Tech authoritarianism is a useful name for a political and social arrangement in which digital tools give a government, sometimes acting alone and sometimes working alongside powerful private companies, an extraordinary ability to observe, sort, influence, restrict, and ultimately control the people it governs. The phrase means something more specific
Over the past four days, I have argued that AI and surveillance technology could reshape the relationship between citizens and their government more than most laws passed in our lifetimes. A progression is worth keeping in mind. Surveillance leads to identification, identification to classification, classification to prediction, prediction to restriction,
A future surveillance state may not need to build a surveillance network. Private industry has already built a great deal of one. Our phones know where we go. Advertising networks learn what interests us. Social platforms record who we know. Connected cars generate location and driving behavior. Apps collect the
The most efficient surveillance state is not the one that arrests the most people. It is the one that rarely needs to. When people believe their activity might be examined someday, something quiet happens. They begin adjusting on their own. Maybe you skip the demonstration. Maybe you decide not to