And I guarantee that billionaire Larry Ellison blithely believes that he'll be exempt - that all of this surveillance will just be used against the little people. And he's almost certainly right.
He will be exempt. The areas that he lives in and the things that he does will not be tagged as "criminal" on the data system that he has the contract to administer.
That's always how these systems work. You don't worry about getting dragged into the Saudi Consulate and bonesawed to death by intelligence officers when you're MBS, because you're the boss and the guy getting bonesawed is your employee.
For the same reason, you don't worry about getting spied on when you're the one who owns and operates the big surveillance infrastructure because it exists for your benefit.
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. - Ursula K Le Guin
He’s voicing what every billionaire and government official already thinks. Call me pessimist but I believe it’s unavoidable. VPNs are seen as “tools to overcome government bans to access illegal websites” in so many countries, hence getting banned. Access to mainstream websites also getting harder and harder when on VPN. People hosting Tor exit nodes are living in fear of police raids.
Even with some little amount of privacy protecting measures, websites start to act strangely or do not work, and the amount of websites like this increases every day. As protecting our privacy becomes a bigger and bigger effort, more people will give up, strengthening the arguments against it. Eventually we’ll hit big brother levels.
As someone who was born before the age of surveillance capitalism, I can tell you we've hit that level a long time ago. Anybody who thinks society has been running normally for at least the past 15 years is too young to have known what a normal society is.
Exactly. I am elder millennial, and I grew up in Dubai. Back in the 80s and 90s in Dubai the only security cameras that existed were in malls and some supermarkets, and public CCTV by police did not exist. Traffic light cameras to catch people speeding and/or running a red light only got started in the early 2000s. This is one thing that I honestly say that really demarcates the early 2000s from previous times is the fact that the possibility of mass surveillance became a reality only back then. Before that surveillance was mostly disjointed and not at all interconnected. If you had security cameras, then they were on VHS tapes and unless you had the budget to get new tapes regularly, most people would just rewind the tapes and tape over and over, meaning they will degrade fairly quickly, and since most places didn't keep an archive for too long, if something 'suspicious' happened a few weeks prior that you weren't informed about until today, it would be lost since those tapes were likely overwritten, and there is no way to recover that.
The 90s were far from perfect for me. I had a fairly hard time growing up. But I honestly just wish for the dignity of not being on camera 24/7. My apartment building has cameras on all floors and I cannot exit or enter my own apartment without being caught on camera. That is if those cameras are real and not fakes.
Maybe billionaires should be filmed and streamed continuously, since their behavior has such a big impact on the world. If they don't like it maybe we shouldn't allow them to control such incredible assets. I'm sure billionaires have nothing sketchy to hide, right? What we will see is probably how they are hard working people who are not at all detached from normal folks. Right?
So the Panopticon. The hypothetical prison that even people in the 1800s thought would be a human rights violation to build because it was such an extreme form of psychological torture.
Well, we already experience that psychological torture. After 2002/2003, and then especially after 2012, this concept has already burdened our everyday behavior. Browsing behavior, phone calls, texts, emails…every single way we communicate, even face to face meetings with phones in our pockets are open to surveillance. And it’s been shown that it’s been used. Over a decade ago, thanks to Snowden. Now? Things have surely gotten worse and I would bet the farm on behavior very much having changed due these facts.
And not for the better. I think people are actually much less kind to each other when they are aware of being observed. Or worse, deliberately performing for content.
When envisioning the rising of such surveillance system turning our prison into a planet, I had always hoped that the "hackers" in the world would protect us from such.
Robocop... the movie they love but don't realize is a complete mockery of THEM. As a kid I thought that Robo was just cool, but as I got older and rewatched it a few times, I realized just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
You know what's one profound thing I noticed a few years ago that flew over my head? The ED-209 robot does not have a non-lethal apprehension method. It only threatens to kill for non-compliance, and then does so if compliance is not absolute. It has no way of restraining or leading arrested suspects if they comply, and no other method to deal with non-compliant suspects other than to blow them away. No tasers, no net gun, no ropes, no tear gas, no sci-fi 'set for stun' laser beam, nothing.
