Who needs democracy when you have data?
There is nothing in the world right now that I fear more than the creep of Chinese surveillance&#x2F;authoritarian practices into the rest of the world&#x27;s society. They are a rapidly growing superpower, and while I hold no fantasies of U.S. supremacy, this specific trend in the use of digital technology terrifies me.<p>There won&#x27;t be a war, by the way. I honestly think we&#x27;re past the point as a species where superpowers duke it out in such a literal fashion. It&#x27;s just bad for business. (Military might today is usually directed from superpowers to third-world countries, but that&#x27;s a topic for another day).<p>China&#x27;s influence and dominance will happen through the private sector, ironically. They have their own versions of Google and Facebook: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. These are the tech giants through which the Chinese government gets most of its data on citizens. They are even more ubiquitous than ours - people do everything from getting loans to scheduling medical appointments through them - and they&#x27;ve begun trying to break into the western markets. Tencent in particular has been investing billions in everything from Blizzard to Tesla. At the same time, Google, Facebook, and Apple are also trying to break into the Chinese market. Those companies have already compromised their values for the sake of that opportunity by blocking VPN apps on app stores, censoring content, etc. For now those policy adjustments only apply in China itself, but once it becomes an established (and massive) market - they have four times the population of the U.S. - do you really think the companies would stand up against pressure from the Chinese government to apply those policies elsewhere?<p>Between the spread of the companies it effectively owns, and the deals being made with the rest of the world&#x27;s most powerful tech companies, China will soon wield more influence than the U.S. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;ll be long before surveillance-states are the norm.