It is both enjoyable and distressing to revisit the futurism of past eras, especially essays and works of fiction that analyzed the technical and political problems of 50, 60 and 100 years ago and prognosticated about what the world would be like in two generations. The best futuristic writers tend to be on target with many of their predictions, but wildly off base on others. What gives the work of authors like H.G. Wells, J.G. Ballard and William Gibson continued relevance is their ability to accurately define the problems facing humanity and theorize – convincingly – about how humanity might adapt.
Such reflections filled Greymantle’s mind during a recent re-reading of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov‘s 1968 essay titled “Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom”, which was smuggled out of the Soviet Union in the late 1960s as an act of defiance against the ruling bureaucratic elite which governed the USSR at that time.
Sakharov’s essay is best remembered for its prediction that there would be – more accurately, that there MUST BE – some kind of convergence between the Soviet and U.S. systems. Sakharov thought of this convergency mainly in economic terms. He believed the United States should, and would, become less completely capitalist by adopting some elements off Soviet socialism, while the Soviet Union should learn from the economic success of the U.S. and adopt some elements of capitalism.
Sakharov also argued broadly in favor of intellectual freedom in his essay, hinting that there should be an opening in the Soviet political system to make it less ideological. In contrast to Soviet leaders’ official line that the Soviet Union was run along principles of ‘scientific socialism’, Sakharov believed that the USSR was being run primarily along narrowly political and ideological lines that smothered scientific debate and prevented the USSR from being run on truly ‘scientific’ principles.
While Sakharov did not explicitly call for open elections or political reforms that would have transformed the Soviet Union into a Western democracy, he was open to expanding the Soviet system to include new political parties who could articulate alternative points of view to the increasingly hidebound ideology of the Soviet Communist Party. In 1968, to advocate for even modest political openings of this kind was extremely dangerous for Soviet citizens. Sakharov and is wife, Yelena Bonner (both nuclear physicists) would spend the next 20 years of their lives in and out of Soviet prisons.
WHAT SAKHAROV SAW RESULTING FROM A ‘CONVERGENCE OF SYSTEMS’
Sakharov did not have a specific program of political reforms in mind when he wrote his 1968 essay. Rather, his essay was a warning of the dangers of unchecked expansion of the Soviet and U.S. nuclear missile arsenals, the overarching threat of global thermonuclear war, and Sakharov’s view that human society had reached a turning point at which the major nations of the world could choose a path of mutual recognition and cooperation, or descend into militarism, demagoguery, and self-destruction.
Sakharov’s ‘convergence’ essay was, above all, a plea for intellectual freedom and open debate, both within and between societies. Without intellectual freedom, Sakharov believed the urgent natural and technical problems humanity was facing as a result of the technological revolution could not be solved. Key areas of concern identified by Sakharov were: the threat of nuclear war, starvation resulting from overpopulation, environmental pollution, widespread poverty and, quite presciently, the threats posed by the creation of artificial intelligence.
In Sakharov’s view, humanity was perfectly capable of coming to grips with these challenges and averting its own destruction. What was needed was greater dialogue and openness within the Soviet bloc, between the USSR and China, within the capitalist West, and between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and the economically advanced and developing nations. Solutions could be reached, but human societies urgently needed to collaborate on solving problems, rather than pursuing great power battles and fiendish ideological and racial feuds.
A necessary step in any international process towards greater cooperation would be a limited convergence between the Soviet and U.S. systems, with their economies becoming more alike over time. Once the U.S. and USSR had reached a similar level of economic development and adopted the same technologies, particularly consumer technologies, Sakharov contended this would eliminate many of the underlying causes of tension and conflict between the superpowers, smoothing the path to an era of more peaceful international relations.
Sakharov conceptualizes how such a convergence could come about thusly:
“The development of modern society in both the Soviet Union and the United States is now following the same course of increasing complexity of structure and of industrial management, giving rise in both countries to managerial groups that are similar in social character. We must therefore acknowledge that there is no qualitative difference in the structure of society of the two countries in terms of distribution of consumption. I consider that further advances in our economic reform and a greater role for economic and market factors accompanied by greater public control over the managerial group will help eliminate all the roughness in our current distribution pattern.
