The Digital Dictators foreignaffairs.com/articles/china…
Digital tools were used to organize mass anti-state demonstrations (Arab Spring, etc). Autocrats learned that these tools were eminently surveillable, and now they're used to neutralize those movements.
Digital tools were used to organize mass anti-state demonstrations (Arab Spring, etc). Autocrats learned that these tools were eminently surveillable, and now they're used to neutralize those movements.
"They are harnessing a new arsenal of digital tools to counteract what has become the most significant threat to the typical authoritarian regime today: the physical, human force of mass antigovernment protests."
There's a kind of max-min problem in looter societies: you either peel off some of your wealth to build hospitals and roads, or you peel it off to buy guard labor to keep people who want hospitals and roads from building guillotines.
At a certain point, it's cheaper to fund social programs than it is to pay cops, spies, and prison-guards.
But surveillance provides massive productivity gains for guard-labor: automated spying is MUCH cheaper than the handcrafted, artisanal spying of, say, the Stasi
But surveillance provides massive productivity gains for guard-labor: automated spying is MUCH cheaper than the handcrafted, artisanal spying of, say, the Stasi
So it shifts the curve. Your society can be MUCH more unequal and corrupt and still remain guillotine-free for longer, if you can use automated surveillance to disrupt guillotine-building movements.
And since the Vichy nerds who build and maintain these tools will sell to anyone (Hi, NSO Group!), even basketcase dictatorships with no technological capacity of their own can play. So it's not just super-advanced technological states like China, but also Ethiopia.
"Fast-forward to this century, and a different reality emerges: coups unseated around nine percent of the dictatorships that fell between 2001 and 2017, while mass movements led to the toppling of twice as many governments."
Technological autocracy also allows smart dictators to emit highly targeted hospitals and roads, spending in precisely those districts were unrest is fomenting, while leaving less-upset neighboring districts untouched.
("I know half my appeasement dollars are wasted, but I don't know which half")
And technological autocracies let dictators create the appearance of pluralism, by allowing carefully measured amounts of dissent to exist on forums, in consultative polls, etc, but always in containable systems that can be shut down on demand (see, eg China)
All of this creates autocratic debt, though. The problem of autocracy isn't merely the denial of self-determination for the people, it's also that autocrats have no one to check their worst impulses.
They dunningkruger their societies into famines, infrastructure collapse, pandemic, industrial doldrums. The longer you autocrat, the more autocratting you have to do, because your society's failures are obvious to more and more people with each passing day.
Eventually, your anti-guillotine budget exceeds all the resources you have, and then there's a crisis. The longer that crisis takes to arrive, the more damage the autocrat will get to do, and the harder it will be to recover.
"There was 1 East German spy for every 66 citizens. The proportion in most contemporary dictatorships... pales in comparison. It is true that in North Korea.. the ratio of [spies] to citizens is 1:40—but it was 1:5090 in Iraq under Saddam and 1:10000 in Chad under Habré."
"Pushing back against the spread of digital authoritarianism will require addressing the detrimental effects of new technologies on governance in autocracies and democracies alike."
