Nonfiction

Being Harmonized

A recent read I’ve neglected to review is this book about China’s surveillance system and its advancement of the totalitarian regime. The book details how the surveillance state has developed in China, how it is used, and how the consciousness of the citizenry has evolved to accept and participate in it.

It’s hard to read the book without recognizing a similar mentality at work in America. The surveillance practices of internet companies and smart devices, the crackdowns on free speech in the name of “disinformation,” and the increasingly propagandistic nature of narrative management in journalism all become impossible to un-see after reading this book.

What brings it to mind this morning is an NPR story: “Flying Microchips The Size Of A Sand Grain Could Be Used For Population Surveillance.” Not only is the development itself disturbing — tiny microfliers smaller than a pencil point and designed to mimic seed dispersal and insect swarms — but the article itself is little more than a product announcement with zero critical analysis. It’s hard to find even a headline on NPR these days that doesn’t make a heavy-handed statement, but in this story about potential spyware dispatched to surveil Americans, there is no consideration of privacy implications or the ethics involved in the use of such technology. There is certainly no mention of the deeply tragic consequences when our top experts get hold of drones and deploy them with astonishing stupidity.

The engineering is ingenius, and like most technologies there is the potential for legitimate use. But the natural course of things is that technologies like this ultimately serve the drive for some humans to dominate others, whether to gain wealth or power. In this case, population surveillance is mentioned off-handedly in a list of other uses such as monitoring environmental contaminants or diseases. If we’re not concerned about its ramifications for personal freedom, this can only be because it’s just another stage in a process already well underway, and over which we have no real control.

Microflier, Northwestern University

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