25 ms·

Who needs democracy when you have data?

117 points by raleighm 8y ago

efields 8y ago
The people inside the democracy. They need democracy.
- hkai 8y ago
  Well, they believe they don't. My compatriots from my two home nations, Russia and China, usually defend the authoritarian policy thanks to years of soft propaganda and opinion guiding. "Western countries have problems too, and did you see America, this is what democracy leads to." You can see that on HN, too.
  - geofft 8y ago
    The fact that these people believe that their current system of government is better - i.e., that the result of a democratic election would be to avoid democracy - should cause us to worry if the same effect is at play when people who have lived their whole life under a democratic regime say that their current system of government is better, too.
  - njarboe 8y ago
    See "Manufacturing Consent" (1988) by Chomsky and Herman for a classic critique of how in the West there are also "soft propaganda and opinion guiding" systems in place and operating successfully. I wonder though, with the internet and the rise of Trump, if Chomsky might say these systems are not in control as much as they used to be.
  - boomboomsubban 8y ago
    >Western countries have problems too, and did you see America, this is what democracy leads to." When you compare the "democratic" two-party American answer to terrorism and the "autocratic" one-party Chinese answer, it's hard to see democracy as the superior choice. Spying on millions of people is terrible, as are the re-education camps, but the "War on Terror" is responsible for millions of deaths while spying on millions of people. Years of soft propaganda make people praise American behavior, and democracy provides no option to end it.
- beat 8y ago
  Do they? Can you really establish a rational need for democracy, or are you just running on cultural reflex? If you take this question as me saying we shouldn't have democracy, maybe it's reflex. It's an interesting question. Democracy isn't an end in itself, but rather a means to an end. What is that end (or those ends)? How else can those ends be achieved?
  - cocacola1 8y ago
    Does there even need to be an end at all? I prefer the notion that there's never an end and it's just all one long journey. Death may be the end of a person, but the journey continues for everyone & everything else.
  - Tade0 8y ago
    The end is a robust system that minimises corruption and this can only be achieved when the people in power can be held accountable and are easy to replace.
    - beat 8y ago
      Ok, so why is corruption the problem? I can easily imagine a government that is not corrupt at all that terrifies me (such as a theocratic state), and I can imagine governments that are quite corrupt that are just fine for most purposes.
  - bopbop 8y ago
    A rational need for democracy for you would be so that I don't govern you according to my wishes. A rational need for democracy for me would be that you don't govern me according to your wishes. A rational need for democracy for the uyghurs would be that Xi Jumping doesn't govern them according to his wishes. I've always understood this to be what is meant by democracy is the worst form of governance, apart from all the others.
    - gknoy 8y ago
      But ... we currently (in the US) have a direct example of the rulers in power governing the populace in a way which is "not according to the wishes" of roughly half the population. (I think this is a direct result of our 2 party system, as compared to Britain's multiple parties, but I've no idea how to fix it.) Any time you vote on the losing side of an election (whether it's for who to elect, or approve a tax, or legalize (or ban) certain acts, you end up being governed by _every one else's_ wishes. On the bright side, at least in a democracy I mostly have the trust that such changes CAN happen, over time, if enough people come to believe similarly as I do about things.
coldtea 8y ago
>It helps that a tumultuous couple of years in the world’s democracies have made the Chinese political elite feel increasingly justified in shutting out voters. Developments such as Donald Trump’s election, Brexit, the rise of far-right parties across Europe, and Rodrigo Duterte’s reign of terror in the Philippines underscore what many critics see as the problems inherent in democracy, especially populism, instability, and precariously personalized leadership. In other words, that a democracy might actually function as one -- oh, the horror -- reflecting what people want, instead of what the elites and the well off 10% wants them to want, or present as TINA.
- fcarraldo 8y ago
  If Trump, Brexit and Duterte are what the people want, perhaps we live in societies that are incapable of self-governance. I'm no fan of centrist neoliberal politics, but regimes and decisions which destabilize economies, marginalize minorities and villainize immigrants are clearly not a better alternative.
  - goatlover 8y ago
    > clearly not a better alternative. To what, though? What's the choice here? Give a few people even more power without having to be voted in? Who decides which people get all the power? What if they're worse? How do we get rid of them? Is a bloody revolution or decades of dictatorship really the same as having elections where the votes don't always make the best choices?
    - mrec 8y ago
