The Search for a Fair Society: The Difference Between Past Regimes and Today’s or the Secret of Tech Billionaires
November 7. Welcome. Time for coffee and a talk about a realistic utopia of a fair society as a fair society is the only form of cooperation that offers us the chance to banish violence and war from our lives.
Frankly, the US election results shocked and shattered me. But as Einstein said: “If I were to remain silent, I’d be guilty of complicity.” Now more than ever it is important to define our goal with all possible clarity to have a harbor to land. Yet, to do that I will need to recharge and do some random searches for whatever will come up that might help. But before I’ll take the next two weeks off, I want to let you in the little secret why tech billionaires in particular stepped up this election cycle, siding with the aspiring autocrats. For that, let’s dive into two anecdotes from my own family history.
The mothers of both of my maternal grandparents were Jews in Germany when Hitler was voted into power. They were both married to non-Jewish men who stood by them. That’s not where the similarities ended. The families of both the husbands were supporters of Hitler. How much so? Some members of my grandfather’s paternal family even made a bit of a career in the SS. When my grandfather’s father died in a freak bicycle accident on a deserted path through the woods, my great-grandmother Ella was immediately sent a deportation order to a concentration camp. That she wasn’t deported was thanks to a related SS doctor who declared her officially unfit for any travel. What he proved with this action was that even he – an officer of the SS – wasn’t implementing the replacement dataset that the Nazis pressed on the population into the generation process of his individual model of the world. If he’d done so, it wouldn’t have allowed him to make a distinction between Jews that need to be terminated and Jews that could live on. He only mostly acted as if he was implementing the replacement dataset to the full extent.
And that’s a problem every state ever in human history had to face as soon as any degree of force is used to make citizens implement replacement datasets that they aren’t agreeing to in their full extent, but that plagues regimes specifically because the number of people who disagree and the extent to which they disagree with the replacement dataset is so much higher. In fact, it’s what brought them all to fall. Because when you force people into compliance and compliance in this case means to exercise an internal action, people will not necessarily give in but mask to the outside. When it comes to the generation of their models of the world in their minds, however, they will choose their own data. The reality they create for their own, will at one point be irreconcilable with the reality the regime wants them to see. And they will seek new opportunities for cooperation as by nature we want to cooperate. But cooperation can only happen when realities are at least partially aligned. So, the new cooperators they will seek will be other people not implementing the regime-required replacement dataset. That’s how resistance movements are born.
To prevent this, a regime must surveil its population and pick up the small details that reveal the person who only masks before they can seek and find other cooperators that offer them a fairer deal. Things like a SS doctor giving a false certificate to a Jewish mother to save her from death. The Nazis tried with the Gestapo. The East Germans tried with the Stasi to an even greater degree, what takes me to my second story.
The Stasi was the Ministry for National Security, a political police that had special rules i.e. they were above any law. The ratio between formal and informal employees of the Stasi and citizens was about 1: 2.5. So, when three people met, it was highly likely that one of them would write a report about what happened for the Stasi. This made sure that the Stasi had all the information necessary to isolate the maskers, to make it impossible for them to find other cooperators that offered them a realistic, fairer deal than the regime did before they could become a threat to the regime.
But collecting all the information isn’t enough. That’s why it is a falsity to believe that just because we have the world at our fingertips via the internet, we are any smarter or better off than our ancestors. Having the data is only a good thing when you have the capacity to process and filter them for relevance, when you can find patterns and connect them to a problem that needs solving. That’s why random searches are a threat to the individual but offer the highest payoff in a collaboration – only together we have the capacity to process the information found and make it relevant for problems that need solutions. East Germany, unable to deal with all the incoming data, choked on it.
With the level of our connectivity today, the means of surveillance available, the computer capacity available, and AI with its LLMs at the level that they are, it is possible today to accomplish what the Stasi didn’t. Huge amounts of data that represent our lives and our otherwise concealed thoughts can be processed and used to suffocate any resistance against the regime before it can get out of your head. That’s what every algorithm does today on social media. And that is the difference between a regime today and any regime that came before. A regime today has a realistic chance to survive long term. It’s up to us and our ingenuity to prevent that.
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