to resolve and mediate disputes between individuals. So I don't think this is a violation of individualism. Even Objectivists believe in the courts and police. The key is that the state is there to protect individual rights, that's it.
I think you're exactly right, another poster raised the interesting point of whether where those lines are drawn is inevitable based on the circumstances or if we have a lot of collective control.
> Like you I would welcome some state intervention here, but I have to recognize that this is me lessening my commitment to the values of individualism.
Is it though? Do you consider state intervention to eliminate slavery/indentured servitude to be a similar reduction in commitment?
The question, when trying to maximize individual freedom, is what exactly you're maximizing. You can take approaches that maximize the freedom of those already most free (those with wealth and privilege), or you can try to increase the average (mean) freedom, or the median freedom, or increase the freedom of those who are least free by establishing a floor.
Most of the approaches other than the first involve curtailing the freedoms of the most free in some way.
Wanting to increase the median individual freedom by limiting the ability of individuals to enter into agreements with corporations that trade away their privacy in this way doesn't necessarily signal a lessening of commitment to individualism.
Well, first, it's "to enter into implicit agreements..." — I think it's an important detail. Second, you always pay for "cell phone games" with some amount of money (ranging from $0 to infinity) plus a trove of optional data; the option to pay with just money simply is not there.
Yeah, but that's a bad thesis, don't you think? There's a much easier explanation than the twist on freedom is slavery the author is pitching: surveillance state is easy and it makes greedy people rich.
but it's more complicated that "makes greedy people rich"
this "greedy people" are humans embedded in social circles too. Many are in situations (social circumstances) in which they are not really free to not be greedy. Further, many of these "greedy people" are not even individuals but corporations (autonomous money, as I half-jokingly think of them) i.e. businesses large enough that all the decisions are systematically directed to increase stockholder value (if they don't 'beat the market' their investors are loosing money)
You are restating what the article says but I don't see any evidence presented nor is a mechanism that would cause this link presented. It sound to me like no more than idle speculation. 'Individuality created a vacuum that was filled by surveillance'. What does this even mean? Why are these two things related? Correlation does not equal causation.
I'm restating the article in response to a comment that I thought misunderstood the article at a fundamental level.
It's idle speculation but sometimes idle speculation is interesting. Should everyone wait until they have conclusive evidence from prospective randomized controlled trials before writing?
> The argument was that getting rid of the informal, localized social norm enforcement mechanisms (your nosy neighbors, a meddlesome priest, etc) that used to prevent people from fully expressing their individuality created a vaccuum that was filled by surveillance.
I'm not clear on why this vacuum must exist and more importantly, why it must be filled.
I think the idea is that the increased size and density of society has led to more complex social structures that prior laws were not able to catch up to. See your sibling comment about the consolidation of populations into cities and the creation of modern policing. Technological advancement also leads to more issues- contrast the multitude of free speech/censorship fights over online content vs. AOL chat rooms having blanket moderator policies two decades ago. As society grows, so does the vacuum created by places the law is hazy on. And so does the number of bad actors, from thieves snatching Amazon packages off doorsteps to jihadist suicide bombers.
> As society grows, so does the vacuum created by places the law is hazy on. And so does the number of bad actors, from thieves snatching Amazon packages off doorsteps to jihadist suicide bombers.
I'm pretty sure the law is not hazy one bit on either of those issues.
The original claim was that social norms was enforcing some kind of behaviour, and that individualism has eroded those norms thus permitting previously forbidden behaviours, and therefore led to us deploying surveillance to "pick up the slack" to enforce such behaviours.
I'm still not clear that those norms were necessarily good, that eroding them was necessarily bad, that all of those behaviours should be forbidden, and that therefore this is why surveillance arose. Presumably, surveillance is used to go after those breaking the law, not those breaking social norms, so this just seems like an elaborate non sequitur.
From a less philosophical and more partisan read of the situation, I'm inclined to believe that 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror gave the premier national government the carte blanche to pursue surveillance, widely supported or tacitly consented by the majority of the populace. And because such surveillance was normalized, large corporations, themselves experiencing several decades of increased free rein thanks to deregulation, also began engaging in profitable surveillance activities.
Perhaps this all would not have been so inevitable if we were living under a different sociopolitical climate.
How can individualism harm privacy? I mean, what is the alternative? Is that alternative more privacy and less surveillance? I do not think so.
And I talk from the experience of having lived for long in a non-capitalist country.So I do not know what the hell that headline is doing there as if capitalism or individualism was to be blamed of worse privacy. Not at all. I can give countless examples myself. It is not related to any of those things. In fact, I think they track people even more where I was...
> This article draws conclusions not in evidence, and thinking about this more broadly there is nothing about individualism that requires a loss of privacy.
That may be true, however, individualism may increase the probability that you'll lose it, just not to 1.
> On the contrary, I myself, as most staunch individualists, are also privacy advocates, and we structure our lives to both preserve our individuality and freedom, and privacy is a central point of that.
What you advocate for isn't necessarily what you get.
> Their example of doorbell cameras especially falls flat to me, because most people (including myself) are motivated to have a doorbell camera due to our own individual issues and not to support police dragnet surveillance. Some folks, myself included, even have made the effort to use doorbell cameras that are not cloud connected and record video locally on NVR so that this data can't be shared without our explicit permission. There is nothing about these situations that /requires/ a loss of privacy, and the causal link assumed in this article is not established within.
Aren't everybody else's doorbell camera's the privacy issue? The ones the staunch individualist has no control over?
> Aren't everybody else's doorbell camera's the privacy issue? The ones the staunch individualist has no control over?
