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 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.
I have met people who have fled autocratic countries. Life sure looks ok there from a surface level. Unless of course you are from the extended family of someone who displeased someone better connected. Or you are in the way of someone. Or you happen to have said something which displeased someone. Then life is not ok at all and there is approximately nothing you can do about it.
Of course everyone there knows that’s how it works. That’s why everyone there shuts up and lower their head because they don’t want to be the idiot having a run up with the power that be.
To return to parent's point, we want to say it applies only in autocratic countries, when we have similar pockets of despair as well.
Not everyone can just "fight the man" if they feel prayed upon or abused. Most here can probably solve critical issues with money or even move countries if/when shit hits the fan.
But lower social class people aren't in that mindset, and the power local authorities hold on their life is a lot heavier.
It would be a deep mistake however to fall from the traditional defence of illiberal countries and think that the imperfection of liberal democracies somehow make authoritarian countries as legitimate and acceptable. Oppression there is not an imperfection. It is the system working as designed.
To take a mild example, we don't look at federal countries and assume it affects citizen's life in a radical way that can be straight attributed to the federal nature of it. Germany biggest differences from France probably aren't because of that. Sure it has an impact, but not in an easily predictable way.
Authoritarian regime are prone to abuse, but that's not enough to guarantee it will be managed worse than the worse democratic countries. We've have democracies fully melt down and becoming literal hell on earth.
I don't intend to praise authoritarian regimes and don't see them as sustainable, but IMHO there is a lot more to a country than just that.
You are missing my points by orienting the discussion towards an abstract concept such as well managed.
Authoritarian countries mistreat part of their populations in a way which makes them morally abhorrent and that’s by design. You will hardly find people pointing it out and defending the marginalised in authoritarian countries because they themselves become the target of the state.
I’m not blind to the fact that most of the apologists I have met in my life who are always happy to point that it’s relative and what about the majority actually happy often want nothing more than to be the authoritarian power themselves. This seems particularly relevant in the current American context.
We have democracies that either hang people on public places, pass eugenic laws, sentence gays to prison, or will engage in ethnic cleansing under official orders. Even in milder areas, prventing whole sections of the population from getting citizenship or limiting their reach (mass incarceration etc.) are well know levers that help a country be nice to its most vocal population while shutting down a whole section of the population. Those are readily available tools, whatever the political system.
And being well managed isn't abstract, you might be better off living in Monaco or Morocco, which are full fledge kingdoms, than a democracy like Nigeria for instance.
I live in a post-Soviet country taking an autocratic turn, I have friends fleeing. I will probably have to leave myself and it's making me miserable. I do not mean to diminish their experience or the experience of anyone suffering under an authoritarian government.
If you'll read the context of the post, I was talking about how Western (predominately US) media portrays other countries, which is frankly dehumanizing for the most part.
I grew up thinking that war starts, life stops; that a different form of government radically and instantly transmogrifies every aspect of a society. We are a peaceful, normal, democratic society and everywhere else is war or repression. A primitive dualism which has not stood up to my experience.
This is what's implied in the news and the movies, and forms a basis for the acceptance of the Western versions of the shared problems I discussed. It is often exaggerated in a way that lines places up for a bomb-driven democratization process.
It also means that, as GP noted, we don't feel the problems coming along when they do.
Do you get where I'm coming from?
It's easy living as a foreigner in autocratic countries. You've got a "get out of jail" card called a foreign passport which not only protects you for political reasons, but also gives you an escape hatch for any reason, government or not.
For locals its entirely different. You don't get the "they're a foreigner, so be nice". Victim of crime? Don't bother with the police unless you have a fat bribe. Ripped off in your business? The courts won't care. Accused of a crime? Bribes are your only recourse.
So yes, the mundane day to day is the same, but when problems pop up the difference is like night and day. In authoritarian country you're at the complete mercy of those with more power than you.
This is a wild take, unless you mean that in thw sense of wake up, eat, work and sleep kind of way.
If I call the prime minister a criminal liar - worst that will happen is I get a defamation lawsuit. In authoritarian countries I go to a prison camp, and the neighbors are the one to report me. Even if I'm not political - if step on toes of people in party I can disappear and the rest will know not to ask questions.
The couple I’ve seen, the people aren’t that direct in their comments.
And I’ve seen reports of citizens being arrested for a day or two while they’re investigated about whether they’re legal or not, before being released, all without warrants or even probable cause. Sure, not a prison camp, but far from what I’d expect in a free society.
But the seeds of disappearing and detaining people without cause are already sprouting in the US among the general population, even if only among a tiny minority of shitty people. And that’s scary.
You might get physically attacked by some neanderthal if you're openly gay in public in the west, and in some middle eastern countries you get stoned on a public square - but hey we all unwind and have some fun when we can, so it's pretty much the same ?
This is pretty true of most authoritarian regimes. State violence isn't publicly broadcast or when it is it's usually framed as "fighting crime".
To Godwin this, life for a non-jewish, non-communist, non-disabled citizen in 1940s germany was typical, even pleasant. I mean, heck, the german government at the time was taking the Jewish citizens property and giving it to favored classes.
The deceptive part of an authoritarian regime is that the outgroup is almost always a minority. The number of people that experience outgroup treatment is almost always a small portion of the general population.
Even in the strictest and most brutal governments like north korea, so long as you abide by state rules things are just fine. You can even go on vacations out of the country if you are obedient enough.
A measure of government is how it treats internal state enemies. Crime exists everywhere, so the question is what's criminalized and how are criminals punished. Also importantly, what crimes does the state look away from if they hit political enemies.
Also the path upwards in society changes a lot.
Compare this to enemies of the state, where we're allowed to wantonly express, depict and act out, sometimes literally, desires and calls for even lethal harm against them.
Russia, for example, runs elections and up until recently allowed the opposing party on the ballot. Same with Belarus. China and Iran also have elections, but the candidates are vetted through the state party. I know now Americans from each of these countries (except Iran). One who still votes in the Belarus elections even though they know it won't change anything.
NK is about the only modern regime I know where all opposition is punished. And even then, there's been reports of a loosening of enforcement.
That's not true. It requires wilful ignorance in some cases, but sometimes not even that.
Take, for example, russian troll farms. They initially were made to shift in-group opinion, because in-group started to a. get mad at Putin, b. reaching the conclusion that most of the in-group was dissatisfied and something had to be done.
Small forums in Russia (and HN is a small forum) aren't even monitored, but you can find abusive and violent language towards politicians in big social russian networks pretty easily.
So you can be in-group for authority and think yourself a free-thinker who isn't afraid to say the truth and cyberbully the president.
Remember the immigration czar said if he had his way only 100M white folks would remain.
If those who are asserted without proof to be illegal can be sent to die in a foreign prison camp so can you.
Try implementing direct political action and see how Western governments treat you. You'll be deemed a terrorist, and if you're caught alive, you'll never see the sun again.
this is what 99% of people spend 99% of their time on. If you give most people the choice between a place that has jobs, clean trains and where women can walk safely at night and one that looks like the Purge but you can insult the prime minister we can make a bet how people will vote with their feet.
This is why China makes the claim that it is actually more democratic[1]. This is not merely propaganda. They are making the case that delivering material goods to people rather than exhausting yourself in some idiocracy-like circus of abstract rights is what should be the point of government.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole-process_people%27s_democ...
That absolutely is propaganda.
The very fact that you can't have any political party of the CCP makes it undemocratic.
However hard China tries to change the definition of "democracy", won't change that fact.
That is only undemocratic if it is against the will of the population. If the population is choosing to only allow selecting employees from one party, then that is perfectly in line with democracy. A "political party" is just a labor union by another name, after all.
Western countries by and large value free and fair elections, but that isn't what defines democracy. Hosting free and fair elections to select the autocrat of your choosing would not make a democracy. What ultimately defines democracy is the population at large having control. How they choose to use that control is up to them.
There are plenty of good indicators revealing why China isn't democratic, but that statement in isolation isn't telling. Keep in mind, though, that the claim wasn't being strictly democratic — rather, it claims that on the spectrum it is more democratic than the alternatives in use.
Politics is the question of how political heterogenity is resolved. The political system is the range of acceptable methods used in that resolution and how power is distrbuted amongst those competing groups. In that restrospect, Democracy and Authoritarianism exist on the same axis. The former resolves things peacefully through voting, the latter has a single interest overriding all others violently.
Hence if you say "population at large having control", it's largely a meaningless statement because if a population is in agreement there is no need for politics and thus no need for a political system. In reality, politics always exist, groups are not homogenous, especially not a group on the size of billions. 99% of people don't really care about what OP says, in so much that they would forsake that for more pettier thing. We will all disagree over the tiniest of issues, and thus from there heterogenity springs and a political system is formed.
Hence, the issue of "delivering results" is largely tangenital and irrelevant because that occurs after Politics. It's a given after all that a interest group would achieve it's goals without the political restraining it. So no, China isn't "more democratic" because the CCP is effective in achieving it's goals when it already has total political control. That's axiomatic.
But there is explicit rejection of plurality, and thus the expression of political heterogenity, there is only one center of power allowed, and political decision-making is resolved violently. So it is Authoritarian, full stop. It is not "Democratic", in the same way it is a oxymoron to state a "Democratic Absolute Monarchy" or a "Democratic Military Dictatorship" even when the latter two can produce results. If you want to call it something, just call Authoritarian Populism.
Control does not imply lack of negotiation. The population at large still has to gather and sort out their issues and contentions, ultimately settling upon an agreement in the end.
A representative democracy takes that model and decentralizes it, seeing the population at large gather only at a local level, hiring messengers to carry the final determination at the local level to a central meeting place where it is compiled with the results of all other localities, but the idea of people gathering, communicating, negotiating, and ultimately reaching an agreement remains the same.
> Hence, the issue of "delivering results" is largely tangenital and irrelevant because that occurs after Politics.
Right, but we're talking about government, not politics. "Delivering the results" is the role of government. Politics takes place during the time when the people have gathered. Once they figure out what they want, then it is handed off to the hired workers in the business known as government to fulfill the wishes of the people. To reiterate: Politics comes before government gets involved...
Well, it does in a democracy, at least. I expect what you are trying to say is that in China the politics happens inside government? That's fair. But what China is saying is that in many so-called 'democracies' the politics is also happening inside government, thereby making them not really democratic either. So, while it doesn't claim to be democratic, it is saying that on the spectrum it is closer to being democratic by at least trying to serve the interests of the population at large rather than, say, "corporations".
What I'm trying to point out here that a democracy is going to try to serve, or rather balance the interests of everyone involved. And that means the corporations do have a seat on the table. Along with HOAs, Investors, Religious Groups, Farmers, Foreign lobbysits, Internet Advocates, Feminists, Minority Advocates, White Collar Workers, Blue Collar Workers etc. There isn't really something called the "interests of the population at large" here, populations in reality are heavily heterogenous with often conflicting interests.
If we talk about the lack of safety or train networks, etc, it's not because of a lack of competence, it's because the sum of vested interests of not having that exceeds the sum of interests that want it, and neither side is willing to compromise that nothing happens. Fustrating, but it's not "idiocracy" as OP says, that is what it means to cooperate in reality. Getting nothing done is very much what it means to be a democracy. If you choose not do, you can end up like Somalia or Syria in total chaos.
When it comes to the CCP, the nuanced but important distinction here is that the CCP is only seat on the table, and they explicitly prevent others from sitting. Their pejorative objective is power for it's own sake, and the action of "caring for the citizens" is more akin to a owner caring for it's pets in accordance to it's own particular perspective than everyone having a seat on the table with metaphorical guns pointed at another. Those other interest groups I mentioned, they cannot coerce the CCP in the same way that they can in USA.
After all, the State of China dosen't have a official military, the PLA is explicitly the armed wing of the CCP that declares loyalty to the party first and foremost. That's a key distinction here from the US Military that serves the Constitution, not the Democrats or Republicans.
Of course, there is inter-party heterogenity, and also the fact that acting like a totalitarian dictator dosen't work well economically, so of course the CCP has to concede a bit. But claiming you are "more democratic" because aren't the most extreme version of authoritiariaism and far less pluralistic than most liberal democracies then it's a awfully banal statement, and more of a propaganda term really with retrospect to OP.
Incorrect. In a democracy, the people gather, present ideas, discuss, argue, and eventually reach agreement. That agreement may not be exactly what any individual wants, but the population at large does reach an agreement as to what is in its interest as a whole group.
