It really makes me wonder why someone with that much wealth needs to go around making life worse for other people. At this point, it feels like a sickness.
It's interesting that the constitution prevents America from having a king, or at least it used to, but maybe the founders didn't think about other kinds of kings.
Because we're in a place, or we're getting to a place, where that's exactly what we have.
I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that the nuisance that a middle class person might feel from an urban tent city or a rat infestation is quite similar to the nuisance that an extremely wealthy person would feel from the entire middle class.
> the constitution prevents America from having a king
This is only true until SCOTUS invents a new interpretation of the constitution that not only allows for a king, but asserts it must have a king (provided they are republican). I mean, who is going to stop them from doing that? Really though, who?
Vampires have to do with blood only tangentially. It is vital energy in a broad sense that they're after, and stomping on people's freedom and privacy is but another way to suck it out.
"Concentration of power on the scale of today's mega-companies is bad" is an idea that would've resonated with the founders of the US. But it wasn't the immediate issue they were fighting, so it's not what got written down.
The greatest trick of the elites has been convincing people that the Constitution is a holy religious artifact at this point instead of a document that will still need major patches as the world changes around it.
Or maybe it's encouraging holy wars over the words of the Constitution while simply ignoring it - and especially the overall suspicion of power - whenever convenient. And thus we get a world where criticism of agents of the government is treason instead of patriotic oversight; where the police don't police their own but close ranks against external complaints.
The constitution just enabled “many kings” through commerce rather than answering to a single king. Now the many kings take turns rotating into the leadership roles as they own the representation (the other thing the constitution enables) and snack on other kings.
And when one of the favorite many kings fail they have the representatives say “this king is too big to fail, don’t let the small kings eat him, prop him up with money from the masses”.
The constitution was written by the wealthy elites of society, for the wealthy elites of society to be free of the tyranny of a monarchy. It was not created to grant equal rights to all people. I.E., see the 3/5ths personhood of enslaved people.
- School attendance and parent pickup coordination. With a combination of face recognition, transit-station like gates, and license plate readers, parent pickup of kids is enforced.[1] Because they're watching.
- Campus-wide monitoring.[2] "Detects abnormal behavior ... such as people gathering"
- Detect climbing on fence [3]
Those are just samples. They offer everything from parking lot gates to millimeter microwave weapon detection. And with the newer control systems, it's all integrated into one comprehensive Big Brother system.
How about we monitor all internal business communications of publicly traded companies and audit for business irregularities there? It is estimated that white collar crime causes far more economic damage than any other type.
New York City has had it's real-time mass surveillance Domain Awareness System in place for years (courtesy of MSFT)... and the crime still happens. What exactly would you expect this to accomplish that's worth the sacrifice to privacy?
Well at least he said police will be on their best behavior too, but yeah unequivocally, fuck no and fuck this.
I don't trust any government to utilize power like that and I certainly don't trust any singularly powerful person to define "best behavior". I can't even trust my elected representatives to act in my best interest.
Even if you have a "good" government, those do not last and AI surveillance serves only to entrench existing power at the expense of freedoms of the general populace at best.
I want this level of surveillance on our "leaders" and the mega-corporations' "leaders" as they've repeatedly proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the vast majority of them simply cannot be trusted without extreme oversight. It's like babysitting the absolute brattiest of children (trapped in adult bodies with adult jobs and responsibilities). You gotta watch 'em like a hawk or they will attempt to pull the wool over your eyes to their own gain (and your detriment) at first available opportunity.
Ellison is involved in the TikTok deal through Oracle which is supposed to host the US version of that abomination of a platform so there is some relevance to his stance on these issues.
Perhaps the only positive that might come from this type of thinking is an eventual revolt that will crush characters like ellison and provide strong real laws that protect us from this garbage in the future.
These old people will torch the world before passing away. Decades away their goal horizon was maybe 10-15 years, now they are moving faster as their time is more limited with goal horizon rather 3-5 years.
If your hatred for this doesn't lead you to commit your skills to building systems of liberation, you're likely part of the tech soldier caste and not yet the liberatory praxis movement.
I keep beating the same dead horse but EVERYONE who supported covid authoritian policies, was complicit in getting us to this stage. It was the same security theater that we got post 9/11 and made 10000 times worse, annulling constitutions, freedom of movement, of speech, of assembly, getting corporations to do the dirty job of governments, creating a social credit and massive surveillance tool in vaccine passports...
We warned you, you called us "freedumb lovers" and "just wanting to get a haircut".
