@"huge need for nanny buttons everywhere"
A big part of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is about getting people to police themselves and others around them. The thing is these "panic buttons" will be brought in for all well and good reasons (at first), but then we all know feature creep will continue, giving us a slide towards buttons and ways to report ever more possible crimes, plus even just thought crimes, including political thought crimes, as we all slide towards ever more ways for effectively government informants to use these "panic buttons" and before you know it companies are offering better profiling technology to partly automate these panic buttons, and then we fall totally into the world George Orwell described.
The danger of course is, as the saying goes, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” because out of good intentions we also slide inexorably towards a world with an ever more powerful minority holding ever greater control over an ever more spied on and repressed majority of people, used ever more for the personal gain of that ever more powerful minority and no one can stop it, until that is, everyone if forced to stand together to oppose the powerful minority, to finally (once again) reset their level of power over the majority, by which time its to late to do that easily.
Sadly every few generations the majority of people forget the dangers and don't believe the dangers of allowing a minority of society such power over the majority, until that is they see for themselves just how bad life is getting. Then sadly the majority has to finally fight to reset the level of power and control over them. (After all its not as if our rich corrupt elite are robbing money from tax payers for themselves and to give millions, even billions of more tax payers money to help earn rich banker friends of politicians millions out of our tax money, thereby demonstrating a behavior far more like a Kleptocracy than a Democracy. But then a Democracy was simply a convenient way, (created so long ago) to placate the majority of people into thinking they have a say in how the country is run, when in fact all they have a choice of is which group of greedy narcissist power hungry control freaks they let into power. All the narcissist control freaks want power, (and their narcissist behavior gives them a competitive advantage in gaining power over others), so is it any wonder society keeps getting redefined into ways to give the people in power what they want, which is more power.
So is it any wonder the people in power seek to exploit and abuse ever more (and better) technology to increase their personal gain from having such power over all of us. But then they tell us in typically Machiavellian ways, that its all done for us, when its really done for them.
After all citizen, we spy to protect you.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
