Article body wasn't reachable. The HN discussion summary is below.
What HN community is saying
Commenters widely reject Ellison's premise as authoritarian. The dominant concern: surveillance targets ordinary citizens while the powerful secure exemptions, paralleling China's system. Top comments emphasize asymmetric power dynamics—those in charge face no reciprocal oversight. One commenter notes that Eastern Europe received higher per-capita foreign investment than China after 1989, contradicting claims Western capital prefers autocracies. A secondary thread addresses the technical inevitability: LLMs make old recordings suddenly valuable by enabling automatic annotation and indexing at scale, so collection is now economically justified. Smaller debate surfaces police bodycams as a partial counterexample where recordings have occasionally exposed officer misconduct, though commenters note footage is often deleted or disabled. Overall sentiment treats Ellison's vision as a dystopian endpoint, not a governance innovation.
What HN community is saying
Commenters widely reject Ellison's premise as authoritarian. The dominant concern: surveillance targets ordinary citizens while the powerful secure exemptions, paralleling China's system. Top comments emphasize asymmetric power dynamics—those in charge face no reciprocal oversight. One commenter notes that Eastern Europe received higher per-capita foreign investment than China after 1989, contradicting claims Western capital prefers autocracies. A secondary thread addresses the technical inevitability: LLMs make old recordings suddenly valuable by enabling automatic annotation and indexing at scale, so collection is now economically justified. Smaller debate surfaces police bodycams as a partial counterexample where recordings have occasionally exposed officer misconduct, though commenters note footage is often deleted or disabled. Overall sentiment treats Ellison's vision as a dystopian endpoint, not a governance innovation.