Singapore’s tech-utopia and surveillance state
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restofworld.org
It's not even close to the worst place to live. That's not the point.
The thing that makes it the worst is that it is superficially desirable. It's like refined sugar, a poison that rots your teeth and causes dozens of health problems but tastes fantastic and is marketed heavily to children.
Only a lunatic or an idiot would want to emulate North Korea but many sane intelligent and well-meaning people want to emulate Singapore. That's what makes it so horrible. It's a shining beacon of totalitarianism that advertises that wonderful things can be purchased at the cost of human rights.
I would rather live, pragmatically, in Singapore than many other countries, but if I were there I'd be fully aware that it's a road to hell.
The runner up for this designation is probably Dubai, which is even more of a two-tier Neo-feudal slave state with third world style corruption and only a superficial rule of law.
> “In a democracy, everyone takes turns. But if you really want a lot of wisdom, it’s better to concentrate decisions and process in one person. It’s no accident that Singapore has a much better record, given where it started, than the United States. There, power was concentrated in an enormously talented person, Lee Kuan Yew, ...”
https://fs.blog/charlie-munger-wisdom/
In short, "what you don't want", according to the Munger social vision, is ... democracy. A benevolant dictator it seems, is the only way. But how many aspiring dictators in the long history of this world have proven out as benevolent? The track record of dictators selected by political struggle I would argue is, by any measure of mass welfare, even worse than that of hereditary monarchs.
Plato wrote about all of this stuff, he was of the same opinion (philosopher kings), and then spent most of life finding out why that didn't work (and was, as a result, sold into slavery towards the end of his life). This came up again in the Enlightenment. The perceived fault of democracy is the strength: it is strong because "everyone takes turns". You significantly reduce your upside, but you significantly reduce your downside too. The US has benefitted hugely from founders who not only understood democracy well, but understood the problems with dictatorship.
Also, it is worth saying that LKY's son now runs the country. It isn't a democracy, are we seriously saying that the country was scoured for the best people and it just turned out the best guy was the son of the last guy? Seriously? LKY's achievements were great, he was a great leader but there is a lot wrong with the country (it runs on slave labour) and has the highest level of political weakness possible (China is a perfect parallel: Deng was a great leader, but he didn't solve any of political issues and assumed the CCP would always lead by consensus, Xi has made himself permanent leader...this is why you have a balance of powers/strong constitution, this is exactly why).
Thanks. Any pointers to sources that actually know something about the real power structure inside Singapore politics? From my scan of several English-language sites there, it seemed only one -- Straits Times -- acknowledged that the country had any internal politics at all:
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/whats-needed...
So, Lee Hsien Loong is LKW's son?
Also this. Wondering if the Progress Singapore Party is a token opposition that's allowed to exist, provided it never threatens to achieve real power, in order to put a fig leaf on the democracy claim?
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/former-candi...
> a balance of powers/strong constitution
Necessary but not sufficient. Support for those values, and a few others e.g. respect for rule of law, willingness to pay taxes, toleration of dissenting opinions, consideration for future generations, is also required, from some significant fraction of the electorate. A certain "political culture". Decay of which I'd suggest is at the root of any democracy's troubles.
Opposition does exist in Singapore's politics, and in fact they do get quite a large share of votes (~40% across many constituencies), it's just that due to the first-past-the-post system the number of opposition MPs that make it into Parliament is extremely small, and thus the ruling party has effectively full control over Parliament.
Now this is definitely a clear flaw of the system but things are changing - younger people are more willing to run as opposition candidates and in the most recent election the Worker's Party made some significant wins.
There are a few things I think are important to consider:
1. Credibility of the opposition. Opposition should not exist for opposition's sake. Many opposition candidates are simply... not that impressive. A good example is the Progress Singapore Party you mentioned (it is a new party, not the most representative of the opposition). Their rhetoric comes across as xenophobic and racist primarily against Indian immigration, which frankly seems to just be pandering to middle-aged, Chinese voters. Of course incompetency exists in the ruling party as well but I won't go there.
