Chinese getting their distopian world going

https://www.foxnews.com/world/china-...scoring-system

Have to give them credit, and admire how they've blended capitalism with totalitarianism. Sure they still arrest people and take them to re-education camps, especially in the western provinces, but how ingenious to just cut off their ability to get a loan or a job promotion rather than the very unsubtle and expensive old methods like midnight abductions and beatings.

with literally hundreds of millions of cameras coming online to track behavior they can now keep people in line with relatively little labor at all. they can leverage their secret police in ways that would make the East German Stasi look like amateurs.

There's lesson here for us too, the coming censorship born of corporate power as much as government in this country, but it is coming nonetheless.

But likely not with the sheer audacity and ambition of the Chinese plan.

Oh and hey, companies like Google, who refused to work on US weapons projects b/c of morality, are helping the Chinese repress a billion people. "Do no evil*", * unless you get paid a LOT and it's some other country you're repressing.

Google has a great search engine and I use the heck out of it. The rest of the of their services I stay away from. They already know more about me than I want to think about.

It's stunning the data Google and Facebook have gathered on Americans. They store everywhere everyone with one of their phones goes, and logs for how long to boot. They can then connect that to our purchasing habits and everything else.

And they are now using it for more than just making money and selling our data to marketers.

I used this analogy here before, but it's like if in the building of this country all the roads were owned by private companies, like the railroads. Yes they are private companies but effectively they are how we communicate and interact now.

it is where we assemble and associate, where we speak. Imagine if private companies owned the roads and could say "we don't want businesses that sell X on our roads", or "we won't let anyone travel our roads to go to this political meeting we don't like"?

that's what we have here today. For example Paypal has blocked Infowars. OK, INfowars is a crackpot site, claiming things totally outlandish like the Sandy Hook shooting being a false flag hoax. I get that's offensive, and if I were the business providing them merchant services I would have the same reaction.

But by being able to shut that down they can shut down that voice. OK that voice is pretty out there, but do they leave a similarly extreme voice like maybe a BLM or Antifa site up and making money? Who decides where that line is drawn?

Google and Facebook have already decided you can't advertise firearms on their platforms. So Google will not accept ads for guns or accessories, Facebook won't approve anything with guns in it.

I have a spring auction coming up with firearms. facebook says I can't promote that auction on their site b/c they don't agree with selling firearms. OK, I can promote it elsewhere, it's a private company. But how long will that last? Newspapers are near death, and political groups are pushing all these companies to take political stances on what to allow and disallow.

These companies control the water supply, the access to markets. They are modern day railroads, controlling the infrastructure on which farmers and merchants utterly depend the same way the oligopolies of railroad companies controlled access in the late 1800s.

At that time we had to regulate them with the first federal authority to do so, the ICC. It was because the railroads were able to strangle farmers and merchants and keep every penny of surplus for themselves.

Modern internet corporations have that same power. Get de-listed on Google's search engines and see how your business does. You'd think the profit motive would keep that in line, but since they are turning down gun revenues right now I'm not very confident.

We're behind the Chinese, but we're at least in the same neighborhood, a parallel if somewhat brighter path perhaps.

How they punish their "deadbeats", including ringtones installed on their phones to shame them.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/chinas...-of-bad-credit

They've got it down. I admire them a lot. Orwell, Bradbury, they all figured a totalitarian state would simply not bother with controlling the lowest rungs on their socio-economic ladders and focus on the middle and upper classes, but the Chinese have figured out a way to break that resource constraint and control everyone from top to bottom with great efficiency.

The great distopian writers didn't foresee the ability of AI and enough computing power to allow that kind of individualized, 24/7 control over a billion person populace.

So kudos for the Chinese for creating a world where Winston Smith would have nowhere to hide, even among the proles.

Oh, and special congrats to Google for being willing to work with them, and all our tech companies for giving them the tech to do it so they could sell iphones and such to the Chinese market, and it's esp. great that Google then refuses to work with DARPA to find ways to counter the Chinese threat.

If you're going to sell out to totalitarianism, sell out hard and totally, that's my motto.