Comment by notabee

I am really starting to think that the Very Smart People (pejorative) holding power think that they can just copy the Chinese mass surveillance and social control model without changing anything else about the economic or cultural models of the U.S. and Europe, and that's going to somehow allow us to compete with them. I'm sure there will be massive exceptions for anyone wealthy and connected, so the panopticon is just a way to whip and threaten the common folk. That's also why it probably won't work. In a way it just reeks of desperation and reaching straight for the most authoritarian approach.