The rapprochement with the capitalist world should not be an unprincipled, anti-popular plot between ruling groups as happened in the extreme case of the Soviet-Nazi rapprochement of 1939-40. Such a rapprochement must rest not only on socialist, but also on a proper democratic foundation, under the control of public opinion, as expressed through publicity, elections and so forth.
Such a rapprochement implies not only wide social reforms in the capitalist countries, but also substantial changes in the structure of ownership, with a greater role played by government and cooperative ownership, and the preservation of the basic features of ownership of the means of production in the socialist countries.
Intellectual freedom of society will facilitate and smooth the way for this trend toward patience, flexibility and security from dogmatism, fear and adventurism.”
Sakharov saw this possible convergence proceeding through four stages:
- An ideological struggle within the communist bloc (which Sakharov calls “the socialist countries”), principally within the USSR and China, between the hardcore Stalinists and Maoists on one side, and what he terms the “realistic Leninist communists” on the other side representing a reform faction. The reform factions in China and the USSR would have to emerge victorious to allow for the convergence process to proceed to stage two.
- Persistent demands for “social progress” and peaceful coexistence in the U.S. and other capitalist countries and the pressure exerted by the example of the socialist countries and internal progressive wings would lead to the victory of the “leftist reformist wing” of the Western bourgeoisie, which would result in the West’s adoption of certain aspects of the socialist system.
- The U.S. and USSR, having overcome their alienation, would then “solve the problem” of “saving” the poorer half of the world. This would involve the building of gigantic fertilizer factories, irrigation systems using atomic power, using the resources of the sea to a vastly greater extent, and an overall program of broad industrialization in the developing world.
- Fourth and finally, the socialist convergence would reduce differences in social structure, promote intellectual freedom, science and economic progress, and lead to the creation of a world government and the “smoothing of national contradictions”.
More than 55 years later, it’s clear that Sakharov was an accurate visionary in many respects. He clearly foresaw much that later came to pass. In other ways, Sakharov was not successful in foreseeing several aspects of our current situation. Some level of convergence has occurred between the great powers…but, the convergence is not what Sakharov predicted: the strange convergence of the world’s great powers is indeed occurring, and principally in terms of their political style.
WHAT SAKHAROV FORESAW CORRECTLY
Reading Sakharov’s famous “convergence essay” in 2024, one is immediately struck, on the one hand, that Sakharov presciently and correctly anticipated the policies of detente pursued by the U.S. and USSR in the 1970s and the USSR’s subsequent adoption of a set of policies under the banners known as ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ in the late 1980s under Mikhail Gorbachev.
More broadly, Sakharov correctly anticipated the struggles within the Soviet Union and Red China between hard core Stalinists and Maoists, on the one side, and the “realistic” Leninist socialists or reformers on the other side. Those struggles began in earnest in the late 1970s following the death of Mao Zedong and continued into the early 2000s. Sakharov intuited, correctly, the eventual victory of the “reformist” factions in both communist nations. Thus, Stage 1 of Sakharov’s convergence timeline was essentially realized by the turn of the 21st century.
Sakharov also correctly foresaw an era of greater international cooperation between the the nations of the capitalist ‘First World’, the group of communist ‘Second World’ countries, and key nations within the developing bloc of ‘Third World’ nations in Africa and Asia. This cooperation has proceeded along several lines, some official and others unofficial, and include projects such as the International Space Station, a raft of trade and climate accords brokered by the World Trade Organization, the UN, and other multilateral organizations, and the so-called neoliberal policies derisively known as ‘globalization’.
Up until the year 2016, when the United Kingdom withdrew from the European Union as a result of the ‘Brexit’ vote and Donald Trump was elected President of the United States (and if I could have read those words 30 years ago via a wormhole in time I would have thought that I was reading a satirical science fiction novel by Isaac Asimov!), this process of convergence seemed to be moving forward at a steady pace, if not quite in the manner that Sakharov had envisioned.