Now you need to walk it all back or the slippery slope will absolutely crush you.
Either you're brave like many were, facing social ostracism and demonization, or you're just going to complain and then just go with "the new normal".
Have you realized it was wrong are we going to keep with the bullshit?
If you think it was public health you didn't pay attention at the suppression of dissent, how different places that didn't do parts of the insane theater didn't have particular problems, how numbers were inflated or deflated depending on the whims of each government. If you really looked at different places and travelled during, when it was supposed to be "impossible", you got to see reality. If you paid attention at how the TV and important people were essential and politicians didn't abide by the bullshit they were selling.
Come on man, wake the fuck up, at this stage. It was indefensible.
No, I didn't kill grandma. Yes, you got manipulated. Own it.
> "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're watching"
Right now, I'm tentatively less concerned about them watching us. They haven't militarized the state this way yet & we'd need to slide a lot more for the boot stomping the face of mankind to get away with such total cooption of technology against thought-rights. Even if it is merely total corporate (not governmental) coersion/corruption against the population, I'm still not afraid of this bluster & abuse being gestured at the citizenry.
What does scare me is communication moving the other direction, not the bottom being read by the top but from the top being broadcast down. This scares me very very much.
Because Ellison's already control: CBS, Paramount, Tik-Tok
And might control:
WB, Discovery (including HBO, CNN).
Larry's threat against democracy & the sanctity of human thought is serious stuff & perhaps things might escalate to where this becomes a real hazard. But the hazard today is that the Powell Memorandum (1971) is way underway and that the explicit plan all along has been for wealthy interests to use a political party as a vehicle to takeover and control the information that people get, to shape the media digest as the ultra-wealthy please.
The Internet has thrown somewhat of a wrench into this plan. But when more solid targets like Media Matters begin to form, it feels like the lawsuit-o-rama, of for example Musk filing existentially thermonuclear lawsuits in the US, Singapore, and Ireland, in an attempt to brutally over-the-top nuke the site from orbit (for daring to show the world the insane antisemitic and conspiracy nonsense he personally advocated engaged with and promoted, as well as for showing Nazi and very closely related content next to paid advertisements). Not just Felony Contempt of Business Model, Capital Contempt for showing what we did.
(Of course there's like none of the loud free speech advocates around, duly angry about this one.)
I am super afraid of Ellison's relationship with society, of what his incredible force of wealth gets bent to. But right now AI is far down my list, versus what's already here now, what the wealthy do to suppress other views, and when they deny the world their own chance to speak the truth & strive towards a just equitable & good planet. Ellison's media empire will one way or another be a first line player for decades. Overall Ellison's media companies seem not so far so pernicious, but it's so hard to guess whether lack of media coverage for large protests going unreported for example is reasoned choice or whether it is active suppression; it feels like already what doesn't get covered and who doesn't get airtime leaves the cutout shape of a hopeful progressive agenda behind.
Whether you agree with me politically or not, i sure hope we can agree that having very few people in charge of the media is a bad end. And imo it's more than a clear and present danger to our democracy, it's already deeply deeply underway.
It really makes me wonder why someone with that much wealth needs to go around making life worse for other people. At this point, it feels like a sickness.
It's interesting that the constitution prevents America from having a king, or at least it used to, but maybe the founders didn't think about other kinds of kings.
Because we're in a place, or we're getting to a place, where that's exactly what we have.
Usually these people are wealthy because of the type of person they are and not the other way around
Bingo. You don't get to be a billionaire by being chill, live and let live kind of guy. You take whenever you get the chance.
I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that the nuisance that a middle class person might feel from an urban tent city or a rat infestation is quite similar to the nuisance that an extremely wealthy person would feel from the entire middle class.
> the constitution prevents America from having a king
This is only true until SCOTUS invents a new interpretation of the constitution that not only allows for a king, but asserts it must have a king (provided they are republican). I mean, who is going to stop them from doing that? Really though, who?
They generally got their wealth by making life worse for other people - isn't it just more of the same.
Their customers are governments. People keep voting for politicians that will happily trade freedom for security.
Vampires have to do with blood only tangentially. It is vital energy in a broad sense that they're after, and stomping on people's freedom and privacy is but another way to suck it out.
I doubt he sees it like that. Plenty of authoritarians think authoritarianism is best for society.
'long as they're the authoritarians-in-charge.
I genuinely think he's trying to sell more storage
That could be true too lol
"Concentration of power on the scale of today's mega-companies is bad" is an idea that would've resonated with the founders of the US. But it wasn't the immediate issue they were fighting, so it's not what got written down.
