Metadata#
- Author(s): Darren Byler
- Number of pages: 150
- Year published: 2021
- Year read: 2023
Review#
A disturbing and distressing examination of the currently-happening Uyghur genocide, and how it’s accelerated by modern surveillance state technologies to create “smart” labor/reeducation camps.
Just like the Nazis leveraged early 20th century industrialization to organize the Holocaust, so China is leveraging computer vision, smartphones, and machine learning to organize its own destruction of the Uyghur, Kazakh, and other ethnic minorities along its borders. A short book, but an informative and scary one! Darren Byler situates this genocide in the overall history of genocides and state surveillance; this book made me want to restart James Scott’s Seeing Like a State - since this book, and this genocide, is very much the eventual, worst extension of what Scott described: the creation of last names, street names, and order so that the state may “see”.