Fascism and the Internet of Things

In The Danger of Tyranny in the Age of Software, Cyber Civil Defense and Oligarchiology and the Rise of Software to Predominance in the 21st Century, I explored the rapidly advancing dangers presented by the growing number of fascist Alt-Right movements throughout the world that have recently come to power. The danger is that these fascist movements are now using the power of social media software to control large populations in a Nineteen Eighty-Four-like manner. This can only become more dire as more and more of the "dumb gadgets" in our daily lives become "smart devices" in the Internet of Things (IoT). Today, the IoT is continuing to unfold, in a relentless manner that cannot be stopped, with each new purchase of a smart device. The danger lies in fascist Alt-Right movements possibly using the IoT, like they have used social media software, to exert even more control over their subjugated populations. I am certainly not the first person to make this rather obvious connection. If you Google "fascism internet of things" you will get about 5.5 million hits. But I contend that to fully understand the rapid decline of the fading 18th-century-Enlightenment democracies throughout the world, you need some softwarephysics. In A Brief History of Self-Replicating Information, I explained that software is merely the fifth wave of self-replicating information to come to predominance on the Earth over the past 4.0 billion years and that software was now in the process of totally reworking the surface, and the near subsurface, of the planet as it comes to predominance and continues to make the Earth an even warmer and cozier place for more and more software to thrive.

There is a recent TED talk that explains how smart device manufacturers and ISPs are already spying upon us for commercial purposes:

Kashmir Hill and Surya Mattu What your smart devices know (and share) about you at: https://www.ted.com/talks/kashmir_hill_and_surya_mattu_what_your_smart_devices_know_and_share_about_you?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2018-07-21&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_content=top_right_button&t=1s

The danger, of course, is that it would be quite easy in the future for a fascist Alt-Right regime to simply exapt the already-existing IoT network of its populace, that was first benignly designed to enhance the day-to-day life of its end-users, but then went on to capture commercial data from those end-users without their knowledge. Such an all-encompassing IoT network could then be used by a fascist Alt-Right regime to completely monitor and control its populace. But unlike in Nineteen Eighty-Four, such a fascist Alt-Right regime would not even need to bother with the expense of establishing the all-pervasive spying network portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Its own citizens would have purchased all of the necessary hardware and agreed to all of the eavesdropping software far in advance!

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Steve Johnston