China’s new ‘social credit system’ | Hacker News Reader

China’s new ‘social credit system’

nypost.com

102 pointsdoener102 comments

The implementation is somewhat disconcerting, but I’m not sure the underlying policy isn’t a good idea. Culture matters. When I go to Tokyo and see people walking a couple of blocks to cross the street (there isn’t necessarily a cross walk on every block), or carrying their litter with them, versus what I see in say New York, I’m astounded. Similarly for the fact that nobody has ever asked me for a bribe in the US, versus what you might see in Bangladesh. These virtuous behaviors are a better way to live and make life better for everyone. China seems to realize that and be trying to change culture in a systematic way. It should probably be done more by carrot than stick, but there is a a kernel of a good idea in there.

(I should note that Western countries had their own large-scale nearly universal social indoctrination and social credit systems—organized religion. Indoctrinating virtuous behaviors is a social function that needs to happen, the question is how do you do it. Note also that Chinese cities exist at a scale where the informal mechanisms for social credit break down. If you litter on my street, people will see you and they will notice. We regularly talk about neighbors who display antisocial behaviors. In New York? Outside maybe your condo board there are no such mechanisms.)

The Chinese credit system is a relationship of those in power controlling those without power. The relationship has no checks and balances, and therefore will only become more controlling over time. This is just day 1, what do you think day 10,000 will look like? You are confusing that with relationships among peers, this is not the same at all.

I live in a very clean city and we don't need social credit systems to handle litter.

The jump so many people take to encourage strong enforcement for bagatelles is astonishing.

Greece also has a lot of bribes but if you would know anything about the culture, you probably wouldn't conclude that you have to liberate the country. Well, I at least hope so...

You can use the stick of course, but loosing that, all benefits it brought you would be lost too. And you would have stripped any opportunities to develop any understanding.

The Greeks are a fascinating case of the utter break down of social trust. Greeks no longer trust each other, and the level of corruption and tax evasion is mind boggling.

I think it’s a false equivalence to compare the belief that a country needs something fixed and saying that it needs to be “liberated” with the force of arms.

> Greeks no longer trust each other

Citation super needed here. Nobody trusts the state because it's corrupt, but that hasn't changed in centuries. The main problem Greece has is that everyone puts their own interests above the common good, from littering and double-parking to appropriating state funds.

http://www.ekathimerini.com/232870/article/ekathimerini/news...

The highlight is that more than 9/10 Greeks disagreed with the statement that people could be trusted.

I can't find any numbers on this, or the article source, but I'd be surprised if this were new. Cyprus went from 13% trust to 10% trust since 1994 and I bet Greece is along those lines. It's just how Greeks are, so the "no longer" part isn't accurate.

>Greeks no longer trust each other, and the level of corruption and tax evasion is mind boggling.

So? They have their culture and it works well enough for them. They might not be the richest country in Europe and they're still digging themselves out of an economic hole but there's not much else about them that's worth complaining about. It sure beats living your life under the thumb of the government.

I don’t know if I’d call the Greek system working.

And living a life distrusting everyone (9/10 Greeks think people can’t be trusted) seems exhausting and bad for your mental health. Is it better than tyranny? Sure. But that’s a false choice, tyranny or corruption.

That probably has other reasons beyond their culture and probably more to do with what was imposed on them. The bribing I was talking about is a phenomenon like giving tips. But that isn't the topic and not the core of the statement.

Increasing social trust through surveillance is like traversing space on a bicycle. Not even that because surveillance probably has a direct massive negative effect on social trust.

What was imposed on them and when?

> These virtuous behaviors are a better way to live and make life better for everyone

This sidesteps that under the umbrella of “virtuous behaviours” are those that support the ruling party. Under the umbrella of undesirable behaviours is dissent of any stripe. That’s what makes this dystopian in a way e.g. London’s CCTV system is not.

Unless you really upset the ruling elite, like Julian Assange, in which case the west will make your life a living hell.

