Essentially he thinks that, because surveillance is so powerful, and because of 21st-century advancements in the military, there is no way that a socialist uprising could happen, if any at all. The news already does a good job of showing that the US has this new incredible surveillance tech!! and could send these brand new, ultra-powerful drones to bomb you!! and it’s all powered by really smart algorithms that can show all your history!!. They are very opaque about how to stop it, and it seems almost like a form of state-terrorism where the US shows its most freitening new technology to the media so that the people feel helpless, thus disinclined to start groups critical of the government. It seems that there is a strain where people like my friend see changing material conditions, and interpret the change as shutting off revolutionary potential once and for all.
I really want to know what you guys think. It really feeds into a lot of Anarchist notions to just leave alone the possibility of overthrow and tend to your own garden and write poems, or Liberal notions of simply voting because nothing else could possibly work.
It’s definitely part psyop to get people feeling hopeless and giving up before they’ve tried. There is a word for this I’ve seen bandied about, panopticon; the idea is that people reach a point where they self-police because they believe they are being watched, even if the system can’t actually be watching them logistically at all times.
As to the actual part modern tech plays, there’s some truth to advances in tech making mass surveillance and aggregation of data more feasible, but it’s not magic. You still need people in the loop looking at what the automation pulls out and making decisions about it, and one of the side effects of handing off more stuff to automation is you can reach a point where you trust the automation to work / be correct and don’t bother to check beyond it. So the automation greenlights, you go “okay, everything is fine”, and move on. This is a thing that can happen in computer programming itself with unit testing, though I’m not sure how common issues occurs as a result: “The tests were passed, so we’re good.” But what about the stuff the tests didn’t cover?
It’s also just a thing that can happen with procedures and bureaucracy in general, and reminds me of a talk I watched some years ago about this guy who, IIRC, was a security consultant or something. And he talked of how easily he could get into otherwise secure places just by having a clipboard and looking like he knew what he was doing. To what extent that exact flaw is still a thing, I don’t know, but point is no system is immune to cracks in it.
The most secure places are the ones where regular people are largely motivated to protect them and follow the rules because they believe that doing so is to the benefit of them, their loved ones, and society at large. The US can make as many drones and algorithms as it wants, but it can’t settle a restive population by slashing pro-social policy and replacing it with more cops.
Many things that people take for granted as inevitable are inevitable right up until the point they are not. That’s probably one of the reasons death can be so hard to cope with. It’s easy to feel like somebody is just gonna always be there and then one day they aren’t, and you have to cope with the fundamental impermanence of things in a very up close and personal way that you can’t ignore. Liberators and oppressors alike have an expiration date. The difference is that forward-thinking liberation forces plan for their end and build a world that can go on without them. Oppressors sometimes try to do this too, but they don’t need to care in the same way, as long as they “got theirs”, and that not needing to care about the future is more so the grifter atmosphere we’re at in the US by now, I’d argue.
In short, the oppressor is not made of cardboard, but they aren’t made of titanium either. It’s still flesh and blood in the end. AI is still just an abstraction/indirection for the fleshy beings making decisions about it.