[rfv6723]

Humanity has never known a world without surveillance. Responsibility cannot exist without being watched. Primitive tribes lived under the constant eye of the group, and agricultural eras relied on the strict oversight of the clan. Modern states simply adopted new tools for an ancient necessity. A society without monitoring is a society without accountability, which only leads to the Hobbesian trap of endless conflict.

[donkey_brains]

Mass surveillance is a relatively recent development. Dense urban civilizations are not. And yet their denizens have not historically devolved into a “nasty, brutish, and short” existence. In fact, cities have been centers of culture and learning throughout history. How does this square with your theory?

[rfv6723]

The 19th century was the true cradle of mass surveillance. Civil registration, property tracking, and institutionalized police forces provided the systemic oversight required to manage dense urban life. These administrative tools served as the analogue version of digital monitoring to ensure every citizen remained known and categorized. Cities thrived as centers of culture only because these new forms of visibility prevented the Hobbesian collapse that anonymity would have otherwise triggered.

[tsimionescu]

And what about all of the previous ~40-50 centuries where cities were centers of learning and art and not Hobbesian hell holes? Ur is slightly older than the 19th century, I believe.

And note that there is evidence for cities of tens of thousands of inhabitants from 3000 BCE, while Rome reached 1 000 000 residents by 1CE. Again, without becoming some Hobbesian nightmare.

[rfv6723]

Augustus established the Vigiles Urbani and the Urban Cohorts, creating a state-funded police and firefighting force to replace the chaotic and often violent system of private client-patron justice. These were the bold, persistent experiments in social order that allowed a million people to coexist without descending into a Hobbesian hell.

[squigz]

None of those things are remotely comparable to the surveillance we're talking about. There's a world of difference between, "My city knows who owns what properties and also we have a police force", and "Western intelligence agencies scoop up every bit of data they can grab about anyone on the planet and store it forever"

[expedition32]

In my country it wasn't until the late 19th century that someone had the balls to stop going to church on Sunday. It was a huge scandal at the time but it all worked out in the end.

Humans have always done mass surveillance on eachother. You don't need technology for that.

[macintux]

At no point in time before this era was it possible for a random bureaucrat to have a reasonably comprehensive list of everyone in a country who attended church yesterday.

Scale matters.

[cucumber3732842]

This is a reduction to absurdity. Those old societies you cite didn't actively surveil with the goal of micromanaging people's daily lives the way that modern ones do.

[rfv6723]

Rural surveillance was far more suffocating because every single action was subject to the community gaze. This is exactly why classic literature frames the journey to the city as a liberation from the crushing weight of the village eye. The idea of the peaceful countryside is a modern utopian fantasy that ignores how ancient clans dictated every aspect of life including marriage and death. Modern Homeowners Associations prove that localized oversight is often the most intrusive form of management. Ancient society did not just monitor people; it owned their entire existence through inescapable social visibility.

[cucumber3732842]

"It was always shit everywhere" is revisionist history born out of the fantasy of statists looking to justify the modern (administrative) enforcement state.

While the lack of anonymity in small towns certainly puts a damper on one's ability to deviate too far from social norms, the list of things and subject that could get you subjected to government violence without creating a victimized party was infinity shorter. Things that get state or state deputized enforcers on your case today were matters of "yeah that's distasteful, he'll have to settle that with god" or it would come back to bite you when something happened 150+yr ago because society did not have the surplus to justify paying nearly as manny people to go around looking for deviance that could be leveraged to extract money. These people had way more practical day to day freedom to run and better their lives than we do now, if constrained by the fact that they had substantially less wealth to leverage to that effect.

> Modern Homeowners Associations prove that localized oversight is often the most intrusive form of management

And they almost exclusively deal in things that historical societies didn't even bother to regulate.

You're beyond delusional if you think running afoul of HOA is worse than running afoul of the local, state or federal government. Yeah they can screech and send you scary letter with scary numbers but they don't get the buddy treatment from courts that "real" governments do (to the great injustice of their victims) and their procedural avenues for screwing their victims on multiple axis are way more limited.

Seriously, go get in a pissing match with a municipality over just where the line for "requires permit" is and get back to me. Unless you want to do something that is more than petty cosmetic stuff and unambiguously in violation of the rules a HOA is a paper tiger for the most part (not to say that they don't suck).

[rfv6723]

Modern bureaucracy provides the institutional architecture and political recourse needed to check such arbitrary local tyranny. Without a central legal authority, an HOA or a town council becomes a lawless fiefdom. In those "freer" times, falling out with the local elite meant you didn't fight a permit; you simply had to pack your life and leave.

[zorked]

That's an incredibly bullshit argument to defend the indefensible.

[rfv6723]

Your reaction actually proves the point. Aggression thrives in anonymous spaces because the lack of oversight removes the weight of accountability. When people feel unobserved, they quickly abandon the social friction that once held tribes and clans together. You are essentially providing a live demonstration of why a society without any form of monitoring inevitably slides into the Hobbesian trap.

[squigz]

I don't think a random internet comment proves anything about society at large.

People don't hesitate to be aggressive even when they're not anonymous and there's a threat of accountability - see, all crime, or people just acting shitty toward others.

Mass surveillance does not cause everyone to magically get along.

[rfv6723]

History shows that whenever surveillance gaps appear, chaos follows. The explosion of crime during early urbanization was the specific catalyst for the creation of modern police forces because traditional social bonds had failed to provide oversight in growing cities. Japan maintains its safety through a deep-rooted culture of mutual neighborhood monitoring that leaves little room for anonymity. Even China successfully quelled the violent crime waves of its early economic boom by implementing a sophisticated surveillance network.

[squigz]

Police forces nor "neighborhood monitoring" are equivalent to mass surveillance though.

Anyway I'm curious why - despite having less anonymity than at any point in history, at least from the perspective of law enforcement - we still see high crime rates, from fraud to murders?