Assange published, with zero redaction, military assets. The journalists who wrote about it and activists who protested surrounding it were not jailed. They didn’t have their credit scores dinged. They were allowed to go about their peaceful dissent.

Cleaner example would have been Snowden, who peacefully dissented and responsibly disclosed his leaks. But even then, the comparison would be wrong. Snowden is a single case, and one which one can freely argue shines poorly on American values. The social credit experiments point to Beijing’s ambitions to scale the threat Snowden saw realised against him nationally and explicitly.

> Assange published, with zero redaction, military assets

And he published information about war crimes. Sorry to mention it, but I prefer to stay on topic. That is on the military and I don't see why it should get any form of protection here.

edit: To clarify: The military has been traitorous to their own people, therefore to itself and is fully responsible for anything that happened.

> Assange published, with zero redaction, military assets.

Which is illegal how exactly?

> The journalists who wrote about it and activists who protested surrounding it were not jailed.

So, the journalist Julian Assange was not jailed then?

> These virtuous behaviors are a better way to live and make life better for everyone.

Sure, until something abuses the power to control those behaviors.

> I should note that Western countries had their own large-scale nearly universal social indoctrination and social credit systems—organized religion.

And religion in the West is slowly dying by the right and will of the people. What happens when people want their social credit system to die? They won't have a choice in that matter.

This debate reeks similarly to the one about the use of electronic ballot systems, which are not better than paper ballots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI

The greatest lie were being told is that technology is democratizing our lives. It does until it reaches network effects, which it then hits an inflection point and gives power to very few.

Why on earth would you walk a couple of blocks to cross the street?

Why on earth would you commend this behaviour?

I appreciate that my judgement of this behaviour depends on the street, but from my experience of Tokyo, the streets are not particularly wide, or busy.

Because that is where the crosswalk is.

That's no different than saying "because the law is the law".

If it is possible to cross sufficiently safely without walking to the cross walk why walk to the cross walk?

The traffic planners put the crosswalks where they are in order to balance convenience for pedestrians with smooth flow of traffic. Jaywalking subverts the deliberate design and overall efficiency b

Normalization of Deviation.

Eventually, everyone would be looking for a chance to cross the road without using a crosswalk = jaywalking, which is exactly what has become the norm in some countries.

And that is not a problem in most countries. Jaywalking as a 'crime' was invented by the car lobby. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797

In some countries there are no crosswalks at all because everybody jaywalks.

In some cities, you put your life on the line every time you cross the road.

I am not exaggerating.

Do you really want that to become the norm?

Obviously not. But you are presenting a polarized pair of scenarios which I don't agree are the only possible outcomes. I think we can strive for something in the middle, between chaos and robotic like use of crosswalks.

>The implementation is somewhat disconcerting, but I’m not sure the underlying policy isn’t a good idea

Any systemic attempt to direct the development of culture by the government is a terrible idea. The government should reflect the people. The people should not be nudge, cajoled or forced into accepting the culture the government wants them to have.

The line blurs when you actually have a democratically elected government (is the will of the government the will of the people) but I think it suffices to say that china's social credit system would cross it.

>nearly universal social indoctrination and social credit systems—organized religion.

The church doesn't record your every misdeed and every major religion includes some strong message of forgiveness for misdeeds. It's not the middle ages anymore so the church can't bar you from doing things under threat of violence like the government can. This comparison is crazy on so many levels.

>We regularly talk about neighbors who display antisocial behaviors

Any neighborhood that includes people who say things like this in a context other than to parodying the hyper-conformity you find in some of the better off parts of the US and Europe (think stuffy HOAs and local councils) is a massive red flag that your neighborhood is somewhere no freedom loving person would ever want to live.

> The line blurs when you actually have a democratically elected government

evidently it is blurred to some but I would suggest that your original assertion stands. They should try to keep their nudging subtle or people will nudge back at some point. It does not matter how good the intent was meant. I think we currently see a lot of this in western democracies.