The greatest trick of the elites has been convincing people that the Constitution is a holy religious artifact at this point instead of a document that will still need major patches as the world changes around it.
Or maybe it's encouraging holy wars over the words of the Constitution while simply ignoring it - and especially the overall suspicion of power - whenever convenient. And thus we get a world where criticism of agents of the government is treason instead of patriotic oversight; where the police don't police their own but close ranks against external complaints.
The constitution just enabled “many kings” through commerce rather than answering to a single king. Now the many kings take turns rotating into the leadership roles as they own the representation (the other thing the constitution enables) and snack on other kings.
And when one of the favorite many kings fail they have the representatives say “this king is too big to fail, don’t let the small kings eat him, prop him up with money from the masses”.
The constitution was written by the wealthy elites of society, for the wealthy elites of society to be free of the tyranny of a monarchy. It was not created to grant equal rights to all people. I.E., see the 3/5ths personhood of enslaved people.
This is way behind where HikVision is now.
- School attendance and parent pickup coordination. With a combination of face recognition, transit-station like gates, and license plate readers, parent pickup of kids is enforced.[1] Because they're watching.
- Campus-wide monitoring.[2] "Detects abnormal behavior ... such as people gathering"
- Detect climbing on fence [3]
Those are just samples. They offer everything from parking lot gates to millimeter microwave weapon detection. And with the newer control systems, it's all integrated into one comprehensive Big Brother system.
"See clearer. Go further."
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULsEFDwVKIs
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sthBo4kYVY
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nbch_TQEA0
One behavior you can “watch” that doesn’t require AI is 81 year old Larry Ellison colluding with pedophiles.
https://www.wired.com/story/larry-ellison-is-a-shadow-presid...
Just [redacted]s doing [redacted]ish things.
Why else do you think buying TikTok isn't just buying access to the world's largest kids menu?
Are we really just copying China now, while pretending that our system is superior and that we hold the moral high ground?
We seem to be speedrunning the copying of some of its worst parts. Don't expect to get any of the high-speed rail or abundant housing though.
I don’t think china actually has this level of surveillance state anymore.
The social credit system has, from my shallow understanding, been effectively removed in a bunch of the cities it was setup in.
How about we monitor all internal business communications of publicly traded companies and audit for business irregularities there? It is estimated that white collar crime causes far more economic damage than any other type.
In article form: “Larry Ellison predicts rise of the modern surveillance state where ‘citizens will be on their best behavior’” https://fortune.com/2024/09/17/oracle-larry-ellison-surveill...
New York City has had it's real-time mass surveillance Domain Awareness System in place for years (courtesy of MSFT)... and the crime still happens. What exactly would you expect this to accomplish that's worth the sacrifice to privacy?
Well at least he said police will be on their best behavior too, but yeah unequivocally, fuck no and fuck this.
I don't trust any government to utilize power like that and I certainly don't trust any singularly powerful person to define "best behavior". I can't even trust my elected representatives to act in my best interest.
Even if you have a "good" government, those do not last and AI surveillance serves only to entrench existing power at the expense of freedoms of the general populace at best.
I want this level of surveillance on our "leaders" and the mega-corporations' "leaders" as they've repeatedly proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the vast majority of them simply cannot be trusted without extreme oversight. It's like babysitting the absolute brattiest of children (trapped in adult bodies with adult jobs and responsibilities). You gotta watch 'em like a hawk or they will attempt to pull the wool over your eyes to their own gain (and your detriment) at first available opportunity.
Be on their best behavior according to whom? Else what?
When will these geezers age out?
Essence of dystopia
I'm annoyed by Ellison saying this as well. But what is new that made this blow up? I vaguely remember seeing this video last year.
Some things should be repeated. For example i've never seen it.
Ellison is involved in the TikTok deal through Oracle which is supposed to host the US version of that abomination of a platform so there is some relevance to his stance on these issues.
It somehow feels like everything that was ever done to keep this type of stuff out of this country has unraveled in the past 10 years
Like they’ve been chipping away at a stonewall for decades and they’ve finally blasted through the wall
Didn't need a blast, only a slight knock on the world's fear of dying from a flu in 2020-2021.
More like the death of the last generations to actually be alive to witness rampant authoritarianism.
Thanks technology.
Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower.
Whos watching him?
The rich don't get watched.
This is strictly for the poor.
As usual.
Disgusting...
Perhaps the only positive that might come from this type of thinking is an eventual revolt that will crush characters like ellison and provide strong real laws that protect us from this garbage in the future.