2. Where do we want to end up? I don't think it's wise to simply rush into "copying" another country's political system. Frankly, I believe that the 2-party system seen in many countries is the "worst case" equilibrium that we should try to avoid falling into. We are now in the midst of the rare process of political change and I don't mind that it happens in slow steps. Let the Worker's Party prove themselves. Let the ruling party take in the lessons from the election and improve themselves or change their policies. It all ultimately works for the improvement of the country which is great news!
3. On the note of not imitating other countries, one thing I am glad to see is emphasis and scrutiny on political integrity. We recently had a case of an MP being caught lying in Parliament and it was taken very seriously. I do certainly hope twitter politics never takes foot here.
What human rights exactly?
> To illustrate how Better.sg tries to diffuse tensions, Keerthi recounted how a dark-skinned, ethnically South Asian member of the group had proposed a project after an interaction that she considered racist. She’d gone to an ethnically Chinese doctor with a dermatological complaint, but he refused to accept her as a patient, saying he couldn’t confidently diagnose conditions on dark skin. She wanted to build a map that collated reports of similar incidents with medical professionals. Keerthi said that he suggested an alternative product: why not build an image library of how skin conditions present on different skin tones, to help doctors out?
It feels like they're unwilling to accept, at a very fundamental level, that the issue wasn't that the doctor "can't diagnose X", but rather that they would prefer not to diagnose X.
> A digital education plan for the pandemic assumed that all children had access to devices, and that all households had one parent spare to supervise them, he added. That simply wasn’t the case, and lower income families suffered disproportionately. “You can map these dysfunctions and asymmetries onto certain socioeconomic statuses,” Kuah said.
This is again one of the more paternalistic aspects of the system at play, they're unwilling to accept anything that falls outside of their "norm," where they — a small subset of powerful people — get to define what is the norm — not the people who live there.
> In a country that’s notoriously obsessed with safety, where jaywalking and failing to wear a seatbelt can be punished with jail time, migrant workers can be transported on the expressways in the back of goods vehicles. Calls for change after a series of fatal accidents this year were rejected, on the grounds it would be too expensive for their employers.
I find this to be insanely inhuman, anyone who falls outside their preferred norm is the subhuman, or the untermensch. Their existence does not matter. Their concerns don't matter.
> The coronavirus burned through the close-packed migrant dormitories. By the end of 2020, more than 150,000 migrant workers, nearly half of them, had been infected, compared to just 4,000 in the general population.
> Inside the dorms, the systems seemed calibrated to trigger near-constant lockdowns; each time a positive case is found in a dormitory, its residents are isolated. Eighteen months on, migrants are still largely shut in. They’re only allowed to leave their dormitories to work, or, once a week, for a few hours at a designated recreation centre.
> That time [went] very fast… but on the other hand, very slow,” he told Rest of World. “All day we stay in the dormitory, [in the] same room. We cannot go out, [we were] only allowed to go to the toilet and shower. Even cannot go [into the] corridor.” Nights were the worst. Having spent most of the day sitting on his bed, watching movies on his phone, he found it hard to sleep. “This was a very, very bad time,” he said.
They've put a group of people, whom they consider to be the untermensch, within group housing where their movement is restricted and they are locked in.
There will be some who will make the parallel to lockdowns in the US and the rest of the developed world, but fundamentally, those lockdowns were about sheltering in place at home, applied equally across the population, and gave people autonomy to go out for essential needs etc.
This targets a specific sub-population. They are forced to live together in dorms. And they can only access recreation for a few hours every week.
That's a prison in all but name.
> People have to trust that there are limits to this organizing principle. If the government changed its mind about enforcing the law on homosexuality, for example, “it would be able to subpoena the location data of every queer person in Singapore to see who they’re meeting,” Rajeswari said. “There are jokes in our community about the government having files on us… but they’re morbid jokes.”
> In 2020, he was jailed for 10 days for hosting a live discussion via Skype with the Hong Kong pro-democracy figurehead Joshua Wong.
It's a "utopia" for sociopaths.