> Culture matters. When I go to Tokyo and see people walking a couple of blocks to cross the street (there isn’t necessarily a cross walk on every block), or carrying their litter with them

Which they do without the threat of a “social credit system.”

There is no good idea inside constant surveillance.

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

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

> When you do something in public in small town USA

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

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

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

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

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

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

> where other people were able to observe them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Culture matters.

So what you're saying is that humans have no rights. If humans have rights, then there is a point where culture doesn't matter.

What is a human right, outside of culture? Unless you're religious, what could it possibly be?

There are rights we consider so important that they all but transcend culture, but that "all but" is critical. It's only a matter of consensus, not celestial fiat.

Pretty much every culture has some notion of a right to due process, personal freedom and personal property. The people of rural Afghanistan may draw the lines in different places than we do but these rights in some capacity are fundamental to all human civilizations.

Personal freedom and especially personal property are only shared cross-culturally, if at all, in the barest of forms. Many African cultures look very negatively on the idea that ones possessions can rightfully be denied to those in need of them unless it will cause you yourself substantial harm. To a lesser degree, many cultures place social cohesion above individual liberty in terms of importance. This actually seems one of the rarer rights historically and globally.

I don't see how due process could be universal - it can scarcely even exist outside of bureaucracy. In any simpler system of government the process is "the most powerful person decides". Heck, rule of law only came into being what, 4000 years ago?

I think they're odd choices though, because there are much stronger cases for things like right to life. But I still don't see how they can be anything but cultural. Where would they come from? What is the font of rights?

It's a sickening idea, moreover, I think you're gravely mistaken if you think this is more about 'keeping litter off the streets behaviour', than total, arbitrary control of the citizenry, mostly for political purposes.

This is the authoritarians dream: 360, total control of people's lives, right out of a dystopian novel.

Second 'organized religion' is a world wide phenom, and is only one of many means by which people are socialized.

> Second 'organized religion' is a world wide phenom

There are exceptions, including some East Asian countries, I think.

>When I go to Tokyo and see people walking a couple of blocks to cross the street (there isn’t necessarily a cross walk on every block)

I think that jaywalking laws are nuts, but then again I am from the UK where we get indoctrinated with a thing called 'the green cross code' in primary school, that tells us how to cross a road safely.

China currently doesn't have a "credit score" like most of the rest of the world. They also don't have a national police database so this is their attempt to do both at once. If you look at the information these two things seem to make roughly 90% off your score.

Everything else is basically an experiment. Each district is doing it differently to find out what works the best and that will then be merged into what the country does. (The scientific process ... using data to inform policy)

I visited Guangzhou in 2018 and was expecting it to be crazy since it has "the worst levels of noise pollution in the world" https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/08/where-world-n... but it was almost crazy how quiet the city was. After the report come out they went around the whole city putting in traffic lights and fixing up all the intersections. There is still traffic but it is now more organised than any Chinese city I have been to. I ask the locals about it and they love the cameras, the order and the reduction in noise pollution. They freely admit that without the cameras most of the other Chinese people would just not obey the road rules so they are glad that the cameras are there.

I image "social credit" will be similar. Lots of people here just don't pay bills because there is no credit history and there are no debt collectors (well not like in the west anyway). If you owe money to the wrong people then it is better to just disappear but for most companies, they have no power and they cannot do anything.

> They also don't have a national police database so this is their attempt to do both at once

China needs a national credit score. And China needs a national police database. What it doesn’t need is both tied together with a political component layered on top.

(I think there is a good chance these experiments will backfire. We tried isolating felons amongst themselves in the United States. It just led to better-networked criminals who had no choice but to return to crime.)

I'm still on the fence. A lot of the time when you run a credit score you also run a police check. Not always but often enough. I expect most of the other stuff will be too much effort to be kept in the score at a national level unless it is a token amount.

China doesn't have the same incarceration rate that the US has (I don't think anyone does). I also don't know how long the score will be impacted by a criminal history.

