RE: "Welcome to the Machine" - 'The Circle' Comes of Age: Surveillance and the Smart Grid
"Seseme Credit," like with many of Chinese "innovations," is but a poor copy of Western censorship tool using social media. The West has already monetized populist drivel on social media platforms from twitter to facebook that media personalities, athletes, and corporations exploit for monetary gain. Kim Kardishan was the pioneer in marketing through social media, to which now most Western corporate and celebrities are beholden. Who in the West will dare speak against populist/Leftist narrative in public, lest they be crucified in all social media platforms?
Since the communist muck living in the landmass designated "China" have no overarching principles other than blind nationalism and profit, it would be only natural that the CCP use monetary incentive to encourage certain sociopolitical thoughts to pervade their society. The West is not as advanced in its atheism as the East, demonstrated by the Leftist agents using seeming moral high ground to browbeat their opponents into submission. There is a fascinating, and perplexing, tendency of the average Western man who desperately seeks the appearance of piety/virtuousness/morality to the point of tolerating deluded fools rioting through his streets.
It seems the West can neither completely rebel against their Christian God to embrace atheism, nor completely reject Christianity for some other spiritual tradition. The Leftists, having rejected Western heritage, culture, and religion that has propelled the once backwaters of the world into the center of man's universe, possess nothing but self-hatred that must be propitiated hourly via adulation from strangers delivered through digital medium. The Leftists do not value privacy because they do not possess any thing of value and deeply resent those who live in recognition of their self-worth derived from sociocultural heritage and religious belief system.
Excellent commentary. I concur that the western media establishment is the progenitor and innovator of using modern media platforms to exercise social and political control of the masses by drowning out alternative (i.e. free-speech/financially deleterious for vested interested/anti-authoritarian) narratives. No doubt Sesame is built on the infrastructure the west has developed, but the blatant intent to use it to control people is not a viable political narrative in the west (yet).
As to spiritual orientation, atheism is the preferred narrative for centralized state power, as its ultimate consequence is that the state becomes the highest authority and the individual thus has no intrinsic worth outside of its contribution to other human beings as moderated and rewarded by the state.
I think the CCP's obtuse methods are illustration of their limited imagination and aptitude regarding sociopolitical manipulation. The calculus of social control would be the efficiency of state control in relation to resources expended. I can not fathom the cost of CCP's inelegant methods in omni-surveillance, data collection, and enforcement. The bloated department of internal surveillance will likely overshadow expenditures in any other government departments in the near future. Hopefully, the CCP will bankrupt itself out of existence, much like how the USSR collapsed attempting to outspend US in external security apparatus.
I think the West has a more elegant surveillance and censorship method, possibly because these social engineering activities were initially designed to maximize corporate profits, and thus, can be somewhat self-sustaining. The competitive environment under which Western propaganda evolved seems to have provided the Western political establishment with fantastic tools of social engineering. The Western man whole-heartedly accepts surveillance and censorship, under which he is subject, in so far as voluntarily providing personal information on social media engines, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. NSA data collection is a travesty, precisely because such obtuse data collection is unnecessary in a society where a subject's location, preferences, political interests, associations, economic status, etc. can be readily obtained by publicly available social media platforms. The Western man, also, voluntarily self-censors any non-conformist views, lest he be subject to social media exile.
I suppose the "tragedy" of our current world surveillance is that the East with the political will to crush its subjects lack the aptitude and imagination of an elegant surveillance state, while the West possessed with the most sophisticated and advanced methods lack any political will to accomplish anything, other than parrot preferences of computer geeks operating their algorithms from a Silicon Valley basement.
Nicely put! I think however the lack of political will in the West is less a question short-sightedness than rational self-restraint until such time as the Constitution and rule of law is dismantled to such an extent that the plutocrats need fear no possible recrimination by the small percentage of the population that still is aware that it has recourse to the law. Once the rule of law is, ironically enough, dismantled by law-maker marionettes to the benefit of the plutocrats, the hammer will fall in earnest.