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China rates its own citizens – including online behaviour
41–50 of 165 posts
Re: China rates its own citizens – including online behaviour
#42It's amazing how different the mentality is in Liberal Democracies versus, say, Communist or Islamic regimes. Personally, I think the evidence is clear that concentration of power, especially a "rating" like this, is a prelude to about the worst tools of oppression one can imagine.
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
Re: China rates its own citizens – including online behaviour
#43[deleted]
What do you mean? People are a natural resource and the government manages that. (only half kidding, sadly. This is China you are talking about.)
Re: China rates its own citizens – including online behaviour
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say you're the Chinese government (or a person in the government) and care deeply about the future of China. What's your main concern? Is it not the prevention of destabilizing civic unrest like that we've seen in Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Ukraine, and for that matter, China? That's the worst possible thing that could happen to the country, and it's quite far from unlikely, and I'd want to do whatever I can to pre…
Then you should probably do same things that successful countries do. Ones that did not have devastating civic unrest. From Australia to Austria. 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…
To offer a cynical perspective from a formerly colonized country, it seems to me that what made Australia, the UK, the US, Canada etc. successful is blatant disregard for human rights and equality when they were going through the same phase that China is going through now.
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.
Re: China rates its own citizens – including online behaviour
#45What I wonder about when I read things like this: 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 prai…
I've read enough articles over the years that this move on China's part is not surprising to me at all. I think the average person in China is quite fed up with the lack of morality and social compassion in the general public - due to news articles like the ones I am about to link you. Extreme lack of good samaritan behavior: http://www.chinasmack.com/2015/stories/old-chinese-woman-aba... https://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
No, that doesn't sound crazy at all. I don't sit around with the myopic viewpoint that everyone in the world shares my same ideas, ideals and 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.
Re: China rates its own citizens – including online behaviour
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds exactly what Experian does. They are used by most (all?) UK banks to validate your credit score and they also provide an "identity protection" service. If your score is too low with them you don't get any credit anywhere.
Still it is very hard to link credit score with citizen activity, with gradual punishment of undesirable ones. Once it would dismarry from financial reality, many banks will start to skip it, because it will become profitable.
Here's one method of implementing it.
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.
Re: China rates its own citizens – including online behaviour
#47What are the odds that something like this is already in place on global scale by some American spooks? To "fight the war on terrorism" or something. Surely it's not that difficult to do considering internet megacorps already do behaviour analysis and payment processors already keep track of what goes where, including credit scoring.
I doubt it. To make it work, you need leverage. Make citizen's life slightly easier or slightly worse based on his score. 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.
I'd be surprised if the US didn't already have a database somewhere with scores indicating the likelihood of you being a terrorist which probably has a bearing on the likelihood of you getting stopped at an airport or put on a no fly list. Not the same as the Chinese proposal but something along those lines.
Re: China rates its own citizens – including online behaviour
#48What I wonder about when I read things like this: 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 prai…
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
--C.S. Lewis
Re: China rates its own citizens – including online behaviour
#49This is madness. I thought I was reading a fake article. > 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 high…
> 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 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…
You raise a point that was already true for DRM - the impediment from the restrictions pushes the law abiding citizen into piracy.
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.
Re: China rates its own citizens – including online behaviour
#50It's amazing how different the mentality is in Liberal Democracies versus, say, Communist or Islamic regimes. Personally, I think the evidence is clear that concentration of power, especially a "rating" like this, is a prelude to about the worst tools of oppression one can imagine. 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 (fo…
Consumer credit rating agencies already essentially do this, and a number of subprime lenders only make credit decisions if they can connect to social media accounts. There are specialists in "connecting the dots" of all your various life activities right here in the West. Already certain sectors require a clean credit score to get a job. It's really not very different from this Chinese scheme, since this dot-joining will inevitably profile your political and social leanings, your secrets, your very personality and its inevitable flaws. China will do centrally what we do in a distributed fashion, but the end result is the same.