Bans and blanket restrictions on social media, like the impending US TikTok ban or Australia’s recent age restrictions, are often presented as decisive solutions to complex problems. These measures promise to safeguard national security, protect user data, or shield vulnerable users from harm. Yet, they rarely achieve their intended goals. Instead, they create a paradox: rather than mitigating risks, such restrictions make platforms and user practices less governable. Users circumvent controls, oversight is fragmented, and transparency gives way to opacity—all while opportunities for meaningful governance are lost.
That doesn’t end with surveillance, though. You have to show your hand at some point, or people will (not unreasonably) assume they’re in your blind spot and can behave as they please. That’s why you might get those annoying “Hello this is your ISP, please stop violating the Millennium Copyright Act or we’ll disconnect you” emails if you’re not torrenting behind a VPN. Also why a random woman in Florida made headline news for saying “Deny. Delay. Depose.” to her insurance broker. Its not about real time universal surveillance so much as terrorizing people into thinking they’re a person of interest.
There are limits. A lot of this stuff is still just a game of percentages. You have a pool of 100M end users and you can whittle that down to 5M potential suspects. And then maybe you can get it to 100k people you seriously think are up to some shit. And then you get it all the way down to 5k people who are really truly dangerous, based on some mathematical heuristic. But then you have to do… what? Actually go peep in someone’s window or dig through their trash to see what’s up.
Meanwhile, you’re banking heavily on the other 99.995M people not flying off the handle when you weren’t actively looking.
Far easier to cultivate or outright manufacture radicals to target and do high profile arrests on. That’s why you’ll find police organizations like the FBI and the NYPD running honeypot websites and local groups, dangling bait and waiting for the radicals to come to them.
Everything has its role. The NSA is, for the most part, outwardly facing. And a lot of its role is offensive rather than defense. But you do still occasionally see the knock-on effects downstream. The NSA trying to shut down Iranian nuclear energy with the Stuxnet Virus, for instance, blew back on the US in a big way. In the same way, Radio Free Asia doing anti-China agitprop all over the Pacific Rim gave us the Marcos and Duterte regimes in the Philippines and the chronic resurgence of the Park family and its allies in South Korea. That fuels religious radicalism and narco-trafficking in the region, which eventually comes back to the US in a big way.
Enshittification in pursuit of bigger and bigger profits is certainly its own problem. But it is only possible because smaller and less surveilled competitor media is either strangled in the cradle or bought out by the bigger fish. TikTok getting forced into sale to American investors, Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio prosecuted for insider trading after he refused to open up his telecom company to the NSA, Japanese car companies threatened with tariffs and sanctions unless they insourced their factories to the American Gulf Coast.
These systems work hand-in-glove. Enshittification is a consequence of the consolidation that state intervention allows. And state intervention is encouraged by big private interests seeking to weed out competition in exchange for more compliance with federal spying.
You’re right. That’s how it works and what makes it effective.
It’s far worse than that. It starts slow. But once they got several distinct factors, those multiply and it goes down fast. Think for example location tracking. There might be 5,000 people around. Or passing a cellphone tower along the highway roughly at a similar time. Then you take a single second measurement, when they head back home. And you got them. It’s very unlikely that two or more people pass that point twice at the same time. (Exceptions apply.) Or browser fingerprinting. There are websites where you can check your browser fingerprint. They’ve always told me mine is unique amongst hundreds of millions of internet users. They only need half a dozen or a dozen or so different factors to narrow it down to one exact person (or device). It’s not always like this. But more often than not.
Yeah, I guess they’re not stupid. There are a lot of simple and effective things available. I’d pick the low hanging fruits, too. That’s a sound choice.
Sure. I’m not an expert on this. I have to look up most things you said. But US foreign policy sure had it’s positive and negative consequences. For a lot of countries, in the middle east and all around the world.
I’m pretty sure that’s not always conspiracy or intended. But yes, a lot of that is consequential. Or symbiotic. And for example the politicians and big tech companies aren’t entirely separate from each other. There is a lot of lobbying and money involved that also gets things going in some direction someone likes. I think it’s important to point out that we have counterexamples. Like regulations that limit the companies. Sometimes they get fined. They can lose in court and be forced to do things. So not all is lost. But other times politics doesn’t limit their greed. Or make them pay taxes. It’s a mix.