This isn't rooted in cynicism but in what I think is an accurate understanding of life.
Life exists in a perpetual state of war against entropy. There are always massive problems. Your body spends anywhere from 20% to 50% (depending on how you count it) of its metabolic energy just not falling apart. If your body stopped doing this you would turn into mush in a few days... almost literally.
So if you look at a place and it looks like utopia, there are a few possibilities:
(1) Everyone is paying through the nose in the form of taxes or other fees to pay other people to fix things.
(2) The problems are being hidden through a campaign of propaganda and cosmetics. The extreme of this is known as a "Potemkin village."
(3) There is a system of slavery or near-slavery in which an underclass is handling all the dirty work.
(4) There are massive problems you are just not seeing yet because you are not looking closely enough. This often happens when people visit somewhere or live there briefly but do not stay long enough to really get to know the place deeply.
Singapore has low taxes. Their situation seems to be a mix of options 2-4.
Oh, and on lockdowns:
> There will be some who will make the parallel to lockdowns in the US and the rest of the developed world, but fundamentally, those lockdowns were about sheltering in place at home, applied equally across the population, and gave people autonomy to go out for essential needs etc.
I would argue that the US barely even had true "lockdowns." There were few places in the US where anyone actually got in real trouble for going out, not wearing a mask, etc. There were places of business and public buildings who would turn you away, sure, but that's about as soft of a glove as you can get here. I see tons and tons of people completely ignoring COVID orders and nothing happened to them.
I don't think I want it different. I will call people stupid for ignoring COVID orders and not getting vaccinated, but if I saw people getting arrested I don't think I would be okay with that.
This reminds me of the HK story. I'm happy to provide more color elsewhere (feel free to reach out via twitter or email), but essentially the no-tax government was deeply involved with the triads and the construction industry. There was a tax system alright, except one that was enforced with gangs and shady deals rather than lawyers.
I live in the USA, and it seems like culturally we tend to think that our country is the best place in all dimensions. I love traveling and enjoying the differences in different places. I think that it is a slippery slope downwards criticizing different cultures and legal systems.
I will say that the “law and order” aspect is way overblown. Residents will break laws and take shortcuts just as they do in the West. The difference is the government will not hesitate to make an example out of you (doubly if a foreigner).
It is very impressive what Singapore has accomplished but there are a lot of problems under the surface that rich expats never see.
Oh and the deference to authority is prevalent. Their Covid contract tracing app went from “for Covid only” to “general law enforcement” right quick with barely a peep from the voters before the govt passed a law making it all “legal”.
In the places I've been to in Asia, racism is not something that's actively thought about. People still have biases within them, but because it's not something they ever discuss or think about. Hence they don't even realize they have those biases.
Perhaps one reason could be that some those places aren't very racially diverse to begin with, at least not as much as America.
I'm from Asia, and I've lived in America for a few years. Trust me, I was treated more politely in America than I would've been in my own home country lol.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it also seems like your account is on the border of using HN primarily for political/ideological battle. That's the line at which we ban accounts, because it's the line at which they start being destructive of the site. If you'd please fix this, and use HN as intended (for intellectual curiosity and thoughtful conversation), we'd appreciate it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Could you name a few example? I have college friend who live and work there, and they never mentioned discrimination. Although we are both Chinese mainlander, might be treated as part of majority.
There are several reasons: Chinese are rich. Nobody likes the rich. Chinese are foreigners. Nobody likes foreigners. Chinese are heretics and infidels. Nobody likes those. Another cause is the, admittedly brilliant, tactic of divide and conquer that Western colonial powers used. Set the natives up against the Chinese merchants instead of white government officials. The Chinese conveniently lacked the firearms and navy guns that the whites had access to.
There have been many downright genocidal riots against the Chinese across the region. The Chinese government was too weak to do anything about it.
Why do they feel the need to ask that question? Are issues with people of specific nationality more prevalent?
Someone correct me if I am wrong.
So, like the US, but with less hypocrisy about it?
In Singapore it’s just tolerated.
