Just a decade after a global backlash was triggered by Snowden reporting on mass domestic surveillance, the state-corporate dragnet is stronger and more invasive than ever.
First they sell the fear, then they sell the “solution”. Poor on poor crime is down to record lows. What’s up is government crime on poors, that has skyrocketed.
All these cameras do for the people who paid for them is provide a memento of the thing being stolen from the front yard. If you think you’re going to show the video to a cop, and they’re going to say, “Hey! I know that guy!”, and then run off and retrieve your truck that’s too big to fit in your garage, you are sorely mistaken.
Also, if you install these things inside your house, you can bet dollars to donuts that someone is gooning to your antics. I mean, besides your dad.
If you really need to see who knocking, just put a camera at a high enough point not to scan past the porch
the thing 1984 got wrong is that people are willingly buying their own (multiple) telescreens and happily submitting their entire life to the party
We didn’t see how we got to 1984. We just see one person living with consequences of what society has become. We’re building our own 1984 right now!
1984 and brave new world ass world
relevant webcomic contrasting 1984 and brave new world, which is insightful, but doesn’t include the reality that we’re literally living in both novels’ universes
Give me brave new world all day - it would be vastly preferable to whatever this shit is.
It seems Brave new world is the global north/middle class, 1984 is the global south/working class… With class experience varying by county and over time with a tend towards 1984 experience as the majorities wealth gets extracted by the upper class.
Definitely. A world where people are happy and healthy and live basically fulfilling lives. There are a few fanatics who opt out, and they’re unhappy. Go figure.
This is why Fahrenheit 451 (and not 1984) is my go-to analogy for today’s plight: Bradbury correctly predicted that people would willingly walk themselves into an oppressive technocracy for the sake of entertainment and convenience.
i mean we could say we’re living through 1984, brave new world, Fahrenheit 451, handmaid’s tale, maybe lolita–i haven’t read that one, but heard it’s a bit child-rapey
whatever it is, no one source has really encapsulated the hell of actual reality today
I don’t find Brave New World to be especially dystopian. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I haven’t read it, what’s not dystopian about it?
The first thing Wikipedia says about it is “Brave New World is a dystopian novel” 😅
Maybe you not finding it especially dystopian says more about the state of the world right now than the book… 😅
Keep in mind that the book is very old, published in 1931. DNA hadn’t been mapped, information technology was limited, and so on.
In the book, people are born in factories. Working class people are born in from split cells, as quintuples if I remember correctly. Your role in life is largely determined by your genes - workers don’t have the psychology for anything but labor.
In spite of that, it’s not an especially oppressive society. There is a “perfect” drug, soma, which is sort of like a non-addictive, non-physically harmful heroin that can be delivered by gas. When there is unrest, security forces come in and get everyone high until they chill the fuck out.
Sex is open and easy, but always completely voluntary by everyone involved. When people are turned down they are sometimes surprised but never upset or aggressive.
Entertainment is presented as vacuous, but the people seem to enjoy it. There are movies, TV, and so on. Sports are engineered to require people take trains out of town to stadiums, and require deliberately-complicated equipment to play, in order to create demand for production.
So… is that a dystopia? There is no discussion of environmental damage, but overall it seems sustainable, not predicated on infinite growth. People are stuck in the role they were born to, but it seems like there are no artificial barriers to advancement… just that not everyone can be good at everything.
From the view of John the Savage, and to those who’s personalities align with John, it is a dystopia. This clean, orderly, and oppressive society removes the ability to experience real highs like love and real lows like sacrifice. The workers will only know shallow replacements. Furthermore, the workers no longer have the ability to choose. They cannot choose their role in society, and seemingly they cannot choose to leave the society either. Even John is seemingly stuck in the society, and in the end gives into the sensuality and group think after trying to flay himself.
We need legislation with teeth before they manage to get this in every house. It’s going to happen. Your phone, TV, doorbell, car, crosswalks and street signs are all going to be recording and tracking you eventually. Just recognize that’s going to happen no matter what, and get real oversight and rules into place now. If we wait until it’s all locked, the ruling party will never let it end.
We need legislation with teeth
He said, while living under a dictatorship.
Never said it was an easy lift. There’s a long road between where we are and a functioning society. And currently most of Europe is in the lead.
I was gonna make a joke how confusing it must be to see a guy appear between houses and seemingly never go home.
But then I realized I have a smart phone that listens to everything I say and tracks where I am.
A state that should have been obvious to everyone FFS. The cameras are pointed at neighbourhoods, the audio is poly directional, which includes inside the home, and are hooked up to wifi to transmit the data. We have facial recognition, speech recognition, even gait recognition, AI object identification, license plate readers, audio filtering, all automated and analysed for review and every smart device has cameras and microphones.
Yall are fucking morons for embracing all this shit and normalizing a surveillance state that none of us have any control of and doesn’t benefit society at all. It’s been a slow moving car accident for 20 years that the masses are too fucking stupid and too arrogant to see until the wreck happens.
Yall are fucking morons
I don’t think you’re insulting the right audience here.
I mean that in the general sense, to society at large.
I’m pretty sure plenty if not most of people here pay most of their shopping with a card rather than cash, even though that shit at minimum goes into a database for ever and ever, probably shared with the authorities and in some countries just outright sold for pennies to anybody willing to pay for it.
