Online surveillance and other enshitification is becoming so rampant and apparent, I think it’s actually pushing people offline. Maybe it’s just my bubble but I’m seeing way more earnest effort from others to meet IRL for various activities.
Well I hope you’re right and people move offline
This is a really good question. With everything that’s currently going on, it can be easy to get stuck in fight or flight and be stuck in a doom loop that this is all there is, and ever will be. But that’s not how it goes. Already worldwide people are rejecting AI, and it’s crashing to the ground. Also worldwide, Right wing politicians are predominantly being voted down into obscurity. People are hacking hardware they own but have been locked out of, to allow free use. This is a created space away from the corporate ownership that plugs us in for battery powered add revenue. We are quietly saying, what do we want, and how can we build it ourselves. I feel like green spaces are going to make a comeback, places to go that don’t require spending money, places to gather together and exercise, to spite the predatory gym industry or just enjoy nature. Sharing resources in spite of the finite resources being treated as infinite by corporations, builds spaces to gather and trade. An absolute rejection and demystifying of “needing the new fangled thing”, creates workshops for how to build with what you have. And sharing skills. What about bringing back computer rooms to gather together and game or learn. Whatever we imagine we can build, and if all other avenues have been eradicated, we will just build these. Just to shove it back in their faces.
Loved the positivity
We’re already seeing it with Gen Z blank face. People don’t react to others, in part because they could be being recorded.
Probably also they’ve had to speed run emotional maturity for survival sake.
That’s crazy
I dunno. I hope I can go out without being to much different.
Why ask the question about a hypothetical future or even currently when we have been living in a dystopian surveillance society for decades now.
Snowden is already a long time ago and he just exposed what so many people, including myself, knew has been happening. The consequences are already here. The ubitquos nature of surveillance passed this tipping point decades ago as well. Just the other day I heard my coworkers talking about their TVs always listening. I was like your cell phones have been doing this for ten years now, are you kidding me!?
Consequences:
Loss of privacy
Control of opposition for whoever is in charge of the apparatus
Control of societal narrative or zeitgeist
Manipulation of all monetary systems
Well, that’s kind of why the post says “current” you know? The future part getting at “this might get even worse as time goes on”
I was referring to the fact surveillance culture is from the past. In fact, the only new thing is technology. The FBI was found doing dossiers on all the civil rights people.
Makes sense
We’re already at the point of hiding from the T.V. to write privately in your journal, and the state can put you on trial for erasing your phone memory, so that’s neat. I can’t imagine we’re too far away from getting a knock on your door if you don’t have any devices plugged in that they can monitor you through. Establishing personal privacy will eventually be considered reasonable suspicion. “What exactly are you trying to hide from us?”
25 years back it was considered a big privacy invasion that Windows XP would profile your system to ensure it get the right version of a security update. So determining if you needed 32bit or 64 bit. Home or Server. What version you were currently on.
Nowadays, most know who we are, what we are saying, who we are saying it to, scanning our photos, tracking your keyboard inputs, facial recognition, GPS tracking, wifi/bluetooth tracking, voice profiling, what you are reading, what sites you are visiting etc. And all this happened in 25 years.
I fear how things will move in the next 25 years. It all feels like they are locking people down so that they cannot push back against hash changes coming down the pipe. Dropping living standards accelerated by the dual problem of declining resources and climate blow back leading to power structures that try to secure itself using any tools possible.
Watch them in the effort of doing this use tribal justice by turning once mundane things into a vice, and then using said vice against people, all cataloged and analyzed with decades of data fed into the data set.
A few years back, that really felt like where things were going. Now, everything’s coming apart; you can’t really have a quiet sleepwalk into the great benevolent authority watching everything, when it’s not clear which authority that would be.
Loud shifts into surveillance are possible, like sometimes happen after a new regime is established, but that’s a different beast. People will kinda know it’s fucked, even if they go along with it.
It’s going to be a one way or the other kind of deal, we’ll see how it shakes out.
