Comment on Promised myself I will support them after they go stable. They kept their promise and so did I

• PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  The other person deleted their comment so I can’t really know what the argument was, but I would like to make a distinction:

  While tools cannot be political themselves, tools can lend themselves to specific political purposes.

  A tank cannot itself be fascist, but it can make fascism more viable. Surveillance software cannot be political, but it is easily abused by fascists to destroy political opposition.

  What matters is the harm and benefits. Is the harm caused by the tool justified by it’s benefits? Or are the primary use cases for the tool to prop up fascism?
  (I suspect that “authoritarianism” would be a better term to use here, but I’m continuing the theme of the thread)

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Their argument was that software can, in itself, be fascist, and that’s what we went around and around on. The example given was facial recognition software that can determine race (and later, country of origin).

    Essentially, I said exactly what you’re saying, while they argued the opposite. I wish I quoted them, but I did only directly address their claims, if you’ll take my word for it.

    I don’t want the government to have and use facial recognition software (their example) and extensive security camera systems (my example, such as Flock), not because those solutions are fascist in and of themselves, but that they can be used by fascists to accomplish their goals. Even if the current regime uses them purely for good (i.e. completely opt in facial recognition, cameras inaccessible to police until there’s a warrant with no passive collection) the next regime may not.

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    • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      The extension of the argument I’m making (and maybe them kinda?) is that it’s functionally the same as if the software were political.

      You can make software that nearly exclusively benefits a particular political belief for family of beliefs.

      So even if it’s not actually technically political, it can be functionally political, at which point the argument is splitting hairs.

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      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        I think those are important hairs to split.

        Let’s say there’s a camera system built due to a direct public vote and rolled out by a political party all agree defends democracy. The stated goal is catching red light violations and speeders, and it’s a popular system. As part of the functionality it reads license plates, and that is verified by a human every time, and no footage is stored if there’s no violation.

        Is that system fascist? Most would say no, and it exists in many states, like California and Washington.

        Then the next election, a fascist is elected, and one of the first moves is to repurpose that system to track undesirables, and now it stores a ton of footage.

        Is that system now fascist? It’s the same exact system as in the previous example, it’s just being used for fascist ends, such as tracking vehicles with certain plates (e.g. Illegal immigrants, minorities, etc) Nothing has changed in the capabilities or programming of the system, the only change was when to capture footage, what people use it for, and how long to store it.

        Yes, it’s theoretically possible to design a fascist system, such as an LLM that only gives fascist answers, but that’s an incredibly narrow set of possible systems.

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• upsidebeet@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Again, it’s not the software itself that’s fascist, it’s what it’s being used for that’s fascist. Facial recognition for determining citizenship could absolutely be used for non-fascist purposes, like simplifying border crossings to not require documentation. Likewise, surveillance systems can also not be used until there’s an actual warrant (i.e. no passive recording).

    The technology itself isn’t fascist, it’s how it’s applied that’s fascist. The mass data collection is fascist, the tools used to collect that data isn’t fascist in the same way that guns and tanks aren’t fascist, but they can certainly be used by fascists.

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    • upsidebeet@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      [deleted]

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      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        If anyone is refusing to engage, it’s you. You provided no argument for your position, whereas I’ve explained as best I can in detail, with examples of similar things. Me not agreeing with you isn’t “refusing to engage,” it’s a good faith debate.

        If there’s some point you’ve made that I’ve failed to address, I apologize, I tried to be thorough to not waste any time going back and forth.

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