Can We Avoid a Surveillance State Dystopia?

Moreover the present is always being rewritten by government and the media. This is something that's been apparent to a lot of people for some time. Not only did Noam Chomsky write extensively on this subject but Hilaire Belloc wrote more or less the same thing about newspapers in 1918 in "The Free Press".[1]

One of the key things Belloc pointed to was the necessity of non-corporate, decentralized, topical, and outright propagandist press to counteract the effects of corporate newspapers. I think he'd be very pleased to see the current blogosphere. So the author's points about the necessity of decentralized technology actually go quite a bit further than the points he makes.

On the other hand though, it seems to me that what this shows is that there is no bright line between dystopia and normal life. By some measures, of course, we are already in a surveillance state dystopia. So I am not sure the question is meaningful.

The major problem that makes the dystopian elements of the present hard to dislodge however are the twin facts that:

1. American culture is very much focused on impersonal institutions of scale (central government, big corporations), and individualism, and this isolates individuals, denying them support break free from the impersonal institutional bonds that we have created in substitute for the bonds of family, neighborhood, and community (which were stronger when I was growing up and are stronger where I am living right now, Indonesia).

2. We place our primary protections of the individual not in social ties (common everywhere else) but in documents which purport to restrain the central government (namely the Bill of Rights).

My view is that until we can start focusing on building stronger communities, decentralizing government and bringing the power closer to the people, and decentralizing the economy (disfavoring large businesses in favor of small ones) the dystopia will in fact deepen.

[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18018

It is not inevitable. Also all technologies are used by people meaning they are used for good and evil.

I say it is not inevitable for a couple reasons. First, in order to be super-accurate, you have to be able to make inferences based on existing data to a very high probability of correctness. Unfortunately, these inferences are based on hidden assumptions and can't be tested. Therefore you have no way of knowing how accurate the mass surveillance actually is. Worse, the more massive the surveillance becomes, the more of an inkblot you have to work with. As Heisenberg said, "Data does not imply theory."[1] And the more data you have the easier it is to delude yourself into thinking all the conclusions are perfectly accurate because of confirmation bias etc.

So you have solid epistemological reasons that the technology can never become super-accurate.

Additionally deployment isn't inevitable. What's really going on here is that companies are trying to sell products to the government, and Congress is allocating lots of money to buy them. Funding decisions are political and they are not inevitable.

So in my view, this technology creates more problems than it solves (on a good day even), and represents a way for wealthy individuals to get money transferred to them.

[1] Heisenberg, Werner. "Physics and Philosophy"

If mass surveillance does exist, the concern becomes equality of access. Information asymmetry is now the problem. Fear of blackmail is moot when everyone already has access to the information. If we must have technology intruding on our privacy, I would personally prefer a world where everyone can intrude, instead of a select few.

Fully public, mass surveillance is logical extension and conclusion of if-you-have-nothing-to-hide rhetoric.