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Top-level
 This lie has spread to the law enforcement and national security agencies, who treasure Big Tech's surveillance as an off-the-books trove of warrantless data that no court would *ever* permit them to gather on their own. Back in 2017, I found myself at SXSW, debating an FBI agent who was defending the Bureau's gigantic facial recognition database, which, he claimed, contained the faces of virtually every American: 2/ 7 comments
This pathology is endemic to neoliberal thinking, which insists that all our political matters can be reduced to *economic* ones, specifically, the kind of economic questions that can be mathematically modeled and empirically tested. It would be great if all our thorniest problems could be solved like mathematical equations. Unfortunately, there are key elements of these systems that *can't* be reliably quantified and turned into mathematical operators, especially *power*. 4/ The fact that someone did something tells you nothing about whether they *chose* to do so - to understand whether someone was coerced or made a free choice, you have to consider the power relationships involved. Conservatives hate this idea. 5/ They want to live in a neat world of "revealed preferences," where the fact that you're working in a job where you're regularly exposed to carcinogens, or that you've stayed with a spouse who beats the shit out of you, or that you're homeless, or that you're addicted to Oxy, is a matter of *choice*. Monopolies exist because we all love the monopolist's product best, not because they've got monopoly power. 6/ Jobs that pay starvation wages exist because people want to work full time for so little money that they need food-stamps just to survive. Intervening in any of these situations is "woke paternalism," where the government thinks it knows better than you and intervenes to take away your right to consume unsafe products, get maimed at work, or have your jaw broken by your husband. 7/ Which is why neoliberals insist that politics should be reduced to economics, and that economics should be carried out as if power didn't exist: https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/05/farrago/#jeffty-is-five Nowhere is this stupid trick more visible than in the surveillance fight. For example, Google claims that it tracks your location because you asked it to, by using Google products that make use of your location without clicking an opt out button. 8/ In reality, Google has the power to simply ignore your preferences about location tracking. In 2021, the Arizona Attorney General's privacy case against Google yielded a bunch of internal memos, including memos from Google's senior product manager for location services Jen Chai complaining that she had turned off location tracking in *three* places and was *still* being tracked: https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#goog 9/ |
Gregory's Server
The agent insisted that the FBI had acquired all those faces through legitimate means, by accessing public sources of people's faces. In other words, we'd all opted in to FBI facial recognition surveillance. "Sure," I said, "to opt out, just don't have a face."
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