Interesting article. On the one hand, it provides insides into how the project actually worked in china, which I didn't know. That's interesting.
But it misses a huge nuance on the whole "dystopian" thing. The main thing about "social score bad" takes is that the government will use that scoring. It's not private <-> private. Everything the author mentions about the various scoring in the US (and EU for that matter, although to a lesser extent in some cases) is between you and private institutions. The government does not "track" or "access" or "use" those 3rd party scores.
It's a bit like 1st amendment in the US. You have the right of free speech with regards to the government. That means the government cannot punish you for your speech. But that says nothing about your relationship with private parties. If you go to a government institution and tell them their boss sux, in theory you shouldn't be punished for that, and they'll keep serving you. But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar. Or any private property. Tell them their boss sux, and you might not get service.
So yeah, there are lots of 3rd party rating services. But they're mainly between you and those 3rd parties. The government mainly stays out.
Great article and good point. I never articulated this as good as the article but, I've always assumed that when I use Uber/Lyft and rate a driver, if I give too many drivers a low rating I'll be banned from the app. I'm not saying I will actually be banned, I have no idea. Rather, I'm saying I fear I will be banned.
I mean why not? Any customer that effectively makes the company look bad can be banned by the company.
I bring up Uber/Lyft in particular because 99/100 drivers break traffic laws. The speed (10-15 miles per hour above the speed limit), they tailgate which is both putting me in danger, putting other car in danger, and is illegal (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...). They'll do things like stop a full car and half past the waiting point at an intersection (have pictures of this). In other words, there a line behind which a car is supposed to wait. Then there's a crosswalk. They've stopped the car so it's past the crosswalk while waiting for the light to change. They turn right on red when the sign says no right on red. Etc....
I'd give them all 1 star out of 5 except for the fear mentioned above. That my "social credit" with the company would have them drop me as a customer.
Why do you think sms "2fa" is suddenly so popular with banks and other fintechs, despite things like passkeys and u2f, you know things that _actually_ prevent people from breaking into accounts, have existed forever?
The real problem here is privacy and anonymity. These discrete "rating systems" used by various companies aren't particularly dangerous as long as they cannot identify users by some common identifier such as name, DOB or address. Got banned by Uber or Amazon? Just create a new account.
>Open your phone right now and count the apps that are scoring your behavior.
Zero. Are everyone really that terminally online? I reject most things that use an app. Yesterday I encountered a coffee vending machine that required an app. I walked away. Uncle Ted was right.
There was a comment that appeared for a few minutes before getting deleted, that vaguely lined up with what I wanted to say. It didn't reappear, so I'll just repost it:
>real life also has social credit. were you an asshole to the bartender last week? that goes to your reputation at that bar. did you volunteer with a local non-profit? that goes to your reputation with that organization. even without an algorithm, people remember.
Such as system does exist, but it is filled with issues. Halo effect and other biases impact memories, in ways that we would not tolerate being made explicit. We are more forgiving of some people than others, we tolerate some forms of stress as a possible excuse (not a complete removal, but to allow for much quicker redemption) than other forms of stress. Rules are selectively applied, and this all gets fed into confirmation biases where we overlook the bad done by people labeled as good and the good done by people labeled as bad (often with the labels themselves being unjustified in their application).
The larger the social network grows, the worse this system performs. Stereotypes develop because we don't have capacity to judge each individual, confirmation biases reinforce stereotypes until individuals cease to exist, as the stereotype prevents them from becoming close enough to ever overcome it.
So while this system has always existed (well at least as long as recorded history), it continuously worsens and is increasingly at odds with a globalized world.
Using the author's loose criteria, one could say a criminal record is a social credit system.
These are the emergent fruits of living in a complex society, where one cannot realistically track reputation of everyone they encounter across all areas of life. We could move away from some of the formalized systems, if we decided to go back to shaming people for poor behaviors.
> Citizens are tracked for every jaywalking incident, points are deducted for buying too much alcohol
The first time I visited China I was under 21 but I had heard the drinking age was 18 so I went to a convenience store to buy a beer. Person running the till was probably 12 and didn’t say a word or ask for ID. Unbelievably lax compared to the US sometimes.
I generally think it’s easier and more effective to track the outputs rather than the inputs: you don’t need to track how many beers they buy, just outlaw public intoxication. And enforce that law.
What if I want to buy copious amounts for a party? Or there was a discount so you want to stock up? This seems a bit shortsighted, it is not always the case that if you buy something then you need to consume it right away.
"Social Credit" doesn't exist in China the way it's portrayed in Western media. It's really just a way of enforcing civil judgments, so you aren't living high on the hog after telling your creditors that you're broke.
Depending on the type of bankruptcy declared, debtor exams happen here.
> As of 2024, there's still no nationwide social credit score in China.
> The gap between Western perception and Chinese reality is enormous
They inserted "nationwide".
The social credit score in one China region (khm Xinj... khm) is truly dystopian, and I bet people there don't care whether it's "nationwide" or not, if they can literally be sterilized or get sent to concentration camps because of that.
The issue is that American media/discourse paints a very distorted view of what life under authoritarian rule is like. The truth is in many countries, unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west. But people don’t want to hear that, because we want to feel better than them. Like we wouldn’t tolerate that kind of life.
Of course the most frustrating part about that is as the US and other western countries start sliding into authoritarianism, people deny it because they don’t feel like it’s authoritarian.
Edit: To clarify, I don’t think life is exactly the same - just that the consequences of authoritarianism are much more insidious than they’re portrayed.
You’re being dismissive about the minority part. I guess it varies from country to country but several minority groups combined can actually be the majority like in Iraq, Rwanda, Eastern Europe, SE Asia etc.
> The truth is in many countries, unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west.
At a very superficial level, sure -- people get up, go to work, go out to eat, go to the movies, fall in love, get married, pay their bills, get sick, die, etc. -- like humans in the West. But this is all within the bounds of what the government decided you should adhere to. If you step outside of those bounds the consequences can be severe and without any legal recourse.
Because authoritarian regimes are a law to themselves, rather than applying the law, they're highly susceptible to corruption. Whether you get in trouble or not depends on who you know (in China it's called guanxi). I lived in China for 6 years, ran a business there; I can tell you the system runs on guanxi.
Access to information is highly restricted. All public media and social networks are censored and/or self-censored. There is no freedom of expression on anything that is "sensitive". This is _not_ limited to "minorities, politically active or those in legal trouble". Yes, people have learned to walk the line carefully.
It is more relaxed than the Mao days or the USSR (I lived there too) where you literally had someone on every floor of a building whose job was to report on what everyone else was doing. But it _looks_ more relaxed than it is. If you've visited China, or even stayed there a few months, or studied there for a year as an exchange student, you won't notice it. But believe me it's there. The educated class know it but they've either a) accepted it ("mei banfa"), or b) have emigrated or have made contingency plans for their kids, or c) are carefully subversive.
This is quite an ignorant take with rose-tinted glasses towards autocratic statism.
The truth of the matter that you neglect is that in many countries the minorities, allowed political activity, and many other aspects change without proper notice or disclosure following a strategy that originated from Mao China where the government keeps people guessing. Namely, the Anaconda in the Chandelier paradigm.
This is done not only because of issues within government, but also for the benefit of the ruling class to repress the general population using techniques based in torture to promote automaton-like behaviors from induced stress.
The brainwashed masses will always deny reality in such an environment.
When you have subversive elements that have broken the guard rails and caustically destroyed resilient systems making them brittle; bringing things to crisis and then attempting to silently seize power, and they fail to actually do it, you get the natural rise of authoritarianism. This is what happened with Hitler, and in many respects it was the Communists of the time, as well as the post-WW1 reparations, and economics that paved the way for what came after.
Its insidious yes, because people don't recognize or realize the reason the dominoes fall, and the consequences are just a cascading series of generally but not specifically predictable events in history. It certainly also makes matters worse when you have runaway money-printing to further cause issue.
If the cycle was to be stopped before the consequences, it should have been stopped by the cohorts that gradually and subversively put it into action in the first place, but they wanted to seize power instead, have their cake and eat it too. The people of such a group epitomize many of the deadly sins, and they have willfully blinded themselves to it.
Yeah, this is it. I've lived under governments of a variety of different stripes in some very different parts of the world, I've lived in war zones. Day to day life has been more or less the same across all of them.
