The US will tend to totalitarianism with probability 1

Great Debates
1

I was watching Frontline tonight about domestic spying by the NSA, CIA, etc, and they were talking about the fact that all of our day-to-day actions leave electronic trails that can be traced, more and more places are getting video cameras (e.g. they are nearly ubiquitous in Las Vegas), and the data mining capabilities of computers keep increasing.

The logical conclusion is that, at some point, our every move will be either monitored, or at least “monitorable” (i.e. will be able to be monitored, if the government so chooses). For example, imagine “Google Earth”, but instead of static images taken months ago, it will be live video of any spot on earth.

All is well and good, if the government is benign and is working under a democratic framework with checks and balances.

However, as soon as someone gets a hold on power and establishes a totalitarian regime (either abruptly through some type of coup, or slowly, each step taken “for our protection against terrorism”), it seems to me that there is no way that people will ever be able to become organized to overthrow this government.

In the old days, even if someone succeeded in establishing totalitarian control of a country, people were still able to move around undetected and organize against the regime (to a degree, of course). This meant that there was at least some theoretical chance of someday overthrowing it.

But, in some future era where our every move and action is monitored, as soon as a totalitarian regime is established, it will be there indefinitely.

And since, the probability of someone establishing a totalitarian regime in any given year is non-zero, with probability 1 someone will do so at some point in the future.

So, with probability 1, the US (or any other modern country) will turn into a totalitarian regime and stay that way indefinitely.

Of course, the above is a very hand-wavy argument, but I’d like to get your thoughts on what problems the above argument might have

  1. Do you think we will never enter an era where every movement and action is monitored?

  2. Do you think that, even if (1) happens, no one will ever establish a totalitarian regime in the US?

  3. Do you think that, even if (1) and (2) happen, there will always be a way for people to sufficiently organize to be able to overthrow the totalitarian regime?

2

Well, there’s also a nonzero probability for a totalitarian government to fall to dissension from inside, wouldn’t you say? So I wouldn’t say it would necessarily last forever, though that’s perhaps stronger than you wanted to say in the first place, anyway.

3

Yes. Even all the technology that the hypothetical regime may have can not save it. Government, in all its forms, is inherently inefficient. As the regime expands it will need to employ more and more underlings as it tries to envelop everyone under its umbrella (being totalitarian and all). Since people are people, the first thing to happen will be that the lower echelons get lazy and inefficient. The monopolies that have to be created for the government to bring the populace under its control almost guarantee workforce apathy and low production brought on by the lack of competition. This creates the economic problems commonly seen in the old Soviet style systems, but the same should hold true for any type of totalitarianism after it reaches a certain stage. Also, top down economic policies create fertile ground for the black market to grow. This in turn causes the second problem for the regime: corruption.

Even with all the whiz bang technology the government possesses, once bribery becomes a common facet of the economy, even the people who are in charge of all that whiz bang technology will be willing to have their palms greased. How do you throw the new mafia that developed in the black market in prison if the secret police are on their payroll? If the mid level people who run that whiz bang tech are on the take, what good is the tech to begin with?

It all starts to crumble when the corruption reaches the upper echelons. There’s no longer any power to be gained by leaning on the peons, so officials start to develop their own little fiefdoms and cease cooperating with one another as they used too. No checks and balances, and there is too much power to be had by trying to climb up. (Hell, you didn’t just see this in the USSR, but Nazi Germany. There was even an assassination attempt on Hitler) The head of the secret police knows the head of the energy department is planning a coup, but Energy has managed to put a few generals in his back pocket with a combination of threats withholding fuel from the military and payoffs from the vast fortune he required selling fuel on the black market. At the same time, Transportation is planning to take over Agriculture by simply choking off their supplies.

Everbody’s spying on everybody, but nobody’s watching the little guy. Chaos! Civil War! Barabarians at the gate!

Technology may change, but people don’t.

4

North Korea seems to be doing fine (totalitarianism-wise) and they don’t even have the technology I was talking about in the OP.

With such technology you need fewer people among the masses “working for you” to spy on their neighbors, so the system should be easier to maintain than existing and prior regimes.

