[MrTonyD]

There are lots of effective things - enforce a healthy diet, monitor everyone continuously, reduce the population to improve the environment, put criminals to death.

The goal of a society should not be "to be effective, efficient, and cost-justified". Other values must be considered.

[chr1]

I believe effective culture in this context should be understood as one able to produce and sustain larger number of people, and spread it's influence to more societies.

Reducing population for instance is clearly not effective, because society that does it will be replaced with the neighbour that doesn't.

Putting criminals to death doesn't help much as well, and can harm when an innocent person is killed by mistake.

In this sense western values have been very effective so far, but as technology changes, they may need to change.

Personally i don't think that privacy by itself is a good thing, if there was a device allowing anyone to see video of any place at any time (eliminating all privacy) people would be better off.

Things get bad only if a small group that already had control over the society gets exclusive access to the information, further reducing the power of other groups. This is bad, because it reduces the complexity of the society and doesn't allow to explore more paths (which in the long run have always failed so far). But if the powerful group is smart enough it may still make society more effective, by reducing the crime and vandalism, by helping to develop better school programs etc.

So if western societies want to remain effective the answer can't be simply 'no cameras' it should be cameras plus better mechanisms for distributing the power of the state between more groups.

[Mirioron]

I disagree. I think that "no cameras" by itself is a useful value, because surveillance makes humans behave differently.[0] People have higher levels of stress, are more likely to conform, and probably more likely to engage in civic life. Perhaps the cameras themselves will make surveillance states less competitive?

[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201409/all-eyes-...