China is well known for being a surveillance state, but according to Jordan Peterson, America is not far behind.

Last week, he made the following statement to a congressional committee:

“There are now 700 million CCTVs in China under the rule of the Communist Party. The system to which those electronic eyes are attached is the most complete state apparatus of surveillance yet imagined with the the ability not only to recognize faces at a distance, but gait itself when facial features are hidden or obscured.”

This invasive surveillance software has been ominously named “Skynet after the rogue and all-seeing technology that took such a dreadfully wrong turn in the famous science fiction movie 'Terminator' series, featuring artificially intelligent robots hell-bent on protecting themselves by destroying humanity.”

China’s Skynet system allows the government “access to everything [citizens] possess electronically,” including “their savings and their access to travel.” Their “access to the world can be reduced to zero if [their] social credit score falls beyond an arbitrary minimum,” which allows them to be “shut out of all activities,” such as “driving, shopping, working, eating, finding shelter, and even fraternizing with friends and family.”

“This has also opened up the opportunity for the government to extract slave-like labor from its citizens” who are desperate to “increase their [social credit] score and remain part of human society,” Peterson warned.

While China’s tyrannical Skynet system sounds like something from a dystopian novel, it’s all too real, and according to Peterson, America is heading in the same direction.

“Why is any of this relevant to people in the West?” he asked.

“Well, because the technology that the Chinese Communist Party employs is an extension of Western technology because we already fell prey to the terrible temptation of lockdown employed by that state in the face of hypothetical crisis once,” he said, referencing the COVID-19 pandemic.

Further, the West is prone to falling victim to a Skynet-like system due to the “convenience of universal and automatic recognition of identity and partly because any problem whatsoever that now confronts us can easily be used to justify the increasing reach of the security and nanny state,” said Peterson.

“We all live so much in the virtual world in consequence of our purchasing habits and modes of electronically mediated communication that our very selves have become reducible to … data — the modern equivalent of our footprint” and “an image of our identity,” which is “increasingly bought and sold by the invisible corporate brokers.”

These “brokers” then use the information for advertising purposes — “to sell us what we so desperately and carelessly and conveniently want,” said Peterson, but what most people fail to realize is that it “can also be used to track, monitor, and punish everything we do and say.”

“Governments can and are colluding with these corporate agents to develop a picture, not only of our actions, but of our thoughts and words, so that deviation from the desired end can be mapped, rewarded, and punished.”

“The development of a digital identity and currency … will facilitate the development of a surveillance state — the scope of which optimistic pessimists of totalitarianism, such as George Orwell, could scarcely imagine.”

“The ultimate fascist collusion between gigantic, self-interested corporations and paranoid, security-obsessed, anti-human governments … becomes ever more likely. ‘If you have nothing to hide, you will have nothing to fear’ will be the slogan commandeered by those most likely to turn to surveillance,” Peterson warned.

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