Mastodawn

Sosthène the Zealot

@FreePietje I'm highly suspicious of all the articles we've been reading recently about China's "social credit". Not to say that the surveillance is not pervasive and relatively effective, but i have good reasons to believe they are nowhere near being able to effectively monitor 1.4 billion people, whose about 50% still live in the countryside.
On the other hand, I think they have good motives to make the world thinks they can

@Sosthene I agree they won't have 100% coverage (just yet).

My toot is actually sth I started at and I wanted to carry over to here (and was actually the reason I re-activated my twitter account).

The idea is not to point out the dystopian/1984-ish nature of China's Social Credit system (I think that is obvious), but to point out that the situation in the West isn't that much better, only less obvious.
So the "better marketing" will be theme in this thread.

@Sosthene I don't know yet how/where in that thread I'll incorporate it, but https://theintercept.com/2019/02/14/amazon-ring-police-surveillance/ will surely become a part of it.

Another aspect is that one of the bitmain founders' goal was to make ASICs for AI/ML. Making ASICs for facial recognition doesn't seem far fetched, but the (privacy) implications can/will be massive. Whether bitmain will survive is now dubious, but that won't 'undo' the progress made wrt ASICs manufacturing and I assume will be used FAR more often and broadly.

Amazon’s Home Surveillance Chief Declared War on “Dirtbag Criminals” as Company Got Closer to Police

Video and internal emails show how Amazon's Ring has blurred line between private innovation and public law enforcement.

@Sosthene
Why/what has made you suspicious?

@FreePietje we have really been reading a lot on this recently, we have a lot of nice footage of the CCTV system mapping people and car in the streets, I can't think of another way for western media to have so much info that the Chinese gov willingly feeding them this. Beside the technological issue to have such a massive coverage, there's also social issue, Chinese are not "ants", they perfectly know how to cheat, disobey and rebel when they're not satisfied.

@Sosthene
Other people, like @tim, have been talking about it for quite a while, when it wasn't that popular.

So the info has been available for a while. Having (western) MSM in just a few hands, combined with their revenue model (ads -> clicks), combined with typical effects of 'social' media, you often see certain topics dominating the 'news' for a (short) while, before it moves on to the next hot topic.

@Sosthene Similar thing is happening now with Huawei.
The risk of supply-chain-attacks have been known for quite a while as is the suspicion of Huawei's ties with the Chinese gov. And then all of a sudden it became a hot topic.
My (uneducated/tin-foil-hattery) guess is that it's a story pushed by the US gov so that US companies will be selected to provide the equipment for 5G. Good for the US economy ... and so that they can backdoor it themselves.

@Sosthene
I can name a whole host of other topics which have (followed) the same pattern.

As usual, the real situation is much more nuanced, but I guess that doesn't sell that well and/or requires actually investigating the matter (and be willing so look at it from different angles).

The endless use of a single image (CCTV) is regretful ... and often misleading.
'Darknet' markets and privacy also often get negative imagery used.
Or a physical coin with a B when it's about bitcoin.

@Sosthene
I do find it interesting that you seem to think it's an image pushed by the Chinese gov, while I consider it more a negative/dystopian image pushed by western media and govs.
I see it as "we good, they bad"

@FreePietje we're all reading tea leaves, I might be wrong, but I really think this is just showing off, China don't need that to effectively control its population, you need a ID for basically anything, including buying a phone or taking a train, they don't need a social score for that.
I think Chinese gov really dgf if westerners see them as totalitarian dictators, as long as they look strong and in control.

@FreePietje And I'm a bit mixed about the narrative being pushed by westerners on westerners, the "look those bastards implementing real life dystopia" is mostly implied at least for what I've read, and western media are already mostly collectivist and pro authority, most westerners already gave up most of their freedom and mindlessly giving away their privacy to FB and Google. The dystopia is already here, the social score would only be the cherry on the cake, and we are ready for it

@FreePietje the Chinese gov has been shitting its pants for some years now, economy is not as good as they made everyone believe, and it is perceive as a very serious threat that triggered a political tightening under Xi Jinping. I understand this "social credit" stuff as a PR stunt for foreigners. One important reason for that is that I don't hear my Chinese friends talking about this, and believe me they sure will if this was half as serious as it seemed.

@FreePietje the motive would be to seem stronger than they really are to other countries, and it makes perfect sense at a time when the Chinese establishment is feeling weakened and threaten. I also think there's some ground to their claim though, I think that such a system might be possible and even close to production in Beijing and Shanghai and maybe a couple major cities, but nowhere near the whole country. But Beijing is what matters to them anyway