You are misunderstanding what the GP comment said. The reality is that landlords/employers can and do discriminate based on race, religion, age, etc all the time. They simply just can't say it out loud, that's the illegal part.
I find that Asian people tend to be pretty open about this stuff, whereas in the west it's taboo. Don't think that anyone would be foolish enough to try arguing that there's no silent discrimination occurring in the US.
It's a unique place in every sense: social and cultural issues, economy, geography, history, leadership, etc. It's a very interesting country to study, but the most important thing in any analysis of Singapore is that lessons from Singapore almost certainly don't extrapolate well to anywhere else; don't draw conclusions about how some other country should be run based on what works there.
Singapore is a safe banking haven in a sea of legal risk and chaos.
Singapore was effectively an (almost) empty plot of land when it was established, and it was designed to be an 'banking/commercial haven'.
What makes Singpore 'rich' is the foundation established by the UK as having 'rule of law' and 'peace and order'.
As long as Singpore remains peaceful and orderly, where the commercial law is respected and foreign entities trust that their money is safe and they will get a fair deal, and that ability is not available in surrounding nations (which it isn't, even today), they they will do well.
If you're a Western company looking for a 'gateway to Asia', then Singapore is a good choice. It was literally built to be that.
It's a little bit how Swiss standard of living is supplemented by the fact that 1/3 of the world's offshore money is parked there, and that surplus benefits the locals.
Like a more complicated version of having 'Oil Wealth'.
It is what it is, and we have to be careful about criticism from afar, but that doesn't mean we can't be critical.
Singapore was a trading port from it's first conception when the Sultan of Johor sold the basically uninhabited swamp island to the British. When they were amicably booted out of Malaysia the country was one of the poorest on Earth, they had no natural resources, rampant poverty and unemployment, no military and infrastructure was in a terrible state. They somehow managed to completely turn that around in half a century, if you look at other new nations formed since then not a single one has managed to even come close to their success despite having vastly superior natural advantages. The Balkan states in particular come to mind, they also had a chance to start anew with a clean slate in the 90's and 30 years on they are a collective basketcase of nations whose younger population is abandoning in droves.
40% of all shipping traffic on Earth passes through their waters, the Port of Singapore is the worlds 2nd busiest by tonnage handled. People associate the country with finance while ignoring the sheer volume of cargo that moves through there.
> Like a more complicated version of having 'Oil Wealth'.
Find this comparison very hard to grok. Any country on Earth could copypaste Singaporean banking and corporate laws today if they wanted to, there's nothing stopping them. Now those same countries can't magically have the oil reserves of the Saudis or Venezuela.
> What makes Singpore 'rich' is the foundation established by the UK as having 'rule of law' and 'peace and order'.
By that metric all former colonies should be thriving?
Singapore had Colonial 'laws' 'order' and 'policy' and what amounted to national strategy that worked well within their context as I pointed out in my first sentence: good commercial law in a sea of chaos.
Also, they were a 'fresh slate' without historical ethnic groups, political causes, large swaths of poor, under-performing industries to be subsidized. They can focus on the 'high surplus' activities and leave everyone else to worry about the other things.
Much like if Manhattan were to 'separate' from the US, kick out the poor people, and still control 65% of US banking activity - Manhattan would be much richer and the US somewhat poorer. They could bring in poor worker / non-citizens from upstate NY etc. and keep social costs externalized.
'Any state' cold 'copy' the Singapore model, yes, and the results would be they would probably be 'much better' (if they came from a bad starting point) but not as good as Singapore because of their strategic placement.
If India were to be as efficiently run as Singapore, they would all be 25x wealthier just as a matter of efficient organization.
But it'd be impossible to 'copy' the model because of historical, legacy political forces, every group and party wanting their supposed piece of the pie. And of course, 'efficient organization' is one thing, but without some kind of strategic industrial advantage, it's a bit harder. Of course, India could focus on being the 'IT / Software' power house of the world, and if they did that, then backed by efficient organization, they would be a 'rich' country.