Since 2016, the world’s major powers seem to have hit a major roadblock and appear to be pedaling in reverse at an accelerating pace. The international turmoil unleashed by Russia’s invasion of its near neighbor, Ukraine, in 2022, has added fuel onto the fire.
How would Sakharov have interpreted recent events? Most likely as a resurgence of the spirits of “demagoguery, militarism, racism and adventurism” that he believed had defined global power relations for most of the 20th century, culminating in the Second World War. More on that later.
Perhaps Sakharov’s most impressive foresight was the looming emergence of artificial intelligence as a technological reality that would present both a broad and a subtle challenge to human decision-making. Here is Sakharov’s brief but prescient treatment of the topic:
“We also must not forget the very real danger mentioned by Norbert Wiener in his book Cybernetics, namely the absence in cybernetic machines of stable human norms of behavior. The tempting, unprecedented power that mankind, or, even worse, a particular group in a divided mankind, may derive from the wise counsels of its future intellectual aides, the artificial “thinking” automata, may become, as Wiener warned, a fatal trap; the counsels may turn out to be incredibly insidious and, instead of pursuing human objectives, may pursue completely abstract problems that had been transformed in an unforeseen manner in the artificial brain.
Such a danger will become quite real in a few decade if human values, particularly freedom of thought, are not strengthened, if alienation is not eliminated.”
Reading these words in the months following the dramatic year 2023, which some future historians might properly dub “the year of the AI explosion” is to be jarred by the realization that the gap in time of several decades which Sakharov foresaw separating the late 1960s from the advent of true AI has been closed. Humanity’s “intellectual aides” in the form of cybernetic intelligences have pretty much arrived.
Moreover, it’s not at all clear that “human values” such as freedom of thought have been strengthened during the past generation. If anything, freedom of thought appears to be under greater threat in the First World than at any time since the Cold War ended. Alienation and anomie are far more widespread than they were in the 1960s, particularly among the young who, back in the 1960s, were the most hopeful for the achievement of world peace. Hopes for “the elimination of alienation” are likely to be dashed in the near term, if they could truly be said to have existed.
WHAT SAKHAROV FAILED TO FORESEE, OR PERHAPS TO UNDERSTAND
Thusly, Sakharov’s correct predictions. Reading Sakharov’s essay – again, from the perspective of a contemporary person in 2024 – it’s also abundantly clear that Sakharov was dead wrong in a number of his prognostications. Sakharov’s predictive failures are as revealing as his predictive successes, and probably more so, since they illustrate Sakharov’s blind spots.
These blinds spots were mostly a function of his access to limited information concerning social developments in the West (though his knowledge was far more advanced then most of his Soviet contemporaries), his discipline as a nuclear physicist with weak knowledge of agricultural science, and his emphasis on the need for huge public works projects as the engines of modernization and ‘progress’, common to most technical specialists operating within the communist bloc of nations.
Sakharov’s most obvious predictive failure relates to the section of his essay titled “Hunger and Overpopulation (and the Psychology of Racism)”. In this section, Sakharov foresees continued overpopulation in the Third World particularly as likely to result in mass hunger and the starvation of millions due to the inability of food production to catch up to the rate of population expansion. This section was written at the time the “Green Revolution” was already underway, but had not yet achieved its greatest successes in food production.
The year 1968 was also the year in which “The Population Bomb” by Paul Ehrlich was published, causing a sensation, so it’s not hard to say that Sakharov’s views were quite common in the late 1960s among the scientific and technical elite the world over. However, increased hardiness and productivity of agriculture in India, Mexico, Bangladesh and throughout both the First World and Third World has worked to alleviate the threat of mass starvation caused by a rising world population.
Coupled with rising national incomes and lower birth rates across most of the developing world (with the exception of Africa), rising food supplies have largely averted the threat of mass famine foreseen by futurists of the 1960s. The psychology of racism, as Sakharov dubbed it, has also been under a sustained attack across the developed world. How successful the push against racist beliefs and the mentality of racism has actually been is for future historians to decide. An argument can be made that these attitudes simply become more cunning at hiding themselves, submerging themselves and sometimes even switching ideological sides and tribal affiliations in the process.
