"My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples…"

"For all those reasons, you need surveillance to catch criminals and restore trust…"

We're making a huge assumption here that surveillance takes it down to less than 1%. You'd hate to be trading freedom for nothing at all.

> My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples in order to destroy a high trust society.

Counter-counter argument, it doesn’t actually matter what the proportion is, rather the perception of it. The likelihood of non-white collar crime affecting your life has dropped dramatically in all of our lifetimes. The chance of being affected by white collar crime has skyrocketed - who hasn’t been solicited for a class action lawsuit?

Which leads me to my hotter take: America isn’t turning into a low trust society because of crime and brown people (white replacement theory), it’s turning into a low trust society because of white collar crime, grifting, private equity takeovers, naked corruption, prosperity gospel, fuck-you got-mine, exurban development, oversized car culture, etc etc etc.

The thing is I think if you give people the choice between a 0.001% chance of getting murdered on the street or a 100% chance of being surveilled 24/7 you will find that people will take their chances with the murderers

On-point surveillance by people would be a good start; I do not see why it needs to start with endless surveillance by machines run by a private company.

It is not about percentage of the population, but about whether the bad actor rise to the top.

> The other problem you have is that a lot of crime tends to be financially rewarding, so if left unchecked it will tend to grow over time as the criminals get richer and expand their operations.

It already happened. The president, Miller, Karp, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Musk, hell the company named Flock are all bad actors who got richer over time and expanded their operations.

I see no problem with every private citizen having a video camera that records everything around their home or business, and when a crime happens the police can solicit the recordings.

Also it is fine if such a private surveillance system alerts the police when a crime is in progress.

What I find completely unacceptable is to have such ubiquitous surveillance means that are networked and available to the police or other such institutions for real-time surveillance of whatever they choose. It is absolutely certain that whoever will have access to the centralized control will abuse of this power.

I have grown up in a country occupied by foreign invaders, who have installed in power a government of their choice, who have robbed and murdered whomever they wanted, and then for almost a half of century nobody could do anything against them, because everybody was under surveillance, so that no opposition could be organized.

Americans do not really understand how frustrating it is to live in this way and they fail to recognize how quickly their country becomes more and more similar to the former "communist" countries.

"You know how they deal with crime down there?" Crosby asked me.

"Nope."

"They just don't have any crime down there. 'Papa' Monzano's made crime so damn unattractive, nobody even thinks about it without getting sick. I heard you can lay a billfold in the middle of a sidewalk and you can come back a week later and it'll be right there, with everything still in it."

"Um."

"You know what the punishment is for stealing something?"

"Nope."

"The hook," he said. "No fines, no probation, no thirty days in jail. It's the hook. The hook for stealing, for murder, for arson, for treason, for rape, for being a peeping Tom. Break a law—any damn law at all—and it's the hook. Everybody can understand that, and San Lorenzo is the best-behaved country in the world."

"What is the hook?"

"They put up a gallows, see? Two posts and a cross beam. And then they take a great big kind of iron fishhook and they hang it down from the cross beam. Then they take somebody who's dumb enough to break the law, and they put the point of the hook in through one side of his belly and out the other and they let him go—and there he hangs, by God, one damn sorry law-breaker."

Cat's Cradle

There's a glaring lie of omission when Singapore is cited as a "safe society" in a surveillance context without also mentioning that those same surveillance systems are used to aggressively suppress political dissent (https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/sou...).

Super safe society, unless you happen to express disagreement with any part of it. Then, not so safe for you.

So I guess the question is, once America attains a sufficiently pervasive level of surveillance over its citizens, which people are you hoping will be in power forever?

Japan is not a surveillance society.

UK is not a high trust society. If anything the most trusting British people are likely found in places with the least surveillance.

I don't think this is a refutation. You have narrowed the definition of an admittedly soft term like "high trust society" to be an expression of security or perceived security.

But more to the core of the definition of trust. Singapore isn't using trust, it uses control. Which in most contexts are opposed.

