Didn't Samizdat help bring down the Soviet Empire? If that was possible, why isn't it possible here? Our ossified political class is extremely fragile and inflexible and terrified of the population. They also have a messianic belief in the power of technology that is wholly misplaced. They are ripe for being flanked and undermined.
I'd quality that I'm coming at this issue narrowly, from the perspective of literary fiction, as I'm not politically active in the way that you're describing. That is but a subset of a larger information war that is continuously happening in every Western polity, and my intuition is that things will get worse before they get better. I don't have any predictions that I'm wedded to apart from near to medium term declines in freedom of expression.
One thing to keep in mind is that we can't predict the skew of particular tech. I understand your concerns with AI but the outcome may not be the obvious predicted one.
For example I would argue that at the state level the printing press had a massive centralizing effect. Yes, it helped dissolve the confederated grip of of the papacy over Europe, but compare state control and power between Protestant and Catholic England (or just any nation with a printing press) and it was always radically more centralized.
Perhaps this "AI" tech will be leaked like it'd art producing precursors, or be used to identify state doctrine just as easily, and identify name/shame. Obvious dissidents won't have censorship patterns, but in collaboration with decentralized platforms you describe it may be a brighter picture than any of us imagine.
I think the AI name/shame is interesting. Last time I heard about this they had an AI that could determine criminals from facial recognition using security footage. It tagged 60 California lawmakers as criminals, and then they banned the program. Rules for thee, as they say.
Didn't Samizdat help bring down the Soviet Empire? If that was possible, why isn't it possible here? Our ossified political class is extremely fragile and inflexible and terrified of the population. They also have a messianic belief in the power of technology that is wholly misplaced. They are ripe for being flanked and undermined.
I'd quality that I'm coming at this issue narrowly, from the perspective of literary fiction, as I'm not politically active in the way that you're describing. That is but a subset of a larger information war that is continuously happening in every Western polity, and my intuition is that things will get worse before they get better. I don't have any predictions that I'm wedded to apart from near to medium term declines in freedom of expression.
"the printing press had a decentralizing skew"
One thing to keep in mind is that we can't predict the skew of particular tech. I understand your concerns with AI but the outcome may not be the obvious predicted one.
For example I would argue that at the state level the printing press had a massive centralizing effect. Yes, it helped dissolve the confederated grip of of the papacy over Europe, but compare state control and power between Protestant and Catholic England (or just any nation with a printing press) and it was always radically more centralized.
Perhaps this "AI" tech will be leaked like it'd art producing precursors, or be used to identify state doctrine just as easily, and identify name/shame. Obvious dissidents won't have censorship patterns, but in collaboration with decentralized platforms you describe it may be a brighter picture than any of us imagine.
That's an excellent point!
The skew itself is indeed contingent on all sorts of other factors.
I think the AI name/shame is interesting. Last time I heard about this they had an AI that could determine criminals from facial recognition using security footage. It tagged 60 California lawmakers as criminals, and then they banned the program. Rules for thee, as they say.