Re: <nettime> When repression is cheaper than redistribution

[Patrice Riemens <patrice@xs4all.nl>]

Well, there is an absurdly simple way to achieve this change of 
calculus, though a costly one - for us: leave the screens, go down in 
the street and start getting killed by the riot police, preferably in 
numbers. No modern 'democratic' dispensation survives that, as Jacques 
Chirac knew all too well. His successors everywhere might be less smart, 
but they shall discover soon enough that lethal repression is very 
costly indeed, as it upsets the cart of the consumption-based economy 
real bad. Of course when Xi-JinPing marches in, what will happen sooner 
rather than later, the whole rule-book will change, but in the meanwhile 
we do have some opportunity to 'change that calculus' ...



On 2017-09-04 10:44, Felix Stalder wrote:
> Recently, the German political scientist Ulrike Guérot argued that
> digital technologies changed the political calculus of the ruling
> elites: repression is now seen as cheaper than redistribution to
> maintain the system.
>
> This research, by the Center for Political Studies (CPS), University of
> Michigan, puts numbers to this claim.  Advanced democracies spent just
> shy of $9 billion to surveil 74% of their population, at a cost of
> $10/person. Now, this of course are not the entire costs of the
> apparatus of repression, but just indicates how incredibly cheap
> surveillance blanket surveillance has become.
>
> To gain any traction for political change, we need to change this
> calculus, by making surveillance and repression expensive again.
>
> Felix
>
>
>
>
> http://cpsblog.isr.umich.edu/?p=2129
>
> <...>
>
> While nations worldwide have spent at least $27.1 billion USD (or $7 
> per
> individual) to surveil 4.138 billion individuals (i.e., 73 percent of
> the world population), stable autocracies are the highest per-capita
> spenders on mass surveillance. In total, authoritarian regimes have
> spent $10.967 billion USD to surveil 81 percent of their populations
> (0.1 billion individuals), even though this sub-set of states tends to
> have the lowest levels of high-technology capabilities. Stable
> autocracies have also invested 11-fold more than any other regime-type,
> by spending $110 USD per individual surveilled, followed second-highest
> by advanced democracies who have invested $8.909 billion USD in total
> ($11 USD per individual) covering 0.812 billion individuals (74 percent
> of their population). In contrast to high-spending dictatorships and
> democracies, developing and emerging democracies have invested $4.784
> billion USD (or $1-2 per individual) for tracking 2.875 billion people
> (72 percent of their population).
>
> It is possible that in a hyper-globalizing environment increasingly
> characterized by non-state economic (e.g., multi-national corporations)
> and political (e.g., transnational terror organizations) activity,
> nation-states have both learned from and mimicked each other’s
> investments in mass surveillance as an increasingly central activity in
> exercising power over their polities and jurisdictions. It is also
> likely that the technological revolution in digitally-enabled big data
> and cloud computing capabilities as well as the ubiquitous digital
> wiring of global populations (through mobile telephony and digital
> communication) have technically enabled states to access and organize
> population-wide data on their citizens in ways not possible in previous
> eras.
>
>
> <....>

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: