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.

Capitalists are constantly telling on themselves.

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.

I seriously need to get this giant big cyberpunk writing/worldbuilding project of mine on the road.

Because at the moment, cyberpunk is becoming aspirational. Reality is just, dunno, cyberpunk but dumb as hell.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Surely if the US is engaging in mass surveillance than China can't be.. otherwise which superpower am I supposed to cheer for?

Always thought it was weird that they would scoff at their "social credit score" system. Emphasis on "social". As if that was the fucked up part.

China was the testbed. All of them are doing the same thing

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?

I'm doing my part, it is still perfectly legal to tell people to go fuck themselves, loudly, constantly, and any time they're in public. I'm sure someone will say that's a waste of time etc, I'm fine with that still going to tell oldies who didn't fix shit to go fuck themselves, yeah maybe it won't fix anything, ya still deserve to be punished.

Stop using their services. Call a taxi.

Seems like USA is trying to be everything bad with china with none of the good parts

reason #(big number) to not go to the US

The problem is that state agents can use surveillance tech or surveillance services with no regulatory review on how this technology interacts with the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, what is specifically supposed to protect Americans from this sort of stuff.

This is partly due to the presumption of regularity, the assumption by courts that law enforcement follows rules, even when we know they historically do not. (And DHS is even worse).

It's a separate problem that private companies can also buy this data. They shouldn't have the right to surveil Americans for private purposes any more than the state does.

Also be aware that some districts that are ending their contracts with Flock Safety are quietly switching over to other ALPR services such as Axon. Don't let your district get away with it.