California is home to nearly 40 million people and the supply of water does not always meet demand, particularly in times of drought. A recent newspaper article offered the solution of snitching on one’s neighbors.
On July 9, the Sacramento Bee published an article headlined, “Is your neighbor wasting water? Snitching on them may ease California drought, study says.” According to the report, “ratting out one’s neighbors could help relieve some of the pressure from California’s current drought.”
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The study supports the idea of “participatory surveillance” and cites the Chinese research article “Social ties and citizen-initiated contacts: the case of China’s local one-stop government,” written by Youlang Zhang, assistant professor in public administration at China’s Renmin University, and Xufeng Zhu, professor of public policy and management at China’s Tsinghua University. The article examines why some citizens are “more likely to initiate contact with the government than others.”
Orwell didn’t write 1984 as a how-to guide. As Jim Geraghty wrote in October of 2019, when the CCP-NBA connection exposed for millions of Americans to see: We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs.