These people just can’t help themselves, can they?

The world Ellison described sounds eerily similar to China’s social credit system, which controls citizens’ behavior through a network of cameras using some of the world’s most advanced facial recognition software to surveil their populace.

“I am incapable of understanding badness without trying to re-frame it as comparable to something allegedly bad in another country.” Or as that parody tweet goes: “Americans doing something Americanly in America. What are we, a bunch of Asians???”

Nevertheless, his prediction may already be here in a sense.

Nowadays, it’s commonplace for Americans to whip out their smartphone and film their fellow citizens before uploading it to social media.

Oh yes, surveillance couldn’t possibly be done in overreach by a racist imperialist colony’s state. It’s actually people whipping out smartphones!

I see nowhere in this article that it even attempts to engage with the question of where crime derives from. The most brutal policing system cannot stop crime if systemic causes put people in a position where they feel they have nothing to lose. The most surveillance-heavy system for police themselves cannot stop them being racist psychopaths if the system of policing, and the state body, makes sure they are.

The Constitution meticulously distinguishes between a “citizen” and a “person,” and it grinds me gears whenever someone conflates them, which is often. Probably 7–10% of people in the US at any given moment aren’t citizens.

One day, the billionnaires will face the pitchfork. I didn’t think I would see it happen in my lifetime, but Elon Musk has convinced me that the day is much closer than anyone thinks.