Sakharov’s second major predictive failure was in the area of Western progressives and their ability to force a convergence of the Western and socialist systems in the economic sphere, combined with a greater emphasis on peace and mutual recognition in the political sphere.
Contrary to Sakharov’s outline for convergence, the Cold War ended under a conservative Western regime, with the rightest U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush successfully signing arms control agreements with the USSR in its final years and overseeing a dismantling of a good part of the apparatus of military confrontation in Europe in partnership with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his successor, Boris Yeltsin, the first Russian non-communist head of state since 1917.
Ultimately, the greater era of East-West cooperation foreseen by Sakharov occurred between post-communist Russian and Soviet sphere leaders and conservative Western leaders, including the arguably conservative, in economic terms at least, U.S. President Bill Clinton. Western progressives, far from making their countries more socialistic – at least in the U.S. and UK – largely accepted the broad structure of capitalist ownership, production and consumption rather than opting for a more state-based model of economic production.
At least, this was true between 1991 and 2008. The U.S. administration of Barack Obama arguably began a return to the more statist objectives of Western progressives of the 1960s and early 1970s starting in 2009, though the extent to which this can be termed truly ‘socialist’ is highly debatable. Obama’s political successors on the left in America are attempting to take the U.S. economy in a far more socialistic direction, but continued opposition from within the Democratic Party coalition is stymying many of these efforts, as is more vociferous opposition from U.S. Republicans.
Thirdly, Sakharov’s vision of a reconciled U.S. and USSR working together to ‘save’ the populations of the developing world has proved a mirage. Post-Soviet Russia was in no position economically to assist developing countries between 1991 and 2008, given the vast economic and financial dislocations caused by the collapse of the communist economic system in the USSR. The vast atomic power projects, gigantic fertilizer factories and irrigation systems, and the greater utilization of the resources of the oceans foreseen by Sakharov have simply never happened.
Instead, the developing countries of the Non-Aligned bloc and a number of formerly Second World ‘socialist’ countries have chosen economic models of development that owe more to capitalism than to communism. The ‘Washington Consensus‘ of the 1990s continued up until very recently, supported by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Private capital has been plowed into many so-called developing countries, most of which have adopted some kind of mixed economy.
While it’s true that technical advisors from Russia and China and Chinese loans (particularly since 2008) have also played a role in the economic progress of the developing world, the fact of the matter is that a variety of private, public, multi-lateral and informal mechanisms have worked together to improve living standards across much of the developing world. The huge economic progress in India, South Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam, and portions of the Arab world reflect these collective factors.
Fourth and finally, the creation of a world government and the “smoothing of national contradictions” as a result of the convergence in economic structure through socialism has decidedly not occurred. Rather, the adoption of identical new technologies such as the Internet, personal computers and smart phones across the globe has led to an accentuation of national characters and contrdictions, rather than to their smoothing and diminishment.
Where a potential world government is concerned, the United Nations (UN), once seen hopefully by progressive and various elements of the political left as the kernel for such a potential future, has become a forum through which various civilizational blocs of nations engage in power struggles of various kinds. Smaller actors such as extreme ideological factions and terrorist organizations also utilize the influence of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and UN departments to advance their goals.
The kind of world government hopefully envisioned by Sakharov still lots a long way off. That’s probably a good thing.
SINISTER CONVERGENCES: POLICE STATES, PROPAGANDA AND MISINFORMATION
One of the longest sections of “Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom” is titled “Police Dictatorships”. It begins thusly:
“An extreme reflection of the dangers confronting modern social development is…in particular, the rise of demagogic, hypocritical, and monstrously cruel dictatorial police regimes. Foremost are the regimes of Stalin, Hitler and Mao Tse-tung, and a number of extremely reactionary regimes in smaller countries, such as Spain, Portugal, South Africa, Greece, Albania, Haiti and other Latin American countries.”
