[sol_invictus]

It's difficult to read sentiment and know whether you're being sarcastic or not so please take no offense from my tone, but this is the complete opposite of "beautiful" - it is the first steps in turning humans into units of production with every action being optimized for you and leaving little to no individual freedom.

It's communism 2.0 except the government doesn't only dictate production quotas but also "life quotas." It's an absolute nightmare and seeing what a spectacular failure communism 1.0 was, everyone should be more than freaking out about this.

[userbinator]

I'm pretty sure it's sarcastic and a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

[BoxOfRain]

It's not communism rather that same tendency that both communist and non-communist powers often display once they reach a certain size: the tendency of large bureaucracies towards increasing their own power and influence at the expense of the people they're supposed to serve. By declaring this tendency communist we blind ourselves to the fact this can happen to any bureaucracy whatever labels it gives itself. This can happen to the most cut-throat capitalist business as well as the most oppressive communist state, it's the nature of large organisations in general.

The British government hasn't built an illiberal surveillance state because it sits in the private clubs of London dreaming up ways to oppress the plebs for its own sake, it's done so because there's a lot of bureaucratic incentives towards this behaviour and the sum of millions of individual cogs without malice is the path of least resistance. It's why the police go after people over jokes made in poor taste on Twitter while burglaries might go uninvestigated, signals intelligence is far cheaper than actually investing in proactive policing and boots on the ground. Add that to the fact that people are easily scared and gaslit into giving up their liberties for promised safety and it's easy to see how these things about. Nothing to do with communism, although historical communist regimes often displayed this behaviour to a high degree.

The cure in my opinion is a government based on the principles of subsidiarity, decisions should be taken as close to the people they effect as possible at the lowest practical tier of government. Decentralising government as far as we can (preferably to council or even district level) and making it intentionally difficult for government entities to consolidate power in a meaningful way is how we prevent abuses of power to begin with, we must treat political power as we treat enriched uranium: incredibly useful and vital for civilisation but also very corrupting to biological life if not handled with extreme caution. The road to Hell isn't just paved with good intentions but sign-posted and landscaped with them too.

[sgjohnson]

> everyone should be more than freaking out about this. Yet nobody does. Because everyone is living too comfortable a life to dissent.

Just ask the Chinese. (general populace, not the government)

And that's basically a reason why I'm a libertarian, but unfortunately I don't see the future as more libertarian, unless there's a massive paradigm shift. The general populace will put up with whatever governmet oppression or tracking or whatever, as long as they can keep living their cushy, comfortable lives.

[inter_netuser]

>Just ask the Chinese. (general populace, not the government)

and what do they say?