My latest Guardian column
examines the relationship between technology, surveillance and wealth
disparity — specifically the way that cheap mass surveillance makes it
possible to sustain more unequal societies because it makes it cheaper
to find and catch the dissidents who foment rebellion over the creation
of hereditary elites.
Social stability comes at the intersection of “guard labor” — coercive
control efforts — and beneficial social programs. The more a state
spends on social programs, the more of its citizens will buy into the
legitimacy of the social order, and the less it has to spend policing
those citizens. By making policing vastly cheaper, the IT revolution has
created a new wealth-disparity reality, in which it is more “cost
effective” for elites to buy surveillance than it is for them to pay
their share for the common good.
