This is madness. I thought I was reading a fake article.
> the system is 'very ambitious in both depth and scope, including scrutinizing individual behavior and what books people read. It's Amazon's consumer tracking with an Orwellian political twist.'
What a coincidence. Recently I had to decide whether to buy books on politics for kindle. I didn't like the fact that it tracks everything I buy, what sentences I highlight, the notes I keep... I bet my libertarian books would make my score very low in future China.
> This score is not only determined by one's lending behavior, but also by hobbies and friends. If friends have a poor lending reputation, this reflects badly on the person, just as prolonged playing of video games. Buying diapers indicates responsibility and scores therefore well.
This detail was hidden in the article, yet it's one of the most important. It's not about external control, but also self-control. This is what a true Orwellian society promotes. The score acts as feedback to everything we do.
It's funny to imagine social hackers buying tons of diapers to get on top of the rankings.
> Recently I had to decide whether to buy books on politics for kindle. I didn't like the fact that it tracks everything I buy, what sentences I highlight, the notes I keep... I bet my libertarian books would make my score very low in future China.
This is why I keep "pirating" and hoarding books. I know it's bad for the common good and bad for the authors but I feel paranoid about corporations and national security agencies collecting and later, perhaps, analyzing what I read, including how long I linger over a page, what I underline, when I take screenshot excerpts, etc.
I started innocently enough, by scanning all my physical books (and downloading the epubs or pirated pdfs of books I already paid for in physical form whenever available) just to lighten my steps, so to speak. Then I came upon a passage in 1984 where books were altered, entire passages excised and rewritten to suit whatever powers that be. It was completely unrealistic when 1984 was written, of course, but in 2013 (when I read it), this hit a little bit too close to home. With all our devices constantly itching to phone the mothership, this is not a fantasy anymore but a possibility. All that stands between Orwell's dark vision and reality is, in fact, political will and our collective memory of times when this was not possible. Perhaps future generations who do not remember physical books will more easily acquiesce to such intrusions for the sake of "mental hygiene" and, you know, the children and stuff.
Anyhow, today I look at a 16K+ Bibdesk database which, of course, includes the files/ebooks on my airgapped machine and feel curiously satisfied. Not in a lifetime will I be able to read all this but I know that I could spend my remaining days reading freely, no matter the external circumstances. Freedom of thought! (Also, a very neat and nifty system for me personally I admit... :)
You raise a point that was already true for DRM - the impediment from the restrictions pushes the law abiding citizen into piracy.
For example, Cinavia might limit the devices you can play your legally purchased movie on. So law abiding citizen end up introducing themselves to TPB so they can play their movie on their projector-connected laptop, and then they realize that the latest episode of Game of Thrones has already downloaded by the time they got round to alt tabbing to their favorite torrent solution...
But your point is excellent and perfectly valid: if you want a fun, "edited" book try and source the first edition of "See you in November" by Peter Stiff which allegedly has been more recently edited by the interested parties. (It does not make for civilised reading, particularly if you are British.) I knew a few more but their titles don't come to mind immediately.
Seems like checksums could solve the issue of minor textual edits of classic texts. Sites like project Gutenberg could even keysign texts if we thought this a major concern.
Is it wrong that the first thought in my mind is how to influence their ratings at scale? "Diaper stuffing" while humourus is probably not far off the initial reputation optimization schemes that have probably already commenced.
I'd say there's a good chance you'll be able to buy your way to a top score while the poor become the geocities of citizens.
You raise a very interesting point. Maybe the ranking is also designed to stimulate the economy.
> "Diaper stuffing" while humourus is probably not far off the initial reputation optimization schemes that have probably already commenced.
The government would keep the algorithm a secret, so there would be a SEO for human beings: the CRO citizen ranking optimization. CRO would tell you what books to buy, the top 10 items to boost your rating, what people you should befriend...
In a system where social ranking determines opportunity, employment, and all other aspects of life - you better believe social hacking is going to happen.
If I bought large quantities of textbooks written by Party Authors and used them to support my tables and benches...would that lead to an execution for corruption or a higher CRO for ingenuity? ;)
If people of this century, continue to believe this kind of domination between human to human is acceptable and desirable, I want off the planet, and possibly emancipation from the human race.
There's some factors aren't numerically quantifiable: Respect for elders? How does one metric that? Time donated to charitable services for the elders?
What this will create is real life level grinding, and a glut of half-assing a lot of socially desirable "traits". This could get very ugly, very fast if this article is accurate, creating a society where corners are cut in the interest of upping their score. It's like profit motive but for every day interactions.
It's something I have pointed out in other threads as well: extrinsic rewards destroy the intrinsic motivation. "Why should I do something that doesn't raise my score?" This is very clear in traditional schools: few students go beyond the assigned tasks and readings, popular kids mock the ones who study for their own benefit and cheating is rampant.
Oh but then you'll donate the diapers. And since your score will be determined by what others think of you, pretty soon there will form feedback rings pushing their scores higher and higher.
It's funny to imagine social hackers buying tons of diapers to get on top of the rankings.
I would assume the ranking system will work such that having a high rank isn't that valuable but having a low rank is very bad and looking like you're trying to hack the system doubling bad. Thus I'd assume hacking would be a high-risk, low-reward activity.
This is bad. But before judging China, people need to ask themselves if the hold their own government to the same standard of criticism. As an American, I feel if the US government had similar plans and someone had leaked them on Wikileaks, there would be more conversation about the leaker's girlfriend than outrage about the plans themselves.
Countries such as the US and Australia already implement much of what the article describes: credit rating, criminal record, financial assets, standarized test scores, educational and employment records, residential history, searchable online presence, with the greatest weighting given to financial assets of course because how much money someone has trumps all.
The main differences with the announced Chinese plan are:
* it will aggregate many various ratings and makes them available publicly on all citizens, something that's done only privately for some residents in the US
* it extends the system to social criteria, something only done privately through sports clubs, religious groups, etc in the US, and dilutes the importance of a person's financial assets in calculating a person's "worth"
* it's using technology from the ground up, intead of slowly automating a paper-based system that's already been developed over the years
The social criteria is questionable. If the Federal Government cares, do you not think they can dredge your social media interactions? Do you not think that they do this for presidential candidates and those applying for top brass positions? Do you think they don't have numerical indicators to prioritize and sort the hundreds of millions of profiles they have on American citizens? They very near most certainly do.
Where do you imagine that this system is applied? What China is working on is more akin to credit ratings in that it is openly part of decision making processes for non-shadowy actors. The NSA might have such a system internally but there's not evidence to suggest it would affect your life in any way (if you are a US citizen inside the US).
Definitely the flags and scoring systems the US has in place are not part of a public conversation in the United States, are not used by US employers (for example) during job applications, etc. I agree that this makes the system very different in kind despite similarities in form.
I imagine that the US currently uses this to prioritize domestic investigations for the FBI and law enforcement.
I imagine that the US currently uses this during the process of vetting membership to the intelligence community, other sensitive positions, political leadership (I forget which NSA whistleblower mentioned the targeted surveillance of then president-prospect Obama), and for security clearances.
I imagine that the US currently uses this to find and disrupt politically minded groups and to deal with narrative challenges inside the United States.
The reason why people are not interested in the alleged US government over reaches is because we still fundamentally trust our government to do the right thing.
Americans just don't give a shit if the government has access to your data, because so far it doesn't use it.
This is why the John Oliver segment a few weeks back showed that when people thought their sexts were actually able to be viewed, they were outraged.
Our government already has the power to literally end humanity.
Right now, all the NSA stuff and other spying is just has the potential to be abused. No harm, no foul writ large.
You can believe that is wrong or shortsighted, but it doesn't mean the American people don't care about anything.
Please speak for yourself, instead of relying on what "we" or "the people" want for apparent authority. Sexts are actually able to be viewed, and have been in the past:
You are right that people generally do take offense only when presented with gross and abject violations of their privacy, but to say that people shouldn't care about what the government is doing because the government doesn't (currently) do anything with it, is passing the buck along to future generations. Why even allow for such a massive potential for abuse to arise in the future? And again, documented abuses have already occurred, to say nothing of ones swept under the rug. Why collect the data in the first place if the government "doesn't use it" as you put it?
Most people trust USgov; apparently just last year we were only 2 points behind Japan. My impression of Japan is that most people there are very trusting of their society/rules/system/etc, so for USA to be just 2 points behind Japan is a significant(and disappointing) bit of info.
I take no issue with making it a sourced statement of fact, e.g., "75% of Americans approve of the X, Y, Z programs in a 2014 Gallup poll." But to vaguely reference the current state of public opinion and use that as a basis for a normative statement that approves of the government's actions is frustrating. It dodges a discussion of the merits of the programs in favor of a "the public approves it, and no harm is being done, so no one should take issue" sort of stance.
I don't know a single person that doesn't have a very low, highly critical opinion of the US Government already. That includes essentially universal skepticism of Congress.
So yes, I think Americans criticize their government almost as a professional sport. Non-stop 24/7, everywhere. Even for things the government isn't responsible for.
I'd argue the only thing Americans are guilty of is too much complaining and criticizing of their government, and not enough doing to change it as a follow-through.
Now you know (of) a single person. Our public servants are largely fine people. We get stuff that's weird because of people being dancing monkeys for campaign finance. This is actually, in my opinion, overt, specific and designed entertainment product. It's very rarely an attachment to principle or thought out - one reason Reagan did so well is that he pretty much believed a lot of what he said ( not all - you have to be tactical too ) . He said, not what people around him, said.
Clinton wasn't as much of rigid principles, but you got the feeling he was, outside of being very charismatic, genuine. Even Dubya, I more or less trusted.
Use your anthropic principle - there would not be people saying things like what, say Ted Cruz says unless there was positive feedback for it.
I don't think nationalizing campaigns works, either. Huge public choice problem and a slightly different set of incentives.
I've worked a bit with actual government employees, and they were uniformly great except for one clot of them. Total observer bias, though.
All in all, I think the shear between what we actually want and what we say we want is the cause, and is an excellent example of revealed preferences. Why else would there have ever been some policies we've seen, like racial laws in the post-Reconstruction South? How does that ever make any sense at all, yet so much energy and time went into it?
To misquote Walt Kelly ( of the Pogo cartoons ) - "we has met the enemy, and it is us."
I have many fairly right-wing friends, and most of them, when pressed a bit, will clarify what they are afraid of. It's not nothing. They have their bias, I have mine. I'm able to talk to them about these things without much ugliness.
Our public servants are not fine people. They kill unarmed civilians in their custody, they kill Americans without cause nor due process, they torture innocents, admit they torture innocents, and then do nothing. Our public officials state on record that financial institutions are too big to jail then proceed to use the law to terrify and ruin the lives of those who dare defy their agenda.
So there are bad people who are public officials, and there are people who are in over their head.
The vast majority are dedicated professionals.
"Too big to jail" happened because we tried to use mortgages for this bizarre social welfare hack. A conservative economist and writer - Charles Calomiris, with his coauthor S. Haber - picks this apart pretty well.
Emphasis we, though.
The few cases where I can think of "using the law to terrify and ruin..." are pretty complicated and there's plenty of "WTF?" to go 'round.
> "Too big to jail" happened because we tried to use mortgages for
No, it didn't.
Too big to jail happened because money drives political influence, and the people responsible for the collapse of Wall Street have the latter because of the former.
If you mean the collapse itself happened for that reason, that's not true either. To the extent the "social welfare hack" thing is true, it was being done for decades before the bubble even started building. The frauds that lead into the buble and collapse didn't happen because of that, they happened because of the regulatory structures put into place designed to prevent exactly that kind of thing after the Great Depression were removed; at the time that occurred, critics warned that doing that would lead to exactly the kind of shenanigans that, in fact, occurred.
The decades of bubble building is exactly the root cause.
The regulatory framework - I presume you mean Glass-Steagall - has never been shown to have been capable of preventing this sort of thing. Even people who advocate for it - mainly Paul Vocker - admit this. Keeping investment and deposit banking separate had nought to do with it. There might have been other "firewalls" but I've yet to see a proprosal that has been identified as sufficient to prevent this sort of thing.
Fraud was fraud; whether policy to push lousy mortgages came from Fannie/Freddie/Congress or not isn't all that controversial to me - I am sure it is true because of the evidence. But it is controversial to some.