While most of the dictatorships Sakharov references above were right-wing, or, as he puts it “extremely reactionary” regimes, the bulk of Sakharov’s commentary in the “Police Dictatorships” section of the essay is focused on the communist, or “socialist” dictatorships of Stalin and Mao. This is telling, as Sakharov was writing in the Soviet Union only 15 years after Stalin’s death, when the late Soviet dictator’s actions were still the subject of heated debate and revisionist scholarship.
Sakharov makes an astute distinction between the early stages of these dictatorships, which involved demagogy, bullying storm troopers, and a seizure of power, with the modus operandi of their later stages. As Sakharov puts it, these relied on “a terrorist bureaucracy of reliable cadres of the type of Eichmann, Himmler, Yezhov and Beria at the summit…of unlimited power”.
All very true. The same could be said of a number of smaller leftist and Islamist regimes, as well. I’ll cite only those of Afghanistan, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, and the Sudan here, in the interests of brevity.
There exist strong and consistent patterns among the police dictatorships of the 20th and 21st centuries and how they operate. Once these patterns have been established, it becomes very difficult for a nation to break free of them for any length of time.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first election of Boris Yeltsin in 1991, Russia experienced a decade of democratization and the tearing down of at least some structures of the prior communist regime before the forces of that old regime began reasserting themselves in the early 2000s. The election of Vladimir Putin as Russian President in March 2000 was one such reassertion, though even Putin abided by some democratic norms and procedures early in his rule.
The drift towards a police state, which is how Russia is again best described as of this writing, was a gradual one, though it may have been planned in some stages years before according to blueprints drawn up by Yuri Andropov, the longtime head of the KGB in the 1980s. Once that drift accelerated, however, Russia’s metamorphosis first into a “sham democracy” in the 2008 to 2012 period, and then into a de facto police state after 2012 became more or less unstoppable.
What made this drift possible? The answer is primarily propaganda and misinformation generated both by Mr. Putin’s government and by various media actors sympathetic to Putin’s agenda. This enabled Mr. Putin and the oligarchs aligned with him to take over greater shares of the Russian economy and obtain complete control over all regional governments. The shaky independent Russian media environment of the 1990s and early 2000s gradually gave way to the present Russian media landscape, which is dominated by a half-dozen TV channels owned by Putin-affiliated oligarchs.
The two best histories of how this process occurred in practice, and who the players were, can be found in “All the Kremlin’s Men” by Russian journalist (and now exile) Mikhail Zygar and “Nothing is True and Everything is Possible” by British television producer Peter Pomerantsev.
It would be a poor use of time to recapitulate their arguments here. Suffice it to say that President Putin and his circle of cronies and functionaries are experts in the shaping of public perceptions and opinion through the use of mass media. In the words of author Pomerantsev, “In Russia, even the business of government has become a reality TV show”.
Endless repetition of the government line, coupled with scads of lies and half-truths, many of them contradictory on their face, keep the Russian public confused about the nature of the truth, or whether there even is a truth that can be known. A public confused and lulled into complacency in this manner is easy to manipulate and control.
Once Mr. Putin had gotten a complete grip on Russian media, he set about using the Internet, social media, cyber attacks and other worldwide communication channels to attack Russia’s opponents, which he views mainly as Ukraine, Germany, and the United States.
The creation of so-called “troll farms” made up of hundreds of hackers, cyber-warriors, and agents provocateurs engaged in pseudo-journalism by creating thousands of fake news websites that repeat and advance the core arguments supporting Russian interests has literally bombarded the Internet (aka World Wide Web) with an exponentially increasing supply of Russian propaganda. Russia’s highly sophisticated propaganda and misinformation is having a strong effect on politics and society in the U.S. and its allies, with pro-Kremlin talking points repeated even by U.S. senators and Congressmen.
Mr. Putin’s intention is clear and direct: to sow confusion and disruption within enemy nations in a way that best supports Russia’s interests, as such are understood by Mr. Putin.
