China is the template for using technology for totalitarianism, says Noah Smith.
"The internet's inventors thought it would be a force for human freedom, enabling regular people to speak up from a position of relative privacy without getting government permission or paying large fixed costs. And for a while, in the 1990s and 2000s, that's more or less how it turned out."
"Then two things happened. First, internet users migrated from the Web (where attempts at tracking can be detected and blocked) to apps, which watch and record pretty much everything you do in the app. Second, internet use switched from PCs to smartphones, which are far easier to track in physical space, and far easier to link to a user. Together, these changes turned the internet into a technology for universal surveillance."
"Internet discussions -- or at least, discussions about politics and public affairs -- have become concentrated on a small number of platforms like TikTok and Twitter. In democratic countries, those platforms are hotbeds of dissenting views, amplifying ambitious chaos agents and spreading viral rage on a daily basis. But China exerts fine-grained control over what gets said on its own centralized discussion platforms."
"Social media may thus create instability in democracies while leaving autocracies untouched."