You go shopping, go to work, see friends, have a few beers or maybe a smoke, eat out, go to weddings, birthdays and funerals, play sports. People run businesses, post memes.
The way non-OECD, "non-democratic" countries are portrayed in the West gives us a very false sense of superiority.
We have the same problems: gilded elites, crushing poverty, persecuted minorities, illusory participation in governance, terrifying police, rampant corruption.
I'm not saying everywhere is identical, there's a spectrum. There's just more similarities between countries than differences, in my experience. The things that often distinguish are more cultural and geographical than political.
The huge volume of immigration, both where people leave and where they go to reveals this to be false. The experience may be similar for whatever class you belong to, but the reality is demand to live in western democracies is massive for a reason.
> We have the same problems: gilded elites, crushing poverty, persecuted minorities, illusory participation in governance, terrifying police, rampant corruption.
Who is "we" here? United States? If not, would Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Norway, (South) Korea, Japan, and Taiwan agree with that sentence? I doubt it. They are all doing very well -- highly functional (democratic) government and very high human development. (To be clear, there are lots of developing countries not yet a part of OECD who are also doing pretty well in those categories.)
No, it is not. It seems that way if you are a (s)expat in the honeymoonphase. Then you learn the language and look into the abyss.
In it families who can not trust one another, hierarchies of incompetence with bribes upon bribes, no legal recourse to anything, a caste system of actual misery and no perspective for that to ever change. And that is peace time. In wartime the ethnic majority progroms and kicks everyone else out of the country.
> The truth is in many countries...day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west.
That's true right up until your infallible dear leader invades your neighboring country, fails, and rapidly starts ratcheting down social controls in a desperate attempt to preserve political stability. I don't think Russians would describe day-to-day life as "mostly similar to the west" anymore. China could be next.
In non-democratic nations: You are allowed to do almost anything you please, except for speaking up against political power or in any way challenge them.
In democratic nations: You aren't allowed to do anything, but you are free to speak up against political power and challenge them as much as you please.
>> The issue is that American media/discourse paints a very distorted view of what life under authoritarian rule is like. The truth is in many countries, unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west.
Short term maybe. But there are reasons people want(ed) to move to the USA, and I don't mean refugees. A lot of college educated well-to-do folks have always wanted to come here. Also, the innovation, economic strength, and military strength of the USA will all suffer if the level of corruption increases - because corruption is a burden on the systems that produce those results. You can't get rid of it, but you can't let it run rampant either.
In China, if you say anything bad about the CCP they will strap you to a chair in a struggle session and force you to admit you were wrong. That alone is terrifying.
I don't think you've lived in one of the countries you're talking about. I lived in Beijing for a couple years, and early on I wanted visit Tian'anmen Square and tourist. I wanted to see what there was to do, how to get there, etc., but any search term (in English, anyway) was blocked. So the CCP's inability to accept their past actions and their insistence on making up a false reality made a legitimate activity difficult. Last time I went you had to stand in long lines because they required you to show your ID card (passport, in my case). I worked for a tech company, and none of us could do our jobs without a VPN, because half of all tech blogs got blocked. (Partly because a lot of them blocked on fonts.google.com, which was blocked because google.com was blocked; probably those would time out if you waited long enough.) I couldn't read more than about three paragraphs of the People's Daily without wanting to throw it across the room because the fake reality and shoulds/oughts were so blatant. Maybe it's more subtle in Chinese, but I doubt it. Fortunately I was not there for the whole Covid disaster.
You could argue that the CCP is totalitarian, which is authoritarianism++. The problem is that since technology can be used for totalitarian ends, it will be. Putin is authoritarian (certainly by no means Communist), yet reports I hear from Russia make it sound much like China. There's the forced conscription bit for his war against Ukraine, too. Erdogan seems a little better, but his economics-denying policies caused rather large inflation, and life seems to be definitely impacted in other ways, censorship being one of them.
Well, how about just old-school kings? That's Trump, or MBS. Trump's changeability is a feature of kings: once you know where to look, you see it lots of places. Grimm's fairy tales have a number of cases of the king looking favorably on someone and then being influenced against them by someone else; it's practically standard if a king shows up. I saw Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale" last week, and it revolves around a king who is having a great time with a visiting king. He wants the other king to stay a while, and has his wife persuade him. But the king thinks he is too easily persuaded, decides this must be because he is sleeping with the queen, tries to murder his friend, and tries the queen for treason. It's a bit sitcom-y, but sitcoms don't work if the premise isn't believable. You see it in Reynard the Fox, where the king is quite easily swayed by smooth words. Darius in the book of Daniel gets manipulated by his courtiers into passing a law against Daniel. Trump does political "fire and motion" (see Spolsky's old blog), so he appears unusually changeable, but random decisions are just a part of kings.
So no, life is not just mostly the same as we have now in the US. What we have in the US is a historical aberration. Unfortunately, we have the authoritarian Left (which denies being authoritarian by redefining words), and we have a foolish authoritarian Right. If the rest of us don't get our act together we are likely to slide back to historical norms.
>day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west
The "happy path" is, the major differences start when you have any kind of a problem, then not having any functional institutions makes the experience _very_ different from the west.
This isn't even remotely true. Life is nothing like western countries in most parts of the world, authoritarian or not.There is a reason for such levels of immigration to western countries.
As first generation out of Salazar's dictorship, what I see is current generations completely ignoring what was taught to them during the last decades.
I can surely tell, the memories of my parents and family members that had to live under the regime isn't really that those were better days, unless one was a collaborator.
Try to do some public comment that can be misused to mean some kind of bad opinion on the regime, and off you go, out of the map.
Okay. But you still can’t have repercussions from the government for your speech in America. On this issue Europe is definitely backsliding - for example, see UK police showing up at doorsteps for social media posts). But countries like China and Turkey take it MUCH further. You can be jailed for years for political speech or wrongthink. That does change day to day life. You can’t think or act freely. At best you can live a lie and stay quiet.
The main problem with living under authoritarian rule is
1. the absenсe of control for the way where the country is going.
2. the value of human life is approaching zero.
Today your life is pretty decent (unless you're some kind of minority (c)), but tomorrow you find yourself with a mobilization order because your country decides to start a war. And nobody cares about your surviving.
Basically what I was saying a week ago about the rise of China as an empire: we already have this at home, and it’s worse because we don’t bother regulating it.
Look, social credit is neither a new concept nor is it destined to be some Orwellian/Black Mirror/Authoritarian tool that keeps undesirables enslaved in low-wage work or targeted for “reeducation” - that’s a decision we allow Governments or Corporations to make on our behalf by refusing to bother regulating these systems or holding bad actors accountable.
The sooner we accept that this is possible, that it’s already here in many cases, the sooner we can begin negotiating regulations in good faith with one another. Maybe it’s placing limits on the data corporations can gather and retain, or maybe it’s preventing the government from acquiring private data without transparent judicial warrants tied to crimes. Maybe it’s something else entirely!
All I know is the current status quo enriches Capital while harming people, governments, and Democracy. I think that’s bullshit, and we should do something about it.
Non-existent in the country I live in. There's a national registry of debtors and people end up there for a very good reason.
>Linkedin, Amazon
There's no reason to consider these to be essential services, I am not using either and I'm doing perfectly fine in life.
>Instagram
LOL
>Uber, Airbnb
There are several copycats, traditional taxis and hotels are still a thing and public transportation or your own car are valid alternatives
What even is this article? I skimmmed the rest of it and it just seems like the crux of the article is about proving how China's systems are actually fine while ommitng the fact that their systems are mandated by the state. Is Chinese propaganda what makes it to the front page of HN nowadays?
> Is Chinese propaganda what makes it to the front page of HN nowadays?
Yep. Because USA is a country which still ostensibly has free speech norms in its society, so you could get human rights commentary one day, foreign propaganda another day (even though the federal Trump government arrests political opponents), where meanwhile many human rights movements are banned in China. As the Soviets would say in the early 20th century, "And you are lynching Negroes". False equivalence is the bread and butter of authoritarian propaganda. By equating the two, we may fail to distinguish right from wrong and slide further toward authoritarianism.
> The only difference between your phone and China's social credit system is that China tells you what they're doing. We pretend our algorithmic reputation scores are just “user experience features.” At least Beijing admits they're gamifying human behavior.
Um no. That is not the only difference by a LONG SHOT.
If I want to evaluate whether or not I want to involve myself with you, in any capacity, then that negotiation is between you and me. I can ask for references. I can ask for a credit check. I can go pay for a police background check. I can read public review sites. Or, I might decide that because you listen to country & western music you're not a real person and I can't know you and leave the vetting at that.
Consequentially, however, that dealing impacts our relationship and none other. You might find other people who don't care about the same "social credit criteria" that I do and you might find yourself dealing with them instead.
That's kind of the beauty of this thing we call "freedom." Anyone gets to choose who they want to deal with (or not) and make their own individual choices. The "systems" they opt in are always opt in (or at least they should be).
The difference between a government "social credit" system and individuals (businesses or people) vetting other individuals based on their own chosen requirements is force.
A government system mandates this across society in a broad authoritarian sweep. Get on the bad side of "the party" and now you are a social pariah and will not have any luck finding anyone who wants to deal with you, country music lovers be damned, because it is forced upon everyone. A business has no choice but to apply "the" system because if they don't they get punished. It is not opt-in, it is a one-sized-fits-all mandated by force of law system that removes individual discretion and choice from the equation.
That's a LOT different than just "we're upfront about it."
Furthermore, while I appreciate when authoritarians are honest about their violations of basic human rights and freedoms, that doesn't suddenly make what they are doing OK. I don't want to deal with a thief who is honest about their thievery any more than I want to deal with one who tries to hide it.
We often think of "social credit" as something far away, like in China. But it’s worth noticing how our own systems are starting to blend with state power. Just today, Graham Linehan, a comedy writer, was arrested by five UK police officers over social media posts when entering the country.
We may not call it social credit, but in practice we’re already building it.
While I broadly agree with the article's point, this part stood out to me as the author not really knowing that much about Utah:
> the image [of overt social-credit tech in public] is so powerful that Utah's House passed a law banning social credit systems, despite none existing in America.
More like the LDS Church banned social credit systems that would compete with theirs lol
I come across as rather "stuffy," here, but you won't find instances of me fighting with others (a mild exchange is the most I'll do), or harassing folks.
There's a reason: I used to be a real asshole troll, in the UseNet days (Don't listen to the folks with rose-colored glasses, telling you that things were better in those days; it was really bad).
I feel that I need to atone for that. I'm not particularly concerned whether anyone else gives me credit (indeed, it seems to have actually earned me more enemies, here, than when I was a combative jerk).
I do it because I need to do it for myself. I feel that we are best able to be "Productive members of Society," when we do things because we have developed a model of personal Integrity.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 99.5 ms ] threadBut it misses a huge nuance on the whole "dystopian" thing. The main thing about "social score bad" takes is that the government will use that scoring. It's not private <-> private. Everything the author mentions about the various scoring in the US (and EU for that matter, although to a lesser extent in some cases) is between you and private institutions. The government does not "track" or "access" or "use" those 3rd party scores.
It's a bit like 1st amendment in the US. You have the right of free speech with regards to the government. That means the government cannot punish you for your speech. But that says nothing about your relationship with private parties. If you go to a government institution and tell them their boss sux, in theory you shouldn't be punished for that, and they'll keep serving you. But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar. Or any private property. Tell them their boss sux, and you might not get service.
So yeah, there are lots of 3rd party rating services. But they're mainly between you and those 3rd parties. The government mainly stays out.
I mean why not? Any customer that effectively makes the company look bad can be banned by the company.
I bring up Uber/Lyft in particular because 99/100 drivers break traffic laws. The speed (10-15 miles per hour above the speed limit), they tailgate which is both putting me in danger, putting other car in danger, and is illegal (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...). They'll do things like stop a full car and half past the waiting point at an intersection (have pictures of this). In other words, there a line behind which a car is supposed to wait. Then there's a crosswalk. They've stopped the car so it's past the crosswalk while waiting for the light to change. They turn right on red when the sign says no right on red. Etc....
I'd give them all 1 star out of 5 except for the fear mentioned above. That my "social credit" with the company would have them drop me as a customer.
