Beyond what children can understand is that, as they become adults, they will be the first generation whose entire life will become a searchable digital profile. Everything the young do now is recorded. Not just the things they know are recorded, but information from security cameras to school reports, photos of them in a nightclub, CCTV of them buying alcohol with a fake ID, their internet search history, their likes, and their social graphs.
Not only will the internet log who they know, but it will also map everyone theyve ever known or interacted with digitally. While all this information isnt yet searchable and may (for now) be private, it exists, and will do forever in a way that our current society is entirely unprepared to understand. Moreover, a child born in China in 2020 will be born into their social credit system, with its every action and word being mapped and tracked from birth.
Of course, youd argue, this wont actually happen, because most of that data is private, is secure. We have checks and balances in our societies to protect us from such Big Brother nightmares. But that is now. Western societies are the main advocates of people having rights, privacy, and control over what government and corporations can know about us and do with our data.
This ideology mainly developed in postwar institutions and societies as a reaction to that era of dictatorships, creating rules and treaties to protect the freedoms for which the war was fought. But these are the societies in which the resurgent populist right are now arguing for less government, less regulation, for more of what they falsely believe is freedom.
Aside from this shift within Western democracies, it is likely that the bigger pattern we cant see from where we stand is that the West is in decline and the future belongs to countries like China.
Chinas social credit system can already ban people from foreign travel (or escape, depending how you choose to see it) and has seen up to 7 million people added to a social blacklist. It combines an unregulated, unfettered use of surveillance technology and the worlds largest facial recognition system so that the state can see who its people meet, where they go, and what they are saying, and then use that against them.
Ultimately, everything will be tracked by the state, connected by ever more sophisticated algorithms, run on ever more powerful computers, until dissent becomes impossible and there is no and there is no escape. How do you oppose a system like that?