5

Technology cuts both ways. I could see “Stainless Steel Rats”, experts at hacking/ phreaking and using high tech illegal hardware and software to beat the system.

6

i believe that governments tend toward totalinarianism irrespective of technology. The more you snoop the easier your job of maintaining what you consider to be proper law and order and national security becomes. Incidents that threaten law and order and national security always arise and a little snooping in the dire emergency is accepted by the courts and the people. Once that precedent has been set, the next law and order emergency will require just a little more advanced snooping because the previous amount of snooping was obviously insufficient.

It’s a tendency to ratchet up the governmental intrusion and the only defense is for the people to be watchful and throw out at the earliest opportunity those politicians and their supporters who show a tendency toward secrecy and intrusive government.

7

1.) Yup. Atleast I have to admit the desire and possibility will exist. However:

2.) Stupidity and human nature, as already noted, are working against this

3.) Without a doubt. Unless TV and Hollywood have lied to us, all it takes is one good hero and a down-trodden filthy mass.

8

I don’t see how video cameras lead to totalitarianism. I lived in London for a while, and there were video cameras just everywhere. You couldn’t swing a dead cat in the City without knocking over a CCTV. While this fact seems to completely freak out many Americans, but I really didn’t find many Britons who cared very much about it. I think most grasp the following realities: 1) the more cameras you have, the less likely that someone is sitting there watching every one of them and tracking the individual movements of millions of people in realtime; 2) the main use of video cameras and any other technology that captures such huge volumes of data is to archive it in case it is needed for future examination; 3) odds are that the people reviewing the videos and those in charge of whatever investigations share the same democratic principles shared by the general population; 4) people don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy when they are walking down a public street in full view of everyone; 5) the public’s tolerance for more invasive forms of monitoring (like wiretapping) ebbs and flows, and simply because it may be on the rise now isn’t a good predictor of a trend (otherwise the excesses of the CIA in the 1970s will have already lead to wiretapping every phone line in America).

As I said, I disagree with the probability 1 bit, but I think any totalitarian regime that takes power takes power indefinitely. But indefinitely does not mean permanently. I don’t know if you were using the two terms interchangeably or trying to be dramatic.

I guess I’m just incredibly skeptical that there’s any kind of firm link between the advance of technology and people’s willingness to surrender democratic values. Heck, if anything, I think the advance of technologies like the internet in the last decade or so has been of great benefit to democratic principles, not a threat to them.

9

Except the technology goes both ways.

Video cameras can be used by the powerful to spy on the average people. But we average people can use video cameras to spy on the powerful. In the old days a politician making a racial slur wouldn’t be a story. Nowadays you’ll have video of that guy making the racial slur, and it plays on the national news. When the head of some corporation cooks up an illegal plan, there are electronic records to follow that can prove what he did. When a cop beats the crap out of a homeless guy for no reason, a video camera will show that he was unjustified.

The answer is that data gathering may make totalitarian government more powerful, but it makes liberal democracy more powerful as well. And since totalitarian government depends on secrecy but liberal democracy depends on transparency, ubiquitous data gathering benefits liberal democracy much more than it benefits totalitarianism.

10

I wouldn’t be so sure of that. North Korea has only been around what? 50 years or so? That’s not a whole lot of time, yet their infrastructure is already crumbling. The point of my post was that ,given time, totalitarian governments fall apart. Do you honestly think North Korea can sustain their current policies for another 50 years without falling apart? They’ve already exhibited my problem #1: poverty and food shortages, and my problem #2: corruption. It’s only been two generations. Give’em time.

11

that’s easy for you to say. You don’t live in North Korea. The fact that a totalitarian government will fall apart sooner or later doesn’t help the people who live there now.

I think the prevention of a gradual slide into a more intrusive government is by throwing the rascals out often enough that they can’t get entrenched. I’m not a term-limits-by-law supporter but it doesn’t lake more than three or so terms before legislators begin to get uppity.

12

And what do you imagine growing out of the ashes of North Korea? It seems to me that authoritarian governments are the default for humanity and when one collapses for whatever reason it is most likely to be replaced by another. Or maybe some quasi-free but not really state, like Iran.