      Thank you. Democracy is not about guaranteeing competent government, or government that agrees with you. Democracy is about avoiding civil wars. I think people forget this, and forget how hideous civil wars can be, because it's been so successful.
    - fcarraldo 8y ago
      I don't know. I didn't offer an alternative, and I'm not sure that there is one. I only pointed out that from the GP's viewpoint, these examples of democracy reflecting the will of the people (Trump, Duterte, Brexit) are not having positive impacts on society. I don't believe they should be held up as examples of democracy at work, but rather as unfortunate failures of democratic systems.
known 8y ago
"Politics is an art by which politicians get money from the rich and votes from the poor in the pretext of protecting each from the other" --Oscar
abfan1127 8y ago
people who's data has noise seems like a compelling group.
sgjohnson 8y ago
I don't need democracy. I only need liberty. Representative democracy creates career politicians. And career politicians are yet to prove that they aren't just a complete waste of oxygen.
MichaelMoser123 8y ago
<< systematic falsification of data on everything from GDP growth to hydropower use pervades Chinese government statistics. So what's the use of all this fancy data if they can't have accurate statistics? That should have been the basis of scientific management?
- wty 8y ago
  I laughed. The Chinese government has the accurate version of all data, what is published to the world is false and has different purposes
- lainga 8y ago
  Columbus kept two logbooks, one with his ships' real positions, and another with falsified positions to show his men so they wouldn't become discouraged.
  - MichaelMoser123 8y ago
    Columbus was one man, here you have an enormous organization: Are you sure that all decision-makers know the correct statistics and not the falsified one? Are there more than two levels of truth here - does the academy of sciences have the same figures as the central committee? What about the ministries and regional authorities? This madness must be creating its own challenges, so to speak. You never know if the numbers that one is looking at are correct - the job of Mandarin is not an easy one.
    - etrevino 8y ago
      The Soviet Union kept two sets of historical archives, allowing only the most reliable and/or senior people inside the "real" one (for example, accurate data on Stalin's purges). They also kept two sets of economic statistics. As you suggest, it caused a lot of confusion. And, yeah, no one knew who had the correct information.
pnathan 8y ago
An interesting perspective. I would like to understand more in depth the history in China of how influence has been gained and how ordinary people were able to affect the local politics. In the English/Germanic tradition, we might have a parley-ment, or a town hall, or a Thing. I wonder what the comparable system in China was? Does anyone have some in depth knowledge here? (happy to rtfm if one is available)
- digi_owl 8y ago
  My, likely flawed, understanding is that the Chinese trust the government more than the west have a history of doing. The mentality is something more like a family elder, if i have understood things correctly.
- lainga 8y ago
  All governments need some method of contact with the governed to assert their legitimacy. It's telling that in North Europe we had parliaments - places to speak your mind - because speaking your mind was how we did that. Oratory was, and is, seen as a necessary quality in a good governor, since at least ancient Greece and certainly since the days of Rome. In China, on the other hand, there is no major oratory tradition. The way Chinese government contacted the people was by being everywhere and nowhere - omnipresent, through the imperial civil service, and yet unseen. If you wanted to gain influence in the government, you took the imperial examination, became a bureaucrat, rose through the Nine Ranks, and hopefully, by the time you reached the top, you had enough governing experience to see merit in the old way of doing things.
  - Karrot_Kream 8y ago
    > If you wanted to gain influence in the government, you took the imperial examination, became a bureaucrat, rose through the Nine Ranks, and hopefully, by the time you reached the top, you had enough governing experience to see merit in the old way of doing things. Yes but this was a huge source of instability for the Qing regime. Arguably, the Qing's failure to adapt to the modern world came in part from a cabal of bureaucrats that opposed reforms.
  - 8y ago
mortenjorck 8y ago
> Uighurs are required to install government-designed tracking apps on their smartphones, which monitor their online contacts and the web pages they’ve visited. Appalling as this is, I'm surprised the government needs to do this at all, given the assumption that WeChat or Tencent would already have all this information and be required to make it readily available. Then again, maybe the visible intrusiveness is the point: Han get spied on invisibly through social media and mobile carriers; Uighurs have mandatory app installs to constantly remind them who's in charge.
- jhayward 8y ago
  It may be simple expediency: there are many stories of Uighur people being stopped by police and having to show them their phones. The app may be a pragmatic way to facilitate that interaction without need for central monitoring (which is probably also used).
falcolas 8y ago
