Tea at Trianon: The Surveillance State

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, November 24, 2024

The Surveillance State

From Kerwin:

As I discussed in this post from a couple weeks ago, computer devices (including cell phones) are paradoxical insofar as they’re both maximally private yet maximally public simultaneously. You have an audience of potentially anyone, yet you’re thinking thoughts that could only occur to someone who feels alone, sitting there in solitude, unburdened by the need to behave respectably as when surrounded by people in a shared three-dimensional space. Essentially, when you’re submitting a video of yourself behaving like a spaz, you’re looking for an audience of people who feel exactly the same way you do in this intensely emotional private moment, and people do in fact sometimes resonate with your exhibitionistic display, themselves off in their own isolated headspaces. Just don’t expect all these people to get along with you if you were to invite them to a big party.
But all the same, in the back of people’s minds, they do know that they are Being Watched in a much deeper sense, a sense that extends beyond whatever they choose to submit to their faceless audience of wayward onlookers. People know that everything they do is being monitored by higher forces in both the public and private sector. This deeper sense of knowledge isn’t intrusive, either; in fact, advertisers and the government go out of their way not to remind people of it.
An ad company can easily determine if a woman is pregnant based solely on her engagement with social media and search engines, but the same company won’t deliberately bombard her with ads specifically about pregnancy. Instead, it will prepare an array of ads with maybe one about diapers here, another one about baby toys there, and they’ll be placed strategically so as to be visible without feeling invasive. Yet invasive they are, and people know it. If you were to ask the pregnant woman being targeted, “You know that companies are recording everything you do online, right?” she’d answer in the affirmative and probably even be aware that this is why she’s getting baby-related ads. We don’t mind being recorded, just as long as we don’t have to be reminded about it and forced to endure the shame that must accompany any serious reflection on this state of affairs. That’s why software companies that emphasize privacy, like Signal or Tor, tend not to be especially popular. Even being reminded that privacy is a good idea in the first place is unpopular, since it forces us to think of why we might need it. Essentially, we haven’t been coerced into accepting the reality of 24/7 surveillance and data mining, but we have been massaged into it. (Read more.)