Maybe. There's nothing that prevents other people from having a doorbell camera that doesn't violate privacy, except for the greed of large companies. Certainly most people do not install a doorbell camera with the intent to violate privacy, so it doesn't logically follow for me that doorbell cameras necessarily cause a privacy issue, not the least of which because I was able to set one up that does not cause a privacy issue.
The privacy issue here isn't caused by your neighbors possibly having a recording of what you do on the public street, it's caused by a random person and a law enforcement agency and a data broker company in different parts of the world and with no relationship to you having a recording of what you did on the public street. The doorbell camera alone is fundamentally no different from your neighbor peering out the window or checking their peephole in the front door. The difference comes from the companies building systems /explicitly/ on the basis of capturing and trading/selling that data and embedding this in the products they offer to consumers. It does not have to be this way, and indeed there are product offerings that don't upload live streams of the all their video to the cloud to be snarfed up my data brokers, voyeurs, and police agencies.
Remember, these are cameras pointed at a public street, so while there is a reasonable expectation that you have privacy from non-involved/non-present parties to your actions there, there is no such expectation of privacy from those who could reasonable observe you. Individuals who wish to keep their actions secret don't do them on the public street in broad daylight, and that has been true for millennia.
> there is no such expectation of privacy from those who could reasonable observe you
The difference between
a neighbor looking out their window or sitting on their porch as you pass, and
a tiny device watching 24/7, saving everything it observes, and making the recording available to third parties including the police*, without either the owner or you being informed
is gigantic. There is no comparison here: these cameras are different in kind (not degree) from the normal human lack of privacy on the sidewalk.
> Certainly most people do not install a doorbell camera with the intent to violate privacy
But they do, in fact, in actual practice. Just as a hunting accident may not have been intentional but still has an effect.
---
* If you give me six minutes of video of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. – Cardinal Richelieu, probably
I think you are misreading me. I am very clearly marking the difference between such a device and a camera which is NOT cloud connected. It’s the shuttling of the data that creates the privacy issue, not the mere recording.
> Certainly most people do not install a doorbell camera with the intent to violate privacy
Most people will install a doorbell camera that gives them the most functions for the least amount of money. Does the doorbell cot me $10, but give me good quality video? And a way to replay video from last week? And a way to corroborate the video with neighbors video to catch repeat offenders? And a way to share the video with police? Great, I'm sold.
Your privacy? What privacy? It stops where you get too close to my house, I'm a true individual and need to control and protect my house/"castle".
While correct, I think you are missing the point on doorbell cameras. Of course it doesn't require trusting Ring to not destroy your privacy by using their system.
However, what percentage of people who want a doorbell camera are going to go through the work of setting up a local NVR. It is practically zero. I think the other issue is that if everyone else in your neighborhood does have a Ring, how does that not affect your privacy? Of course, Ring's business model is fear mongering and I'm not absolving them. But people will generally choose the path of least resistance. The fact that people want a camera to prevent a package from being stolen not because they want to create a police dragnet means almost nothing when the result of the camera sales creates an abusable police dragnet. And to be clear, some people actually do want to create the police dragnet because "other people" are scary. Spend 10 minutes on NextDoor and you will see lots of this.
Even if you did setup a local CCTV monitoring system, how would I know you did that? It's completely fair to assume at this point that any camera watching you is syncing all of it's data with The Big Scary Cloud.
I'm deeply offended that, even as I write this post, my office cameras are staring me in the face. We SHOULD NOT stand for this bullshit.
Exactly. Consumer tech today from social media to hardware devices like doorbell cameras seem to only be able to exist (eg. funded) if they include collecting data on the user. Therein is the problem and there is no technical reason why tech x has to include spying features. But if there is no way to get tech x to market without them, then so be it. As an individualist myself, I am retreating rapidly in to not using tech. The last thing I would ever do is put an Amazon microphone in my kitchen or a Google camera on my door. I have switched to DDG and Brave. And as time allows, considering ways to use email and phones without being spied on. It's a sad state of affairs - not so much the market reality that privacy breaching is the primary monetization, but that not everyone else is like me and rejects it. The masses willingly swallow it.
Like you, I'm not sure how the article arrived at the cost of individualism is privacy. I'm very individualist (I guess?). I've been in a collectivist culture before (the military) and immediately one of the first things you become aware of is that the cost to collectivism is privacy. That could just be my experience, and really privacy may not be related to either, but more the values of the group. In individualism it's the average of how much each individual values privacy, where in collectivism the result is more a statement about the groups goals (or rather, the purpose for which they are collectivist.)
> Some folks, myself included, even have made the effort to use doorbell cameras that are not cloud connected and record video locally on NVR so that this data can't be shared without our explicit permission.
Well, if a crime is committed in an area the police think your doorbell is viewing and you refuse to turn over any footage then they cops will serve you a warrant.
This is a very wordy article with a lot of non sequitur. A lot of big claims about surveillance states and behavior modification, but then the only practical examples are things like people installing doorbell cams to catch package thieves instead of “the prying eye of their neighbors” or traffic cameras catching red light runners.
The article then veers toward complaints about “cancel culture”, albeit with very flowery language:
> Used to purge public life of these individuals, social media enables the construction and enforcement of intellectual and political orthodoxy.
Is it really surveillance if people are responding to public social media posts that someone deliberately uploads to a website for the purpose of public discussion?
I read the whole article but struggled to get anything useful out of it. The author’s entire premise seems to be built on a “good old days” vision of the past that has been idealized as a sort of utopia where everyone behaved well because their neighbors were constantly watching them, which is an ironic premise for an article that also complains about cancel culture on social media:
> Omnipresent surveillance, a technical fix for social disorder, is a surrogate for the communities a post-Enlightenment world has destroyed.
>social media enables the construction and enforcement of intellectual and political orthodoxy.
