Who needs democracy when you have data?
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
There won't be a war, by the way. I honestly think we're past the point as a species where superpowers duke it out in such a literal fashion. It's just bad for business. (Military might today is usually directed from superpowers to third-world countries, but that's a topic for another day).
China's influence and dominance will happen through the private sector, ironically. They have their own versions of Google and Facebook: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. These are the tech giants through which the Chinese government gets most of its data on citizens. They are even more ubiquitous than ours - people do everything from getting loans to scheduling medical appointments through them - and they've begun trying to break into the western markets. Tencent in particular has been investing billions in everything from Blizzard to Tesla. At the same time, Google, Facebook, and Apple are also trying to break into the Chinese market. Those companies have already compromised their values for the sake of that opportunity by blocking VPN apps on app stores, censoring content, etc. For now those policy adjustments only apply in China itself, but once it becomes an established (and massive) market - they have four times the population of the U.S. - do you really think the companies would stand up against pressure from the Chinese government to apply those policies elsewhere?
Between the spread of the companies it effectively owns, and the deals being made with the rest of the world's most powerful tech companies, China will soon wield more influence than the U.S. I don't think it'll be long before surveillance-states are the norm.
It's bad for business until it's not. Isolationist economic policies will over time make war more likely.
> Between the spread of the companies it effectively owns, and the deals being made with the rest of the world's most powerful tech companies, China will soon wield more influence than the U.S. I don't think it'll be long before surveillance-states are the norm.
I'm not sure about China wielding more influence than the U.S. That sort of thing is really hard to predict accurately, especially from the perspective of someone who isn't a world leader privy to all available information.
I do agree that surveillance states will be the norm, though, at least everywhere that doesn't currently have a democracy functioning well enough to prevent it.
I think at the end of the day it just comes down to the numbers. With four times the population, they have four times the market of consumers and four times the workforce to create value. The U.S. is still in the lead for now, somehow, but China has recently taken up a very potent type of hybrid economic development, where free-market startup-culture is encouraged, but guided and pruned by the government.
I don't necessarily disagree with it either, though. I think the situation is far more complex to boil down to just that.
It is possible that they are actually so large that it will start working against them. Like an animal so large that it can't eat enough food to stay alive.
I am certainly looking forward to seeing what happens, though. It's a very interesting time to be alive and I hope that China does keep growing enough to provide all of it's citizens with a quality life. They've made great strides in the past half century, in spite of their current government's many flaws.
I would agree if it weren't for the ideology that would come with it. My dream scenario is that their government's corruption will increase until it collapses like the Soviet Union, leaving behind a society that's actually much better equipped than the soviets to hit the ground running in a liberal democracy (given the country's partial embrace of capitalism), and then they'll grow enough to provide all their citizens with a quality life. But that series of events seems unlikely.
I don't think the USA gets enough credit for inventing this hybrid economic development system. Good examples include:
* Military computing -> Intel, IBM, etc. -> Moore's law
* DARPA cash -> early networking/PC projects at universities -> hacker/hobbyist culture -> Microsoft and Apple
* Gov't really emphasized "finding information" in CS the 1990's -> NSF grants at Stanford -> Google.
* The Human Genome Project -> Illumina, Solexa, etc. -> Moore's law-shaped cost curve for sequencing
And less R&D heavy examples like the national railways and the interstate highway system.
This pattern continues today. Self-driving cars started as several decades of NSF-funded research projects that turned into a DARPA-funded competition a decade-ish ago that turned into an industry-funded goal rush today.
What's ironic is that the very thing that will bring about surveillance states in the western world is democracy. Of course it will be framed as anti-terrorism measures. But surveillance is suveillance.
Although I agree with you, it's worth noting that this sentiment is not a new one. There were plenty of people who believed that WWI marked the end of war, at least in Europe.
Even after WWII, Pax Americana (in Western Europe) was not an inevitability. Today's relative stability in that part of the world was the result of enormous investments in intentional policy. As well as a fair bit of luck.
> Military might today is usually directed from superpowers to third-world countries, but that's a topic for another day
This sentence is a bit of a tautology [1]. But in any case, it's worth remembering that those incursions always find their way back home. Consider the most recent wars. The European migrant crisis has its roots in the most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Furthermore, the USA will eventually feel the economic impact of those two wars. The fact that [2] could happen while the USA ran up enormous deficits (completely unrelated to that growth) is deeply worrying; what will happen in even a slightly less dynamic domestic economy?
> China's influence and dominance will happen through the private sector, ironically.
This view of the world also has a time-honored tradition. Thomas Jefferson was an early proponent of the view that national power flows from economic might rather than hard power. It's worth noting that the policies he actually implemented while in office diverged substantially from his ideological beliefs.
