The Power of Data and Surveillance

In order to collaborate on a large scale,

you need to convince everybody to believe in the same story.

What really, the, the, the engine of history is stories.

And they don't even need to be true.

Some of the most powerful stories in history were fictions.

But you need to get everybody, or at least a significant part

of the population, to believe in the same story, otherwise it doesn't work.

Science is not really, at least this is my view as a historian,

science is not really about truth, it's about power.

The real aim of science as a project,

as an establishment, is not truth, it's power.

Particular individuals, particular scientists,

may be very interested in the truth, personally,

but as an institution, the real aim of science is power.

Those who own the data really own the future.

We are reaching a point in human history

that we have enough biological knowledge

and we have enough computing power,

and all you need in order to systematically hack millions of people is just the data.

That to hack people means to know people better than they know themselves.

To, somebody in San Francisco, in Beijing,

knows you, knows more about you than you know about yourself,

about your medical condition,

about your mental weaknesses,

things that you did 5 years ago, 20 years ago,

you completely forgot about them, they know it.

This is something we never faced before. Not even the KGB could do it.

And we are already beginning to see the emergence

of such total surveillance regimes

in places like Xinjiang,

in places like in my own home country in Israel,

we have this big laboratory of surveillance called the occupied territories,

where you have 2.5 million guinea pigs

of how to completely survey and control

a, a, a population

with very few soldiers.

I mean, when you look at the numbers, it's amazing

how few soldiers you need to control millions of people if you have their data.