Singapore's Smart Nation Minister
futuregov.asia
futuregov.asia
[0] http://www.pmo.gov.sg/mediacentre/transcript-speech-prime-mi...
> Balakrishnan notes that “reactionary governments” tend to try to shut these sites down, “which doesn’t work”. Others “just ignore it, which also doesn’t work”. The Minister explains that “what I believe, and it has been strengthened by my experience in the week in which Lee Kuan Yew passed away, is to get the silent majority to step up. Suddenly you realise the tone, even of hitherto raucous, noisy, critical, cynical, gets altered. So the answer is not to reject those technologies or posts, but to mobilise real people to express real views on the basis of data and accuracy.”
While it's concerning that Singapore assigns a relatively low value to free speech and minority viewpoints, it's also refreshing to see someone in government recognize that the solution to unfavorable speech isn't censorship, but more speech.
Example being freedom to hate speech and slander, free speech comes with hidden trauma terms of repression. We say speak your mind, but remove your name if you do not align more, if you show your real heart and mind so weird and normal.
Where we assign value to terms of recognition is often needing (Data-)Empathic Accuracy for actionable intelligence (open source intelligence) about Poverties of Thought.
Smarts to save or kill 0 to 1 (or ∫), is a pain dicotomy that faces artificial intelligence, and if we want emotionally determinable stability from structures we need basic smart list/listening.
Is this a 51% Attack == 51% Trauma?
What would mapping do? What would pattern recognition do?
(I have noticed Hacker News is the site where droning deliberately creative accounting language profits are justified supremaracistly, triggering killing alternative language/realities without formal libraries. (The positive people read back words, nobody negative uses a single word said. They repress-repeat by need to draw words apart by war in/visibility repetitions? Listend ve. listen.))
A hybrid between Authoritarian and Democracy.
While it may looks negatively in many western worlds, it seems to be working for Singapore. And from what I've read their citizens are very well educated and their officials aren't all lawyers, they are far more educated than US politicians.
> unfavorable speech isn't censorship, but more speech.
They're probably going to some how have their own government sponsor speech to counter online speech from what I've gathered. It's seem like the implicit thing the dude implying, where his government will get these unvoiced people to talk about online articles and judge how true it is.
The things that work in Singapore are as follows:
* Public housing (90% of the country lives in public housing projects and they are all high quality).
* Unapologetic Keynesian macroeconomic management -- when unemployment is edging higher, they might decide to build a new airport terminal. When inflation bumps a little high, they won't. No bullshit about debt ceilings.
* Mercantilist trade policy (similar to Germany, Taiwan, Japan, SK and Germany) - suppression of the value of their currency in order to give their exports a boost. Not used as much any more, but it built their industrial base.
* Intelligent city planning - development policy that is people centric rather than market centric.
Things that don't work:
* Authoritarianism - a culture of authoritarianism it's not just bad for people, it's bad for business. It's particularly bad for the software development process, because it hampers creativity and fosters slavish behavior (it's not just the government that is authoritarian).
* No minimum wage / pathetic levels of unemployment benefits / pension benefits - that's a feature if you own a company. It's a bug if you earn a wage (even a non-minimum wage). You don't see many beggars in Singapore. You do see 85 year old women collecting bottles for recycling and selling tissues.
* Mandatory 2 year military service - doing useless crap for two years won't help the country if Indonesia decides it wants to invade. Again, fosters slavish behavior (possibly a feature if you own the right kind of company).
* Restricted freedom of speech - that's a feature if you run a government, otherwise it's a bug. No, it doesn't help with racial harmony and it never did, despite the government's protestations. Neither does it have any impact on economic growth.
Read between the lines. He's not saying that. He's saying that the solution to unfavorable speech is to insist on "accurate speech". I think when he says "more speech" he means "more of our speech" (government sponsored new media initiatives, I guess - paying people to post approved facts to facebook perhaps?).
Their messaging on this is consistent. They don't want a plurality of opinion if it means that sometimes "lies they don't like will be told". They will "insist on accuracy".
For you, of course. There is no mechanism that I know of that holds the government to the same standard.
The practical upshot of this is that freedom of speech can be quashed with libel laws and a judiciary that could hardly be described as "independent of the government". Unless you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that everything you say is true, they can slam you with fines and possibly jail time for statements that you made that are either untrue, can't be proved, or they can describe as 'racially inflammatory/insensitive to religion'.
They can pick and choose, too. Say 99 things that really needed to be said, and repeated one rumor that wasn't true? If you have an audience and they don't like you or want to make an example of you, They will nail you. That's why there's a strong culture of "STFU and keep your head down if you know what's best for you".
This is part of the story of how political opposition in Singapore has been divided and conquered and kept at bay (there's a lot more detail in the wikileaks cables about Singapore, which is worth a read). I suspect that if they had a first amendment, the PAP would have started losing elections a while back.
Who knows, though. Maybe they won't find a solution to the 'new media problem' and the opposition will manage to leverage it to win an election in the years to come.
And a recent case of somebody saying things they're not allowed to say, even though they're true: http://www.tosingaporewithlove.com/