China confounds all that western liberals believed about the net | Hacker News Reader

China confounds all that western liberals believed about the net

theguardian.com

30 pointsSmkyMt14 comments

Am I the only one that sees an irony with the deep blue states with this article? There seems to be an unbounded expansion of Government in those areas; from what intrusions it has on your personal life (sugar taxes [unless your starbucks]), to business regulations [coffee causes cancer signs, demanding women be on boards], and increasing the reliance of people on the government (business taxation to 'help' the 'homeless' in areas with high inflation, taxation of business cafeterias).

> Am I the only one that sees an irony with the deep blue states with this article?

There’s a vast chasm between the government being used as a tool for collective action (like when forcing human-friendly business regulations) and government being used as a tool for control.

Would you mind if I borrowed this as a political talking point in public forums?

Sure, that's fine—it's probably not my original thought, either.

I would agree with you in general, but at the same time I think there is key nuance of perspective here. "Human friendly rules" can be seen as unwelcome authoritarianism in different cultures, or even by different people within the same culture. In other words "human friendly" is an expression of your own personal views and values, which are subjective and well... personal.

Let's create an example, which is not all that hypothetical. There seems to be an increasingly large body of evidence indicating that social media is simply a net ill, potentially quite a severe one, on society. Do you begin to censor/prohibit it, or do you allow it to run mostly as it will? In our culture the answer is clear. We value freedom as something in and of itself, even when the outcomes it produces are not desirable. Yet it's certainly not particularly hard to imagine that another culture might see that eliminating these sort of events would be something that would contribute towards a 'healthier' society, even if we remove any notion of government control from however 'healthier' is defined. The actors making decisions in both cases would believe they're acting in a 'human friendly way' yet come to completely different conclusions.

> There’s a vast chasm between the government being used as a tool for collective action and government being used as a tool for control.

Doesn't matter how deep. It's a short jump. The former is a characterization of the latter. They achieve the same goals and someone is awaiting their turn to use that tool.

"Dear passengers, people who travel without a ticket, or behave disorderly, or smoke in public areas, will be punished according to regulations and the behaviour will be recorded in individual credit information system. To avoid a negative record of personal credit please follow the relevant regulations and help with the orders on the train and at the station."

To me, this is the most worrisome part of the article. The implementation of an "individual credit system" would grant an administration an unprecedented amount of control over the lives of individuals, from policing the actions of an individual within their own home, punishing those who deviate from their "proper" social roles (imagine an individual losing credit for being openly gay), or actively suppressing any perceived threat to the administration. Taxing sugar or requiring companies to put warning labels on their products is laughably tame compared to this level of invasiveness.

"And although the American tech giants have become accomplished data vampires in their own right, they are mere amateurs compared to their Chinese counterparts, who are not hampered by concerns about data protection, privacy or even the rule of law."

I was under the impression that "deep blue" states were more effective than red states at implementing privacy laws. Think of California's Consumer Privacy Act. At any rate, the article says that "any data a local company holds effectively belongs also to the state". I don't know of a comparable policy in any state here in the US.

Although the additional regulation in states like California may invite comparison with the likewise highly regulated Chinese system, the paths taken to enact those regulations are very different and that difference matters doesn't it?

In California, we put these regulations onto ourselves through the vote because a majority of us think they will lead to better living (sometimes we are wrong). Because those regulations usually do not materially abrogate the rights of others as enshrined in the US and CA constitutions they often stand the test of time.

And the regulations exist at our pleasure -- if at some point they become too onerous, we can fairly easily elect leaders to dissolve them. You have seen this with our drug laws, which are more lax than most states because stricter laws served us poorly. Government for and by the governed.

In contrast the Chinese system is not realistically a government for and by the governed, but rather a government for the purpose of maintaining control, harmony, and the peace in that order.

I hate to be the one to point this out, but: it certainly isn’t just China.

This reminds me more than a little of Hernando de Soto's work with _The Mystery of Capital_, subtitled "Why Capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else." It's an interesting read for its specifics (and I think he's got it right that successful private markets depend heavily on a network of accepted public services). But one generalizable takeaway might be that would-be sociocultural exporters often don't understand why their social systems work -- it's easy to take for granted background cultural features and social institutions you simply assume are there.

Also: it's probably worth noting that while the US isn't particularly dystopian, it can't be taken for granted that it will remain a liberal democracy (there are highly visible impulses to turn it down a different path right now) or that technology won't be a significant tool of social control.

(Nor is it entirely clear that the West has capitalism totes dialed-in.)

Thanks for this comment. It initially piqued my interest because I confused de Soto with the Spanish conquistador of the same name, quickly cleared that up though! It was cool to realise he was key in the economic reforms of Peru, my family had to move because of the Shining Path, so it's close to home.

So I've quickly read his Wikipedia entry (and have the book to read later). It seems like the critiques of his approach, resulting him being lumped in the 'neoliberal' bucket, is that he pushes property rights as practically the only requirement for developing countries to successfully reform their economies to the benefit of all. Whereas your phrasing as "successful private markets depend heavily on a network of accepted public services" (which I agree with more) would seem to encompass more than only legal and justice frameworks towards property rights.

Anyway, I'll read the book and think more about it. Thanks again.

Yeah, I'm probably overly vague about "accepted public services." More specifically, the kind of thing De Soto seemed to focus on are property recording systems, functioning courts working on reasonably well-defined property law, and permitting/review/accounting that makes economic activity legible. These aren't super sexy public institutions, and it may well be they aren't sufficient for a truly thriving society, but they are basic entry level public components of a functioning private enterprise system, and apparently more than a few attempts to export US capitalism have failed to account for them.

I mean, Brave New World and 1984 predicted the abuse of technology to socially engineer societies into obedience. These novels were written in the 30s and 40s but still seem prescient today. China has become the living embodiment of those books, with its social credit system. It's not surprising per se, China's communist roots serve as an excellent breeding ground for techno-authoritarianism. My only fear is that the Western world has forgotten it's classical liberal roots...

It is quite a common sense any technology can be used for whatever purposes at the hands of its master. Not sure the net should be an exception. As we have witnessed, social networks can be used to organize Arabic Spring. They can also be used to screw up the election process in many countries.

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