My counter argument is that you only need 1% of the population to be bad apples in order to destroy a high trust society. Hell, even a single serial killer on the loose will make a lot of people too afraid to walk alone at night. One or two burglars can be responsible for 50% of the burglaries in a town. And so in and so forth.

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.

For all those reasons, you need surveillance to catch criminals and restore trust even if 99% of the population are good people.

"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.