On top of that another thing I realized is that Dick Jones considered that thing to be street ready to take on law enforcement. From everything to ultra-violent encounters to jaywalking and parking tickets. What it tells me about his mentality is that he would be a HIGHLY successful billionaire today...
I have been hating this man's guts since the mid 90's and somehow it never lets off. Most hateful people manage to become a little bit more likeable as they age. Even this disgusting piece of human refuse Bill Gates might pass for a somewhat okay human being if you wilfully overlook why he truly does philanthropy.
But Larry Ellison? Hell no. He never changes. he's just consistently the worst year after year, decade after decade.
Have you ever asked yourself how it's possible that ALL the fucking ultra-rich almost without exception do philanthropy?
It doesn't make sense: most of those millionaires and billionaires are psychopaths who essentially don't give a shit about their fellow man, acquired their wealth by exploiting and shafting others for the most part, and don't give a shit about how that makes them look: why on Earth would any of them do philanthropy, let alone all of them?
It only starts to make sense when you understand philanthropy is yet another tax loophole.
Private jets .
They’ve all got multiple front yards & none of us can afford pitchforks
But small aeroplanes, those are weak.
& these parasites just looove em
Not only that, he will probably set all the cameras that he is in control of to switch off on command or if he is in the vicinity (in addition to purging the previous 10 minutes or so) so that he is NEVER caught on any camera, period.
Was he on that island discussing whether the billionaires could keep their security detail loyal with shock collars?
Ellison is the world's sixth-richest man with a net worth of $157 billion, according to Bloomberg.
They are really concerned when people tire of their children dying from hunger and easily treatable diseases, we'll be coming for them. But rather than give up an iota of the money generations can never spend for our ecology and things people need to live, they resort to things like shock collars and surveillance states.
"We're going to have supervision," Ellison said. "Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there's a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on."
And if we entertained the idea that this was true and the core focus of this idea (it's not) what do we think the chances are that the "appropriate person" will be one of two things:
Another cop
A subscription service digital surveillance company with that cop as a client that they report back to for "internal investigation", as long as the bill is paid.
Even if his vision for the future worked perfectly (which it won't) and wasn't abused (which it will be, rampantly and immediately), it's still a complete dystopian nightmare lol
What behaviors of Larry Ellison is it going to help change? Hoarding wealth to the detriment of society? Attacking the tech sector with their army of lawyers? AI monitoring billionaires sounds strange, but I'm willing to see how it goes.
“People behave themselves in a panopticon”-rich people
Firstly no, people don’t. Second, they go crazy in one. And third, this basically breaks down the threads of both community and individualism to create a miserable nightmare
How about instead of that, we give the entirety of Lana'i to Native Hawaiians via Hawaiian Home Lands and boot Larry Ellison out into the ocean on a raft or something.
China is preventing people from traveling and working due to their social credit system. Their level of intrusion has no comparison to any other country. The level of intrusion into peoples lives is horrible and unprecedented. Its 1984 made manifest and no amount of garbage arguments is going to to be able to equate their surveillance state with any other country.
This guy's company is planning to build nuclear-powered datacenters btw. Check in with yourself on whether you think that's a good power this responsible human being should have.
Does he realize that we've had AI surveillance systems for years?
Just look at my record of being locked out of my own bank account.
False positives and nothing working became the norm like 10 years ago thanks to putting these dumb AI systems in charge of IPS and "anti-fraud" systems. This is what happens when you put AI in charge of surveillance. Its like that scene from idiocracy when the computer gives him the name "Not Sure" because its a computer.
Easy peasy. Don't want to be captured by surveillance cameras? You are free to not go where the cameras are.
Oh, are you not wealthy? Do you not have land? Do you not have access to food, power, other resources without venturing out to where these cameras are? Get more money and stop whining, you dirty poor.
This is why my infatuation with libertarianism that most teens seem to go through only lasted a week.
Guy has been a fed since day one. Involved in early CIA projects. Bunch of the early contracts he got for Oracle came directly from the CIA. It made the company. They've been pally ever since. Ellison is just the CIA with all the social tact of a tech billionaire.