Wonders Never Cease

Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, has tweeted “End the CCP” in response to a CNN report describing the digital “health” app that the Chinese government is using to track everyone in the country, to collect personal data on a daily basis, to assign arbitrary color-coded “health status” categories to each human being, to use this “health code” system to bar people from public places, to freeze their bank accounts, and to confine them to their homes if they should happen to engage in non-health-related behavior that the Communist Party finds disagreeable. 

The CNN correspondent notes, in the understatement of the century: “Concern is this surveillance will stay long after covid is gone.” 

Really? You mean they might actually overstep the understandable “emergency” of the “public health crisis” and start melding this “health check” system into the universal “morality score” system that the CCP began implementing in full a few years back, with the explicit intention of having the whole system up and running in 2023? You mean there is “concern” that the CCP is going to use digital technology and the complete obliteration of online privacy to micromanage every Chinese person’s activities, permissions, and access to his own money? 

From the Business Insider article linked above:

CNN previously reported that the government was already using the app for means other than mere contact tracing — residents in the Chinese province of Henan saw their health codes turn from green to red in mid-June after staging a protest outside a bank that had frozen their deposits. 

Imagine that! Who would do something so dastardly as use the internet — this wonderful, freedom-enhancing means of self-determination and social media togetherness — to turn everyone into a slave of the state devoid of self-determination and basic privacy of speech and action to a degree that Orwell would have thought too far-fetched to include when writing Nineteen-Eighty-Four? Furthermore, wouldn’t the CCP have to be awfully cynical to exploit the Covid-19 pandemic as a means of implementing new policies and establishing new precedents of government authority — in the name of the public welfare, of course — that would then become standard, permanent elements of state power long after the pandemic is over? I mean, what kind of people would they have to be to abuse the public trust that way, merely for the sake of expanding their own power? And how naïve and indoctrinated would the Chinese people have to be to put up with such tyrannical leaders, or to imagine that these measures are actually just good-faith efforts to “protect public health”?

Thankfully, nothing like that could ever happen to us. We’re so lucky we have democracy and freedom and the right to play any game we like and sleep with anything we prefer! And so many great Netflix shows, and places to upload our selfies.


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