You hit on it, but this is the crux to me - what makes them think this wasn't possible before? Or, if they did think it possible before, how does voluntary sharing to a community compare with, say, church-driven enforcement of intellectual and political orthodoxy? I agree, there were no good old days on this topic.
> ...church-driven enforcement of intellectual and political orthodoxy
It's interesting you noted that line. When I read it, I was thinking of the legendary Saturday Night Live "Church Lady" skits. The character Dana Carvey created perfectly captured the judgemental, moralizing environment I saw in church communities as a child. The skit was so funny because it reflected a reality barely hidden beneath a thin-veneer of faux-friendliness.
This was possible before social media, but social media (like most technology) allows it to happen faster, on a larger, scale, and cheaply. Before you had to rely on neighbors' gossip. Now you have Facebook, where your "neighbors" from two continents over tell you things are wrong in your neighborhood.
The article never tries to make a direct case for causality. Every time it gets close, it completely ignores any underlying motivation (say authoritarianism). Including such a reference, the article's thesis would be something like since smaller-scale systems of control have been undermined by individualism, authoritarian desires have come to rely on surveillance. Which does not supply that less individualism would cause less surveillance (eg China), despite that being what the article wants to imply.
Modulo that, we're left with a pretty bland idea that as mobility has increased, the desire to know more about newly-met people has increased. Back in the day, a newcomer to town wouldn't be trusted until they had established a reputation. Now you can fly across the country and open a bank account on the same day. I don't particularly enjoy having global identification and surveillance databases like that. But it's hard to ascribe this to individualism per se as opposed to the ease of travel regardless of the strength of communities you're traveling between. We don't attribute the adoption of time zones as a consequence of individual communities failing to keep their "local time", but rather the need for consistency across a wider area caused by train travel.
Flipping the script can be useful to discover blindspots in conventional wisdom, but nothing in this article made me question individualism as being a strong counter to surveillance.
> nothing in this article made me question individualism as being a strong counter to surveillance.
as I understood it, that has nothing to do with the point of the article. On that level, I'd say the point of the article is how both east and west are converging towards a similar amount of individual surveillance (while most of the article deals with why this may be the case)
The article's headline seemed interesting enough to maybe take a look. Your concise review saved me trying to parse through it. The quotes you posted clearly show it's the kind of overly-intellectualized prose that's too often just window-dressing trying to inflate a handful of unremarkable ideas.
it's just that now, your nosey neighbors softly keeping an eye on you are not limited by the geography of neighborhoods. it's now limited by the scaling capabilities of the entire internet (i.e. unlimited)
It's easy for any individual user who is reading HN and cares enough to spend time setting up their own device (possibly including installing a custom ROM if you don't trust Google's checkboxes).
It's not easy to get most everyone to disable it such that it is no longer the societal condition. Since that is the level at which we're discussing things, that is what is important.
It's easy enough for any individual who cares. Even if you personally struggle with that sort of thing, it's not hard to find someone to do it for you. But the fact is most people don't care because some corporation who knows me only as user #24601 having location data indicating I spent 20 minutes in or around a Barnes and Noble doesn't negatively affect me the way that my neighbor taking pictures of me while I shower does.
“Anyone who cares” assumes a much higher level of technical competence and awareness than is actually present in the general population.
Most people have very little idea of the myriad ways they are being tracked (they know that it’s happening in general, but not the specifics), so they don’t go digging around in their phone settings to figure out how to make these changes.
The numbers on Apple’s “ask app not to track” usage demonstrate that the “people just don’t care about their privacy” crowd have serious blind spots.
If the issue were technical competence, you'd have a whole industry full of technically competent people who would be paid to take care of the issue for others. Even if people didn't realize that they needed the service, these enterprising individuals would produce marketing materials to reveal the pain point to them. That's how most technical services are sold. An electrician doesn't need me to understand the danger of a particular electrical issue, they only need to tell me the undesirable consequence of not fixing it - someone can be dumb as bricks but they'll still shell out money to fix it if they're told it could start an electrical fire.
The fact is this privacy protection industry does not exist because even after thoroughly explaining the issue to people, they generally still don't care. At the end of the day, it's not a real pain point - I suffer no measurable damage from corporations having my personal data, indeed I derive some small but non zero benefits. It might feel weird or even unethical to you, but that's just like your opinion man, and people with other value systems will not necessarily feel the same way. These people aren't dumb and blind, just apathetic.
> The fact is this privacy protection industry does not exist
The largest consumer hardware company in existence (Apple) makes privacy a significant part of its marketing. I’m not sure where you’re getting this idea from.
You state that there is no real pain point, but I would posit that the pain point is simply non obvious. People are definitely weirded out when they have a conversation with someone about a product that they’d never heard of and then it suddenly shows up all over their phone. They simply don’t comprehend how much the bits of data they are shedding could lead to that kind of prediction behavior from Google/facebook et al. And to be fair, I doubt that the engineers behind that could explain the behavior with exacting precision.
At the end of the day there’s no good lever for the typical consumer. It ends up being framed as a all or nothing decision, and so they throw their hands up and say they have no interest in living as a hermit.
I've never once heard someone say they're buying an apple product for privacy purposes.
You're starting out with the assumption that prediction behavior is objectively a problem. Most people are well aware that they are shedding tons of information, but so what? When people get weirded out when their phone listens to them do they seek out someone to solve this problem for them, or do they shrug their shoulders and ignore it?
The world is full of complicated but nevertheless clearly problematic issues where the how is challenging to explain but the why isn't. With corporate surveillance the how is easy to explain but the why is not. There isn't some measurable harm inflicted, and most concerns are hypothetical in nature. Just because something feels vaguely weird doesn't mean it must be a problem, it just means you're not used to it.