Appropriate background for any claims of unbiased decision making based on statistics: https://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/LieStat/ https://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/LieStat/ The numbers can be completely accurate, but the interpretation will always be biased. Also - "USA Temperature: can I sucker you": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17744886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17744886
ttflee 8y ago
The gov't has already been so difficult to get with. With algorithms, doubly so.
SamuelAdams 8y ago
The northern city of Rongcheng, for example, assigns a score to each of its 740,000 residents, Foreign Policy reported. Everyone begins with 1,000 points. If you donate to a charity or win a government award, you gain points; if you violate a traffic law, such as by driving drunk or speeding through a crosswalk, you lose points. People with good scores can earn discounts on winter heating supplies or get better terms on mortgages; those with bad scores may lose access to bank loans or promotions in government jobs. Some parts of this seem analogous to USA's Credit Score system. A total surveillance state isn't a great idea but this small part of it seems reasonable, no?
- nathell 8y ago
  $deity forbid, no. The problem with this is that once you get beneath a certain threshold, you find yourself on a self-reinforcing spiral which it's hard to get yourself out of; a spiral not unlike that of homelessness. Watch Black Mirror's S03E01 for a glimpse of where this can take us.
  - CaptSpify 8y ago
    Additionally, what someone considers positive, someone else may consider negative. If I attend an anti-gun rally, who gets to decide if that makes me gain, or lose points?
PakG1 8y ago
Democracy is good because it basically allows for a peaceful revolution if a populace is dissatisfied with its government. Democracy is bad because the government risks enduring endless bickering and nothing getting done. Etc, etc. I don't know what the right answer is anymore.
- dsr_ 8y ago
  More to the point, democracy is good if and only if it allows for peaceful transitions of government.
  - nixarian 8y ago
    Democracy is good only if the population is sufficiently educated and informed. Americans are, by and large, poorly educated and ill informed.
    - jewelthief91 8y ago
      Americans are vastly more educated than even a few generations ago.
    - jhayward 8y ago
      > Democracy is good only if the population is sufficiently educated and informed. Americans are, by and large, poorly educated and ill informed. Compared to what? America of the 1900's? The 1950's? India, at any point in time?
- dfjliasjg 8y ago
  I've always thought that deadlock was a feature instead of a bug. If half the population is for it and half is against it then nothing should happen legislatively.
  - vorpalhex 8y ago
    Federalist paper #10 contains a lot of thought on this topic, and it's worth reading. Like all documents of this type, it should be read as a kind of argument between two competing sides. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp
harshreality 8y ago
Why does MIT Tech Review insist on an incognito-hostile and tor-hostile mechanism to try to limit free views (to 3/month)?
- VierScar 8y ago
  What extensions/privacy settings do you use? (Chrome or another browser?)
Millennium 8y ago
Data is nothing; interpretation is everything. That's why democracy is needed even in the presence of data: the people still have a need to choose how the data is interpreted and who will do the interpreting.
- weberc2 8y ago
  It's particularly easy to mislead by only collecting data that supports a given position. This is why heterodoxy is so important in the academy, and why it's so concerning that certain fields are so hostile toward unorthodox points of view.
bumholio 8y ago
A more apt story would be "Who needs democracy when you have economic growth". It's strange how the exceptional economic circumstances of China are glossed over in such social analyses. China has had average 10% growth rates for 3 decades, it's economy has grown by a factor of 40 since 1988. It's hard to explain just how powerful this positive economic shock has been. The Chinese people have seen, during their recent lifetimes, the country transitioning from abject poverty into a world superpower in the medium income range. Their quality of life and paychecks have grown every year and the political leadership is addicted to this growth, it's how they stay in power and easily quench all discontent. As soon as this incredible growth cycle is exhausted we will start to see the first chinks in the armor of the Party State, we will see the public demand democracy and official accountability. Look for example to Hong Kong, where the growth has been much slower (they already had a high level of development) and the dissenting voices are multiplying. And that's exactly what will happen in the rest of China in the next 10-20 years; growth becomes much harder once you have picked the low hanging fruits and you get closer to the advanced countries.
namedlambda 8y ago
