[mustacheemperor]

>Schools nationwide have invested millions of dollars in the monitoring technology, including federal COVID-19 emergency relief money meant to help schools through the pandemic and aid students’ academic recovery. Marketing materials have noted the sensors, at a cost of over $1,000 each, could help fight the virus by checking air quality.

>Students found vaping also can receive a misdemeanor citation and be fined up to $100. Students found with vapes containing THC, the chemical that makes marijuana users feel high, can be arrested on felony charges. At least 90 students in Tyler have faced misdemeanor or felony charges.

Imagine getting a felony as a high school senior for getting caught vaping weed by a sensor bought for a thousand bucks in COVID-19 emergency relief funds.

[jauntywundrkind]

I think you've hit the nail on the head, about how systems of compliance breeds malcontentedness.

There's the saying "absolute power corrupts absolutely," but it's such a more boring banal inverted tyranny that allows well intended useful money to flow into such low life police state shit, and it ruins so badly the greater project & belief in doing stuff.

Cynicism seems ever on the rise, and it keeps seeming ever more warranted. More and more, nothing becomes as punk & contrarian as hopefulness & trying, in believing that we can surpass our mired shittinesses.

[ethanbond]

This is why the only viable solution to avoid tyranny is aggressive safeguarding of democratic institutions and the gradual (and continuous) alignment of laws with our actual desires as a society.

The technology for authoritarianism will continue to get cheaper and continue to proliferate. There’s no way to prevent that.

[rokkitmensch]

I'm pretty sure we proletariat lost on all fronts. I advocate we give up on change via text official routes (which tends to absorb as much energy as anyone can throw at the project while producing epsilon results, barring the odd tournament-market victor [Britney Spears, Neil deGrasse Tyson for examples]), and teach our children and each other the importance of undermining and subverting the dominant control structures at every turn.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

They thought of that. But with the current tech, the solution is a matter of implementing a social credit (or similar) system. Western nations will have this eventually, its inevitable. With it in place, you can achieve fine grain continuous compliance of any behavior. Scary from the populace pov, but an absolute miracle from the pov of the powerful.

[rokkitmensch]

One of the few things I've taken away from Doctorow's work is the notion of Whuffie from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

I noodled on a brief implementation on the Ethereum Blockchain, with a high level design of "anyone can issue and revoke to/from anyone else, and aggregate scoring is implemented by users", where my personal scoring system would have some kind of 3rd degree WoT evaluation, and normalize everyone's point-scores against the total quantity given by each of their point-givers".

Ridiculously heavy and expensive to implement on Ethereum, but I'm sure some other backing storage could handle the weight and transaction volume.

Probably worth writing up a whitepaper, as the cryptoderps say.

[ephemeral-life]

> alignment of laws with our actual desires as a society.

The fact is, people desire different things from society. Some people want to have other people take control, because they believe it provides them with security. Others want total freedom and the two are completely incompatible. I think the only solution is to leave behind the old way of people staying in the nation they are born. Different nations should be allowed to have completely different policies and people should be allowed to choose which policy sets best fit with their ideology and be allowed to freely move to the nation that applies.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> The fact is, people desire different things from society

I agree, that is a fact: a minority of people do desire different things from society, by definition, because what the majority wants is what society wants, by definition. How much does that matter in reality? Of course we can't allow a person to veto society, that would be minority rule, which is inferior to majority rule, all other things being equal.

I'm not sure why, but it feels like an unpopular minority has, over the last few decades in the u.s., been less and less accepting of this, and felt more entitled to veto the whims of society (a.k.a. the majority) in favor of their personal whims, rather than convincing the majority (a.k.a. society) to agree with them.

> Different nations should be allowed to have completely different policies and people should be allowed to choose which policy sets best fit with their ideology and be allowed to freely move to the nation that applies

I also agree here: it'd be great to be able to pick and choose countries, for a number of reasons, including the one you cite. One difficulty is, the other side of the coin is: each country also gets to pick and choose citizens as it sees fit. But if you disagree with a given country's society (a.k.a. disagree with the majority), it seems reasonable to want to leave it for one you agree with.

[20after4]

In theory that would be one of the strengths of the federal system in the United States. In practice, unfortunately, most laws are homogenized and nationalized instead of letting states differ significantly.

There are some major differences, don't get me wrong, but that seems to be trending towards more central control over at least the last 120 years.