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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Sesame Credit: Cool ways to use game mechanics
 
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sitchensis
Mar 4, 2009

A Wizard of Goatse posted:

It's a very old kind of totalitarian state made more efficient by information technology. The major innovation here is where once the state had to rely on agents and snitches to do the same thing with their messy and limited means of information-gathering, now so much day-to-day business has been centralized in a few networks it's reasonably plausible for them to sit back at headquarters and manipulate The System itself as a whole to do the work for them. When every legit transaction goes through a state-accessible electronic network at some stage every transaction (legit or not) is done in the lobby of the secret police's office.

The NSA works on the same principle - the most suffocating police states of the 20th century still had to actually send someone out to physically bug their political enemies' homes and update a wiretap every time they used a different phone, so it was always possible for radicals to go underground or fly under the radar or get their straight friends to handle stuff that needed to pass official scrutiny. Now the whole world's correspondence passes through the state's systems, everywhere you go you're phoning home to them yourself, and they can let invisible algorithms that never sleep and can handle hundreds of individuals anywhere in the world at once do the work of identifying you and following you around.

God this is depressing. Can we even call this a totalitarian state? It seems to me that all of this is the state in service of capital.

* # ¿ Dec 17, 2015 20:38
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# ¿ May 10, 2024 00:54
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sitchensis
Mar 4, 2009

Fojar38 posted:

Please expand on how state surveillance is in service of capital.

The revolution won't be Tweeted

* # ¿ Dec 17, 2015 20:50
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Sesame Credit: Cool ways to use game mechanics