I remember watching an anime, around 3 or so years ago, called "psychopass". It was about a dystopian country that was governed by technology. The system would decide what would be the best position for somebody in the government if they desired to go there. It'd also monitor people and evaluate in real time their psyche. People who were predisposed to psychopathic and/or sociopathic behaviour were flagged and monitored. The police would use guns that tranquilized flagged people and disintegrated people deemed public danger. This article painted China as a predecessor of the country presented in the anime. As for the ranking / credit system. I don't believe that such an idea is feasible, as it resembles elo. We know from online games such as League of Legends that elo is not an appropriate metric as it's often governed by multiple variables out of the individual player's control. While in the 'long run' it evens out, it often creates the illusion that a player stuck because of their environment and not themselves, which while may be true in a few cases, in most cases is false.
_bxg1 8y ago
There is nothing in the world right now that I fear more than the creep of Chinese surveillance/authoritarian practices into the rest of the world's society. They are a rapidly growing superpower, and while I hold no fantasies of U.S. supremacy, this specific trend in the use of digital technology terrifies me. There won't be a war, by the way. I honestly think we're past the point as a species where superpowers duke it out in such a literal fashion. It's just bad for business. (Military might today is usually directed from superpowers to third-world countries, but that's a topic for another day). China's influence and dominance will happen through the private sector, ironically. They have their own versions of Google and Facebook: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. These are the tech giants through which the Chinese government gets most of its data on citizens. They are even more ubiquitous than ours - people do everything from getting loans to scheduling medical appointments through them - and they've begun trying to break into the western markets. Tencent in particular has been investing billions in everything from Blizzard to Tesla. At the same time, Google, Facebook, and Apple are also trying to break into the Chinese market. Those companies have already compromised their values for the sake of that opportunity by blocking VPN apps on app stores, censoring content, etc. For now those policy adjustments only apply in China itself, but once it becomes an established (and massive) market - they have four times the population of the U.S. - do you really think the companies would stand up against pressure from the Chinese government to apply those policies elsewhere? Between the spread of the companies it effectively owns, and the deals being made with the rest of the world's most powerful tech companies, China will soon wield more influence than the U.S. I don't think it'll be long before surveillance-states are the norm.
- wilsonnb3 8y ago
  > I honestly think we're past the point as a species where superpowers duke it out in such a literal fashion. It's just bad for business. It's bad for business until it's not. Isolationist economic policies will over time make war more likely. > Between the spread of the companies it effectively owns, and the deals being made with the rest of the world's most powerful tech companies, China will soon wield more influence than the U.S. I don't think it'll be long before surveillance-states are the norm. I'm not sure about China wielding more influence than the U.S. That sort of thing is really hard to predict accurately, especially from the perspective of someone who isn't a world leader privy to all available information. I do agree that surveillance states will be the norm, though, at least everywhere that doesn't currently have a democracy functioning well enough to prevent it.
simmanian 8y ago
This might be slightly off topic, and I’m really all for democracy, but I do worry that the system is losing its competitive edge in the age of reputation. It’s just way too easy for an organized party to spread maliciously fake information and sow discord among the populace. We saw this at work with Russia’s Twitter accounts that claim to be from Texas, England, and other Western worlds, writing subtle hate tweets against refugees, Muslims, BREXIT proponents/opponents, etc. Thing is, it’s not just Russia that’s doing this. There is a German study that found social/political bots that root for Japan’s nationalist agenda [1]. South Korea has been having similar issues on their biggest websites. And I’m willing to bet there are organized parties within America that benefit from social division as well. A non-democratic society is probably better equipped to move forward amidst all the chaos (and in preventing chaos in the first place), whereas a democratic one may be much more likely to tear itself apart from inside out. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29182493 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29182493
andyzweb 8y ago
This is heavily reminiscent of Project Cybersyn, a project of the Chilean government in the early 1970's.
SnakeBallzz 8y ago
Anyone who does not see that America will soon be like China (Totalitarian) is just plain stupid! Who needs democracy when you have data?: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611815/who-needs-democracy-when-you-have-data/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611815/who-needs-democrac... Just look at how we have all of these cameras and Alexa devices in our houses. And our phones that track our every move. Look at Tesla cars with all of their tracking tech. It`s ALL conditioning to prepare us for TOTALITARIANISM.

