Thread by @sqiouyilu

the sheer fucking cosmic horror of knowing that I live on an actual alternate timeline. that there is an actual point of divergence for me

in 2017 I visited china as part of a multinational SF writer delegation to see china’s emerging facial recognition technology, which the company was trialing as part of a payment system, but the government having access to photos from IDs for recognition was already established

since then, the CEO of that company has disappeared after criticizing government regulators (he appears to be alive, but who knows how accurate that is), a new genocide campaign began, and facial recognition is now used to surveil people’s every movement during forced isolation

I wrote #InTheWatchfulCity as a direct result of that trip, in an attempt to envision how surveillance could be perhaps not utopic, but at least a tool for guardians of a nation to ensure the wellbeing of their citizens and that no such disappearances like the CEO’s can happen

I’m fucking back in the US where we have abundant effective vaccines and people refuse to get them because of fascist ideologies and go on letting COVID rage on and continue to kill and disable people

while ppl in china COME TO THE US FOR VACCINES because theirs isn’t effective

the chinese vaccine isn’t effective and loses protection power over time, but the US won’t share ours because we’re capitalist warlords who’d rather have more money making a public good proprietary than consider the wellbeing of the whole fucking planet

just fucking bizarro world to be safe, for some measure of “safe,” in a christofascist country, while my kin who I diverged from are suffering. as fucking dark as hunger indeed