The fact im storing up on dozens of antipsychotics (cause yay i was feeling better and i didnt need but my doc wanted me on them) now doesnt sound such a bad idea, maybe i can just absolutely dismantle all my brain functions into death or becoming a vegetal, you know, live life but keep your options opened, I’d hate to live like a bitch like that, always being watched like if i was on reality TV or some bullshit, i read a bit on the TV stuff (i think you are referencing 1984 or bnw maybe) but i dont have a tv, a pc is more than enough
I don’t see many ways out really, its depressing
No, you should take your pills. Those aren’t the kind of pills you stop taking when you’re better.
From what you write, I feel you know nothing about the business of psychiatry, I’m prescribed antipsychotics while not having any psychosis or symptoms that could be helped by its use, I’ve been prescribed wrong things multiple times in the past aswell, and being told “just believe this doctor because the doctor is the authority and knows best” some of the meds i have taken in the doses i was prescribed back when i trusted the doctors made me actually suicidal (outside of the organ damage of course)
You will know if you ever get into taking psychiatric meds and how that works. I WISH it wasn’t like this, I really do. But it just isn’t. I was never warned of any side effects short or long term by any of my doctors, and when i had them, unless they were like super apparent like not sleeping for 4 days or something, they were hand waved away.
My intention is not to be mean or dismissive to you, but I do feel in this one case at least, you don’t have the experience required to know how it works in reality (and not only what the media tells you “stay on your meds!”)
I do take some pills selectively as I’ve read on them and their usefulness in my case, even suggesting pill changes in my schema, to pretty good success actually.
This whole thread seems like a paranoid psychosis symptom. Because you stopped your meds, you’re no longer feeling well. You just can’t tell.
I may or may not know “the business of psychiatry”, but your psychiatrists definitely do. So do mine. I’m not trying to be mean, here, either.
I mean, I appreciate the concern, even if you are wrong is really nice to know there are people concerned about the well being of strangers like that online, and because I can’t reasonably prove to you or convince you of my mental state (not that I would even need to try to do that, as you are a rando on the internet) I think there’s no use on trying further to explain the situation.
In any case, thanks a lot for the kind words and concern given so selflessly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
I have noticed my behaviour being affected for several years now.
I did find it funny with how muted the language was in the Ted Kaczynski sub-reddit considered the subject matter at hand. In the end, that sub got completely erased off the Reddit, not even a page saying “This page is banned”, just a complete void as though it was never there.
could i ask what you do/avoid doing? im curious (ofc if you feel comfy sharing)
Minimal online presence. No social media, minimal use of Google, Twitter, hobby forums, product reviews, no cookies and so on. Lemmy was difficult to join but I am glad it exists.
I wrote more but deleted it…
It’s already changing lives. I did some stupid shit in my teens, I would hate if it was recorded. Teens now have that knowledge that anything can be recorded and shared easily with the world.
I don’t think they’ll do any of the dumb stuff I did at parties.
when underage i did ONE video call with an adult, to think that might be somewhere out there… man that’s funny
Internet Archive folks just did a podcast episode about this: Mass Surveillance and the Loss of Fun. Basically everyone is on stage putting on an act all the time.
Thank you so much, I’ve been looking for frameworks on what tf to do about it, like how to live my life now, I’ve been depressed for a bit so I havent left the house much in the last few years and now that this update hit the server i dont know what the best moves are, its a totally novel situation for me, i read the panopticon but not much more than that, i literally dont know how life will turn out now
Just look at China. Subdued is the word.
Funnily enough:
My mom told me she’d block me if I sent the xijinping jokes to her when she visited china.
Anyways, even after they returned I got in an argument with my brother so i send anti-xi stuff to the family Wechat group to troll them and my brother left the group and blocked me. Last I heard he was searching for women in China to marry so thats probably why, he doesnt wanna lose the 1.4 billion population market of potential “marriage candidates”. (seriously he could just marry a Taiwanese, since he’s obsessed with traditional chinese characters)
My wechat account is still active btw, I think diasporas get more leeway vs a local Chinese.
Lolol
YOLO
Edit: For context the argument was that he was keep saying annoying shit so I told him to shut up. And he pulled out the “freedom of speech card” (which doesnt even apply here since this is him being annoying and triggering my anxiety, effectively harassment, nothing to do with government trampling rights), so I responded by saying to most sterotypically “Pro America” rant on wechat, so then my brother blocked me. Oh I thought he loved free speech, why be so scared of CCP and block me?