> What I'm trying to point out here that a democracy is going to try to serve, or rather balance the interests of everyone involved.
Whereas in reality the interests don't show up. In fact, in the USA, showing up to the table (a.k.a. lobbying) has come to be considered abhorrent behaviour, even though that's technically the civic duty of all citizens in a democracy. Lobbying (i.e. gathering, presenting ideas, discussing, arguing, and eventually reaching agreement — and passing that result onto the massager, in the case of representative democracy) is the only way a democracy can function, fundamentally.
China isn't cut off from the rest of the world. They notice just as well as we do that even if these places are democratic on paper, the people don't actually practice it, instead leaving control to a small group of figureheads and the few people who do show up to (i.e. the 'evil' lobbyists). Their claim is that leaving control to that small group of people who are pushing their own personal interests, is, on the spectrum, ultimately less democratic than an equally small group that ostensibly takes in all the considerations of the population at large.
I infer that what you are trying to say is that in a place like the USA, the social environment would allow people to change their ways, kick the small group to the curb, and start practicing democracy, if for some reason they wanted to in the future, without tremendous pushback, whereas the CCP would not be so accepting. That is no doubt a fair assessment, but completely talking past the original point. It wasn't said based on some kind of future hypothetical.
Well then it's important then actually to undertand what the CCP itself believes here. This is not what they are claiming explicitly. Wang Huning's critique of America isn't because it is poor or mismanaged, it's because it accepts heterogenity, in multiculturalism and diversity that he believes leads to social decay, loss of cohesion, and weak stability. And National Sovereignity and Powerful State is Paramount, not the livelihood of the people. To that extent, heterogenity is suppressed in favour of enforced homogenization all through a powerful central party. Dissent, Historical "Nihilism", Postmodernism, Plurality, cannot be tolerated because they weaken National Direction.
They don't find the idea of small group of corporates leading as problematic because it still provides a single coherent direction. No, what they fear is when everyone goes to table and starts pushing their own opinion.
If you understand this, that their rejection of liberal democracy comes from fundamental point through influence of figures like Carl Schmitt and Marx, the idea that they are "democratic" is just largely just rhetoric for foreign audiences. And it's worldview that quite close to American Postliberals like JD Vance or Peter Thiel. Whether you agree with it or not is another thing, but this is not democracy in any sense of the word. You need to know at least what side you're speaking for, because many posters in HN certainly are displaying irony in supporting China while simultaneously opposing Trump, when Trump's authoritarian actions of cracking down on minorities and opposition are very much what the CCP would be endorsing. And by Trump's own words, he is justified by the "Will of the People".
They don't claim to be democratic, only more democratic. The alternatives compared against aren't democratic either, so the hypothetical possibility of the CCP being, on the spectrum, more democratic is theoretically sound. Reality isn't, though. The trouble with the claim is that what makes something more or less democratic in the real world is completely nebulous, allowing anyone to pick arbitrary criteria to make the claim.
> You need to know at least what side you're speaking for
Information can be inaccurate, but it doesn't have a side, fundamentally.
No. As shown in Wang Huning's Neo-Authoritarianism, being more democratic is bad. Ideally they'd be operating on greater homogenization.
>Information can be inaccurate, but it doesn't have a side, fundamentally.
You need to seperate foreign rhetoric from actual political beliefs. Do you understand here what are the implications of Huning's beliefs, and lineage they draw from Schmitt? Or are you going to make the claim that Trump is more "democratic", which is banal it's meaningless.
Of course it is, and so is the opposite claim.
But that wasn't what the parent post said. The word "merely" does work in that sentence - i.e. "This is not propaganda" has a different meaning to "This is not merely propaganda"
"merely" here makes the claim that it is not only propaganda, it is not just propaganda. It has substance beyond being propaganda. It is that and more.
It's almost refreshing to see a good old-fashioned well-constructed propaganda edifice, and not a big pile of crap, one that that aims to get people to believe in something rather than nothing at all.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood
https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/on-fake-hannah-arendt-quotat...
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8220792-the-point-of-modern...
It's wild to me that you believe this.
I've spent a few years in China and have made close Chinese friends. One constant I see is Chinese will not admit publicly, but they'll whisper to you in quiet corners that that know their government is authoritarian and the West is more free.
Well, umm, far more people (rich, middle, poor) are emmigrating out of China with preference for Western Liberal Democracies than Westeners immigrating in. The thing is, in terms of job opportunities, the USA still far surpasses China for same amount of individual effort. And if I want to just live comfortably, Japan, Australia, Korea are all valid options.
Like even the abysmally poor birthrate dosen't reflect on China with regards to the long viability of what you describe.
Like, having mandatory bomb checks in your metro systems is already on the excessive and comical side of authoritarianism here. Most countries, even poorer ones don't do that.
> Singapore is much less authoritarian than China. The PAP plays dirty in a legal way
> having mandatory bomb checks in your metro systems is already on the excessive and comical side of authoritarianism here
What would be the impact on your life of publicly calling names your company's CEO on social media ? You make it sound like a defamation lawsuit is peanuts, when you'd probably be fighting against an army of lawyer while you're unemployed, if you're in the US that definitely sounds like a life defining event.
I also wonder if most authoritarian régimes even have prison camps ?
This suggests the worst that could happen if you called the US President a criminal liar is that you would go to federal prison.
I suppose the conclusion is that the US is an autocracy.
That's the point. You have the same type of problems everywhere, but not the same quantity and quality. But people seem to not care or understand those differences, and weaponize the concepts, instead of looking at the outcome.
This is politics.
> We have the same problems: gilded elites, crushing poverty, persecuted minorities, illusory participation in governance, terrifying police, rampant corruption.
and if we wanted to give ANY society a geometric representation it would have a point at the very top that would represent the most powerfull person, and would then widen out to represent the average and then taper down to another singal point, that would represent the single person in that society whoes life was composed of nothing but horror not of thier own fault and who will die with no chance of any help or redress. We can name those living at the top, but pretend that the wieght of society is not carried by a succesion of nameless inocents , comunist, socialist, religious and other societies give lip service to this, but all fall short of declaring a policy that no one will ever be ignored, forgotten and abandoned, but each and everyone of these systems has an elaborote way of doing reputation management or credit score, merit, titles,etc to signal virtue/worth, that can be gamed, so it is. And here we are, and my time/attention must now, be diverted back to the game, lest I loose more than the few points of carma it costs me to speak out here.
Why such drama with many words, when all can be summed up with that. Yet somehow, people consider life much better on one side of the spectrum, while other side is considered utter shit. So much that many people are risking their lives, and some are dying just to 'move across spectrum'. It may be a hard concept to grok for typical western kids who often struggle with finding noble worthy hard-to-achieve goals in their lives, who got good life served at literal plate without moving a finger, but trust me its damn real.
I've grown up during communism, in country heavily oppressed by soviet russia and littered with many of their military bases, ready for that WWIII battles that never came. Not 'spent some time someplace so I am an expert', my whole identity was only that and nothing else.
Yes we all need to go shopping, its just that my parents couldn't buy any fresh vegetables nor fruits for their son, who suffered mild malnutrition due to that. And sometimes the shelves were empty or full of one type of canned sardines (I mean whole supermarket, nothing else, beauty of constantly failing central planning, unless you were part of regime/communist party).
Yes we all went to some form of school, but I was being brainwashed to be obedient future soldier for absolutely rubbish ideologies. If I would say something bad about regime even with utmost innocence of a small kid, my parents could easily end up in jail, lives ruined, even distant family torn apart for good.
Yes we all could travel, its just that I could not travel even within different communist countries, not without regime's special approval stamp in passport. Neutral, or god forbid proper western countries were off limits, unreachable, you would be shot on sight on the border, or torn apart by dogs.
And so on and on. Yeah, its just a spectrum, what a joke.
I lived in Bulgaria & Czechoslovakia in 70's and 80's, and my memories are quite different than yours.
You can buy fresh vegetables and fruits (in-season, local, not shipped from Peru) & dairy products & bread & eggs as much as you can afford (and the prices were affordable, stable for a dozen years). Bananas, oranges & other exotic stuff was not available, maybe around Christmas if you had the right information and waited in a long queue. Slightly better but nor really good with better cuts of meat.
I never ever saw empty shelves in shops, not in Bulgaria, not in Czechoslovakia. I am pretty sure of that, because in 1982+- we were on a 'friendly exchange trip' to Kiev (elementary school organized, with a school in Kiev reciprocally coming to us a couple months later) and saw those there, and still remember the shock.
Jeans and such stuff was for kids with connections or family in the west. Few people had cars, mostly skoda/lada/moskvich/wartburg/trabant/polski fiat. Small, very basic shit. Public transport worked, to every little village. Nothing fancy, but functional. You could live without car, not like in USA.
I have never met a soviet soldier in my life at that time, those poor souls were closed-off at military bases and were forbidden getting out (maybe to prevent them seeing than life in Czechoslovakia was so much better than in CCCP).
The education in schools was focused more on math/engineering/hard sciences, and kids of those times had better background in those than the kids growing today, although humanities are another thing. We did not sing the hymn, like they do in USA. Everyone knew those are lies. But a photo of the current leader of the communist party was hanging there. Communist indoctrination was everywhere, you learnt to live with it and filter it out. Unlike the west, where most people still believe the official narratives.
I could see Austria behind the iron fence from the window of my bedroom, seeing the lights of the cars driving there, but thinking I will never see those places in my life.
One afternoon, I saw my younger brother (late elementary school at that time) walking across the field towards the fence, too curious and stupid. Suddenly, from a well-hidden bunker, a couple of guys with rifles and a german shepherd appeared, and escorted him out. No shooting at sigh, no beating, no record of 'dangerous anti-communistic element'.
My uncle, serving as a young conscript at Shumava forest, late 50's (he had no choice about that), on the border between Czechia and Western Germany, got knifed in back by somebody trying to flee to the West. Survived, 2cm from kidneys. Ended up living most of his life (since 1969) in USA.
My mother threw away her communist card, shouting, at the face of the local party committee, with the words 'to hell with such party, when I, a widow with two small kids, have to live in such apartment (small room + small kitchen, dark, a toilet and a kitchen sink with only cold water (no bathroom), small coal stove the only heating). She did not go to jail, eventually we got better apartment (central heating, real bathroom and toiled, hot water).
You know, those are real life anecdotes. Not the propaganda tropes endlessly replicated.
If you were politically active, anti-communist, you lost your engineering/science/arts/whatever fancy job and ended up e.g. as boiler operator of the local heating plant for municipal heating. 50's were wild with several highly-politicized processes ending up in capital punishment (so was McCarthyism in the USA at that time), but 70's and 80's were relatively tame.
In the next class, there was a son of a well-known dissident. Had no problems getting into high-quality high school (merit-based entry exams, mostly math), not sure how would the thing went with the university studies (math/engineering probably OK, law/philosophy probably not), but the fall of communism came.
There was widespread small-scale stealing from the state ('if you are not stealing from the state, you are stealing from the family'), although the real large-scale looting came after the fall of the communism.
There was even a joke about this:
⸻
In Poland, during the times of hard socialism, a math associate professor calculated that a shipyard worker earned three times more than he did. So he thought “screw this,” crossed out the titles before and after his name, and went to work in a factory.
Of course, he was doing well in the factory — he didn’t strain himself too much and earned three times more than at the school. Then the factory introduced an evening school for workers, with the promise that whoever attended would get a raise. So the associate professor signed up and started going.
On the very first lesson — bam — mathematics. The level was like the first year of high school, so the associate professor was just dozing off, not paying attention. The teacher noticed him, called him up to the board, and asked him to calculate the area of a circle.
The professor started writing, but for the life of him couldn’t remember the formula for the area of a circle. So he decided to derive it. He wrote the conversion to polar coordinates, then integrated it, and ended up with –πr². So he stood there, wondering where the minus sign had come from.
And from the back row, someone whispered: “Reverse the integration interval.”
⸻
Also, behold, people queueing for toilet paper in 88 in Czechoslovakia: https://youtu.be/O6qUqFy2FEU
This sort of thing is happening in the states. Maybe we're the commies now.
2) jokes are jokes, exxagerating a kernel of truth to the point of absurdity is what makes the joke. The truth is, the salary of prof was never anything special, but was marginally better than the salary of average worker. There were some highly (i.e. 2x, maybe even 3x?, salary scales overall were really flat) paid worker occupations, miners were one of them (maybe due to work hazard). The way to get the luxuries was not through money, but through connections (yes, mostly communistic ones).
3) shit happens (the accompanying text talks about a fire in the main/only paper-mill making toilet paper in Czechoslovakia), there were queues when the rumor spread 'there will be bananas in the local fruit&vegetables shop'. There were people panic buying toilet paper at the start of COVID also, maybe its a local specialty :-)
One anecdote I remember from my youth was people routinely taking their windshield wipers off when parking somewhere out (those were notoriously in short supply and easy to steal). So yes, there were supply problems, no rose glasses, but nothing extreme.
As with everything, there is too much polarization: some people remember only the bad stuff and it was a hell on earth for them, others remember only the good stuff and emphasize that. As always, the truth is in between.
Not exactly. Australians did exactly the same thing. There were people who bought ridiculous amounts of toilet paper and stored stacks of it in their garage and other people missed out, causing massive demand vs. supply problems for a extreme future outcome that never occurred. It's the selfish-survivalist greed of individual humanity en-masse.
The same thing happens occasionally with petrol, unexpected demand for fear of missing our creates the supply problem. At extremes if it happens with banks, the run on banks mean the bank collapses because it's over-leveraged and can't give back everyone their savings because those savings have been lent but not repaid yet.
So a supposed long-term democratic capitalist society (Australia) behaved the same as the post-past-forced-dictated-communist society of former Czechoslovakia (now Czechia.
I think when humans get - it just occurs in different ways based on the local envioronment/scarcity/society and your version of brainwashing of your local upbringing. How many of us consider propoganda from the inside looking out (hard to identify) vs. taking an 'outside looking in' perspective? It's way easier to shit on North Korea than your local/national government. You have constantly shift your thinking in questioning your local news as much as non-local news.
Anecdotally, the recently voted #1 Australian song of all time music video was filmed there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIBv2GEnXlc, and one of my favourite footballers ever was Czech, so I may be biased. I really Prague when I visited, aside from the tacky tourist strip near the river on the non-castle side.
>I really Prague
I really liked Prague... except for the tourist stretch on the non-castle side of the river which way tacky. We have our own tacky shops where I'm from, they're just not all together in a long continuous span.
Tell me what these narratives are. I do not disagree, but I am a westerner who never left home.
And our socio-economic system is the best there can be, don't even think about changing anything about it (questioning this is a total taboo).
The people distrusting the official narrative, think that we don't actually live in a democracy an there is an elite in power who just keeps this as there facade.
We have had a pretend democracy in the US for the last 60 years.
I rarely offer an opinion here, expecting in advance it will gray into oblivion, however politely or sincerely it's presented. I see it happen to others often enough to remember.
In most cases I see the word democracy used, I have the exact thought, "pretend democracy". I don't deliberately try to be a morose cynic. I've just become incapable of thinking the very word without the subjunction "pretend".
The corporatism burgeoning here makes this seem undeniable to me. Am I that delusional? Is it really not that bad? Do the so called people really have a level of influence over their society befitting of the word? I don't see it. I just see words.
For me, as a born eccentric, aspects of the concept terrify me. I tend to favor the principles of a Republic, with unassailable foundations impervious to popular fervors and whims. Ideally with heavy democratic principles fortifying the Republic. I don't see either.
I look at recent affairs with FTC for example, and too many things to list. I don't even know what to call what I see. Recipe for nightmares comes to mind, but I know the flaws of emotions well enough.
Personally I find myself retreating into a quasi spiritual state, remotely bordering asceticism. Fading into an in but not of it.
I'm convinced it's a brutally complicated situation. Evey day, though, I think it could be drastically simplified with kindness, but that's a subject where I'm inclined to go full macabre and will hush now.
Okay but that is exactly why I would prefer a western liberal government. It is better and that is ideal is worth criticizing authoritarians for, and fighting to keep in the west.
Microsoft bundling IE was so egregious that the department of justice took time off from chasing drug dealers and terrorists and came within an inch of being split up if it didn't back the fuck off on strangling the web. Financial fraud on Wall St or in the boardroom? Skilling, Fastow, Ebers. Hard prison time. Clinton lied about chasing skirt in the office, ended his career, real consequences.
Even once the Internet was becoming common, the idea that something typed into it might get you fired? Preposterous!
I don't know what being a "western liberal" government means to you, but this thing where all the walls have ears and billionaires do fucking anything they want and no scandal can damage a politician and all the surveilance and technology is an ever-tightening noose and everything is on a permanent record?
Sounds pretty damned Soviet to me.
My point is that there is a difference and throwing your hands up and saying everywhere is bad obscures what is being lost and how democracies allow nonviolent ways to seize it back.
Same with the billionaires.
The entire problem gets painted as "other" but it's you: you're actually promulgating it by your very choice of language here!
What I care about is outcomes, what actually happens, what norms and institutional posture actually obtains in reality.
And on that basis, "western liberal" society has very little business holding its nose up about "authoritarianism" as a blanket term for rival nations in 2025. No one here is talking about Sudan or Turministan, they're talking about other advanced nations with participatory politics, robust social welfare programs, limited influence for oligarchs, and highly competent governance.
This becomes diffusion of responsibility because every cycle maybe 1% were directly embracing far white religious authoritarian. The consistency of those choices were sticky because the oligarchy spent decades ensuring.
The point being, very few people actively participated and there was no progressive decadal length comspiracy. But the reverse isnt true.
There was and is a decadal length conspiracy to become a far right ethnostate run by religious minority.
The left is completely comfortable with censorship. It is completely comfortable with DEI statements being required for college admissions or with establishing issues related to gender or race discourse that the population doesn't agree on as a matter of law.
A rule doesn't stop being authoritarian just because you agree with what is being pushed. Nor does it stop being authoritarian when it doesn't come explicitly from the government. I do believe the right has worse intentions on these matters, but the left has so, so, so much more power that it's absurd to even try to draw a comparison. The idea of college requiring statements aligning with right-wing values being tolerated in any way, shape or form for example is just unthinkable.
"Vastly less power", pray tell, would you rather piss on a Christian cross and post it on social media or a LGBT flag? What do you think would have worse consequences? Can you even imagine a prevalence of corporations showing to align themselves with the Christian right for a month every year?
The "Christian right" would, no doubt, sell their soul to have half as much power the left has. It doesn't even come close, it's off by orders of magnitude for crying out loud. If anything this power is exerted so widely you barely even recognize it. You see a pride parade, or any entity making an effort to promote or signal multiculturalism and it doesn't even register as left wing when it evidently is.
Can you even picture anything comparable to BLM, on the right? Can you imagine the right managing to pull a display of power comparable to disturbing the meaning of a word as basic as "woman"?
Where is this vast amount of power manifested? It's surely not in the form of respect, it's definitely not in the form of demographics, which dwindle year by year. Culture? What references are even there, Jordan Peterson? Nick Fuentes??? I'm just baffled by this perspective.
You're arguing that the people kidnapping people without due process and zero consequences, masked police, are equal to some arbitrary "leftist" in some time that's not relevant to todays political climate.
It truly is bizarre how mental gymnasts survive in this logical incapacity.
What do you think leftist means? I think we can divide it loosely into social and economic elements, and while aspects of social leftism have (sort of) made serious advancements in the last 50 or so years, the US has become more economically right over that same period. We’ve deregulated and allowed vast consolidation among corporations and wealth and income inequality have exploded. Leftists typically share many opinions with socialists economically, and typically don’t get along with the growing class of the uber-wealthy (they want to take their money). They don’t get along with huge companies so they don’t get campaign funding from them. The democrats are centrists with some progressive social policies (because they need to be to get money). They hardly ever do useful leftist things like tax corporations or the wealthy. Leftists have been screaming about palestine, dems hardly give it a peep and some are proudly, openly zionist.
> Where is this vast amount of power manifested? It's surely not in the form of respect, it's definitely not in the form of demographics, which dwindle year by year. Culture? What references are even there, Jordan Peterson? Nick Fuentes??? I'm just baffled by this perspective.
I’m baffled by your detachment. All three branches of the US government. Fox news for the olds. Joe rogan, the largest podcast I think, is moderate and constantly brings on righties. The corporations that make all our stuff and heavily influence our government aren’t exactly socialists. Academia might be the least right wing institution I can think of, and it’s a glorified jobs training program that rakes in money and holds enormous investment portfolios. If left means not lynching gays then sure, but otherwise our society is quite right wing in the ways that matter. Do you think a corporation putting up a pride flag for a month to make more money makes them leftists?
>Can you imagine the right managing to pull a display of power comparable to disturbing the meaning of a word as basic as "woman"?
>"Vastly less power", pray tell, would you rather piss on a Christian cross and post it on social media or a LGBT flag? What do you think would have worse consequences? Can you even imagine a prevalence of corporations showing to align themselves with the Christian right for a month every year?
Frankly, do you care about any issues that matter? Literally issues made of matter. Point me to material shit that affects lots of people. I can point at plenty of real, material issues that are produced and sustained by right wing economic and social policy. Homelessness, disproportionate incarceration, high recidivism, housing costs, soon power costs from datacenters, shit pay, pay not tracking productivity gains, shit infrastructure, tons of drug overdoses etc.
>Can you even picture anything comparable to BLM, on the right?
Maga?
>You see a pride parade, or any entity making an effort to promote or signal multiculturalism and it doesn't even register as left wing when it evidently is.
Yeah they do it out of the kindness of their fucking hearts right? I bet uber cares a ton about the minorities while they pay shit, deny you benefits, and raise prices.
The bogeyman of authoritarian left is just amusing.
(disclaimer: I've gotten more conservative as I've gotten older. It will happen to you, too)
Might be a hard metric for some people to confront, but the USA is one the least racist countries in the world. The gridlock in many ways is strongest signal of excessive plurality and minoritarianism (of marginalized groups) than of single power groups unilaterally controlling things.
And the incidence of 'being in legal trouble in USA' vs 'being disappeared in BAD COUNTRY XXX' is quite different, for almost all bad countries.
So not seeing a huge difference between liberal democracies and authoritarians.
At what point does it become authoritarian to you?
Reminder that Trump declared Zelensky a dictator for following his country's established democratic process.
They even put lawyers defending these politicians in prison for defending them... The constitution doesn't seem to matter since the government apparently don't have to care about it.
Your question deserves an answer.
The US was a liberal (post-Enlightenment) democracy.
Senator McCarthy was eventually kicked out of Congress for his witch hunt.
President Nixon was confronted by Republican members of Congress, and he resigned after this meeting rather than face impeachment.
So when I was a kid, lawmakers largely upheld the norms, the rule of law. Many of those same lawmakers might have today been considered racist or misogynist or might have failed some other standard of 21st century society.
As a liberal democracy, the United States has never been perfect, but it's always been worth improving.
"Eventually discarded when no longer useful" would be a more accurate phrasing. The witch hunts continued under other schemes and for other targets.
>As a liberal democracy, the United States has never been perfect, but it's always been worth improving.
Well, isn't that the case with every government?
We witch hunted. We also got lapped by the FSB most years. What saved us was our economic engine.
My wife's grandparents had a subscription to "Soviet Life" magazine, beautiful postcard photos and articles about the glowing future of mankind, collective posts capitalist society...
From the 1950s. We've got stacks of them. Wild.
So, yes: many intellectuals in the United States had an "I want to believe" attitude.
> It was a good witch hunt.
There's no such thing as a good witch hunt.
When you are targeting innocent people, destroying lives in the name of freedom, there can be no liberty.
Inciting mob justice is playing with fire. It's a form of insanity. Our judicial system was designed to find fact and render judgment as far from that madness as possible. It's imperfect but can be made to work.
> We very much almost lost the Cold War to the Soviets.
Anyone who spent a weekend in a nuclear bomb shelter in the summer of 1983 knows there was no winning in that Cold War. Everyone was losing.
> What saved us was our economic engine.
The short answer is yes, I agree.
There's a much longer answer. I toured a tiny bit of Estonia and Russia in the summer of 1990. I wish I could tell you in just a few words how I saw a thousand acts of bravery, many acts of brutality, and more than anything a million hungry people who wanted better for their children.
What saved us was our economic engine, our mutual commitment to the welfare and defense of our NATO allies, our intelligence service and our diplomatic corps. Career professionals and rational leadership.
Not witch hunts.
Only when McCarthy and those policies got unpopular, they let him do it as long as he was popular. So we will likely see the same with Trump, as long as he doesn't make as grave overreaches as they did back then likely nobody will do anything to him.
