“For most of history, surveillance ran into the same wall: payroll. A Soviet censor could open your letter. He could not open everyone’s letter, because steaming envelopes takes hands and there were never enough hands. The Stasi got closest, running files on a share of the East German population large enough that historians still argue the exact fraction, and it took warehouses of paper and a network of informants the size of an army to do it. The ceiling was human. Reading you cost a person a day, and a person’s day costs money.”

“What protected the ordinary person was the price of attention. You were boring, and boring was expensive to read.”

“AI removed the ceiling. A model reads every message at a cost rounding to zero, sorts them, flags the interesting ones, and never asks for a raise. The thing that made mass reading impossible was arithmetic, and the arithmetic just inverted. Two variables remain: who holds the data, and what they say when the state asks.”

(Denis Stetskov)

https://techtrenches.dev/p/the-cost-of-reading-everyone-just

#ai #surveillance