Of all the flawed arguments I hear from surveillance apologists, the worst one is this: in the tribal village, there was no privacy, only gossip. And now we’re creating the global village.
Well, there were also no antibiotics in the tribal village, just magic herbs.
Well, there were also no antibiotics in the tribal village, just magic herbs.
What do you even say to someone who insists on equating global surveillance capitalism with a prelapsarian village and doesn’t recognize that what (maybe) worked on a scale 150 people doesn’t work at a scale of 8 billion?
For one thing, tribal gossip was a way of keeping power in check, whereas centralized technological surveillance is an unparalleled tool of social control. There’s a reason we had to invent democracy along with various checks and balances as we scaled our societies up.
It's really ironic to hear this argument from computer scientists because computer scientists have it drilled into us that things become qualitatively different when you can do them at scale. Surveillance is no exception; in fact it's an especially good example.