I'm not saying it will work. I'm just saying that because other countries have done it one way does not mean that every other way of doing it is automatically wrong.

As an expat here my current score is "B" but I'll move up to an "A" next year. I don't know if that score means anything...

Much, if not most, of the rest of the world doesn't have a credit score either.

You mean the US-style credit score, right? Because I can't imagine a country that has banks giving out loans without at least credit worthiness analyses that are essentially credit scores, but lazily computed. And lazily-computed credit score is still credit score. E.g. in Poland, we don't have "credit score", except that the bank will happily calculate it for itself whenever you ask for a loan, which means we have to keep our interactions with credits and debts in mind, the same way Americans do.

The historical norm for credit has always been offering up possessions as collateral. You don’t need a complicated credit scoring system, or reliable enforcement mechanisms for debt & fraud, you just sell off the collateral if the customer doesn’t pay the loan.

This is exactly the function that pawn shops provide in the West, although their usage has dropped significantly since the introduction of consumer credit.

What is happening in China is that most things are pre-paid or have very low hard credit limits.

You often have to pay six months of rent in advance to rent. I know lots of people that have been cut off electricity or phone service but you can get it reconnected in hours or less if you pay the bill.

The one nice thing is that there are NO late fees, reconnection fees, overage fees, etc. You just don't get service.

Ouch. I couldn’t summon 6 months of rent, and I’m pretty comfortable economically.

That may be, but the most popular credit these days is probably mortgage loan, and I haven't heard of those being given on a collateral, at least not to regular people buying their first home. Same with consumer credit, so at this point I'm not convinced that most of the world really doesn't have (possibly lazy) credit scoring.

> the most popular credit these days is probably mortgage loan, and I haven't heard of those being given on a collateral, at least not to regular people buying their first home.

In my corner of the EU, banks require a guarantor (or even two!), plus a copy of your salary slips. And plenty of people are simply not approved.

Also, mortgages are implicitly backed by the home itself. In the worst case scenario the bank can claim the property back and sell it to recoup their losses.

How can they not see treating people this way will push them lower and lower?

Believe it or not, majority of the people actually like the CCP and the system, they just hate corrupt officials.

That's the goal.

We've seen with Leica that China is willing to punish outside companies, they are willing to reach outside China and threaten Uighurs in Australia.

I wonder if we see the social credit system exported / applied to those outside China under the guise of security or good behavior as a sort of pay to play deal.

Does anyone have visit China and presence the social system in first person?

I've heard that some people like it (Chinese co-workers), as they feel everyone acting better, but they don't live in China at the moment.

I've been living in Beijing for over ten years. So far I haven't heard anyone complain about it.

I know it's hard for Westerners to understand but most middle class Chinese are likely to see it as a good thing. The whole time I've been here I've read a constant stream of stories about fake food, fake medicine, fake milk-powder (which killed many babies), fake products, all types of fraud, etc. Add that to the general anti-social behaviors (such as spitting in the street) and you can see why many people recognize the need to "improve peoples' behavior" as Orwellian as that might sound to Western ears.

Middle-class urban Chinese also distinguish themselves from rural Chinese which they see as kind-of backwards. That's why there's little appetite for democracy ... nobody thinks those people should be voting.

Which specific system were your coworkers talking about? One of those run by private financial companies like Alipay or WeChat pay? One of the small-scale experiments run by various municipalities? The country-wide blacklist of people who did not comply with a court order to pay their debts? Something else?

"The" social credit system looks very different from the monolithic apparatus of totalitarian control that people imagine it to be, so many different views can be simultaneously true.

I guess they do not realise what is coming?

> '...one of the ways that people can improve their own social credit score is to report on the supposed misdeeds of others.'

Now, that's Orwellian. As described in the book.

It's not the cameras, the government agents in the shadows or the spying technology... It's the end result of everyone spying on each other that made the world of 1984 so inescapable to Winston.

You don't have to go to a book of fiction to get an example.

Some Chinese are still old enough to remember the Cultural revolution.

