Show Notes
It’s got the Big Brother and Newspeak of 1984, the predictive policing of Minority Report, the monitoring and neighbourly delation of the Stasi and the cultural erasure of the Khmer Rouge. And concentration camps. In Xinjiang, the Chinese Communist Party may well have created the perfect police state. Journalist Geoffrey Cain investigates the Uyghur genocide and reveals what happens in the real world when you combine totalitarian ideology with artificial intelligence.
02:26 A day in the life of a Uyghur woman
07:28 Every totalitarian dystopia wrapped into one
10:16 A 21st-century genocide
12:32 The technology doesn't even need to be that good
15:48 Why China went after the Uyghurs
19:47 How the return of the Taliban might impact the Uyghurs
21:45 Dystopia in the dark
24:34 How China exports its surveillance
27:51 How Western corporations and economies got trapped
32:46 The death of techno utopianism
35:23 First let's fix the financial system
📚The Perfect Police State, by Geoffrey Cain. Public Affairs. 2021.
Buy it here.Samsung Rising, by Geoffrey Cain. Penguin Random House. 2020.
Buy it here.