It's like if you're arachnaphobic, you could conjecture that everyone who doesn't take precautions against spiders is simply ignorant of just how many spiders are around them, and indeed its true most people are not experts on spiders, but the fact is most people legitimately don't have a problem with spiders, and in the vast majority of cases they shouldn't as most spiders do no harm.
Your assertion was that there were no enterprising individuals that market privacy focused products.
I pointed out that Apple depends significant marketing, pr, and development resources towards positioning its products as a privacy preserving option. But because of your informal polling of people you know that all goes out the window?
For the record, the relative privacy of iOS over android was a significant consideration in my most recent buying decision. I say relative because it’s obviously not “perfect privacy”. But in any case you have heard now from at least one person that based their decision on that fact.
You’re quite clearly working backwards from a pre established conclusion. Do some, many or even the majority of people not care about privacy? I’d concede that point. But the narrative on HN that has last for years that regular people just don’t care at all is very much over confident.
Having seen two laptops side by side displaying different prices for the the same package holiday until the cookies were cleared on both I'm not so sure that there's no pain involved in ubiquitous tracking.
I think for the most part people just aren't aware of the consequences of corporate surveillance.
This is a blind assertion that conflates "caring" with knowing enough to act, and has become less compelling as time goes on. The only way we could unbiasedly poll whether people "care" is if the phone setup process popped up fully-informing Yes/No questions. As it stands, defaults are powerful and people simply do not know how they can control their data being leaked - the average person thinks that GPS satellites track their location.
On the contrary, it is a blind assertion that those who do not act only do so specifically out of a lack of knowledge. If people cared about a problem, they could look up solutions, or look up people who could solve it for them, or people who could solve it for them would come knocking on their door, offering to solve their problem for them with the expectation they'll say yes.
Talk to 1000 random people, take all the time you want, bring any supporting material you want, how much of their hard earned money could you convince them, on average, to pay you to solve this problem for them? What is the value of having this issue magically disappear? For the vast majority of people, I doubt they'ed be willing to pay much if anything, which is equivalent to apathy.
As I said, in the median person's model of the world GPS satellites are tracking everyone's location. You're essentially assuming that when talking to someone, they will automatically trust me when I describe the details of the problem they have and trust me when I tell them how they can (partially) solve it. In reality, even people that acknowledge there is a problem still will not trust a solution from a random person - rather they will become defensive and engage the cognitive dissonance. People generally become convinced of problems and solutions either of their own volition or by social proof.
Articles condemning big tech are popular for a reason. Apple's anti-surveillance developments are popular for a reason. Movies about surveillance dystopias are popular for a reason. People like their autonomy while having a hard time imagining all the ways surveillance data can be abused. This narrative that surveillance subjects are fully informed willfully consenting participants is surveillance industry propaganda, and its ridiculousness becomes more apparent by the year.
No offense, but your argument is so off topic, conflates the presented argument, and is wildly speculative of what an end user might do that it seems as if your intention is to distract from the argument at hand.
You completely ignore the fact that the user has to understand they are being tracked.
I don't know of a single survey that demonstrates end users understand they are under constant surveillance. Can you point to one? Otherwise this argument seems like a complete distraction.
You completely ignore the fact that users can be told that they are being tracked. When they are told, do they say "this is a problem that I am willing to spend my resources on solving" or do they do nothing because they are apathetic?
You are the one claiming that people lack understanding but nevertheless care. Show me the survey indicating that claim to be true.
The idea that shifting "norm enforcement" from local communities towards impersonal institutions is somehow "bad" is extremely wrong and harmful.
Large impersonal institutions are much easier to hold accountable than local communities. In small groups all sorts of abuse can be hidden and sometimes even outright accepted in the name of "cohesion".
Small communities with informal power dynamics can be extremely toxic in a way that is far more harmful than google knowing what videos you watch. Small town may seem idyllic but they are often hell for that one gay resident.
Based on some of the responses, it feels like most people have not experienced / cannot imagine a small community exerting moral, behavioural, cultural pressure; either because they haven't been part of such a community or because they haven't been pressured due to pre-existing conformity.
Sure, Google/Coca-Cola/BigCorps are hard to change course.
But small communities can be far, far nastier to an outsider / different person and sometimes far more insidious / damaging / harder to influence.
And it can be difficult to see.
My wife has joined a Mommy's group at a neighbouring church; she's gushing how open and welcoming and friendly they all are. Then I asked to consider that a) She happens to be a nominally-christian white middle-class straight anglo-saxon white-collar mother with kids b) How do you think somebody without those characteristics would be welcomed at the church? How many characteristics would have to change for environment to transform? We then read the church's website, attended an actual sermon to see what they heard, and boy oh boy, has her perception of friendly welcoming fellow mommys changed :<. It's all smiles and friendliness until/unless you cross some cultural/instilled/assumed line and norm.
but they are; compared to tiny communities that have no external or internal methods or frameworks for change or improvement or accountability, large corporations are a veritable cornucopia of paths for change!
I treat original post as a relative comparison, not an absolute claim.
> Large impersonal institutions are much easier to hold accountable than local communities.
I think this is exactly backwards.
> but they are often hell for that one gay resident.
Contrarily, people are way more likely to accept a person once they know them personally as part of their community. Small towns don't operate like high school locker rooms.
> Small towns don't operate like high school locker rooms.
On the one hand we have endless accounts of people deathly afraid of coming out, even to families that "know them personally" (and grave consequences in cases where the truth inadvertently comes to light), even when the larger community/law explicitly protects them. On the other we have your vague assertion that it'll be all right. I doubt "just get to know the other" works outside of specific constraints that are absent from most "organic" threats to the local orthodoxy.
