When I worked at Microsoft the biggest complaints were parking and the variety of subsidized foods at the cafeteria.
Maybe if you consider "Can't walk wherever I want" as inhumane, all of them are, but there is definitely a difference between a prison in Rwanda vs one in Norway, and probably one would feel humane after observing the other.
On the other hand, people (generally) get sent to prison for committing a crime, not for being incredibly smart or talented.
My feelings toward 404 are deeply conflicted. It was a cage, yet for a long time, I desperately wanted to go back. As I explore in Part 2, the most tragic part wasn't the strength of the cage, but its fragility. It vanished almost overnight, and when the 'cage' that gave us our identity and social standing disappeared, many of us lost our sense of meaning entirely.
We were free, but we were also 'lost' in a world that no longer had a place for us.
I don't know how exagerated that was, but yes sometimes things go fast:)
I still wonder which model it was…
I've met several across different disciplines and two (at least) in computer science and networking. When the barriers for travel came down, many studied and worked abroad, I met some in Edinburgh at the end of the 70s who worked in advanced language areas (think the foundations of ML) formal methods, CSP, you-name-it. People like these in networking (I subsequently know and worked with in governance contexts) built and led the chinese academic internet. These people are now senior academics in the Chinese academy of science. They're serious, smart people.
There was also a late 1970s VLSI boom in China. It's why they were so successful in the 80s and 90s outsourcing chip commercialization space.
So to my own knowledge if not "in" the cultural revolution certainly very rapidly afterwards assuming you take its run up into the 70s.
Hundreds of thousands of micro-computers had been built during that period. For example, there were many used in the textile factories. Workers there were encouraged to learn programming. They wrote programs to control the weaving machines.
After Capitalist Roaders seize the power through a palace coup, they told everybody that, the Great Cultural Revolution wrecked the economy. So most were ditched.
As programmer shortage emeraged in the 1980s, Capitalist Roaders start promoting "grab toddlers to computers".
You might think this is about the rise of fascism[0] in the US, Chat Control in the EU, the failure of revolution in Belarus and Turkey, censorship in the UK, martial law in South Korea, etc. But it's about all of those.
I am reminded that the only real power comes from violence (performed or threatened) and that we keep building cool stuff because we get paid a lot, yet we don't own the product of our work and it is increasingly being used against us. We don't have guns to our heads yet but the goal of AI is to remove what little bargaining power we have by making us economically redundant.
At every point in history, oppressing a group of people required controlling another (smaller but better armed) group of people willing to perform the oppression. And for the first time in history, "thanks" to AI and robotics, this requirement will be lifted.
[0]: https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...
But a gay man growing up in the 1950s in a rural village was plenty oppressed. It's actually quite fascinating how in the 1960s/70s we had a Cultural Revolution of our own that ended a thousand years of religious oppression! And we didn't even have a Mao.
But never forget we are always one bad week away from sliding backwards.
It's fine if you want to argue that there is a rise in fascism in the US, but you need to actually pose that argument, not just talk about it as if its true and that everyone agrees with you.
Also, there is not currently any martial law in South Korea. That was a brief event that lasted a matter of hours from when it was announced and when it was repealed. It's an open question if any actions were actually performed under the guises of it.
But yes, you are its hysterical fringe voices calling this the “rise of fascism in the US”.
The source I linked is written by a historian[0] - a guy who actually studied how this kind of stuff happens. You'll also notice that his post uses a fairly high standard of proof - using 2 different definitions of fascism and using only the wannabe-dictator's own statements to show he satisfies all points.
There's also a YouTube video and a YouTube video. Here's an actual lawyer talking about the legality of the proto-dictator's actions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hybL-GJov7M
Is any of the boxes not checked?
Rather from numbers in my opinion. "Divide and conquer", or its modern equivalent "confuse and manipulate", is what makes violence effective. It is always striking to compare how much people are similar, even in our divided society, versus how much dissimilar they think they are. I'm used to help organize long boat trips with all kind of people from various backgrounds, and it's funny to watch.
In the past it was easy to convince people that "the other" was strange and dangerous, due to physical distance. Today we achieve the same with social media.
Because for now more people means more violence. If you control more people, you control more potential violence. So if your enemy controls more people, you need to either amass more people in your cause or divide the enemy's cause.
And there are limits to how many people you can control. Even in the past, they were surprisingly large to my liking. Helot slaves to their Spartan owners were 7:1 at some point apparently. Soldiers in WW1 had riles and bayonets, yet one guy with a revolver could send dozens of them to their deaths. But still, it was impossible to censor communication among ordinary people and prominent enemies of the regime required constant supervision by another person. Digging up dirt or evidence could take months of work. Now so much communication is online, detecting dissent can be automated to a large extent. There's a limit to how many people can be in prison without starving and without the state collapsing by how many people need to perform useful work and how many people you need to guard them.
But I bet soon we'll see a new dystopian nightmare where prisoners are watched by automated systems 24/7, increasing the prisoner to guard ratio. And finally, look at Ukraine. Artillery was the primary cause of casualties in the past century of wars and you needed people to transport heavy shells, load and fire them. Apparently 1 ton of explosives per death. Now it's drones, which can be mass produced largely automatically and controlled automatically. And they are so precise you could use them to target individuals in crowds.
The closest I know of is an article exploring why there are is no research into just riots: https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/445638/
I follow lesswrong from a distance and they are all about AI takeover but I have seen almost nothing about humans using AI to enslave other humans. And I mean literally almost nothing, I only use "almost" because I remember maybe one post by a person other than me here on HN and that's it.
As for the general trend towards authoritarianism, I see some mentions here and there but I don't think the general population is aware or cares. Usually, most people only start caring when something materially affects them so the typical strategy of divide and conquer ("target minorities first") works quite well.
There might be a small trend of people talking about how wealth works and how the system is stacked against those doing actual work in favor of the owner class: https://www.youtube.com/@ChrisKohlerNews and https://www.youtube.com/@GarysEconomics
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The saddest thing is we (the people) should be learning from countries like nazi Germany or current China and Russia about what not to do, or specifically what not to allow other people to do. But really, general education is shit and history is taught by memorizing names and dates. Plus children don't have enough real world experience to truly understand most of the processes driving historical events and I think most people in general never reach the combination of intelligence and systems thinking to apply any knowledge they might have gained. By all metrics, I am well above average intelligence and even I needed to have a fresh look at history once I started realizing basic principles like "incentives drive behavior".
It's the opposite - they (the rich and connected) are learning from history - what didn't work last time and what to do differently.