Okay, so all Western societies are bound to go surveillance state in near future, unchecked by judicial forces and social credit systems to top it off. It will happen and we can only postpone it.
What is the response to that of the technologically competent segment of society? Will this give birth to a rogue cyberpunk culture of hackers and cowboys? Or are we facing an era resembling a black mirror episode with smiles and flowers on the bright side and secret prisons beneath?
> What is the response to that of the technologically competent segment of society?
Cynically and probably realistically? A lot of them are busy implementing them either enthusiastically or “just following orders”.
> Will this give birth to a rogue cyberpunk culture of hackers and cowboys? Or are we facing an era resembling a black mirror episode with smiles and flowers on the bright side and secret prisons beneath?
Almost everybody I met working in IT doesn't care about such political and societal developments and is happy as long as there is steady supply of exciting gadgets.
> Likely both :(
These scenarios are indeed not mutually exclusive. But in the cyberpunk fantasy the counter culture would be more visible and also accessible for outsiders. Like having your social credit score increased by some hackers hanging out in a Chatsubo hidden in a dark alleyway in exchange for a couple of illegal chips. In the black mirror version it would be completely hidden and super dangerous to even speak or think about it.
You cannot fix society’s problems through technical means, every technology workaround around a bad law can be countered by legal/judicial controls.
Invasive conservative policies always see upticks in times of social upheaval. We live in a time with a high rate of change, and people want stability and control, and vote for politicians and policies that deliver that.
Make people feel safe and stable and they’ll stop pushing for laws to control other people’s lives.
Not sure what society's problems are you hinting at, but private communication is just a technical problem and has technical soultions. Even if it turns out to be a bit of a cat/mouse game in practice. Technical solutions often work on individual level, work right now, and work even if majority of people don't care to implement the political soultion.
If competent individuals will want private communication, they will have it regardless of what minor distopia EU politicians will dream up.
You absolutely can get around restrictive laws through technical means, that's why buying illegal drugs online is safer and more convenient than even before.
> and social credit systems to top it off. It will happen and we can only postpone it.
What social credit systems are you talking about specifically? Maybe I live under a rock, but I haven't heard anything about something like that in EU or Europe.
SCHUFA for Germany. They want to get your bank payments next. If your score is bad (which can be if you live in a neighbourhood which is "bad") you can't get loans or other contracts like for mobile data.
If it's based in part on where you live rather than your history of paying bills on time, debt to income ratio, and net worth, it's not just a credit score.
Actually credit scorer like Schufa and similiar "pre-sorters" have been severely limited with the EuGH judgement from December 2023. Another win for the GDPR.
The new battleground is now the "essential" part of the GDPR, i.e. what pre-sorting is essential to arrive at a decision and what not. I guess we will see quite a few cases before the courts...
Currently they are somewhat hidden. When GDPR came out in force, I tried removing my name, phone number and address from all kinds of public places, and I also found some local company that collects personal and behavioral information on people and provides it to other institutions to asses whether they want to do business with you or not. (banks, etc.)
They gave me the results of their algorithm for me personally, but refused to describe the algorithm. Results were kinda non-sense, but when I wanted them deleted, they told me that I may have trouble in the future with their clients, due to lack of information on me in their systems. Probably a scare tactic, but still annoying and concerning.
depends on how you define it. in my book a SCS requires that what impacts the score is disconnected from what is impacted by it. the Punkte are just impacting your driver's license. the Schufa score can lower your chances to get an apartment just because you had problems with a cellphone provider.
Paying a phone bill and paying rent are close enough to the same kind of thing that it's rational to conclude someone who pays late or fails to pay one of those might also be delinquent on the other. A score based on bill payment history is just a credit score, not a social credit score.
Maybe not exactly the same as China's, but the "common understanding" that your internet persona must be tied to your identity, and that this identity can be scored based on a bunch of criteria. - or that how you spend your money must be trackable and traceable.
It will begin to grow out of the places that are already used this way: things like insurances, then will grow towards "securities" such as mortgages ("where do you spend money, does it look suspicious to us?"), and afterwards to "luxuries" such as air travel. Eventually nearly everything will require submission of financial documents and social profiles for nearly everything and only when that's the case: with a whole host of people wasting time on re-validation of the same information and a huge bureaucratic mess; will someone come along and give it a government sponsored name and a centralised point of access and scoring. - and it will be sold as being better than what came before, and it will be.
This is how other forms of centralised identification have grown over time, so I'm not pretending to have prescient knowledge of the future.
This "inevitable" spiel is bad for discourse. There are absolutely ways to stop this, and even delaying should be considered is valuable for anyone who believes this is a bad end result.
It's one thing to be negative, other to act like everything is determined and resistance is futile. By saying things can't possibly be changed, we make it harder to change them.
I don't disagree with the gist of your analysis; the forces you describe exist, and they work towards surveillance. They can still be opposed and curtailed in a number of ways.
> What is the response to that of the technologically competent segment of society? Will this give birth to a rogue cyberpunk culture of hackers and cowboys?
Do China and Russland have these people? Not more than anywhere else.
What is the response to that of the technologically competent segment of society? Will this give birth to a rogue cyberpunk culture of hackers and cowboys? Or are we facing an era resembling a black mirror episode with smiles and flowers on the bright side and secret prisons beneath?