• SpookyBogMonster@lemmy.ml
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    1 hour ago

    Americans weren’t joking when they said that stuff about China, they were parroting an exaggerated version of the reality, which was being fed to them by people who don’t actually care about limiting mass surveillance.

  • DupaCycki@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    Not to glaze surveillance, but at the very least it can have some positive results, like in China, where it helped bring down crime to non-existent levels, and increased public safety.

    You can just leave your stuff on the street and come back for it later, without worrying about theft. Whether or not it balances the negatives is another question entirely, but I think we can all agree some upsides beat no upsides any day.

    As opposed to countries such as the US, Australia or the UK, where surveillance is used for nothing but spying on you and ensuring you’re as miserable as physically possible. Nobody even bothers using the existing surveillance infrastructure for any positive effects. It’s like everything only has the sole purpose of benefitting the oligarchs.

    Similarly, the EU is slowly pushing some surveillance plans, with no thought behind them whatsoever. As of right now, they’d be a 100% net loss for everyone, everywhere, in every situation, except the tiny elite class.

    I guess they just got tired of pretending lately. Even the good old “think about the children” is used less often nowadays. Soon it’ll just be “submit without question or get executed.”

    For so many years we’ve been manipulated to be grateful for everything, because we could always be living in a dystopia like China. And here we are, moving in a considerably worse direction, without even the slightest benefits of those dystopian structures.

    Have we forgotten the most effective ways of keeping politicians in check?

    • Pup Biru@aussie.zone
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      1 hour ago

      Even the good old “think about the children” is used less often nowadays. Soon it’ll just be “submit without question or get executed.”

      TBH we have the “think of the corporations” line these days that’s used more than think of the children

    • s1ndr0m3@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      I’m sure they will make it part of the employment contract under the guise of “safety.”

  • tigermountain@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    And what’s worse, eventually all the information gathered from all this surveillance will be turned into training data for AI. So right now, for all intents and purposes, none of us has any true privacy. And one of the most deeply damaging aspects of this is that it changes how we think. Subconsciously, when we’re engaged in thinking and we have even a brief idea that our thoughts might somehow, someday be known (through the actions of a surveillance state, for example), we reframe our ideas so that one day they will be known by someone else; they will have an audience. This is a much different state than when we’re able to think with the freedom of knowing, even subconsciously, that our ideas are completely private.

  • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    I wasn’t joking when I said the ccp spies on their citizens and I wasn’t joking when I said the US spies on their citizens after the Patroit Act. The normalization of a surveillance police state all across the world is terrifying.

    Uk too.

    • GalacticRobot@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      Uber certainly would. Just sell the data and make profit. Or realistically, just start scanning for bluetooth and wifi mac addresses, and upload that with GPS, which is what Flock is planning on doing, now you just tie it to a one time scanned license plate. Isn’t technology grand? Ugh.

  • psx_crab@lemmy.zip
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    11 hours ago

    Chinese citizen would be living under

    Correction: Chinese citizens already living under a surveillance state. UK and now US and also many other countries is merely learning from the best(worst). Mandatory age verification for socmed and game? China already have that years ago. ISP level blocking? Great Firewall of China is there from the beginning.

    • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      End to end encryption chats are banned in China btw. China is living in this complete dystopia already and the only reason we don’t hear it because China is very good at hiding this. The great firewall is as much to contain Chinese inside as it is to repel others.

      • qwertyuiop@lemmy.ml
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        6 hours ago

        End to end encryption chats are banned in China btw

        I know imessage is commonly used and it’s e2e. The firewall is a blacklist not a whitelist, and Github isn’t blocked. They would have to manually block any server that hosts matrix/xmpp if they wanted to actually enforce that. The most annoying thing they do (at least in Shanghai) is the ISP’s have raw.githubusercontent.com resolve to 0.0.0.0, but you can just manually add the ip in your /etc/hosts file. Maybe it’s to make downloading releases tarballs more annoying to encourage domestic alternatives?

  • Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    14 hours ago

    The surveillance state is not just in the US. China and the UK love that shit too. Pretty much any government with the money and will for it is doing it for the benefit of a digital panopticon.

    • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      Funny how this surveillance never correlates with any happiness or safety metrics. It’s almost like it’s not there to improve society but to control it or something 🤔

  • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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    15 hours ago

    There is somewhere between 60% and 90% of Americans who think at least one party in government, or Israel rulership that, hates them. In China, that is well under 10%. Both are extreme surveillance states. In China, you can plug a charger for your ebike on the street, and no one will steal it. Its used for genuine property protection instead of CIA Man persecution.

    So the “Chinese were living under” line misses the point of what surveillance is used for. US decline needs desperate regime oppression to perpetuate itself from the threat of the people it hates, but who may/have the democratic power to escape the clockwork orange propaganda feed.

    • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      And no one will steal it

      Too bad someone will steal you before you can get back to the bike if you have the wrong political sticker on the bike :/

  • Kurtismayfield@lemmy.zip
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    16 hours ago

    For decades people have been warming about inverted totalitarianism… where private companies do the heavy lifting in controlling and surveillance or the population. Very few listened. Now that we are approaching complete sacrifice of your privacy to these companies, people are finally waking up. But it may be too late.