> > Large impersonal institutions are much easier to hold accountable than local communities.
> I think this is exactly backwards.
No it is not. States and corporations are bound by law and to a great extent by public opinion while smaller communities are much freer to tyrannize their members.
Being part of the same "community" didn't stop school segregation in the south, the federal government did.
> States and corporations are bound by law and to a great extent by public opinion
In theory. In practice, corporations do risk analysis and compute liabilities and flout the law all the time. Particularly environmental laws. One disaster after another. Coverups, bribery, corruption, evading accountability. You're living in an alternate universe, because this one is full of malfeasance and screwups from huge organizations with zero consequences.
Large communities will literally genocide you and everyone who shows a hint of sharing your belief system, do it through euphemism so he general populace has plausible deniability, burn all the books that refer to you with any sentiment other than poison, and imprison anyone who mentions you in passing while smiling.
With your reasoning, feudalism is the most accountable form of government, safest for minorities.
Small communities will literally lynch you and after the fact they will all agree you were a rapist.
It's not clear why you brought up feudalism but systems in which a local lord is responsible for dispensing justice allow for far more abuse that those with centralized legal systems. It is always better for judges to be as far removed from the outcome of the case as possible.
In the case of a large institution adhering to some law-encoded conducts and held accountable by the wider public, there is less chance for targeting random individuals based on their specific views, relationships and personal states of affairs. Again, it is key that the institution is accountable and not some repressive apparatus of a totalitarian state.
What "large institutions" are good for is preventing norm enforcement.
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Prohibits the Department of Defense or Department of Education from doing a form of norm enforcement. Prohibits the states of Alabama or California from doing a form of norm enforcement. Good.
Laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race/sex/religion/etc.
Prevents the CEOs of Walmart or Apple from doing a form of norm enforcement. Good.
The things done by China or the USSR to people with the wrong ideas. Direct norm enforcement by a large institution. Serious candidate to be the worst thing ever.
It makes it unconstitutional for a law to do that. It doesn't stop private citizens from exerting social pressure on churches to not do that, e.g. by shaming them in public.
1. Not always. Small institutions often have totalizing influence, and escaping small communities is often easier said than done.
2. There's nothing stopping private citizens from exerting social pressure on large corporations either.
Again, institutional size is a red herring in this conversation. Every argument that small is better than large or vice versa works symmetrically with plenty of real world examples. It's almost like size is a totally orthogonal issue.
No, size matters quite a lot when it's the large institution enforcing norms. If you're openly gay and your church hates gay people, you can stop going to church or go to a different one. The smaller the church is, the easier that is. If you're openly gay and the USSR hates gay people, you're probably gonna get murdered.
> If you're openly gay and your church hates gay people, you can stop going to church or go to a different one.
Yes, the difficulty of escaping a norm enforcing institution is an important desiderata. More important than size.
The social dynamics of cults are a (politically acceptable) counter-point. Leaving a small and insular community is rarely so trivial.
> If you're openly gay and the USSR hates gay people, you're probably gonna get murdered.
This conversation started with a discussion of large social media sites and you keep bringing up authoritarian governments to prove "big = bad".
Yes, escaping a nation-state is difficult. But if you're on a political extreme and don't like a social media site's speech rules, just don't use that social media site. And deleting a social media account is infinitely easier than abandoning the social group / town where you grew up.
So here we are again.
This game is becoming a bit silly, so let me unroll an infinitely long thread by providing a template for the next 5,000 replies:
you: "X1 is small and X1 is good but X2 is big and X2 is bad."
other commenters: "X3 is big and X3 is good but X4 is small and X4 is bad"
occasionally: "Nuh-uh X{$n} is not so bad"
me: "X5 is small and bad, X6 is big and good, X7 is small and good, X8 is big and bad. It's almost like there are features other than size that better unify toxic norm enforcing communities."
> Small town may seem idyllic but they are often hell for that one gay resident.
This is wrong on two levels.
1) Norm enforcement implemented by a faceless institution does not make the neighbor less bigoted.
2) The institution can implement discriminatory behaviors just like the neighbors, but with the power to capture and kill people from being part of some unwanted minority.
>Large impersonal institutions are much easier to hold accountable than local communities. In small groups all sorts of abuse can be hidden and sometimes even outright accepted in the name of "cohesion".
Look at all the congregational hearings about Facebook and other large tech companies, or the endless anti threats against google. they all amounted to nothing. Twitter can arbitrary ban anyone from its platform, sometimes for politically motivated reasons, without any recourse for whoever was banned. Same for YouTube.
I don't know. Look at Texas and their recent changes. I think the larger the group, the harder it is to have opposition and discourse. Making a whole state hell for a whole group of people isn't any better than for one resident. It also prevents other more reasonable towns from not doing so because it is the law.
Loss of privacy is not driven by individualism, but by an increasingly risk intolerant society.
Individualism is not directly in conflict with privacy, but rather both are in conflict public safety and compliance.
The article posits that increased individualism and breakdown of communities has led to a loss of privacy, but this was not a given, but a choice.
A society can simply choose to reject the loss of privacy and accept the costs that may come with individualism & privacy.
Further, the entire argument that community surveillance was effective and required replacement is suspect. For example, murder rates were higher and case closure was much worse in the past under the community surveillance model. Crime rates were dropping at the same time that communities were disintegrating, all before the advent of mass surveillance.
A society cannot "simply choose" to reject corporate and government mass surveillance.
There was no public vote I'm aware of to decide whether to install cameras and sensors on every street and highway. Shall we vote to take them down now?