Canada, Australia and New Zealand are 'clean slate' (mostly) colonies with an effective colonial bureaucracy, and at least some advantage of natural resources, and they are rich.
And FYI if every nation surrounding Singapore did adopt their model of governance, Singapore would be much less important in the equation, much like if the 'Rest of China' became as trustworthy, consistent and fair minded as Hong Kong ... then Hong Kong would lose much of it's advantage.
This is an ignorant thing to say and it borders on orientalism and ignores all the facts that led to them being "basket cases".
I would say it's unfair but it's mostly lazy.
If you remove that from the equation, what makes SG, or any of the aforementioned places, so special?
And being a Bangladeshi migrant worker is fucking awful and not particularly safe.
There's an undercurrent of really horrible shit going on underneath the shiny surface:
* https://tnp.straitstimes.com/news/singapore/maid-who-killed-... (she probably was abused a lot, it is very common...)
* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-57563235 (the pinnacle of maid abuse)
* https://archive.md/RCAI2 (tl;dr don't try to protest being paid less to drive a bus because of your race. they will toss you in prison and beat the shit out of you before deporting you)
You have to watch out for your safety all the time. Just a few weeks ago my friend's bf was beaten up along with several of his friends in Warsaw. The police has done nothing, the embassy has done nothing (they are from on the biggest Western EU countries). You won't read about it in the newspaper either.
I also never feared police or the state for that matter in Singapore, if I didn't do anything illegal.
I cannot say the same for the USA, where there are "no go" areas in all major cities (and many smaller ones), crime stats are way higher, and an encounter with a cop can turn sour way more easily.
Not to mention I had an accident (in Singapore) and my friend called the ambulance there, and had to spend the night on a hospital, where they did several tests, and the cost was like $100 for first rate care in ultra-modern facilities.
>I also never feared police or the state for that matter in Singapore, if I didn't do anything illegal.
Japan, Korea and Taiwan achieve the same level of safety while not being dictatorships. No need to compare it to the US.
They have the rule of law, they have elections, all of those countries are characterized by, in reality, a very monocultural, depolitized, bureaucratic system of government. Live in Singapore in reality is no more or less 'democratic' than live in Japan or Taiwan or SK.
You absolutely will not be arrested for holding up signs outside government buildings[1], or questioned by the police for reading a book on the train as a protest[2]. You would not be sued to bankruptcy for making what would be considered political speech in these other countries. Or just about anything on this list https://twitter.com/kixes/status/1174024357443600384?s=21.
Singapore is absolutely less democratic - there's no need for scare quotes.
[1]: https://twitter.com/kixes/status/1353999081287245824?s=19
[2]: https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/police-question-one-ma...
I think this is a false equivalence. TFA mentions a democracy activist who was imprisoned for 21 days because of a small, non violent protest on a subway. He had been previously arrested for criticizing the judiciary in Singapore.
Unless I'm mistaken, you would not be arrested for either of these acts in South Korea or Japan. They are both imperfect, but in some important ways more free.
Things like that, and worse, have happened time and again in the US too...
Are they the Illinois of SE Asia? For that matter, if the US laws on insider trading applied to congresspeople, half of our elected representatives would rightfully be behind bars, too.
The amount of "mindbending messed up"/"distropian" stuff the US has from a European point of view is absurd.
Well, the slogan «‘No Way To Prevent This’, Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens» is from The Onion («America's Finest News Source»)...
99% of Europeans haven't been to America and only know what Hollywood movies tell them. The kind of person who thinks you can visit New York City and the Grand Canyon in the same day and have to worry about mass shooters everywhere all the time.
And this is not some pop culture instilled notion, but my empirical observations on the ground. Heck, I've talked with too many people who didn't even know the major cities in their own state, 100 miles away from their town, or major parts of its own history, and might as well never even left their county...
San Francisco has some very obvious problems, but there's no way I'd rather be in Singapore as someone who has worked at social media startups, crypto, and dabbling in biotech/longevity... the early opportunities aren't there because the imagination and freedom to pursue it isn't there.
