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China: Harbinger of a Brave New World
Totalitarianism is a function of technology. Prior to recent times, governments might claim to be absolute, but they did not have the record-keeping, administrative capacity to make good on that claim. Now they can do so far more easily than ever before — without hiring armies of spies. All that they have to do is follow the population on the Internet and use computers to collect and analyze the data. What Google can do, governments can do — and in Xi Jinping’s China that is what they are going to do. As The Weekly Standard reports,
China’s Communist government is rolling out a plan to assign everyone in the country “citizenship scores.” According to the ACLU, “China appears to be leveraging all the tools of the information age—electronic purchasing data, social networks, algorithmic sorting—to construct the ultimate tool of social control. It is, as one commentator put it, ‘authoritarianism, gamified.’ ” In the system, everyone is measured by a score ranging from 350 to 950, and that score is linked to a national ID card. In addition to measuring your financial credit, it will also measure political compliance. Expressing the wrong opinion—or merely having friends who express the wrong opinion—will hurt your score. The higher your score, the more privileges the government will grant you.
To do this, of course, the Chinese government needs help, and that is where private enterprise comes in. Alibaba and Tencent are set to administer the plan; and, if you hold stock in Yahoo, you are party to this as well.
In 2006, Yahoo was allowed to buy a chunk (now worth $23 billion) of Alibaba after it handed over to the Chinese authorities the name of a democracy activist who was anonymously using a Yahoo email address. As The Weekly Standard piece adds, he got a 10-year prison sentence for leaking the directives sent out by the Chinese Propaganda Department for the purpose of suppressing a commemoration of the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Lenin once said that, when the time comes for us to hang capitalism, the capitalist will sell us the rope, and that Yahoo has done.
Could this happen here? If the fine folks at Google had to choose between sacrificing profits and sacrificing the rest of us, what do you think that they would do? It is certain that the techniques of social control being developed in China will be adopted elsewhere. Vladimir Putin would not hesitate to dirty his hands in this fashion. Can we be confident that down the road our political leaders would exercise self-restraint or that our business magnates would stand tall?
Think about the Gestapo-style raids directed against conservative activists in Wisconsin recently. Think about the fact that 48 Democratic Senators voted in 2006 to repeal the First Amendment. Thanks to the new technology, we are about to enter a brave new world.
Published in Technology
Thank you. It’s now on my list. :)
Privacy has always been an illusion. It is the belief that we are not seen, irrespective of that reality. What I think matters most is not if we are actually observed by anyone or anything but what are the consequences of that observation. In that I think the distinction between the United States Government and China resides.
The Chinese survey their people to micromanage them and reward compliance with rules created by an arbitrary political process controlled by unaccountable autocrats. The US government may monitor us to to discover the conspiracy to commit actions which have been deemed criminal by a democratic process of an open and accountable system of Government. Superficially the two may do the same thing, but fundamentally the two actions are very different. This does not make our system impervious to abuse, no human system can be flawless in such respect, but the outcomes of US and Chinese surveillance will be vastly different, in the end.
Remember above all government forms of surveillance is the ever vigilant sight of our God who not only sees all that we do but knows our hearts as well. If we can be fine with his penetrating gaze and final judgement, I think we can live with the NSA’s metadata collection.
I’m in favor of demonizing the NSA, no matter what Jeb says.
Valiuth:
“Remember above all government forms of surveillance is the ever vigilant sight of our God who not only sees all that we do but knows our hearts as well. If we can be fine with his penetrating gaze and final judgement, I think we can live with the NSA’s metadata collection.”
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Ah, techno-theocracy, where science enables what religion justifies. Is this not the worst of all worlds?
I don’t understand this faith in accurate data entry. This concept of “citizen score” in China will be subject to enormous abuse from the moment they become important.
No one will enter any data that would lower their score. Anyone engaging in “socially disharmonious” behavior will use false identities. The advantages are so obvious that an instant and extremely lucrative black market will spring up immediately.
Have some faith in markets, people.
Mildlyo, you misunderstand. Metadata sees right through your false identity scheme. And nobody expects “data entry” to power this surveillance scheme, any more than the KGB relies upon marketing surveys to sell communism.
While I don’t think a government could do what Google does quite that efficiently, it doesn’t have to work even moderately well in order to help a tyranny along immensely.
Once an average citizen stops and considers whether he’s willing to make a comment critical of the regime you lose three quarters of your ability to hold a revolution, whether or not that comment is actually monitored.
Yes — and, short of a revolution, criticism will be muted. Look at how effective the IRS was in 2012 in shutting down the Tea Party.
I am not myself especially concerned about what the NSA is doing today. But I am profoundly worried that the power in the hands of that organization — and for that matter in the hands of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft — will be abused in the future. Can we really rely on our political leaders to restrain themselves?
As for the supposed accountability of our politicians, has anyone yet been held accountable for what the IRS did? Will Hillary be held accountable for sequestering her emails as a public servant on a private server? In the Age of Obama, laws are for the little people.
Last time I visited Beijing I noticed the Chinese seem to have a higher tolerance for authoritarian presence in their lives. Metal detectors were the norm at every subway gate and entrance to ‘public’ places like Tiananmen Square. Something tells me the West isn’t far behind, though. We’ve sadly accepted mass surveillance as a necessity and allow our destinies to be ruled by data sets. Credit scores are a great example – you need to spend your entire life in debt of some kind or another in order to do it again. Live without credit cards and you might as well not exist. So I don’t see a huge leap from that to ‘citizenship scores’ based on online and social activities. If it doesn’t happen by government sanction it will become the de facto norm anyway, just as your number of Twitter followers today is considered some kind of credibility indicator.
I like the idea for America, but instead of the score being based on a person’s “correct” opinions, it should be based on a person’s “informed” opinions. Virtually the entire American Left and American media (but I repeat myself) would be lucky to crack double-digits.