China to go full dystopia with mandatory vehicle RFID chips in 2019

Even without its thick blanket of Blade Runner-like smog, China would totally qualify as a real-life modern dystopia, thanks to a heavily regulated national internet and a profoundly authoritarian government. Well, guess what -- that government will be getting even more tools to track and monitor its citizens by way of RFID technology making its way into new Chinese-market cars starting next month, according to the Wall Street Journal. If that sounds super-scary and weird to you, you're not alone. The program is ostensibly being used to generate data that will help alleviate China's hellacious traffic, but critics of the plan say that it will also likely be used as another powerful tool for domestic surveillance by the Chinese government.