Making totalitarianism truly total, China’s government is becoming the world’s first all-seeing state. But at issue aren’t just Beijing’s 200 million surveillance cameras — one for every seven citizens — which it uses to watch its people. Now the Chinese autocrats want to monitor another realm, one we’d always considered safe from intrusion: your mind.
What’s more, with so-called “brain wearables” currently being sold in our nation, China’s thought police may already be at work in the U.S.
Beijing has long been trying to control Americans’ thinking through what it calls the projection of “soft power.” It has bribed our schools and colleges into accepting its “Confucius Institutes,” which pump Chinese propaganda into young American minds. It has succeeded in censoring our movies — to ensure China is portrayed as its autocrats would prefer — by threatening to deny noncompliant filmmakers access to its huge market. Beijing has also bullied our businesses into doing its bidding (for example, into not portraying Taiwan as a country).
Furthermore, China has been improving its abilities to engage in cyberspying without detection, developing “new methods for breaking through internet-facing security tools in order to discreetly get into the databases of data-rich organizations,” The New American reported yesterday.
But brain wearables are something else entirely.
Such devices enable us to monitor brain activity as easily as we do heart rate, blood oxygenation, or miles walked. But they’re a double-edged sword. “Consumer brain wearables can empower us to take charge of our mental health and wellbeing,” wrote Fox News’ Nita Farahany last week — “but they also threaten our last bastion of freedom.”
These devices use “brain sensors embedded into everyday technology like ear buds, headphones and watches that can detect brain activity to give us insight into our own minds,” Farahany continues. “Powerful algorithms can decode and classify brain activity to tell whether a person is focused, stressed, engaged, frustrated, [meditating] and more. Which means that as you listen to music or take a conference call, your brain activity can be recorded in real-time.” This isn’t just the future, either — this technology is a reality now.
“Hundreds of thousands of brain wearable devices are already in use worldwide by people to meditate, improve their focus, track their sleep activity, decrease their stress levels, or even play video games with their minds,” Farahany informs. “Already they are helping people with ADHD to better manage their symptoms [and] may soon give people with epilepsy advanced warning of impending seizures.”
But then there’s this, Farahany adds: brain “wearables can’t literally read our thoughts, but they can be used to probe a person’s mind for recognition of facts, numbers, words, shapes, images and even political biases.”
Far from frightening big-government puppeteers, these applications make them lick their chops. And in Beijing they’re licking their chopsticks, with employees and students reportedly being compelled to use brain-monitoring technology (BMT) so that their focus can be probed throughout the day.
For example, Farahany tells us, conductors at the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed rail line — the world’s busiest — and workers at Hangzhou Zhongheng Electric and the State Grid Zhejiang Electric Power have had BMT inserted in their hats. Employees have been sent home if their brain metrics or emotional states were revealed as sub-par.
But it’s not just the adults. If you’re a day-dreaming child (as I was), watch out. Farahany relates that fifth-grade pupils in the city of Jinhua were forced to don BMT headsets so that data on their focus could be provided to parents, teachers, and the government.
It isn’t merely that Beijing could learn that little Fu has a crush on pretty Ling, either. It’s also that BMT could be used to crush dissent; in fact, China has already supposedly probed people’s minds for loyalty to the government.
Unlike Las Vegas, however, what happens in China doesn’t stay in China. Chinese BMT devices have been sold worldwide, including in the U.S. An example is Flowtime, produced by China-based Hangzhou Enter Electronic Technology (Entertech).
“Entertech has accumulated millions of brain activity recordings from people worldwide engaged in everything from mind-controlled video game racing to working and sleeping,” writes Farahany. But the company does far more than that.
“It also records their [users’] personal information, GPS signals, device sensors, computers, services a person is using, their IP addresses, operating systems, referring web page and other pages visited,” Farahany elaborates. This “means the U.S. government shouldn’t just investigate whether it should ban TikTok, but whether brainwave data is being recorded from U.S. users while on the platform, too.”
Note here that, as per the fascist norm, the Chinese state and the country’s businesses are joined at the hip; thus, a Chinese company collecting data on U.S. citizens is tantamount to Beijing doing so. Also consider that China’s law dictates that every one of its companies and all its 1.4 billion citizens are required to, at the government’s behest, engage in spying.
Farahany stresses that we must have a national debate over BMT and secure a right to “cognitive liberty.” Of course, China’s actions perhaps won’t spark this, given how our pseudo-elites pander to the despotic regime.
What’s more, while BMT can’t read thoughts (yet), but only brain patterns, what lies ahead? These patterns could perhaps be described as the language of despair, the language of happiness, the language of focus, etc. But will the day come when technology will be able to decipher the “words” (specific thoughts) within these languages?
That would be true mind reading — and power-hungry politicians would lust after it. Just recently, a woman was arrested in Britain for silently praying outside an abortion clinic. And if the day comes where authorities won’t have to rely on confession to ascertain one’s thoughts but can technologically detect “unauthorized prayer,” the order of the day just may become, “Our father, who art in Washington.”
