zlacker

>"China is using technology for the perfection of dictatorship." -Pete Buttigieg, 2020 US presidential candidate

PRC may be blazing the trail, but as the tech becomes proved and available, I won't be surprised to see creeping adoption in more "free" countries (especially following crises).

>>mLuby+(OP)
Exactly. People are already used to much more surveillance than they used and this trend just keeps going. Sometimes it's China taking the lead, sometimes the US, sometimes other countries. But they all look at each other and slowly adopt what the other country is doing.

I am pretty sure the next generation will never see anything other than complete surveillance by countries or corporations. And for them it will seem normal.

>>Ididnt+S2
If your whole argument is based on fatalism, you might as well say so....because right now you assume the conclusion.

>>Subicu+2i
It doesn't look like fatalism to me; the argument is based on the bandwagon effect and how dramatic outcomes can be arrived at through incremental changes.

>>mLuby+(OP)
In China, surveillance is nationalized. In the US, it's nationalized (NSA) and privatized (Facebook). The tech already exists and people are using it willingly.

>>mLuby+sk
It's the slow erosion of values. I remember a time when people would "never do online banking", now pretty much everybody does it. Some years ago nobody would have thought it possible that the border agent may ask for social media accounts or decrypt your phone. Now they do it. It's a very slow progression that may take decades but it's happening everywhere.

>>orthec+Ok
It's a bs comparison. The Chinese government surveillance is purely for dictatorship, and they do put political opponents and human rights lawyers in jail at a massive scale. The NSA surveillance is mostly for legitimate security reasons and is under restrict scrutiny.

>>educat+4v
LOL

China does it to protect their people from people that want to undermine and dismantle the party

This is true! This is exactly what we want to happen! These are security reasons from their perspective

Can you see how that is not so different? In the US we are as oblivious to the exact nature and motives of security threats too, and tolerate our border and surveillance agencies to preempt an unspecified threat. The mere existence of scrutiny doesnt make the systems that different.

>>Ididnt+S2
To be honest most people already see surveillance capitalism as normal. Weirds me out for one.

>>orthec+Ok
I like your idea about nationalization vs privatization of national security, but it appears that your example about the US could also be applied to China - replace the NSA with China's MSS, and Facebook with Wechat.

However, large companies in China are tightly coupled with government when it comes to national security issues, while there is probably more pushback in the US.

>>rollti+Jw
I disagree that it's similar. It's one thing to perform surveillance on individuals where you have strong reasons to suspect they will engage in terrorist acts (meaning making plans to kill lots of people) and quite another to do so because someone disagrees with you being in power. I'm sure there's an overlap of people who do both but that's not the group I'm talking about and I'm also sure NSA/US authorities abuse their powers (hence why we constantly have to fight against power/survaillence creep) to monitor people that are simply political enemies but that doesn't negate the difference between the 2 situations (ie just because the US may engage in that type of behavior doesn't excuse the behavior China engages in). I grew up in an Eastern European communist dictatorship and I know what it means to be afraid to talk against the party and its leader. I'm now an immigrant to the US (so arguably no as many rights as a citizen) and in no way is there the same type of censorship and oppression.

Put it another way, where do you draw the line in terms of how the government is allowed to behave in regards to its citizens since you can pretty much excuse any abusive behavior under the reasoning of "security reasons"?

>>d1zzy+GV
US intelligence agencies aren't in the business of picking people up and disappearing them for expressing discontent with the power structure.

I believe the Chinese government apparatus is in that business.

Regarding the surveillance for surveillance sake, I don't see much difference. I see you describe exactly what I did.