6 ms·

It seems to be a very common theme in Western journalism to describe Asian countries as dystopias or dystopias in the making. Often this is based on the idea of

by kubb 5y ago

It seems to be a very common theme in Western journalism to describe Asian countries as dystopias or dystopias in the making. Often this is based on the idea of a dystopia floating around in Western pop culture, influenced by books like Big Brother or Brave New World. This comes with a habit of putting these societies in contrast with the western societies, and claiming the obvious superiority of the latter. This sentiment could be paraphrased as "these people are surely living in hell, and that's because they don't know how to preserve their freedom". It's also phrased as a warning to their own people: "be careful about all those new political ideas, or we'll end up like those Asians (or Africans)". This to me seems very much like a mixture of arrogance and ignorance which leads Westerners to believe that things are the best where they live, and it's so because they're just so smart that they could set things up this way, and they have the best culture. It's bizarre if you take a step back and think about it, as if they're collectively patting themselves on the back, and at the same time are trying to convince themselves that the issues that they're having are nothing in comparison to the issues that others have.

carapace 5y ago
Not to put too fine a point on it but by a lot of measures thing were better in Western societies for the last couple of centuries, eh? Arguably things still are better. It's evening out, but only really in the last few decades. I mean, science and the Industrial Revolution? The Enlightenment and humanitarian values?
- secondaryacct 5y ago
  Sure, but are they brave new world dystopia or farming societies. One has to decide.
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    Not clear at all. What takes the label of a BNW, what of a farming society, whether the dichotomy is descriptive or theoretical...
jollybean 5y ago
Nobody is calling Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia or frankly S. Korea a 'Surveillance State'. Not Japan either really. China is being referred to as a 'Surveillance State' because it is. Singapore has been a planned/authoritarian since the 'revolution', so it's not a stretch either.
- geodel 5y ago
  > China is being referred to as a 'Surveillance State' because it is. No, I think it is called because China is rich/powerful enough to put technology in place for surveillance where as many others want to but can't afford. It also has developed a kind of adversarial relationship due to its economic impact on west. So more reason look negatives one can find.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    "Want to but can't afford" is quite... uncharitable ? (What is happening in, say, Japan or South Korea - surely they are rich enough ?
  - jollybean 5y ago
    No, many nations have the wealth to put Orwell Tech in place, they don't because it's wrong on every level. China controls it's citizens through absolute control of information. Every email, every text. The 'VPN' bypass is 1) still controlled and China can shut those down as they please and 2) not hugely relevant if 99% of the population believes the facts the CCP wants them to believe. Orwell (well, Blair) himself could not have conceived of the level of control because the tech simply didn't exist. That said, I think you're right to hint that maybe other states have not been able to do this, but that some will. I believe China will become a major exporter of surveillance tech in the coming decades.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  Pakistan will get there soon enough at the rate it's going
babelfish 5y ago
Absolutely. The author of the article lives in London, which is notorious for police surveillance (1 camera per 13 people!), but there's no way they'd write a similar article about a Western country.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Have you checked ? I have the opposite expectation...
- Jedd 5y ago
  > Absolutely. The author of the article lives in London, which is notorious for police surveillance (1 camera per 13 people!), but there's no way they'd write a similar article about a Western country. Are you asserting this because you've researched all the articles that Peter Guest has written, or because you just don't think he would? A starting point on RestOfWorld - the site's name kind of gives away the focus for their reporting, so it's probably a skewed subset: https://restofworld.org/author/peter-guest/ https://restofworld.org/author/peter-guest/
- foldr 5y ago
  >which is notorious for police surveillance (1 camera per 13 people!) These cameras are mostly privately owned. They're not part of a police surveillance system. Bear in mind that the Metropolitan Police only has about 33,000 officers. Even if they all spent all day watching surveillance footage, they wouldn't get anywhere close to looking at the footage from all of those cameras. What happens in practice is that lazy (or overworked) police officers will occasionally bother to retrieve CCTV footage that might be relevant to solving a crime. I can see why people feel creeped out by CCTV cameras if they're not used to them. However, painting London as some sort of hypersurveillance environment isn't true to life (at least in my experience of living there). It's also worth adding that CCTV is an almost absurdly inefficient means of spying on people if you actually have malicious intentions. We all now carry personal tracking devices that are immeasurably more useful for this purpose.
echelon 5y ago
