Cutting carbon emissions with "soft genocide"

*Well, I don't think it's gonna play out like this, because it's kind of hard to have a functional "panopticon" without noticing what you're seeing. If you've got an alleged panopticon that's really just all denialist filter-bubbles, then you've lost contact with objective reality. You're living in a fantasy, not in realpolitik. It's gonna be tough to make your Five-Year Plan because everybody's so crooked, demoralized and afraid.

*However, I don't see any speculation in here that's outright impossible, and, yeah, it's all present-day elements that aren't yet well distributed.

*You have to wonder what the end game is for a society like Stross describes. Okay, you've automagically starved-off 80 percent of the planet's population with drones and barbed wire, and you're all living in your panoptic mogul boxes with the sea washing around the first floor. Now what? What do you say to your teenage kid?

You might pull an Orwell 1984 and just end the book by typing "boot in their face forever," but "forever" is just not a good concept for forecasting any actual lived futurity. "Forever" never plays out well, it's theology. Stalin may have totalized political power and stuffed it in his own pockets, but he gets old, you know; he just dies off with the passage of time, and then what do you tell yourself? How do you look in the mirror?

Science fiction writer dwelling in cruel Brexitania moans about Things To Come

(...)

You don't need to build concentration camps with barbed wire fences and guards if you can turn your entire society into a machine-mediated panopticon with automated penalties for non-compliance.

The Nazis had to leave their offices in order to round people up and brutalize or murder them. They had to travel to the Wannsee Conference to hammer out how to implement Generalplan Ost. Tomorrow's genocides will be decentralized and algorithmically tweaked, quite possibly executed without human intervention.

Why?

The people who buy into the idea of eugenics and racial supremacy—the alt-right and their fellow travellers—will sooner or later have to come to terms with the inevitability of anthropogenic climate change. Right now climate denialism is a touchstone of the American right, but the evidence is almost impossible to argue against right now and it's increasingly obvious that many of the people who espouse disbelief are faking it—virtue signalling on the hard right. Sooner or later they'll flip. When they do so, they will inevitably come to the sincere, deeply held belief that culling the bottom 50% to 90% of the planetary population will give them a shot at survival in the post-greenhouse world. (That's the "bottom 50-90%" as defined by white supremacists and neo-Nazis.) They'll justify their cull using the values we're seeing field-tested today racism, religious and anti-religious bigotry, nationalism, sexism, xenophobia, white supremacism. These are values with tested, proven appeal to [petty authoritarians](https://theauthoritarians.org who feel that their way of life is under threat.

Of course there will, as time goes on, be fewer and fewer members of the murdering class, as climate insecurity causes periodic crop collapses, automation reduces the need for human labour is required to keep things running, and capital accumulation outstrips labour value accumulmation (leading to increased wealth concentration and societal stratification and rigidity).

Who are the murderers? I'll give you a clue: they're the current ruling class and their descendants...