Comment by ls612

I’d suggest that one of the key innovations of authoritarian control over the populace in the 21st century vs the 20th is that surveillance and compute means the authoritarian states don’t need to use the brute force of the legal system against the average person to keep power. They can focus only on key targets while not molesting the broader population in the same way the Stasi et al did. I’d go so far as to say for the typical American and the typical Chinese their experience of the legal system is virtually identical, in that they don’t experience it. But for those targeted by the system, the precise mechanism may vary but the certainty of the outcome does not.