Since the advent of worldwide social media, a cacophony of voices have come out to shame western countries. "How dare you! Look at your awful selves first, Americans / Europeans / Cowboys!" I'm making a caricature here, but you get my point. We're constantly being accused of being xenophobic, racist, imperialist, etc. Our prideful "Western thought" is arrogant. These accusals are a constant assault on our nationalistic sense of shared identity and worth. The idea that no matter where we came from, that this is a melting pot. One where we admire rugged individualism and freedoms, and have a sense that if we work smart and hard and try our luck enough times, we will succeed. There's an endless barrage of voices telling us we're horrible. It's starting to seep into the youth and shape their worldview. Most of this is coming from the outside. The thing is, we know that there are a lot of broken things. We're working on it. Democracy is a work in progress. To quote Snowden, it's "a direction". Every new year is better. America was never going to have a monopoly on power. Globalism accelerated Asia's rise to our level within just a generation, and now we have to work much harder to stay at par. When we praise our system and decry others, know that we're not angry about this situation. Other countries are more appealing now as a result of this great averaging out of wealth and productivity. But the rapid increase in quality of life will taper off and begin to look just like America. We're not in decline - the world is catching up. But even amongst equals, we Americans have a pretty good idea of the shape of the world we want. We want liberty, freedom of speech, and a subservient government. We want the opportunity to beat anyone. To not have our government stand in the way as a cabal. We want to swear at our leaders and draw funny cartoons of them without having to worry about our safety. We want to vote them in and out and investigate them when they do wrong. Because sometimes we think we know better, but even if not, it's what we think we deserve. And before you raise Singapore on a pedestal above us, please realize that they kill people for minor drug possession [1]. I'm incredibly glad we don't emulate this model. It's not for us. (We do bad enough already...) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_Drugs_Act_(Singapore) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_Drugs_Act_(Singapore...
- kubb 5y ago
  From your comment, I'm getting the sense that you live in a besieged fortress. It doesn't have to be so extreme though. Singapore is no dystopia, and neither is London (in fact, I'd prefer living in the latter than the former if only because of the weather). They just make different tradeoffs in how they're organized. And they deal with different (though overlapping) sets of issues.
secondaryacct 5y ago
And they re not closed, you can live in them and see for yourself. I m a Hong Kong permanent resident now and I agree with you: these societies seem more like traditional family oriented societies than western sci fi dystopia. In effect, for most people here, the dystopia is Sweden lol
- ubermonkey 5y ago
  What would be dystopic about Sweden, to someone from one of these places?
- stanislavb 5y ago
  Why Sweden exactly? What's special about it?
  - kubb 5y ago
    Could be LGBT rights and migrants with brown skin. Racism and homophobia tend to do well in traditional family-oriented societies.
  - ur-whale 5y ago
    > Why Sweden exactly? What's special about it? Taxes
- joconde 5y ago
  Out of all western countries, who would chose a Scandinavian one to qualify as a dystopia? They probably have among the highest standards of living in all of Europe. That sounds like the same prejudices the OP said westerners have.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
If we gave aliens pictures of Baltimore and Singapore which would they pick as the dystopia?
- bilbo0s 5y ago
  Neither. To an alien they would look the same. We can't differentiate an anthill in Boston Mass. from an anthill in Gerona Cuba. They look the same to us. I only pointed that out to show how little space there is between what we call "dystopia" in Asia, and what we call the legal order our own societies. I doubt a completely uninformed but intelligent 3rd party could sus out the systemic differences between the two.
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    "Aliens" is so poorly defined that the question is meaningless.
chuckee 5y ago
Yes, Western journalism is famous for uncritically praising the West, holding it up as the realization of a perfect, flawless ideal, to which all other societies can only aspire to. But when it comes to those other societies, the headlines are filled with dire warnings that they will taint our perfect system with their backwards or dystopian ways if we allow them to immigrate. > It seems to be a very common theme in Western journalism to describe Asian countries as dystopias or dystopias in the making. Whereas they would never describe their own countries this way. Just look at the praise heaped upon Britain: The Guardian view on surveillance: Big Brother is not the only watcher now - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/13/the-guardian-view-on-surveillance-big-brother-is-not-the-only-watcher-now https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/13/the-gu... Welcome to London, the city that never sleeps because it’s too busy watching you. - https://www.inverse.com/article/22198-london-surveillance-theresa-may-cctv-terrorism-future-cities https://www.inverse.com/article/22198-london-surveillance-th... 'We are hurtling towards a surveillance state’: the rise of facial recognition technology - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/05/facial-recognition-technology-hurtling-towards-surveillance-state https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/05/facial-re... London’s police department said on Friday that it would begin using facial recognition to spot criminal suspects with video cameras as they walk the streets, adopting a level of surveillance that is rare outside China. - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/business/london-police-facial-recognition.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/business/london-police-fa... Britain is at risk of becoming a surveillance state more intrusive than the Oceania of George Orwell’s 1984, a government watchdog has warned. - https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/surveillance-state-becoming-more-intrusive-than-1984-9jnf92v3b https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/surveillance-state-becomi... For several years now, the British media have been telling us that theirs is a surveillance society. "It could be the 4 million closed-circuit television cameras, or maybe the spy drones hovering overhead, but one way or another Britons know they are being watched. All the time. Everywhere," Luke Baker wrote in a representative Reuters article published in 2007, going on to note that "Britain is now the most intensely monitored country in the world, according to surveillance experts, with 4.2 million CCTV cameras installed, equivalent to one for every 14 people." - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/london-is-the-surveillance-societys-biggest-test-yet/243445/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/londo...