That isn't rule of law, that is rule of personality.
isn't this democracy at work? will of the people and all that?
A core part to liberal democracy is that the government must follow the law. If the government doesn't follow the law due to checks and balances failing then its not a liberal democracy.
Really popular policies have a wide support among the population, which means that they will became law, or even an amendment to the constitution. (Most countries have something like 3/5 supermajority requirements for changing constitutions, which is a lot more practical than the basically-as-of-now-impossible US procedure.)
At this moment, if you want to keep "liberal" character of the country, your "checks and balances" institutions have to act in a fairly authoritarian ways and invalidate laws which attracted supermajority support. What is then stopping such institutions to just rule as they see fit? Even checks and balances need checks and balances.
Nevertheless, I would say that "liberal democracy" isn't one that can always prevent illiberal policies from being enacted. I would say that it is one that can later correct them.
Note that historically, most obvious executive encroachments of liberty (Guantanamo etc.) in the US were later overturned by new administrations.
McCarthyism didn't have that much support from voters, so this isn't the issue, it didn't become law. The issue is that the elected representatives didn't do anything to stop it until it started having massive disapproval from voters.
Voters needing to massively disapprove of government abuse for the "checks and balances" to do their job means the democracy isn't working as it should, the government doesn't need to change the constitution they just need to keep disapproval low enough to continue with their illegal actions. In a true liberal democracy the checks and balances works, ministers who perform illegal acts are investigated and relieved of their duties without needing elected representatives to start that procedure.
I live in Sweden and I can't even find examples of a politician that blatantly ignores laws and procedures that get to stay for years here. I think the two party system is the biggest culprit, then you need support from both parties to remove criminal politicians, but that is very difficult to get when people have to vote against their own. In a multi party system each party is a minority, and allied parties are not friendly to each other, they gladly sink an ally to absorb their votes since the issue was the party and not the alliance, people wont move to the other block over such a thing.
Is widespread surveillance of private communications popular with Swedish electorate, or do people like Ylva Johansson support and even push such abominable things regardless of what actual Swedes think?
If the latter, it is not that different from what McCarthy once did, and our entire continent is in danger that this sort of paranoid dystopia gets codified into law approximately forever. At least McCarthy's era was short.
I feel the EU level is not very democratic since its more removed from voters, similar to the US federal level, I see the same kinds of problems in both. As long as the EU doesn't get the same level of power as the US federals I am happy though since local lawmakers can fix things.
I think lot of people I know would feel concerned about what might happen to them if they did that right about now. I don't pretend to know anything about you, but it might be worth examining whether the level of concern you expect people would have about this might vary quite between people with different circumstances than yours. At least to me, it seems pretty likely that if a country were to slide into authoritarianism, not everyone would feel the effects equally all at once, so the fact that you haven't felt a change in your level of concern about this doesn't necessarily mean that a shift isn't happening.
To be clear, I'm definitively not saying that it's impossible for anyone to know whether it's happening or not because we can't know the experience of literally everyone, or that I'm 100% positive what we're experiencing will end up in undeniable strict authoritarianism for everyone. My point is that I do think there's been a genuine shift in how safe a large number of people feel from persecution in the past year and a half that's based on things happening to them or people in similar circumstances to them. It's certainly possible that I'm in a bubble where I'm associating with a lot more people than average who have these concerns, but the reverse is equally true for someone who hasn't been noticing these things, and I do think there's sufficient evidence that the concerns are real. The implicit assumption that everyone feels equally comfortable in their rights protecting them just isn't something that seems accurate right now.
don't be ridiculous there are anti-trump protests every single day. Even on Labor Day (last Monday).
I would not be disappeared. I would not be charged with a felony. I would not be imprisoned for years or decades.
And, where the rubber meets the road for my personal mental health: I can say what I think to my friends and family. They may disagree. They may even argue. They're not going to report me to the secret police, nor are there secret police waiting for someone to report something.
That distinction really matters.
Thank you, that's a much more concise way of stating exactly what I meant
This is very different from what things are like in places like Russia.
they fact that you know about this case at all and how much it has been in the news and the outrage and protest against the executive branch speaks volumes to the differences between the US and real authoritarian regimes.
I'm not trying to minimize the dangers of Trump. My point is that there is a huge difference in the level of authoritarianism between today's US and what I consider to be actual authoritarian countries. Today's US is one of the freest countries on the entire planet. We should keep it that way. I don't see what good it does to act as if today's US is anywhere close to actual authoritarian countries.
Is today really "closer than many Americans would have considered possible"?
People really should try to understand that if someone says "I think that the US is vastly freer than Russia", it does not mean "I think that there is no reason for concern" or "I think that the US is going in a good direction".
Actually, they do. If you have the wrong color, they take any reason as a pretext for action.
Not yet? Currently, they are only imprisoning and deporting legal permanent residents and people on student visas for their political opinions. But denaturalization is clearly on the table.
True, but ICE is imprisoning and deporting US citizens simply for being an immigrant with the wrong skin color.
The administration recently announced that it will review the visas of 55 million immigrants, and factors like political opinion are on the table when it comes to their choice of who to go after.
"First They Came"[1] was written to try to wake up people like you, whose privilege blinded them to the significance of the events around them. You need to start paying attention before you lose the country you thought you knew.
right now they are "deporting" (without due process it's kidnapping/trafficking) in order of skin colour. they will work their way down towards you.
Singapore might be a state run authoritatively with the same party in power for 60 years, but you're free to walk around at any time without fear of any crime happening to you. Or public projects that "just work" where in the "western liberal" case their deteriorate or are tied up in bureucracy.
And life if "you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble" is not roses in the west either. From murder by police (e.g. "walking while black") to having stuffed being pinned on you because you're a union activist or for civil rights, etc.
And that's not "now with Trump". That was the case under Obama, Bush, Clinton, all the way to McCarthy, and even all the way after and before the Civil War.
Are you saying this was already happening, just as much, under Obama, say?
Are you saying that only this particular type of government abuse matters, so if prior governments didn't do this particular thing, then they're A-OK no matter whatever else they did?
As for your strawman:
--
According to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data from fiscal years 2009 to 2016, more than 3 million individuals were formally removed from the country during the Obama administration. Annually, between 58% and 84% of these removals were so-called "summary removals" carried out through legal procedures such as "expedited removal" and "reinstatement of removal," which do not involve a hearing before an immigration judge. On average, about 74% of removals during this period fell into these categories. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-deportations-court/
--
No police intervened for those 3 million people either (except to deport them summarily).
But the guys that took them didn't wear masks (maybe), so that's ok.
Why? Because you're breaching innocent peoples rights and removing their ability to get justice.
The fact that prior administrations did this on a large scale without the need to have gangs of thugs shows that the lawlessness of the administration is unnecessary to meet the ends of managing immigration.
Could you explain why you consider this a strawman? It sounds like you're onboard with the dismantling of USA democracy?
I'm unmoved by the argument. If the choice comes down between "the trains run on time" and "I can arbitrarily imprisons for my speech", I'd happily live with trains that don't run on time.
No, it's an added argument that "and everyday life is the same, if not improved".
Many people would prefer living in an orderly state like Singapore, than in a place they fear for their safety, public order is deteriorating, their cities are dying, public works are crap, politics are a circus, and so on, even if they don't get to vote one of two parties that do mostly the same things in favor of billionaires while their life worsens.
That's no 1920s fascist Italy. Nor is China for that matter.
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.
Do you have any data to back up that claim?
E.g. the number of diversity lottery applicants (one of the easiest proxies to judge how many people express their interest in moving to the US) went up from 12 million in 2011 to almost 20 million last year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_visa#Number_of_visas_issued_...
Where are you getting this information? Visa issuance more than doubled between 2020 and 2024.
https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Annual...
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...
I’m not seeing a year to year comparison on the page you linked. It’s calculable from the monthly figures, but I’ll wait and see if the GP responds with his own source.
Yes, primarily because its the richest country in the world and it's "easy" to make money.
I think overall you are correct but probably still not safe to generalize. If you're moving to escape persecution then just being "on the other side" achieved this. If you are economically motivated then just leaving doesn't guarantee anything, you can be worse off. This circles back to the idea that the people who are persecuted by a regime paint the public opinion of that regime.
I have friends from Eastern Europe who emigrated to North America (mostly Canada) in the early '90s only to move back shortly after when the reality didn't live up to the hype and their expectations. They had a better life back home. The move was economically motivated, not escaping persecution. Many families under authoritarian regimes had the option to move to a Western country but not being actively persecuted meant they had no hard push and decided for the "comfort of familiarity".
East Berlin slipping into authoritarianism is a good showcase for this. Most people chose to stay in place for long enough to build a wall. We're talking years in which they saw the reality around them but only the ones who actively suffered from persecution chose to leave. Today plenty of East Germans still look back fondly at those times because they didn't feel the objective pain of persecution, only the subjective general suffering of "I could have better but don't".
Daily life can also be fine in fascism if you don't belong to any "unpopular" groups and don't care about any. Until the customary war starts, that is...
It's good to know liberal democratic progressive countries such like the US would never start a war.
I do not entirely disagree without, but lack of freedom does intrude into day to day life to some extent.
Accept elected officials whose policies don’t match up with popular opinion and accept standard employment hierarchy.
Prison is at least 3 hots and a cot.
Decent prison conditions tend to overlap with countries with decent human rights.
IN authoritarian countries you might very well be starved or tortured in prison.
You might also just disappear and your body may or may not be found in an identifiable state.
Just because the censorship is outsourced to the private sector, mostly, doesn’t make the day to day any different when you rely on support of the private sector, alongside discretionary support from the state
Visa holders are experiencing detainment for this specific thing, this cycle. And in other western democracies anyone can be fined and imprisoned for it as well
Wishful thinking that there is imperviousness to disagreeing with the state narrative in the west
The reality is that it’s not always on the mind 100% of the time and you learn to appreciate the day to day life under Eastern and Western authoritarian systems
Sounds a lot like having a job.
I recall in 2016 British employers who said they would fire any employees they discovered voted for Brexit - of course the only way they could find out is if people said how the voted but that is a free speech issue.
I think we need legal protections for things like free speech that we have traditionally had against governments to apply to employers and service providers. I think legislation that prevents various forms of discrimination proves it is achievable.
Picking on not the worst country in the world, but one I know (and was living in at the time this was at its worst). Things have changed there since, thankfully.
but not landed you in prison or disappeared, I take it?
Not adequately or safely.
https://impactjustice.org/new-report-provides-first-ever-nat...
Was your school worse than that?
It's typical that when someone is arrested for "X action with Y detail" (e.g. buying a knife with intent to kill someone) people who oppose the arrest will only state the X (and for some reason this works). To correct the record when someone says "I don't expect to be arrested for buying a knife", "I do expect to be arrested for planning to a murder" is a correct response.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_prisoners_in_the_Uni...
Intelligence and genetics.
Genders and gender specific spaces.
Gender and social/professional roles.
Those are topics which have "sky is blue" level ideological certainty, and not open for debate.
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.
Free system don't make those easy either, but you have way more layers of protections, safety nets, and way less death sentences looming over your head. Money and who you know matter less the freer a society is.
However, this is an abstract concept that people can't grasp unless you lived it.
That's the problem with building a society: people can't be arsed to do anything unless they felt the pain. They can't picture problems they didn't live through.
This is why you'll see people telling you the UAE is the best things since sliced bread, only to come back years and years later, once they actually paid the price. They had a car accident with the wrong person. They tried to do business by got pwned by corruption. They got sick because of pollution. A family member got in jail for BS reasons.
All that can happen in a free society, it's just less likely, and the consequence are less dire.
Very hard to make people get how important it is. Anything that requires nuances and projection is near impossible to communicate to the mass.
That's why we have tribes and symbols. This is the only way to sell a project to big groups of humans, because then you substitute the complicated concept with a simple us vs them or good vs bad narrative.
Of course, once you do that, people think even less, and you get extremism rising.
This is why, IMO, free systems never last. Our last 80 years run was a statistical anomaly. We got very lucky.
That affects everyone.
That's... Sufficiently concerning, don't you think?
And do you think American media really distorts the "other" side more than Chinese or Russian media distorts what life in the west is like?
having lived for a long time in both china and america: yes. chinese people are given a much more accurate view of life in america than americans are given an accurate view of life in china
thats why there was that meme going around earlier this year when tik tok people joined rednote that said americans were shocked to learn their media was lying about how bad chinese people had it, while chinese people were shocked to learn their media was telling the truth about how bad americans had it
having lived for a long time in both china and america: yes. chinese people are given a much more accurate view of life in america than americans are given an accurate view of life in china
When I visited Shenzhen and then came back to the US recently, I felt like I went back in time 15 years.
I've been saying on HN for years that the commenters here should buy a ticket and go see China for themselves. It's extremely safe. Far safer than any American city/suburb. No, they're not going to detain you and send you to jail. They don't care about you. People are generally friendly even if you're from the US.
"Some Americans reported having their content blocked or accounts suspended for material deemed sensitive by RedNote, as content moderators control what the Chinese audience can see. A search on RedNote for Xi Jinping, China’s leader, comes up blank."
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2025/0129/Ameri...
It seems like the Chinese government works pretty hard to make sure its own citizens don't understand how bad things are in China. Maybe they fail at that but it isn't for lack of trying.
"It's hilarious to me that one side is sharing that Chinese people are convincing Americans that they've been fed propaganda about China, and the other side is saying that no, it's the Americans telling the Chinese that THEY are being fed all the propaganda! This is hilarious and dumb, but not as crazy as what happened on the Tiananmen Square in 1989!"
https://imgur.com/gallery/idea-that-bunch-of-americans-flood...
For all its faults I think I trust America's freedom of speech to make information available better. We should be diligent in protecting it as a principle because although the government is somewhat constrained by the first amendment, others are not.
I'm not vouching for any country, I'm just saying the public perception in the US is completely distorted.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese had a slightly more realistic view of the US.
from the most modern cities to the most distant rural regions
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...
You only realise you can’t do something when you come into contact with trying to do it. Otherwise you live your life blissfully unaware of how free you arent.
Its like how you feel that driving is safer than flying, despite driving being the most dangerous thing most people do… you only realise how dangerous it is when its too late.
> Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.
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.
You absolutely can. The obvious example most frequently talked about is that there are plenty of things you can say, which if the wrong person hears them or they trigger automated alarms, it will get you an unfriendly visit by people flashing badges. They might be there to give you a threatening talking-to, or they might be there to arrest you full-stop.
The less obvious example is that even if you don't cross any lines to trigger a direct response like that, it's recorded all the same. It will shape future interactions with law enforcement agencies. You will be flagged as a person of interest, as a hostile actor, etc. Legal speech can very easily make you suspicious and law enforcement will treat you accordingly before they've ever met you. It's not a recipe for a good outcome when the people with badges start off thinking you're likely to pull a gun on them.
At times, it's been far worse than this. I'll direct you to COINTELPRO, or any of the other mryiad of historical instances where the US government has protected its interests by going after domestic elements it sees as subversive.
> On this issue Europe is definitely backsliding
Europe never had free speech to the degree that America did. In many countries, it's unlawful to speak ill of royal figureheads for example.
> for example, see UK police showing up at doorsteps for social media posts
This absolutely happens in America, as I mention above. You might say it's to a different degree, but the end result is the same.
> You can be jailed for years for political speech or wrongthink.
All it takes is for you and your ideology to be labelled as extremist and terrorist, which is a wholly arbitrary line to draw.
Also, there were several news in the past decades about cases when police was even at the doorsteps of perpetrators before their mass shooting because of their social media posts (but more times, Americans were disappointed that police didn’t prevent the shooting even when there were incriminating social media posts). The problem is not social media posts, it never was. It’s their content. And also, it’s not just social media posts most of the time when the police come to your doorsteps even here in Europe. But that cannot be made to sensationalist headlines.
It’s still worse the law situation in Europe, but an adversarial government can find ways to circumvent even the better laws. And from the outside, it looks like that this would happen exactly in the US.
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.
I'm not talking about Russia, China or North Korea, though of course it can also fit some of those countries.
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.
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.
There are also crazy countries like Iran and North Korea.
There's nothing special to China in this regard.
There's very little real data on day to day life in NK, mostly fantasizing by the West, but what do you think is day to day life in Iran? I doubt it's crazy. It's probably a lot like in many other countries. Iran is not a hell-hole.
As a foreigner I was generally expected to stay away from big protests when they flared up, and internet connectivity sucked (though this was also a time when the world was less dependent on near-constant internet access). Otherwise it was pretty much like any other "middle-tier" country.
I was a teenager back then, so it was especially nice in certain ways: Tehran was pretty safe, so I had a lot of freedom to get around unsupervised that I later did not have in some other "more free" places.
If you call it what it actually is, too many Americans might actually connect the dots.
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 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.
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.
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.
Burma, maybe. But even that's a stretch. You're exaggerating for dramatic or comedic effect, that much is certain.
Isn't corruption the reason given by Xi Jinping for removing from their position multiple high ranking CCP members, generals, regional representatives and billionaires?
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.
I had a very difficult time finding a place to rent as I had no credit score. Only places that were available without credit score was a room to share. That was not an option with a cat, wife and kids.
Finally, I found a place that was willing to accept the entire year's rent up front. Moving such a large amount of money from Canada to US had its own set of hurdles.
Once that was sorted out, I had to deal with yet more craziness to buy a vehicle. I decided to buy a CPO Mazda from the dealer in cash (using a cheque, of course). Once I signed all the papers, they ran a credit check on my newly created SSN. The system could not find my SSN. So, they denied letting me buy the car because they couldn't accept such a large amount from a person they could not verify. My passport and Canadian driver's license were not acceptable proof of ID for the dealer.
On the flip side, my long history with Amex in Canada was ported over. So, they quickly set me up with very high limit credit cards.
We already live in social credit but I fear the ones maintained by companies might be better for the consumer.
What I took from the experience (especially after going through various iterations of it in several other countries) is that most communities are biased against migrants/newcomers. Egalitarianism would be nice, but in practice nepotism and chauvinism are encoded in policy.
Loans are a different story, it varies a lot - but in my country for example, after working 6 months in a full-time job you can get a mortgage without issues. All they care about is how much you are earning, and that you don't have any other debts so that you couldn't afford the repayments.
For me it's crazy not being able to rent a place even paying a whole year beforehand.
I’ve had an identical experience as an 19 year old college dropout trying to rent an apartment and buy a car with no established credit history. It at least 5 years to qualify for my first unsecured card with $1,000 credit on a 6-figure salary. I could not qualify for any vehicle, not even a used cheap Honda Civic with my lack of history, and I had to play the Craigslist rental game for years as well.
The reason being that you can't be held accountable across borders. I may have good credit in Canada, but my German landlord can't sue me there if I fall behind on rent.
It is a real pet peeve of mine that people take such hard stands on issues like this when it's so easy to check what's actually happening first. This thread isn't the most egregious example, but it is an example of someone just imagining a system with a big flaw and then suggesting a solution to the problem they made up.
[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/social-security-n...
Their business replies on collecting and storing vast troves of data that influence your credit score.
Were the likes of Experian and Equifax taken out of the credit system, you would see a massive credit crunch as every business that relies on them would have to manually verify anyone's credit score (which could introduce a whole new set of biases) or forego that completely.
Interestingly, when it comes to business credit checks, i.e. Financial viability and director background checks and history - this is something an LLM could very easily find red flags from publicly accessible data before forking out money for a full report.
Take the Netherlands, they don't use scores; rather you would request a report that details any known factors that influence creditworthiness.
The difference is: - the score is a simple weighting (0-1000) that is systematically calculated by the bureau. - Without a score provided, you have to make a judgment yourself on that individual's creditworthiness from their report.
Go to another dealer, I have bought cars with a personal check without having a credit check at all. I think that's a really unusual policy.
SSN's aren't perfect, you can still commit identity fraud. But high value financial transactions get safer the more you can verify about someone.
No, It's absolutely not. Like i said, I've bought multiple cars with personal checks, all over $10,000, never gave SSN or had credit check. Unless it's some sort of local law, it's a ridiculous policy. Find another dealer.
>Dealers are often involved on the financing side directly, and their systems are just set up to require a Social Security number to put anything into the system.
This seems totally made up and doesn't match my experience at all.
If your dealership is letting you drive off with a vehicle with a personal check (not even a cashier's) and without any kind of credit check or database identity verification, that's actually pretty wild. I assume you know the owner or salesperson personally. Otherwise, you could be a rando passing them a forged check, and then they'll be out both cash and car. I don't know many businesses willing to take that $10K+ risk.
Duly noted. I might be in your position one day in the far future. Will prep for it.
Thanks :)
Not really. Try to rent an apartment in Germany (any EU country really).
Canada / USA is a breeze in comparison.
I moved to Switzerland and all I needed was a clean debt register entry and my employer contract.
And then every year after that they required another 12 months rent up front, when it came to the annual tenancy renewal. Track record of paying the rent wasn't good enough to prove that I could keep paying the rent.
You have a deposit, typically three months rent, that's typically enough to indicate whether or not you're able to pay rent.
They absolutely do in Germany and Austria. Renting is almost impossible without pay slips from LOCAL employers. Pay slips from your previous EU country don't count. So relocating is a huge bitch.
>Whether or not you can pay rent is entirely your problem (North EU).
It immediately becomes the landlord's problem here when they're legally not allowed to evict you once you stop paying rent. So they're trying to be 110% sure you're the ideal tenant who always pays on time. Especially since for many private landlords the rent you pay them is also their mortgage payment to the bank.
>You have a deposit, typically three months rent, that's typically enough to indicate whether or not you're able to pay rent.
Deposits don't mean you're able to keep paying rent since that deposit might be borrowed money or from illicit activities. Landlords want to see stable employment (well known employer, that you're past probation period, etc), not that you have a lot of random money in your pocket when you sign the contract.
I don't support this status quo, but it is what it is because it's a sellers' market and governments don't want to change that.
This doesn't sound right. In which "North EU" country sis this BTW?
Been a while for me but afaik nothing has changed: if you lived and worked here before, then a couple of your last salary statements are sufficient (bar the problem of actually finding anything and being accepted, but that is besides the point).
So I am definitely not loving or defending this, but afaik compared to needing years of time to build your credit score in a "smart" way (and by hearsay I would probably mess it up, "just be employed for 3 months" sounds very easy to do?
It isn't besides the point at all. It being a seller's market means landlords can and do ask for whatever paperwork they want which often enough includes a SCHUFA report. You can choose to not provide it but they can also choose to rent to someone else who does.
Social credit would be like if the government didn't let people lend to you for being a commie or trans. Social credit is not something you can just sort out on the phone.
Seems to me to be dependent on how the incentives line up.
A credit bureau WANTS you to part with any money you might have for a car. So it works out when they control the issuance of your loan.
But would you want the NRA to control the social credit system regulating a firearm purchase?
I prefer that to Chase controlling it: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/19617/00019768782300... (the link details an instance in which Chase was alleged to have debanked a bipartisan, multireligious charity headed by a former U.S. governor, senator and ambassador). The NRA would probably let me buy the gun, after all!
If you read the comment, you’d notice that there were no loans involved whatsoever.
If you can’t rent or buy a car without a credit score, you should only be allowed to buy a gun until you have proven that you’re a trusted member of the society.
Requested a personal card with no credit score and that somehow went through fine despite friends in similar circumstances getting rejected. Best guess is because I had a company issued Amex already they could use that as history
>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.
I was musing over something, though. We have creeping Orwellian things like face recognition and the policing of chat histories. But some of this is private, as in, not done by the state. Even when done by the state, it isn't in most places to prop up the regime and prevent dissent. It's big brother mechanisms without a Big Brother. I speculate that it's genuinely motivated by preventing disorder, because (is this true?) over the last couple of decades people have got more disorderly in petty ways to do with thieving and harassing and scamming one another. Then the people don't like it, and so the people politically demand heavy-handed policing of the people.
Because of what, the decrease in crime?
Consider how many children were terrified to swim in the ocean after seeing Jaws for the first time... statistics do very little to allay existing (irrational) fears for most people.
People are not afraid of sensational crime next door. They want crime to be happening where political opponents live, so that they can feel good about punishing them.
In summary, everybody has started liking doing everything in a hands-off way via the internet, but also everybody hates it.
That was never possible before. Historically, conversations didn’t leave records, and when they did, they were trivially burned. There was no sense that the police should have access to the records because there were no records.
The technical and ethical problems of this “common sense” are far from obvious to most whose primary exposure to and mode of thinking about policing and technology is what we see on TV.
Tl;dr: violent crime doesn’t mean anything when you have billions, but instability in the system does. Surveillance state tropes exist for a reason, and that’s b/c they add resiliency to a system that would otherwise collapse.
I don't know in which world you're living so here are officials, likely downplayed, numbers for the EU, from an official EU website to get you back to earth:
"In 2023, sexual violence offences, including rape, continued to rise in the EU."
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Rape numbers are through the roof in France (nearly 40 000 a year now): they went x6 in 20 years.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1072770/number-of-rapes-...
"The number of violent crimes in Germany increased in 2024 with a sharp increase in rapes and sexual assaults.":
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-sees-rise-in-sexual-violence-a...
Thefts and violent thefts are on the rise all across the EU. When I was young I didn't hear about being stabbed to death so that their Rolex could be stolen.
In the city were I grew up in now people firing full-auto AK-47 is a weekly occurrence.
Someone who walks into a major EU city and tells me its safer than it was 20 years is very blind.
Meanwhile the risk of my daughter getting raped is very real. And the fault is as much on the rapists as on the ones who try to refute irrefutable numbers.
> When I was young I didn't hear about being stabbed to death so that their Rolex could be stolen.
Exactly, you didn't hear about it, such violence was quite common in some places, but there was no 24/7 online reporting backed by immediate social media outrage. Things are much much more hysterical now.
The mobile phone created an occupation for people who would otherwise be on the street committing crime. It paced people, even common kids, adults, we commit much, much less crime than the previous generation, and even less in unreported crime (bar fights, revenge against a neighbor, etc.). The boomers used their hands!
But the problem is: If you follow the average strength and fight training of citizen from 1970 to today, violence should have been practically zero. It is much higher because some subsets have abnormally high rates.
You claim the average is going down. OP claims it’s going up. Both are right. Violence wins.
Big Brother does exist: it's money. If there were some single named entity, people would rebel against it, so it's diluted and realized through financialization of one's interactions with other humans. Big Brother is invisible to individuals because it's us, and no individual thinks “I'm Big Brother” when it's their point of view looking out. It's an illusion that creates and enforces scarcity but only works if everyone else also believes (power word: “Full Faith and Credit”).
Check out “Wishes and Rainbows” from The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston for a primer on our road to rootα: https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/economic-education/wi... (favorite panel, top-right on page fifteen: ◀ 1̵1̵ + 9 ／ = 20 ▷)
Then in most places it's increasingly scarce in presence and continue to exercise influence on a very tiny part of the population.
The US constitution not extending government limitations to society-scale corporations is a very convenient loop hole. Similar situations exist in other liberal-on-the-book countries.
Total Surveillance but fractional. We live in a society but people only see parts of the whole. No one has all the interactions
But yeah it's better than some capricious bureaucrat just pulling decisions out their ass with no serious recourse, except all those cases there the process is just that.
The whole and entire point of all of this, is fairness and reasonableness.
The fact that mistakes are sometimes made, even corruption sometimes, does not really change things. If corruption becomes common the system starts to fail and either reforms are made or the system decays into authoritarianism.
If you had to move across the country to leave your bad name behind, you used to be able to. And just like bankruptcy you’d start with nothing so it wasn’t exactly easy but it was at least an option. Now what recourse do people have?
> "If you weren’t born and raised here, you’re an outsider even though you’ve lived here for thirty-five years. That’s just kind of typical in small communities." https://dokumen.pub/small-town-america-finding-community-sha...
Is it easy? No, but neither is declaring bankruptcy or moving across the country.
Contra: "Wherever you go, there you are." (i.e., you don't stop being an asshole just because you move.)
We would need some kind of legislation around this. No company is looking to decay scores over time unless there is some profit motive to be exploited (like there is with credit scores).
Bear in mind that you can mitigate a lot of risk by operating as a business instead of establishing a relationship in an individual capacity.
And people, much like businesses, need disaster recovery plans. We advise people to have escape plans from their homes; similarly, they should have escape plans for their critical information. Almost nothing in this world is risk-free.
Depends how deep you got. I for one would lose access to my mobile phone (Google Fi) and email, so it would be very hard for me to get access to anything that uses my phone number for 2FA. Or the email address for any kind of account recovery. Huge nuisance but maybe no financial consequences, except maybe an involuntary trip to the bank's branch to access the account.
This is accurate. And taken for granted in the US.
Someone once remarked to me: "I think it's cool you can just pick up and go anywhere (on a huge scale)" - They were from the Netherlands.
Oh and also remember that the EU has freedom of movement for labour, not necessarily people. If you don’t have enough money, you can’t just move to another EU country and hope things work out.
I mean, I think you could pick up and move but it was much harder, and how far you could reasonably move when you did move was limited pre-modern era. If you can't move that far, the likelihood of someone knowing you or word spreading is probably higher.
Although I remember seeing an article here on movement of serfs a while back, I think the conclusion was that they were more mobile than one might think.
This had pros and cons depending on who you were. For example, thieves loved it as you could drop you criminal record simply by moving somewhere that no one recognized you. On the other hand, there were documented cases of mistaken identity and people being prosecuted just because they looked like someone else. Then there is the case of William West which is better understood by looking at the pictures of two men names William West [1]
Contrast that to today where it doesn't matter which town in the US you live in, there is always a credit record that is tied to you.
1 - https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/will-william-west-case-fing...
Hahah... You never offended a bartender for sure.
The big ones (credit score and criminal history) are strongly tied to you, but have recourse to challenge mistakes and remove strikes from your record. The sufficiency of those recourses is open for debate though.
However, all of the private company's social credit systems have a much looser coupling to your actual ID. Often you can just make a new account. If you first get a new credit card, phone, phone number, internet connection, and address, most companies would completely fail to correlate you to their previous profile of you.
Digital social credit is (potentially) an automatically calculated number with strict and unyielding consequences that follows you around for your entire life.
I agree there is a scarier potential there. And also some do, on occasion, escape their context (mostly credit score). They also have bigger contexts, but not so big that I would jump to the Chinese social credit comparison.
That bartender most likely has 3 to 5 worse assholes every shift and dozen usual assholes . He is not going to remember he doesn’t care.
Local non profit after 2 years most likely won’t have the same people and top guys won’t remember all one off volunteers.
Believing any of it having more significance would be attributed to “spotlight effect” in my opinion.
Further my interactions with the bartender aren't likely to be measured or even known about by the non-profit and vice versa. To the extent my "credit" is a factor it doesn't travel with me from location to location.
I don't see how this is a relevant factor. If you're a karen at a restaurant who constantly sends your food back for the tiniest of issues, how is that any different than if the interaction happened online, such as if amazon gave you a bad customer credit score for your excessive returns?
>Further my interactions with the bartender aren't likely to be measured or even known about by the non-profit and vice versa. To the extent my "credit" is a factor it doesn't travel with me from location to location.
Word travels around, does it not? Moreover why is it relevant whether it's a number sitting on a database somewhere, compared to some vibes sitting in some guy's head?
Is amazon going to tell me that up front? In the restaurant case the manager can explain the issue to the customer and ask them not to come in again. It becomes immediately resolvable whereas in your example I have no idea what just happened to me.
> Word travels around, does it not?
The difference between the analog word and the digital word is extreme.
> compared to some vibes sitting in some guy's head?
I live in a town of 2 million people. These vibes have zero impact. Add them to a database that can be tied to my credit card number? Now they have real impact. I don't think that's a reasonable or desirable outcome.
The problem with these systems isn't their mere existence it's their draconian implementations.
In either case they can explain, it's entirely orthogonal to the question of whether it's in-person or not. There's no technical reason why Amazon can't send you a email saying that you were banned for excessive returns, for instance. Moreover I can imagine plenty of reasons why a restaurant manager might not want to explain the precise reason, such as the threat of lawsuits, or not wanting to create an argument/scene. See also, why some HR/hiring managers are cagey about why you were turned down for a job.
>The difference between the analog word and the digital word is extreme.
The difference between a hyper-connected metropolises of today, and a random village in the 1800s is also extreme.
The difference is that the restaurant has a human evaluate if your complaints are valid while Amazon only sees statistics and doesn't care why you might have a high number of returns. The restaurant can also only realistically ban a few worst offenders before that becomes unmanageable for them while Amazon has no such cost associated why banning you. Then there is also the scope of the impact. You likely have many more alternative restaurants you can go to but no one really competes with Amazon as a whole.
> Word travels around, does it not?
Only in extreme cases. You won't be banned from all Restaurants in town just because Bob got offended. With a centralized credit score once you get flagged then those checking it will usually not even talk to you.
In large, dense cities you’re pretty much anonymous; I could dance naked in a main street today and (provided no one’s recording) carry on with my life with zero repercussions.
Some people make a living out of that fact. Tourist traps do not exactly engage recurring customers, every purchase is a customer’s first.
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.
One is more distributed and not controlled by any single entity, the other puts all the power over your life into the hands of a few oligarchs.
and people don't just remember. sometimes they set you up to test you and or to give you a chance.
some other times they set someone else up to test you and or to give you a chance.
and sometimes people poison others to increase their and or your social credit.
as Austin Powers (or was it Ali G?) said quite eloquently: "behave".
But I will agree that it’s far from perfect. It’s also similar to the bar example. A reputation is built one person at a time. It takes a while, with repeated bad behavior, to build a bad reputation with the entire staff or regulars.
Certain subreddits you can't comment on until you have a minimum # of karma, some other subs auto-ban you if you contribute or subscribe to other subs.
otherwise, people have always judged each other with any way they could
> Here's what's actually happening. As of 2024, there's still no nationwide social credit score in China. Most private scoring systems have been shut down, and local government pilots have largely ended. It’s mainly a fragmented collection of regulatory compliance tools, mostly focused on financial behavior and business oversight. While well over 33 million businesses have been scored under corporate social credit systems, individual scoring remains limited to small pilot cities like Rongcheng. Even there, scoring systems have had "very limited impact" since they've never been elevated to provincial or national levels.
Compare that to the situation with, say, credit scores in the US --- wholly run by an oligopoly of three private companies, but fully ingrained into how personal finances work here. At least a publicly run credit score would be held accountable, however indirectly, to voters and the law; and its safety might be treated as a matter of national security, rather than having Equifax and Experian leaking data like clockwork.
The fact there's a credit system that protects banks from the people makes it painfully obvious who is in charge of Western society - consider this:
You take out a loan to contract the company to build you a house. The company defaults and disappears overnight. The bank is protected automatically but it's up to you have to run after your money yourself.
oh yeah and whos guaranteeing borrowers for these banks? source would be nice but I bet you dont reply
To be fair, that's the outcome. But there has been attempts to make more problematic, more intrusive, darker versions of this. They just never worked out for technical or ethical/legal reasons. And they made a nice picture to frame the competing culture, darker than they are.
However when I'm paying for some work to be done in the future, I'm essentially lending the contractor money predicate on the work being done by a certain deadline, quality or even at all.
So I'm the lender until the job is done, and if the borrower defaults on this it's not my fault, but certainly my problem.
Anyway my point is that if you become a lender for a nontrivial sum of money it might sense to hedge that risk (insurance, credit risk entrustment, ...)
China has had a lot of official social control for centuries, but it was local and managed by local cops.[2] As the population became more mobile, that wasn't enough. But a single national system never emerged.
There was a work record history, the Dang'an, created by the Party but to some extent pre-dating communism. This, again, was handled locally, by Party officials. This system didn't cope well with employee mobility. But it didn't get built into a comprehensive national system, either.
China is authoritarian, but most of the mechanisms of coercion are local. Local political bullies are a constant low-level problem.
Kind of like rural Alabama.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/22/1063605/china-an...
It is a fundamentally flawed comparison.
Yes, that's the point of a credit score.
> increasingly even get a job
Do you have any citation of proof of this? I've never heard of this happening even once.
The actual distinction here is between positive/negative rights. In OP's case, it's if even if you do have the money to do X thing, you are artifically not allowed to do so. That's a violation of negative rights.
In your case, you're positing that if you couldn't afford it anyways, it's "social credit" if private lenders don't give you help because you have a history of not paying loans back. That's an appeal to positive rights, that people have a active obligation to you, and it's not even from the government but from private lenders. That's a far more contentious assumption that ironically isn't held by the Chinese or the CCP or most of the world for that matter outside of a spoilt corner of the West. And it's a critique that dosen't even land in reality when the Fed does provide easy student loans at a far greater scale than the Chinese Government. A policy that has worked out swimmingly well!