I agree with you about what the future of conflict between the US and China will most likely look like. I think most people do. The question is how you hedge that bet: is the alternative military&economic peace (because military conflict is unimaginable)? Or, is the alternative military conflict on top of the existing economic conflict?
I think the latter is more likely.
--
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World
[2] http://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/virtually-768...
However, I have some friends who work in the government, and conversations with them have given me a small source of hope: the government may feel like it mostly consists of the clowns we see in the news every day, but the reality is that it's made up of a massive collection of American citizens, many of whom are extremely competent at their jobs and whose priorities are simply to keep things working well for everyone. They do incredibly thorough planning for contingencies that allow us to do things like weather natural disasters (that's the department one of my friends works in), etc. So much complexity and knowhow and effort goes into simply keeping this whole thing moving at all, and part of me hopes that there are people somewhere in there who are are thinking through all this stuff, who know what they're doing, and who have a plan.
I tried to find the quote and couldn't, but IIRC this exact argument was used for why WW1 never could have happened (prior to WW1).
At the very least, with how much money America dumps into its military, I think dominating our economy is simply a path of less resistance than trying to dominate our military.
Many of the most egregious human rights violations weren't understood until after the war, and reached their worst practices under wartime pressures.
And against this, you're hoping for "action like they did in WW2, which could honestly be one of the better outcomes of all this"?!?
No, WW3 would be bad.
I have no high hopes that good comes of what China does there.
Even when physical violence never occurs, it still fits into the geopolitical equation. So long as Taiwan continues to exist in a state of defacto independence, the US can act as a distant, only somewhat interested hegemon in opposition to local Chinese hegemony. Geography still dictates military strategy and power. So long as Taiwan remains a place to potentially base aircraft and ships, China can't credibly threaten and control the South China Sea. Taiwan itself is situated in relatively rough seas and has a rugged coastline which drastically restricts opportunities for a seaborne invasion. Invading Taiwan will take a supreme effort, smaller but in the same order of magnitude of the effort required to mount the D-Day invasion.
China's influence and dominance will happen through the private sector, ironically.
Thankfully.
They have their own versions of Google and Facebook: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent.
I hope that the Great Firewall will be like the South China Sea. China may be influential, but the wells of culture run deep. Therefore the impetus for Japan and Korea to remain independent also runs deep and will remain strong.
Stratfor's "China's Geographic Challenge" --
What if climate change cause a massive movement of people? Can this scenario bring old school war for resources?
Appalling as this is, I'm surprised the government needs to do this at all, given the assumption that WeChat or Tencent would already have all this information and be required to make it readily available. Then again, maybe the visible intrusiveness is the point: Han get spied on invisibly through social media and mobile carriers; Uighurs have mandatory app installs to constantly remind them who's in charge.
The app may be a pragmatic way to facilitate that interaction without need for central monitoring (which is probably also used).
Etc, etc. I don't know what the right answer is anymore.
Compared to what? America of the 1900's? The 1950's? India, at any point in time?
China has had average 10% growth rates for 3 decades, it's economy has grown by a factor of 40 since 1988. It's hard to explain just how powerful this positive economic shock has been. The Chinese people have seen, during their recent lifetimes, the country transitioning from abject poverty into a world superpower in the medium income range. Their quality of life and paychecks have grown every year and the political leadership is addicted to this growth, it's how they stay in power and easily quench all discontent.
As soon as this incredible growth cycle is exhausted we will start to see the first chinks in the armor of the Party State, we will see the public demand democracy and official accountability. Look for example to Hong Kong, where the growth has been much slower (they already had a high level of development) and the dissenting voices are multiplying. And that's exactly what will happen in the rest of China in the next 10-20 years; growth becomes much harder once you have picked the low hanging fruits and you get closer to the advanced countries.
https://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/LieStat/
The numbers can be completely accurate, but the interpretation will always be biased. Also - "USA Temperature: can I sucker you":
So what's the use of all this fancy data if they can't have accurate statistics? That should have been the basis of scientific management?
The Chinese government has the accurate version of all data, what is published to the world is false and has different purposes
A non-democratic society is probably better equipped to move forward amidst all the chaos (and in preventing chaos in the first place), whereas a democratic one may be much more likely to tear itself apart from inside out.
I wonder what the comparable system in China was? Does anyone have some in depth knowledge here? (happy to rtfm if one is available)
In China, on the other hand, there is no major oratory tradition. The way Chinese government contacted the people was by being everywhere and nowhere - omnipresent, through the imperial civil service, and yet unseen. If you wanted to gain influence in the government, you took the imperial examination, became a bureaucrat, rose through the Nine Ranks, and hopefully, by the time you reached the top, you had enough governing experience to see merit in the old way of doing things.
