MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
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Hits of the Day
Inside China's Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking
By ocean-kat on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 12:13am |This article about China's use of computer monitoring of nearly everybody in the country just fucking blew me away. I knew of the possibilities and the danger but I had no idea it was so far along. Imagine what could happen if Google, Facebook, your debit or credit card purchases, Amazon purchases, every bit of data every company collects on you is in the hands of a single entity and the government. That's pretty much what is happening now in China. Absolutely must read article. Very long but totally worth the time.
URL:
https://www.wired.com/story/age-of-social-credit/
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Comments
Here's a shorter article on the subject. Probably this brief summary was taken from the more in depth article previously linked.
by ocean-kat on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 5:02pm
Is an important read. I have not commented because I just hope I am dead before more of this starts happening here.
Except to say this: the dependence on smart phones even here is already waaaay outta control. Remember Hurricane Sandy with the forlorn hipsters lost and homeless on the downtown streets for days, begging for a charge. Also too: when the electricity goes, if you don't have cash, you got nothing.
by artappraiser on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 6:35pm
The story terrified me and I don't think it's paranoia. Its hard to comment on as there's so much there. I wanted to link it but had trouble figuring out how to summarize it. What do say about an app with government connections that has so much influence that a traffic ticket or trivial civil suit can bar one from buying a plane ticket or booking a hotel reservation or at least bar one from booking first class travel or hotels.
it reminded me of Nosedive, an episode on Netflix's Black Mirror. We can only hope that there's sufficient competition in democratic countries that will stop any one company from gaining that much power and we can stop the government from accessing or contributing to it.
by ocean-kat on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 7:44pm
The government will be your only protection from the metadata files collected by multinational corporations and social media tech giants. The corporations which produce nothing except terabytes of personal information on you and everyone, which they collect, market and sell.
The Republican Party will do everything they can to enable this activity, because it makes their schemes easier to pull off, as we saw in the last election with Cambridge Analytica.
The data aids their hold on power, by facilitating the exploitation and manipulation of the public more easily and at less cost. The same aim as China. Realizing the GOP anti-democratic objective for years, more clear than ever now, of unrestrained authoritarian government serving their oligarch master$.
by NCD on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 8:45pm
How does this affect people who have no smart phones? People who aren't likely to buy a plane ticket, book a hotel reservation or, frankly, do anything that requires an app on a phone they can't afford?
Don't be terrified. Be aware, and make your choices accordingly. If you have the perk consider yourself lucky - and if you're lucky enough to have the perk, be careful.
by barefooted on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 8:45pm
I have no phone and that creates problems for me. It's become normal for your phone number to be the first method of identification by businesses and doctors. Some of my doctors will communicate with me by email, others refuse to use email. Often with no phone one is excluded from sale prices at many businesses. Of course that's the plan to push one towards being tracked but then one must make the choice that is becoming all to common. Accept tracking or pay more. According to the article smart phones have become nearly ubiquitous in China and I've read several articles that businesses both here and abroad have stopped taking cash. I expect that trend to continue. Life will become harder and more expensive if you avoid being tracked. Harder and more expensive if you run afoul of the tracking algorithms. That seems to be what is happening in China and it's fairly far along and advancing fast.
by ocean-kat on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 9:14pm
You have no phone; that's your choice but is apparently a problem for you in the modern world. Your concerns are not only considerate but understandable - yet what is your fix?
by barefooted on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 10:19pm
Yes it's a choice based on a cost/benefit analysis of my situation and life style. I have no reason to hide my situation, the details of my cost/benefit analysis, or my personal fix for the difficulties the choice presents but those personal details aren't very pertinent to the discussion. I haven't had a phone for decades. The point is that 10 or 20 years ago that created no problems but now it does and those problems are increasing. It's getting to the point where it's getting harder to exist in modern society without a phone. You ask, How does this affect people who have no smart phones? I suspect in the future there will be no one without a smart phone.
imo NCD is posting the most astute analysis of the problem of data gathering and tracking. The hazard is to the nation as a whole. The government will be your only protection from the metadata files collected by multinational corporations and social media tech giants. Only government can legislate what gets collected, how it is used and by whom. That's the broader societal fix beyond my personal issue. We can only hope that the government does create some legislation to control the data collection and tracking and not enter in collaboration with the corporations as is happening in China.
by ocean-kat on Thu, 08/23/2018 - 12:37am
The hazard is to the nation as a whole. It's not an individual threat remedied by relocating, say, in a remote cabin off the grid. It's about controlling power in a democracy, or additionally influencing "acceptable" behavior in a country like China.
Only government can legislate what gets collected, how it is used and by whom. The individual tracking data can make innocent merchandise ads, or, more sinister, targeted disinformation and political propaganda aimed specifically at a susceptible target audience, and do it cheaply and easily.
As long as enough people are effectively manipulated politically, or ideologically, everyone will still ultimately be affected.
One billionaire, Robert Mercer, leveraged Facebook metadata with CA to help get Trump elected. That is the anti-democratic control objective, and the danger.
by NCD on Thu, 08/23/2018 - 12:00am
Today gave a foreigner with a much better phone than mine 50 cents for the metro - trying to hook up with someone, getting to a change office complicated... funny I would have been more reluctant with someone begging for food, not sure how I prioritize or if it just happened too fast.
by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 7:38pm
Gotcha. Forget the phone, it wasn't about that.
As for prioritizing, forget that, too.
by barefooted on Wed, 08/22/2018 - 8:50pm
What were we talking about? Who are you?
by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 08/23/2018 - 12:52am
Another cheery article:
Welcome to the Age of Privacy Nihilism by Ian Bogost @ TheAtlantic.com, Aug. 23
Google and Facebook are easy scapegoats, but companies have been collecting, selling, and reusing your personal data for decades, and now that the public has finally noticed, it’s too late. The personal-data privacy war is long over, and you lost.
Reminds me that I posted this other one that's on a more philosophical level a week ago. I found it quite good and not as depressing. I guess because pondering these things within another frame gives one a sense of control, similar to therapy with a psychologist, I guess? I.E. if you know exactly how it's hurting how you want to live, that's the first step to possibly handling some of the damage:
SELF-INVASIONS & INVADED SELF: HIDDEN INJURIES IN AGE OF EXPOSURE
by artappraiser on Fri, 08/24/2018 - 12:07am
Mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. You never know, could be the Chinese version of Randall Weaver/Ruby Ridge:
by artappraiser on Tue, 09/04/2018 - 11:52pm
not 100% related, but thought intriguing enough to post it somewhere people interested in China might see:
by artappraiser on Wed, 09/19/2018 - 8:53pm
by artappraiser on Thu, 09/20/2018 - 11:22pm