jsr 8 months ago

Fear is dictatorship glue. You can't imprison everyone with a dissenting thought. Or inconvenient factual observation. But fear teaches self censorship. And is a scalable system of control. The challenge, of course, is to keep the fear going. And push it all the way down into private conversations. In the 20th century, such fear required massive human investment. Informants... model punishments...information control. All on a linear scale. And there was a post-cold war school of thought that said: once everyone is connected, these systems won't work. But tech isn't, by nature, an a dictatorship antidote. It can equally be an expedient. Just ask China. In the past 20 years the government has empirically developed technologies & private sector partnerships for scaling fear and self censorship to north of 1.4 billion ppl. Log scale. Out here in the rest of the world take a look around. The major underpinnings of our online & financial behavior have comprehensive person-tracking surveillance and information-shaping built right in... primarily to sell us even more things. But it is the shortest possible distance from that to a totalizing system of government surveillance. Punishment. And information control. We all carry informants in our pockets. Ready to snitch on us, shape what we feel, and implement punishments. This is a tremendously inviting system for governments with the instincts to grab these levers. Increasingly, they are doing just that. Pictured: Stasi interrogation rooms.