However, once the cameras go up, you will never ever create one there. High trust requires, well, actual trust. You can’t build real trust in a panopticon just a sickly police state facsimile of it.
Society and progress moves at the speed of trust. Without it many uniquely human and beautiful things disappear.
The other problem you have is that a lot of crime tends to be financially rewarding, so if left unchecked it will tend to grow over time as the criminals get richer and expand their operations.
For all those reasons, you need surveillance to catch criminals and restore trust even if 99% of the population are good people.
> The other problem you have is that a lot of crime tends to be financially rewarding, so if left unchecked it will tend to grow over time as the criminals get richer and expand their operations.
It already happened. The president, Miller, Karp, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Musk, hell the company named Flock are all bad actors who got richer over time and expanded their operations.
This is directly refuted by Singapore, Japan, arguably the UK, and others. Singapore is very interesting to visit. Externally there's somewhat of a narrative of a harsh police state but when I visited I almost never saw a single police officer and they don't have particularly many police officers on a per capita basis (170/100k vs 440/100k in NYC). Most of the policing naturally happens by aid of the surveillance system and a very strong effort to take action to bring justice for any crime. As a result, everyone believes crime will be punished and so you end up with a very safe society. This expectation of crime being taken seriously actually _creates_ trust because you can have high faith that any criminal action someone may take will have consequences and therefore be deterred.
Super safe society, unless you happen to express disagreement with any part of it. Then, not so safe for you.
So I guess the question is, once America attains a sufficiently pervasive level of surveillance over its citizens, which people are you hoping will be in power forever?
UK is not a high trust society. If anything the most trusting British people are likely found in places with the least surveillance.
But more to the core of the definition of trust. Singapore isn't using trust, it uses control. Which in most contexts are opposed.
Surveillance isn't even important for the formation of a high trust society. On the contrary, with increased surveillance possibilities, formerly high trust societies seem to have degraded.
On top of that, the majority of the military consists of civilian conscripts, which arguably holds more power if the system ever goes bad enough to degenerate into martial law
Its great little bubble, but not of democracy, or freedom, far from it, rather some moebius-esque utopia of few elites above everybody else. They are also openly racist & xenophobic in their laws, ie in immigration they have to maintain exactly same racial/ethnic split as in the past, so people are granted citizenship on quotas of their ethnicity / skin color (so of course white people are not that welcome, just temporarily tolerated). If this is required to keep everybody in check and behaving nicely, I can easily skip that and raise my children away from such twisted panopticon.
You want an actual long term stable utmost free society for past 800 years and counting? Switzerland. People are nice and tolerant because they are nice and not from the fear of repressions on every step. 30% of residents are foreigners yet society doesn't boil in internal conflicts, I'd say by far the best managed immigration I ever saw. One has to experience it personally to understand the massive difference compared to most of the world. Tons of guns yet very little gun violence (compared to US non-existent). All aspects of society work at least as good or more often better than rest of Europe/world.
Disagree. High-trust can only exist in the absence of class disparity. You're not going to steal from your neighbor if your neighbor has exactly the same things as you do. You will if he's substantially richer. At the same time, you want to be as rich yourself as possible. Can't have both though.
Countries like Japan or Singapore aren't high-trust societies, they're high-enforcement societies. That's different. In my eyes, high-trust society is a society where law enforcement isn't needed because people self-police because they value the collective, not because of fear of punishment.
A friend of mine never locks his car because he trusts that nobody will steal it even though he knows that once the car is stolen, the chance of recovery is zero because the police simply ignore such reports. This is high-trust society.
Did the US or any advanced democracy "flirt with/fall face first into authoritarianism" a few decades ago?
Only because, I'm betting, that you view street surveillance as something that binds others, but not yourself. I doubt you would make this argument for any other kind of surveillance.
If Microsoft were to record everything you did on your PC, would you consider Windows the "high trust" OS community vs Linux? Of if your employer began surveilling all your devices (including personal ones) to ensure you weren't stealing from the company, would you consider your company one of "high trust"?
I don't deny that surveillance can reduce crime, but the idea that surveillance undermines high trust societies is relatively straightforward
It is part of the problem, not part of a solution.
Some people will always be antisocial due to tendencies and possibly mental illness, but having a society that is so rich and yet has so many poor people as the USA will of course create criminals. No amount of cameras will solve that.
We know how much some billionares hate their jets tracked even though they have small army of bodyguards and three letter agencies spending budget of small country protecting them.