Surveillance isn't even important for the formation of a high trust society. On the contrary, with increased surveillance possibilities, formerly high trust societies seem to have degraded.

Saying the UK is a "high trust society" is definitely an interesting choice

That sounds great! Maybe not so great for the occasional person sentenced to death for selling weed, but that's just the price of freedom.

In Singapore, policing does not have the dystopian surveillance thing attached to it, because a large number of police are civilian conscripts. It takes the edge off, when you know that your neighbor's 18 year old kid is working in the police force, rather than some mercenary force

On top of that, the majority of the military consists of civilian conscripts, which arguably holds more power if the system ever goes bad enough to degenerate into martial law

Read up a bit on it. You have numerous signs over the town that state explicitly canning in case of participating in any form of protest that government will consider violent. How that is defined is of course on... government. Read up on how they treat immigrants, its basically serfdom pyramid of massive exploitation on all levels of poor from neighboring countries - confirmed by colleagues living there long term.

Its great little bubble, but not of democracy, or freedom, far from it, rather some moebius-esque utopia of few elites above everybody else. They are also openly racist & xenophobic in their laws, ie in immigration they have to maintain exactly same racial/ethnic split as in the past, so people are granted citizenship on quotas of their ethnicity / skin color (so of course white people are not that welcome, just temporarily tolerated). If this is required to keep everybody in check and behaving nicely, I can easily skip that and raise my children away from such twisted panopticon.

You want an actual long term stable utmost free society for past 800 years and counting? Switzerland. People are nice and tolerant because they are nice and not from the fear of repressions on every step. 30% of residents are foreigners yet society doesn't boil in internal conflicts, I'd say by far the best managed immigration I ever saw. One has to experience it personally to understand the massive difference compared to most of the world. Tons of guns yet very little gun violence (compared to US non-existent). All aspects of society work at least as good or more often better than rest of Europe/world.

Those societies were created way before the level of survelliance modern AI pushes

What they were saying is they prefer people to behave because they want to be good people which are part of a good society than to be good people simply as a byproduct of fear of jail.

Does making millions in profit from bitcoin while being a president or getting private jets from other countries count into that?

Because it is naive to think that the people with the power of absolute surveillance would ever permit “sousveillance”. People already survey atrocities committed by regimes and reporting them does less and less every year.

Camera towers may benefit the populace in the short term, but eventually they will be used as a choke collar.

Think of every story, historical or fiction, where a rebellion or resistance struggled against entrenched power. Now imagine that with constant surveillance everywhere. The story gets really short: “then they were all rounded up”.

There are high trust communities all over America. Fewer every year.

This looks very interesting, thank you for the recommendation.

Authoritarian are not high trust. And people who call for authoritarian societies are not calling for high trust. They call for control and subjugation.

> It's why we flirt with/fall face first into authoritarianism every few decades.

Did the US or any advanced democracy "flirt with/fall face first into authoritarianism" a few decades ago?

>The idea that surveillance undermines high trust societies seems insane to me.

Only because, I'm betting, that you view street surveillance as something that binds others, but not yourself. I doubt you would make this argument for any other kind of surveillance.

If Microsoft were to record everything you did on your PC, would you consider Windows the "high trust" OS community vs Linux? Of if your employer began surveilling all your devices (including personal ones) to ensure you weren't stealing from the company, would you consider your company one of "high trust"?

I don't deny that surveillance can reduce crime, but the idea that surveillance undermines high trust societies is relatively straightforward

No, we had high trust societies before the shitty surveillance tech. There are quite a few effects that undermine it even and this tech is part of the reason why.

It is part of the problem, not part of a solution.

100% Agree. And I'll go further saying the highest trust societies I've lived in have been medium-size, rural/suburban. Everyone is in the social/economic class, similar traditions/backgrounds, similar church etc...

I don't think surveillance prevents crime. Not having so many poor people prevents crime.

Some people will always be antisocial due to tendencies and possibly mental illness, but having a society that is so rich and yet has so many poor people as the USA will of course create criminals. No amount of cameras will solve that.