Me and my Ai #4

 

A conversation about the Stasi

The Stasi, the East German Communist regime’s secret police force and intelligence agency, operated between 1950 and 1990. A pervasive surveillance operation that infiltrated every aspect of daily life to enforce and maintain the regime’s control over its citizens.

The activities of the Stasi are credited for the 11% decline in East Germany’s population over a period in which Europe’s population grew more than 30% (and the world’s more than 100%).

Approximately one in every 200 East Germans worked for the Stasi. More astounding though are estimates suggesting that as many as one in every 30 East Germans was informing for the agency.

Without going into detail on its operations, which included blackmailing family members into informing on each other, and ‘psychological warfare’ techniques aimed at inducing anxiety, paranoia and a sense of helplessness, the Stasi's long-term effects on trust, social capital, and economic performance include lower interpersonal trust, reduced civic engagement, higher unemployment, and lower incomes. No wonder people wanted to leave.

Today, social media companies gather intelligence on members of society far more effectively than the Stasi ever did. With the aid of massive computing power, they interpret and develop that intelligence far more effectively as well. They are conducting a different kind of psychological warfare on citizens, driving them to huddle under dopamine dependency and extracting incomes through marketing and advertising targeting the individual. They are increasingly implicated in activities supporting the control that various political entities are attempting to exert over their constituencies. Who have no option to go 'over the wall'.

Seriously though. Imagine trying to explain social media to an East German citizen living under the Stasi.

Today I read, given a few years, we’ll all be wearing network-connected glasses which, while augmenting our realities with information, will simultaneously monitor sound and vision of all social interactions. And send it back to the agency for analysis. Every response, every nuance, every offhand remark, contributing to profiles analysed by the world’s most powerful computing assemblages.

I'm inclined to think of the above as alarmist. Nevertheless, it bears consideration, or perhaps simply adds context for those already considering the implications of social media monitoring for the control of society and its citizens. The Stasi lasted 40 years.