The unintentional effect of this online propaganda campaign, when reinforced by media consolidation and trends within U.S. conservative media, may be more dangerous still: to encourage the evolution of the U.S. political system in an authoritarian direction similar to Russia’s. The U.S. is not alone among nations in facing this danger. If unchecked, such trends over time could result in a convergence of the Western and authoritarian systems in a manner completely unforeseen by Andrei Sakharov in 1968.
Such a convergence would be marked by an evolution toward economic systems that are a hybrid between state socialism and oligarchic & plutocratic control of major industries, media systems dominated by rabidly partisan television news and social media influencers that are largely loyal to one major political party or political coalition, eroding free speech norms, suppression of debate, and a continuous stream of “information campaigns” intended to promote a constantly-shifting set of priorities, many of them quickly embraced and then abandoned, by the governing elite.
Add to all of the above increased technological surveillance of cities and other population centers by closed circuit television networks (CCTV) operated by private citizens, private industry, municipal police departments, and the federal government, all of which become increasingly interlinked. This is not what Sakharov predicted: a strange convergence of the world’s great powers.
This would be a recipe for disaster.
HOW THE U.S., LATIN AMERICAN, AND RUSSIAN SYSTEMS COULD CONVERGE
The biggest danger to the U.S. political system lies in its current two-party arrangement. In the U.S., power has typically alternated between one of two major political parties since the 1790s. Smaller and third parties have also existed in parallel to the two major parties, but have become increasingly irrelevant since the 1940s. Various attempts to launch successful third parties since the early 1970s have not met with sustained success.
The danger for the U.S. lies in growing illiberal tendencies within both major parties which, if unchecked, are likely to lead to one or the other of the two refusing to cede power in the event of an electoral loss. To some extent, this has already occurred with the Republicans and the 2020 Presidential election. The fear is that 2020 could be a blueprint for future electoral shenanigans by one or both parties.
While thousands of television channels broadcast in the U.S., highly concentrated media ownership of the major channels is a feature of the economy. Among the center-left channels that make up most of the so-called “mainstream media” a handful of seven major companies have ownership.
The beliefs and attitudes of the owners of ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and MSNBC are more or less identical, and have become more similar over time, resulting in less viewpoint diversity. Since the late 2000s, these channels have tended to cover news related to minority groups and sensitive social issues using framing, language and buzzwords generated by various activist and advocacy groups. As a result, news of the center and left has tended to become less objective and more entangled with advocacy.
On the right of the political spectrum, Fox News dominates as the right-leaning television channel. The tenor of its broadcasts has been marked by a highly propagandistic and demagogic approach since the channel’s launch in 1996; these tendencies have become more pronounced over time. Many former contributors to Fox News and centrist and left-leaning journalists view Fox News more as a propaganda channels similar to Russia-1 and NTV in Russia than an actual news network.
To the right of Fox News, One America New Network (OANN) and Newsmax, while smaller in national reach and viewership, are even more openly conspiratorial and extremist in their viewpoints than Fox News. Similarly, American talk radio personalities on the right of the political spectrum have changed their approach to become more populist and indulgent of fringe beliefs since the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and particularly since 2020.
In this fraught news environment, and with a highly polarized public and political parties engaged in a zero sum quest for power, a danger exists that, in a moment of national crisis, large segments of the news media may side with illegitimate claimants to electoral power, or with bureaucratic organs and actors who act beyond the legal confines of their brief. In either event, American democracy could be severely compromised as a result of media players, particularly television channels, behaving in a manner analogous to state media organs in a developing or authoritarian nation.
These dangers exist in Europe and in Latin America, as well. As a number of prominent political commentators have pointed out, Hungary has already become a kind of “illiberal democracy” under the leadership of its Prime Minister, Victor Orban.
Italy under the premiership of Silvio Berlusconi went through a similar stage, though Berlusconi never enjoyed the degree of power exercises by Orban given the limits on prime ministerial power contained in the Italian constitution. These limits were further reinforced by the large number of political parties and federal structure of Italian government. Against these constraints, Berlusconi’s ownership of three of the largest Italian television channels allowed him to enjoy the longest stint in power of any post-war Italian prime minister between the mid-1990s and early 2010s.
