China is proposing to assess its citizens' behavior over a totality of commercial and social activities, creating an uber-scoring system. When completed, the model could encompass everything from a person's chat-room comments to their performance at work, while the score could be used to determine eligibility for jobs, mortgages, and social services.I suppose it's already the case that your behavior on social media can help determine your eligibility for a job in America. Certainly it will be considered if you are up for a security clearance. We have a ways to go before they're tracking everything we do all the time to make sure we comply with the politically correct view before we obtain state services, though.
However, all is not well: the government has just been licensed to perform behavioral experiments on the American people to see if can 'nudge' us to 'better' behavior. The government has a history of trying out psychological experiments to control the American people that is not very charming. If you didn't watch this BBC documentary the first time around, you might want to do so this time.
The data is already being tracked, but they have no ways to analyze it or crunch it into useful barometers. They would need an AI or an expert system for that.
ReplyDeleteThe Chinese Cultural Revolution set ratings for traditional and reactionary products, so any exposure to such could be given a rating. That's because they rated everything in the entirety of Chinese history, including Buddhist and martial art family scrolls with their usefulness and level of reactionary elements to be purged.
Their level of bureaucratic efficiency is indicative of how a centralized empire could hold and govern so much territory. Given that database, it's potentially feasible that they could come up with a simple rating system, like Amazon has, which collates the value of X with the amount of exposure a person has to Y.
A problem with the Cultural Revolution, though, was that standards changed. Witness the Hundred Flowers period. I wonder if China's new social media -- Wretchard calls it "Fatebook" -- will be able to accomodate shifting standards from the leadership? Will everyone have to spend all their time updating their previously stated opinions in accord with the new doctrines from the Ministry of Truth? Will the rating system be able to turn on a dime, ferret out newly wrong opinions, and update your rating accordingly?
ReplyDeleteGrim, can you expand on this? I always figured the "100 Flowers" to be a brilliant ploy to get the opposition to reveal themselves for more convenient elimination..
ReplyDeleteSometimes I think the zero's ardent anti gun rhetoric is to do the same thing- get folks to run out and buy a gun in order to get them on a database.
It actually happened fairly often, and not just in Maoist Communism: the reason Orwell described it in 1984 was that it was a feature of totalitarian states of both the Communist and Fascist variety. Yesterday's truth became today's thoughcrime, and everyone had to scramble to pretend they'd always understood and believed in the same way as the Great Leader now said was right.
ReplyDeleteMy sense of the Hundred Flowers period is that Mao was characteristically overconfident when he opened the floor to new ideas. There were so many competing ideas, and people were rushing to embrace the various different schools so quickly, that he had to lock down hard. I think he thought that his way was so obviously right that the suggestions would be mild and few, rather than hot and heavy. When that wasn't right, and it looked like the nation would spin apart, he had to clamp down on everyone who was doing just what he'd said to do the day before yesterday.
The BBC itself is a government mind control program. Using that as a way to get the gist of political control techniques out to people is rather ironic.
ReplyDeleteWill everyone have to spend all their time updating their previously stated opinions in accord with the new doctrines from the Ministry of Truth? Will the rating system be able to turn on a dime, ferret out newly wrong opinions, and update your rating accordingly?
Over arching mass produced top down systems will naturally break down. O Care is a good example along with Centralized planning and farming. A systematic mind control program needs the willing cooperation of its subjects, not merely the terrorized moaning of the oppressed or in Jones Town.
The Left has an organic example of how to modulate views with their Gaystapo purging of Eich and their multicultural "racist" or whatever label they use now, to control and herd the livestock, online, in real life, etc.
In a police state, the system may be needed to get information out and file informant information, but it is the informant network itself, composed of willing humans, which do the corrections.
Rather than the direct method the KKK or SS used, modern 21st century police states and thought control programs are much closer to the psychological ops of the Stasi East Germany.
Societies with extremely well regulated respect for Order and Power, as well as efficient bureaucracy, are better able to harness the power of the state for unique purposes. Whether that power is used for good or evil depends on who is King and Caliph.
Btw, people should run a parallel simulation, computer or biological, on what happens if the Biblical prophecies about Mystery Babylon wasn't about Babylon but what looked like Babylon to prophets who have never seen the Statue of Liberty (or Libertine). It has interesting conclusions if Mystery Babylon=United States.