The ideas behind the mortgage buildup were just that - ideas - that were accepted by a broad spectrum of people.
And neither you nor anyone else can show that money driving political influence has one thing to do with it. It was the style of the times. There was a cycle of deregulation beginning with Jimmy Carter.
Might be that Dick Armey was bought and paid for, but I am pretty sure he would have advocated for deregulation regardless out of ideology anyway.
The only idea I am aware of that may have made a difference is that Brooksley Born wanted CDOs/CDSs on exchanges, and we simply don't know what would have happened. It is bad that she was shouted down, but that has more to do with certain foibles in how things like the regulation that is there works, and with how the Fed interacts with those.
She was, in effect, a heretic, a Jeremiah who was not listened to. And it's a black mark on us. But we don't know.
Greenspan's mea culpa covers it - he did not know that banks really weren't doing the proper risk analysis.
But we just do these things. We have bubbles. There will be more before it's over. "Nation of Deadbeats" is quite the book.
Our public servants are not good or evil. They are merely people responding to the incentives that they are faced with.
This means that they are incentivised to behave by fear of losing their jobs, by financial contributions and kickbacks, by legacy, by moral sentiment, by haste and convenience, by duty. There are very few to no public servants who feel that what they are doing is wrong - and you might agree with some of their actions even when it blurs lines (assassinating Osama Bin Laden without due process of law).
What's happening now is that America's post WWII order is fracturing and weakening. There are new players on the stage. The theater of global politics and finance is shifting from Europe to the Asian Pacific. The borders fixed to prevent another great European war had also been fixed to provide energy security from the Middle East - but this freezing has prevented those people living there from having a great or fully modern society of their own. The technology backing nuclear weapons has exceeded the defense capabilities of all nations at a time non-proliferation treaties expired (the Bush administration did not renew them). Russia and China are rushing to create a Eurasia that can compete with Europe and Europe is trying to create a United States of Europe to ween away from NATO and to achieve a regional hegemony that provides it security and an opportunity to be a global player. Frought with both politicization, financial warfare, general gamifiedness, and brittleness global finance has brought financial redistribution, bubbles and busts to both hemispheres.
In response the US is building oil pipelines across the Americas, coup'ing Venezuela to open up its oil to US investment, settling new bases and rigs into the now contested (for geostrategic military reasons) the artic north.
The internet through all of this was supposed to allow a marketplace of ideas to exist across the world - but instead has been used by nations to propagandize, spy and sabotage one another.
In this turbulant time of America losing its grips, huge changes and bets will be made and American leadership will kill, torture, surveil and censor to ensure its own survival. That is to say we can't think of this as good versus evil but dog eat dog. The world has never been about good and evil, though men are compelled by it before they stand in trenches and need to survive.
The sad part is that during a time on Earth where there is more of everything for more of everyone that changes and fluxuations and opportunity mean the prospect of violence.
To be clear you, not me nor the parent, but you introduced good and evil into the conversation. We were discussing fine, as in decent or humane.
But if the words good and evil are to mean anything then the torture and murder of innocents must qualify as evil. Spare me your grad school real-politics analysis, none of which justifies torture because it categorically cannot be justified.
Thank you. Yes I introduced it as terminology because I felt it was present in content without the terminology before I spoke my piece.
You misunderstand me. I am neither justifying nor trying to justify torture. I am trying to show why nations convince themselves that torture is justifiable. The calculus of nations - their realpolitik - exists in a world where an analysis of torture makes it seem sensible (entirely tangential to its being reprehensible).
To add more here: what I'm saying is that if every modern nation actively participates in these behaviors we must go beyond good and evil to understand the behavior - there only appears to be relative good rather than an exaggerated excluded middle. A realist, realpolitik analysis affords us a way of understanding the points of contention and the contradictions that incentivize those nations and their representatives to participate in reprehensible activity.
Wherein comes 'constructive realism': if it is incentives and power conflict that incentivize reprehensible acts then we can fix the acts not by voting for new representatives but by changing the conditions that lead to contentions. The realpolitik analysis is not a cynical analysis or one that is doomed to justify behavior: it is instead one that places the responsibility on conditions and context as much as specific actors.
That was a mostly joking jab ... but seriously, have you looked at a demographics map of the US? In between just about every blue city/urban center, there are broad swaths of rural red. Many of these folks are of the opinion that what the government does is right, and we shouldn't question cause they know best. Which is ironic given their love of "small government" ... but when the police, military, or otherwise "security" related organization is concerned, it's all yes all day.
In my 34 years I've never met someone that had an overwhelmingly positive view of the US Government. Not a single person. The only thing I've seen is very selective, mostly partisan focused cheering, on the rare occasions when a party does something its partisans like. The next minute they're back to griping about government, for one reason or another.
Tune into the news, and you're all but guaranteed to see non-stop anger, criticism, and rejection of government actions, policies, and politicians in general from the population of the US. That is true whether you're talking about Jon Stewart spending half his show mocking the government for something, or the right wing at Fox News.
Every poll that gets done comes back with Congress having epic low ratings. That has been the case for a long time.
This goes back before the time of Mark Twain mocking the US Government, it was a very popular sport even then. For 200 years, there has been a consistent bashing of Congress and its actions in the press and popular culture.
Most Americans do criticize the government, but only on a few party-aligned talking points. Few agree on what is worthy of criticism, and many miss the important issues because they are preoccupied by relatively inconsequential hot button issues.
"Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process."
I am surprised the page is still up!
disclaimer: I am not American but like a lot of Americans I know I am disappointed with Obama too, mind you the politicians here in Ireland are also lying and power-grabbing scumbags :(
like the saying goes
“democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others”
:( It saddens me that such an obvious joke gets downvoted. It would be nice if people could reply when they downvote. Was the joke not received as such, what is not funny or does the community hate jokes?
Or if the leaker was a traitor or a patriot before issuing ad hominem attacks against him in order to bolster popular opinion when he or she is whisked away to Gitmo in the name of "national security."
* But before judging China, people need to ask themselves if the hold their own government to the same standard of criticism.*
Not really. We should judge China immediately as bad and then go on to look at our own states (which aren't terribly good). The "let's get perspective on this repression" argument is always a sham, whether it is made by China, by the US or whoever. We need to look at all governments but never to say "the badness here makes this other action OK".
