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the slippery slope towards techno-fascism

There’s a great section in this paper by Frank Pasquale, The Algorithmic Self, which relates to my developing and deliberately provocative account of techno-fascism:

Stray too far from the binary of Democratic and Republican politics, and you risk being put on a watchlist. Protest shopping on Black Friday, and some facial recognition database may forever peg you as a rabble-rouser. Take a different route to work on a given day, and maybe that will flag you—“What is she trying to avoid?” A firm like Recorded Future might be able to instantly detect the deviation. Read the wrong blogs or tweets, and an algorithm like the British intelligence services’ Squeaky Dolphin is probably keeping a record. And really, what good is site-monitoring software in the absence of laws that punish, say, the use of jackhammers at construction sites before daybreak? Will the types of protesters whose activism helped make cities livable be able to continue their work as surveillance spreads? Billing sensor networks as integral to the “smart city” is only reassuring if one assumes that a benign intelligence animates its sensing infrastructures.

http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2015_Spring_Pasquale.php

My suggestion is that these tendencies, as a slippery slope that is reversible but thus far isn’t being reversed, intersect with existing trends towards authoritarianism and depoliticasation. They increase the likelihood that the very scary things incipient within the ‘war on extremism’ and the ‘post-democratic tendency’ will come to pass by contributing to the fragility of social movements and the distraction of the people who comprise them. They also provide a socio-technical infrastructure through which this dystopic potential might come to be realised by defensive elites, effectively unopposed within the polis, who seek to ensure their privilege (more and more of which will be inherited in coming decades) against a backdrop of social upheaval caused by climate change, unprecedented mass migration and structural unemployment driven by automation.

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