Consider the relatively recent societal normalization of same-sex relationships and the recreational use of marijuana. Over the decades, those ideas slowly progressed from being both immoral and illegal, to moral but still illegal, and finally to both moral and legal. But in order for any of that to happen, there had to be a counterculture that was able to experiment and eventually demonstrate to the world that morality could change over time. To the extent that AI surveillance chills this sort of experimentation in public or in private, social progress becomes impossible.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
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The scariest thing about our surveillance culture is how we internalize it and change our behaviour without even realizing it. The other scariest thing is that it stops us talking to one another, so that we can never organize to improve the dystopia we live in.
Snowden told everybody in 2013 that they already possessed a panopticon. Imagine how much better it is now. And just in time for fascism!
No, he didn't.
He specifically always made special effort to tell people that we have tools to communicate securely because they do not have a panopticon.
What Snowdon blew the whistle on was that they were trying to build an illegal panopticon
I'm sure it's already chilling progress - at least at work.
You are basically getting a social credit score at work already. I have to laugh when cons talk about how we don't want to be like China and have a "social credit system"; meanwhile, they either don't know or don't connect that you already have one in most jobs.
For example see:
fuck that's stupid. I'm sure a centralized system to categorize and score people's emotional states would never be misused or applied prejudicially!
if these shills get their way, a computer program written by a metaphorical 'group of chimps with typewriters' will now decide the direction of everyone's professional lives. brilliant.
we're all gonna get marked "unhirable" because we didn't use enough emojis when replying to middle management
Oh, I'm sure they are already being abused on the daily. You cannot put that kind of data into the hands of typical management and expect anything else.
And as far as I know, there is next to zero protections from this in the United States. The law has been on the side of employers when it comes to any communication in the workplace ever since I entered the workforce - the rule is pretty much, when you use company devices for anything, they own your ass. Same thing when you walk through the front door. Any ideas you may have about "free speech" or privacy....LOL.
I don't even know what the "revolt" at Meta could even consist of when their employees were aghast that their employer was spying on them. Duh, it's happening already, nearly everywhere as far as I know, and the United States laws are not going to protect the worker. Of course, I'm sure they are all Libertarian-leaning and think they don't need a union, because, gosh, why would they want something like any kind of power? They can negotiate against a megacorp all by their lonely selves with their super macho ninja coding skillz or whatever.
They are for sure trying to track people on bullshit "KPIs", and tracking every little thing via "agile software" like Jira or monitoring all the stats on things like GitHub. That's all pretty basic. And going back decades I've heard of instances where someone in IT is asked to "pull emails between so and so" or "I want to see the chat activity from so and so". And not because they were worried about some kind of compliance issue or the like...no, they wanted to know what these people were saying about a manager(s).
So, yeah, they are going to be using these tools, and if the "AI" says someone has a "negative attitude", that's one more excuse to fire them.
Wells that fucked. Last job used Zoom and Teams and this one I work at currently uses Slake and Zoom.
It's like people wrote eight years ago about how Slack was never going to offer the plebes end-to-end encryption, because why the hell would employers want that? Lots of the clueless, again, think it's about the users. Oh, to be so young and naive again...
Anyway, we've been using Slack where I'm at for quite a while. I'm sure every single BigCorp chat/video offering has a way to plugin in AI spyware to measure the sentiment of their ~~captive audience wage slaves~~ employees.
We also have Teams and Zoom in addition to Slack. I have zero expectation of privacy for any of them.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/why-slack-doesnt-have-end-to-end-encryption-boss/
Well, assholes like Thiel have no use for social progress for all of you great unwashed.
And if we do something wrong – shoplift, litter, jaywalk, you name it – the system will notice, retain it, tie it to your official government record, communicate that fact to you, and provide real-time alerts to any relevant authorities … and maybe also to the general public.
No, it won't.
It will confuse you with others and others with you.
So, sure, it'll have a rap sheet of all the times it thinks you did something bad, but many of the entries in this system will be surveillance of other people misattributed to you