Billionaire Larry Ellison says a vast AI-fueled surveillance system can ensure 'citizens will be on their best behavior'
Original Article: https://www.aol.com/billionaire-larry-ellison-says-vast-160646367.html?guccounter=1
Written by qpooqpoo
In the latest example of the technocrats' utter contempt for human freedom, Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, cheers on the arrival of mass surveillance. "Citizens will be on their best behavior," he happily proclaimed during an Oracle meeting in September 2024. Even if his vision for the future is outright dystopian, at least credit his frankness. Better the public see the true faces of their enemies unmasked by smarmy blather and PR-doublespeak. Of course, that's not to say his worldview is based on reality, or that his notion of a "good" surveillance society is valid. No, it’s just another perversion brought about by a long ideological tradition called "progress." And, in the eyes of the technocratic elite, technological progress must always justify itself. This means, of course, that everything the technocrats do, in their eyes, must be good (they are always the heroes in their own fantasies). While they gain all the riches, fame, glory, and above all power from their surrogate activities, everyone else is left to deal with the consequences. If privacy, freedom, or dignity threatens our long march to the wonderful Brave New World—then they must not be really things worthy of preserving. Or, as we are often told, those things never existed in the first place. One may recall the famous line of Sun Microsystems CEO decades ago telling reporters, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."[1] Current discussions about "free will" by insufferable pseuds in the grift-tube-o-verse echo this sentiment. The arguments there are rarely that we shouldn't have agency but that we never did—so why resist? The logic is deeply nihilistic, but nevertheless convenient to a technological system predicated on increasing control and prediction of human behavior for its own growth and security.
It is no accident that mass surveillance is being embraced, even in so-called democratic societies. Once a technology becomes economically viable and materially possible, its implementation inevitably follows a certain course: beyond rational control and responsive only to the needs of efficiency and power among competing individuals and social systems. The rationalizations come later, not to justify the technology's creation—that was already determined—but to pacify public unease and forestall resistance. The talk of “good behavior” is just the latest of these retroactive justifications, a convenient narrative to make the bitter pill easier to swallow. And as the surveillance grows, so do the justifications: governments and corporations assure the public that these systems are for their protection, their convenience, and their own benefit. And so they are... in the very narrow view in which a particular element provides a specific benefit to an individual. Yet, taken together as a systemic whole, the practical result is always the same: an ever-tightening web of monitoring, where privacy and freedom are eroded not with a single law or decree but through the gradual layering of infrastructure, each step deemed reasonable in isolation.
Technocrats like Ellison reveal how out of touch they are when they think they can rely on public apathy, learned helplessness, or distraction to justify such patently absurd excuses for a techno-system inevitably marching toward its logical hellscape future. For one, there is a whole new generation for whom these technological systems themselves are identified as causing direct, palpable impacts that are approaching intolerability. The second will be the expression of this growing discontent by the coalescence of organizations, vigorous and implacable, that identify the technological system in its entirety as an irredeemable evil and the technocrats who promote its growth as among the worst criminals who have ever lived.
[1] https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/you-have-no-privacy-get-over-it