I mean there’s a lot of obvious ways to try to game these and ways to defend against gaming, but the basic idea is feasible:
Eg: Leave phone at home —> require phone for entry/cross-check credit cards or other id artifacts, or machine learn unusual patterns
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Once infrastructure is in place, you can use it in more flexible ways.
“Yellow alert! A super-spreader event just happened at Starbucks and you were exposed. This block is now under quarantine. If you leave before test-sweep and all-clear, you will face a fine up to $200”
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This might sound dystopian etc but it’s not actually that different from fare enforcement on public transit. And roads/public spaces ARE public transit. You should expect to have freedoms curtailed a bit if you choose to use them.
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The way to ensure civil liberties is not to try and prevent such opt-in systems but make them locally bounded, and with larger unsurveiled free spaces outside of denser urban areas. You can pass freely back and forth if you accept reentry screening. The city block as a clean room
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This stuff is not hard to imagine, architect and build in MVP ways. What’s hard is hard-coding the fundamental shared values in auditable ways, giving people meaningful opt-outs/alts, and most importantly, govern and evolve in accountable ways for the long term.
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The funniest thing for all thise panicking about this vision is... you basically already accept far more intrusive surveillance for your online wanderings, and banal versions of this in paper-based mobility governance (passports, tickets, boarding passes, physical fences).
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In practice, mobility politics tends to boil down to a negotiation around “you decide what mobility governance tech to use, I’ll decide where you can put it”
Trump’s wall is an example of such a negotiation. He got what... 3 new miles of wall? 93 total, 90 replacing old wall.
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Here, the “existing wall” or green zone fences is all area under ticketing or permission control: transit, airports, buildings with metal detectors. I’d guess 10% of “public” built environment in a modern city is restricted mobility policed by fences, walls, and ticketing/passes
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Good question. Probably local public transit agencies of cities will take this on as expanded scope. In fact a near-future sci-fi thing I’m working on, I imagined a vastly expanded Clipper authority (the Bay Area transit smart card system). twitter.com/mkornblum/stat
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I’m surprised people are surprised so many of us are so ready to trot out such scenarios and already have some literacy in the ideaspace. Do you people not read/watch any scifi? This stuff is tropey to the point it’s actually hard to write new sci-fi that goes beyond.
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The hard challenge of all this is actually underlying moral foundations. The 4 options that already exist:
Basic paternalism (right/left Big Brothers)
Libertarian paternalism (nudgeology)
Cancel culture (anarchic sousveillance)
Cookie culture (surveillance capitalism)
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About 2/3 of your life probably is *already* under surveillance conducted under one or more of these moral models. We’re not talking 0 to 1. We’re talking 0.67 to 0.75, incrementalism, with some apps attached.
The only genuinely radical option is blockchain-based versions
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Cory Doctorow proposed a version of the radical blockchain type option in Little Brother but afaik, such literary explorations are as close as we’ve ever gotten to real examples of such schemes. Looking forward with 🍿 for the MVPs.
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