Chapter II: Law & Order Ltd.

“Mussolini made the trains run on time” is a classic saying both in political discussion and common parlance. It’s used as a justification of fascist governments, pointing out that maybe fascists kill a bunch of people, but at least they’re efficient in solving problems in society. It’s exemplified in Science Fiction all the time with films like 1984 or Minority Report. Sure, 1984 presents a world where people live in fear of a totalitarian government, but that government snuffs out any opportunity for dissent before it ever appears, and has created a system of wars designed to perpetuate itself indefinitely. Yes, Minority Report shows a world where people are imprisoned without actually having committed a crime, but it also dropped the murder rate in Washington D.C. down to basically nothing. These systems may not be the best for people, but they’re just so darn efficient. This is an absolute baldfaced lie, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you on something. And there is no better demonstration of this in action than the film Brazil.

Brazil is very silly in it’s presentation of an Orwellian dictatorship. It has AC repairmen with 2 foot long visors, torturers who wear baby masks, and plastic surgeons who use Saran Wrap. That in itself is not a critique. It’s unbelievably easy to make fascism look silly, just look at any Mel Brooks movie, or for a recent example, JoJo Rabbit. Where the critique becomes particularly interesting is in how its applied to the security state.

The fundamental satire of Brazil is that a Dystopian security state would be as dysfunctional or more than any currently existing government organization. Full of redundancies, inter-departmental conflict, and people just trying to go through their days without being hassled. If the world of 1984 is a fascist version of “The West Wing”, then Brazil is a fascist version of “The Thick of It.”

But why does this dysfunction exist? The government has complete control over the populace, and can effectively act with impunity. Why is it not competent? The answer is just that the people who run these organizations are basically as competent as those who run the mundane government organizations that exist now. There is an implicit assumption that the people who do fascism are dangerous ubermensch, when in reality it’s all just fail-sons, fake tough guys, and incredulous doofuses.

The same is true of the tools that are being used. The assumption is that once the fascists are in charge, they’ll utilize or manufacture tools that can pinpoint dissidents in this new world, and harvest information that can provide a totalizing portrait of who they are and what they’re like. Meanwhile, in the real world, the tools people are building for this tasks are even worse at guessing who’s likely to be a criminal than humans are. As pointed out in the article “AI is sending people to jail—and getting it wrong” by Karen Hao, facial recognition software often mistook members of congress for criminals, and risk assessment tools are only really useful for identifying which of the defendants are poor or people-of-color. For an even more recent example, the company FAMA does automated background checks through people’s social media history, and flags tweets it sees as “bad” or “good.” The only things it seemed to look at in the posts in question was whether or not they used swear words.

Now, what I’m not saying is that fascist governments aren’t dangerous because they’re incompetent. Rather, that they’re incompetent, and that makes them more dangerous. Fascist governments will end up killing or disenfranchising not just those within it that it sees as dissidents or undesirables, but also totally random people who didn’t violate any of the arbitrary rules the government had. Basically everyone living under a fascist government is marked for death at all times, whether they comply with it or not. If fascist government was an animal, it would be the biggest, dumbest elephant the world had ever seen. But when elephants fight, it’s the ground that suffers.