Remembering this helps me to understand Other Naomi, and the sudden power she has found in terrifying large numbers of people with claims of “tyrannical” vaccine passports with a “CCP-style social credit score system.” She is tapping into these barely submerged fears, which are rooted not in fantasy, but reality. Vaccine passports aren’t a social credit system, but social media itself kind of is. Those QR codes on our phones aren’t putting our lives under constant surveillance, but as all those clever jokes suggest, our phones themselves and many other smart devices are, or at least could.

QUESTION: What evidence supports the claim that smartphones constitute a de facto surveillance/social credit system comparable to what critics fear from vaccine passports?

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 280