It's Time to Take Down your Smart Cameras - Benn Jordan

I think were mostly on the same page with CCTV alienation topic. I just have a greater emphasis that the technology has no part in cuasing alienation as it is just tech being used in perverse ways by peoples in a system where the most wealthy profit off of or simply lower their visibility as the issue while most of us are alienated. I’d similarly apply that to social media. Mastodon has no part in fueling alienation (quite the opposite) and yet it’s a distributed form of social media. Why? Because it isn’t centrally owned and doesn’t have algorithmic behavioral and emotion knobs to tweak. Gopher: > As for your last part I’d have to strongly disagree, people are perfectly capable of showing empathy to a mass of people who are outside of their own lives. We’ve seen it through the 20th century in the form of international class based solidarity movements and it’s starting to reemerge today as even Westerners become more conscious of imperialism. I agree with this, and reduced thus argument too much to make it sound like I believe humans can’t care for outgroups. Humans absolutely have the ability to apply compassion for outgroups but it’s not a default behavior or mode most live in every day unless we’re forced to. That’s the whole basis of ingroups and outgroups is that to expand your more kindred empathy to those you share identity with based on who you perceive you are and who fits within that group. The fastest way to disolve alienation is a common cause. The ruling class prefers war so they can scapegoat the badness to another country, but dissolving the middle class like we’ve seen with technologies like the printing press, industrial assembly lines, robotics, and AI is where solidarity and that mindset empathy pulls us together. The issues I was also alluding to is also about how large governments apply homogenized policies that have no way of representing the beliefs of an increasing group of people. So then people voting based on their local values can’t apply empathy to people hundreds of miles away and this has more to do with shortcomings of beurocratoc methods that apply over our day to day living that I don’t think work at a larger level. This gets into a whole other can of worms about homogenized cultures that breeds resentment in whole other ways. Basically you need governments but local context matters soooo much. If we don’t resolve this systemic way of making policies into zero sum power grabs we will constantly see alienation from back time and time again until we realize it’s the policy setters benefitting again.