Comment on AI Startup Flock Thinks It Can Eliminate All Crime In America

• philosloppy@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  many mid-20th century French thinkers like Foucault, Debord, Deleuze and Baudrillard spent a lot of time writing about surveillance and technology. Lots of this stuff has turned out to be extremely prescient. (Ellul is another example, but as a Christian Anarchist his critiques of what he called the Technical Society, are a bit of an outlier from the other guys above who, despite a plurality of ideas and perspectives, were all coming from a pretty similar place wrt their philosophical backgrounds)

  A pretty easy to digest example is Deleuze’s “Postscript on Societies of Control”, which is like 5 pages long and available for free online, written ca 1990 that is pretty spooky in how accurately it predicted the current state of affairs today.

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  • SugarCatDestroyer@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Oh, have you read the revelation of John the Theologian? It’s becoming a reality.

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  • AcidiclyBasicGlitch@sh.itjust.works ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I’m reading Ellul right now and loving it.

    The focus on efficiency as a means to an end that just keeps on digging new holes to fill old ones.

    Becoming so focused on achieving efficiency and then losing a piece of our humanity in the process.

    He has a belief about prison camps being inevitable in a society where efficiency is the ultimate goal. But most importantly he makes it a point to emphasize that this isn’t inevitable if enough people are warned in advance and revolt against it.

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    • philosloppy@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      his book on propaganda, The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, is also well worth a read.

      And, if you like Ellul, you should definitely check out Ivan Illich’s work. He’s another social critic coming from a heterodox Christian perspective (Catholic in this case). His ideas can seem a bit unintuitive at and even off-putting to modern sensibilities at times (especially his idea of Life as Idol and his critique of modern medicine in general) but he’s another guy with a lot going on that has been pretty accurate in his prognosticating of contemporary society.

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