I've been in mainland China for the past year and I wish western politicians would get it through their skulls that most of the ccp model's upsides come from CCTVs in public areas and a police force that prioritizes stopping street crime.

I believe that's it's sadly a necessity for control of the population when you have other superpowers employing this.

If you are Europe, and you have democratic elections, you have an informational power asymmetry towards the states that have mass surveillance and control. You are (as we saw last year with the Romanian election that was swung to 60% in 2 weeks over TikTok) susceptible towards influence of other superpowers. Even if you want to keep democratic elections, you need to somehow make sure that the citizens are voting in their interest. If the citizens at the same time are victims of the attention economy, their interest will be whatever foreign superpowers want it do be.

One well-tried solution is to engage and educate the population. However, this takes years, not weeks as the campaigns take, and takes immense resources as people will default to convenient attention economy tools.

Other option is to ban platforms/create country-wide firewalls. It's a lot harder in democratic societies, you ban one app and a new one takes it's place. Cat is kind of out of the bag on this one.

Last and easiest option is mass surveillance. Figure out who is getting influenced by what, and start policing on what opinions those people are allowed to have and what measures to take to them. Its a massive slippery slope, but I can clearly see that it's the easiest and most cost-effective way to solve this information-assymetry

Said leaders are only really democratic based on the literal name of the party they signed with when running for office. There's nothing democratic about these types of programs and I have to assume that a plainly explained referendum spelling this out on a ballot would fail miserably.

This is a systemic problem of modern information technology. With social media for instance, either you let the technology run rampant and the worst case scenareo plays out. That is misinformation, tribalism, bidy dysmorphia and the pletora of other issues. The worst case pesamistic mode of what the technology can do, that is self termination. The alternative is that you have to have the watchmen over watch everything and you have the full dystopia model.

While there is a middle road, it is almost never taken as it is the hardest path. The real trick is to not invent the torment nexus but you cannot know this as the n'th order effects are decades beyond the initial creation. But that is so incredibly difficult to anticipate.

Think about it, the transistor was invented in 1947, 70 years later it turned into the surviellance panopticon. Very few could have seen that coming.

I dont have answers just explanations here.

Canadian leaders are currently very consciously choosing to partner with China as opposed to the U.S.

I get diversification, that’s a good call, but adopting policies that actively harm Canada to the benefit of China is where we’re at and it’s so far beyond the pale. Just take a look at Canada, who for as long as I have known, have tried to maintain its industrial base in Ontario, eg the cross-border supply chain for automobiles, but then this "new" government comes in and is like y’know what we really need right now? To compound the effects of tariffs, piss off our biggest trading partner, risk NAFTA (CUSMA) and our entire cross-border supply chains with the US all so we can get some cheap electric cars from China, which won't even be manufactured here (atleast not with Canadian jobs); meanwhile we just spent close to $100 billion in subsidies explicitly to try and kickstart electric vehicle manufacturing in Canada. May have been more productive to turn that $100 billion into pennies and throw them down a wishing well...

Getting a warrant for each person is not "mass surveillance". Why do you think a warrant is not required? It is.

Look at what social media considers to be safe countries.

You are absolutely bombarded with messaging about how Dubai and Chinese cities are the safest places in the world. I have friends who live in each who consider North America and Europe crime ridden shitholes because theft is possible to get away with.

If society believes that crimes is utterly rampant despite it collapsing over the past few decades, there is nowhere else to go but mass surveillance to make sure that even the smallest of visible crimes are stamped out.

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There is no democracy in countries like Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, plus the EU. What you vote for is not what you get. You vote for X and get the Agenda. Vote for Y and you get the Agenda.