Good in theory, problematic in practice. A goal to strive towards but not achieve.

The main problem is that the dictatorship of the proletariat is so easily corrupted into a regular ol dictatorship. It’s supposed to be a transitional period, but when that much power is in play, it’s hard for people to give it up - and even when they’re willing, they can just get ousted by less scrupulous people.

Making it safely through that passage is like a Great Filter of socio-economics

They do basically what I’m describing, just not as well because they don’t have as much of an incentive. Are end users willing to pay for these more advanced models?

Well there you go. It could be authoritarian, except an authoritarian govt isn’t subsidizing it. Exactly like I described.

Governments, however, are willing to pay that amount. Why?

You keep walking straight into the points I’m making.

That, in itself, isn’t authoritarian

Wrong. Setting up a super invasive surveillance system is inherently authoritarian, even if they initially happen to use it for reasons that don’t typify authoritarianism. You have to bend over backwards so hard to keep it from becoming authoritarian, that it will just naturally corrupt any entity that deploys it, even making the monumental assumption that an entity that deploys this didn’t have the intention to use it for nefarious purposes from the start.

it’s only authoritarian of there’s some enforcement arm to enforce obedience or punish disobedience.

Is a rather clumsy piece of mental gymnastics. Not only have you said it before. You can use this argument, coupled with your earlier “it’s constituent parts aren’t authoritarian” to argue that nothing is authoritarian.

Again, I disagree. Something is only political when used for political ends.

And again this is just the pro-gun argument. Fine on paper, useless in reality.

I’m making the argument that it is possible for software to be political even if it wasn’t created as such. I only need to show that a single case is possible.
You are making the argument that it is impossible, and you keep trying to prove it by example.

Welcome, it’s been like this for a while.
We have no idea what to do about it.

Again, in theory in a vacuum, I agree. But I disagree that anything you describe could actually be both commercially viable and deployable without authoritarian involvement

In your example do you not see all the gymnastics and bending over backwards you need to do to avoid the inherent nature of the system? I’d go so far as to say that the people in your theoretical HOA are analogous to supporters of a authoritarian regime.

You’re making a pro-gun argument here, and it’s not convincing for similar reasons: products are more than the sum of their parts, and the actual application of a product matters more than the theoretical use. If it is nearly impossible to meaningfully use apolitically, then it is not apolitical.

Surveillance has a lot of use cases outside of government. Palantir could have sold its services to non-profits like the ACLU as a check on local, state, and law enforcement agencies.

In theory, yes. In practice no.

ALCU could not roll a system like that out; never mind securing the resources needed to deploy this meaningfully; using it would go against their ethos, because using it would make them authoritarian, or adjacent.
Similarly, even if HOAs could deploy a system like that, that’d make them authoritarian.

Mass surveillance products like these don’t have a lot of non-authoritarian uses. Even if you could find such a use (of which I’m skeptical), it’d almost certainly need to be subsidized by an authoritarian customer. We’re not talking about security cameras around you personal property, here.

That and theBestPageInTheUniverse were formative

(I say, realizing that I remember nearly none of them besides vibes)

I mostly agree with you, so we’re probably not really doing much in this discussion. I’m trying not to be pedantic, but as my name will tell you, I find that to be a challenge lol.

I agree wrt how to regulate.
If disallow the govt from broad indiscriminate surveillance and disallow the govt from circumventing that rule by subcontracting it to private entities, then these companies and products that perform the mass surveillance would naturally become unprofitable and collapse. I would argue that such a product would be by its nature political, because it’s only practical use case was the furtherance of a political goal.

Cameras aren’t political, but the use of cameras for mass govt-level surveillance is political. So a system that does so (like the ones sold to the govt) is a political software product.

To me where it gets tricky is when private entities grow to government-sized proportions, and begin to use these same tools for similar purposes. I think that is also a problem, but it becomes harder to frame it.

So this is why I’m trying to avoid using the term fascist, because it means something specific but nobody can really agree what that thing is. For the purposes of this discussion, I’d prefer to say “authoritarian”.

I wouldn’t call traffic cameras invasive because they’re only at (some) intersections. But it’s still kind of borderline.
A private citizen recording people in public and the government doing so are fundamentally different. I think that having the government subcontract away that responsibility to maintain privacy is an abdication of that responsibility and is an intentional act to move towards authoritarian on the part of the govt. Now if the private company intends to help the government do that, is immaterial; that is the only major use case for their product, so it is functionally a tool with an authoritarian purpose.

Is it such a dichotomy in reality? No.
But we need to be exceptionally careful when we see these gray areas

Like the fascist LLM example I gave, or a training simulator that is hard-coded to only present fascist ideology.

Right. That’s what we’re talking about.
But I think the bar is a little lower. I think it’s enough to be primarily useful for (eg) fascist goals. If it happens to have minor non-fascist uses, I don’t think that materially changes anything.
I don’t think that Lemmy is primarily useful for furthering tankie goals.

I think that privacy invading surveillance systems are primarily useful for furthering authoritarian goals, by intention or not. There are some nice alternative uses, but I think that the use case of primary importance is in service to authoritarianism, which makes it authoritarian software.

If you mean a complete absence of the electromagnetic force, then chemistry and physics are going to get very disastrous for us very quickly

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 mean, superpowers are already supernatural, so I don’t want to assume that all the rules of physics apply

The extension of the argument I’m making (and maybe them kinda?) is that it’s functionally the same as if the software were political.

You can make software that nearly exclusively benefits a particular political belief for family of beliefs.

So even if it’s not actually technically political, it can be functionally political, at which point the argument is splitting hairs.

My boy just forgot blind people exist and can function their bodies

It does, but it doesn’t handle encryption at rest. Everyone needs to be aware that the immich admin can see their photos on the disk.

You don’t even need reasonably powerful hardware, I do it on my raspberry Pi 5. It just takes a little longer, which isn’t usually a problem except for the first time you import your library.

The other person deleted their comment so I can’t really know what the argument was, but I would like to make a distinction:

While tools cannot be political themselves, tools can lend themselves to specific political purposes.

A tank cannot itself be fascist, but it can make fascism more viable. Surveillance software cannot be political, but it is easily abused by fascists to destroy political opposition.

What matters is the harm and benefits. Is the harm caused by the tool justified by it’s benefits? Or are the primary use cases for the tool to prop up fascism?
(I suspect that “authoritarianism” would be a better term to use here, but I’m continuing the theme of the thread)

Nextcloud is like Google drive, immich is like Google photos.
You’d typically prefer to look at your photo albums in Google photos instead of Google drive.

I’m running it on in docker and I’ve connected it to my NAS mounted as a network drive. I set it up a few months ago, do it’s better since then.

Don’t even worry about the hardware, I’ve got it set up on a raspberry Pi 5. It’ll take a while to do all the classification on your existing library, but new photos get classified fast enough. You’re unlikely to need to do a smart search immediately after you’ve taken the pic.

For clarity, I’m not on Windows (obv, raspberry Pi), and I’m not using docker directly; I’m running HAOS on my pi, and I’m using the immich add-on. I know it uses docker, but I can’t tell you the exact command to run.

True, but I also think that my exact answer likely generalizes to most situations where institutions are capitalizing on the suffering of people.

IMO this post isn’t about the willingness for people to help each other in times of need, it’s about the willingness (and ability) for the community to organize a defense against institutions that are using the situation to exploit the community.