I think societies with massive surveillance will stagnate until they collapse.
> "Do you see the cable system? The mausoleum has an information line, the only one in the village. Whoever lives there holds all links to the outside world."
> [...] "Stability," he said. "The Terrans wanted stability, that's why they set up the Interdict. They didn't want technology to break them into pieces, as it's done to us. They blamed technology for the disasters. The war plagues, the carbon dioxide that melted the ice caps... They can't forget their dead."
"Surely the whole world isn't like this," Vera said.
"It has to be. Anywhere there is variety there is
the risk of change. Change that can't be tolerated."
"But they have telephones. Aircraft."
"Enforcement technology," Lindsay said.
> But life moved in clades. Lindsay knew it as a fact. A successful species always burst into a joyous wave of daughter species, of hopeful monsters that rendered their ancestors obsolete. Denying change meant denying life.
The comment above though probably meant the true communism, i.e. society without money.
While it might not be something you can compare to communism, the Inca Civilization had a centrally planned economy with no form of money at all and was HUGELY successful [1]
Why would you think that? The term "communist experiment" implies that it's one being conducted right now. There are no states with even hints of plans for this "true communism" you speak of.
Human societies have evolved a very sophisticated mechanism for moving people up and down hierarchies using a distributed reputation tracking system. This system is interesting in that they’re trying to centralise the reputation tracking system and thereby control it.
To the extent that it replicates what people, on average, think about you I think it’ll work. But planned economies loose to unplanned ones because distributed decision making outperforms centralised decision making. Eventually this system will be misused, make bad decisions, or get ridiculously complex. Then people will loose faith in it. When that happens there’s very little China’s government can actually do to control 1.4 billion people. (That’s not to say that there their remaining options aren’t very worrying though, e.g. tanks)