Totalism+

Someone has proposed Internet Plus, and later on I also saw machine learning +. I think now it is the time I proposed Totalitarianism Plus, or Totalism+, thereafter

Totalism, in a Nutshell

For me it is simply a system with power from top-down. Public power first, then it grants permit to everything it allows. To your surprise many people enjoys it (well, what else can they do tho).

Totalism+

I define it as an extension of traditional totalism: it shall refer to the application of modern information technology in conventional Totalism. For instance, there are many new developments for totalism enabled by modern tech that we discuss below.

Cheaper surveillance

Hidden cameras/microphones in smart homes, smart TVs, or other smart IoT, software/OS backdoors, voice/text detection etc. has enable authorities mass surveillance that is even beyond the extent described in 1984. Sadly Soviet did not have the chance to witness this.

Dissenters classification

With cutting-edge ML classifications, powered by mass surveillance data, an authority can accurately classify dissenters. This relieves the authority from traditional control strategies such as 1. providing general welfare (for bribing the public) or 2. mass purge. Now an authority can accurately eliminate the dissenters, with a low false negative rate (escaped dissenters).

Information manipulation

The authority might fear Internet for its freedom at the beginning, but later on it discovered that as the largest player in this game of info, authority has many strength over individuals. It can resort to censorship (remove existing info), Sybil attack (formulate new info) or even Physical attack (arrest a netizen), for instance.

Even simpler, it can shutdown foreign website connections, or even all Internet connections when things turn against it. Internet shutdown has been seen too many time across world.

After all these backfires

I still believe that Internet, to any extent, enables freedom. Even when the Internet is twisted and controlled, there are still info flows. And in the end, fake or pro-authority info only prevail among who censors their mind proactively, since truth-seeker can learn from both truth and lies. As one of my favorite joke goes. Soviet Newspaper headlines: Today nothing happened.