Lets see how comfortable much less protected US politicians gonna be with a fact that everyone knows what time they leave their house by minute, what routes they take and where their cars gonna be.
https://www.instagram.com/theguardrailguy?igsh=ZXAxM2h2ZXFub...
From his bio, he lost his daughter to a guardrail crash and started exposing improperly installed guardrails.
https://tiaonline.org/press-release/tia-announces-publicatio...
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=TIA+EIA+2...
In general, 222H and its predecessors govern engineering standards for:
a. Self supporting lattice/grid/angle steel type towers.
b. Guyed towers
c. Self supporting monopoles of all types (could even theoretically be antenna/solar/camera attachments as additional wind loading on a wood utility pole sunk into the ground, but more commonly, for steel monopoles)
If you're going to put steel monopoles in the public highway ROW they need to be compliant with both AASHTO standards and also the above.
This isn’t about surveillance states, it’s about companies run by idiots.
Just like it's "not their problem" that in a state where certain types of data sharing is not permitted. There's nothing they'll change in the agency's account to prevent it. They'll even offer training on it. Because it's "not their problem".
I'd love for them to build a case more impartially and drop the activist nature of the language they use.
Because city counsel meetings are scheduled at awkward times for anyone employed to actually show up to. So only tech unaware old people show up
I never would have accomplished that if I spent more time reading comments on the internet about all the things we are powerless to do.
Congrats! You decided to give up.
You're now advocating against your best interests and the best interests of everyone you love. Way to go, slugger!
Free society is more important than marginally safer streets.
This relevant post is flagged, but yes, I do think this is a symptom of America crossing the asshole threshold where it pays to outright lie and call your fact checkers insincere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837460
When reporting, if the work of citing standards is done, it makes the report much more likely to go through and have action taken.
Contrary to SF, where I've called the police and provided evidence for an open and shut case, and the cops shrugged their shoulders. Flock cameras won't fix that.
At the same time, on HN we are not even having a conversation about what a sort of tradeoff between surveillance and safety. I live in Seattle, actually just had ~$400 in buckets of paint stolen off my porch just yesterday. Yes, buckets of paint. I had a break in 2 months ago, and that was one of many over the years. This is in U-District, a high crime, but also oddly affluent neighborhood. I absolutely detest the fact that criminals run around the city with impunity committing crime after crime. It makes everyone's life here just a bit more miserable—there are so many people that don't want to move to the city because of the crime; there are all these invisible costs we are paying because of it.
So to think that cameras are such a no-go just doesn't make sense to me. Certainly there are ways to do it ethically. I think south korea is a great example, as well as many european countries. Honestly, I think it's just bizarre that every time Flock gets brought up on HN we all flip the bird to the supposed surveillance state without even discussing the tradeoffs.
Just read this thread, where some people support Flock because they hate crime more than they hate surveillance.
People really don't like public safety crime. Not only will they vote for surveillance, they will vote for public safety authoritarians like Bukele just to stop it.
They are thinking: What good is your abstract notion of freedom if I cannot leave my house at night, and I have to be hyper vigilant of violence?
I don't know the solutions to this. The media clearly plays a big role in this, but regulation of media and social media is its own can of worms.
One thing I am quite confident about is that actually stopping public safety crime without surveillance must be a priority, otherwise it's cart before horse.
You know in future it will really help to catch some criminals stealing copyrighted IP, watching some illegal types of porn or using some sanctioned Chinese LLM.
This drifts into truism with "few," "criminals," "everyone" and "by force" left so vaguely defined.
Now imagine a world in which cops served the masses.
For example, a self-supporting steel monopole in the middle of a field, that if it falls over is going to hit some corn has a very low reliability factor. Even if it has been engineered to withstand the worst case 120 mph wind with extensive rime ice loading.
On the other hand, if you have a 40 or 50 ft steel pole that's within the highway right away and it might fall over into traffic moving at 70 mph, that's a whole other question.
222G and H and similar do not cover scenarios like being hit by a 5 ton or 10 ton truck, I am not familiar with, but presumably there are also engineering standards for designing poles within the highway right-of-way that have to be able to withstand a certain sort of hit by a vehicle. Or being protected by a certain engineering standard of bollard.
sorry but data and experience does not bear that out. Denending on which source you look at, the Uk is a "high trust" society.
Now, your assertion about surveillance, sounds true but kinda rings a bit false.
The places where there are less CCTV cameras tend to be rural areas, and let me tell you, they do not trust anyone they don't know (I used to live in rural england) why? because there is no chance that the police will help you, unless you're being threatened.
Adding appurtenances to one changes their wind loading and reliability. The engineers who signed off on some light pole designs might be unhappy to learn that multiple square feet of wind loading are being added after the fact.