Before 2013, only lunatics were concerned with mass surveillance. Look how far we've come. Now the media gives lip service to "privacy advocates". And the result of all this "privacy advocacy" is a giant popup window reminding you that you must submit to tracking if you wish to engage. Engineering consent. Maybe we can meet up in the metaverse to organize a revolution.
>A society cannot "simply choose" to reject corporate and government mass surveillance.
There is absolutely choice. Both are are supported by continuous choices choices people make every do. The choices are different between government and corporate surveillance.
On the government surveillance side, people can choose to vote for politicians that support their privacy and lobby their representatives. They can also start public propositions, make donations, or run for office.
On the corporate side, people can choose to refuse to use products, websites, or stores that sell their data. People can take actions to anonymize themselves.
People make these choices every day. Often people choose not to support privacy because they value something else more, e.g. convenience, money, time, safety, ect.
None of these sound like choices that will result in a significant increase in privacy unless people, en masse, collectively decide to do it with a hive mind that doesn't exist. People are technically "choosing" the status quo, but doing it from a very limited set of options.
What you're doing is like saying citizens of North Korea are "choosing" to live under the Kim regime because they could technically try to overthrow him if they wanted to. You have to consider the costs of doing so and the likelihood it would succeed.
I never said the choices were easy or cheap, or that they could be made on an individual basis.
On the contrary, many of these are collective choices made by society, especially when it comes to the law.
>What you're doing is like saying citizens of North Korea are "choosing" to live under the Kim regime because they could technically try to overthrow him if they wanted to. You have to consider the costs of doing so and the likelihood it would succeed.
I actually think this is the most insightful and humane way to think about those who live in NK under the Kim regime. They are born into an awful situation where their choices are very limited. They can collaborate, resist, or try to flee and all have unattractive consequences. I wouldn't disparage someone for choosing any of the above given such poor options. The plight of these people is defined by their lack of attractive choices, for example, they can not choose to emigrate from NK, or vote in free elections.
Similarly, this framing showcases the bravery and optimism when people choose to do make hard choices, like to be a resistor in NK, despite the tremendous cost and low chance of success.
To me, saying people have no choice is dehumanizes those both those who suffer or secede based on their choices.
Except what is the motive to not surveil anyone besides the head of household? Sure, it becomes harder because the head of household is generally more legible (in the ribbonfarm sense), but it's not like the surveillers just give up on everyone else. In fact targeting children has always been quite lucrative, for example "Go get your phone and hold it up to the TV to talk to Santa Claus ... <touchtones for 900 number>"
Approaching from another direction, how can I delegate surveillance of myself to another third party who interacts with the system? It's certainly possibly for specific aspects (eg nominee deeds, LLCs with professional managers, etc), but being able to do so in general is not possible (eg many counterparties won't accept interacting with an LLC and will demand to know the beneficial owners). Surveillance systems are fundamentally totalitarian in that they assert having in-depth knowledge about your existence, regardless of what you've actually leaked to them.
The motive is precisely because it is less lucrative/useful, and surveillance costs money. The 900 number thing is only lucrative because anyone, even a small child, with physical access to a phone has enough agency to bill arbitrary things against that phone number. The dialer (or their guardian) can be forced to repay that bill in some cases, but society obviously lets them incur it.
The way you would delegate surveillance of yourself to another party is to give everything you own to that party in exchange for the ability to live on their property and never interact with the rest of society. Giving up all agency does not look like creating some legal fictions, it looks like withdrawal from society.
I'm not sure I agree with grandparent's assessment, but I don't think these are the strongest arguments against it. I think a better argument would appeal to incidental surveillance: my car has no agency, and nobody is interested in tracking the car for its own sake, but it is surveilled as a way to watch me.
> Giving up all agency does not look like creating some legal fictions, it looks like withdrawal from society
I don't disagree and I've been on both sides of such agent relationships. But I feel like we are ultimately bickering over framing, due to the original article's terrible framing that fails to address underlying causes. It's not so much that I disagree with the original comment as that I don't think it fosters actionable conclusions.
Performing mass surveillance doesn't cost that much, demonstrated by the popularity of collecting "big data" - ie "we'll find a use for this some day". Rather than saying that surveillers decide to only collect data on the subjects with agency (because doing so to everyone would cost too much), it's more productive to talk in terms of surveillees taking steps to prevent the surveillers from having access to that data in the first place. Like sure if I turn my phone off to prevent my location from being tracked, the phone company could technically dispatch a costly private investigator to follow me around until I turned it back on. But that's outside the scope of what we're practically discussing.
Another way to think about it: privacy stayed constant over time, it just shifted from the family, local communities, and the social oversight (“eyes on the street”) that came with it, to big tech and government.
1) The amount of information that big tech companies have about individuals is enormous compared to the most nosy neighbor. Search engine usage, email contents, phone location, IM metadata tell quite a story.
2) In the any tight knit community or town privacy is equal and non hierarchical. I know about you and you know about me and everything is good or at least tolerable.
This is not comparable in any way to the completely asymmetrical big tech/government surveillance (and consequently manipulation) that is happening.
Information is power and asymmetry of power is domination.
Not the parent but I read it as you've always only had a limited degree of privacy but the "what people know about you" has expanded from a small in-group to a much larger population. Which, very broadly speaking, seems reasonably true.
Confuses cause and effect. The loss of privacy, aka tracking people for what is euphemistically called "advertising", causes individualism. Or more simply, if you destroy the ability to communicate and discuss collaboratively, communities cannot be created. CAS.
False dichotomies there. Collectivism is not lacking surveillance, it's just that the surveillance is distributed and decentralized, you have citizens snooping on other people's business and ratting them out for their political beliefs (a behavior common in former soviet countries).
