This is why billionaires must be ended. They are terrified of everyone else and will do anything to control us.
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Arne Babenhauserheidereplied to Charles U. Farley last edited by
@freakazoid Do you remember Douglas Rushkoff writing about the event where the rich discussed disciplinary collars for guards?
How tech's richest plan to save themselves after the apocalypse
Silicon Valley’s elite are hatching plans to escape disaster – and when it comes, they’ll leave the rest of us behind
the Guardian (www.theguardian.com)
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Charles U. Farleyreplied to Arne Babenhauserheide last edited by
@ArneBab Those armed guards are what we call "the middle class".
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William Pietrireplied to Esther Payne :bisexual_flag: last edited by
@onepict @freakazoid Maybe we can compromise? How about we start with total automated surveillance of everybody with a net worth over $100m? plus every elected official. Oh, and every cop.
Maybe we can sell it as "With great power comes great responsibility". We all know that prototyping with a small set of users work best, and there are only like 30k people with $100m. It'll make the necessary human review manageable, too. Heck, I'd volunteer for an hour a week to keep an eye on Ellison in his volcanic-island lair.
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Charles U. Farleyreplied to William Pietri last edited by
@williampietri @onepict I'm not sure how we could get into a position where we could do such a thing and then do that instead of just taking the billionaires' stuff so there aren't any more billionaires. And getting rid of the cops while we're at it.
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Arne Babenhauserheidereplied to Charles U. Farley last edited by
@freakazoid I disagree.
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Charles U. Farleyreplied to Arne Babenhauserheide last edited by
@ArneBab Thanks for your opinion, complete stranger.
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Arne Babenhauserheidereplied to Charles U. Farley last edited by
@freakazoid The same thanks to you, complete stranger.
But to provide an actual argument: they want to project physical control, not social control. That’s why calling this the middle class is wrong and downplaying the risk. Physical control — with armed forces — needs far fewer people than social control. As long as those armed people are kept loyal.
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Charles U. Farleyreplied to Arne Babenhauserheide last edited by
@ArneBab Hey, so you replied on my thread, so you can act like it or get blocked. I may block your entire instance just to be sure if this is how people there typically act.
Anyway, I'll try one more time, because I'm feeling generous. I was describing the condition that exists *today*. The middle class defends the status quo because they see that they are far better off than the lower class. That is WAY cheaper than direct armed control, because they contribute *voluntarily* both out of fear of ending up in the lower class, and out of the delusion that someday they will become part of the upper class.
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Arne Babenhauserheidereplied to Charles U. Farley last edited by
@freakazoid ah, you talked about today — then you do have a point, though it’s not complete, because the same happens with underpaid people who are afraid of those who are treated even worse.
What I added was proof of actual plans rich people made for a future in which they want to *keep* their power even though their usual means to preserve power no longer work.
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William Pietrireplied to Charles U. Farley last edited by
@freakazoid @onepict To be honest, I'm not totally serious here. If the rest of us could surveil those with outsized power, that would be great, but as you say, they won't allow it. I mean it mainly as a narrative counter to their proposals. Every single time somebody proposes mass surveillance, I think people should say, "Great idea, let's start with those with the most power." It sounds (and is) reasonable, but would help align the powerful against broad surveillance.
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Charles U. Farleyreplied to Arne Babenhauserheide last edited by
@ArneBab There is plenty of that sort of siege mentality among the wealthy, imagining that we'll all gang up against them. IMO believing in that actually causes us to underestimate the threat, because it causes us to accept the premise that we'll all just storm the bunkers of the wealthy.
But it's not realistic, because it presumes that the availability of food will decline about the same everywhere at once, and that the remaining food will be about evenly distributed. But that basically can't happen. What will happen is just an extension of what's already happening. Global food production will decrease, possibly by quite a bit, but remaining food production will be extremely unevenly distributed.
People are already extremely concerned about "immigration". We have European governments murdering people in the Mediterranean and everyone else just looking the other way. And that's TODAY while there's still enough food to feed everyone. And despite plenty of food, talk of "food security" is steadily increasing, and we've had multiple panics, usually around rice, in times when there has been plenty of rice in the world.
So the rich aren't going to be hiding out in self-sufficient fortresses in Hawaii and New Zealand. They will have fortress *cities* in fortress *countries*. And the people of those countries will help them because they'll see people starving on their own streets, or dead or in prison or in camps, to say nothing of those dying at the borders, and they won't want to become like them.
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Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:replied to William Pietri last edited by
@williampietri @freakazoid Jeremy Bentham who came up with Panoptic philosophy also had the idea that those in power needed to be utterly transparent and therefore surveilled as well.
so when history mentions Bentham they talk about the Panopticon, his dead body being preserved and the fact he was eccentric. The idea of government transparency is spoken with a Whisper.
So yes, those in power monetary and given power should be surveilled.
Not allowing billionaires to exist is good too.
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Charles U. Farleyreplied to Charles U. Farley last edited by
@ArneBab I think Cory Doctorow's novella "Masque of the Red Death" does a good job of laying out what would actually happen if billionaires retreated to fortresses like that.
That scenario really doesn't concern me right now. The one that concerns me is the one that's happening in front of our eyes as we speak. We are well into the first stages of ecofascism, and in the Anglosphere and most of Europe even the supposed "left" parties are fully on board with it.
It's not going to be about preserving the planet for "humanity", or through "degrowth". We're going to preserve the planet for "us" (i.e. people like those who have the power) through eugenics. And I don't mean any kind of obvious population control or anything like that; simply the act of letting people live or die based on the circumstances of their birth, in the name of borders, "sovereignty", "security".
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Charles U. Farleyreplied to Esther Payne :bisexual_flag: last edited by
@onepict @williampietri This is David Brin's thinking with his "transparent society". Yet I never see any mention of *how* we will make things work that way. We gave the cops bodycams. They turn them off when they want to do something bad, and then they suffer no consequences for it. If we can't make that happen, how are we going to force far more powerful people to allow themselves to be subjected to surveillance.
IMO the whole idea of "the transparent society" is a Trojan Horse. Police bodycams are certainly used to surveil everyone else. The people they don't effectively surveil are the ones they were supposedly intended to surveil. Isn't that how all of this kind of legislation ultimately ends up getting twisted?
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Esther Payne :bisexual_flag:replied to Charles U. Farley last edited by
@freakazoid @williampietri there is always a way to twist technology.
Take for example citizen surveillance of cops and the cops play loud music so that when the video is posted to YouTube there's a copyright strike.