I want to go further with this idea. What we need to do is understand why both nations are doing this. What reasons do they have? Why does it seem like a good idea? Are they the same reasons? Are they somehow fundamental? How much choice is there in how these behaviors are implemented? Are there alternatives with other tradeoffs that appeal to the underlying reasons and if so why was this solution chosen?
Sometimes this leads us, especially if we feel the urge to repeat standard bylines, to conclude that "The People's Party are just evil, and that's why they do it." But if the reason for doing it were merely evilness, then we might also conclude the US does it for evilness - something that isn't as much of a goto by-line.
I don't really fully understand why all major governments surveil, censor, propagandize and profile their (and other) citizens - but comparing history with 21st century challenges give us pretty good hints. First, it seems fairly natural for countries to exercise some forms of control of their populations, both to provide a common security and stability (something citizens for the most part benefit from) and to preserve its own institutions (something every government is compelled by).
Specifically in the 21st century it is common practice to utilize international propaganda to disrupt and destabilize opponent populations, foment revolutions by exporting dissent, and to misinform foreign citizens during diplomacy and geostrategy efforts. Indeed, both democracies and countries that mimic the machinations of democracies, need to gain of appear to gain public support for initiatives based on complicated, centralized or even secret initiatives do actually benefit countries as a whole. In many ways autocratic institutions need to control their people less than semi-democratic institutions since ultimately some king or body of diplomats make decisions without the input of citizens.
Digressing further it is doing this sort of analysis that can show why a state engages with the practices that it does. If there is a large desire to reform practices it is these end reasons that must be challenged if the behavior is to alter.
> Specifically in the 21st century it is common practice to utilize international propaganda to disrupt and destabilize opponent populations, foment revolutions by exporting dissent, and to misinform foreign citizens during diplomacy and geostrategy efforts.
This was all common in the 20th Century, particularly the latter half, as well.
Yes. With a matured and global internet anonymous bloggers, leakers, sources to journalists, news agencies, targetted ads, twitter campaigns, social media experiences and search rankings are fabricated and altered to assist in these ends. The social analysis used by corporations to get branding and commercials to 'go viral' are used by governments to target individuals that disseminate social influence to wider audiences. The techniques and capabilities have grown over time and the access and affordability means more of it is done by more actors.
What are the odds that something like this is already in place on global scale by some American spooks? To "fight the war on terrorism" or something. Surely it's not that difficult to do considering internet megacorps already do behaviour analysis and payment processors already keep track of what goes where, including credit scoring.
"Although the program was formally suspended, its data mining software was later adopted by other government agencies, with only superficial changes being made. According to a 2012 New York Times article, the legacy of Total Information Awareness is "quietly thriving" at the National Security Agency (NSA).[12]"
"As a "virtual, centralized, grand database”,[18] the scope of surveillance includes, among others, credit card purchases, magazine subscriptions, web browsing histories, academic grades, bank deposits, passport applications, driver's licenses, toll records, judicial records, divorce records, etc.[10]"
"Health information collected by TIA include drug prescriptions,[10] medical records,[19] and individual DNA.[20]"
And we know now the government has already been working to build back doors into all these opt-in services. However, contrary to what you say, it is arguably not opt-in. It is becoming increasingly infeasible not to leave digital footprints. And if you make the effort, then you automatically red-flag yourself as someone who is behaving like a terrorist or meth-dealer.
I doubt it. To make it work, you need leverage. Make citizen's life slightly easier or slightly worse based on his score.
Worse access to credit, withholding from top universities, preventing from starting a business - not easy to do anything like that on a grand scale in market society. So you won't exactly be making a new citizen.
This sounds exactly what Experian does. They are used by most (all?) UK banks to validate your credit score and they also provide an "identity protection" service. If your score is too low with them you don't get any credit anywhere.
1. Require that all banks have insurance for accounts that are unable to be FDIC insured but are under $200,000.
2. Legislate that credit scores take into account a score determined by Homeland Security, under the premise that homeland knows more about a person (e.g. do they gamble in monaco off books a lot? are they involved in a radical movement and likely to lose or give their jobs? are they a likely to be arrested?). If the public needs more sell on this use the canned like "Do you really want your bank to lend money to terrorists?".
3. Drop FDIC insurance for any bank that operates outside of #2. #1 will force these banks to buy insurance, lowering their profitability. At this point, the system self-regulates and is hard to dismantle.
Score is still "go" vs. "no go". You can only shut off so many people because parallel "grey" finance market arises.
More finesse is needed. You can try banks to offer different deals to identical (finance-wise) people based on their HS score, but they're probably sue.
I'd be surprised if the US didn't already have a database somewhere with scores indicating the likelihood of you being a terrorist which probably has a bearing on the likelihood of you getting stopped at an airport or put on a no fly list. Not the same as the Chinese proposal but something along those lines.
US security forces can affect things for the average person, just not the same things that China can. Not credit scores at the moment (well not legally on a mass scale), but they can for example put you on a no fly list; or if you're a non US citizen and they didn't like your "facebook" score, in this hypothetical system - they could deny you entry to the US.
So yeah this is more than just monitoring, I just called it that to distinguish it from the large scale behaviour shaping China seems to be toying with. Even having such a system in place, however, makes people behave differently: google "panopticon".
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
I've read enough articles over the years that this move on China's part is not surprising to me at all. I think the average person in China is quite fed up with the lack of morality and social compassion in the general public - due to news articles like the ones I am about to link you.
I think the majority of the West believes that the government is behind everything. But the truth is that most of these kinds of changes in China are actually reflected in the people's opinion. In this case, the PEOPLE in China are really sick and tired of seeing news articles like few I have linked. The government has just decided that this seems like the best method to achieve what the people want.
I know it sounds kind of crazy, but you have to remember that almost nobody in China has ever read 1984. They don't share your values.
No, that doesn't sound crazy at all. I don't sit around with the myopic viewpoint that everyone in the world shares my same ideas, ideals and values.
What I meant by my original post was that I try to put myself into their thought process when they arrive at such decisions. I know however that I cannot, based on my own bias and brainwashing.
[Playing Devil's advocate here, just to offer alternate perspectives]
> How did they get to this point?
Having a dictatorship as a government tends to lead down this path.