Please read it again. It was hypothesized that you could have a hard time getting a college loan if your parents had bad credit. Now, you could construct an argument for why that policy makes sense for credit issuers, such as 'statistics show that 87% of debtors' children go on to become debtors themselves'. But the underlying objection was that you shouldn't need to go into debt to get access to higher education in the first place, ie college should not be insanely expensive and you should be able to manage the academic and financial demands with a part time job.
But we're conflating social credit with credit scores are we? A highly contentious normative claim has little to do with OP's argument and is obviously not a basis for a rebuttal for distinctiying the two systems. Which I would imagine there is a certain intentionality in reaching for highly contrived arguments based on literal hypotheticals rather than accurate description of reality.
Yes, we are. "Your credit score is social credit." is the first sentence in the original post.
If you want to reject the entire premise of this article/blog post, thats your prerogative, but it's really not that different.
That's what I'm saying here. You're the one who's making strange tangents here to try to rebutt OP.
>but it's really not that different.
No it's not. Because others are explaining why the premise is wrong. You using the normative assumption that "university should accessible" to conflate credit scores with the descriptive reality of social credit.
That first assumption is just an opinion that far from everyone holds, and you can effectively construct hypothetical that credit scores would fail to reach to justify your point. That's not good debate, and I'd be be curious to see what dosent count as "social credit" here.
Democracy is about balancing different interests. So yeah, it is hard when the change you want isn't neccessairly what others believe in. You do need to compromise with other groups. Which means that large, coaliation parties that emerge will naturally regress to the mean. But ironically, that also is the suremost sign of plurality that things very much are different from authoritarianism where it pretty is just one interest group trampling over all the others. Well, some here might prefer that, but they are almost definetly not going to be the ones in charge.
In this case a corporation is judging me and then offering those judgments as a service.
Quite a difference.
The western system creates an illusion of choice, which those in power have found ways to manipulate. It has become merely a convenient tool for them to exploit the rest of the population, while the "free market" and "democracy" keep them oblivious to it.
But whatever people like me say, it will be too hard for most of you to accept the reality.
Unless you guys start accepting that and find an alternative solution or system, you'll keep digging yourself deeper into the hole you're in. More debt, more wars, more homelessness, more crime, and no future.
Edit: I might be another troll, but from last few elections I don’t feel any progress. As an engineer I see continuous offshoring of well paid positions to cheaper EU countries. As self employed electrician I see regulatory and tax madness.
I'm aware there are more than exactly 2 parties in the ballots in many western countries. It's not about the numbers, but whether any of those choices really give the people real alternatives, or just different ways to screw the majority of the people.
As you can probably can see from the above interaction, people resort very quickly to ad hominem attacks.
You seem to think awfully highly of your ability to reason about the world, but I find your claim to be fairly lacking. This all reads like the ramblings of a 19 year old who just discovered Chomsky.
Address the argument rather than engaging in ad hominem.
You have tons of meaningful economic choices everywhere in American life. You can bank with any bank and look for competing offers for credit to do useful things. For example you can buy a home and shop for a better interest rate by taking an offer for a loan from one lender to another and 9 times out of 10 you'll come away with a better offer. But you can easily not take on a loan and choose to preference flexibility and therefore rent. This housing choice involves a myriad of sub choices about lifestyle, commuting preferences, school adjacency, and other elements you may want to balance. Because US state are often quite different in character and economic and social opportunity you have a ton of dimension along which you can exercise choice.
Someone posting here likely has access to remote work and can meaningfully choose to live in a quite mountain town in West Virginia with satellite internet where you never see more than a few people every week, or you could live in a mid sized city like I do and get involved in neighborhood organizations. Similarly you could move to NYC and live in a small apartment an spend all of your time going out to bars and restaurants. These are SUPER meaningful choices on an individual level.
I've literally never heard of this.
> Can you not bank, if all the banks are colluding against you? And still have the rest of your rights?
All the banks? There are 3,917 commercial banks and 545 savings and loan associations in the US. It's probably the most banks per-capita of any country. You'd be hard press to not be able to even work with a local credit union.
There are total nutjobs of all walks that are living just fine. There are actual Nazis and commies living just fine.
It's a big country. If our whole society already has dystopian social credit it should be easy to find examples.
Stop right there, then you'll see them :) Millions of them
Weird take. There’s a massive difference between a centralized government-run system and a decentralized system run by individual companies.
Credit scores are closest but limited to financial behaviors
They are also very much not decentralized.
Meanwhile, in China, social credit is ideological in nature. I.e if you disagree, even if you are factually correct, you get penalized.
Such as? I'm wracking my brain, but I can't think of a single non-financial situation where someone has asked to pull my credit.
clearances don't apply to the population on the whole -- you have to willing apply to a cleared role. and you're going to be spending the gov's money and handling secrets, it makes sense to see if they can handle said money, cuz if they can't they'll sell secrets
I've never heard of a pre-emplyment check requiring a credit score. sexually harassing a fellow employee and getting fired will not end up on your credit as long as you can pay bills, and even if you can't, the lack of bills is what shows up, not bad work behavior
Clearances are a far broader investigation, but to the extent that they look at your credit, I believe it is also to establish your financial status, which is most definitely a significant component of the clearance process.
Preemployment: I admit to not having started a new job in many years... Is there any evidence whatsoever you can present that companies regularly reject candidates not in a position of financial trust for having poor credit?
As I said in the first reply, there is very little behavior you cannot tie money to in some way, so you can go down this path forever of trying to find a reason why credit scores are totally valid proxies for all human behavior, and you would be technically correct while missing the point entirely.
Ha. Pot, meet kettle.
Two out of the three examples given were not "tied to money in some way", they are examples where the creditworthiness of the person is central to the transaction.
> Credit scores are used for a lot more than finances.
but you can't provide a concrete example.
> giving institutions that are not even under democratic control
Which institutions? Banks? Landlords? Other people trusting you with their property?
> the power to punish individuals or groups as they see fit across all sectors of life.
Where? How?
The best you can hope for from a potential employer is to be told they hired someone else. The default experience in America seems to be that they'll simply ghost you.
> Which institutions?
Credit bureaus...
It's difficult to be an intelligent, honest person in the west because of this.
It's like most people don't understand reality. Everything they believe just happens to fit within the circle of allowed beliefs. They are in alignment with the system and benefiting from it (often unwittingly). It's only when the circle of allowed beliefs shrinks that they start to notice what I described above.
I suspect a lot of people were 'awakened' after the most recent Israel/Palestine conflict because that shrunk the circle of allowed topics a lot. A lot of the people who were morally aligned with the ESG agenda before now found themselves partly outside the circle and you could see the agenda shift. Terms like 'diversity' which were originally conceived primarily as racial and gender-based started to drift towards 'neuro-diversity' as a response to the discomfort created by the shrinking circle having shrunk a little too fast...
If you're outside the circle, you can see it much more clearly. The worst part is that you didn't even get to choose your fate. Kind of ironic as the west prides itself on individual choice. The circle shrinks slowly until you suddenly find yourself caught well outside of it when the consequences have accumulated beyond a certain threshold.
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.
I think, at least from my interpretation of it from being in China and having Chinese family, that something like underage drinking is seen more as a family issue, than a legal issue. What stops the 16 year old from drinking? The fact that their friends / family will see them being drunk, and think less of the person and their family. A 16 year old being drunk in public is family issue. Sure, the cops will intervene at some point, but China has very little drunken / raucous public behavior than the west does.
they were big on the opium, as I recall
That's what happens when you get systematically manipulated by the biggest empire in the world smuggling in illegal drugs...
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.
And that I have a choice of phones, or even no phone at all, and none of my phone options is legally permitted to execute me.
Further down, the article argues that switching costs between private companies are ‘enormous.’ I don’t know if they are that large, but however painful it is to switch from Apple to Google, it’s orders of magnitude easier than moving between nation-states.
It notes that private systems ‘increasingly collaborate.’ Sure, and that can be a problem. But there’s a huge difference between a patchwork of systems which collaborate and a pervasive, inescapable State.
Finally, it notes that governments purchase private data. Sure, but are they using that data to restrict fundamental freedoms? They may be (Canada’s restriction of economic rights for folks who donated to protesters comes to mind — although I don’t think that was actually enabled by purchasing private ‘social credit’ data).
> Utah's House passed a law banning social credit systems, despite none existing in America.
Does the article contend that Americans live in a social credit system, or that none exists in America? It can’t have it both ways!
Finally, the article leads with a definition of ‘social credit’ as evolving beyond an original definition of ‘distributing industry profits to consumers to increase purchasing power.’ Whatever that might mean, it seems completely irrelevant to the meaning of the phrase under discussion, as relevant as mentioning in a discussion on O.J. Simpson that ‘O.J.’ can mean ‘orange juice’ (in Mr. Simpson’s case, it stood for ‘Orenthal James.’
Plenty of cops have shot/executed innocent people, and were declared not guilty due to qualified immunity.
Plus, a phone in China can't execute you either. It'd be the police goons who do that.
Luckily not a single US citizen was ever executed by the US government
I'm speaking from a Swedish perspective but for a long time already we had these "credit checks", where a company can quickly order a check on a customer to see if they're eligible for paying via invoice, or installments. And the consumer gets a letter in the mail notifying them of each credit check and who requested it. They basically see if you have any large debts, and what your reported income is.
But now some companies have gone even further and actually invented a credit score for us, that you have to pay them a subscription fee to see.
All this is an organic progression driven by corporations who simply want to know if consumers are worth their time and risk.
No it doesn't.
It's mostly for luxury items and services that they request credit checks.
Of course a landlord can still request you send in proof of employment and your salary specification.
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.
- China: no records about a person is a good thing
- Elsewhere: no records is a very bad thing
- China: records can be corrected and eliminated
- Elsewhere: records are permanentAlthough Meta is trying to "fix" that last part of course.
China is actually far more fragmented than some people thought. The central government isn’t that all powerful. I mean even today, let alone 20 years ago. It is actually the big businesses like Ali/Tencent that are centralizing the data they collected — exactly like what US corporations are doing.
The reality is, there's always an entity that controls a society. If not culture or religion, it will be the government or shadow government, or corporations and banks.
Never forget that the main reason WFH was attacked in such a coordinated effort within a short period of time was because it threatened banks' business interests and model. Who's going to pay banks if landlords (commercial and residential) can't milk renters' money? It's a food chain and on top of it are the banks, and at the bottom are you, the average worker living paycheck to paycheck. WFH disrupted that and shifted the power to you. You don't have to rent/own downtown, so you (landlord) don't have to pay hefty property taxes. As a result, the government is losing, banks are losing, landlords will finally have to find real jobs instead of leeching off others, and all of that was a nightmare to them, and thus the push for hybrid or whatever under the fake claims it promotes cooperation and teamwork.
Depending on the type of bankruptcy declared, debtor exams happen here.
They also will happily give your money to any thief pretending to be you, and then blame you for their mistake.
It's popular because it solves the problem (not ALL problems, but the one they're trying to solve) and it's easy and low-barrier to implement and use.
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.
- it's not at all the same as an aggregated government-assigned score (though we may be on the road to that)
- the take of "things are so bad in China and basically the same here" are very naive; live in China for 5+ years and I guarantee you'll have a different view
> 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
At times it makes me wary of protecting my score (which may not even actually exist), and I'll often just take the loss rather than return something.
> You may argue there's a fundamental difference between corporate tracking and government surveillance. Corporations compete; you can switch services. Governments have monopoly power and can restrict fundamental freedoms.
By saying:
> This misses three key points: First, switching costs for major platforms are enormous. Try leaving Google's ecosystem or abandoning your LinkedIn network. Second, corporate social credit systems increasingly collaborate. Bad Uber ratings can affect other services; poor credit scores impact everything from insurance to employment. Third, Western governments already access this corporate data through legal channels and data purchases.
This is weak and handwavy.
* People leave Google's ecosystem all the time; it's practically sport here on HN.
* "Bad Uber ratings can affect other services" - is this theoretical or has this actually happened? Without specific citation, I'm calling bullshit.
* Poor credit ratings make it hard to get credit, yep. However, this area is heavily regulated and really only comes into play when you're asking someone to extend credit to you. It won't stop you getting on a train.
* It's not clear what governments are doing with corporate data. She needs to be a lot more specific about the harms here.
Also, saying that social credit systems in China are "limited to small pilot cities" is not particularly reassuring. The pilot programs are what we should freak out about. When it's rolled out en masse it's too late.