It's a systems problem because allowing serious dissent and dissatisfaction can inspire innovation.
This is out of scope.
The comparison is about city management. Not creativity.
When you talk about creativity, SF is at the forfront a giant nation of 300M people, 2 orders of magnitude larger population and market size. That naturally support more creativity and innovation.
As for how much the market contribute to your claimed advantage, it's hard to measure. It might be that indeed SF per capita creativity, excluding market impact, is better than SG. I have no reason to doubt that, but I see not proof.
Not mentioning other aspects when you are a central cit in a superpower.
If we're talking about the Bay Area tech startup founders then roughly half of those are born outside of the US. Singapore could have just as easily attracted those immigrants, but they went to SF instead.
Same for me in Barcelona. Getting pickpocketed is the worst that can happen.
> I also never feared police or the state for that matter in Singapore, if I didn't do anything illegal.
Well that's the thing, there's a lot of stuff illegal in Singapore :)
In terms of the police, if you are detained you have no right to remain silent and no right to counsel (until after you’ve been interrogated).
And the healthcare system is top notch and affordable, but the governments attitude is “citizens need skin the game”. Private insurance is almost a requirement otherwise the public system will leave you with thousands in out of pocket costs.
It is a remarkable country but scratch under the surface and there is a lot that doesn’t work well too.
You might have never been in fear, but were you ever stoked? And I mean genuinely socially stoked, not the monetary excitement after winning at the casino.
Violence is a big predictor of strong sentiments among the populace.
If you don't risk taking punches and kicks, you'll hardly get the reward of hugs and kisses.
Social volatilty gives socially competent people a good opportunity to capitalize on their competence. Nowhere is this ever more clear than places like Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa, Mexico...
A socially competent person will make friends and romantic relationships as soon as they get off the plane.
A socially incompetent person will get robbed and risk mugging, again as soon as they get off the plane.
The so called dangerous places are also the fun places.
Of course if you are loaded but socially incompetent (say many of the billionaires in Silicon Valley or Wall Street) then your 50B net worth won't be enough for people to restrain themselves from beating you unconscious and taking you Rolex or Phatek Philippe (that your socially incompetent brain decided to sport there even though you are nobody but a walking wallet with no street cred)
That said, even rappers seem to retire to "safer" places then these "lively" options you describe. So something about being safe appeals to many people, not just the socially incompetents'.
The US is huge and there are pockets of instability of course, especially in big metro areas such as LA, Chicago , Baltimore and Detroit.
For a socially competent person who lacks the prequalifer of fame though ,they are not that great again due to prices which are US-like
These people have no rights and any protesting ends them up in Changi or shipped back somewhere else.
> These people have no rights and any protesting ends them up in Changi or shipped back somewhere else.
Presumably they would have rights in their own countries. Since they left those should tell something about practical value of rights when one is just trying to survive while being poor.
Just pointing out that he was an upper class non-citizen and his experience is very different from a lower class non-citizen because of that.
A migrant Mexican worker has full access to the US courts, labor laws protect them, etc.
Migrant workers in Singapore are simply discarded if troublesome. Even though the population of 90%+ vaccinated (for months), migrant workers in Singapore have been confined to their dormitories (when not working) for almost 2 years now.
Pretty regularly trucks with workers in the back with get into accidents and a number will die. Government says “to expensive to make companies transport them in buses”.
There are literally two different systems for Singaporeans and foreigners.
Most places have some source of cheap labor that is exploited.
On the contrary, I think this is essential. As an American, I'll note that criticizing our government is a national past-time. One that even extends beyond our country and others join in. It's important to remember we live in a democracy (don't detract by saying we live in a democratically elected republic). We perform checks and balances on our government. The government is flexible. We can learn from the good and bad from other countries and ourselves (specifically what works in states run by different parties and economies). This is great.
We also need to criticize governments and societies that are violating human rights. This cannot be ignored just because they are not seen as culturally okay by someone else.