Yes but this was a huge source of instability for the Qing regime. Arguably, the Qing's failure to adapt to the modern world came in part from a cabal of bureaucrats that opposed reforms.
What does everywhere and nowhere, mean, specifically, in the context of a society without telephony and electronic surveillance? What were the means for a local official to adapt policy in the face of pressures and demands from his local stakeholders? How were these pressures transmitted?
Again, happy to read scholarly works well versed in the way of Chinese governing here, this is probably "Basic Chinese government history 101" stuff. :)
"Western countries have problems too, and did you see America, this is what democracy leads to."
You can see that on HN, too.
When you compare the "democratic" two-party American answer to terrorism and the "autocratic" one-party Chinese answer, it's hard to see democracy as the superior choice. Spying on millions of people is terrible, as are the re-education camps, but the "War on Terror" is responsible for millions of deaths while spying on millions of people. Years of soft propaganda make people praise American behavior, and democracy provides no option to end it.
If you take this question as me saying we shouldn't have democracy, maybe it's reflex.
It's an interesting question. Democracy isn't an end in itself, but rather a means to an end. What is that end (or those ends)? How else can those ends be achieved?
A rational need for democracy for me would be that you don't govern me according to your wishes.
A rational need for democracy for the uyghurs would be that Xi Jumping doesn't govern them according to his wishes.
I've always understood this to be what is meant by democracy is the worst form of governance, apart from all the others.
Any time you vote on the losing side of an election (whether it's for who to elect, or approve a tax, or legalize (or ban) certain acts, you end up being governed by _every one else's_ wishes. On the bright side, at least in a democracy I mostly have the trust that such changes CAN happen, over time, if enough people come to believe similarly as I do about things.
It's what distinguishes it from populism, which is also a rule of the majority, but is a tyranny in that it scapegoats the losing side rather than tries to establish a peaceful way of life for everyone.
We can have a law against murder but that's not enough: there will still be murder. It takes a whole society working with the shared value that murder is wrong in order to uphold the institution of the law.
Treating it like an on-off switch, my way or the highway on everything, led to much of the weirdness of the 2016 elections in the US.
The fact that Government is being governed according to some of your wishes is coincidental. It's only in a democracy (or an autocracy where you are the ruling party) where the fact that some of your wishes are the laws is built in to the fabric of the system.
The word compromise is an interesting choice - a comprimise is an agreement between several parties in which all sides agree on a less then optimal solution for themselves in favour of a resolution the group can agree to. It's essentially a democracy - it's certainly the basis for participatory democracy.
I'm not sure where the on-off switch analogy is coming from - it's definitely not my opinion - hence the Churchhill comparison. Also, on-off seems very binary.
On a similar note, I would say that the comparison to the 2016 US Elections feels a little simplified - being given a choice of two parites doesn't mean you are being given a choice representing your wishes. At best, it can mean you are being given two options from a range on a spectrum, but even then the spectrum and gap between political parties is normally more then a single issue.
The American Left, for instance, would in Europe be on a fairly right wing part of the spectrum.
But I was talking about compromise. And an unwillingness to tolerate compromise in our leaders was characteristic of the 2016 election - that's how Trump won the GOP nomination, and how Bernie put up a hard fight against Hillary Clinton. Bernie doesn't compromise on anything (he's not even a Democrat!), and most of his supporters find that admirable. Hillary compromises on everything, and those same supporters find it shameful, even though she's the one with an actual record of getting actual things done.
As a Democrat, I liked both the Democratic candidates (for different reasons), but can imagine a candidate I would have liked much better - one closer to my personal values. By voting for one, I compromised. I find Trump to be a disturbing human being who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near actual power. Nonetheless, his presidency is not the end of my world, and I sometimes even admire him (the same way I'd admire a child who killed their parents and then begged for mercy as an orphan, but admiration nonetheless).
"Democracy generally means I am being governed according to some, but not all of my wishes."
The fact that you are/are not being governed according to some of your wishes in a non-democratic society is coincidental. Why it may or may not be true for any given government, it is not inherent to the structure of any non-democratic government.
For all of the subsequent points in this comment about compromise, that's desirability in a democratic (small d) candidate - that doesn't have anything to do with the system itself.
But yes, I appreciate all the points you are making about the candidates - I would say Bernie does compromise, but his stubbornness is part of his desirability, certainly.
Hilarys ability to compromise becomes extremely clear when you look at what she stood for in the 70s/80s and the policies she pushed while running for presidency.
