How China built the perfect police state, with Geoffrey Cain

Borderline

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.

Show notes
00:17 Intro

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

18:06 Membership ad

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

30:44 The New Cold War

32:46 The death of techno utopianism

35:23 First let's fix the financial system

38:35 Outro

📚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.

🐦 @geoffrey_cain and @iroughol

Stories referenced

🇦🇺 Facebook’s battle with Australia

🇺🇸 Amazon and the NSA

🇨🇳 Xinjiang’s cotton and Western brands

💻 Apple’s terminated supplier

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