[rt4mn]

This is probably going to be a bit of a mini rant, been thinking bout this for a while (10 years in fact).

> Although it is physically impossible for the single guard to observe all the inmates' cells at once, the fact that the inmates cannot know when they are being watched motivates them to act as though they are all being watched at all times. They are effectively compelled to self-regulation.

This is the fundamental idea of the Panopticon, and you see it baked into parts of the modern surveillance State as well. But outside of some workplace and carceral contexts i don't think its actually the direction we are headed. The spooks want the power to actually use the data surveillance gives them, they are not really interested in social control as far as I can tell. At least not yet.

True, most of the data hoovered up by the "Intelligence community" is almost never actually looked at with human eyes, but they are actively trying to work towards building a system whereby all that data is still analyzed and used, or quickly searched with just the right keywords.

The panopticon is useful for illustrating one of the many side dangers of surveillance (namely that it instills fear and stifles expression) but it does not cut to the core issue: Mass surveillance drastically upsets the power balance between the government and the governed.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

China's social credit system is explicitly about being able to use surveillance technologies for social control. I suspect these approaches will only grow and mature in authoritarian states. In nominally free states like the US, this tech will also seep into society via private but essential industries like credit scores, access to rentals, etc., and then eventually by the government itself for things like passports, access to government aid, etc. This tech is just too tempting not to be used by the already powerful to become more powerful.

[m463]

> act as though they are all being watched at all times

in tech surveillance, the idea is that you CAN be watched all the time. Information gleaned is added to a dossier, which can be reviewed later.

I think this kind of stuff causes a terrible conformance.