> What goes on in the mind of the person sitting in the "idea room" when they first thought of this?
I don't think the people who pitch these ideas are always the negative power hungry types - though with the media constantly pitching fear as they do in North America, it's easy to see how we'd immediately jump to that conclusion. My knee jerk reaction is incredulity, but stop and think about it for a second... their brainwashing is no different than happens in our Western "Democracy." We talk about the "freedom" we have, but our behaviour is manipulated by the media, advertising, consumerism, the society around us which seeks to enforce our buy in to their values. What's the difference if it's peer pressure making us conform or the Government? The end result is the same - it makes it a struggle to maintain independent thought, and upon reflection, is it really independent thought anyway? Are we truly free? Cases can be made for both sides of the argument with both sides claiming the other is deluded.
There are many negative personalities in society, those that don't toe the line, those that don't care about the effect their actions have on others, those that would do whatever they please and to hell with everyone else.
I can see how in some skewed perspective, one might consider "what if we can make people conform to the way we think everyone should behave to make our society a better place for all." Unfortunately, as they say, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I could see it bringing harmony to society if everyone bought into it, however, I think it's much more likely to end up in some Demolition Man style dystopia where those that conform live in the open and those that don't wish to conform and want freedom live in some alternate reality, hidden from mainstream society.
Hopefully Taco Bell doesn't win the franchise wars or they're all doomed :P
I'm an American. So what I can't help wondering is ...
How comprehensive is the data analysis system that my government uses ???
Is it more ... or less comprehensive ???
Do they really only use it on "bad" actors ??? Or do they use it on everyone to determine who has the capacity to be a "bad" actor ???
Etc etc etc.
Articles like this, at least, give me a good idea of what they are probably doing. However, I have to say, I'd like more articles on how to remain invisible to government surveillance systems. Though I'm pretty sure it is impossible at this point. Or, at the very least...
China has long been a "face" orientated society. This is traditional to varying extents throughout the world, with (parts of!) the US probably being at the other end in terms of extreme individualism.
Once you keep dossiers on people, it's natural to want better dossiers. This is just an extension and a centralization of technology that in the was is used to mould people's consumerist behaviour by rating their purchasing habits and credit. In the US there are reports of people being unable to access jobs if they have poor credit or healthcare if they have poor "lifestyles".
Dehumanisation is very easy: you reduce people to statistics, and then give those tasked with maintaining the system the objective of increasing certain statistics. The overall question of "is this just?" is hard to see and hard to discuss.
You don't have to reduce people to statistics, all you need is ideology and believe in a better future brought to you through ideology. Ideology is the real bastard.
Yes and with pragmatism you get Realpolitik, which may be a decent position to maximize some goals but can have nasty results as well if you're not careful. I dont think its possible to get away from this problem, all we can do is be aware of it as a problem and avoid the pitfalls.
It is also possible that the people who designed this genuinely believe that they are doing good. A thought process like this "imagine our country with super nice citizens - citizens who are respectful to elders, don't read bad stuff, don't do bad stuff, are polite, have good credit score etc etc. our country could be a model country for others, we'll truly create a society where everyone is nice to everyone else" or something along those lines. They probably thought it is for the greater good. Just one scenario.
Let's say you're the Chinese government (or a person in the government) and care deeply about the future of China. What's your main concern? Is it not the prevention of destabilizing civic unrest like that we've seen in Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Ukraine, and for that matter, China? That's the worst possible thing that could happen to the country, and it's quite far from unlikely, and I'd want to do whatever I can to prevent it.
Then you should probably do same things that successful countries do. Ones that did not have devastating civic unrest. From Australia to Austria.
What do they do? What's holding them afloat? Hint: it's the remnaints of democracy and civil society, not special services looking for destabilizing factors day and night.
Special services don't hurt, but everyone relying on just them had bitter end. Treating your citizens like criminals didn't help.
I assure you that Syria and Libya had extensive systems to counter insurgents, and it led them straight nowhere. As it was for DDR and USSR.
To offer a cynical perspective from a formerly colonized country, it seems to me that what made Australia, the UK, the US, Canada etc. successful is blatant disregard for human rights and equality when they were going through the same phase that China is going through now.
To take the US as an example, the Europeans just came to North America, pretty much killed or made life miserable for the native americans, stole all their land, brought in a bunch of slaves as free labour, prevented what the chinese might call "disharmony" by making sure non-white people couldn't immigrate until as recently as 1960, gave little or no regard for nature and the enivornment and so on. Equality and human rights were really bolted on as an afterthought well after development was achieved.
When it comes to the environment, you're accusing based on things that were not well understood in 1870-1910 when the US went through its industrial revolution.
The health effect correlation with specific chemicals was extremely poorly understood when the US went through its industrial revolution. The progress of chemical and biological sciences were still in the first inning.
The understanding of how certain chemicals can pollute or destroy the environment, and specifically what that means for long-term health, were hardly understood at all. I would argue 1% of what is known today about the environment, was known in 1900. One need not look any further than the medical therapies that were being attempted in the late 1800s to understand how backwards and ignorant the various scientific fields were.
The same cannot be said of the last 30 years when it comes to China. Their behavior is one of destruction with near complete disregard for the vast information that we now have.
Not really. Have you heard of lead paint and gasoline ?
The Ancient Greeks knew lead was poisonous - didn't stop american companies from using it since it improved profit.
This is startlingly true. For example most of Africa or the Middle East is going through very blood struggles that the western world only got through 70 years ago. Some places are at the French Revolution stage, others at the Glorious Revolution stage, others still stuck in a Weimar Republic or even Nazi regime phase.
Prosperity seems to be a prerequisite for solid democracy. And unfortunately it does not ensure it :(
"All of this is part of what I call the informational appetite. It’s our total faith in raw data, in the ability to extract empirical certainties about life’s greatest mysteries, if only one can deduce the proper connections. When the informational appetite is layered over social media, we get the messianic digital humanitarianism of Mark Zuckerberg. Connectivity becomes a human right; Facebook, we are told, can help stop terrorism and promote peace. (Check out Facebook.com/peace to see this hopeless naïveté in action.)"
It's amazing how different the mentality is in Liberal Democracies versus, say, Communist or Islamic regimes. Personally, I think the evidence is clear that concentration of power, especially a "rating" like this, is a prelude to about the worst tools of oppression one can imagine.