During this time people were interrogated for days by their peers in so called 'struggle meetings' in an attempt to change their supposed incorrect behaviour.

Reporting someone as a bourgeois person could cause them to disappear.

The soviet satellite republics strike me as another real world 1984 dystopia. You can watch whole movies about the terrifyingly real East German Stasi.

The Securitate (The secret service of Romania) would be another equally terrifying example.

In the novel itself, Ingsoc is said to be similar to the CPSU. Orwell was drawing direct inspiration from the USSR under Stalin, as well as from other real world events.

From what I remember of 1984 I don't think everyone was spied on all the time - it was mainly the Outer Party members (~13% of the population) who were scrutinized so closely as they were the source of potential threats to the Inner Party. Most of the characters in the book, apart from O'Brien, were Outer Party members.

The proles were relatively free to do whatever but they were too poor to do much of anything which is why they were left free.

That said, the real life 1984 that we see slowly emerging in a piecemeal manner worldwide (faster in some places than in others) seems to mostly effect the lower and middle classes.

I would argue the key aspect of something being Orwellian is the redefinition of language such that arguments against the government's position cannot be made anymore.

The idea of people being spied on by their neighbours in 1984 comes from real-world examples that Orwell was drawing on at the time (the Hitler Youth and the purges under Stalin). While it is very dystopian, I would classify it as being extreme totalitarianism and not Orwellian. Almost all recent totalitarian regimes I can think of had people informing on their neighbours.

I would say that having people feel that it is acceptable to inform on their neighbors is a key element of a proper totalitarian society.

This is why I routinely go off on people when they suggest calling the cops (or some other external authority) over petty differences. I don't want to see that kind of behavior left unchallenged let alone normalized.

You are absolutely right. I can't edit to correct myself. The redefinition of language is more `Orwellian` than the all-spying.

My point is that the spying in 1984 is most of the time seen as being done by Big Brother and its agents against the people but it was quite clear to me when reading it that it was more about everyone keeping an eye on everyone to report to BB, people were doing the watching and there was no escape (I seem to remember there's a line about how they don't know if the camera work but that doesn't matter because you can't prove it and people could be spied on by anyone anyway).

Maybe it's time I pick it up again.

Well, everyone would have a telescreen in their pocket. China has a big surveillance playground in Xinjiang region (paywalled: https://www.wsj.com/articles/twelve-days-in-xinjiang-how-chi...), including random microphone recordings.

People are easily manipulated. You only need the right incentives and tricks.

As long as they are convinced or can be convinced that only bad people will be prosecuted (they are good people after all, right?) many people will welcome this.

Reminder: Why do you need privacy if you have nothing to hide?

>As long as they are convinced or can be convinced that only bad people will be prosecuted (they are good people after all, right?) many people will welcome this.

Everyone is the hero of their own story.

Does NY Post have a source/reference for this?

How long your since co-workers been out of China? I'm in China right now but I don't think that system has changed people's behavior that much. Plus, I think it's stupid to put a score on everybody's head ("Oh, you're below 10, we can't be friend" stupid).

Based on my observation, people acting better usually because now they can and willing to, rather than been forced to.

In our city for example, we used to have many jaywalkers. But that number dropped since the administration constructed better pedestrian crossings (underground tunnels, foot bridge etc). People still jaywalking when those infrastructure is unavailable.

How does it affect their social credit score if they don't like it?

They opinion don't affect the credit score, they currently live abroad. How can we evaluate the system? number of people likes / dislikes? National level of happiness?

Are the rules of what costs you social credit score available?

Probably (although it makes more sense for them to be vague) but you shouldn't really care about the paper rules anyway, instead here are the real rules:

Rule One: there are no rules.

Rule Two: you must pretend Rule One does not exist. Instead pretend that there is a set of clear, objective, and just rules that apply to everyone equally and fairly; that it is possible to live without ever violating a rule; that no one is above the rules; that the rules aren't made up on a need-to basis by the powerful.

Rule Three: arguing against the rules is against the rules.

