I guess they do not realise what is coming?
> '...one of the ways that people can improve their own social credit score is to report on the supposed misdeeds of others.'
> '...one of the ways that people can improve their own social credit score is to report on the supposed misdeeds of others.'
It's not the cameras, the government agents in the shadows or the spying technology... It's the end result of everyone spying on each other that made the world of 1984 so inescapable to Winston.
That said, the real life 1984 that we see slowly emerging in a piecemeal manner worldwide (faster in some places than in others) seems to mostly effect the lower and middle classes.
The idea of people being spied on by their neighbours in 1984 comes from real-world examples that Orwell was drawing on at the time (the Hitler Youth and the purges under Stalin). While it is very dystopian, I would classify it as being extreme totalitarianism and not Orwellian. Almost all recent totalitarian regimes I can think of had people informing on their neighbours.
My point is that the spying in 1984 is most of the time seen as being done by Big Brother and its agents against the people but it was quite clear to me when reading it that it was more about everyone keeping an eye on everyone to report to BB, people were doing the watching and there was no escape (I seem to remember there's a line about how they don't know if the camera work but that doesn't matter because you can't prove it and people could be spied on by anyone anyway).
Maybe it's time I pick it up again.
This is why I routinely go off on people when they suggest calling the cops (or some other external authority) over petty differences. I don't want to see that kind of behavior left unchallenged let alone normalized.
Some Chinese are still old enough to remember the Cultural revolution.
During this time people were interrogated for days by their peers in so called 'struggle meetings' in an attempt to change their supposed incorrect behaviour.
Reporting someone as a bourgeois person could cause them to disappear.
As long as they are convinced or can be convinced that only bad people will be prosecuted (they are good people after all, right?) many people will welcome this.
Reminder: Why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide?
Everyone is the hero of their own story.