Our successful societies originated in a state of constant (public) surveillance. When you do something in public in small town USA, people see you and that information ripples through the informal social networks. Historically, institutions like churches and schools facilitated exchange of that information. Those things breakdown when you have Chinese cities with millions of people, most of whom just moved there from somewhere else not that long ago.

It’s not just a problem in China, either. If you drive to DC from Annapolis, you’ll see car after car violating the HOV restriction on US 50. Like 80% of vehicles in the HOV lane are single occupant. How do you solve that? Or people blocking the box in DC? Or people taking lefts from K Street during rush hour, when they are prohibited? There is a cost to all that—it slows things down for everyone and undermines deliberate traffic planning. I’d support, for example, cameras that automatically ticket violators.

> When you do something in public in small town USA

“In public” is an important part of that sentence. China is attempting, with the direct and indirect assistance of Western firms like Facebook and Google who have experience building deep surveillance systems, to extend that scrutiny into what was previously the private sphere.

> Our successful societies originated in a state of constant (public) surveillance

Not at all true. Especially in contrast to today. People actually had a lot of privacy on every possible metric.

edit: Or asked differently: What was surveilled and through which channels?

People lived in small communities where other people were able to observe them. They were forced to interact with others through church and just basic market transactions (you go to the general store, you don’t order something on amazon). At harvest time everyone worked together to get everything done. The communities were small enough so that other people could detect patterns of antisocial behavior. That alone discouraged such behavior. If it didn’t, the community could apply social pressures to correct the behavior.

If you go into a restaurant in Sibley Iowa and leave your table a mess, people you know personally notice. If you do it in Manhattan, you can be shameless—the odds of someone recognizing you are remote, and even if someone does nobody sees you in public often enough to put together a pattern of behavior.

> where other people were able to observe them

in a very limited way, with even less tools than today. Scale is a factor but there are a million other factors in "tightly knight communities" that corrected for what you call "antisocial" behavior.

I think you mean policing. The societal worth doesn't need to be established here.

Surveillance is the act of looking for suspicious behavior with the intent to find flaws. That wasn't a requirement to a society. If anything, these ideas lead to witch hunts.

Living closer together is not just mutual surveillance. That would be quite the stretch.

Not really. A simplistic counterargument would be that our "successful" societies originated when we were able to escape the constant surveillance of the village, into the more permissive environment of relatively anonymous cities. And while it´s obviously more complex than that, at one level our entire species history could be labelled as a continuing attempt to escape the trap that is fascism/centralised control.

But more importantly, in a village there is at least some sense of a two way flow of information, citizens interact with each other and their leaders - albeit occasionally at the end of a sharp dagger.

There is no interaction in constant surveillance, there is no appeal. Obey orders, no matter how stupid or nonsensical they are, imposed by somebody with no local knowledge. The history of that society does not end up getting written by its perpetrators.