Zero. Are everyone really that terminally online? I reject most things that use an app. Yesterday I encountered a coffee vending machine that required an app. I walked away. Uncle Ted was right.
otherwise, people have always judged each other with any way they could
>real life also has social credit. were you an asshole to the bartender last week? that goes to your reputation at that bar. did you volunteer with a local non-profit? that goes to your reputation with that organization. even without an algorithm, people remember.
The larger the social network grows, the worse this system performs. Stereotypes develop because we don't have capacity to judge each individual, confirmation biases reinforce stereotypes until individuals cease to exist, as the stereotype prevents them from becoming close enough to ever overcome it.
So while this system has always existed (well at least as long as recorded history), it continuously worsens and is increasingly at odds with a globalized world.
These are the emergent fruits of living in a complex society, where one cannot realistically track reputation of everyone they encounter across all areas of life. We could move away from some of the formalized systems, if we decided to go back to shaming people for poor behaviors.
The first time I visited China I was under 21 but I had heard the drinking age was 18 so I went to a convenience store to buy a beer. Person running the till was probably 12 and didn’t say a word or ask for ID. Unbelievably lax compared to the US sometimes.
I generally think it’s easier and more effective to track the outputs rather than the inputs: you don’t need to track how many beers they buy, just outlaw public intoxication. And enforce that law.
What if I want to buy copious amounts for a party? Or there was a discount so you want to stock up? This seems a bit shortsighted, it is not always the case that if you buy something then you need to consume it right away.
Depending on the type of bankruptcy declared, debtor exams happen here.
> The gap between Western perception and Chinese reality is enormous
They inserted "nationwide".
The social credit score in one China region (khm Xinj... khm) is truly dystopian, and I bet people there don't care whether it's "nationwide" or not, if they can literally be sterilized or get sent to concentration camps because of that.
But they said it's not nationwide! As of 2024.
Of course the most frustrating part about that is as the US and other western countries start sliding into authoritarianism, people deny it because they don’t feel like it’s authoritarian.
Edit: To clarify, I don’t think life is exactly the same - just that the consequences of authoritarianism are much more insidious than they’re portrayed.
At a very superficial level, sure -- people get up, go to work, go out to eat, go to the movies, fall in love, get married, pay their bills, get sick, die, etc. -- like humans in the West. But this is all within the bounds of what the government decided you should adhere to. If you step outside of those bounds the consequences can be severe and without any legal recourse.
Because authoritarian regimes are a law to themselves, rather than applying the law, they're highly susceptible to corruption. Whether you get in trouble or not depends on who you know (in China it's called guanxi). I lived in China for 6 years, ran a business there; I can tell you the system runs on guanxi.
Access to information is highly restricted. All public media and social networks are censored and/or self-censored. There is no freedom of expression on anything that is "sensitive". This is _not_ limited to "minorities, politically active or those in legal trouble". Yes, people have learned to walk the line carefully.
It is more relaxed than the Mao days or the USSR (I lived there too) where you literally had someone on every floor of a building whose job was to report on what everyone else was doing. But it _looks_ more relaxed than it is. If you've visited China, or even stayed there a few months, or studied there for a year as an exchange student, you won't notice it. But believe me it's there. The educated class know it but they've either a) accepted it ("mei banfa"), or b) have emigrated or have made contingency plans for their kids, or c) are carefully subversive.
The truth of the matter that you neglect is that in many countries the minorities, allowed political activity, and many other aspects change without proper notice or disclosure following a strategy that originated from Mao China where the government keeps people guessing. Namely, the Anaconda in the Chandelier paradigm.
This is done not only because of issues within government, but also for the benefit of the ruling class to repress the general population using techniques based in torture to promote automaton-like behaviors from induced stress.
The brainwashed masses will always deny reality in such an environment.
When you have subversive elements that have broken the guard rails and caustically destroyed resilient systems making them brittle; bringing things to crisis and then attempting to silently seize power, and they fail to actually do it, you get the natural rise of authoritarianism. This is what happened with Hitler, and in many respects it was the Communists of the time, as well as the post-WW1 reparations, and economics that paved the way for what came after.
