>unparalleled ability to monitor and predict individual's behavior
>unparalleled ability to influence and control dissemination of information
the internet was a mistake
Unparalleled ability to monitor and predict individual's behavior
Ian Adams
Camden Nelson
On one hand, it is horrifying in a very impressive manner.
On the other hand, it has always been this way with TV and newspapers.
Ryan Davis
TV and newspapers did not allow for mass surveillance and data collection.
They didn't allow for such granular control of who sees what content.
Jace Smith
That's almost true.
They can't surveil you if you don't use their services.
And access to knowledge had to be done in a much more recordable way, ie buy or borrow books by essentially signing your name somewhere.
While it is much different than the internet we were used to, it's much more like "real life" now.
Elijah Allen
I think the comparison is somewhat unsuitable. Yes, you might need to give a library your address and sign a book out, but no one is stood over your shoulder as you read it. Plus, this is a library. If you were to buy a book from a shop it's likely no one would ever know you had it as I doubt some shopworker is going to care enough to remember.
Same with newspapers, television and radio. No one has a clue what you are doing with it once you shut the door. And it's likely no one will ever know.
This is all the same to an extent if you pay cash for things, which I'm sure will be something outlawed before too long.
Bentley Rogers
>They can't surveil you if you don't use their services.
Have you forgotten Google's PREF cookie? Or ISPs?
>And access to knowledge had to be done in a much more recordable way, ie buy or borrow books by essentially signing your name somewhere.
Buy a book with cash, get a newspaper out of a box, etc.
Even if you assume a perfect paper trail it's incomparable to internet data collection.
Collating all of these hypothetical paper records of book, magazine, and newspaper sales in America would be incredibly impractical and impossible to do in secret.
Analyzing vast majority of American internet traffic is possible and easy to do in secret.
>While it is much different than the internet we were used to, it's much more like "real life" now.
It's much less like "real life", it was effectively impossible to spy on millions of individuals in secret before the internet. Just think of the manpower it would require.
If the government could issue warrants and search millions of homes a day without the owners knowing you think they wouldn't?
That's become a reality in the internet age.
Jace Clark
Internet was literally a government project. No shit governments are good at watching and tracking it. It was never meant to be in the hands of the plebs, and now it is they've found another way that they can make use of it.
Julian Scott
For all its nice parts the Internet will inevitably be leveraged to create dystopian surveillance state.
Increasingly advanced data-mining techniques and increasing computing resources combined with mass capture of internet traffic, the proliferation of physical surveillance systems like security cameras and license plate scanners, and the increasing ubiquitousness of networked sensor laden devices in our lives means it's only going to get way worse.
Without big technical advances and democratization of anti-surveillance technology plus large adoption by the masses I don't see a way to stop this train.
I hope I'm just Chicken Little.
Caleb Nelson
Considering how many people retweet every dump they take and Instagram their dinner, as well as sharing their entire lives on Facebook, I don't think most people care. Why would they? They're already sharing all that stuff anyway.
Logan Perez
Yeah, I was understating it.
It would require a large number of the masses to suddenly care very much about privacy and surveillance mostly on the basis of principles since the Watchers won't be brazen enough to inspire revolt out of myopic self-interest until it's far too late. The only other hope would be scifi level breakthroughs in anti-surveillance tech, but that's the realm of fiction.
Things like Shadowrun are enjoyable because they're fantastical and the Little Guy always has some way to hit back.
The real world will be mundane and hopeless with no feasible path to change power structure or even lash out at it.
The last thing left will be the automation of force which will ensure their position of power forever barring a cataclysmic natural disaster such as an asteroid strike.
Our only hope is that these future elites in their magnanimity give us a pittance branded as Basic Income so we can enjoy the shallow comfort of consumption before we die and in return they receive a docile population.
Oliver Hall
>>unparalleled ability to monitor and predict individual's behavior
hello? did you hear the news about hillary?
Christopher Morales
>see thread
>end up reading Bruce Schneier essays
WE ARE SO FUCKED
Isaac Walker
>>unparalleled ability to monitor and predict individual's behavior
the truth can remain lost among the sea of garbage
>unparalleled ability to influence and control dissemination of information
the willingly stupid and woefully uninformed have remained so for many epochs before ours
Easton Gonzalez
if you think that advertisers, media, and governments are capable of controlling human action through symbols then you have swallowed their ultimate lie.
the final revelation is that the establishment is the biggest consumer of its own truman show. they truly believe what they are saying and when the false reality is punctured, no one is more disturbed than the establishment
Hunter Taylor
to be fair bruce is a dumbass. he has an incredibly straightforward establishment background so he's not obviously capable of holding a revolutionary position
Jordan Phillips
What do you mean? The ones I was reading seemed pretty on the nose and depressing.
