You are thoroughly underestimating the technological element though. The difference is that even among the western """"SJW"""" faction, there are both those who would be as fine with the Social Credit element as the Chinese are, and those who are fully aware of the risk and would vehemently oppose it.Originally Posted by End
Eastern culture doesn't have that ongoing Socratic kind of element of self-questioning where each generation takes a chance to look at what's currently going on and choose to either accept or rise against it depending on what they want. Instead it's all solid legalism over there. It's always "nut up or shut up" about everything. So even martyrdom doesn't make a difference over there because they don't have a tradition of the government and society ever being able to be made to give a crap about how many people they're killing. They have a long heritage of a large, cheap, expendable worker base, and the legacy of that is in their society to this day. You can't defeat that kind of authority with any ground-up rebellion.
And again, worse still is the technical aspect. You can argue that the people might develop some sense of self-worth eventually and seek expanded individual rights for themselves, either through force or reform, but emerging technologies are making these chances dwindle. When all the factory jobs, and even a lot of the white-collar jobs, are automated, an individual worker's life is worth even less than it already was, and that aggregates until even the lives of the masses are collectively worth a lot less. Fleshbags cannot launch an armed revolt against robot guard dogs on every street corner and drones in the sky. And now there's neural networks and AI. There's data analytics models to profile people and predict their behavior before they even know they're being analyzed. If your own behaviors are being profiled, analyzed, predicted, and responded to by the authorities, you can't even passively create the conditions, on an individual or collective level, that lead to the regime in power being undermined, because everything you do is being ever so subtly responded to so that it can't have any destabilizing effect on the existing order.
And you know what Zhima Credit is, right? I don't know if it's more frightening if you just don't know or just don't care, but some social changes in Western countries came about partially due to market changes, rather than socially active individuals. When you have a system in place that means you can't get an important loan or that plane ticket you need or in some cases a loaf of bread because you just so happen to have a """"misguided"""" friend who's let slip some spicy opinions about the State, no one will be able to afford to have any divergent thoughts anymore. It's a technological basis for cementing the status quo until the end of time, and that's even if the status quo is that the public has to collectively look away as more tanks are driven over babies.
You want that? You think your little super-weapon of martyrdom is going to do anything to stop an authority that can offload increasingly more of its muscle, and its brainpower, to machines that can't have such silly little opinions about "freedoms" and "rights" that we humans do?
You're really counting on a religion, a device that dates from the bronze age, to take on the equivalent of a Demiurge on earth? Wanna ask the chinese Muslims how well that worked for them?
Sorry dude, you have to believe in actual magic to roll those dice. I'm not going to count on that to save us.
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