Think about the most notorious authoritarian regimes. Third Reich, GDR , USSR, Mao's China. They had relatively weak surveillance capacity. Secret police had to personally spy on the target and manually install bugs/taps. Technology was primitive and error prone. Most casual conversations were less vulnerable to spying. Rural people were relatively safe. Private conversations could be easily held in secret (e.g. walk outside, play a record).

Also consider resourcing, the manpower, money, tools, electricity devoted to surveillance back then compared to today

How about today? Where could you venture in secret without being tracked? How could you hold a private conversation? Your face & license plates are constantly tracked, along with your personal phone, laptop , watch, fitness tracker, Tire Pressure Management Systems, etc.

If you had to assign a logarithmic authoritarian intensity scale to those regimes, and to today's regimes, how would you rank them? Consider the spying capacity, resources, recording capacity, analytic capacity.

I would put today's regimes many orders of magnitude more severe.

what do you think?

Scary stuff. But if we only use mass facial-recognition to catch “the bad guys” then that’s OK, right? It’s not totalitarian or authoritarian at all, right? When a majority of voters want it, that’s democracy, right?

My head hurts.

[1] https://news.met.police.uk/news/arrest-landmark-for-met-offi...

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c62lq580696o

[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/met-police-facial-reco...

I'm really scared that technology-enabled authoritarian regimes become much more powerful than they used to be.

In the past decade we had some examples where some countries had really big anti-government movements and protests... and they simply couldn't achieve anything substantial. Iran comes to mind, but I think we also had some in the East of Europe.

And then there are countries like Russia and North Korea (and likely many more) where it looks like (at least from the outside) that mass protests are pretty unlikely, because any kind of political opposition is suppressed before it reaches this level.

Let me give an optmistic counterpoint. We should go back to Gramsci, who observed that the regime holds itself to power mostly by ideological hegemony. If everyone is being wiretapped, it's difficult to construct and maintain ideology that would justify that.

We can imagine something like 1984, where it was only the party (middle) class monitored for thinking. But proletariat (low) class was free to think whatever - because they knew system was bad; they weren't required to pretend.

I guess my point is, the totalitarian system doesn't need widespread surveillance. But it needs believable ideology, which enough people from low and middle class believes to keep the communication barrier between these groups sufficiently closed.

Is the neoliberalism such ideology? Is it something that can offer enough positives to sustain/counterpoint negatives of widespread surveillance? I doubt it.

We can look at recent examples where UK and US tried to control the narrative and failed - Palestine Action, ICE arrests, troop deployments in cities, Tiktok ban.. Despite surveillance, people are not buying the ideology.

Yes, though on the flip side, that power is very fragile now, relying on complex, difficult to maintain technology, with high overhead costs (aggregate, not individual). They can also more easily be turned against their creators or those who believe they have firm control but don't.