Let’s say there’s a camera system built due to a direct public vote and rolled out by a political party all agree defends democracy. The stated goal is catching red light violations and speeders, and it’s a popular system. As part of the functionality it reads license plates, and that is verified by a human every time, and no footage is stored if there’s no violation.
Is that system fascist? Most would say no, and it exists in many states, like California and Washington.
Then the next election, a fascist is elected, and one of the first moves is to repurpose that system to track undesirables, and now it stores a ton of footage.
Is that system now fascist? It’s the same exact system as in the previous example, it’s just being used for fascist ends, such as tracking vehicles with certain plates (e.g. Illegal immigrants, minorities, etc) Nothing has changed in the capabilities or programming of the system, the only change was when to capture footage, what people use it for, and how long to store it.
Yes, it’s theoretically possible to design a fascist system, such as an LLM that only gives fascist answers, but that’s an incredibly narrow definition.
Just because a product has a plausibly deniable use case doesn’t really mean that it’s not functionally political.
If someone creates a super invasive surveillance system and initially uses it for a seemingly benign purpose, that doesn’t mean the intention all along wasn’t more nefarious, especially if the system was practically irresistible for power structures and it’s use directly lead to authoritarianism. Like giving someone their first hit for free.
In a case like that, I would discount the benign use as a red herring, and say that the software is functionally political.
I think those are important hairs to split.
Let’s say there’s a camera system built due to a direct public vote and rolled out by a political party all agree defends democracy. The stated goal is catching red light violations and speeders, and it’s a popular system. As part of the functionality it reads license plates, and that is verified by a human every time, and no footage is stored if there’s no violation.
Is that system fascist? Most would say no, and it exists in many states, like California and Washington.
Then the next election, a fascist is elected, and one of the first moves is to repurpose that system to track undesirables, and now it stores a ton of footage.
Is that system now fascist? It’s the same exact system as in the previous example, it’s just being used for fascist ends, such as tracking vehicles with certain plates (e.g. Illegal immigrants, minorities, etc) Nothing has changed in the capabilities or programming of the system, the only change was when to capture footage, what people use it for, and how long to store it.
Yes, it’s theoretically possible to design a fascist system, such as an LLM that only gives fascist answers, but that’s an incredibly narrow definition.
Just because a product has a plausibly deniable use case doesn’t really mean that it’s not functionally political.
If someone creates a super invasive surveillance system and initially uses it for a seemingly benign purpose, that doesn’t mean the intention all along wasn’t more nefarious, especially if the system was practically irresistible for power structures and it’s use directly lead to authoritarianism. Like giving someone their first hit for free.
In a case like that, I would discount the benign use as a red herring, and say that the software is functionally political.