117 points by raleighm 8y ago

efields 8y ago

The people inside the democracy. They need democracy.

hkai 8y ago
Well, they believe they don't. My compatriots from my two home nations, Russia and China, usually defend the authoritarian policy thanks to years of soft propaganda and opinion guiding. "Western countries have problems too, and did you see America, this is what democracy leads to." You can see that on HN, too.
- geofft 8y ago
  The fact that these people believe that their current system of government is better - i.e., that the result of a democratic election would be to avoid democracy - should cause us to worry if the same effect is at play when people who have lived their whole life under a democratic regime say that their current system of government is better, too.
- njarboe 8y ago
  See "Manufacturing Consent" (1988) by Chomsky and Herman for a classic critique of how in the West there are also "soft propaganda and opinion guiding" systems in place and operating successfully. I wonder though, with the internet and the rise of Trump, if Chomsky might say these systems are not in control as much as they used to be.
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  >Western countries have problems too, and did you see America, this is what democracy leads to." When you compare the "democratic" two-party American answer to terrorism and the "autocratic" one-party Chinese answer, it's hard to see democracy as the superior choice. Spying on millions of people is terrible, as are the re-education camps, but the "War on Terror" is responsible for millions of deaths while spying on millions of people. Years of soft propaganda make people praise American behavior, and democracy provides no option to end it.
beat 8y ago
Do they? Can you really establish a rational need for democracy, or are you just running on cultural reflex? If you take this question as me saying we shouldn't have democracy, maybe it's reflex. It's an interesting question. Democracy isn't an end in itself, but rather a means to an end. What is that end (or those ends)? How else can those ends be achieved?
- cocacola1 8y ago
  Does there even need to be an end at all? I prefer the notion that there's never an end and it's just all one long journey. Death may be the end of a person, but the journey continues for everyone & everything else.
- Tade0 8y ago
  The end is a robust system that minimises corruption and this can only be achieved when the people in power can be held accountable and are easy to replace.
  - beat 8y ago
    Ok, so why is corruption the problem? I can easily imagine a government that is not corrupt at all that terrifies me (such as a theocratic state), and I can imagine governments that are quite corrupt that are just fine for most purposes.
- bopbop 8y ago
  A rational need for democracy for you would be so that I don't govern you according to my wishes. A rational need for democracy for me would be that you don't govern me according to your wishes. A rational need for democracy for the uyghurs would be that Xi Jumping doesn't govern them according to his wishes. I've always understood this to be what is meant by democracy is the worst form of governance, apart from all the others.
  - gknoy 8y ago
    But ... we currently (in the US) have a direct example of the rulers in power governing the populace in a way which is "not according to the wishes" of roughly half the population. (I think this is a direct result of our 2 party system, as compared to Britain's multiple parties, but I've no idea how to fix it.) Any time you vote on the losing side of an election (whether it's for who to elect, or approve a tax, or legalize (or ban) certain acts, you end up being governed by _every one else's_ wishes. On the bright side, at least in a democracy I mostly have the trust that such changes CAN happen, over time, if enough people come to believe similarly as I do about things.

coldtea 8y ago

>It helps that a tumultuous couple of years in the world’s democracies have made the Chinese political elite feel increasingly justified in shutting out voters. Developments such as Donald Trump’s election, Brexit, the rise of far-right parties across Europe, and Rodrigo Duterte’s reign of terror in the Philippines underscore what many critics see as the problems inherent in democracy, especially populism, instability, and precariously personalized leadership. In other words, that a democracy might actually function as one -- oh, the horror -- reflecting what people want, instead of what the elites and the well off 10% wants them to want, or present as TINA.

