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

• sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I disagree that anything you describe could actually be both commercially viable and deployable without authoritarian involvement

  You haven’t heard of Ring cameras? Commercial security systems? They do basically what I’m describing, just not as well because they don’t have as much of an incentive. Are end users willing to pay for these more advanced models? No, so consumer grade cameras stick to object detection like deer vs racoon instead of specific individual detection (e.g. scanning eyes).

  Governments, however, are willing to pay that amount. Why? Because they think it’ll help them detect criminals, and they think that helps keep people safe. It’s an extension of the HOA idea, just with government-scale funds backed up with law enforcement to go after threats. That, in itself, isn’t authoritarian, but setting up such a system opens the door for authoritarians to take control and misuse it.

  I’d go so far as to say that the people in your theoretical HOA are analogous to supporters of a authoritarian regime.

  Analogous, sure, but the HOA has no enforcement arm for non-residents, so all they can do is ask the police to intervene. That’s the difference with a city, it has a police force it can order to intervene using information from that system. It’s the mixing of enforcement and surveillance that makes it authoritarian.

  So a surveillance system is not itself authoritarian, it’s only authoritarian of there’s some enforcement arm to enforce obedience or punish disobedience.

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  • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    They do basically what I’m describing, just not as well because they don’t have as much of an incentive. Are end users willing to pay for these more advanced models?

    Well there you go. It could be authoritarian, except an authoritarian govt isn’t subsidizing it. Exactly like I described.

    Governments, however, are willing to pay that amount. Why?

    You keep walking straight into the points I’m making.

    That, in itself, isn’t authoritarian

    Wrong. Setting up a super invasive surveillance system is inherently authoritarian, even if they initially happen to use it for reasons that don’t typify authoritarianism. You have to bend over backwards so hard to keep it from becoming authoritarian, that it will just naturally corrupt any entity that deploys it, even making the monumental assumption that an entity that deploys this didn’t have the intention to use it for nefarious purposes from the start.

    it’s only authoritarian of there’s some enforcement arm to enforce obedience or punish disobedience.

    Is a rather clumsy piece of mental gymnastics. Not only have you said it before. You can use this argument, coupled with your earlier “it’s constituent parts aren’t authoritarian” to argue that nothing is authoritarian.

    Again, I disagree. Something is only political when used for political ends.

    And again this is just the pro-gun argument. Fine on paper, useless in reality.

    I’m making the argument that it is possible for software to be political even if it wasn’t created as such. I only need to show that a single case is possible.
    You are making the argument that it is impossible, and you keep trying to prove it by example.

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