I first started thinking and writing about some of the things we’re only experiencing now way back in the mid-90s. A friend and I together posited many of the events and concerns of the present — among them, ubiquitous electronic tracking and surveillance, the corporate attempt and success of that attempt to re-assert control over information and the complete dominance of McJobs as the prevalent job type*.

Unfortunately few of my writings from that time survive. Not that it would matter, really. If you aren’t credentialed, you could discover free energy and teleportation and no one would care (until someone with credentials stole it from you and “validated” it and took all the credit and money).

Really it only matters to me, but I am glad to say that I saw the future fairly clearly in an area that I care about.

All that is just to segue into this review of Randall Collins’ Sociological Insight that discusses the psychological effects of ubiquitous surveillance.

Coercion, by the way, requires surveillance, which Collins meant in the old-fashioned sense of “someone watching you” as opposed to all-out electronic surveillance (which is still, eventually, someone watching you), and its effects on conformity, group think, and submission. High-surveillance societies are really coercion societies, and they produce people who appear dull and without any initiative.

This is something everyone should read and think on because we are moving from a low-surveillance society back to a high-surveillance society; perhaps the most high-surveillance society in history, in certain respects. Understanding what it is likely to do us is important.

I suspect one of the drivers of slow economic growth and something that mainstream (and many heterodox economists) will never consider as such is this all-consuming and ever-present surveillance. It’s impossible to model and extremely-difficult if not impossible to quantify, so no matter how large is effect it’ll always be discounted or just discarded outright.

By the way, lately I’ve been attempting to identify large-effect factors that are completely or mostly ignored by the math-obsessed quant culture.

Some of these factors I use to trade, so I will never write about them or discuss them here or anywhere.

Outside the realm of trading though, it’s a comparatively easy to be much smarter about the world, to punch above your weight and to comprehend more of the cosmos by identifying the huge gaps in math/engineering/quant culture and exploring the vast realms they ignore.

More on that later, though.

*One quote from that time I remember clearly: “Not everyone without a degree can be a burger-flipper. What are we going to do, flip burgers back and forth to one another? An economy just can’t work that way.”