fcarraldo 8y ago
If Trump, Brexit and Duterte are what the people want, perhaps we live in societies that are incapable of self-governance. I'm no fan of centrist neoliberal politics, but regimes and decisions which destabilize economies, marginalize minorities and villainize immigrants are clearly not a better alternative.
- goatlover 8y ago
  > clearly not a better alternative. To what, though? What's the choice here? Give a few people even more power without having to be voted in? Who decides which people get all the power? What if they're worse? How do we get rid of them? Is a bloody revolution or decades of dictatorship really the same as having elections where the votes don't always make the best choices?
  - mrec 8y ago
    Thank you. Democracy is not about guaranteeing competent government, or government that agrees with you. Democracy is about avoiding civil wars. I think people forget this, and forget how hideous civil wars can be, because it's been so successful.
  - fcarraldo 8y ago
    I don't know. I didn't offer an alternative, and I'm not sure that there is one. I only pointed out that from the GP's viewpoint, these examples of democracy reflecting the will of the people (Trump, Duterte, Brexit) are not having positive impacts on society. I don't believe they should be held up as examples of democracy at work, but rather as unfortunate failures of democratic systems.

known 8y ago

"Politics is an art by which politicians get money from the rich and votes from the poor in the pretext of protecting each from the other" --Oscar

abfan1127 8y ago

people who's data has noise seems like a compelling group.

sgjohnson 8y ago

I don't need democracy. I only need liberty. Representative democracy creates career politicians. And career politicians are yet to prove that they aren't just a complete waste of oxygen.

MichaelMoser123 8y ago

<< systematic falsification of data on everything from GDP growth to hydropower use pervades Chinese government statistics. So what's the use of all this fancy data if they can't have accurate statistics? That should have been the basis of scientific management?

wty 8y ago
I laughed. The Chinese government has the accurate version of all data, what is published to the world is false and has different purposes
lainga 8y ago
Columbus kept two logbooks, one with his ships' real positions, and another with falsified positions to show his men so they wouldn't become discouraged.
- MichaelMoser123 8y ago
  Columbus was one man, here you have an enormous organization: Are you sure that all decision-makers know the correct statistics and not the falsified one? Are there more than two levels of truth here - does the academy of sciences have the same figures as the central committee? What about the ministries and regional authorities? This madness must be creating its own challenges, so to speak. You never know if the numbers that one is looking at are correct - the job of Mandarin is not an easy one.
  - etrevino 8y ago
    The Soviet Union kept two sets of historical archives, allowing only the most reliable and/or senior people inside the "real" one (for example, accurate data on Stalin's purges). They also kept two sets of economic statistics. As you suggest, it caused a lot of confusion. And, yeah, no one knew who had the correct information.

pnathan 8y ago

An interesting perspective. I would like to understand more in depth the history in China of how influence has been gained and how ordinary people were able to affect the local politics. In the English/Germanic tradition, we might have a parley-ment, or a town hall, or a Thing. I wonder what the comparable system in China was? Does anyone have some in depth knowledge here? (happy to rtfm if one is available)

digi_owl 8y ago
My, likely flawed, understanding is that the Chinese trust the government more than the west have a history of doing. The mentality is something more like a family elder, if i have understood things correctly.
lainga 8y ago
All governments need some method of contact with the governed to assert their legitimacy. It's telling that in North Europe we had parliaments - places to speak your mind - because speaking your mind was how we did that. Oratory was, and is, seen as a necessary quality in a good governor, since at least ancient Greece and certainly since the days of Rome. In China, on the other hand, there is no major oratory tradition. The way Chinese government contacted the people was by being everywhere and nowhere - omnipresent, through the imperial civil service, and yet unseen. If you wanted to gain influence in the government, you took the imperial examination, became a bureaucrat, rose through the Nine Ranks, and hopefully, by the time you reached the top, you had enough governing experience to see merit in the old way of doing things.
- Karrot_Kream 8y ago
  > If you wanted to gain influence in the government, you took the imperial examination, became a bureaucrat, rose through the Nine Ranks, and hopefully, by the time you reached the top, you had enough governing experience to see merit in the old way of doing things. Yes but this was a huge source of instability for the Qing regime. Arguably, the Qing's failure to adapt to the modern world came in part from a cabal of bureaucrats that opposed reforms.
- 8y ago

mortenjorck 8y ago

> Uighurs are required to install government-designed tracking apps on their smartphones, which monitor their online contacts and the web pages they’ve visited. Appalling as this is, I'm surprised the government needs to do this at all, given the assumption that WeChat or Tencent would already have all this information and be required to make it readily available. Then again, maybe the visible intrusiveness is the point: Han get spied on invisibly through social media and mobile carriers; Uighurs have mandatory app installs to constantly remind them who's in charge.

jhayward 8y ago
It may be simple expediency: there are many stories of Uighur people being stopped by police and having to show them their phones. The app may be a pragmatic way to facilitate that interaction without need for central monitoring (which is probably also used).

falcolas 8y ago

Appropriate background for any claims of unbiased decision making based on statistics: https://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/LieStat/ https://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/LieStat/ The numbers can be completely accurate, but the interpretation will always be biased. Also - "USA Temperature: can I sucker you": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17744886 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17744886

ttflee 8y ago

The gov't has already been so difficult to get with. With algorithms, doubly so.

