= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Multiheaded comments on I've had it with those dark rumours about our culture rigorously suppressing opinions - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
Comments (857)
Make that "centralized governments"; there is in fact no logical contradiction between democracy and total surveillance. Generally, in every case where people consider the Hobbesian Leviathan, they forget that Hobbes himself considered a democratically shaped Leviathan to be somewhat inferior but perfectly possible.
I didn't say there was, just that there is a general societal association between surveillance and bad things. (Surveillance -> Secret Police -> Scary governments doing bad stuff).
I imagine if the dominant cultural narrative of the last century was of centralised and authoritarian but benevolent states social attitudes would be a lot different. As it is all those features are lumped together into totalitarianism in the popular consciousness.
This perception makes people unwilling to support/vote/campaign for privacy reducing options even when there is an obvious net benefit (e.g. DNA and fingerprint databases would solve a lot of crimes at minimal cost in western liberal democracies).