If you look at the numbers of how China’s military and economy stack up compared to the US, you could be excused for thinking that they represent no threat to your way of life; however, this presumes a military equation. They don’t have to go head to head with us to make a huge change in how we live. There are more ways to lord over your people and your neighbors than just fighting them.
In the tectonic plates that we know of as keeping or acquiring ‘superpower’ status by nations or cultures, I see a distinct change in how I, at least, view the emergence of a distant power throwing its weight around. In the cold world model and until recently, I could look at violence, war, or the trampling of human rights as an unfortunate thing that happened to others but would not apply to me because of a strong military and a common agreement about what constitutes the rule of law anywhere we exert influence. But today, while I can, for now, rest safe in the knowledge that our bombs are smarter than their bombs, I am increasingly concerned that we could be subjugated without a bomb from above, a shot fired, or a boot on the ground.
We’re surrounded by dominoes – a whole room full of them. You’ve probably seen videos of the much entertaining and increasingly impossible set-ups of hundreds of thousands of dominoes cascading across the room. A hundred feet away, one is pushed over and in a matter of minutes, those hundreds of thousands are knocked over including the ones at my feet. Today, our entire world is a fragile network of dependencies and compromises that are attached to long lines of innumerable potential chain reactions. When the Saudis’, ostensibly on ‘our team’, can fly a team into Turkey, also ‘our team’, and kill, chop up, and dissolve a human being that was critical of the top Saudi prince, just how secure are we? What if I blog something critical of Bin Salman? Am I in this far away land, threatened? And by the way, how is that different than the very high degree of possibility that our CIA and surrogates actually do the same thing on the soil of others?
But this isn’t just about life and death. When you consider that China, our biggest ‘frenemy’ is a significant player holding our borrowing chain, that they’re quickly growing their domestic economy beyond our scale, making all their transactional economy digital, they’re walling off their own Internet, and putting a centralized forceful drive into monitoring every single last one of their own citizenry, one must wonder, how long before our own omnipotent Federal government and omniscient Silicon Valley finish their marriage of purpose and take a liking to Chinese style control? Our own Google is helping then do it! People, the seeds are there, the means are there and all that’s lacking is time and the connecting of dots. Even Britain, our closest ally has shown the way and more or less perfected a pretty darn inclusive surveillance state.
Ten or twenty years from now, I can see us still being close to blows with China, and meanwhile, we will voluntarily become them, seeing the practicalities of cradle to grave total control made easy and automatic by tech. I can see us all having behavior ledgers tallied about us, just as is now occurring in China. Our state, or even a conglomeration of states, will see every street we drive or walk on, every penny we spend, and listen to every word we say. Their AI will process this and make decisions on what privileges we enjoy, what jobs and income we take, and most importantly, control who we associate with. In the end, if it ever becomes expedient to fully isolate or eliminate whole localities or identified groups, the control needed to perform that will be at someone’s fingertips.
The key component that is new here is that tech is stateless. But the impulse by states to control, manage, or even cull some level of non-cooperation or opposition is ubiquitous and not new. Furthermore, we cannot presume that our state will safeguard us against multinational influence and action. We’ve already sold our souls and our personal identity to tech in the form of cellphone apps, marketing data, even medical data and there is more to come. It’s pretty safe to say that someone in Russia or China may already know your blood pressure or whether you buckled your seat belts today. They may know this by either hacked, freely given, or grey area backroom configurations of our digital infrastructure. All that remains is for an array of interests to close the loop and design actions that benefit from these tiny pieces of knowledge. In this, they aren’t there yet, but it’s getting closer.