High-tech Power: Government Surveillance & Censorship
In the 2002 film Minority Report, based on a story by famed science-fiction writer Phillip K. Dick, Tom Cruise’s John Anderton lives in a dystopian future Washington, D.C., where ubiquitous retina scanners track your every move, allowing the government to locate you within seconds and intrusive holographic commercials to target your tastes in any public place. The police have become almost omnipotent and all-seeing, able to deploy unstoppable robotic spiders to search for criminals, and reliant upon psychic “precogs,” who can predict murders before they even occur. In such a world, Anderton and his fellow “precrime” investigators have managed to eliminate murder — and personal freedom along with it.
Such a view of America in the 2050s may have seemed fantasy to audiences two decades ago, but the coming of age of a panoply of new surveillance and control technologies is more and more imparting to such disturbing sci-fi an aura of prophecy. In particular, the sophisticated new tools for censorship — of controversial ideas and truths inconvenient to America’s ruling establishment — have become so pervasive and so effective that the future of free speech, and even the long-term viability of free and independent thought, is coming increasingly into question.
Dystopia With Chinese Characteristics
For the 1.3 billion citizens of the People’s Republic of China, the future techno-dystopia is already here. In devising ways to harness the oppressive potential of 21st-century technology, Communist China is setting the pace. With the help of Western techie quislings, China erected the so-called Great Firewall, the most comprehensive censorship and surveillance mechanism ever devised, a bewilderingly complex array of jamming, blocking, and tracking contrivances that now allows China to almost completely block access to the virtual outside world, and to keep tabs on the thoughts and deeds of all of its hundreds of millions of citizens who surf the web and use smartphones. The only way that the Chinese (and foreigners residing in China) can normally breach the Great Firewall is with a reliable VPN (virtual private network), which allows access to sites such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Western news media, and other social and informational online media that Westerners take for granted. Since 2017, however, the Chinese government has made even the use of VPNs illegal, and has been jailing Chinese with the forbidden software on their phones and laptops.
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