What is holding the government back from doing the same thing? It’s not from a lack of technological capacity. In 2013, Edward Snowden, the renegade National Security Agency analyst, revealed that the US federal government’s spying was vastly greater than previously known. In his 2019 memoir, Permanent Record, Snowden writes of learning that
the US government was developing the capacity of an eternal law-enforcement agency. At any time, the government could dig through the past communications of anyone it wanted to victimize in search of a crime (and everybody’s communications contain evidence of something). At any point, for all perpetuity, any new administration—any future rogue head of the NSA—could just show up to work and, as easily as flicking a switch, instantly track everybody with a phone or a computer, know who they were, where they were, what they were doing with whom, and what they had ever done in the past.11
Snowden writes about a public speech that the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief technology officer, Gus Hunt, gave to a tech group in 2013 that caused barely a ripple. Only The Huffington Post covered it. In the speech, Hunt said, “It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human-generated information.” He added that after the CIA masters capturing that data, it intends to develop the capability of saving and analyzing it.12
Understand what this means: your private digital life belongs to the State, and always will. For the time being, we have laws and practices that prevent the government from using that information against individuals, unless it suspects they are involved in terrorism, criminal activity, or espionage. But over and over, dissidents told me that the law is not a reliable refuge: if the government is determined to take you out, it will manufacture a crime from the data it has captured, or otherwise deploy it to destroy your reputation.
Both the spread of the cult of social justice and the reach of surveillance capitalism into areas that the Orwellian tyrants of the communist bloc could only have aspired to have created an environment favorable to the emergence of soft totalitarianism. Under this Pink Police State scenario, powerful corporate and state actors will control populations by massaging them with digital velvet gloves, and by convincing them to surrender political liberties for security and convenience.
China: The Mark of the East
We don’t have to imagine the dystopian merging of commerce and political authoritarianism in a total surveillance state. It already exists in the People’s Republic of China. No doubt China’s totalitarianism has become far more sophisticated than the crude Sino-Stalinism practiced by its first leader, Mao Zedong. Even in a worst-case scenario, it is hard to imagine the United States becoming as ruthless as the state that has incarcerated a million of its Muslim citizens in concentration camps in an effort to destroy their cultural identity.13
Nevertheless, China today proves that it is possible to have a wealthy, modern society and still be totalitarian. The techniques of social control that have become common in China could be adapted by America with relative ease. The fact that concentration camps in the American desert sound far-fetched should not keep us from understanding how much of China’s surveillance system could be quickly made useful to corporate and government controllers here.
In the early 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping opened China to free-market reform, Western experts predicted that liberal democracy wouldn’t be far behind. They believed that free markets and free minds were inseparable. All the West had to do was sit back and watch capitalism free the liberal democrat deep inside China’s collective heart.
Forty years later, China has become spectacularly rich and powerful, creating in a single generation a robust, colorful consumer society from a mass population that had known poverty and struggle since time immemorial. The Chinese Communist Party, which worked this miracle, not only maintains a secure grip on political power but also is turning the nation of 1.4 billion souls into the most advanced totalitarian society the world has ever known.
Beijing’s use of consumer data, biometric information, GPS tracking coordinates, facial recognition, DNA, and other forms of data harvesting has turned, and continues to turn, China into a beast never before seen worldwide, not even under Mao or Stalin. In China, the tools of surveillance capitalism are employed by the surveillance state to administer the so-called social credit system, which determines who is allowed to buy, sell, and travel, based on their social behavior.
“China is about to become something new: an AI-powered techno-totalitarian state,” writes journalist John Lanchester. “The project aims to form not only a new kind of state but a new kind of human being, one who has fully internalized the demands of the state and the completeness of its surveillance and control. That internalization is the goal: agencies of the state will never need to intervene to correct the citizen’s behavior, because the citizen has done it for them in advance.”14
He is talking about Beijing’s pioneering use of artificial intelligence and other forms of digital data gathering to create a state apparatus that not only monitors all citizens constantly but also can compel them to behave in ways the state demands without ever deploying the secret police or the threat of gulags (though those exist for the recalcitrant), and without suffering the widespread poverty that was the inevitable product of old-style communism.
The great majority of Chinese pay for consumer goods and services using smartphone apps or their faces, via facial recognition technology. These provide consumer convenience and security,