Individualism does not require surveillance. The existence of the state does though, and if the preference of the citizens is for individualism, they delegate their collective surveillance duties to the police/army/secret services etc.
Individualism is possible without a state, collectivism is not.
> In Western countries, globalization and rapid technological change have dissolved the communities that grew up around industrial centers in the past. As these communities have crumbled, the systems of informal monitoring by neighbors and peers that maintained order within them have ceased to be effective.
I've never previously seen someone try to portray early industrial cities as lacking in crime. A strange form of rose colored glasses.
I think the biggest driver for loss of privacy is mass consumerism and the popularity of FAANG-like products, which have little to do with individualism. I think advertisers have done a great job of equating individualism with consumer choice in many people's minds but that doesn't make it so.
Sigh, read it and abandoned it. The true price is never discussed. He who feeds the data dragon, supplies a Interface for Social engineering on a unprecedented scale.
Facebook or Google could cook subtle social control schemes up in a cognitive blindspot and we could not even observe or discuss them, because they would seem natural to us. Like a synthetic religion and cults, just replacing the old religions & communitys, easily accessible for manipulation via the social networks.
This could be summarized: in the west, technology has empowered populism and in the east, technology has empowered totalitarianism; often to the same ends.
You missed the argument against accountability for ones own words (aka "cancel culture"). To be fair, though, it was kind of shoehorned in. I wonder if it was the original point of the article?
I do think the author made a mistake here: the author credits western 'social controls' to so-called "Neo-paternalist nudge theories", i.e. as if there's some western illiberal thinkers out there that have decided for us that we should collectively police each other socially for the greater good.
This couldn't be further from the truth. Those thinkers exist, but they have no power anyways. Cancel culture and other "illiberal" modern activity is actually emergent behavior from strongly connected social networks. It's pure populism. It's just that millions of people go on the internet for the purpose of feeling angry at somebody else on twitter or facebook, and this via the free market results in people losing jobs, people being ostracized, or even the formation of real-life protests and riots.
I wouldn't call social media viral phenomena as strongly connected as opposed to broadly connected. Viral media does not require strong connections (people reacting over Twitter or Reddit hardly know each other), and neither is virality obviously boosted by strong connections.
It might be a little misleading to say populism is the point of democracy, but you're not wrong.
Either way, "the same end" referring to massive surveillance, social controls, etc.
In China obviously the CCP does all that
In the West, it happens more or less organically through populism: communities all installing ring cam, cancelling people on twitter, etc. It's driven by populism instead of totalitarianism.
And that's not even to say it's all bad either, if the vast majority of people want to see a neo-nazi lose their public service job, is cancel culture really that bad in this situation? Like you mentioned, that's essentially democracy.
However, it can get out of control when it's gone unchecked. Every now and then you see one of those "cancel culture gone wrong" articles upvoted to the top here, where one quote out of context gets amplified on social media and ends in lost jobs and death threats.
The real problem is that there is no mechanism to keep the overwhelming power of modern populism in check. The country wasn't designed in an era where a million people could start a shit storm together from separate geographies. In the 18th century, you needed to get enough angry people in one location to form a mob. That only happened in rare and exceptional circumstances. It was self limiting, in a way. The internet has changed the rules, so societies are still learning to adapt.
Creeping surveillance has nothing to do with philosophies or control systems. The technological era has made it really cheap to spy on people. It is going to take some real bloodbaths for principles to win over that sort of economic pressure.
Hopefully we never really feel the bite of cheap surveillance, but realistically? The Nazis weren't even a century ago. The next 100 years will be rough.
I think the article misses the mark attributing surveillance to a social need to control behavior that was a vacuum because of the dissolution of traditional communities.
Immediately before the surveillance era, at least in the US, crime rates had been declining for many years indicating no unraveling of social order. Meanwhile community dissolution had been going on for decades.
I think the obvious answer is correct: mass surveillance became possible and cheap, and states adopted it as soon as they could.
I think the motivation for the article is a hope for a kind of society where information technology can coexist without surveillance, and the author errs by misdiagnosing the shape this society could take. It won't be one where we revert to traditional community control which the author supposes, or one where people can outrun surveillance with savvy use of technology which seems to be the default position of many tech-savvy people.
Rather the solution is to apply democratic control to information technology. Democratic control is the best way to mitigate concentrations of power such as the military, courts, taxation, etc.
I think there is another factor that has to be considered: An increasingly risk aware or risk intolerant population.
I believe that the general population is more fearful of threats, and therefore more willing to sacrifice privacy for perceived security.
As you say, crime rates are declining, but technology has enabled the population to be informed of every crime in every community, so the threat perception is greatly increased.
There isn't even a remote equivalence between 'a few doorbells which may, in some cases be used by police' to the 360 information control that the CCP has implemented.
'Surveillance Capitalism' of the Facebook type is equally as mundane: nobody is actually harmed by the fact that Facebook knows a lot about you. Facebook feeds people garbage information, which is arguably harm, but they'd do that anyhow.
If Facebook's was only allowed to collect a fragment of information relative to what they do today - nothing would change. The world wouldn't skip a beat.
Meanwhile, the failure of CCP's information controls, would probably mean regime change within 5 years.
> the logic of Enlightenment values has led to increased social control.
Despite that, fundamentalist Christian communities, closest surrogate for "good days before Enlightenment", espouse much stricter social control than mainstream society.
> we are seeing an increased reliance on technologies of surveillance. For example, front-door cameras now protect homes from burglars, and internet-connected videos inform absent residents when packages are delivered
I'd like to re-frame this positively. Putting minor surveillance powers in the hands of everyday folk is a net win. I don't know about you, but I like to see who is poking around my premises. Oldskool neighborhood watch initiatives don't cut it anymore. I can see there would be a problem if your IP camera got accidentally broadcasted to the public facing Internet and criminals could see your house was empty, but the onus is on the user to lock down their equipment. Not the manufacturers.