SamuelAdams 8y ago

The northern city of Rongcheng, for example, assigns a score to each of its 740,000 residents, Foreign Policy reported. Everyone begins with 1,000 points. If you donate to a charity or win a government award, you gain points; if you violate a traffic law, such as by driving drunk or speeding through a crosswalk, you lose points. People with good scores can earn discounts on winter heating supplies or get better terms on mortgages; those with bad scores may lose access to bank loans or promotions in government jobs. Some parts of this seem analogous to USA's Credit Score system. A total surveillance state isn't a great idea but this small part of it seems reasonable, no?

nathell 8y ago
$deity forbid, no. The problem with this is that once you get beneath a certain threshold, you find yourself on a self-reinforcing spiral which it's hard to get yourself out of; a spiral not unlike that of homelessness. Watch Black Mirror's S03E01 for a glimpse of where this can take us.
- CaptSpify 8y ago
  Additionally, what someone considers positive, someone else may consider negative. If I attend an anti-gun rally, who gets to decide if that makes me gain, or lose points?

PakG1 8y ago

Democracy is good because it basically allows for a peaceful revolution if a populace is dissatisfied with its government. Democracy is bad because the government risks enduring endless bickering and nothing getting done. Etc, etc. I don't know what the right answer is anymore.

dsr_ 8y ago
More to the point, democracy is good if and only if it allows for peaceful transitions of government.
- nixarian 8y ago
  Democracy is good only if the population is sufficiently educated and informed. Americans are, by and large, poorly educated and ill informed.
  - jewelthief91 8y ago
    Americans are vastly more educated than even a few generations ago.
  - jhayward 8y ago
    > Democracy is good only if the population is sufficiently educated and informed. Americans are, by and large, poorly educated and ill informed. Compared to what? America of the 1900's? The 1950's? India, at any point in time?
dfjliasjg 8y ago
I've always thought that deadlock was a feature instead of a bug. If half the population is for it and half is against it then nothing should happen legislatively.
- vorpalhex 8y ago
  Federalist paper #10 contains a lot of thought on this topic, and it's worth reading. Like all documents of this type, it should be read as a kind of argument between two competing sides. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp

harshreality 8y ago

Why does MIT Tech Review insist on an incognito-hostile and tor-hostile mechanism to try to limit free views (to 3/month)?

VierScar 8y ago
What extensions/privacy settings do you use? (Chrome or another browser?)

Millennium 8y ago

Data is nothing; interpretation is everything. That's why democracy is needed even in the presence of data: the people still have a need to choose how the data is interpreted and who will do the interpreting.

weberc2 8y ago
It's particularly easy to mislead by only collecting data that supports a given position. This is why heterodoxy is so important in the academy, and why it's so concerning that certain fields are so hostile toward unorthodox points of view.

bumholio 8y ago

A more apt story would be "Who needs democracy when you have economic growth". It's strange how the exceptional economic circumstances of China are glossed over in such social analyses. China has had average 10% growth rates for 3 decades, it's economy has grown by a factor of 40 since 1988. It's hard to explain just how powerful this positive economic shock has been. The Chinese people have seen, during their recent lifetimes, the country transitioning from abject poverty into a world superpower in the medium income range. Their quality of life and paychecks have grown every year and the political leadership is addicted to this growth, it's how they stay in power and easily quench all discontent. As soon as this incredible growth cycle is exhausted we will start to see the first chinks in the armor of the Party State, we will see the public demand democracy and official accountability. Look for example to Hong Kong, where the growth has been much slower (they already had a high level of development) and the dissenting voices are multiplying. And that's exactly what will happen in the rest of China in the next 10-20 years; growth becomes much harder once you have picked the low hanging fruits and you get closer to the advanced countries.