by kubb 5y ago

carapace 5y ago

Not to put too fine a point on it but by a lot of measures thing were better in Western societies for the last couple of centuries, eh? Arguably things still are better. It's evening out, but only really in the last few decades. I mean, science and the Industrial Revolution? The Enlightenment and humanitarian values?

secondaryacct 5y ago
Sure, but are they brave new world dystopia or farming societies. One has to decide.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  Not clear at all. What takes the label of a BNW, what of a farming society, whether the dichotomy is descriptive or theoretical...

jollybean 5y ago

Nobody is calling Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia or frankly S. Korea a 'Surveillance State'. Not Japan either really. China is being referred to as a 'Surveillance State' because it is. Singapore has been a planned/authoritarian since the 'revolution', so it's not a stretch either.

geodel 5y ago
> China is being referred to as a 'Surveillance State' because it is. No, I think it is called because China is rich/powerful enough to put technology in place for surveillance where as many others want to but can't afford. It also has developed a kind of adversarial relationship due to its economic impact on west. So more reason look negatives one can find.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  "Want to but can't afford" is quite... uncharitable ? (What is happening in, say, Japan or South Korea - surely they are rich enough ?
- jollybean 5y ago
  No, many nations have the wealth to put Orwell Tech in place, they don't because it's wrong on every level. China controls it's citizens through absolute control of information. Every email, every text. The 'VPN' bypass is 1) still controlled and China can shut those down as they please and 2) not hugely relevant if 99% of the population believes the facts the CCP wants them to believe. Orwell (well, Blair) himself could not have conceived of the level of control because the tech simply didn't exist. That said, I think you're right to hint that maybe other states have not been able to do this, but that some will. I believe China will become a major exporter of surveillance tech in the coming decades.
selimthegrim 5y ago
Pakistan will get there soon enough at the rate it's going

babelfish 5y ago

Absolutely. The author of the article lives in London, which is notorious for police surveillance (1 camera per 13 people!), but there's no way they'd write a similar article about a Western country.

BlueTemplar 5y ago
Have you checked ? I have the opposite expectation...
Jedd 5y ago
> Absolutely. The author of the article lives in London, which is notorious for police surveillance (1 camera per 13 people!), but there's no way they'd write a similar article about a Western country. Are you asserting this because you've researched all the articles that Peter Guest has written, or because you just don't think he would? A starting point on RestOfWorld - the site's name kind of gives away the focus for their reporting, so it's probably a skewed subset: https://restofworld.org/author/peter-guest/ https://restofworld.org/author/peter-guest/
foldr 5y ago
>which is notorious for police surveillance (1 camera per 13 people!) These cameras are mostly privately owned. They're not part of a police surveillance system. Bear in mind that the Metropolitan Police only has about 33,000 officers. Even if they all spent all day watching surveillance footage, they wouldn't get anywhere close to looking at the footage from all of those cameras. What happens in practice is that lazy (or overworked) police officers will occasionally bother to retrieve CCTV footage that might be relevant to solving a crime. I can see why people feel creeped out by CCTV cameras if they're not used to them. However, painting London as some sort of hypersurveillance environment isn't true to life (at least in my experience of living there). It's also worth adding that CCTV is an almost absurdly inefficient means of spying on people if you actually have malicious intentions. We all now carry personal tracking devices that are immeasurably more useful for this purpose.