But even back here at home, little by little, we are on the way to being enslaved by the machines. If something can be more efficient (for consumers, say) it will be made more efficient and put pressure on all the humans (workers). Already our attention span is not what it used to be because as humans we have to deal with a huge volume of things being thrown at us. Already demand for human labor is decreasing. But what's next is much more efficient ways to punish people for certain behavior, and make them conform. The hive mind dominates the individual, with better and better tools. China rates its citizens, not the other way around. All the "soviet russia" joke formulas come true. The assumption is: one is permanent, the other is not.
Consumer credit rating agencies already essentially do this, and a number of subprime lenders only make credit decisions if they can connect to social media accounts. There are specialists in "connecting the dots" of all your various life activities right here in the West. Already certain sectors require a clean credit score to get a job. It's really not very different from this Chinese scheme, since this dot-joining will inevitably profile your political and social leanings, your secrets, your very personality and its inevitable flaws. China will do centrally what we do in a distributed fashion, but the end result is the same.
- Criminal records / record of conduct
- Tracking by various advertising companies, market research, etc.
- Whatever records NSA, FBI etc. keep on you. This doesn't even have to be a file-per-person, but they have your metadata, and if you stick out, you might come under closer scrutinty.
The difference is that these sources are not pulled together. Also as a sibling post noted, there is no feedback to the citizens. I don't know whether I have a bad or a good score with the police. I hope I have a good score :-). But if you want to consciously change citizens behavior, you'd have to tell them their scores. (Well, what we do right now changes citizens behavior by scaring them, but thats a different issue.)
One thing I find curious is that there is apparently no sensitivity among the inventors of this scheme towards how dystopian it sounds like. That's why you can have big posters in China saying things like "Friends! Be virtuous and vigilant!" or a Hong Kong official saying something in earnest like "if the brain is sick, it must be washed" with regards to school textbooks. There are PSAs and government posters in the US, too, and people try to push their agendas in school curriculums there, too... but for one they would not go quite as far in the US, and especially such manipulation is attempted much more tastefully.
> That's why you can have big posters in China saying things like "Friends! Be virtuous and vigilant!"
I'm not sure what you want to imply, but i just got back from London where each and every public transport facility (bus, tube, train) kept repeating over the PA that "any suspicious people or parcels" should be reported to a member of staff. Or something like that.
We're not really that different -- i would be surprised if the US is.
This goes much further into social behavior, and takes advantage of consumer and social data in new ways:
"If friends have a poor lending reputation, this reflects badly on the person, just as prolonged playing of video games. Buying diapers indicates responsibility and scores therefore well."
Also, while it starts with financial responsibility, the ambitions are larger:
"The intentions of the new system are not only economical, fighting fraudulent practices, but also moral. 'This is a deliberate effort by the Chinese government to promote among its citizens "socialist core values" such as patriotism, respecting the elderly, working hard and avoiding extravagant consumption', says Creemers."
The difference being that credit ratings are used to evaluate how creditworthy you are by looking at tangible data that is (mostly) directly related to your use of credit and actually predictive of your credit worthiness.
This system gives the government the power to codify and even gamify what it means to be a good citizen. It's attempting to shape the way people think and behave in an extremely invasive way.
But wouldn't that be the natural evolution of a credit rating?
A CR is a single metric to evaluate trustworthiness. I can easily imagine a future where credit rating takes into account all of your quantifiable life qualities.
The interesting truth is that the majority of Chinese society agrees with and supports such policies. Misunderstanding that and possibly trying to save them is pointless and counter productive. In my experience there is a surprising lack of individual social responsibility (or ethical behaviour) in China unless they are aware that they are under surveillance.
This is just the initial phase - finding out the traits of the perfectly controlled citizen. Next is actually creating such citizens. I wouldn't be surprised if within 3 decades China regulates how parents design their children at birth (as in they'll all have to design them to be compliant to the government in adulthood).
See, the thing about this comment isn't that I believe it couldn't happen. It's that I for damn sure don't think it will only be done by China.
The designing will be regulated in all countries, some attributes will be ruled unsafe to alter, or only allowed to be altered in specific fashions. The appropriate medical council variant will explain rationally that it's unsafe to do otherwise for such and such reasons. The line between medical justification and political meddling is pretty easy to blur with a bit of pressure and some good relationships.
The general public will have access to change certain genes/or be required to make these changes for the 'good' of the population. These Genes will be to make the working class less disruptive (reducing conflict by reducing genes that generate anger/or narrowing the emotional band of people to a much more narrow scope (think gene changes that have the same result as anti depression medication)) while stating that these genes need to be changed to get rid of medical issues such as ADHD For example Think about removing the ability to have their own children, got to pay extra if you want your child to be able to have their own.
The top will be able to change a lot of other things. They will be able to boost intelligent (do you really think the governments of the world want a super smart population? no, they will kept that for themselves)
All in all we are getting to the stage where there will be 2 classes of humans. The working class will become completely inferior to the uppers and thanks to the gene changes very few if any will ever raise above their station
Seems like we trying 1984 in US n Euro. And Brave new world in China
If you try and counter this with "people wont stand for it" they will, none of the China population will stop it, and once its standard there they were be breeding super humans. The rest of the world will either have to do it to keep up, or accept our Chinese overlords
So glad I have no plans to bring a child in to this future we all building for them
Alpha (“the upper class”)
Beta (“the second upper class”)
Gamma (“the middle class”)
Delta (“the second lower class”)
Epsilon (“the lower class”)
Double-Plus (“the superior subdivision among Alphas”)
Plus (“the superior subdivision among Alphas, Betas, Gammas or Deltas, but inferior to Double-Plus”)
Minus (“the inferior subdivision among Alphas, Betas, Gammas or Deltas”)
savage (“a person outside the integrated portions of society, and therefore separate from all classes”)
Your point about a society capable of large scale gene editing would not need a working class is legit. it will be used to thin the populations out to 'manageable' numbers. Then class split based on parentage.
A perfect system and within 3-4 generations completely normal
Because it's the hierarchy that defines you. An Alpha, alone, is indistinguishable from an Epsilon. See Veblen Good; if nobody looks at your rolex it's just a heavy timex.
