4 ms·

I totally agree with you because things just don't work like that. When Nazis came my grand father was a teenager. A lot of local chads believed in them and jo

I totally agree with you because things just don't work like that. When Nazis came my grand father was a teenager. A lot of local chads believed in them and joined SS and did all the dirty work. Then when soviets came these chads were afraid that they will be prosecuted for murdering Jews so they did the only logical thing - joined soviet milicija. What basically made them untouchable. My grand father's brother ran away to US. These local chads then could "prosecute" all the family for "joining partisan movement". It was not soviets from Moscow that were counting every head. It was local supporters who knew each other from the high school. If there was some brother missing in family, they could send all the family to gulags, take over the land, take over houses by accusing family joining partisans. So my grand father spent his teenage years hiding in neighboring villages. It is not Google who will give you out. They will have upper hand if anything because they are big and etc. It will be your employer who will comply. It will be your local mailman (what was all these packages you were receiving from China?). It will be your neighbor who likes to shoot guns and doesn't like you for one reason or another. What people should understand that this "fascist government" will be sitting in DC. They will not be sending somebody from DC to Minnesota because "someguy at gmail dot com" wrote something against them. How inefficient that would be. It will be local people who will be supporting "the new great government". And they have much more compromising information about you than your emails. When the doomsday comes you will not be hiding your baked beans in your bunker from zombies. It will be your neighbor whose three kids are starving. Or just your other neighbor who likes guns and to eat. And he is hungry, pretty hungry right now.

granzymes 6y ago
Thank you for sharing that story.
pydry 6y ago
>What people should understand that this "fascist government" will be sitting in DC. They will not be sending somebody from DC to Minnesota because "someguy at gmail dot com" wrote something against them. How inefficient that would be. It'll be easy as pie. The data is there in an easily consumable format. The tools exist to categorize and find undesirables. Tools exist which can be used to rank you in terms of desirability. DC won't sent somebody to Minnesota because of what you wrote in a gmail alone. However, what you wrote in gmails would likely contribute to a "social scoring system" which would be used against you.
- AndrewThrowaway 6y ago
  I both agree and disagree with you at the same time. Yes, social scoring would be easy to implement. However for it to work you would need critical mass of people believing in it. If you live in Minnesota and somebody in DC says that your score is low you can kinda just ignore it. When you local milkman stops selling you milk because of it, then things get dark. However your local milkman can already have "a score" for you which is even worse than that one from DC. E.g. not selling you milk because you are gay or have a green mohawk. HN attracts specific technical audience who tends to see things from very technical (hard, logical) point of view. However what I want to stress here are "softer" things - how society works, how people interact, how they sell out, what they want to achieve with this etc. It is much harder to define and is much scarier TBH. It might be a good idea to be nice to your neighbors, demonstrate only mild opinions, basically just "hide in a gray mass of people" before you start setting up your own email servers, degoogle yourself and etc if you are thinking about fascist government taking over. For technology or corporations to betray you, you most probably be betrayed by society before that.
  - pydry 6y ago
    >If you live in Minnesota and somebody in DC says that your score is low you can kinda just ignore it. Did you ask the Chinese citizens in Chongqing if they can "just ignore" their social score coz they're not in Beijing? The answer may surprise.
    - AndrewThrowaway 6y ago
      My thought is that if fascist government takes over, Minnesota at first would be something like Hong Kong. It is not like social scoring could/would happen overnight. At first you would need a lot of people to believe in it, a lot of people to support it and etc. I understand that things would not so simple of course. My main message is that technology is only a tool, it is still people, society doing the act.

granzymes 6y ago

Thank you for sharing that story.

pydry 6y ago

>What people should understand that this "fascist government" will be sitting in DC. They will not be sending somebody from DC to Minnesota because "someguy at gmail dot com" wrote something against them. How inefficient that would be. It'll be easy as pie. The data is there in an easily consumable format. The tools exist to categorize and find undesirables. Tools exist which can be used to rank you in terms of desirability. DC won't sent somebody to Minnesota because of what you wrote in a gmail alone. However, what you wrote in gmails would likely contribute to a "social scoring system" which would be used against you.

AndrewThrowaway 6y ago
I both agree and disagree with you at the same time. Yes, social scoring would be easy to implement. However for it to work you would need critical mass of people believing in it. If you live in Minnesota and somebody in DC says that your score is low you can kinda just ignore it. When you local milkman stops selling you milk because of it, then things get dark. However your local milkman can already have "a score" for you which is even worse than that one from DC. E.g. not selling you milk because you are gay or have a green mohawk. HN attracts specific technical audience who tends to see things from very technical (hard, logical) point of view. However what I want to stress here are "softer" things - how society works, how people interact, how they sell out, what they want to achieve with this etc. It is much harder to define and is much scarier TBH. It might be a good idea to be nice to your neighbors, demonstrate only mild opinions, basically just "hide in a gray mass of people" before you start setting up your own email servers, degoogle yourself and etc if you are thinking about fascist government taking over. For technology or corporations to betray you, you most probably be betrayed by society before that.
- pydry 6y ago
  >If you live in Minnesota and somebody in DC says that your score is low you can kinda just ignore it. Did you ask the Chinese citizens in Chongqing if they can "just ignore" their social score coz they're not in Beijing? The answer may surprise.
  - AndrewThrowaway 6y ago
    My thought is that if fascist government takes over, Minnesota at first would be something like Hong Kong. It is not like social scoring could/would happen overnight. At first you would need a lot of people to believe in it, a lot of people to support it and etc. I understand that things would not so simple of course. My main message is that technology is only a tool, it is still people, society doing the act.