There is a point when even money can't save you.
These old people will torch the world before passing away. Decades away their goal horizon was maybe 10-15 years, now they are moving faster as their time is more limited with goal horizon rather 3-5 years.
It's not age that's the distinguishing characteristic.
Big Brother will be proud.
Yeah, no. In fact hell no.
you don't hate these fuckers enough, you think you do but you actually don't.
edit: I guess the downvotes because you disagree with my take, but it's true. why a powerful, rich person wants such control over the citizens?
To follow on:
If your hatred for this doesn't lead you to commit your skills to building systems of liberation, you're likely part of the tech soldier caste and not yet the liberatory praxis movement.
To say this is dystopian, is an understatement.
I keep beating the same dead horse but EVERYONE who supported covid authoritian policies, was complicit in getting us to this stage. It was the same security theater that we got post 9/11 and made 10000 times worse, annulling constitutions, freedom of movement, of speech, of assembly, getting corporations to do the dirty job of governments, creating a social credit and massive surveillance tool in vaccine passports...
We warned you, you called us "freedumb lovers" and "just wanting to get a haircut".
Now you need to walk it all back or the slippery slope will absolutely crush you.
Either you're brave like many were, facing social ostracism and demonization, or you're just going to complain and then just go with "the new normal".
Have you realized it was wrong are we going to keep with the bullshit?
Holy false equivalence, batman.
The oligarchs suck. Public health does not.
They just found the right excuse, Robin.
Except they didn't, Rando.
Being critical on oligarchs is a good start, just don't get stuck there, keep joining the dots.
If you think it was public health you didn't pay attention at the suppression of dissent, how different places that didn't do parts of the insane theater didn't have particular problems, how numbers were inflated or deflated depending on the whims of each government. If you really looked at different places and travelled during, when it was supposed to be "impossible", you got to see reality. If you paid attention at how the TV and important people were essential and politicians didn't abide by the bullshit they were selling.
Come on man, wake the fuck up, at this stage. It was indefensible.
No, I didn't kill grandma. Yes, you got manipulated. Own it.
Yes my man, that was a pentest failed by the humankind.
A test whether the fascism will be accepted under a different set of excuses this time.
Oh boy it had been.
> "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're watching"
Right now, I'm tentatively less concerned about them watching us. They haven't militarized the state this way yet & we'd need to slide a lot more for the boot stomping the face of mankind to get away with such total cooption of technology against thought-rights. Even if it is merely total corporate (not governmental) coersion/corruption against the population, I'm still not afraid of this bluster & abuse being gestured at the citizenry.
What does scare me is communication moving the other direction, not the bottom being read by the top but from the top being broadcast down. This scares me very very much.
Because Ellison's already control: CBS, Paramount, Tik-Tok
And might control: WB, Discovery (including HBO, CNN).
Larry's threat against democracy & the sanctity of human thought is serious stuff & perhaps things might escalate to where this becomes a real hazard. But the hazard today is that the Powell Memorandum (1971) is way underway and that the explicit plan all along has been for wealthy interests to use a political party as a vehicle to takeover and control the information that people get, to shape the media digest as the ultra-wealthy please.
The Internet has thrown somewhat of a wrench into this plan. But when more solid targets like Media Matters begin to form, it feels like the lawsuit-o-rama, of for example Musk filing existentially thermonuclear lawsuits in the US, Singapore, and Ireland, in an attempt to brutally over-the-top nuke the site from orbit (for daring to show the world the insane antisemitic and conspiracy nonsense he personally advocated engaged with and promoted, as well as for showing Nazi and very closely related content next to paid advertisements). Not just Felony Contempt of Business Model, Capital Contempt for showing what we did.
(Of course there's like none of the loud free speech advocates around, duly angry about this one.)
I am super afraid of Ellison's relationship with society, of what his incredible force of wealth gets bent to. But right now AI is far down my list, versus what's already here now, what the wealthy do to suppress other views, and when they deny the world their own chance to speak the truth & strive towards a just equitable & good planet. Ellison's media empire will one way or another be a first line player for decades. Overall Ellison's media companies seem not so far so pernicious, but it's so hard to guess whether lack of media coverage for large protests going unreported for example is reasoned choice or whether it is active suppression; it feels like already what doesn't get covered and who doesn't get airtime leaves the cutout shape of a hopeful progressive agenda behind.
Whether you agree with me politically or not, i sure hope we can agree that having very few people in charge of the media is a bad end. And imo it's more than a clear and present danger to our democracy, it's already deeply deeply underway.