The Banality of Surveillance(benn.substack.com) |
The Banality of Surveillance(benn.substack.com) |
Just imagine how it'll be now... for decades you'll be fending off some hidden receipts from an IG comment you made.
I worked remotely, so planned to simply do work for half the time I was there. As such, I brought a proper monitor, keyboard, etc. with me.
As I have my 20" boxed up LCD panel in my arms in the immigration/customs line at Schipol, a Dutch immigration officer comes up and asks me what the monitor is for. I of course like an idiot said "staying here for a couple months for a vacation, but I plan to work some while I'm here!". I got infinitely lucky with the officer in question - she very quickly told me I was incorrect and that the monitor was to play video games and that's what I was going to tell the immigration officer at the passport desk.
One of those early lessons learned that I'm sure looking young, naive, and stupid helped me in a way that I could not get away with in my mid-40's these days.
What cracked me up was driving back late one evening, arriving back at the Canadian side. The agent asked where I'd been, and I mentioned the town just behind me.
"Oh, _meetings_, eh?" wink
Which proves how much theater there is in security and that laws are not there to be blindly followed, but to enable the state to pursue its perceived enemies
Some of the dimensions they store are prosody, intensity, timbre, non-verbal vocalizations, pauses, timing and emotional inflection. In other words, another large layer of information on top of just the prompt text. This data doesn't get translated into text, it goes straight into a speech-to-speech model.
It strikes me that from just a few minutes of such data and the associated semantic content, an AI can assemble a detailed and accurate emotional/psychological dossier of any user, on demand. In the hands of a federal agent it would be a powerful tool to impose their department's will, or their own. Also it's an ad targeting mother load. And if that were already in place we would have no way to know.
Talking to a machine seems banal already, but the metadata contains an instruction manual on where your buttons are and how to press them.
“The underlying model that brings Grok to life is a voice-to-voice model which understands the expressive range of human speech... The model is able to do this because of how it internally, within a single model, processes speech (including paralinguistic cues) and generates expressive speech output.” https://blog.livekit.io/xai-livekit-partnership-grok-voice-agent-api/You don't have to buy mouse click data on every John Smith when you've handed the handful of media empires to your buddies, reporters are jailed, dissidents are killed and CEOs willingly bend the knee to make a quick buck.
The most precious we normal people have are our attention and the most value is attached to our wallets. Guess what, we part with both when we willingly watch ads.
You don't need an LLM writing 600 lines of SQL, because Google already has a billion lines of code in production, serving ads. Stealing your attention when you should be meeting friends, or meeting a family member's gaze.
For the average person it's the exact opposite. They have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.
If anything, they get laid less than before Facebook, less than ever, if the official polls are to be trusted...
But the concept is broadly applicable, and certainly applies here. The point is that evil actions at the state level depend on ordinary people who conform to expectations without thinking about the societal consequences of what they’re doing.
The only way out is to unplug. Something I am realizing is very hard to do mainly because of my conditioning. My goal it to become the next Jesus (in the human sense), or the next St. Francis.
Just like my compulsive intent to keep coming back here to make these useless comments. What does it really do for me?
The capitalists (and you cannot tel me this is not because of capitalism) have ruined everything about the internet.
My goal: A flip phone (with a faraday bag) and a laptop with no connection to me at all, just to use to look up things, like a library.
The same thing it does for everybody else: gives them some rare in real life engagement in discussing topics they care about, and subtitutes for interested friends.
Facebook actually implemented this as a user facing feature.
I think it was very early days, but I used it, it was fucking creepy, and everyone hated it. I think Facebook probably removed it because it drove people away. It made you feel like a creep for checking on your friends page.
Posted on Substack