alt Hacker NewsWe like to think surveillance is something you can turn on for one problem and turn off afterward. In practice, that never happens. Once the machinery is in place, it stays and looks for new work. Tools justified today by "illegal immigration" won’t stop there. They drift into credit scoring, health insurance pricing, hiring and firing decisions, school admissions, housing access, travel permissions, banking, welfare eligibility, and even which online accounts are allowed to exist. Not because anyone set out to build a dystopia, but because systems, once built, naturally expand to whatever can be measured and enforced.
As Benjamin Franklin put it: those who give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither. The tradeoff rarely feels extreme at the time. It feels reasonable. By the time it isn’t, there’s no way back.
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This specific point is addressed in a famous 1995 anti-technology essay by Ted Kaczynski.
Specifically paragraphs:
127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. ...
128. While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable. ...
129. Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed. ...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
That first sentence of yours really struck a chord with me. I tried to think of other examples:
Cars — essential for leveraging time to travel longer distances and carrying multiple passengers and heavy loads; ens up being used by one person to drive three minutes to get coffee.
Guns — to quickly précis a … complex topic: good guys, but also bad guys.
Electricity — power generation goes up decade after decade, but so too does consumption with wasteful consumption going hand in hand with productive consumption.
As you might be able to tell, I think the answer to the question “how do we stop technology X from destroying us?” lies in licensing and regulation enacted through legislation.
Your comment should offend far more on HN than it will.
Heck, drop into any comment section about transportation infrastructure or environmental policy (or a few years ago public health policy as well) and there's all sorts of evil mustache twirling going on about how to use basically the same sort of technologies to deploy state violence in pursuit of some goal and they are either unable or unwilling to think a few steps ahead see that what they're advocating for will over time if not quickly lead to dark places as policy and priorities change incrementally.
As I'm concerned the people who are happy to peddle this stuff when it suits them are just as complicit as the people who are cheering for it right now when it's being used for "obviously bad" things.
>As Benjamin Franklin put it: those who give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither. The tradeoff rarely feels extreme at the time. It feels reasonable. By the time it isn’t, there’s no way back.
This quote is like a lightening rod for exactly the kind of people I'm talking about.
I don't think this is a useful framework for understanding these issues. What you are saying can, in essense, boil down to "any law enforcement is bad". ICE and its inhumane practices are just symptoms of an increasingly authoritarian administration that receives sufficient mandate from the population to push for increasingly authoritarian practices. The tools are just that, tools. The situation will keep getting worse until the population gets sick of it enough to push the wannabe autocrats out of power (and not replace them by other wannabe autocrats), and have the new administration dismantle these tools. Easier said than done, I know.
Indeed, that's true. Payment for autism, originally intended for sick children, now a Somali scam. Veteran's disability, originally a means to allow people who were injured while serving the country, now a way for a desk-jockey to receive an annual stipend.
Any mechanism, once built, seeks to expand its scope. Until it delivers mail ;)
There is a gradual chilling effect of self-censorship to mass surveillance and loss of anonymity. When you know you are being watched, you change your behavior. You don't visit the "wrong" protest, you don't meet with the "controversial" whistleblower, and you don't seek out the "unpopular" doctor. Total surveillance creates a "soft" totalitarianism where citizens police their own movements to avoid falling into a "high-risk" algorithm, even if they've done nothing illegal. At its extreme, such societies end up with no outliers, no more of "the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels." (Steve Jobs). Safety and compliance at all cost.
The peer-reviewed consensus of this in psychology describes a three-step internal process of Anticipatory Anxiety, Risk Aversion and Self-Censorship [1]. The Conforming Effect (Conformity Theory) has been measured in studies such as those by Jonathon Penney (2016/2021), where use of Wikipedia data and search traffic shows a statistical drop in "sensitive" searches (e.g., about "terrorism," "human rights," or "health") immediately following news of government surveillance. [2]
[1] Surveillance as a Socio-Technical System: Behavioral Impacts and Self-Regulation in Monitored Environments, https://www.mdpi.com/2079-8954/13/7/614
[2] Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use, https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1127413?v=pdf