Cooper Edwards
>advertisers, media, and governments are capable of controlling human action through symbols
literally language
Chase Bailey
The benefits greatly outweigh the downsides.
Austin Torres
Yeah technology never changes anything, it'll just be like it's always been.
schneier.com
Aiden Brown
Maybe. At least we'll be dead when the worst of it happens. Though I wonder if people in the year 3500 will go "better Big Brother than living like they lived before 1990." Though who knows what image they'll have of us.
Brayden Hall
I sort of had a paranoid phase. Then the Paris terrorist attacks happened and it turned out governments couldn't do surveillance for shit. Now I believe in the power of incompetence.
Adam Reyes
snow crash is a bad novel and the post-modern hypothesis that "you are your context" gives short shrift to human intelligence and the basic observation that the establishment can't control your whole context and a small change in context can lead to an unbounded change in semantics. pay attention and use your head, propagandists convince themselves that your head doesn't matter because they think it washes out as statistical error. it's pretty pathetic
bruce's business is best when people are afraid. this is not a conscious manipulation on his part, but rather that he's so focused on the specifics of his business that he's not capable of putting it into a broader sociological context, and like all academics he thinks his ad-hoc sociological assessments are weighty even though that's not his expertise. if you have a concrete security question he's a real expert, but if you want to know about the future he's only marginally better than ray kurzweil
Justin Howard
DING DING DING DING DING
government surveillance is more aspirational than real. it's worth countering that aspiration because it's vile, but the presumption that it's inevitable (or laughably that we're already there) is based on the same kind of techno-determinism that thought the Internet would liberate us, or that the Singularity will save us
Andrew Rivera
Modern governments have no desire to actually stop major crimes. You know all those images of British police with a pile of plastic knives saying "more weapons off our streets"? Yeah, they class those as weapons so they look super good on the yearly report.
en.wikipedia.org
>What we have in this country today, then, is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny – the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through "sensitivity training" and multiculturalist curricula, "hate crime" laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny.
Charles Gray
No they don't. The benefits are marginal at best in comparison.
No technology in history has been so asymmetric in terms of the power it gives the elites,state,etc vs everyone else.
Compare to something like the firearm which if anything leveled the playing field.
We're only barely at the start of this tech and stopping rare events like terrorist attacks is such a minor aspect.
They already have license plate readers that can scan every car in sight and log their location, time, etc. Eventually facial recognition will be at similar level and your location will be logged anytime your in a camera's field of view.
I'm not talking just 5-10 years but past that.
I'm curious why you think it'll stop.
Noah Parker
>The benefits are marginal at best in comparison.
You live in a period of time where almost the entire wealth of human knowledge is easily attainable in some form. You can near instantly communicate with people around the globe, and even have the anonymity to basically say whatever you want without repercussion. There has never been so much information and such ease of communication ever before in human history.
>No technology in history has been so asymmetric in terms of the power it gives the elites,state,etc vs everyone else.
The old system had a few people disseminating information to you through "trusted" sources. They could and did lie to people. Look at World War II propaganda for a great example. These days anyone can basically share anything online and it has the potential to reach millions of people. Even excluding that you still are anonymous and can speak your mind. You can still talk to people from other places, exposing yourself to more cultures and ideas than you would have previously. Despite the NSA knowing everything about you or people like George Soros and the Koch Brothers spreading their disinfo, people in general have had much more power than ever before. The US just elected Trump for president, despite the media being against him fully, for example.
>Compare to something like the firearm which if anything leveled the playing field.
Until technology advanced to the point where you could build multi-million dollar weapons which gave the government far more firepower than the people could ever have. But that's assuming the US would use bombs, nukes, fighter Jets, etc. on its own people. Practically firearms are still a great equalizer, as the Bundy Ranch stuff showed.
Levi Green
>Even excluding that, you still are anonymous and can speak your mind.
Forgot my comma.