What I think is the problem is the comparison. The "America is the greatest at everything." But also the other countries that criticize America but then ignore their own similar issues, just shifting focus. We have to criticize ourselves, but use it as a means to move forward. It can't ever be "x is bad and that's the end of the conversation." It's about a "more perfect union" than "a perfect union" because we have to constantly be improving and adapting to the changes in the world. The danger is being static and thinking what worked before or what works somewhere else automatically works else{when,where}.
The whole problem is that now we just complain and the conversations lack nuance. I'm not sure if they ever had nuance, but I do know that it is important if we're to progress from where we are now.
I think that is a stereotype itself, and at this point held more by non-Americans than Americans. Aside from a minority of hard core believers, what I mostly hear is complaining about the country. Especially online.
I've seldom met Americans who didn't think so, even leftists seem to have this mental wart (well, some of them might think Canada is the apex of civilization). Manifest destiny, and everything.
I can't remember the last person I met who thought the US was the best place in all regards. We're mostly aware of the problems, but completely opposed on how to fix them. The current political climate is born from that intense frustration with the status quo.
One reason is it kind of insinuates that people can exist beyond time and space. So they can have all good things cherry-picked and be made available.
Like I see here people drooling over cheap mobile internet in India without thinking about so many good things in life are simply not available or far too costly by local purchasing power when compared to US.
The entire global economy is one, too, in fact. Not to spoil it, but that's something The Good Place ends up wrestling with by the end.
I could never bear it myself. I'm from the Netherlands and I hate the way most areas there are so boring and designed by committee. I'm more attracted to cities where not every brick has to be the prescribed colour. It makes a place so much organic and interesting IMO. And I value individualism much more than an orderly society. I prefer the laissez-faire attitude in Spain over rigid policing.
This is why I'd never consider Singapore and choose to live in Spain. But this works both ways, I would imagine a lot of people live in Singapore precisely because things work that way there.
Of course not everyone has that choice but I'd say most people that are reasonably well-off do. And Singapore seems to be full of those :)
Upper and middle class? I agree. The lower class and the Indonesian and Malay below them? I saw slightly more discontent.
I have mixed feelings about my time in Singapore. If you’ve never been there the only way I can accurately describe it is it’s like if Disney built a real city. I believe you would get very different results of a survey during the day vs after about 2200 or 2300, when the shoppers are all home and the street cleaners come out.
I think it absolutely earns its name as “the air conditioned city“. But… I will say that for the most part it works well, I just couldn’t do it. I did see people litter here and there, mostly lower class workers stuffing cigarette butts in nonobvious places. But I would send my older mom there without a care in the world for her safety.
As to safety… for a country with strict laws, all police still had body armor, I saw patrols of 4-5 guys all with handguns and usually two with MP5 submachine guns walking around different places, and thought it was interesting to see posters along the stations that warned you should be prepared for terrorism including where to go and how to cut off bleeding.
The whole time I was there I felt like there was an underground I couldn’t get to. That for as beautiful as the city was on the surface (it really is), that there had to be an equal but opposite underground, wether true or not.
They did had issues with terrorism in the past, from islamic extremists...
I think you're talking about 1960's. Today, this is completely opposite. In fact, I see European exceptionalism on HN which rarely gets challenged.
Considering all legal systems equal is a slippery slope to saying that only inhabitants of the "first world" deserve human and civil rights.
On the other it's an authoritarian one party system posing as a democracy where the government owns/runs more of the economy than most so-called socialist states.
It's a great example of the trade-off between personal freedoms and economic security.
Umm, no this isn't a trade-off you need to make. Look at Scandinavia and the rest of Europe. In Sweden, we have complete economic security and personal freedoms. I don't know why you'd think authoritarianism is a necessary trade off for even less economic security than here.
South Korea and Taiwan were military dictatorships for much of their economic rise.
[1] https://www.wired.com/1993/04/gibson-2/ [2] https://www.wired.com/2012/04/opinion-jeyaretnam-disneyland-...