And don’t get me started with just how many Techies jumped into Tesla’s “surveillance nightmare on wheels” - I mean, Techies were very much a large block of early adopters of Tesla cars and this was already well after the Snowden Revelations.
Further, how many people are in the habit of accessing the Internet behind a VPN?
(Personally, living in Britain - maybe the worst offender - at the time, the Snowden Revelations were what prompted me to start using a VPN regularly)
Whilst lots of people here have an actual “lets keep my digital footprint” mindset and praxis, I get the impression that most do not, and even those who bitch and moan about “surveillance” trade convenience (or, even worse, the Techie desire for “shinny new thing” thus getting shit like Alexa) for high digital visibility.
So yeah, maybe not “Yall”, but probably “Most of you”.
100%
Yeah, we’re the people who’ve been sounding the alarm for 20+ years. I’m tired boss
I swear the friendly future I had hoped of as a kid in the 80s/90s was either all propaganda, hijacked, or we actually did end up in an alternate timeline of pure fuckery.
This is not the future I evangelized.
And yeah, those of us who grew up through it have seen the horrific turn of things have taken from potential world changing awesome humanity, to absolute evil.
I loved that ad, it instantly brought the point I’ve been making for years home to the whole Super Bowl party.
Just wanted to point out one oddly written passage:
Numerous media outlets sounded the alarm. The online privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) condemned Ring’s program …
Many private citizens who previously used Ring also reacted negatively. “Viral videos online show people removing or destroying their cameras over privacy concerns,” reported USA Today
I was hoping to see that this story had gone national and wasn’t just a buzz in privacy centric circles, so my ears pricked up when they said “numerous media outlets.” But then the example they gave was a quote from was EFF, which I would not exactly call a “media outlet.”
Below they go on to say that “private citizens” also cried out, and then they use a quote from a USA Today article. USA Today - now that’s a media outlet. 🤷♂️
Next they say that even scum sucker fish are against all this, using a quote from JD Vance to back it up, and that part was all right.
My progressive-but-detached friends have suddenly noticed how creepy the services are. Not sure if it’s enough to get them to cancel whatever they have, but the combo of “Ring wants constant access” and “Google handed over inaccessible data” has at least gotten them to question their privacy.
Can’t speak for conservatives because I don’t have any of those left in my circle.
Don’t forget Amazon and Google also have smart speakers with microphones…
Big Brother doesn’t just watch, he listens too.
I’m not allowed to have a smart speaker of any kind in my home office, but especially Alexa. All my homies are required to hate Amazon.
Amazon owns Ring, so it makes sense
That’s why I only buy Chinese.
Even if they surveill they have no reason to hurt meAnd you’re absolutely certain they don’t sell the data back to US brokers or even authorities directly?
You could, idk, maybe not buy prepackaged surveillance camera that rely on someone else’s computer to work.
Well ya, obviously. And I do that. But for most people that’s not an option. They just gonna get what they have available from Amazon and works via wifi
If I have to choose between buying into a US run surveillance state or buying into a Chinese run surveillance state, I choose to buy neither.
That’s a very short-sighted and unimaginative position.
Lmao. Idgaf. I get 0 money from ring income. Maybe they should stop fing me first.
That’s why I only buy Chinese.
dude, buying people is illegal!
;-)
Renting is legal
Frigate with a cheap “AI” accelerator (running visual models) FTW!
It is fascinating to me that the FBI desperately wanting to pretend that they’re relevant and doing actual investigative work in the Guthrie case stupidly confirmed that corporations are not only spying on us all, but feeding the data into federal databases for access without a warrant or any meaningful oversight.
Y’all, it’s wild that so much of what your dumbass, Infowars-obsessed grandparents told you is literally true and provable now.
A few people have said it, but I’m really glad my tech is always a few generations behind and I never bought into voice assistants or smart home technology. And I keep my phone in a faraday bag when not in use. That probably makes it somewhat harder for them to spy on me logistically.
My dad rips his name out of junk mail and shreds it. He doesn’t want his name tied to his address, which is ironic in the first place, given that he’s already getting junk mail. He’s been worried about hiding his identity, address, cars, etc from some unknown surveillance entity based around Red Scare beliefs. Still, a few steps short of foil hat types.
Then he went and got cloud-based cameras. He’s clueless about smartphone privacy already. He resembles his friends in his cohort. They protested “leftist government surveillance” and then showed me that they’d will invite mystery surveillance in with the slightest promise of convenience.
Sounds about right. Boomers are adorable.
What’s also interesting to me about this is imagining how many crimes they know about that they simply allow to take place.
I mean why assume a boomer. Very easily a genx or millennial. Think about it millennials kids are around 20 now.
Don’t have to force surveillance on people. They’ll literally pay money for it.
Imagine that 🤣
If anyone wonders why there are so many scams, it’s easy! The average consumer is in general are short sighted, gullible and naive. Of course there will be plenty who will to exploit that.
The conditions of capitalism make desperate people, or those after easy money, ripe for plunder. Ahh capitalism, you glorious old whore.
The thing with privacy is nobody thinks about it until they need it, then it’s too late.
most of whats being funneled into palintir to look for any threats against the right wing regime, simple as that, or anything that threatens the old guard DNC too.