> but the onus is on the user to lock down their equipment. Not the manufacturers.
Huh? Why? I mean the user needs to have responsibility for the equipment they use, but it is absolutely also the manufacturers responsibility to produce reasonably locked down equipment.
I meant that these devices come with security features that the users don't even research beforehand, and blindly stick them on the Internet without even changing the default password. Google for 'public IP camera directories'. There's people monitoring the growth of their cannabis plants in their 'secret' attic, all public for everyone to see (including law enforcement).
The design of the device shouldn't allow the user to place it in an operational state without doing obvious security checkup items like changing the default password; this is an onus on the manufacturer.
You've got a point (individually-run surveillance is much less concerning that societal-level surveillance), but you're completely ignoring that the most popular brands of cameras rely on sending video to centralized conglomerates.
It's always good to see John Gray's writing getting attention, in my opinion he is one of the most perceptive writers out there. However, the title of this submission should probably changed since the conversation is getting sidetracked. The original title of the article is "Surveillance Capitalism Vs. The Surveillance State" with the tagline "Surveillance technology is the surrogate for the communities Western capitalism has destroyed". The comment about individualism and privacy is a single sentence in the middle. The main drive of the article, as suggested in the original title, is about the convergence of both West and East in terms of mass surveillance and internet monopolies. Considering the vast gulf between their histories and cultures, surely this convergence is an interesting (and not at all inevitable) phenomenon.
Agreed, I get the sense people are still sounding it out from the bottom up, as the collusion of the state with industry to dominate a nation was the original definition of fascism. The difference from early 20th century models and later and into the new century is that both fascism and communism were mere national movements. The necessary condition for totalitarianism as described by Arendt is it was by definition not limited to or part of the mere nation state, but rather a movement that leveraged other movements to prey upon and absorb nation states under its system of dominion, using directed chaos against atomized people. This is what made totalitarianism a meta level system, and not just a left/right thing. The sufficient and necessary condition is that it aims to become post-national as a means to dissolve the nation state into atomized/neutralized individuals under totalitarian rule. (critics of both capitalism and socialism should recognize this, but if you don't, the deception is by design.)
North Korea and Singapore because they are still nations are still just mere national tyrannies and surveillance states, whereas China, the US, Britain, and even to a greater extent, Australia and Canada are becoming totalitarianized because they are already the compromised vassals for a post-national movement that seeks to effectively dissolve all physical, sexual, familial, religious, tribal, regionalist, nationalist, and obviously, racist, identities. One liquid humanity under managed technocratic rule.
If one is to be anti- something, anti(surveillance capitalism) is perhaps the only accurate anti-fascism of this era, as it is to be against the collusion of the state with surveillance capitalists to dominate your countries, but if you are really looking to fight the good fight of today and not baited with disctractions into relitigating ideas from 100 years ago, I would suggest turning your attention to how surveillance is used to totalitarianize nation states and dissolve them, as whether we are right or left, when we are against the anti-human deception and evils of totalitarianization, we are very much on the same team.
The article has a minor flaw that should be highlighted.
Per "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" the issue isn't the surveillance per se. It's how that awareness is used against us.
That is, the Surveillance Capitalist isn't simply watching, there's a feedback loop that allows them to influence. Influence where to go. Influence what to buy. Ultimately, influence what to think.
The actual title of the article is “Surveillance Capitalism Vs. The Surveillance State.”
I could be very wrong about this, but, I worry more about corporate surveillance than government surveillance.
That said I worry about both. When the government and corporations know much more about us than we know about them then they have a tactical advantage in every interaction.
I worry about both. But a corporation will never have the level of power of a state as we know them today. The state on top of f*cking you they extract you money so they end up abusing you with your money. If they feel uncomfortable they regulate against you if they see a chance and do not forget they have the legal monopoly of force.
It is not that I favor one or the other. Is is just a bigger threat power in a State, which remember, are managed by imperfect humans also, such as corporations, than corporations.
Because corporations cannot become monopolies easily (in deregulation I would say that they cannot by definition) and do not have power to regulate (at least not in theory, we all know crony capitalism, right?).
You can think of it as a hollowing out of the middle. As people have become more individualistic, they’ve lost interest in the “middle range” of power: neighborhood, town, city, state. This power structure has collapsed almost entirely, flushing all of it to the top, centralized federal level. This is also why an urbanite in Brooklyn is more similar to one in San Francisco than to those a hundred miles north in upstate New York. Local identities have been replaced entirely by national and increasingly international ones.
I wouldn't chalk that up to individualism as much as to the idea that the Internet has caused people increasingly to identify with groups that don't correspond to physical proximity.
Their example of doorbell cameras especially falls flat to me, because most people (including myself) are motivated to have a doorbell camera due to our own individual issues and not to support police dragnet surveillance. Some folks, myself included, even have made the effort to use doorbell cameras that are not cloud connected and record video locally on NVR so that this data can't be shared without our explicit permission. There is nothing about these situations that /requires/ a loss of privacy, and the causal link assumed in this article is not established within. It's simply the case that every major tech company is incentivized to create systems that destroy privacy because they can more effectively monetize on our data and government agencies turn a blind eye because they also benefit from the loss of privacy in the private sector. It takes technical acumen and effort to ensure your privacy while still taking care to utilize modern technology, and the majority of people, even in the tech industry, do not have the necessary technical acumen to do so.
This is clearly a problem, but it's not a trade-off between individualism and privacy, it's a trade-off between the greed of dystopian multi-national megacorps and privacy.