Thanks for clarifying, that was interesting.
As an aside on the Hillary thing... something that frustrates me as a Democrat is that we're supposed to be the party of learning and evolving, but then we punish people for opinions held and mistakes made decades ago. I want our candidates to evolve. I've certainly evolved.
The problem is that a lack of checks and balances means a single bad egg is all it takes. It doesn't just take some people being good people - or even most - it takes everyone being a good person to make that work. Humans as a species just aren't like that.
Barring the birth of some Platonic philosopher king, authoritarian societies will never achieve this. The authoritarian power will inevitably come to represent some particular interest to the exclusion of all others.
In other words, that a democracy might actually function as one -- oh, the horror -- reflecting what people want, instead of what the elites and the well off 10% wants them to want, or present as TINA.
Only if we take the preferences of the 10% of well cushioned (who see themselves as Elois and the masses as Morlocks) as some universal law, or _the good_ itself, as opposed to what they are: preferences based on their private interests.
This is the very definition of "tyranny of the majority", and is also self-defeating in terms of democracy: marginalized groups are no longer fully represented in democracies once they have been marginalized.
That's part of democracy. Whether they should be marginalized or not is up to the culture, not to the political system.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17436985
[2] https://theconversation.com/what-exactly-is-neoliberalism-84...
To what, though? What's the choice here? Give a few people even more power without having to be voted in? Who decides which people get all the power? What if they're worse? How do we get rid of them? Is a bloody revolution or decades of dictatorship really the same as having elections where the votes don't always make the best choices?
Think of the many contemporary political issues on which the elites refuse to provide such a choice and insist on governing as they please.
This is the same as when the media (the voice of the same elites) blame lack of political progress (on for example climate change) on certain demographics of poor people. As if the elites care about what these poor people think. Since when did the elites lend an ear to these people to consult on policy?
They blame it on democracy when it is anything but.
Brexit was a false choice foisted upon the people by wealthy special interest groups that used falsehoods[0][1] and illegal tactics[2] to mislead the people [3][4] into voting for something they didn't fully understand [5]
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/infact/brexit-second-referendu...
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/final-say-bre...
[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/vote-leave-ca...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2018/05/30/615388562/fishermen-say-they-...
[4] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-voter...
[5] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/06/24/48...
So if anything, Trump's election is a point in favor of more democracy, not less.
To the extent that the elites made President Trump's run possible, I believe it was because they believed him to be the most defeatable Republican competition for Mrs. Clinton. The media loved reporting on him, because it was fun. Meanwhile, the Republican Party relied too much on primaries and not enough on caucuses, and awarded delegates based on plurality rather than having runoffs. As it turned out, while he was the most-defeatable opposition for Mrs. Clinton she wasn't able to actually defeat him.
As for Brexit, the whole reason it was on the ballot was that Mr. Cameron believed that he could get a clear vote of confidence on the U.K.'s E.U. membership. This is a pretty historic instance of hubris: had he simply asked for a two-thirds vote, he'd have won. But he went with a simple majority, and that defeated him.
If they gave the people what they wanted then everybody (and nobody?) would be elites, right? Or maybe the majority of people just want those 10% to be rich. And since Brexit was brought up, can you think of any huge promise that was made in order to get the vote but won't be kept? Must be that what people really want is to be lied to. [1]
Today's democracy functions as a 2 step process: the campaign where people hear what they want to hear (and usually they're even told what they want) and the term where they're getting something else. Or getting what they want to a degree. You vote promises, not results.
Democracy may be the best system we have but it's far from good because while the theory is stellar, the practical application is less so.
I think the majority of people are actually comfortable with the existence of even extreme (billionaire-scale) inequality. Although people want to feel that the inequality is just -- based on wealth-creation, rather than rent-seeking.
50% of Americans earn ~$37000. The poorest 35% had a decrease from 2016 to 2017. Do you feel they are particularly favored in the grand scheme of things? Because they certainly have the power to change this by sheer voting power.
As I said before, democracy is the business of selling promises once every 4 years. Unless you have the power to get what you actually want you are not leading anything and you have no real power. It's like the power to choose your poison is not an actual power if you didn't want to die in the first place.
You can have an elite (in wealth/earnings) and still have a voting system that reflects the majority's wishes.
In fact, unless you can balance those two you don't have a democracy -- at best you have a bastard system where elites buy influence (and not outright, that would still be up to the people "selling" their vote: they buy it though political favors, gerrymandering, mass media influence, etc).
>And since Brexit was brought up, can you think of any huge promise that was made in order to get the vote but won't be kept?
