China rates its own citizens – including online behaviour
volkskrant.nl
volkskrant.nl
> 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.
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... :)
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.
Ironically enough, Amazon has already once erased 1984 from users' Kindle devices: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...
I wouldn't mind an apt-get 1984.txt
In that case government might release guidelines by which buying diapers without its need become criminal offense.
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.
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.
> "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...
This is a country that imposes the death penalty for corruption. Social hacking isn't something that is going to happen there.
1. That death penalty is an effective deterrent.
2. That social hacking would be tried as corruption, or even at a level of corruption for the death penalty.
3. That China doesn't have a corruption problem already regardless of the potential penalty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_China (not saying this is the truth, just that you're making an assumption that not everyone agrees with)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
http://change.gov/agenda/ethics_agenda/
"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”
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.
http://www.businessinsider.com/most-nsa-abuses-are-self-repo...
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.
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
So the main differences are those of degree.
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.
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".
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.
This was all common in the 20th Century, particularly the latter half, as well.
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.
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".
Once it would dismarry from financial reality, many banks will start to skip it, because it will become profitable.
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.
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.
To get a job your employer might need to see your Facebook history.
It's coming, it's just going to be decentralized and (arguably) opt-in.
"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]"
How did they get to this point?
What goes on in the mind of the person sitting in the "idea room" when they first thought of this?
Are they just the product of an already oppressive government and therefore see this as completely and totally fine?
Or do they know that it is oppressive, but since they're already a cog in the machine, they pitch the idea up and get praised for it?
The vast majority only care if they earn enough to make ends meet. Their silence contributes to where we are now.
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.
They try to fight reality and thus make what they saw self-fulfilling.
Once you look for insurgents you only see them everywhere and then you are ruined.
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.
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.
Source : Cosmos by NDTyson
Prosperity seems to be a prerequisite for solid democracy. And unfortunately it does not ensure it :(
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.
Careful there. Liberalism, for example, is an ideology. And as far as the meaning of that word can be formalized, pragmatism fits too.
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...
impractical in the extreme.
Extreme lack of good samaritan behavior: http://www.chinasmack.com/2015/stories/old-chinese-woman-aba... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wang_Yue http://www.chinasmack.com/2011/videos/shanghai-pudong-airpor...
Chinese tourist behavior: http://www.chinasmack.com/2015/videos/thai-model-rants-about... http://www.chinasmack.com/2014/videos/thai-flight-turned-bac... http://www.chinasmack.com/2012/stories/mainland-chinese-tour...
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.
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.
It is a worthy thought exercise nonetheless.
> 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
That was some ill-advised product placement. Maybe not as bad as Lockheed in the new Terminator movie, but still...
--C.S. Lewis
"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.)"
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.
I wrote a piece on this. The genie is out of the bottle: welcome to the Big Data revolution: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169
"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."
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.
This is terrifying.
I'm curious about what kind of game people will play once given that score.
- 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.
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.
https://imgur.com/bYVXi7x,DQticJw#0 https://imgur.com/bYVXi7x,DQticJw#1
We also have ones promoting considerate social behavior:
http://imgur.com/Rqv5hLr,Zh7k1Qf#0 http://imgur.com/Rqv5hLr,Zh7k1Qf#1
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.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/designer-babies-on-the-way-in-ch...
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
I actually doubt you need much working class in the society capable of large-scale gene editing.
Working class is only profitable when produced by pre-industrial society on its own ("village").
lets go with instead
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
You don't really need deltas and epsilons in the long run. Unless they are very cheap to have, robots are going to replace them.
Unrelated, this does make me want to watch Gattaca[1] again :)
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.
[1] http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2012/29c3-5338-en-enemie...
speed up to 1:14 for the good stuff
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.
http://www.engadget.com/2015/04/24/department-of-defense-cre...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/us/white-house-takes-cyber...
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_27974832/defense-secr...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/science/pentagon-looking-f...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/23/technology/the-pentagon-as...
http://www.hngn.com/articles/87223/20150424/secretary-defens...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/23/defense-department-sili...
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 us because it is alien to us.
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.
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...
After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
I love the 'respecting the elderly' bit, as in: respect the party bosses.
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.
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.
I think they've shown plenty of mastery of it.
You won't easily find creature more miserable than their result. Alcohol consumption spiked and life expectancy actually plummeted.
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.
I wonder who's writing their software?
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.
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.
Why females?
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.
It did not peak before Gorbachev was in power.
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.
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)
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.
This is our brave new world.
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.
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.