The reason I know this is that in the telecom industry some (less experienced) people periodically try to use COTS light poles for some design that will hold just a few very small light duty sector antennas, or one or two 30cm size PTP microwave antennas in addition to the lamp fixture, as a "Hey I have this great idea to save some money" concept, and learn the hard way that the poles aren't rated or designed for it.
Chinese were taught to grow in honesty and integrity explicitly for thousand years and it's becoming common consensus when more and more people are educated. When the bar raises and the gov is not given more freedom to the people, it's just nature to let the surveillance cameras grow to each and every inch of the land.
Me personally would chose safety over privacy though.
ITs not actually that surprising. Trust is different to cynicism though.
Respect for private property rights? A court system that’s broadly seen as following the law? Elections where the outcomes are not disputed? Officials not soliciting or accepting bribes from normal citizens? High trust society.
The UK certainly has its problems, but the tricks are often technically legal, and they’re nowhere near as bad as in third world countries.
That said, bribery is quite common in UK nowadays: https://www.surrey.ac.uk/news/millions-people-uk-are-being-d...
Whoever call for it usually thinks they are rich or influencial enough to never ever be affected. They really do believe in it right until they take a flight out of some office window.
Yep people really delude themselves.
These companies are tech bros - they are selling to the authoritarians and they are increasingly their enablers, funders and biggest sycophants.
Please stop grinding whatever axe you think you're grinding, and put that energy towards something useful.
I would not have guessed in a million years that someone would argue that country's surveillance doesn't have a dystopian vibe because the country conscripts people into service.
A system that has brought security and cohesion, and thus wealth, is accused of being dystopic
Especially if that society is fairly homogenous. (I'm well aware that Singapore is a fusion of cultures, but it's nothing like an empire that can shuffle its conscripts around, so that they always end up policing and brutalizing an ethnic group that's different from theirs.
But it’s still a counter-example to “once cameras go up all trust is lost”. Clearly cameras are not the sole issue that makes trust achievable. As demonstrated by high-trust societies with cameras!
For most people in most places, police are ineffective and therefore the first is orders of magnitude more of a problem. For example in the Bay Area, car break-ins are incredibly common and police are incapable of solving it. This would be unthinkable in Singapore.
> unless you happen to express disagreement with any part of it
On the other hand, the government in Singapore is genuinely popular. A majority eligible of voters chose to re-elect the incumbent. For reference, only 32% of eligible American voters chose the current US president.
#1 is annoying but has many solutions. You can call the cops, you can defend yourself, you can sue in the courts.
#2 is the most terrifying one since there is absolutely nothing you can do.
Thus any society needs to do the utmost to prevent abuse #2 above all else.
Easy to say when the opposition rots in prison.
Surveillance everywhere means you can't park in a no parking zone for 3 minutes just to drop something off real quick. You'll get a ticket mailed to your door. You can't go 5 mph over the limit when nobody is around. You can't slow down at a stop sign without stopping for a full 10 seconds without risking being busted. You can't sneakily sample a grape before deciding whether they taste good enough to buy. You can't not tip a bad restaurant without them plastering your picture on the walls to embarrass you. You can't say a mean thing to an annoying person online in the heat of the moment. Half the people on earth cheat on their spouses while pretending they never would and anyone who does should be imprisoned, and soon they'll have their secret revealed and regret their words. You can't trip and fall in a goofy way without your video being a global meme for a whole month.
All these pop into people's heads and make them think "screw that" after at first thinking it's great.
But back to Flock: public cameras are not 24/7 surveillance, as those don't surveil people at home.
ps: I'm not for a panopticon, enforcement needs to come with surveillance also, otherwise it will just be an anarcho-tyranny. So common in the developed world. And enforcement of law must also apply to companies, even (and especially) to vendors of the law-enforcement.
> But back to Flock: public cameras are not 24/7 surveillance, as those don't surveil people at home.
And backlash its got is the real proof that people not protest against it only because they are not really aware of how bad it is.
Sit someone down, a normal average person, and explain to them the actual implications and then do you think they will agree? Reality shows that when people actually understand what surveillance means they reject it wholeheartedly
They certainly say they do. Then back they go to Amazon, Facebook, Instagram et al.
The problem with murder rate is it doesn't matter what the actual numbers are. Just bombard people with bad news 24/7 and they will believe the sky is falling and murderous mobs are roaming the streets.
But most people won't.
See how they react to terrorism, despite the fact they amount to almost nothing compared to any other cause of death.
People are NOT rational.