[snugghash]

Thank you for the thoughtful expansion. I completely agree with you on the level you're thinking about this, and I also agree that our tech level in collaboration is basically amplified mob rule, same as 100 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29051178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29051412

But zooming out, I think a society/government's job is preventing destruction and growing. That may not be in a way that's dangerous to other governments, but high relative growth can make other governments irrelevant. I'm claiming that the value from unabashed large scale data surveillance that CCP gathers is very large, and that might be a significant enough factor moving forward that privacy-first countries might simply not be able to keep up with it, and become irrelevant.

From this viewpoint, if the EU is doing this, we have no large diverse conglomerate that can serve as an experimental control any more. We can't even tell if privacy "is a good thing", for the final metric of growth. Not US, not EU, not India. Africa is still not in the same league.

Every single one of them have basically succumbed to privacy vs. security false dichotomy (https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/). Every single one thinks the way forward (at least for now) is mass surveillance.

Maybe they think the gain from not having public crime is big enough to justify the cost. In which case CCP was "right" - convergent evolution means something (for now).

[artificialLimbs]

The government's job is to defend individual liberties. Full stop.

The rest is fluff that should be put down with violence if necessary.

[rixed]

> The government's job is to defend individual liberties.

You must find data coming from the real world very hard to analyze through this lense. You might want to try these popular alternatives:

"The government's job is to defend the privileges of the few"

or the latest trend:

"The government's job is to defend itself"

[snugghash]

You mistake the way western governments are structured with "governance of a society". The CCP is far more than the traditional there branches of the western democratic government.

Societies self-govern and create structures. Some of those structures are companies, some are government. Sometimes the government regulates companies, and sometimes companies regulate the government.

Edit: even in the US for example, ONLY the judiciary is concerned with defending individual liberties. If that's all that's necessary then we wouldn't need elections, just a military and that's that.

You seem to heavily discount the amount of work it takes to become post-scarcity - most societies in the world fail to achieve this, even for simple things like cell phones in 2021.

[artificialLimbs]

That the CCP is far more is clear indication that it is too much.

(In the US) The judiciary is very obviously not the only branch concerned with protecting individual liberties. Law makers pass laws with the intent to do so and the President can command the military to do so if necessary.

The world is on track to completely eliminate starvation and abject poverty in a few years, maybe a decade or two.

Projected life span and quality of life is at an all time high on average, and crime is overall down which is another indicator of plenty rather than lack. It is utopian minded idealism that everyone should have everything they want (including cell phones) and the world should become 'post-scarcity' (whatever that means). I have found utopian minded idealists to be the least experienced with regards work.