> "Lacking in natural resources, Singapore’s government has long stressed that its most important resource is its people. However, with declining birth rates and low population growth, the country increasingly relies on immigrants to help shoulder the economic burden. In 2020, Singapore’s foreign workforce stood at just under 1.23 million, out of which about 351 thousand were classified as skilled labor. Most of the foreign workforce were employed in sectors that were deemed unappealing to Singaporeans, such as in construction and the service industry, or as domestic help." [1]
https://www.statista.com/statistics/698035/singapore-number-...
The power structure looks like a kind of 'walled city'. The position of Singapore at the east end of the Straits of Malacca, a key transit route from the Indian to the Pacific Ocean, made it a trading hub and Singapore's wealth is due to extraction of a percentage of the wealth flowing through it.
The economics of oil industry is more complicated than that. Canada does not refine most of its oil either. It's not because we don't have the technology or the money to build more refineries. It's because refining any more than the current amount does not make economic sense.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
I mean, science and the Industrial Revolution? The Enlightenment and humanitarian values?
Taxes
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.
> 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-gu...
Welcome to London, the city that never sleeps because it’s too busy watching you. - 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-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-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-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/londo...
"How dare you! Look at your awful selves first, Americans / Europeans / Cowboys!"
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...
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.
"Not angry about this situation" describes European foreign policy, not American
Same thing in America, this has been the case for a long time.
Helps two fold, with lawsuits against the bus company/ accusations against drivers, and of course with catching criminals.
I think the most succinct way to describe the US to an outsider, in a way that will help them understand or explain most of the behaviors that may seem odd, is that everyone's #1 goal all the time is to avoid ever taking the blame for anything, supported by a #2 goal of finding someone else to blame. In an ideal situation, things are arranged such that no one may be blamed.
No, your son was in fact hitting people, and the bus driver kindly asked him to stop, which is all she is allowed to do.
She would have been fired multiple times over if it wasn't for the camera disproving wild allegations from parents who want to lay responsibility on anyone but their kid.
I certainly agree with your assessment, cameras are obscenely obvious in Singapore, which leads to the feeling of being watched. The difference, I suspect, is that more money is spent to make the cameras an obvious fixture, and you can be sure that the well-connected government is tracking you through them. In Singapore, little brother and big brother are one and the same.
Having better surveillance is a tool which can be used for good and bad, contingent on circumstance.
For example, I live in the SF Bay Area. One highway near me (880) suffers from a very large amount of excessive speeding. A system capable of identifying speeders and charging them for their actions would be a boon for public safety. So surveillance here would be a net benefit to society.
However, surveillance being used to prevent alternative ideas from being discussed (alternative solutions to problems or alternative philosophies) is less clearly positive. On the one hand, being able to prevent bold-face misinformation (see a Trump speech for an example) could be beneficial. Preventing reasoned debate, however, detracts from society.
I don't think luddite responses to surveillance technology are effective. The technology is here. Pragmatically, its growing use in society cannot be prevented. We should instead focus on trying to maximize the good aspects of surveillance while minimizing the bad.
As an aside, I find one-sided pieces like this one off-putting. I understand the desire to spin a narrative, but in focusing exclusively on the negatives of the Singaporean approach we (the readers) are left wondering about the other side to the story.
If they were able to eradicate a technology we had for 5000+ years, I'm sure a death penalty for installing surveillance equipment/cameras could very well go a long way in Bay Area as well.
Your statements seem contradictory. Why wouldn't a death penalty for all Ring owners work?
Then you will be back complaining that "the traffic is much worse now" ;)
Chesterton's fence and all
There is fairly robust evidence that prevailing natural speed of traffic is safest and limits that aren't appropriate for the road often reduce safety, as it is the speed differential that's dangerous, not so much the absolute number.
If you set limits too low for driving conditions, you in fact endanger people by policy, instead of helping. It's a valid and commonly raised defence against speeding in many states.
Reckless driving is distinct from excessive speeding all, probably best not to mix up two very different things.
Reckless charge can happen at any speed, even 1km/hr, but it does require proof of intent, and is a strict liability offence. speeding is an absolute liability offence without the mens rhea element.