You forgot some people are going to be more equal than others.

This is one of the best comments I have ever seen on the web. Thank you for writing it.

Yes, as well as how you earn it back. Eg, by donating blood and other kinds of "good deeds"

In a society that does not put enough pressure on people to grow up and function, it is tempting to look at this as a possible solution. Coupling it to government power, though, is an outright horror. Any social credit system needs to be run independently, by society, not by the state (not least because of people's unfortunate tendency to remember that there is a difference).

Your comment suggest you are from the first world and that your parents did not put enough pressure on you. Otherwise your reflection upon your wealth wouldn't result in this tirade.

You have been credited -13 social $$$.

Authorities have been informed. You will also need to clear your room, because your social credit indicates that it is just a bit too nice for you.

>In a society that does not put enough pressure on people to grow up and function, it is tempting to look at this as a possible solution

Which is exactly why these kinds of developments should be worrying to the west. We're becoming less and less capable of having discussions and drawing hard lines when it comes to maturity and personal responsibility.

> grow up and function

What exactly do you mean by this?

the media bias score of nypost base on adfontesmedia is only 20,selected Story. https://www.adfontesmedia.com/ . https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-post/ https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings As a chinese some mistakes in article 1.the phone bells the ban of trains or flights. all because the debt which courts can not enforce. all the methods only want you obey the judgements.

2.alipay the paypal of alibaba, has a system, like the ebay store rates, the score now can benefit the Second-hand trading. all these system is about economy. Nothing with political issue.

political problem don't need score system.

Article reads like an advertisement for his probably shitty and poorly sourced book.

The only positive side is that china’s regime is comiting suicide with this system. Seems like nothing was learned from communist russia. Intellectuals will flee, then top scientists, nobody will trade with them anymore, political opponents will be sent to camp, until finally it will all collapse under economical meltdown.

My only concern is that civilians don’t pay a too high price in the process.

Norway has just landed some major deals for exporting fish to China. And nor the goverment or the majority of the population seem to bother what China is doing. Money talks, while human rights are censored.

>And nor the goverment or the majority of the population seem to bother what China is doing.

I think this has a lot to do with the, "It doesn't effect me, so its not my problem," mentality that is still pretty prevalent in the globalised world.

As the lyric goes, "Credulous, at best, your desire to believe in angels in the hearts of men."

I don’t think the general public is aware on what’s going on in china in details. They think it’s still pretty ok. But the direction the country is taking is pretty clear, and we soon should hear about nightmarish events more and more. Once one major western country starts taking a public stance and back it up with actions, the others will follow.

The US has just barely started to make some noises with this mini trade war, which I believe will result in some tariffs remaining in place encouraging some of our manufacturing to move from China to central America.

> the others will follow

Sadly, that is only true for countries that have a president like Trump. A populist, strong-arm type of politician wouldn't be my first choice but my government in Germany would have folded already. They proposed that people need to use their real names on the internet just a few days ago. Yes, it is that bad and yes, they are old and frightened.

Only if your economic outlook is vastly positive people accept this form of control and see it as a necessity. There is indeed a danger that people start passively accepting the surveillance, even if the outlook turns in a worse direction.

edit: It also helps that the majority is still lacking education and surveillance is a very real but abstract danger.

> Money talks, while human rights are censored.

It does seem like the world is becoming/has become a cross-border plutocracy.

Sorry, but you give people too much credit. The situation is in fact reversed -- people will only flee from an economic meltdown, until that happens people won't flee.

Shouldn't it be "a distopian nightmare"?

I'm sure 'an' is correct since that's the headline the NY Post wrote, but I'm just curious why.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/dystopian

> Relating to or denoting an imagined state or society where there is great suffering or injustice.

> ‘the dystopian future of a society bereft of reason’

> ‘the utopian dream that became a dystopian nightmare’

No, I'd say the NY Post made a typo.

The NY Post is a rag. Never feel the need to trust it. It is not the NY Times.

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