Many. EU's history is full of people voting against EU policies, even directly and overwhelmingly in referendums, (France, Ireland, Italy, etc) and then getting ignored by their representatives.
Even with Brexit the whole concern from day one after the shock that despite the whole "you're ignorant/you're doomed/this is the end/the sky will fall/TINA to the EU" campaign people still voted for it, the first concern openly expressed was how to annul it or make it so that it's followed in letter but in practice everything remains the same.
Not only are most people easily manipulated into believing they want something when they actually need something else or their votes are simply bought with "trinkets", sometimes they are also not even being offered those trinkets in the end. Their vote is worth nothing the second they cast it.
You're focusing too much on Brexit, it was just an example. Politicians fooled people into thinking they vote for (among others) more money to the NHS only to turn around right after the vote and say "that's not happening". The vote was heavily based on misdirection and manipulation. All perfectly democratic but without actually giving any power to the people. What happens after a promise is broken? Nothing.
Somewhere else in the world people might be told that "I'm sure education is important but the war against terror...". So they vote for the war without even realizing that they're losing twice: they have to fight a war and miss out on education. Again, perfectly democratic.
Democracy as it stands now is actually the business of selling promises. If you vote for a promise that's never fulfilled what exactly is your power other than to try again?
Sorry, but I consider accusations of whataboutism an easy cop-out from the duty to put things in perspective. It's predominantly one-sided too, those accusing people of bringing up Y in a critique of X seldom or never critique Y. But even if they did, both critiques would be bogus without whataboutism anyway. Things can only make sense and can be understood in comparison, not in some abstract pure critique that ignores what happens in parallel and what the alternatives were.
But I digress. Let's get back to the comment.
>You're focusing too much on Brexit, it was just an example. Politicians fooled people into thinking they vote for (among others) more money to the NHS only to turn around right after the vote and say "that's not happening". The vote was heavily based on misdirection and manipulation. All perfectly democratic but without actually giving any power to the people. What happens after a promise is broken? Nothing.
Sure. But that's neither here not there -- that's a common with politics.
I'm focusing on Brexit because it's the perfect example of this contempt for democracy (and the "unwashed masses") when it involves a choice the 10% doesn't like.
As if one choice or the other was objectively good and the other objectively bad -- which misunderstands and diminishes the role of democracy to always choosing the objectively good. Instead, democracy is about balancing opposing interests, as individuals see them.
Saying that those that voted opposite to what one would want are "voting against their interests" etc, is putting one's position above politics, and into the realm of inherently good. That's not democracy, that's TINA.
>Democracy as it stands now is actually the business of selling promises. If you vote for a promise that's never fulfilled what exactly is your power other than to try again?
Mass protests? Mass participation to party meetings and conferences? Grassroots emergence of new candidates? All of those have been tried with various degrees of success (including toppling governments). Not all of them are guaranteed to work all the time of course, but that's life. It's all up to the vigilance of the citizenry (or lack thereof).
Well, that may be your duty, to be "the defender" regardless of the topic. But from my perspective not only is it one of the most useless techniques if you want to contradict someone, it's also irrelevant to the discussion. Which was about democracy in general, with a particular example of Brexit. Telling me others (FR, IT, DE) do the same presumably to make the UK (or the people) look... less bad is a pathetic way to provide an excuse for Brexit. An excuse that nobody asked for. I don't care whether it'll turn out well as long as I could prove "democracy" meant people getting tricked with false promises. A point you don't really want to address I see.
You also just manage to strengthen my point with it: democracy may be the best thing we have but it's still so fragile and screaming to be manipulated that in real life most implementations only give the impression that you as "the people" have any power.
Some parts of this seem analogous to USA's Credit Score system. A total surveillance state isn't a great idea but this small part of it seems reasonable, no?
The problem with this is that once you get beneath a certain threshold, you find yourself on a self-reinforcing spiral which it's hard to get yourself out of; a spiral not unlike that of homelessness.
Watch Black Mirror's S03E01 for a glimpse of where this can take us.
The system would decide what would be the best position for somebody in the government if they desired to go there. It'd also monitor people and evaluate in real time their psyche. People who were predisposed to psychopathic and/or sociopathic behaviour were flagged and monitored. The police would use guns that tranquilized flagged people and disintegrated people deemed public danger.
This article painted China as a predecessor of the country presented in the anime.
As for the ranking / credit system. I don't believe that such an idea is feasible, as it resembles elo. We know from online games such as League of Legends that elo is not an appropriate metric as it's often governed by multiple variables out of the individual player's control. While in the 'long run' it evens out, it often creates the illusion that a player stuck because of their environment and not themselves, which while may be true in a few cases, in most cases is false.