---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Sep 5, 2017 at 2:16 PM Subject: Fwd: <nettime> When repression is cheaper than redistribution To: Michel Bauwens <[email protected]> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Felix Stalder <[email protected]> Date: Mon, Sep 4, 2017 at 10:44 AM Subject: <nettime> When repression is cheaper than redistribution To: [email protected] Recently, the German political scientist Ulrike Guérot argued that digital technologies changed the political calculus of the ruling elites: repression is now seen as cheaper than redistribution to maintain the system. This research, by the Center for Political Studies (CPS), University of Michigan, puts numbers to this claim. Advanced democracies spent just shy of $9 billion to surveil 74% of their population, at a cost of $10/person. Now, this of course are not the entire costs of the apparatus of repression, but just indicates how incredibly cheap surveillance blanket surveillance has become. To gain any traction for political change, we need to change this calculus, by making surveillance and repression expensive again. Felix http://cpsblog.isr.umich.edu/?p=2129 <...> While nations worldwide have spent at least $27.1 billion USD (or $7 per individual) to surveil 4.138 billion individuals (i.e., 73 percent of the world population), stable autocracies are the highest per-capita spenders on mass surveillance. In total, authoritarian regimes have spent $10.967 billion USD to surveil 81 percent of their populations (0.1 billion individuals), even though this sub-set of states tends to have the lowest levels of high-technology capabilities. Stable autocracies have also invested 11-fold more than any other regime-type, by spending $110 USD per individual surveilled, followed second-highest by advanced democracies who have invested $8.909 billion USD in total ($11 USD per individual) covering 0.812 billion individuals (74 percent of their population). In contrast to high-spending dictatorships and democracies, developing and emerging democracies have invested $4.784 billion USD (or $1-2 per individual) for tracking 2.875 billion people (72 percent of their population). It is possible that in a hyper-globalizing environment increasingly characterized by non-state economic (e.g., multi-national corporations) and political (e.g., transnational terror organizations) activity, nation-states have both learned from and mimicked each other’s investments in mass surveillance as an increasingly central activity in exercising power over their polities and jurisdictions. It is also likely that the technological revolution in digitally-enabled big data and cloud computing capabilities as well as the ubiquitous digital wiring of global populations (through mobile telephony and digital communication) have technically enabled states to access and organize population-wide data on their citizens in ways not possible in previous eras. <....> -- ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?search=0x0C9FF2AC # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected] # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/