There was a good talk back in 2012 from ex NSA that laid out some of the
details for how the US surveillance keeps track of online behavior
too[1]. I think (as awful as it is) we can expect most governments major
governments to do this if it's within their technical capacity.
To get out from under this, I think we'll need 100% encryption of
everything, open source devices, and ways for companies to make money
without ads or data brokering. Basically, this will stop when hell
freezes over.
Have you been following the news with regard to the Defense Department and Silicon Valley?
There is a concerted effort now, through government compulsion and money, to funnel venture capitol towards start-ups with cyber security (offensive and defensive) and away from those offering encryption and privacy services and communications solutions.
The sum total of the following links: DoD will be investing, through parterships with executives of companies that acquire technology from startups, like Facebook, and with partnerships with Silicon Valley Venture Capital Firms to invest in companies that increase the national cybersecurity posture of the US (attack and defense) and to limit funding to technology that it thought to harm the national security of the US (E2E encryption solutions are specifically mentioned). The past few months have seen many defense officials making their way through silicon valley to meet with executives and VC firms, including the Admirial and soon-to-be-representative of the State Department.
There are a number of reasons that I can tell - but no one 'killer' reason. The first is that sequestration has been cutting the defense budget so that the normal methods of technology development and acquisition are more limited in what they can fund. The second is that the pace of investment in the public sector, while very good, isn't always able to complete with the private sector - especially when the size of the private sector is so much larger than public innovation. There's also that the direction of technological change right now in SV is toward personal consumer products. Another reason is that more broadly the internet and cybersecurity has been a much larger problem for the US than it had anticipated. While the US has state of the art surveillance capabilities, built with its Five Eyes allies, it does not have the best cyberattack and defense teams (Russia is a notable leader). Obama characterized cyberwarfare as being more like basketball - everyone is scoring all the time and the one who scores the most wins. This is exacerbated by asymmetries. The US has the most to lose from cyberwarfare in terms of IP, wealth, and political secrets.
There is a new term being traded for what warfare is like today. Modern warfare exists simultaneously on multiple fronts, including the cyber domain and propaganda and information warfare. This term is hybrid warfare.
Finally, DARPA has new programming models it would like the private industry to adopt but no way to compel them to do so (Probabalistic Programming). This is a nice way for them to encourage the private industry to adopt and play with some of these new publicly developed technologies.
The last link I posted elsewhere in this conversation tree is the overview for the 2015 DoD cyberdefense planning. They are making investments on ALL fronts. Cybermilitary training, international partnerships, technology acquisition and investment, cyberwarfare simulation and modeling, diplomatic approaches, information sharing, etc. In other words, this is just one way that the DoD is 'getting serious' about cyberwarfare.
My gut reaction ( being an anglo, American, redneck, privileged, don't tread on me kind of person ) is that this is horrible.
But thinking deeper on it I wonder if this is what Chinese Democracy looks like. The goal being maximal harmony, rather than maximal personal freedom. The method being a constant polling of all participants by all participants rather than occasional polling of those who can be bothered to vote.
It looks alien to you because you haven't come to terms with the fundamental shift in technology (all the data that is created, collected and analyzed) and politics in western society (using said data in the name of security).
The current trend is to gather all data and to use it in any way possible, regardless if you're in China or if you have a Confederate flag on your truck.
Just an FYI a confederate flag is as offensive to most thinking Americans as a Swastika flag would be to most thinking Germans. For various reasons we don't currently ban their display. But it is and should be a quick route to political irrelevance to claim it as your own.
> [...] I wonder if this is what Chinese Democracy looks like.
No, tautologically because it's not a democracy.
Balance of power issues pretty much mean that a democracy can't stalk its citizens and still claim that they have an independent right to vote. And that's ignoring all the other stuff we know China does to maintain order like kidnap and murder dissident bloggers.
Also, this concept that maybe asian people are actually happier (presumably than other 'races') when tightly controlled is offensively racist. China has traditionally been a brutal authoritarian state but that doesn't mean the people are happier when dictated to any more than anyone's fingers naturally pluck cotton better despite centuries worth of evidence...
This might show my European perspective, but I'd rather have my government collect such data than some unaccountable private entity. Even better if no one does it of course.
This perspective is in my opinion entirely misguided.
The incentive of a private organization is to find ways to profit off you. That desire leads to fairly predictable behavior.
On the other hand, a government owns you and has true power over you.
While the odds of a company abusing this information is much more likely, it's damage to you (abusing you with unwanted ads, etc) is far less bad than how a government would use such info to abuse you.
Another dimension to this is that if a private company establishes a monopoly on your information, it's position is all but permanent. It's possible for a whole slough of similar companies to acquire the same information, therefore nullifying each others monopoly and power over you. With a government this is not the case.
One difference to me is that a private entity is (hopefully) restricted to only capturing data through their own channels. i.e. Google can track everything I search, all of my emails within gmail, etc. But they cannot track a hotmail account, they can't read my text messages, etc. If I'm not OK with the tracking, I have other alternatives, or can choose not to use any of them. But there's nothing stopping the government from intercepting anything I do.
Of course in reality right now, every single channel I go through is a Google channel. I'm writing this comment within Google Chrome, while an Android phone sits arms length from me. Heck, I even route all my non-gmail accounts into gmail. So while it feels different, I guess it really isn't.
And this might show my American perspective, but I trust Google with my data more than the US government (not saying I trust Google, just that I trust the government less). Google is an organization founded on technology, and have shown that they care about pushing forward in innovation in digital security. The US Gov didn't originate because of the internet and haven't really demonstrated a mastery of it.
The Soviet Union was run by increasingly aging and increasingly paranoid revolutionaries (literally, people who had fought a coup) who were generally unconcerned with science.
The PRC is run by technocrats educated in the West.
It's very nice to think that it's impossible to "create a new citizen," but the West has been doing that pretty effectively over the last few decades. I don't doubt the Chinese will be successful.
There is no inherent good in the universe. There is no particle or fundamental force for morality. There are truly no constraints. It is nice to believe that good will win and evil will fail, but that doesn't always happen. There's no law of the universe preventing the PRC from creating a new citizen, a perpetually controllable citizen, held in check by pervasive surveillance of a very similar form to the one experienced in the West, only with the results visible, and leveraged against the people openly, rather than covertly and without opportunity to improve your score (try getting off the no-fly list).