As for the OP, I don’t see the United States becoming a totalitarian society in my lifetime. I’m sure the President will become more and more powerful, the Congress weaker and weaker, and some shocking things will occur, but the day to day life of the average person will more or less stay the same. We may lose more rights, but there are certain lines which can’t be crossed. The entrenched interests are too smart to screw up things that much (I hope).

13

Waitaminnit. Let’s be careful with our terms. A totalitarian government is, by definition, a government which owns or controls nearly everything in society, including the economy, and which does not tolerate the existence of a “civil society” independent of the state. A government that simply knows everything about everybody is not necessarily a totalitarian government; neither is a government which cannot be overthrown or effectively resisted. In fact, a government that can be effectively resisted hardly qualifies as a government at all.

14

And also note a paradox.

Totalitarian governments are brutal and repressive, not because they are strong, but because they are weak.

An authoritarian government that had the power to track and observe the behavior of all citizens has no need for mass arrests or brutal repression. They don’t have to worry about being overthrown, because any such attempt is futile. So they can let people argue and complain and whine and do whatever they like, as long as they don’t directly take actions that threaten the power of the government.

15

Or, worse yet, an ineffectual state like Iraq’s.

16

They probably know what you’re gonna do/think next.

17
  1. The more data to parse the harder it is to parse
  2. As surveillance technology advances so does the ability to fake it
  3. The cameras watch the watchers too
  4. It’s a cliche how poorly different organizations communicate between one another
  5. False data is implanted in the system all the time
  6. The government is made up of factions that watch each other
18

:confused: Hitler’s state wasn’t weak. Neither was Stalin’s.

19

I’m guessing he meant “weak” in the sense of “brittle”, of being literally unable to allow any criticism of government policies, however innocent, because the whole structure would come crashing down like it did in the USSR in 1990.

In addition to what BrainGlutton said, you can also define totalitarianism as a government devoted to imposing an ideology.

20

No…not a chance. The processing power alone is beyond your comprehension. One of my customers who I do a lot of consulting for is a video security customer. I build out their network systems for their newer IP based monitoring networks. Even the top of the line best systems take a LOT of bandwidth to get any kind of resolution thats usable…not to mention tons of disk space even with compression. Not to mention that when you scale up even more how do you keep track of every movement and action? We are talking about millions or even hundreds of millions of people. Think about how many people it would take to realistically monitor all those people in real time. Even trying to go back through the archived video (assuming you actually could have both the processing AND storage to monitor everywhere all the time :dubious: ) would take a hell of a lot of time…even using state of the art software.

‘ever’ is a loose term…and potentially a long ass time. I don’t think that a totalitarian regime will ‘ever’ be established in the US in my lifetime (which is ‘ever’ for me). And I think that IF such a regime is established it will be independent from video monitoring technology. One does not lead to the other IMHO.

Certainly. Again, you have an unrealistic view of the technology and how it would scale up in such a massive system. If you tried to monitor EVERYTHING (i.e. had it not only in every public place but private places too…AND you tried to have more than a few hours of archive so you could search back through it…AND you actually had the software that would let you search through the data in some kind of useable time frame…etc) you would end up overwhelming your personnel if nothing else (this is assuming you met all the other technology blocks I mentioned :dubious: ). People would easily find a way, even using such low tech approaches as simply disabling or damaging the cameras, yanking out the infrastructure, etc. Casually walk by keeping your face averted (or wearing a disguise) and then painting over the bubble or camera lens, say…or hitting the housing really hard with a large stick (camera’s are pretty delicate, espeically the newer IP based ones…the older analog ones are a bit more robust). This doesn’t even get into higher tech solutions.

In order to make your riduculously large and expensive (and frankly impossible) monitoring network ALSO safe from these kinds of things would take even MORE money and technology. And still someone would find a way to get around or break it. The reason why these camera systems work now is that we pretty much go along with it…we don’t care so we aren’t actively TRYING to break them. Even so, people manage to do a certain level of casual harm anyway. Imagine if people (especially guys like me who actually know how this stuff works) ACTIVELY decided that this stuff pissed us off?

-XT