Mexico and Peru, for their part, remain relatively weak and unstable democracies, with long histories of one-party rule, dictatorships, and attempted coups. Mexico has a highly concentrated media environment dominated by Grupo Televisa and Telmex/Telcel. The former is owned by Emilio Azcarraga Jean and the second by Carlos Slim Helu. Between them, they control nearly 85% of audiovisual and broadcast media in Mexico, giving them outsize influence.
Mexico’s current, and outgoing, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), is, like Donald Trump and former Venezuela leader Hugo Chavez, a populist in style. When he lost the 2006 Mexican presidential election, AMLO staged a months-long sit-in in the Zocalo, Mexico City’s large and famous public square, to protest what he said was a ‘rigged election’.
While it appears that AMLO won’t be running for re-election in 2024, in keeping with the Mexican constitution’s one-term limit, there is no guarantee that he won’t seek power again in future, or that another populist in the mold of Hugo Chavez or his successor, Nicolas Maduro, will not arise in Mexico. The danger for Latin American nations such as Mexico, Peru and Brazil is that they, like Venezuela, might all incubate dangerous populist movements in future, aided and abetted by concentrated media giants who are either unwilling to oppose an illiberal regime or, even worse, operate under the modus operandi that supporting such a regime is, in essence, good for business or their share price.
Naturally, dictatorships and other illiberal regimes rise and fall, and none last forever. The stronger and more long-lasting the liberal traditions of a nation, the more likely that nation is to resist or recover from a period of illiberal or dictatorial rule. The danger of the 21st century, and the coming centuries, is related to the increased and pervasive technological control and oversight of the mechanisms of modern life. With technology at its beck and call, even an unpopular liberal regime can last for quite a while.
A FINAL THOUGHT: THE INCREASING PERVASIVENESS OF SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGY
The People’s Republic of China leads the world in surveillance of its citizens through the use of surveillance technology, as measured by CCTV usage. Across China’s major cities, including Beijing, Nanjing, Shenzhen and Shanghai, there exist 636 million CCTV cameras, or roughly 439 cameras per 1,000 citizens. That’s one camera for every two people.
All other countries of the world lag behind China’s propensity for surveillance, and thank God for that! It is nevertheless interesting to note how pervasive CCTV camera surveillance has become in some of America’s largest cities, and in the cities of a small number of other Western nations, not to mention within nominally democratic developing/Non-Aligned nations.
Outside of China, as measured by the number of CCTV cameras per square mile, South Asia, the US, the UK and Russia lead in the level of surveillance. Delhi, India and Seoul, South Korea were the two leaders by this measure, with 1,500 and 680 cameras per square mile, respectively. These cities were followed by Singapore in third place, then Hyderabad, Pakistan, New York City, and Moscow in 4th, 5th and 6th place. After Moscow, London (UK), Mumbai, Chennai and Dhaka, Bangladesh marked the rest of the top 10 list of cameras per square mile.
Outside of China, as measured by the number of camera per person in the most populated cities of the world, the U.S. cities did not make the top 10. By population, Tokyo, Japan is the most surveilled city on earth with one camera per 1,000 people. Shanghai, Dhaka, Sao Paolo, Delhi, Mexico City, Cairo, Beijing, Mumbai and Osaka rounded out the top 10 list by population.
Nevertheless, the number of CCTV cameras in American cities has been creeping upward due to concerns about public safety and police departments’ embrace of technology to catch law breakers. The list of top ten U.S. cities by number of cameras per square mile makes interesting reading. The top 10 in the U.S. include Washington, D.C., Atlanta, San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Boston, Denver, Los Angeles, and Detroit. Atlanta has 484 cameras per square mile. That is more than Singapore, Moscow and Hyderabad, India, and not too far behind Seoul and Delhi, India.
More CCTV cameras per square mile than Moscow…in the city of Atlanta, Georgia.
These are statistics to think about as we ponder the convergence of political systems across the globe, and how this trend might progress and what it might mean for our futures.
Until next time, I remain —
Greymantle
