[im] fwd:When repression is cheaper than redistribution

[János Sugár]

>From: Felix Stalder <felix at openflows.com>

>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.
>
>
>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.
>/..../