namedlambda 8y ago

I remember watching an anime, around 3 or so years ago, called "psychopass". It was about a dystopian country that was governed by technology. The system would decide what would be the best position for somebody in the government if they desired to go there. It'd also monitor people and evaluate in real time their psyche. People who were predisposed to psychopathic and/or sociopathic behaviour were flagged and monitored. The police would use guns that tranquilized flagged people and disintegrated people deemed public danger. This article painted China as a predecessor of the country presented in the anime. As for the ranking / credit system. I don't believe that such an idea is feasible, as it resembles elo. We know from online games such as League of Legends that elo is not an appropriate metric as it's often governed by multiple variables out of the individual player's control. While in the 'long run' it evens out, it often creates the illusion that a player stuck because of their environment and not themselves, which while may be true in a few cases, in most cases is false.

_bxg1 8y ago

There is nothing in the world right now that I fear more than the creep of Chinese surveillance/authoritarian practices into the rest of the world's society. They are a rapidly growing superpower, and while I hold no fantasies of U.S. supremacy, this specific trend in the use of digital technology terrifies me. There won't be a war, by the way. I honestly think we're past the point as a species where superpowers duke it out in such a literal fashion. It's just bad for business. (Military might today is usually directed from superpowers to third-world countries, but that's a topic for another day). China's influence and dominance will happen through the private sector, ironically. They have their own versions of Google and Facebook: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. These are the tech giants through which the Chinese government gets most of its data on citizens. They are even more ubiquitous than ours - people do everything from getting loans to scheduling medical appointments through them - and they've begun trying to break into the western markets. Tencent in particular has been investing billions in everything from Blizzard to Tesla. At the same time, Google, Facebook, and Apple are also trying to break into the Chinese market. Those companies have already compromised their values for the sake of that opportunity by blocking VPN apps on app stores, censoring content, etc. For now those policy adjustments only apply in China itself, but once it becomes an established (and massive) market - they have four times the population of the U.S. - do you really think the companies would stand up against pressure from the Chinese government to apply those policies elsewhere? Between the spread of the companies it effectively owns, and the deals being made with the rest of the world's most powerful tech companies, China will soon wield more influence than the U.S. I don't think it'll be long before surveillance-states are the norm.

wilsonnb3 8y ago
> I honestly think we're past the point as a species where superpowers duke it out in such a literal fashion. It's just bad for business. It's bad for business until it's not. Isolationist economic policies will over time make war more likely. > Between the spread of the companies it effectively owns, and the deals being made with the rest of the world's most powerful tech companies, China will soon wield more influence than the U.S. I don't think it'll be long before surveillance-states are the norm. I'm not sure about China wielding more influence than the U.S. That sort of thing is really hard to predict accurately, especially from the perspective of someone who isn't a world leader privy to all available information. I do agree that surveillance states will be the norm, though, at least everywhere that doesn't currently have a democracy functioning well enough to prevent it.

simmanian 8y ago

This might be slightly off topic, and I’m really all for democracy, but I do worry that the system is losing its competitive edge in the age of reputation. It’s just way too easy for an organized party to spread maliciously fake information and sow discord among the populace. We saw this at work with Russia’s Twitter accounts that claim to be from Texas, England, and other Western worlds, writing subtle hate tweets against refugees, Muslims, BREXIT proponents/opponents, etc. Thing is, it’s not just Russia that’s doing this. There is a German study that found social/political bots that root for Japan’s nationalist agenda [1]. South Korea has been having similar issues on their biggest websites. And I’m willing to bet there are organized parties within America that benefit from social division as well. A non-democratic society is probably better equipped to move forward amidst all the chaos (and in preventing chaos in the first place), whereas a democratic one may be much more likely to tear itself apart from inside out. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29182493 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29182493

andyzweb 8y ago

This is heavily reminiscent of Project Cybersyn, a project of the Chilean government in the early 1970's.

SnakeBallzz 8y ago

Anyone who does not see that America will soon be like China (Totalitarian) is just plain stupid! Who needs democracy when you have data?: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611815/who-needs-democracy-when-you-have-data/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611815/who-needs-democrac... Just look at how we have all of these cameras and Alexa devices in our houses. And our phones that track our every move. Look at Tesla cars with all of their tracking tech. It`s ALL conditioning to prepare us for TOTALITARIANISM.