• atlas@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 months ago

    “citizens on their best behavior” “big brother is always watching”

    Don’t sound very different to me

  • piyuv@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    He’s voicing what every billionaire and government official already thinks. Call me pessimist but I believe it’s unavoidable. VPNs are seen as “tools to overcome government bans to access illegal websites” in so many countries, hence getting banned. Access to mainstream websites also getting harder and harder when on VPN. People hosting Tor exit nodes are living in fear of police raids.

    Even with some little amount of privacy protecting measures, websites start to act strangely or do not work, and the amount of websites like this increases every day. As protecting our privacy becomes a bigger and bigger effort, more people will give up, strengthening the arguments against it. Eventually we’ll hit big brother levels.

    • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
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      3 months ago

      Eventually we’ll hit big brother levels.

      As someone who was born before the age of surveillance capitalism, I can tell you we’ve hit that level a long time ago. Anybody who thinks society has been running normally for at least the past 15 years is too young to have known what a normal society is.

      • Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        Exactly. I am elder millennial, and I grew up in Dubai. Back in the 80s and 90s in Dubai the only security cameras that existed were in malls and some supermarkets, and public CCTV by police did not exist. Traffic light cameras to catch people speeding and/or running a red light only got started in the early 2000s. This is one thing that I honestly say that really demarcates the early 2000s from previous times is the fact that the possibility of mass surveillance became a reality only back then. Before that surveillance was mostly disjointed and not at all interconnected. If you had security cameras, then they were on VHS tapes and unless you had the budget to get new tapes regularly, most people would just rewind the tapes and tape over and over, meaning they will degrade fairly quickly, and since most places didn’t keep an archive for too long, if something ‘suspicious’ happened a few weeks prior that you weren’t informed about until today, it would be lost since those tapes were likely overwritten, and there is no way to recover that.

        The 90s were far from perfect for me. I had a fairly hard time growing up. But I honestly just wish for the dignity of not being on camera 24/7. My apartment building has cameras on all floors and I cannot exit or enter my own apartment without being caught on camera. That is if those cameras are real and not fakes.

        • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
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          3 months ago

          Here’s a little story that shows how much society has become dystopian:

          Back in the 90’s, I worked in France for a while. When I was there, a case was brought up against the state that had violated a CNIL rule: some dude was cheating on his taxes by claiming he lived at some address. Tthe French fiscal administration sued him because they obtained a file from the electricity company and another from the water utilty company showing that the consumption of both electricity and water were so low it wasn’t consistent with the dude actually living there.

          The case was thrown out, the dude walked and the state was fined because it had violated a rule that clearly stipulated cross-referencing files for the purpose of extracting secondary information that wasn’t available in each single file was a violation of privacy and civil liberties.

          I shit you not. This used to be a thing.

          Can you imagine this today? All the Big Data sonsabitches cross-reference billions of files ALL THE TIME and nobody bats an eyelid anymore.

          If you’re old enough, you remember sovereign states taking privacy seriously. If you’re not, you don’t. And that’s how Big Data gets away with what they do today because fewer and fewer people remember a time when it was unacceptable.

          • Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee
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            3 months ago

            This is why libertarians and many modern authoritarian LOVE corporations. Unlike governments which have some accountability (that has seriously been dwindling) corporations can basically do what they want. Laws are effectively written by corporations so that anyone in any position of authority is never thrown in prison or even needs to worry about that (ultra low level workers can be thrown to the dogs to placate the public every once in a while) and meanwhile the right of protestors has been so seriously curtailed that soon even in formerly first world countries they might be able to break out the machine guns like they did in central America in the 1910s and 1950s. In Britain protestors are being sentenced to record prison terms that were formerly reserved for rapists and muggers.

            There is little question that corporations are behind them all.

    • ikidd@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Well, Larry obviously.

      Coincidentally, Larry will not be under surveillance.

    • delirious_owl@discuss.online
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      3 months ago

      Bending over, touching your toes, and not complaining when this guy comes out from hiding in the bushes and sticks something up ur but

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Emboldened oligarch in a plutocracy.

    But also kleptocracy and really a kakistocracy disguised outwardly as an aristocracy or neo-monarchy as Raskin said.

    Outside of just saying “America” or “Capitalism” How do we combine all of this into one satisfying, effective term?

  • sweetpotato@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    Only the fact that he is able to say shit like that out loud is a sign of a rotting society. People are ok with being their slaves

  • beefbot@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    3 months ago

    Private jets . They’ve all got multiple front yards & none of us can afford pitchforks But small aeroplanes, those are weak. & these parasites just looove em

  • delirious_owl@discuss.online
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    3 months ago

    Does he realize that we’ve had AI surveillance systems for years?

    Just look at my record of being locked out of my own bank account.

    False positives and nothing working became the norm like 10 years ago thanks to putting these dumb AI systems in charge of IPS and “anti-fraud” systems. This is what happens when you put AI in charge of surveillance. Its like that scene from idiocracy when the computer gives him the name “Not Sure” because its a computer.

  • njm1314@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    My best behavior is to be on Larry Ellison’s front yard with pitchforks burning torches and guillotines.

  • xantoxis@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    This guy’s company is planning to build nuclear-powered datacenters btw. Check in with yourself on whether you think that’s a good power this responsible human being should have.