Its insidious yes, because people don't recognize or realize the reason the dominoes fall, and the consequences are just a cascading series of generally but not specifically predictable events in history. It certainly also makes matters worse when you have runaway money-printing to further cause issue.
If the cycle was to be stopped before the consequences, it should have been stopped by the cohorts that gradually and subversively put it into action in the first place, but they wanted to seize power instead, have their cake and eat it too. The people of such a group epitomize many of the deadly sins, and they have willfully blinded themselves to it.
You go shopping, go to work, see friends, have a few beers or maybe a smoke, eat out, go to weddings, birthdays and funerals, play sports. People run businesses, post memes.
The way non-OECD, "non-democratic" countries are portrayed in the West gives us a very false sense of superiority.
We have the same problems: gilded elites, crushing poverty, persecuted minorities, illusory participation in governance, terrifying police, rampant corruption.
I'm not saying everywhere is identical, there's a spectrum. There's just more similarities between countries than differences, in my experience. The things that often distinguish are more cultural and geographical than political.
That's... Sufficiently concerning, don't you think?
They are less prepared for problems. And so suddenly problems happen all the time.
But when there are no problems... Things are going well for the average person.
In it families who can not trust one another, hierarchies of incompetence with bribes upon bribes, no legal recourse to anything, a caste system of actual misery and no perspective for that to ever change. And that is peace time. In wartime the ethnic majority progroms and kicks everyone else out of the country.
That's true right up until your infallible dear leader invades your neighboring country, fails, and rapidly starts ratcheting down social controls in a desperate attempt to preserve political stability. I don't think Russians would describe day-to-day life as "mostly similar to the west" anymore. China could be next.
Or god forbid you want to have some say in policy ... are concerned about opportunities.
Let alone the fact that how authoritarian varies wildly, just like how free ... but they're not the same.
In democratic nations: You aren't allowed to do anything, but you are free to speak up against political power and challenge them as much as you please.
Or that's how it used to be.
Short term maybe. But there are reasons people want(ed) to move to the USA, and I don't mean refugees. A lot of college educated well-to-do folks have always wanted to come here. Also, the innovation, economic strength, and military strength of the USA will all suffer if the level of corruption increases - because corruption is a burden on the systems that produce those results. You can't get rid of it, but you can't let it run rampant either.
There are also crazy countries like Iran and North Korea.
You could argue that the CCP is totalitarian, which is authoritarianism++. The problem is that since technology can be used for totalitarian ends, it will be. Putin is authoritarian (certainly by no means Communist), yet reports I hear from Russia make it sound much like China. There's the forced conscription bit for his war against Ukraine, too. Erdogan seems a little better, but his economics-denying policies caused rather large inflation, and life seems to be definitely impacted in other ways, censorship being one of them.
Well, how about just old-school kings? That's Trump, or MBS. Trump's changeability is a feature of kings: once you know where to look, you see it lots of places. Grimm's fairy tales have a number of cases of the king looking favorably on someone and then being influenced against them by someone else; it's practically standard if a king shows up. I saw Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale" last week, and it revolves around a king who is having a great time with a visiting king. He wants the other king to stay a while, and has his wife persuade him. But the king thinks he is too easily persuaded, decides this must be because he is sleeping with the queen, tries to murder his friend, and tries the queen for treason. It's a bit sitcom-y, but sitcoms don't work if the premise isn't believable. You see it in Reynard the Fox, where the king is quite easily swayed by smooth words. Darius in the book of Daniel gets manipulated by his courtiers into passing a law against Daniel. Trump does political "fire and motion" (see Spolsky's old blog), so he appears unusually changeable, but random decisions are just a part of kings.
So no, life is not just mostly the same as we have now in the US. What we have in the US is a historical aberration. Unfortunately, we have the authoritarian Left (which denies being authoritarian by redefining words), and we have a foolish authoritarian Right. If the rest of us don't get our act together we are likely to slide back to historical norms.
The "happy path" is, the major differences start when you have any kind of a problem, then not having any functional institutions makes the experience _very_ different from the west.
I can surely tell, the memories of my parents and family members that had to live under the regime isn't really that those were better days, unless one was a collaborator.
Try to do some public comment that can be misused to mean some kind of bad opinion on the regime, and off you go, out of the map.