echelon 5y ago

Since the advent of worldwide social media, a cacophony of voices have come out to shame western countries. "How dare you! Look at your awful selves first, Americans / Europeans / Cowboys!" I'm making a caricature here, but you get my point. We're constantly being accused of being xenophobic, racist, imperialist, etc. Our prideful "Western thought" is arrogant. These accusals are a constant assault on our nationalistic sense of shared identity and worth. The idea that no matter where we came from, that this is a melting pot. One where we admire rugged individualism and freedoms, and have a sense that if we work smart and hard and try our luck enough times, we will succeed. There's an endless barrage of voices telling us we're horrible. It's starting to seep into the youth and shape their worldview. Most of this is coming from the outside. The thing is, we know that there are a lot of broken things. We're working on it. Democracy is a work in progress. To quote Snowden, it's "a direction". Every new year is better. America was never going to have a monopoly on power. Globalism accelerated Asia's rise to our level within just a generation, and now we have to work much harder to stay at par. When we praise our system and decry others, know that we're not angry about this situation. Other countries are more appealing now as a result of this great averaging out of wealth and productivity. But the rapid increase in quality of life will taper off and begin to look just like America. We're not in decline - the world is catching up. But even amongst equals, we Americans have a pretty good idea of the shape of the world we want. We want liberty, freedom of speech, and a subservient government. We want the opportunity to beat anyone. To not have our government stand in the way as a cabal. We want to swear at our leaders and draw funny cartoons of them without having to worry about our safety. We want to vote them in and out and investigate them when they do wrong. Because sometimes we think we know better, but even if not, it's what we think we deserve. And before you raise Singapore on a pedestal above us, please realize that they kill people for minor drug possession [1]. I'm incredibly glad we don't emulate this model. It's not for us. (We do bad enough already...) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_Drugs_Act_(Singapore) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misuse_of_Drugs_Act_(Singapore...

kubb 5y ago
From your comment, I'm getting the sense that you live in a besieged fortress. It doesn't have to be so extreme though. Singapore is no dystopia, and neither is London (in fact, I'd prefer living in the latter than the former if only because of the weather). They just make different tradeoffs in how they're organized. And they deal with different (though overlapping) sets of issues.

secondaryacct 5y ago

And they re not closed, you can live in them and see for yourself. I m a Hong Kong permanent resident now and I agree with you: these societies seem more like traditional family oriented societies than western sci fi dystopia. In effect, for most people here, the dystopia is Sweden lol

ubermonkey 5y ago
What would be dystopic about Sweden, to someone from one of these places?
stanislavb 5y ago
Why Sweden exactly? What's special about it?
- kubb 5y ago
  Could be LGBT rights and migrants with brown skin. Racism and homophobia tend to do well in traditional family-oriented societies.
- ur-whale 5y ago
  > Why Sweden exactly? What's special about it? Taxes
joconde 5y ago
Out of all western countries, who would chose a Scandinavian one to qualify as a dystopia? They probably have among the highest standards of living in all of Europe. That sounds like the same prejudices the OP said westerners have.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

If we gave aliens pictures of Baltimore and Singapore which would they pick as the dystopia?

bilbo0s 5y ago
Neither. To an alien they would look the same. We can't differentiate an anthill in Boston Mass. from an anthill in Gerona Cuba. They look the same to us. I only pointed that out to show how little space there is between what we call "dystopia" in Asia, and what we call the legal order our own societies. I doubt a completely uninformed but intelligent 3rd party could sus out the systemic differences between the two.
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  "Aliens" is so poorly defined that the question is meaningless.

chuckee 5y ago

Yes, Western journalism is famous for uncritically praising the West, holding it up as the realization of a perfect, flawless ideal, to which all other societies can only aspire to. But when it comes to those other societies, the headlines are filled with dire warnings that they will taint our perfect system with their backwards or dystopian ways if we allow them to immigrate. > It seems to be a very common theme in Western journalism to describe Asian countries as dystopias or dystopias in the making. Whereas they would never describe their own countries this way. Just look at the praise heaped upon Britain: The Guardian view on surveillance: Big Brother is not the only watcher now - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/13/the-guardian-view-on-surveillance-big-brother-is-not-the-only-watcher-now https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/13/the-gu... Welcome to London, the city that never sleeps because it’s too busy watching you. - https://www.inverse.com/article/22198-london-surveillance-theresa-may-cctv-terrorism-future-cities https://www.inverse.com/article/22198-london-surveillance-th... 'We are hurtling towards a surveillance state’: the rise of facial recognition technology - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/05/facial-recognition-technology-hurtling-towards-surveillance-state https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/05/facial-re... London’s police department said on Friday that it would begin using facial recognition to spot criminal suspects with video cameras as they walk the streets, adopting a level of surveillance that is rare outside China. - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/business/london-police-facial-recognition.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/business/london-police-fa... Britain is at risk of becoming a surveillance state more intrusive than the Oceania of George Orwell’s 1984, a government watchdog has warned. - https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/surveillance-state-becoming-more-intrusive-than-1984-9jnf92v3b https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/surveillance-state-becomi... For several years now, the British media have been telling us that theirs is a surveillance society. "It could be the 4 million closed-circuit television cameras, or maybe the spy drones hovering overhead, but one way or another Britons know they are being watched. All the time. Everywhere," Luke Baker wrote in a representative Reuters article published in 2007, going on to note that "Britain is now the most intensely monitored country in the world, according to surveillance experts, with 4.2 million CCTV cameras installed, equivalent to one for every 14 people." - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/london-is-the-surveillance-societys-biggest-test-yet/243445/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/08/londo...