> Dissidents and revolutionaries would hardly be able to do much.
Hence the scary question: Once the technology is available (now) and complete surveillance is implemented (soon), is there a going back?
Hence the scary question: Once the technology is available (now) and complete surveillance is implemented (soon), is there a going back?
Which necessarily makes it incomplete following Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Here completeness refers to diversity: to maximize completeness is to encourage genetic (and memetic) variation. If society is consistent, such a proposition becomes absurd.
It's an interesting thought experiment, and I don't think the consistent state is reversible. Luckily it requires that all of the world (intelligentsia) agree on the same set of rules, so there's still time.
Taking this argument to the extreme: perhaps the reason we haven't met civilisations from other worlds is simply that they all made the same logical error once the tech was available.
In the book _A Deepness in the Sky_, it is remarked that civilizations/governments that attempt to implement "ubiquitous law enforcement" are making a terrible mistake that always ends very poorly. It is, in the book, a marker of a society that is about to die.
I recommend the book.
The CCP, is not exactly a monolith. It has factions, some get suppressed, some come to prominence. One that saw the negative aspects as being too negative would have to come to prominence to undo the overreach.
They are already heavy surveillance, and have a long history of suppressing dissidents (from labor massacres to McCarthyism, and from the '68 Democratic Convention and Kent State, to black rights demonstrations, OWS, and such -- to name but a few).
If they have such tools at their hands, they'll use them.
It's not a love for freedom that doesn't let them, but that without full enforcement, they risk having such measure come against them. But once full enforcement is feasible...