China and Russia for that matter kind of do not care about the anti-Xi/Putin stuff, so long as it doesn’t turn into ANY form of action. But as soon as there is the slightest whiff of a movement, it gets locked down hard.
There was a group in China about a year back that were living in the mountains and constantly posting about how they didn’t need the government and they were never going to work again. And that continued for a long while until they started to get popular and started to get very provocative in their language and trying to get others to join, they were shut down with little explanation from them other than they were strongly compelled to stop.
There are many Taoist/Buddhist hermits and back to the land folks in China and while it is technically illegal, the government doesn’t bother them and some even get a bit of financial help at times, that is because they do not actively rock the boat of power. To those at the top, those people are seen as harmless and they know it would look bad to take them down, so they are left alone. Same situations but one side decided to project their position, the other is quiet and does not proselytize their position.
It could be a great equalizer if everyone was just as under the microscope as everybody else. The power-tripping types will never allow that, however.
It affects my associations in that I don’t use some of the applications and platforms they, the larger society, use to interact with each other and also that I am reluctant to even contact people at all if they have spyware or LLMs in their phones, cars, computers, etc.
As for if it will affect the way in which people already under heavy surveillance interact with each other, I expect psyops to be extremely effective currently but clearly not absolute as demonstrated by fascists and China losing the US election.
What is a content algorithm if not surveilling and studying civilians to push chosen content in front of them and control how they act, what they buy, where they travel, etc.
Having lived in China for a bit, it’s literally fine depending on who is doing the surveillance. Like I prefer no surveillance, obviously, but unless you genuinely mean harm and as long as the entity doing said surveillance does not genuinely mean harm is a net positive for society.
It’s objectively good at cutting down crime (though not as much as education and poverty reduction), it’s incredibly useful to reduce corruption and false convictions, and it sets a record, good or bad, that is objective (or was before the invention of AI videos).
The one reasonable argument I have heard for surveillance is, what if the average person ends up with the ability to do something that could be fatal to society?
Say we can now engineer a fatal contagious virus in the bed room, this unfortunately means there is only two viable paths through. Either you let the risk of the viruses being unleashed and we end up in a self termination event, or you need to have surveillance into peoples bed rooms to ensure that they are not making these viruses. The real trick is too not make the device that allows this situation to arise.
Now that makes sense from a civilization ending technology like a nuclear bomb, but when it comes to general unrest, it is a vast over reach. But with capital becoming afraid of a shrinking pie, count on them over reaching.
They will do it while saying “It is to protect you”, they need that because all acts of evil always have a claim to virtue.
Hard disagree, with what you said at the top. Overreaching state surveillance is not fine at all. The issue is of course, firstly my privacy, secondly the state may say it means well, so long as you’re in their good books, but they can change their mind on a whim and boom, youre now black bagged and dissappeared
I mean, that’s kinda the whole point about anything that steals your agency, If I could be 100% sure no doubt in my mind that the entity/person that recorder all my data from birth to death would never use it for anything that could harm me, yea record even my gooning sessions, my psychological breakdowns, all my breakups etc etc etc
Thing is you can’t really make that assumption in this world, also because you not only need your current overlords to be 100% good, but every single new overlord you are going to get in the future (at least for the next few decades while you are still alive)
Well that’s why you don’t have overlords, you have an accountable series of people designated to catch corruption first, and all other crimes second.
you mean you have, or you mean you should in theory, have those
fisting, it will be a lot like fisting. uncomfortable but you’ll get used to it.
following on the analogy, what lube-like policy you think could end up being introduced to facilitate such a process? (if any)
Creating in groups and out groups.
Double Think
mind explaining double think? i read the book back on highschool, but i never understood it more than like doublethink is a contradictory way of thinking so its easier to accept nonsensical or paradoxical things “dad loves me so much” - “dad beats the shit out of me if i cook the food to long” living together, something like that?
Think 2 paradoxal truths, example.
Like immigrants take our jobs.
Vs
Immigrants are all lazy welfare recipients.
Anti immigration people believe both “factoids” while they contradict each other. They both feed the same agenda.
Doublethink allows for both to be true from a state mandated/inspired point of view. Often carried by mainstream media.
Oh that makes a ton of sense, sounds like we already are living through that by what im reading in your example, never even noticed that
