SLOBODIAN: Peterson warns surveillance ‘superstate’ to prevail in West

A “fascist” authoritarian “superstate” stripping Western citizens of freedom is “absolutely coming,” psychologist Jordan Peterson recently warned US congress members.In fact, collusion facilitated by technology advances between paranoid, “security-obsessed anti-human governments” and “self-interested corporations” is already “eliminating the private sphere.” George Orwell could “scarcely imagine” the scope of the superstate, particularly with the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) from which no one will be safe, said Peterson. A bleak superstate could emerge where deviating from dictated government behaviour will lead to punishment and exclusion from Western society.WATCH HEREHard to believe? It exists in China now. There, citizens are under constant surveillance and brutally oppressed. And Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government successfully experimented with it when it forced COVID-19 lockdowns, enacted the War Measures (Emergencies) Act and froze private bank accounts.No one should relax. “The danger posed by this increasing ability of governments and large corporations to collude, threatens everyone’s freedom equally,” said Peterson.He was one of five witnesses who appeared on March 7 before the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, chaired by Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan.The subcommittee is exploring alleged abuse of federal authority — President Joe Biden’s administration’s collusion with big banks to surveille private financial data of Americans without warrants in violation of constitutional rights. Targets were “debanked.”Democrats have criticized the subcommittee as a means for Republicans to score political points.However, an alarming interim report released March 6 — Financial Surveillance in the United States: How Federal Law Enforcement Commandeered Financial Institutions to Spy on Americans — revealed law enforcement and other agencies wantonly pried into private lives. Surveillance wasn’t based on criminal conduct, but on political and religious expression.Sound familiar?The subcommittee heard from other witnesses how the FBI track gun purchases through bank records, that Christian charities are shut out by banks and conservatives that haven’t been thrown in jail are still on the Biden regime’s radar.Jordan asked Peterson if the banks were “going to stop with conservatives.”“It could well be at the moment and I think this is the point Republicans here are trying to make, is that the people in the sights of that collusion tend to have more conservative leanings, but that will shift in a moment whenever the political tides shift.”Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) pressed Peterson on his concerns about technology.“Why are you such a Luddite? Why don’t you embrace artificial intelligence and facial recognition and massive computer surveillance and cameras on every street corner, so that we could all be safer,” said surveillance opponent Massie sarcastically.“If the emerging collusion between government and gigantic corporations continues in the manner it is continuing, there won’t be anything that you do that can’t be used against you and will be used in very short order,” warned Peterson.Peterson noted that the subcommittee focussed “a fair bit on January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.“I’m not here to talk about January 6 or about any particular threat or insurrection or protest, political or ideological, real or imaginary,” said Peterson.“I'm here to talk about the already extant and expanding collusion of government and corporation in restricting the individual freedom and autonomy upon which the productive, generous and stable psyche economy and state are themselves necessarily founded."“But we’re not addressing the fundamental issue here directly, which is our new technology enables a mode of surveillance that is so intense and AI-pervading that no one will escape its purview regardless of their political views.”Privacy-invading, increasingly sophisticated technologies now utilized in surveillance regimes, are infiltrating western nations.“There are now 700 million CCTVs in China under the rule of the Communist Party. The system to which those electronic eyes are attached is the most complete state apparatus of surveillance yet imagined with the ability not only to recognize faces at a distance, but gate itself when facial features are hidden or obscured,” said Peterson.The technology is rapidly advancing, finding ways to track and identify citizens more easily.“The demented, naive and prideful engineers who so enthusiastically helped build this system call it Skynet.”“The system is integrated with the so-called Chinese Social Credit system which awards its involuntary participants with the score, indicating their compliance with the dictates of the Chinese Communist Party, allowing for full control over access to everything they possess electronically, most ominously their savings and their access to travel.”A failed social credit score shuts citizens out of “all activities that can be virtualized” — everything from shopping to working to finding shelter to socializing with friends and family. This enables the “government to extract slave-like labour from its citizens” who can work to increase their score.“This is precisely the payment system most desired by the most tyrannical, not the ‘Work for me in benefit thereby that constitutes the contractual arrangement undertaken by free and sovereign citizens,’ but the ‘Work for me and I will lift the deprivation I imposed.’”Peterson explained how easily a government can pounce.“Because we already fell prey to the terrible temptation of lockdown employed by that state in the face of hypothetical crisis once and in the very recent past.”“Because we're walking step-by-step in the same direction partly because of the hypothetical convenience of universal and automatic recognition of identity.”“And partly because any problem whatsoever that now confronts us can easily be used to justify the increasing reach of the security and nanny state.”He criticized Trudeau’s Liberals for debanking Freedom Convoy participants. And warned that the Liberals haven’t backed down.“The government is currently maneuvering in Canada to make the possibility of such collusion a certainty across multiple actual and potential domains of so-called harm, particularly in relationship to government-defined hate. This is absolutely coming, and it's facilitated by the kinds of advancements in technology that we talked about today."Peterson said governments and corporate agents are colluding to “develop a picture not only of our actions, but of our thoughts and words, so that deviation from the desired end can be mapped, rewarded and punished.”“The development of the digital identity and currency is nothing more than the likely end consequences of such inclinations and the combination of both can and will facilitate the development of the surveillance state, the scope of which optimistic pessimists of totalitarianism such as George Orwell could scarcely imagine.”Rapidly emerging AI systems will make it so much easier to exact punishment.“With increasing ability to monitor not only the actual attention patterns and behaviors of its citizens, but to predict those that are most likely, the persecution of even potential crime becomes ever more likely,” said Peterson.

SLOBODIAN: Peterson warns surveillance ‘superstate’ to prevail in West

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