Like how Amnesty International came to be,
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/amnesty-inte...
Fascism only doesn't have an effect in the early stages in the sense that loading a gun has little effect on those not frightened by it.
Actually using it is going to become impossible to ignore.
Look, social credit is neither a new concept nor is it destined to be some Orwellian/Black Mirror/Authoritarian tool that keeps undesirables enslaved in low-wage work or targeted for “reeducation” - that’s a decision we allow Governments or Corporations to make on our behalf by refusing to bother regulating these systems or holding bad actors accountable.
The sooner we accept that this is possible, that it’s already here in many cases, the sooner we can begin negotiating regulations in good faith with one another. Maybe it’s placing limits on the data corporations can gather and retain, or maybe it’s preventing the government from acquiring private data without transparent judicial warrants tied to crimes. Maybe it’s something else entirely!
All I know is the current status quo enriches Capital while harming people, governments, and Democracy. I think that’s bullshit, and we should do something about it.
Non-existent in the country I live in. There's a national registry of debtors and people end up there for a very good reason.
>Linkedin, Amazon
There's no reason to consider these to be essential services, I am not using either and I'm doing perfectly fine in life.
>Instagram
LOL
>Uber, Airbnb
There are several copycats, traditional taxis and hotels are still a thing and public transportation or your own car are valid alternatives
What even is this article? I skimmmed the rest of it and it just seems like the crux of the article is about proving how China's systems are actually fine while ommitng the fact that their systems are mandated by the state. Is Chinese propaganda what makes it to the front page of HN nowadays?
Yep. Because USA is a country which still ostensibly has free speech norms in its society, so you could get human rights commentary one day, foreign propaganda another day (even though the federal Trump government arrests political opponents), where meanwhile many human rights movements are banned in China. As the Soviets would say in the early 20th century, "And you are lynching Negroes". False equivalence is the bread and butter of authoritarian propaganda. By equating the two, we may fail to distinguish right from wrong and slide further toward authoritarianism.
Um no. That is not the only difference by a LONG SHOT.
If I want to evaluate whether or not I want to involve myself with you, in any capacity, then that negotiation is between you and me. I can ask for references. I can ask for a credit check. I can go pay for a police background check. I can read public review sites. Or, I might decide that because you listen to country & western music you're not a real person and I can't know you and leave the vetting at that.
Consequentially, however, that dealing impacts our relationship and none other. You might find other people who don't care about the same "social credit criteria" that I do and you might find yourself dealing with them instead.
That's kind of the beauty of this thing we call "freedom." Anyone gets to choose who they want to deal with (or not) and make their own individual choices. The "systems" they opt in are always opt in (or at least they should be).
The difference between a government "social credit" system and individuals (businesses or people) vetting other individuals based on their own chosen requirements is force.
A government system mandates this across society in a broad authoritarian sweep. Get on the bad side of "the party" and now you are a social pariah and will not have any luck finding anyone who wants to deal with you, country music lovers be damned, because it is forced upon everyone. A business has no choice but to apply "the" system because if they don't they get punished. It is not opt-in, it is a one-sized-fits-all mandated by force of law system that removes individual discretion and choice from the equation.
That's a LOT different than just "we're upfront about it."
Furthermore, while I appreciate when authoritarians are honest about their violations of basic human rights and freedoms, that doesn't suddenly make what they are doing OK. I don't want to deal with a thief who is honest about their thievery any more than I want to deal with one who tries to hide it.
Congratulations on opting out of your business relationship with Experian, then.
We may not call it social credit, but in practice we’re already building it.
> the image [of overt social-credit tech in public] is so powerful that Utah's House passed a law banning social credit systems, despite none existing in America.
More like the LDS Church banned social credit systems that would compete with theirs lol
There's a reason: I used to be a real asshole troll, in the UseNet days (Don't listen to the folks with rose-colored glasses, telling you that things were better in those days; it was really bad).
I feel that I need to atone for that. I'm not particularly concerned whether anyone else gives me credit (indeed, it seems to have actually earned me more enemies, here, than when I was a combative jerk).
I do it because I need to do it for myself. I feel that we are best able to be "Productive members of Society," when we do things because we have developed a model of personal Integrity.