Amerika

If history records anything from this time except a descent into howling hominin chaos, it will remember the rise of the cheap hard drive as the agent that changed society. The ability to store massive amounts of data made it possible to have a surveillance society.

Laws like the Patriot Act recognized that the future of law enforcement will have two aspects: first, it will track everyone through electronic signals and facial recognition, and second, it will create an opt-in society based around a social credit score.

Every now and then, the public hamsters mention that a digital panopticon awaits whether with statistical learning machines or not:

George Orwell’s 1984 warned of a future where Big Brother watches every move. Today, modern technology is making that vision a reality, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison — the world’s second-richest person — sees a growing opportunity for his company to help authorities analyze real-time data from millions of surveillance cameras.

“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” Ellison said in an hour-long Q&A during Oracle’s Financial Analyst Meeting last week.

“Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem,” he said, in comments cited by Tech Crunch.

The future that he describes is unique because it is opt-in. As Aldous Huxley argued, humanity will end up at totalitarianism because it wants to be prosperous, not because of its fears. And in the dystopian future, you will opt-in for the social credit score in order to get better housing, medical care, schooling, jobs, and products.

Think about it this way: we talk about the internet “routing around” obstacles. Diversity is one such obstacle. How do we handle it now? If you apply for an apartment, you have to fill out a lengthy form and submit to credit and criminal records checks.

Without being “racist,” this filters out most of the people who are both of minority status and criminal, a group that is protected by law because of the assumption of equal worth inherent to civil rights. Civil rights protects victims and victimizers alike if the victimizers are from a victim-designated group (VDG).

Huxley wrote of an opt-in society in Brave New World. People wanted more luxury, safety, and comfort so they designed a totalitarian system, aping Plato’s thought experiment in The Republic, that managed every aspect of life but for the purpose of pleasure.

The bureaucracy was a response to the prosperity of society producing lots of people who could not survive a night in the woods alone with nothing but a pocketknife. In nature, the useless are replaced; in society, they are simply hired on for a dumber job so no one has to deal with them.

Thriving societies produce waste humans who feel bad about life and therefore become ironist contrarians in order to reject reality, so that they can feel better about feeling bad. Such people actively seek out destructive half-truths and insane lies to make their feelings comfortable.

In response to the growing problem of idiots and the insane in a thriving society, individuals opt-in to methods opting-out of the mess, such as gated condominiums, private schools, private healthcare, security guards, and exclusive places to shop, eat, and socialize.

Not knowing what to do with idiots who must be told what to do, these people develop ways of managing the idiots or ensuring there is process for them to follow so that they do not need to understand cause-effect relationships, structure, or goals/ends.

This means-over-ends society gives rise to a morality of tolerance and enslaves the intelligent to perpetual management of their labor force, but as a perk, they get a more luxurious life. People always opt for this instead of a “golden mean” of just enough comfort to be free from idiots.

Managing idiots leads to abusive behavior where you have to tell them what to do at all times. Eventually, technology will take over management much as it does in present offices with metrics, spyware, and time accounting:

Manna told employees what to do simply by talking to them. Employees each put on a headset when they punched in. Manna had a voice synthesizer, and with its synthesized voice Manna told everyone exactly what to do through their headsets. Constantly. Manna micro-managed minimum wage employees to create perfect performance.

Your future social credit system will reward those with education and among the uneducated, punish those who commit crimes. Then it will manage them to the last detail so that they can live in a world of social media, streaming video, and on-demand pornography.

Importantly, those who do not opt-in to this system will be excluded like the deplatformed are today. Unless you opt-in, you will not be able to get into the gated communities and will have to live in the ghetto with the uneducated who are also criminal.

As always, when a system of control gains power, people come to it and willingly subject themselves to the yoke in order to avoid the consequences of not having its blessing. All bureaucracies and political machines operate this way and your future technocratic dystopia is no different.

Tags: aldous huxley, dystopia, marshall brain, technocracy