[thingification]

I don't begrudge you projecting information on your retina about people you have seen before. The issue at hand is people you have never seen before, but whose faces have been been captured in a large database.

What's dystopian?

Mass surveillance grants power, to the public and to institutions, to control individuals. One consequence is 'chilling effects': good actions are not taken because of possible future consequences. Planning is hindered, because any action may have unpredictable consequences because of side effects caused by surveillance 'global state' (state as in data, not as in country).

I think there is a negative psychological effect on some (most?) people of being at all times under observation, retroactively, by all people.

Today's governments and today's public often err in their ethical judgements, and "the doctrine that the truth is manifest is the root of all tyranny". Some future ones may be worse. Such large databases (and the social/legal/technical all-seeing surveillance systems we are building) would make it easier to allow bad governments to lock themselves into power more firmly, and once in power to use it in very bad ways: this is Snowden's "turnkey tyrrany".

This kind of information reduces the scope for experimentation, error, and the correction of mistakes. Because that is the source of all knowledge, that is a problem.

Of course some uses of such data will be good. But, power should be localized to prevent it being abused (the principle of least authority). Some good uses (like helping your bad vision) don't actually require the "sudo" superpower to recognize every person on the planet. All others are not worth the costs (this is a hypothesis, as are all statements I guess).

[criddell]

Radical transparency could be a tool for or against oppressors. If I could know as much about my government as they know about me, I think I would feel a lot safer.

[thingification]

We have many institutions that have evolved over centuries to correct the mistakes of governments (including ones that involve malice). Radical anything risks destabilising that most valuable knowledge: incremental change has worked remarkably well in this sphere, given time. There need to be very good reasons to throw everything up in the air - especially given radical transparency is just worse than its absence in many ways (see my earlier comments) -- really the idea has come about not because people thought it was a good idea, but because they thought it was inevitable, which it is not.

I think there are good reasons to expect the current ongoing disaster that is computer security will one day be fixed. Then, radical surveillance will still be with us, but radical transparency will operate in one direction: from those in power to everybody else.

Until then, especially in a society that is showing signs of starting to lose the means for criticism of bad ideas, extreme surveillance does not imply that the same data will be collected and stored about everybody or every institution. The UK government has already introduced data transparency laws. It makes special exceptions for... government. Even though they might eventually be caught, your local population of bureaucrats, with easy access to every detail of your life, will have an asymmetric information and legal power advantage over you, and adding information amplifies that asymmetry. Massive data leaks are still surprisingly infrequent. If we had regular Snowdens across government, what makes us think we know that would be a net good, a general purpose cure-all nostrum for government?

Meanwhile, the rest of population, given data, are happy to "know" the moral truth as they see it about other people and impose their own tyranny without due process (see e.g. Jon Ronson's "So you've been publicly shamed"). And corporations -- but they are discussed often enough that I don't want to add anything now.

Not to speak of progress, planning, and the morality of imposing "radical transparency" on other people.