What behaviors of Larry Ellison is it going to help change? Hoarding wealth to the detriment of society? Attacking the tech sector with their army of lawyers? AI monitoring billionaires sounds strange, but I’m willing to see how it goes.
If History is anything to go by, poor people threatening the rich.
Owner of Cloud company that sells AI services tells governments that AI-powered surveillance is good.
governments and surveillance, name a more iconic pair
Corporations and surveillance?
Which is far worse. Governments are, to a large extent (even dictatorial governments) still have some accountability to the people. Corporations NEVER have that. The greatest propaganda trick that corporations did is that somehow they are better than governments and the less restrictions on them, the ‘freer’ and ‘richer’ the average person will be.
Capitalism and Oppression.
And I guarantee that billionaire Larry Ellison blithely believes that he’ll be exempt - that all of this surveillance will just be used against the little people. And he’s almost certainly right.
He will be exempt. The areas that he lives in and the things that he does will not be tagged as “criminal” on the data system that he has the contract to administer.
That’s always how these systems work. You don’t worry about getting dragged into the Saudi Consulate and bonesawed to death by intelligence officers when you’re MBS, because you’re the boss and the guy getting bonesawed is your employee.
For the same reason, you don’t worry about getting spied on when you’re the one who owns and operates the big surveillance infrastructure because it exists for your benefit.
Just look at Musk to see someone whose wealth entirely excuses his behavior. It ain’t hypothetical in the slightest.
Lmg, he’ll be exempt from this surveillance along with all his rich ass-hole buddies
Subjugating the working class majority is literally the whole point of establishing a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
Didn’t the French have a solution to this problem? Something about heads, or a lack there of.
He’s voicing what every billionaire and government official already thinks. Call me pessimist but I believe it’s unavoidable. VPNs are seen as “tools to overcome government bans to access illegal websites” in so many countries, hence getting banned. Access to mainstream websites also getting harder and harder when on VPN. People hosting Tor exit nodes are living in fear of police raids.
Even with some little amount of privacy protecting measures, websites start to act strangely or do not work, and the amount of websites like this increases every day. As protecting our privacy becomes a bigger and bigger effort, more people will give up, strengthening the arguments against it. Eventually we’ll hit big brother levels.
I2P could be a solid option over TOR then, no?
The problem with it being it not working on the clear net. However, this may also be seen as a benefit.
Outproxies exist
Sure. It is just not as easy as with TOR ;^)
Eventually we’ll hit big brother levels.
As someone who was born before the age of surveillance capitalism, I can tell you we’ve hit that level a long time ago. Anybody who thinks society has been running normally for at least the past 15 years is too young to have known what a normal society is.
Exactly. I am elder millennial, and I grew up in Dubai. Back in the 80s and 90s in Dubai the only security cameras that existed were in malls and some supermarkets, and public CCTV by police did not exist. Traffic light cameras to catch people speeding and/or running a red light only got started in the early 2000s. This is one thing that I honestly say that really demarcates the early 2000s from previous times is the fact that the possibility of mass surveillance became a reality only back then. Before that surveillance was mostly disjointed and not at all interconnected. If you had security cameras, then they were on VHS tapes and unless you had the budget to get new tapes regularly, most people would just rewind the tapes and tape over and over, meaning they will degrade fairly quickly, and since most places didn’t keep an archive for too long, if something ‘suspicious’ happened a few weeks prior that you weren’t informed about until today, it would be lost since those tapes were likely overwritten, and there is no way to recover that.
The 90s were far from perfect for me. I had a fairly hard time growing up. But I honestly just wish for the dignity of not being on camera 24/7. My apartment building has cameras on all floors and I cannot exit or enter my own apartment without being caught on camera. That is if those cameras are real and not fakes.
Here’s a little story that shows how much society has become dystopian:
Back in the 90’s, I worked in France for a while. When I was there, a case was brought up against the state that had violated a CNIL rule: some dude was cheating on his taxes by claiming he lived at some address. Tthe French fiscal administration sued him because they obtained a file from the electricity company and another from the water utilty company showing that the consumption of both electricity and water were so low it wasn’t consistent with the dude actually living there.
The case was thrown out, the dude walked and the state was fined because it had violated a rule that clearly stipulated cross-referencing files for the purpose of extracting secondary information that wasn’t available in each single file was a violation of privacy and civil liberties.
I shit you not. This used to be a thing.
Can you imagine this today? All the Big Data sonsabitches cross-reference billions of files ALL THE TIME and nobody bats an eyelid anymore.
If you’re old enough, you remember sovereign states taking privacy seriously. If you’re not, you don’t. And that’s how Big Data gets away with what they do today because fewer and fewer people remember a time when it was unacceptable.
This is why libertarians and many modern authoritarian LOVE corporations. Unlike governments which have some accountability (that has seriously been dwindling) corporations can basically do what they want. Laws are effectively written by corporations so that anyone in any position of authority is never thrown in prison or even needs to worry about that (ultra low level workers can be thrown to the dogs to placate the public every once in a while) and meanwhile the right of protestors has been so seriously curtailed that soon even in formerly first world countries they might be able to break out the machine guns like they did in central America in the 1910s and 1950s. In Britain protestors are being sentenced to record prison terms that were formerly reserved for rapists and muggers.
There is little question that corporations are behind them all.
I have been hating this man’s guts since the mid 90’s and somehow it never lets off. Most hateful people manage to become a little bit more likeable as they age. Even this disgusting piece of human refuse Bill Gates might pass for a somewhat okay human being if you wilfully overlook why he truly does philanthropy.
But Larry Elison? Hell no. He never changes. he’s just consistently the worst year after year, decade after decade.
why does he truly do philanthropy?
To evade taxes of course.
Have you ever asked yourself how it’s possible that ALL the fucking ultra-rich almost without exception do philanthropy?
It doesn’t make sense: most of those millionaires and billionaires are psychopaths who essentially don’t give a shit about their fellow man, acquired their wealth by exploiting and shafting others for the most part, and don’t give a shit about how that makes them look: why on Earth would any of them do philanthropy, let alone all of them?
It only starts to make sense when you understand philanthropy is yet another tax loophole.
Yeah. He is pretty horrible. What surprised me though is his daughter’s film company has a pretty solid track record on quality movies and tv series:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapurna_Pictures
But yeah, Larry Elison sucks…
Pretty good track record with videogames too.
But they’re will be no cameras in his torture dungeon, of course.
Those are not citizens. This is not a democracy.
You need to pretend you live in a democracy or the administrators will take away the illusion.
You really can’t overstate this plain truth, and people will still cling to the illusion of freedom.
Remember, if you don’t vote, you’re voting for the bad guy!
Larry “privacy is dead, get over it” Ellison.
#TaxTheRich
How does this square with the whole libertarian bend?
Easy peasy. Don’t want to be captured by surveillance cameras? You are free to not go where the cameras are.
Oh, are you not wealthy? Do you not have land? Do you not have access to food, power, other resources without venturing out to where these cameras are? Get more money and stop whining, you dirty poor.
This is why my infatuation with libertarianism that most teens seem to go through only lasted a week.
He doesn’t have to square it because consistency is for poor people.
The golden rule: “He who has the gold makes the rules.”
This dude can shove that stupid boat up his ass
Hear hear!
He looks like a perfectly roasted turkey 🦃 🍗 …
Fuck you, no I won’t
Dude is crying for a guillotine. Someone tell this asshole movies aren’t real life events. lmao
