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As for specific ways the idea applies to surveillance, I can only speculate. The essence would be that everyone is equally under the microscope including law enforcement officers and administration.
We can't stop Google or the government to cover the city with cameras.
But we can put up our own camera network!
I ask because it seems to me that would require dramatic changes in government and society that are extraordinarily unlikely. I'm not even sure if such a system could be maintained without changes to basic human nature.
It doesn't matter if Google can install 100 camera networks and "we" only 1. Both systems record the same data.
One issue that I could see is that there would still be asymmetry in the ability to use the information from surveillance. Someone with access to lawyers, the media, PR people, lobbyists, etc. who knows your secrets is much more dangerous than the average person who knows their secrets.
Maybe, if everything the powerful do is just as watched as the little people, that balances things out a bit.
I'm not postulating some utopia: I think what we'll get is what I call the "Tyranny of Mrs. Grundy":
> Mrs Grundy is a figurative name for an extremely conventional or priggish person, a personification of the tyranny of conventional propriety. A tendency to be overly fearful of what others might think is sometimes referred to as grundyism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs_Grundy
E.g. the Chinese "social credit" system. If that applies to the powerful communists as well as the masses then it might actually work, if not, it's the genesis of Morlocks and Eloi.
You are saying that there are two issues here:
1. A power inequality that would be created if the regular people's secrets are known but powerful people's secrets were not.
2. A lack of privacy would allow people's private actions to be judged and punished by society if they fail to conform.
You are then arguing that giving everyone access to the data/surveillance would solve the first problem but not the second.
If I am correct in my understanding, then I think that's a very reasonable argument. Although I'm concerned that even problem #2 alone could create a dystopia.
[1] I know intention can be difficult to read in text so I want to make clear: I truly mean this as confirming that I am following your argument, not as an indirect way to say that I think you are wrong.
Indeed! But I think it's important to try.
FWIW, I don't postulate that the ubiquitous surveillance is consensual at all, just inevitable. For a lot of people the amount and degree of casual surveillance is already becoming an issue.
I'm saying, if we have to have it, how do we want to manage it?