That supports the original argument if anything. If "Here's how I did X" generates interest on HN, it's quite likely that X is very challenging for the average person.
There's no sure thing to be an alternative that is actually different.
I'm reminded of the SCOTUS arguments about cellphones and tracking, or just technology in general (the actual case(s) aren't so relevant as the arguments).
The argument at one point was that since you're carrying a cellphone or using a computer in some way that tracks your location you made a choice and that end result might be to just give up your right to privacy / location data because you chose to carry a cellphone.
Fortunately a few judges recognized that cell phones aren't just an accessory you pick and choose, they're part of daily life now, to operate in society you generally will need / want one, accordingly you should be able to do so without giving up some rights.
Unfortunately, the same arguments didn't carry over into topics like binding arbitration and so on ...
The rules of the financial credit system are mostly opaque and work through indirect levers. This AML social credit system also totally global, extending anywhere that the FATF has sway.
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.
On the other hand, "private" has the downside of falling into unaccountable monopolies/duopolies. You don't have a individual choice about having a credit score, or whether banks can use it, or with which companies. You have no control, there's no accountability.
If credit scores were run by the government, then in theory democratic processes could regulate them in terms of accuracy, privacy, who was allowed to access them, for what purposes, etc. There would be actual accountability to the people, in what that there isn't when it comes to private companies.
While you say "lots of 3rd party rating services... are mainly between you and those 3rd parties", many are not. They're between one 3rd party (a bank, a landlord), and another (Equifax, Experian).
The ones that are, they're eBay, Uber, etc. Which seem more obviously defensible as being privately run.
I've also heard of food safety regulation, airline safety, public schools, libraries, science funding, workplace safety regulation, building safety regulation, the list goes on.
Giving the government more power is quite often the answer. Sometimes it's the best solution, sometimes it isn't. But it's definitely not "almost never", that much we can be sure of.
No: The dystopia comes from helplessness and inability to appeal injustice, regardless of who/what manages the system or how it is legally constructed.
We must take care to distinguish between the problem we want to avoid versus the mechanism we hope will avoid it... especially when there are reasons to believe that mechanism is not a reliable defense.
> 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.
The difference here isn't because they're "private", but because you implicitly assume you will have alternatives, other local bakeries or bars which are reliably neutral to the spat.
Things become very different if they're all owned by Omni Consumer Products or subscribed to Blacklist as a Service.
Except, of course, it's not that simple. There are a host of behaviors and traits that private businesses are not allowed to consider when choosing whether or not to provide you products or services. These carve-outs to free association exist because at any given time a large enough portion of the population exists of bigots who choose their associations based on characteristics that the rest of society has decided are not acceptable grounds for refusing service. So we compel service if we think not providing it is sufficiently shitty and harmful. Something similar happens when a private institution, or class of institution, is so critical to life or participation in society that exclusion serves as a form of semi-banishment. Such institutions are put under even stricter standards for association.
The idea that social credit or similar are totally fine and peachy so long as it's "only" private institutions using it is a fantasy entertained by rugged individualists who naively narrow their analysis of power dynamics to "big government bad" and discount their dependency on extremely powerful private organizations.
It's much harder to opt-out of a government than a privately-crafted social scoring system. But some become so large that you can't de-facto opt-out, not without significant consequences to your quality of life... And that becomes a problem.
> Your credit score doesn't just determine loan eligibility; it affects where you can live, which jobs you can get, and how much you pay for car insurance.
> LinkedIn algorithmically manages your professional visibility based on engagement patterns, posting frequency, and network connections, rankings that recruiters increasingly rely on to filter candidates.
Luckily neither google nor apple does any hardcore KYC (yet) so such bans can be avoided with a new phone + phone number. Inconvenient? Yes. Being perma-locked out of digital services for the rest of your life? Hardly.
I always found it strange that they are not allowed to discriminate based on gender/religion etc but they are allowed to discriminate based on if you are likable or not. As in they can refuse to serve you as long as they don't mention it's based on anything that's illegal to discriminate against.
Downvotes make my point as well. I do not want to say the right thing so people aren't offended so I am granted access (or updoots). I'd rather deal with robots for this reason. Spending my money somewhere should be enough to serve me, like me or not. I think it's crazy that I even have to explain it...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick#Arrest,_convicti...
> Mitnick was released from prison on January 21, 2000. During his supervised release period, which ended on January 21, 2003, he was initially forbidden to use any communications technology other than a landline telephone.
Regardless these arguments about whether it’s bad based on if the government is involved or not is ridiculous given how interwoven our corporations and government are. Like just doing business with any company strips your 4th amendment rights on that data.
There’s no sane way to argue that they have a clear delineation throughout society
You should visit some megacorp campuses and then rethink this view. If you actually believe it then I dare you to do something against their rules while in one of their offices and be marveled at how many people pour out of the literal walls dressed in clothing colored based on their specific job, and then tell us about how they lack police forces
>They have to do it by proxy, though, ultimately. You can run away from their territory and be safe, until they think of an actual crime to accuse you of.
This is not true, they have their own private security forces, with guns, who will seize you on their property. Managing to run away from an organization's controlled territory to be safe from them, applies to public 0governments too
That's because all that power turns the companies into paragovernamental organizations. Anything with the power to gatekeep human rights is a government.
the more I think about it, the more I think this is the core of a rePUBLIC
there's a bunch of private actors, the "citizens" who get together to form the republic, and thereby establish "the public space" aka the commons
it's all part of how there's widely available social media technology and academic graph languages.
of course the government is going to track the citizens, it's all a matter of how, how much, and to what end.
This is absolutely untrue. The government is a customer of all of these companies, and can whip up a chorus of brownshirts to loudly complain about any objections to the government doing this. There's a reason everybody who talks about speech should know what a long obsolete device called a "pen register" does. It's what we now refer to as a public-private partnership.
> It's a bit like 1st amendment in the US.
It is, in that the government can pay or blackmail* companies into censoring your speech, and doesn't have to bother with prior restraint.**
-----
[*] ...through selective application of what is usually antitrust legislation.
[**] ...which the 1st Amendment never mentions, but has been bound to it by people and judges who wanted to censor speech about communism and birth control.
This rings very true. It's pervasive online, and HN is no exception. The "China scare" is pervasive, "in China they do (some imagined nasty thing that of course the US or Europe would never do, no siree!)".
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.
I think here is the difference between your and authors optics. You count businesses (does this include large corporations/organizations?) as individuals.
It's the difference between one party wanting to distance themselves from you, due to their own "individual" reasons, or all of society by decree under penalty of law.
Congratulations on opting out of your business relationship with Experian, then.
I did not say, or even suggest, that the absence of a social credit system somehow results in everyone wanting to do business with you under any circumstance, and that you can opt out of the criteria that someone else uses to decide if they want to associate with you.
I really cannot understand how you were able to twist the meaning of what I had written so dramatically. Or are you just trolling?
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.
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.
Specifically all of the parts about commenting. Looking at your posts it seemed like you had no idea these exist.
I counted 0, but I do not live in US/China. It will probably came here as well.
We may not call it social credit, but in practice we’re already building it.
Same thing when some websites require you to sign in with Google- there is no Google user score yet but they can ban you from their platform.
>Your Uber rating doesn't affect your mortgage rate, and your LinkedIn engagement doesn't determine your insurance premiums. But the infrastructure is being built to connect these systems. We're building the technical and cultural foundations that could eventually create comprehensive social credit systems.
She doesn't provide any citation for this
> Corporate platforms increasingly share reputation data. Financial services integrate social media analysis into lending decisions
Again she doesn't provide any citation for this, but more importantly she doesn't explain why she thinks it's wrong. Someone who posts "Feeling lucky so headed to the craps table" probably shouldn't be lent to, if only for their sake
Gotta get my FU money as quickly as possible and go live in the woods.
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.
Taxis admittedly aren't that much more careful but a professional chauffeur probably fits the bill, and charges accordingly.
* To Prevent Unfair and Unfounded Ratings: Uber could argue that some riders misuse the rating system. They might give a driver a low rating for reasons outside of the driver's control, such as traffic, a bad mood, or a simple misunderstanding. This policy would be presented as a way to protect drivers from being unfairly penalized, which could affect their livelihood.
* To Combat "Rating Terrorism" or Coercion: A rider might threaten a driver with a low rating to get a free ride, demand an unscheduled stop, or force them to violate a rule. By banning riders who frequently give low scores, Uber would be taking a stance against this kind of behavior, ensuring that the rating system is used as a genuine feedback mechanism, not a tool for coercion.
* To Discourage "Troll" Behavior: Some users might be incentivized to give consistently low ratings just to cause trouble or get attention, a practice often referred to as "trolling." This policy would be framed as a way to filter out users who are not participating in the community in good faith and are instead just trying to cause problems.
* To Maintain Driver Confidence in the Platform: Drivers rely on their ratings to maintain their account status. If they feel that riders are unfairly giving them low scores without consequence, they may become disillusioned with the platform and switch to a competitor. Banning riders who give consistently low ratings would be a way to show drivers that Uber has their back.
* To Improve Service by Identifying and Removing "Unreasonable" Riders: Uber could frame this as a data-driven approach. They might claim that their internal data shows a small percentage of riders who give low ratings to virtually every driver, regardless of the quality of the service. By removing these outliers, they would be improving the overall efficiency and health of the marketplace for the vast majority of drivers and riders. The goal would be to cultivate a community of "reasonable" users who understand and use the ratings system as it was intended.
To continue, for me, my experience is I would rate low probably 7 of 8 drivers for the reasons I gave above. They all break traffic laws and drive recklessly. I kind of wish the app would let me set a driver preference. I'd chose
(*) drive at the speed limit. Don't break any laws. Drive cautiously.
others might choose
(*) get there as fast as possible - (implying ignoring speed limits, weaving through traffic, cutting people off, ignoring turn lanes, etc...)
At least that way the driver would know up front what the user expects. Me, I'd give them 5 stars for not risking my life. Others would give them 5 stars for going as fast as possible.
As it is, I don't rate them low. I just don't rate at all because of the fear of being banned.
I've said this before in many ways to other Americans and they just join the very vocal "china bad, usa good, you're weird for liking china" while then wondering why they don't understand their own credit score, etc.
Imagine having a less than 600 credit score and buying a car, buying a house, renting an apartment, opening a bank account, even getting insurance lol you are auto denied.
"the only difference between your phone and china's social credit system is that your phone is real"
it's in our respective government's interests to tell us that of course the system we live in is the best, hey look at those other people living under tyranny 'over there', aren't you lucky to be living over here, under us?
ok, maybe
... so yeah, it's totally fine lets do it ...
WHAT
> 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.
One day you'll be denied care or your insurance premiums will quadruple because you buy too much sweets in Amazon, or because you once said you fell off a chair while drunk in a party in Instagram. Then you'll care.
I want to rent a hotel room or Airbnb: risk of me ruining or stealing from the place is include in the price. I want hire a contractor: I may run into the same guy who scammed 10 people already and changed name of his business again. I want to rent a car: it's more expensive because of reckless drivers renting it as well and the owner have no way to tell if I am a responsible one. We pay idiot/scammer premium everywhere.
There is a real need for that mechanism and if we keep putting our head in the sand big corps with proprietary solutions will cover that need. That is the worst of both worlds.
Really?
Well, delivery addresses can be somehow anonymized by the use of PO boxes; names on credit cards, not so much.
Of all companies, the systems at Uber and Amazon definitely know it's you starting the new account. They just don't openly mention it, and quietly link your old accounts via monitoring and analytics. As soon as the FBI comes knocking, they're able to provide your current account and all linked accounts. Even the ones they previously closed.
(Not that the FBI has to come knocking nowadays to get that information, but Uber and Amazon are able to provide comprehensive help to law enforcement if it's required.)
use the same phone number, email address or credit card and they know you are the same person, use the same wifi spot or IP address with the same behaviour and they can intimate you are the same.. Even badly written data analysis can do this and a VPN from another country and different username wont convince any system with an ounce of sense.
My point however was not to provide an exhaustive list of workarounds, just to point out that it is the lack of privacy and anonymity in our lives and enables such surveillance.
Instaban. Every. Time.
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.
Rather than asking me to come into a building in real life, the asked me to:
- download yet another app
- make a picture of my id card (front and back)
- hold my id card to bank of phone
- show my face in the front camera
This process got stuck in step 3, because my phone has no RFC support.
The morale? So much for using a cheap Android phone just for that indispensable banking app.