Jaxson Cox
>They already have license plate readers that can scan every car in sight and log their location, time, etc. Eventually facial recognition will be at similar level and your location will be logged anytime your in a camera's field of view.
this the techno-determinism that i'm talking about. contemporary visual recognition systems are far below human performance not only in a concrete quantitative sense, but also in terms of the epistemology by which their performance is quantified (e.g. black people were literally invisible to visual recognition systems for a decade because of mis-sampling in the popular facial corpora, how's that for a super power)
i'm confident that visual recognition will "get better," but implicit in your scenario is that this trend will continue until all information is "known" and actionable to the surveillance state. this is the exact line of bullshit AI researchers have always sold to DARPA for funding and while they truly believe it, it has never worked that way in practice.
these systems regularly produce false knowledge with a false assessment of confidence, produce knowledge that is not accessible or actionable, it's not obvious that the methodology can extend indefinitely or is even sound. people talk about putting all of the alphabet organizations' surveillance data in a giant "knowledge graph" but i'm not scared that they will then plug in a mysterious neural network, A MIRACLE OCCURS, they've solved generalized sub-hypergraph isomorphism and P=NP. lots of knowledge problems map to hard AI at minimum, hard AI is actually quite hard, and assuming that "the kinks will be worked out" because right now we've got 95% accurate face recognizers is techno-determinism
you should be very concerned and working against these things, if only because conscious gaming of their system is one of the things that technocrats rarely account for
Tyler King
Bullshit.
When you buy a newspaper, the newspaper company will only know from the revenue. Not who, when and from where the access happened.
When you watch TV, the broadcasting station knows nothing about you. They can estimate how many people are watching using statistics, but it's pure hit and miss.
The Internet doesn't work that way. When you request information using the internet, you aren't using a ping mechanism (meaning that the publisher pings you the information), you are merely using a ping pong mechanism. That means you (or rather your internet client, be it app or browser or whatever the fuck stupid fucks like you use) confirm to them having received the information.
This leads to obscure formations like VPNs, Proxy, NoScript, uMatrix, Adblockers and TOR.
You think the difference is massive, but it's a massive difference.
Old way: You get bombarded
New way: You confirmably get bombarded
Levi Nelson
>Analyzing vast majority of American internet traffic is possible and easy to do in secret.
What makes you think it happens secretly?
Just visit analytics.google.com and see for yourself how totally secret web tracking is!
Brayden Bennett
>You live in a period of time where almost the entire wealth of human knowledge is easily attainable in some form. You can near instantly communicate with people around the globe
I'd sacrifice the convenience in a second.
>and even have the anonymity to basically say whatever you want without repercussion
I hope you're not talking about Sup Forums. The vast majority online spaces exist by grace of the state, and could be removed at anytime. The few others on tor and similar are very minor and it's 50/50 they're honeypots.
In response to your middle paragraph when I said "No technology in history has been so asymmetric in terms of the power it gives the elites,state,etc vs everyone else." I was referring mainly to the mass surveillance and data collection aspect not the information control OP mentioned.
I still think things like Facebook curating news or the common acceptance of paid shills are concerning. Especially when something like CTR is bush league compared to the leaks we've seen about how the US military and GHCQ have developed tools and systems to manipulate news and information on the internet and control what gets seen.
>people in general have had much more power than ever before
This isn't obvious to me when comparing to mid 20th century America.
>Practically firearms are still a great equalizer, as the Bundy Ranch stuff showed.
I agree, that's my point. Anybody can use and benefit from a gun, nobody outside of powerful entities like corporations and states can use and benefit from mass surveillance and data collection. It's not even effective at its ostensible purpose of increasing security, stopping attacks, etc.
A surveillance state is an affront to freedom of the people and the Internet naturally leads to surveillance state.
>But that's assuming the US would use bombs, nukes, fighter Jets, etc. on its own people
Well at least we know they'll spy on them.
Liam Morgan
>contemporary visual recognition systems are far below human performance
They're quite close. cs.toronto.edu
>but implicit in your scenario is that this trend will continue until all information is "known" and actionable to the surveillance state
How so? All I described was facial recognition and networked security cameras. Do you not take issue with being identified and logged by most security cameras you come across? This info could then be added to data tracking your car's license plate. And if they wanted your emails, web browsing, texts.
>i'm not scared that they will then plug in a mysterious neural network, A MIRACLE OCCURS
I never said they were magically analyzing all the data. The simple existence of the data is bad enough, and the collection of the data is not going to be particularly difficult in next 10 years.