[ben_w]

I feel your vibe as I also distrust authority, but no, it's not "nothing" to do with kids and crime — calls for an end to crypto are foolish and misguided, crypto tech is too simple to inhibit and blocking access to it creates opportunities for criminals to do crimes, any competent criminal group can roll their own crypto from open source projects… but there's a lot of non-competent criminal groups out there too, just like there are plenty of non-competent legally operating corporations.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Well, organised criminals for one, that way they know what they can get away with.

I know where I want to end up, but not how to get there from here: The Culture (Iain M Banks) is a surveillance anarchy where everyone is able to watch anyone at any time, and yet nobody really cares what you do.

[Vecr]

The Culture's not an anarchy, it's just a standard "liberal" (not exact on definitions) surveillance state. A lot of what's shown is 2003 Iraq war style preventative policing, but that's obvious selection effects to make the books interesting, and happens mostly away from central regions.

[ben_w]

I'm not sure how you can say The Culture isn't an anarchy given its only rules are "don't force someone to do something they don't want to", "don't kill someone permanently or we will watch you closely to make sure you don't do it again", and "don't literally read someone's mind or we will call you names and not invite you to parties".

That said, I do agree that there's a necessary selection effect to make the books interesting, as the fundamental problem of writing about a good day in a utopia is that the writer's idea of what that even means is unlikely to sell any copies — so I think of these books in a similar vein to how others say that Asimov's robot books are a demonstration of all the ways that the premise (in the latter's case, the Three Laws) don't really work as well as one might hope.

As I say, what I hope for is the promise of The Culture, but I don't know how to get there… or even if one can.

[wizzwizz4]

Anarchy is an "-archy": it's about the structure of governance, not about laws.

[ben_w]

There are several lenses through which to view anarchy.

My prior point was to illustrate the essential lack of enforcement of any rules, hence by the definition of anarchy as a "society without coercion".

From the lens you are using, that of governance, The Culture definitely matches "stateless society based on voluntary free association" — this is, as shown though historical real-world usage, compatible with "direct democracy", where votes have no intermediaries.

This voting structure was demonstrated in the books: there was a direct-democratic decision about "should we have a war?", most said yes, those who voted "no" were free to disassociate, and not merely in a purely theoretical fashion as the technology at their disposal enabled complete independence to a degree utterly impossible for any human on Earth. In the author's own words, "the Culture kind of fades out at the edges", rather than having a discrete boundary in the way we are used to on Earth today.

[mywittyname]

> but there's a lot of non-competent criminal groups out there too,

Who get swept up by authorities and out-competed by their technologically savvy adversaries. There's strong selective pressure on technologically inept criminals that doesn't necessarily exist for traditional businesses. There's no government organization out there every night rounding up Walmart employees in a bid to bring down the Walton family.

[ben_w]

There's also way more crime than the police have the resources to manage.

My go-to example of this is heroin in the UK: the substance is the most severe level of classification, nobody speaks in its favour even when they regard the war on drugs to be an abject failure ("war on drugs over, drugs declare victory" that kind of thing), yet the number of users of just that one substance exceeds the total UK prison population by a factor of 3.

If you broaden this to all UK users drugs of the same classification, it's around 10 times the total UK prison population. All illegal drugs, 32 times the total UK prison population.

And then there's all the non-drug crimes…

[hsvs6]

No one will ever have resources to suveil everyone and everything, given the rate at which info is exploding. People dont talk about the info explosion problem, cause there is no solution.

[ben_w]

Almost everyone carries at least one microphone and two cameras on their person at all times, along with a WiFi system that researchers have demonstrated can be used as a wall-penetrating radar capable of pose estimation, heart-rate sensing, and breath sensing.

Monitoring with all these things can be done at low-quality in real-time using the compute attached to those sensors, anything that might be interesting can be automatically passed on to a higher level system.

Smart dust was discussed quite widely until very recently, and as all the parts of that are now basically ready, I think the stuff has actually been made and is currently being actively (but quietly, under NDA) investigated by intelligence agencies both for potential uses and potential countermeasures.

A few years ago, I did a Fermi calculation and my conclusion was that a laser microphone pointing at every window in Greater London would cost about the same as the annual budget of the Met Police.

At 128 kbit/s (e.g. for decent compressed audio), recording all 8 billion humans on Earth for a year (24 hours a day so even while asleep) would require about 4 ZB of storage; current storage prices were around $14/TB in 2022, which would thus cost $56 billion compared to $73.4 billion the US Director of National Intelligence requested for the Fiscal Year 2025 National Intelligence Program.

We don't talk about the information explosion "problem" because there isn't actually a problem: all the data on the internet has to be processed anyway just for people to be able to see it in the first place, and for quite some time now all the data we care about is on the internet anyway.

[VMG]

Plus with machine learning you can improve the compression and sift through the data much more efficiently