There is no law of the universe that totalitarianism loses and democracy wins. Maybe the PRC will be successful and create a permanently stable capitalist totalitarian state.
That one is far from truth. Soviet society was hugely concerned with science. They didn't lack in science in their ways; it just turned out that scientifically-sound methods often conflict with social reality and what people like.
For example: while it is sound to build your cities as arrays of concrete blocks with wide roads served by public transportations, living in such environment is no picnic. When you relocate someone who used to have their garden, their garage with tools, etc - into a flat in concrete block, they usually begin to drink for the lack of activities they are used to.
I mean that as far as science is concerned (disregarding humanitarian sciences because they were viewed not scientific enough) this sounds like a good, efficient plan and downside takes some time to notice when you have already invested much.
"There's no law of the universe preventing the PRC from creating a new citizen, a perpetually controllable citizen, held in check by pervasive surveillance"
Control is a contract. Citizen gives you his behavior, you give him predictable prosperous life.
Once you breach this contract, your system begins to leak. Do Chinese expect eternal economy growth now? Because when it stops, millions of people will seek to change their lives to make a living. That's what happened in NK where tight surveillance did not prevent hundreds of thoudsands from unregulated activites such as crossing the border, selling things on market and producing stuff outside of state factories.
If you actually take time to look at the chart, you will see that life expectancy plummeted between 1965 and 1985, losing full three years male life expectancy and gaining zero for women.
And it "peaked" under the rule of Gorbachev who scrapped that "new citizen" nonsense in favour of damage control, which did not help him in the long run anyway.
Let's face it: we are not going to avoid mass data collection and scoring in the west either. The technology is just too cheap to not get people tempted to do it.
The least bad defense probably is to subvert this into a kind of peer to peer panopticon as much as possible. Everyone sees and rates all kinds of aspects of everyone else explicitly and publicly.
This is simply product recommendation software for the government instead of a corporation like Amazon. Same software; recommends people instead of products!
I also see an isolationist aspect: A citizen who spends significant time abroad would likely have a lower score and more trouble staying a part of Chinese society.
Fun read that this article reminded me of:
Harmony – July 20, 2010
by Project Itoh (Author), Alexander O. Smith (Translator)
"In a world where human life is a precious global resource that must be protected at all costs, everything about a person -- choices, emotions, biochemistry, cell metabolism -- is monitored and assessed by computer systems, 24/7. A variety of complex feedback loops are in place to ensure optimum conservation of that resource, including everything from good old-fashioned peer pressure to mandatory inpatient psychiatric treatment." ( M. Garrison, Amazon Review)
I'm glad China does this so we can see real world examples of why we don't fuck with freedom. This will implode eventually just like our money driven political system bullshit in America.
It's funny that when very analogous things happen in America I am accosted by people defending the principle that the West is still a stalwart of 'freedom' because we can still choose and have the freedom to take actions that would hurt us (lower our scores).
If one were to apply the same sort of simplistic argument in the China case, they have as much freedom as anyone else has.
IMO we would also be fools if we don't think there is a scoring system to help sort the millions of Americans with profiles in the American intelligence apparatus.
China has an authoritarian government that produces pollution that threatens the entire world, uses the great firewall to attack tech companies in other countries, ignores human rights and free speech, and supports dictators in Russia and Africa. If China gets anymore powerful, the world is doomed. We need to curb commerce with China.
The US superpower status has been hollowing out and China has begun to be able to project power in very impressive ways. The US sees China as its major threat right now. What the US government would like to do is 'contain' China by keeping it a regional force - so that it can't complete as a global power.
In anticipation of future conflict there has already been a large amount of anti-China sentiment creeping in America - suddenly all of the news about China has a negative spin. If they land on the moon its portrayed as scary rather than impressive. If they build islands in the middle of the Ocean (legally) it's a 'great mound of sand' rather than an incredibly impressive engineering feat. China's selling of air defense systems that thwart the US and the collisions of and mutual reconnaissance of our naval vessels aren't covered much - basically few real facts but lots of spin.
The US doesn't know whether it will be able to beat back China without having to resort to violence. If you watch the presidential speeches between candidates and Washington thinktanks they all have a stance on how they will deal with 'the China problem' (China is ambitious and there ain't room enough for the both of us). Jeb Bush basically said military might - Clinton wants to follow in line with (her) TPP.
There will be more anti-China slant. The interests of China and the US are at odds and becoming ever more so.
This poster is either part of a spin machine or has fallen for the naive and simplistic narrative of good-versus-evil.
All in all though, by all accounts, China and the US are set to butt heads and already have been.
The China boogieman is already disappearing. They will have their hands full with domestic problems as their population demands a more Western lifestyle. As long as the current allies remain together The West is nigh untouchable, sorry.
It is interesting you think the China boogieman is disappearing. Luckily for us the relatively near future will inform us who is right so we don't need to hash out the principles.
It's also interesting to see that what I'm doing in the prior comment is laying out the case made by Washington and the defense contractors and of global strategy reports of allies - i.e. I'm merely mirroring official standings and policies in my comment. Washington is wrong often, let's see if they are wrong again.
Wow... how many more sick and oppressive policies does the Chinese government have to churn out (and so brazenly too) before the people of China say something? Where's the social unrest.. where's their sense of responsibility towards their future generations to nip a thing like this in the bud before it becomes the norm... what, nothing??
> the system is 'very ambitious in both depth and scope, including scrutinizing individual behavior and what books people read. It's Amazon's consumer tracking with an Orwellian political twist.'
What a coincidence. Recently I had to decide whether to buy books on politics for kindle. I didn't like the fact that it tracks everything I buy, what sentences I highlight, the notes I keep... I bet my libertarian books would make my score very low in future China.
> This score is not only determined by one's lending behavior, but also by hobbies and friends. If friends have a poor lending reputation, this reflects badly on the person, just as prolonged playing of video games. Buying diapers indicates responsibility and scores therefore well.
This detail was hidden in the article, yet it's one of the most important. It's not about external control, but also self-control. This is what a true Orwellian society promotes. The score acts as feedback to everything we do.
It's funny to imagine social hackers buying tons of diapers to get on top of the rankings.