[sentientmachine]

What Snowden did, or more specifically what the faceless, unaccountable and un-nameable NSA directors did was what George Orwell was trying to capture in his famous novel.

The notion of thoughtcrime and crimethink being the punishable event in the minds of the people. Where people are afraid to research something because of the perception that the secret unaccountable police will come take you away if you give the idea too much thought. And there is nothing you or anyone can do about it because the entity doing the enforcing is completely hidden. Even asking for the names of the directors and writing about what they've done is crimethink. Thinking about or asking for the document describing which thoughts are crimethink is also crimethink.

But perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way, maybe a utopian civilization would consider thoughts of evil, thoughts of crime and intentions to harm others as a justifiably punishable event. If your neighbor is thinking about how to make a bomb, or how to kill someone, or how to commit suicide, or how to defraud and deceive others, wouldn't it be better if the secret police put a stop to it there?

We could live in a post-crime society. Where everyone is un-corruptable and all humans treat each other as lovingly as we treat our own bodies. The problem with this is that the secret police only enforce the rules of the rulers, which has a thicker script for the lower classes than the upper classes.

[pavanred]

>> But perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way...

Perhaps in such a civilization George Orwell's 1984 would be illegal too.

>> We could live in a post-crime society...

There is no such thing as a post-crime society. Crime is subjective. It's fine when you think about murder etc as a crime in a democratic setting where citizenry has equal rights. But, the definition of crime is never a constant - It was a crime to consume/buy/sell alcohol or drugs once, it isn't anymore (some drugs in some places). Human torture was legal once, it isn't anymore. Even now, in some places of the world, education/equal rights for women is a crime, freedom of religion is a crime. So, there is no such thing as a post-crime society. All that can be is transparency, which democracy and free press have best provided. Hidden policing/courts etc are a step backward as there is no oversight on their operation.

[contingencies]

Perhaps in such a civilization George Orwell's 1984 would be illegal too.

Right now in Thailand: http://blogs.indiewire.com/anthony/thailand-bans-screening-o...

Also posters like http://pratyeka.org/thai-social-networking-advice.png blatantly advise people not to discuss, share or upvote dissenting views, even online.

Orwell and Zamyatin were right.

[NhanH]

> But perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way, maybe a utopian civilization would consider thoughts of evil, thoughts of crime and intentions to harm others as a justifiably punishable event. If your neighbor is thinking about how to make a bomb, or how to kill someone, or how to commit suicide, or how to defraud and deceive others, wouldn't it be better if the secret police put a stop to it there? > We could live in a post-crime society. Where everyone is un-corruptable and all humans treat each other as lovingly as we treat our own bodies. The problem with this is that the secret police only enforce the rules of the rulers, which has a thicker script for the lower classes than the upper classes.

In the past, philosophers have been discussing about "The problem of evil"[0] - which is the paradox of an omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent God allowing (morally) evil to exist. Obviously, it's normally discussed in a theological context, but one argument would apply to a non-theological context as well: the defense of free will. Since free will is the more important/ preferable than non-existent of evil, you can't have human with free will but without the choice of being evil. So as long as free will exists, you will have to be content with having evil/ crime etc as well.

Just to be clear, "evil" in the previous paragraph is being used in the sense of morally bad, and not the invisible, flying, human-haunting type.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil

[maaku]

It is not clear that notion of free will is even a consistent concept however. E.g. free will is perfectly explained as what a deterministic decision process feels like from the inside.

[HSO]

> maybe a utopian civilization would consider thoughts of evil, thoughts of crime and intentions to harm others as a justifiably punishable event.

Can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not but you're certainly not describing my utopia. So there, the idea that an "objective" utopia exists is disproven. Taking that argument further, who now decides whose utopia becomes the utopia? I admire Snowden a great deal for both his courage and his intellect, and one of the strongest arguments he makes against your utopia (again, I just can't tell if you're being sarcastic) is to remind us of the ancient-seeming idea of a "security state". That is, close to 100% security can be had, at the cost of liberty. In other words, it's a tradeoff. We can quibble about whether that tradeoff could be improved (the equivalent of a free lunch or "Pareto improvement" in economics), but "thoughtcrime" and "crimethink" is so far beyond where I would draw the line, you can't even see the line anymore from there…

[Karellen]

How would you know if you had a utopian society yet?

Who gets to define what is a "thought of evil"? Is freeing slaves evil, or against the natural order of things? What about considering interracial marriage? Or living an openly homosexual lifestyle?

Would it be better if the police put a stop to it before such people started doing such horrible things? Locked up people before they had a chance to make their morally corrupting case to society? Suppressed discussion so that ideas could not be thrashed out, improved, built upon and weaponised in a memetic fashion to spread like some awful disease through the minds of right-thinking folks?

We may think we're incredibly moral, because we've got to the point where we now recognise these past beliefs as wrong, even if we're still a few steps from getting everyone to accept them. But for those growing up now who realise the importance of LGBT rights, the generation before you were convinced of their morality for recognising mixed-marriage rights over their predecessors, who were convinced of their morality for recognising the evil of slavery over their predecessors.

If history is any guide at all, it's likely there are things which you think are just the natural order, that will in the future be successfully argued to be morally reprehensible. Our descendants will wonder how we ever let ourselves do such things. I've no idea what those things will be; it might be environmental destruction, or carnivorism, laws/mores against public nudity. But I'm pretty sure we want those thinkers out there, as we're no where near utopia yet.

[summerdown2]

> But perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way, maybe a utopian civilization would consider thoughts of evil, thoughts of crime and intentions to harm others as a justifiably punishable event.

Maybe. And yet, I seem to remember reading an essay a while ago about the difference between cities and companies, and why some cities have lasted for thousands of years, whereas most companies are lucky to make twenty. The answer in the author's opinion was a tolerance for dissent.

So, you may be right about stopping violence, but do you think those in charge of surveillance will stop there? Because I do wonder whether, in a world where thoughtcrime is a real possibility, things might not get end up in a permanently rigid status quo, rather than the free-flowing and ever-changing conversation that we call culture.

[7952]

Strangely the creeping Orwellian scenario may be the most optimistic view to take. If the monitoring is unnecessary it can be rolled back one day. The threat can be removed.

But what if the monitoring really is vitally important in preventing violent crime? The government will loose the spying capability soon enough as technology and understanding evolves. What will happen then?

[Ygg2]

> But what if the monitoring really is vitally important in preventing violent crime? The government will loose the spying capability soon enough as technology and understanding evolves. What will happen then?

We can look at data in regions where monitoring is most egregious and see whether improvements correlate with monitoring, or if they could be explained by other factors.

[guelo]

Civilization has gotten along fine for thousands of years without all-pervasive electronic surveillance.

[walterbell]

In R.A. Lafferty's Hugo & Nebula nominated "Past Master", a time machine is used to retrieve Sir Thomas More to help fix their attempted utopian society, http://irosf.com/q/zine/article/10456

"Thomas's initial reaction to Astrobe is perplexity: how can the people of Cathead reject happiness when they have been offered it on a platter? Why choose misery over a golden life? The people of the slums inform Thomas that a miserable life is better than no life at all. As he asks questions and explores this brave new world, Thomas discovers that the best people on the planet, those of finest intellect and judgment, have migrated to Cathead."

[arcadeparade]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon