The issue is that American media/discourse paints a very distorted view of what life under authoritarian rule is like. The truth is in many countries, unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west. But people don’t want to hear that, because we want to feel better than them. Like we wouldn’t tolerate that kind of life.
Of course the most frustrating part about that is as the US and other western countries start sliding into authoritarianism, people deny it because they don’t feel like it’s authoritarian.
Edit: To clarify, I don’t think life is exactly the same - just that the consequences of authoritarianism are much more insidious than they’re portrayed.
Yeah, this is it. I've lived under governments of a variety of different stripes in some very different parts of the world, I've lived in war zones. Day to day life has been more or less the same across all of them.
You go shopping, go to work, see friends, have a few beers or maybe a smoke, eat out, go to weddings, birthdays and funerals, play sports. People run businesses, post memes.
The way non-OECD, "non-democratic" countries are portrayed in the West gives us a very false sense of superiority.
We have the same problems: gilded elites, crushing poverty, persecuted minorities, illusory participation in governance, terrifying police, rampant corruption.
I'm not saying everywhere is identical, there's a spectrum. There's just more similarities between countries than differences, in my experience. The things that often distinguish are more cultural and geographical than political.
It sure is good being a foreigner in an autocratic country. You are most likely there there for business. You don’t really care about anything because you will leave anyway. Most of my coworkers in Singapore were all like that. Who cares about the mass deportation of bus drivers after their strikes for better working condition? Why look at what’s behind the curtain when you can enjoy the pool?
I have met people who have fled autocratic countries. Life sure looks ok there from a surface level. Unless of course you are from the extended family of someone who displeased someone better connected. Or you are in the way of someone. Or you happen to have said something which displeased someone. Then life is not ok at all and there is approximately nothing you can do about it.
Of course everyone there knows that’s how it works. That’s why everyone there shuts up and lower their head because they don’t want to be the idiot having a run up with the power that be.
> Then life is not ok at all and there is approximately nothing you can do about it.
To return to parent's point, we want to say it applies only in autocratic countries, when we have similar pockets of despair as well.
Not everyone can just "fight the man" if they feel prayed upon or abused. Most here can probably solve critical issues with money or even move countries if/when shit hits the fan.
But lower social class people aren't in that mindset, and the power local authorities hold on their life is a lot heavier.
It certainly is. I’m not pretending that liberal democracies are perfect. Ensuring that the one with the least power or at the margin don’t become victims and remain free is a constant struggle but people are fighting it. It can be a dispiriting one when you go through times like the one of the USA are currently traversing
It would be a deep mistake however to fall from the traditional defence of illiberal countries and think that the imperfection of liberal democracies somehow make authoritarian countries as legitimate and acceptable. Oppression there is not an imperfection. It is the system working as designed.
I look at it from a different lens: the political system and what people's life look like isn't a predefined matrix.
To take a mild example, we don't look at federal countries and assume it affects citizen's life in a radical way that can be straight attributed to the federal nature of it. Germany biggest differences from France probably aren't because of that. Sure it has an impact, but not in an easily predictable way.
Authoritarian regime are prone to abuse, but that's not enough to guarantee it will be managed worse than the worse democratic countries. We've have democracies fully melt down and becoming literal hell on earth.
I don't intend to praise authoritarian regimes and don't see them as sustainable, but IMHO there is a lot more to a country than just that.
> Authoritarian regime are prone to abuse, but that's not enough to guarantee it will be managed worse than the worse democratic countries.
You are missing my points by orienting the discussion towards an abstract concept such as well managed.
Authoritarian countries mistreat part of their populations in a way which makes them morally abhorrent and that’s by design. You will hardly find people pointing it out and defending the marginalised in authoritarian countries because they themselves become the target of the state.
I’m not blind to the fact that most of the apologists I have met in my life who are always happy to point that it’s relative and what about the majority actually happy often want nothing more than to be the authoritarian power themselves. This seems particularly relevant in the current American context.
My general point would be that mistreating part of the population is a tool in a toolbox, and countries from all boards use it way more than we acknowledge.
We have democracies that either hang people on public places, pass eugenic laws, sentence gays to prison, or will engage in ethnic cleansing under official orders. Even in milder areas, prventing whole sections of the population from getting citizenship or limiting their reach (mass incarceration etc.) are well know levers that help a country be nice to its most vocal population while shutting down a whole section of the population. Those are readily available tools, whatever the political system.
And being well managed isn't abstract, you might be better off living in Monaco or Morocco, which are full fledge kingdoms, than a democracy like Nigeria for instance.
You might notice that I have carefully talked about liberal democracies in my previous comments. This is not a flourish. Democracy is not a panacea. The liberal part is essential.
I'll respond to this one, as it's at the top and it started off unpleasantly personal. Do try and avoid making assumptions about the person you're speaking to, please.
I live in a post-Soviet country taking an autocratic turn, I have friends fleeing. I will probably have to leave myself and it's making me miserable. I do not mean to diminish their experience or the experience of anyone suffering under an authoritarian government.
If you'll read the context of the post, I was talking about how Western (predominately US) media portrays other countries, which is frankly dehumanizing for the most part.
I grew up thinking that war starts, life stops; that a different form of government radically and instantly transmogrifies every aspect of a society. We are a peaceful, normal, democratic society and everywhere else is war or repression. A primitive dualism which has not stood up to my experience.
This is what's implied in the news and the movies, and forms a basis for the acceptance of the Western versions of the shared problems I discussed. It is often exaggerated in a way that lines places up for a bomb-driven democratization process.
It also means that, as GP noted, we don't feel the problems coming along when they do.
It's easy living as a foreigner in autocratic countries. You've got a "get out of jail" card called a foreign passport which not only protects you for political reasons, but also gives you an escape hatch for any reason, government or not.
For locals its entirely different. You don't get the "they're a foreigner, so be nice". Victim of crime? Don't bother with the police unless you have a fat bribe. Ripped off in your business? The courts won't care. Accused of a crime? Bribes are your only recourse.
So yes, the mundane day to day is the same, but when problems pop up the difference is like night and day. In authoritarian country you're at the complete mercy of those with more power than you.
It can't be understated the physiological impact of living in countries with functional liberal institutions. Having grown up in a country where crime and corruption were the norm, then coming to a country where I could reliably depend on the systems to be fair felt like meeting a nice girl after escaping an abusive relationship. As much as I sometimes miss my old country, and feel a twinge of nationalistic pride, I never want to go back. It honestly makes me emotional to see people in the "the West" say that things aren't so bad in illiberal countries. You are a fish that doesn't even know they're in water.
> Day to day life has been more or less the same across all of them.
This is a wild take, unless you mean that in thw sense of wake up, eat, work and sleep kind of way.
If I call the prime minister a criminal liar - worst that will happen is I get a defamation lawsuit. In authoritarian countries I go to a prison camp, and the neighbors are the one to report me. Even if I'm not political - if step on toes of people in party I can disappear and the rest will know not to ask questions.
I’ve seen a couple Reddit threads recently where someone says something like “my neighbor has been doing [insert major nuisance here], I think they might not be citizens. I’m not in favor of ICE taking people away, but should I report them since it might solve [nuisance]?”
The couple I’ve seen, the people aren’t that direct in their comments.
And I’ve seen reports of citizens being arrested for a day or two while they’re investigated about whether they’re legal or not, before being released, all without warrants or even probable cause. Sure, not a prison camp, but far from what I’d expect in a free society.
But the seeds of disappearing and detaining people without cause are already sprouting in the US among the general population, even if only among a tiny minority of shitty people. And that’s scary.
OK but that's something that's beginning to happen in the US versus the default of authoritarian regimes - my point is that is not "pretty much the same" as OP put it.
You might get physically attacked by some neanderthal if you're openly gay in public in the west, and in some middle eastern countries you get stoned on a public square - but hey we all unwind and have some fun when we can, so it's pretty much the same ?
I believe the OP's point was that if you are in the ingroup, you can expect life to be pretty much equivalent to what you'd experience in the US. It's only if you are in the outgroup (like being gay) that you start to see state violence.
This is pretty true of most authoritarian regimes. State violence isn't publicly broadcast or when it is it's usually framed as "fighting crime".
To Godwin this, life for a non-jewish, non-communist, non-disabled citizen in 1940s germany was typical, even pleasant. I mean, heck, the german government at the time was taking the Jewish citizens property and giving it to favored classes.
The deceptive part of an authoritarian regime is that the outgroup is almost always a minority. The number of people that experience outgroup treatment is almost always a small portion of the general population.
Even in the strictest and most brutal governments like north korea, so long as you abide by state rules things are just fine. You can even go on vacations out of the country if you are obedient enough.
A measure of government is how it treats internal state enemies. Crime exists everywhere, so the question is what's criminalized and how are criminals punished. Also importantly, what crimes does the state look away from if they hit political enemies.
But the distinction is that in-group requires blind obedience in authoritarian countries. Half this forum is calling their political leaders idiots and will work (vote) against them, they are still in group. This is not a small distinction.
Only the most extreme authoritarians will attempt to silence all dissonance. Most will have a controlled opposition as the illusion of choice and a release valve for anger.
Russia, for example, runs elections and up until recently allowed the opposing party on the ballot. Same with Belarus. China and Iran also have elections, but the candidates are vetted through the state party. I know now Americans from each of these countries (except Iran). One who still votes in the Belarus elections even though they know it won't change anything.
NK is about the only modern regime I know where all opposition is punished. And even then, there's been reports of a loosening of enforcement.
They have argued in court against normal or indeed any due process; for stopping people purely based on race, language, and accent; against recognition of birthright citizenship and said that the next job after purging illegals is getting rid of the citizens who don't belong here.
Remember the immigration czar said if he had his way only 100M white folks would remain.
If those who are asserted without proof to be illegal can be sent to die in a foreign prison camp so can you.
> If I call the prime minister a criminal liar - worst that will happen is I get a defamation lawsuit. In authoritarian countries I go to a prison camp, and the neighbors are the one to report me. Even if I'm not political - if step on toes of people in party I can disappear and the rest will know not to ask questions.
Try implementing direct political action and see how Western governments treat you. You'll be deemed a terrorist, and if you're caught alive, you'll never see the sun again.
What would happen if you deeply insulted a cop at night during a routine check ?
What would be the impact on your life of publicly calling names your company's CEO on social media ? You make it sound like a defamation lawsuit is peanuts, when you'd probably be fighting against an army of lawyer while you're unemployed, if you're in the US that definitely sounds like a life defining event.
I also wonder if most authoritarian régimes even have prison camps ?
When U.S. neighbors report you to the police because you tell them to stop harassing you, you're in an HOA knowingly but without knowing it's absolutely turning authoritarian.
>unless you mean that in thw sense of wake up, eat, work and sleep kind of way.
this is what 99% of people spend 99% of their time on. If you give most people the choice between a place that has jobs, clean trains and where women can walk safely at night and one that looks like the Purge but you can insult the prime minister we can make a bet how people will vote with their feet.
This is why China makes the claim that it is actually more democratic[1]. This is not merely propaganda. They are making the case that delivering material goods to people rather than exhausting yourself in some idiocracy-like circus of abstract rights is what should be the point of government.
> The very fact that you can't have any political party of the CCP makes it undemocratic.
That is only undemocratic if it is against the will of the population. If the population is choosing to only allow selecting employees from one party, then that is perfectly in line with democracy. A "political party" is just a labor union by another name, after all.
Western countries by and large value free and fair elections, but that isn't what defines democracy. Hosting free and fair elections to select the autocrat of your choosing would not make a democracy. What ultimately defines democracy is the population at large having control. How they choose to use that control is up to them.
There are plenty of good indicators revealing why China isn't democratic, but that statement in isolation isn't telling. Keep in mind, though, that the claim wasn't being strictly democratic — rather, it claims that on the spectrum it is more democratic than the alternatives in use.
>What ultimately defines democracy is the population at large having control.
Politics is the question of how political heterogenity is resolved. The political system is the range of acceptable methods used in that resolution and how power is distrbuted amongst those competing groups. In that restrospect, Democracy and Authoritarianism exist on the same axis. The former resolves things peacefully through voting, the latter has a single interest overriding all others violently.
Hence if you say "population at large having control", it's largely a meaningless statement because if a population is in agreement there is no need for politics and thus no need for a political system. In reality, politics always exist, groups are not homogenous, especially not a group on the size of billions. 99% of people don't really care about what OP says, in so much that they would forsake that for more pettier thing. We will all disagree over the tiniest of issues, and thus from there heterogenity springs and a political system is formed.
Hence, the issue of "delivering results" is largely tangenital and irrelevant because that occurs after Politics. It's a given after all that a interest group would achieve it's goals without the political restraining it. So no, China isn't "more democratic" because the CCP is effective in achieving it's goals when it already has total political control. That's axiomatic.
But there is explicit rejection of plurality, and thus the expression of political heterogenity, there is only one center of power allowed, and political decision-making is resolved violently. So it is Authoritarian, full stop. It is not "Democratic", in the same way it is a oxymoron to state a "Democratic Absolute Monarchy" or a "Democratic Military Dictatorship" even when the latter two can produce results. If you want to call it something, just call Authoritarian Populism.
> Hence if you say "population at large having control", it's largely a meaningless statement because if a population is in agreement there is no need for politics and thus no need for a political system.
Control does not imply lack of negotiation. The population at large still has to gather and sort out their issues and contentions, ultimately settling upon an agreement in the end.
A representative democracy takes that model and decentralizes it, seeing the population at large gather only at a local level, hiring messengers to carry the final determination at the local level to a central meeting place where it is compiled with the results of all other localities, but the idea of people gathering, communicating, negotiating, and ultimately reaching an agreement remains the same.
> Hence, the issue of "delivering results" is largely tangenital and irrelevant because that occurs after Politics.
Right, but we're talking about government, not politics. "Delivering the results" is the role of government. Politics takes place during the time when the people have gathered. Once they figure out what they want, then it is handed off to the hired workers in the business known as government to fulfill the wishes of the people. To reiterate: Politics comes before government gets involved.
... Well, it does in a democracy. I expect what you are trying to say is that in China the politics happens inside government? That's fair. But what China is saying is that in many so-called 'democracies' the politics is also happening inside government, thereby making them not really democratic either. So, while it doesn't claim to be democratic, it is saying it is closer to being democratic by more accurately serving the wishes of the people — as opposed to "corporations", for example.
But that wasn't what the parent post said. The word "merely" does work in that sentence - i.e. "This is not propaganda" has a different meaning to "This is not merely propaganda"
"merely" here makes the claim that it is not only propaganda, it is not just propaganda. It has substance beyond being propaganda. It is that and more.
> This is why China makes the claim that it is actually more democratic[1]. This is not merely propaganda.
It's wild to me that you believe this.
I've spent a few years in China and have made close Chinese friends. One constant I see is Chinese will not admit publicly, but they'll whisper to you in quiet corners that that know their government is authoritarian and the West is more free.
>If you give most people the choice between a place that has jobs, clean trains and where women can walk safely at night and one that looks like the Purge but you can insult the prime minister we can make a bet how people will vote with their feet.
Well, umm, far more people (rich, middle, poor) are emmigrating out of China with preference for Western Liberal Democracies than Westeners immigrating in. The thing is, in terms of job opportunities, the USA still far surpasses China for same amount of individual effort. And if I want to just live comfortably, Japan, Australia, Korea are all valid options.
Like even the abysmally poor birthrate dosen't reflect on China with regards to the long viability of what you describe.
Singapore is much less authoritarian than China. The PAP plays dirty in a legal way, but they very much obey rule of law as opposed to explicit Rule By Law in the CCP. They also don't effectively declare themselves God as the ultimate authority and moral arbiters of the nation.
Like, having mandatory bomb checks in your metro systems is already on the excessive and comical side of authoritarianism here. Most countries, even poorer ones don't do that.
> Singapore is much less authoritarian than China. The PAP plays dirty in a legal way
I think the easiest way to explain the Singaporean democracy to someone from a North American/European mindset: In Singapore, the opposition in parliament is freely elected, but the ruling party is virtually guaranteed to be PAP ("People's Action Party"... I just love how that rolls off the tongue, and the logo has 1970s Batman vibes).
> having mandatory bomb checks in your metro systems is already on the excessive and comical side of authoritarianism here
Are you speaking about mainland China here? I have experienced it many times in different cities. I wonder if the Chinese Dark Web has memes about the people that they employ. I have hardly seen lower motivation people at their jobs. They move like zombies and are hardly reactive even when you bag causes a "beep" from one of their machines. Do Chinese people think this actually helps? Do they feel safer? I would love to know.
> I'm not saying everywhere is identical, there's a spectrum.
That's the point. You have the same type of problems everywhere, but not the same quantity and quality. But people seem to not care or understand those differences, and weaponize the concepts, instead of looking at the outcome.
The huge volume of immigration, both where people leave and where they go to reveals this to be false. The experience may be similar for whatever class you belong to, but the reality is demand to live in western democracies is massive for a reason.
> We have the same problems: gilded elites, crushing poverty, persecuted minorities, illusory participation in governance, terrifying police, rampant corruption.
Who is "we" here? United States? If not, would Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Norway, (South) Korea, Japan, and Taiwan agree with that sentence? I doubt it. They are all doing very well -- highly functional (democratic) government and very high human development. (To be clear, there are lots of developing countries not yet a part of OECD who are also doing pretty well in those categories.)
and if we wanted to give ANY society a geometric representation it would have a point at the very top that would represent the most powerfull person, and would then widen out to represent the
average and then taper down to another singal point, that would represent the single person in that society whoes life was composed of nothing but horror not of thier own fault and who will die
with no chance of any help or redress.
We can name those living at the top, but pretend that the wieght of society is not carried by a succesion of nameless inocents , comunist, socialist, religious and other societies give lip service to this, but all fall short of declaring a policy that no one will ever be ignored, forgotten and abandoned, but each and everyone of these systems has an elaborote way of doing reputation management or credit score, merit, titles,etc to signal virtue/worth, that can be gamed, so it is.
And here we are, and my time/attention must now, be diverted back to the game, lest I loose more than the few points of carma it costs me to speak out here.
> I'm not saying everywhere is identical, there's a spectrum
Why such drama with many words, when all can be summed up with that. Yet somehow, people consider life much better on one side of the spectrum, while other side is considered utter shit. So much that many people are risking their lives, and some are dying just to 'move across spectrum'. It may be a hard concept to grok for typical western kids who often struggle with finding noble worthy hard-to-achieve goals in their lives, who got good life served at literal plate without moving a finger, but trust me its damn real.
I've grown up during communism, in country heavily oppressed by soviet russia and littered with many of their military bases, ready for that WWIII battles that never came. Not 'spent some time someplace so I am an expert', my whole identity was only that and nothing else.
Yes we all need to go shopping, its just that my parents couldn't buy any fresh vegetables nor fruits for their son, who suffered mild malnutrition due to that. And sometimes the shelves were empty or full of one type of canned sardines (I mean whole supermarket, nothing else, beauty of constantly failing central planning, unless you were part of regime/communist party).
Yes we all went to some form of school, but I was being brainwashed to be obedient future soldier for absolutely rubbish ideologies. If I would say something bad about regime even with utmost innocence of a small kid, my parents could easily end up in jail, lives ruined, even distant family torn apart for good.
Yes we all could travel, its just that I could not travel even within different communist countries, not without regime's special approval stamp in passport. Neutral, or god forbid proper western countries were off limits, unreachable, you would be shot on sight on the border, or torn apart by dogs.
And so on and on. Yeah, its just a spectrum, what a joke.
Heh, what country are you from? What time period are you talking about? Is it your lived experience or the second-hand memory?
I lived in Bulgaria & Czechoslovakia in 70's and 80's, and my memories are quite different than yours.
You can buy fresh vegetables and fruits (in-season, local, not shipped from Peru) & dairy products & bread & eggs as much as you can afford (and the prices were affordable, stable for a dozen years). Bananas, oranges & other exotic stuff was not available, maybe around Christmas if you had the right information and waited in a long queue. Slightly better but nor really good with better cuts of meat.
I never ever saw empty shelves in shops, not in Bulgaria, not in Czechoslovakia. I am pretty sure of that, because in 1982+- we were on a 'friendly exchange trip' to Kiev (elementary school organized, with a school in Kiev reciprocally coming to us a couple months later) and saw those there, and still remember the shock.
Jeans and such stuff was for kids with connections or family in the west. Few people had cars, mostly skoda/lada/moskvich/wartburg/trabant/polski fiat. Small, very basic shit. Public transport worked, to every little village. Nothing fancy, but functional. You could live without car, not like in USA.
I have never met a soviet soldier in my life at that time, those poor souls were closed-off at military bases and were forbidden getting out (maybe to prevent them seeing than life in Czechoslovakia was so much better than in CCCP).
The education in schools was focused more on math/engineering/hard sciences, and kids of those times had better background in those than the kids growing today, although humanities are another thing. We did not sing the hymn, like they do in USA. Everyone knew those are lies. But a photo of the current leader of the communist party was hanging there. Communist indoctrination was everywhere, you learnt to live with it and filter it out. Unlike the west, where most people still believe the official narratives.
I could see Austria behind the iron fence from the window of my bedroom, seeing the lights of the cars driving there, but thinking I will never see those places in my life.
One afternoon, I saw my younger brother (late elementary school at that time) walking across the field towards the fence, too curious and stupid. Suddenly, from a well-hidden bunker, a couple of guys with rifles and a german shepherd appeared, and escorted him out. No shooting at sigh, no beating, no record of 'dangerous anti-communistic element'.
My uncle, serving as a young conscript at Shumava forest, late 50's (he had no choice about that), on the border between Czechia and Western Germany, got knifed in back by somebody trying to flee to the West. Survived, 2cm from kidneys. Ended up living most of his life (since 1969) in USA.
My mother threw away her communist card, shouting, at the face of the local party committee, with the words 'to hell with such party, when I, a widow with two small kids, have to live in such apartment (small room + small kitchen, dark, a toilet and a kitchen sink with only cold water (no bathroom), small coal stove the only heating). She did not go to jail, eventually we got better apartment (central heating, real bathroom and toiled, hot water).
You know, those are real life anecdotes. Not the propaganda tropes endlessly replicated.
If you were politically active, anti-communist, you lost your engineering/science/arts/whatever fancy job and ended up e.g. as boiler operator of the local heating plant for municipal heating. 50's were wild with several highly-politicized processes ending up in capital punishment (so was McCarthyism in the USA at that time), but 70's and 80's were relatively tame.
In the next class, there was a son of a well-known dissident. Had no problems getting into high-quality high school (merit-based entry exams, mostly math), not sure how would the thing went with the university studies (math/engineering probably OK, law/philosophy probably not), but the fall of communism came.
There was widespread small-scale stealing from the state ('if you are not stealing from the state, you are stealing from the family'), although the real large-scale looting came after the fall of the communism.
I think your view is a tad optimistic. Many people had difficult lives just because they didn’t want to be members of the party. Thier kids didn’t get to good schools, or got to the one 30 minutes by train, they lost jobs and were forced to dry laundry with engineering degrees.
There was even a joke about this:
⸻
In Poland, during the times of hard socialism, a math associate professor calculated that a shipyard worker earned three times more than he did. So he thought “screw this,” crossed out the titles before and after his name, and went to work in a factory.
Of course, he was doing well in the factory — he didn’t strain himself too much and earned three times more than at the school. Then the factory introduced an evening school for workers, with the promise that whoever attended would get a raise. So the associate professor signed up and started going.
On the very first lesson — bam — mathematics. The level was like the first year of high school, so the associate professor was just dozing off, not paying attention. The teacher noticed him, called him up to the board, and asked him to calculate the area of a circle.
The professor started writing, but for the life of him couldn’t remember the formula for the area of a circle. So he decided to derive it. He wrote the conversion to polar coordinates, then integrated it, and ended up with –πr². So he stood there, wondering where the minus sign had come from.
And from the back row, someone whispered:
“Reverse the integration interval.”
1) maybe it was different in 50's, 60's, when I was around, plenty of profs at the university were non-communists in 1989. The communists as a percentage of working population was always low (<11%?), so what you suggest could not have been a generally applied rule, the math just does not work. I assume if you wanted to get to a leading position in a plant/office/university, you needed to be communist. If you refused, that typically meant no promotion. You must have really pissed off the local party boss if it came to your kids could not get to good school. Never a smart move. Probably not a smart move to piss off Irwings if you live in New Brunswick, Canada, either.
2) jokes are jokes, exxagerating a kernel of truth to the point of absurdity is what makes the joke. The truth is, the salary of prof was never anything special, but was marginally better than the salary of average worker. There were some highly (i.e. 2x, maybe even 3x?, salary scales overall were really flat) paid worker occupations, miners were one of them (maybe due to work hazard). The way to get the luxuries was not through money, but through connections (yes, mostly communistic ones).
3) shit happens (the accompanying text talks about a fire in the main/only paper-mill making toilet paper in Czechoslovakia), there were queues when the rumor spread 'there will be bananas in the local fruit&vegetables shop'. There were people panic buying toilet paper at the start of COVID also, maybe its a local specialty :-)
One anecdote I remember from my youth was people routinely taking their windshield wipers off when parking somewhere out (those were notoriously in short supply and easy to steal). So yes, there were supply problems, no rose glasses, but nothing extreme.
As with everything, there is too much polarization: some people remember only the bad stuff and it was a hell on earth for them, others remember only the good stuff and emphasize that. As always, the truth is in between.
Well here in the West we were also sent to some kind of school to be brainwashed to be obedient soldiers for rubbish ideologies, so we have that in common
yet, many people claim they were happier back then. At least in the country where I’m from. No options in life, no hard decisions or responsibility for their lives. Our current PM said he didn’t notice the fall of communism. shrug
I rarely offer an opinion here, expecting in advance it will gray into oblivion, however politely or sincerely it's presented. I see it happen to others often enough to remember.
In most cases I see the word democracy used, I have the exact thought, "pretend democracy". I don't deliberately try to be a morose cynic. I've just become incapable of thinking the very word without the subjunction "pretend".
The corporatism burgeoning here makes this seem undeniable to me. Am I that delusional? Is it really not that bad? Do the so called people really have a level of influence over their society befitting of the word? I don't see it. I just see words.
For me, as a born eccentric, aspects of the concept terrify me. I tend to favor the principles of a Republic, with unassailable foundations impervious to popular fervors and whims. Ideally with heavy democratic principles fortifying the Republic. I don't see either.
I look at recent affairs with FTC for example, and too many things to list. I don't even know what to call what I see. Recipe for nightmares comes to mind, but I know the flaws of emotions well enough.
Personally I find myself retreating into a quasi spiritual state, remotely bordering asceticism. Fading into an in but not of it.
I'm convinced it's a brutally complicated situation. Evey day, though, I think it could be drastically simplified with kindness, but that's a subject where I'm inclined to go full macabre and will hush now.
> unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west
Okay but that is exactly why I would prefer a western liberal government. It is better and that is ideal is worth criticizing authoritarians for, and fighting to keep in the west.
Sure; I think his point was that people much less likely to even notice/acknowledge the slide towards authoritarianism when their own individual experience isn't changing much. Not that it changes authoritarianism's moral standing.
There isn't an "authoritarian bit", it's not binary. When I was young the idea that your own computer would spy on you, or the one in your phone, or in your car? That was a William Gibson novel, wiretaps happened to mob bosses, you didn't worry about it happening to you as part of a dragnet. Security camera? You mean in a bank right?
Microsoft bundling IE was so egregious that the department of justice took time off from chasing drug dealers and terrorists and came within an inch of being split up if it didn't back the fuck off on strangling the web. Financial fraud on Wall St or in the boardroom? Skilling, Fastow, Ebers. Hard prison time. Clinton lied about chasing skirt in the office, ended his career, real consequences.
Even once the Internet was becoming common, the idea that something typed into it might get you fired? Preposterous!
I don't know what being a "western liberal" government means to you, but this thing where all the walls have ears and billionaires do fucking anything they want and no scandal can damage a politician and all the surveilance and technology is an ever-tightening noose and everything is on a permanent record?
I haven't seen anything more authoritarian than the fact that, when you travel, someone will open your suitcase, rifle through your stuff, then close it again, and maybe leave you a little "you are being watched" note, just to make sure you know you shouldn't try anything funny.
I think we’re in violent agreement about what is bad and what we should fight for.
My point is that there is a difference and throwing your hands up and saying everywhere is bad obscures what is being lost and how democracies allow nonviolent ways to seize it back.
I'm not saying that the decline of Enlightenment values and the rise of crony-nepo-central-committee surveilance nightmare is "other", I'm saying it is indifferent to the stated political system, it's about the de facto political system no matter what you call it.
What I care about is outcomes, what actually happens, what norms and institutional posture actually obtains in reality.
And on that basis, "western liberal" society has very little business holding its nose up about "authoritarianism" as a blanket term for rival nations in 2025. No one here is talking about Sudan or Turministan, they're talking about other advanced nations with participatory politics, robust social welfare programs, limited influence for oligarchs, and highly competent governance.
You could explain any authoritarian regime this way, but how much of what we believe and do is some kind of pure, unconditioned-by-our-surroundings choice?
Sure, but its a boiling frog with cancer. Certain states made choices to skew far right and other states mde choices to "keep business open" and others made choices to remain ignorant.
This becomes diffusion of responsibility because every cycle maybe 1% were directly embracing far white religious authoritarian. The consistency of those choices were sticky because the oligarchy spent decades ensuring.
The point being, very few people actively participated and there was no progressive decadal length comspiracy. But the reverse isnt true.
There was and is a decadal length conspiracy to become a far right ethnostate run by religious minority.
Authoritarianism is not a left v right thing, and failing to recognize this is a big part of the problem.
The left is completely comfortable with censorship. It is completely comfortable with DEI statements being required for college admissions or with establishing issues related to gender or race discourse that the population doesn't agree on as a matter of law.
A rule doesn't stop being authoritarian just because you agree with what is being pushed. Nor does it stop being authoritarian when it doesn't come explicitly from the government. I do believe the right has worse intentions on these matters, but the left has so, so, so much more power that it's absurd to even try to draw a comparison. The idea of college requiring statements aligning with right-wing values being tolerated in any way, shape or form for example is just unthinkable.
Money? More money than Hollywood? California? Both of which lean left pretty hard? It's not 1980 anymore.
"Vastly less power", pray tell, would you rather piss on a Christian cross and post it on social media or a LGBT flag? What do you think would have worse consequences? Can you even imagine a prevalence of corporations showing to align themselves with the Christian right for a month every year?
The "Christian right" would, no doubt, sell their soul to have half as much power the left has. It doesn't even come close, it's off by orders of magnitude for crying out loud. If anything this power is exerted so widely you barely even recognize it. You see a pride parade, or any entity making an effort to promote or signal multiculturalism and it doesn't even register as left wing when it evidently is.
Can you even picture anything comparable to BLM, on the right? Can you imagine the right managing to pull a display of power comparable to disturbing the meaning of a word as basic as "woman"?
Where is this vast amount of power manifested? It's surely not in the form of respect, it's definitely not in the form of demographics, which dwindle year by year. Culture? What references are even there, Jordan Peterson? Nick Fuentes??? I'm just baffled by this perspective.
People who are afraid of the "left authoritarians" seem to think that you can just sum up human history and cherry pick some great "left-branded" authoritarian and equate that to todays.
You're arguing that the people kidnapping people without due process and zero consequences, masked police, are equal to some arbitrary "leftist" in some time that's not relevant to todays political climate.
It truly is bizarre how mental gymnasts survive in this logical incapacity.
Sorry but I can't take this seriously. I've given more than enough contemporary examples, if you want to dismiss the whole of it and pretend nothing makes sense, that's a choice and I can't help you.
The current difference in the US context is bureaucratic authoritarianism vs autocratic authoritarianism. They're both authoritarian, and they're both oppressive and stifling. But their actual specific dynamics/mechanisms/effects can be quite different. For example autocratic authoritarianism has a much higher variance (for better and for worse) - look at the current autocrat in the White House coming up with idiotic ideas by the week/month, It's done in the name of unchaining greatness, and it would be nice if that were indeed the outcome. But in reality the chaos from the unrestrained terrible ideas is actually quite stifling. Whereas bureaucratic authoritarianism is more of a beige tyranny of the mediocre, which creates a drag on greatness, but at least provides a stable foundation for building on (as long as you can outrun the bureaucrats)
(disclaimer: I've gotten more conservative as I've gotten older. It will happen to you, too)
Well, if you're in this category in the US (equivalent is being on some kind of arbitrary list that you're not allowed to see and have no way to appeal) your life will also be horrible.
The US being imperfect, or currently on an authoritarian swing, in no way makes it equivalent to countries that are all-in on authoritarianism. The US is still among the very best places in the world to be a minority, politically active, or in legal trouble.
I think you are greatly underestimating how hard it has been, historically, in the US, to be a minority, politically active, or in legal trouble. Note that in the Cold War, many people, especially minorities, were indefinitely imprisoned with show trials (e.g. Mumia Abu-Jamal, Assata Shakur, Leonard Peltier) or extrajudicially killed (Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Marsha P. Johnson, the victims of the MOVE bombing) because of being politically active.
Let's not perfect be the enemy of good. OP is making a relative judgement, not an absolute one. And in authoritarian countries, figures like Jack Ma are dissappeared for far less, while radicals like you mention are just shot and silenced. You are not going to be allowed to build a alternative power structure that can challenge authority regardless if your views are valid or not.
Might be a hard metric for some people to confront, but the USA is one the least racist countries in the world. The gridlock in many ways is strongest signal of excessive plurality and minoritarianism (of marginalized groups) than of single power groups unilaterally controlling things.
Jack Ma was not, in fact, disappeared, though? He lay low for several months while being investigated for financial crimes. He is still the largest stakeholder in Alibaba, and still has a net worth around $27B. It's not even like his assets were frozen.
Disappearing for 6 months immediately after making a controversial speech about the financial system dosen't look good to investors. And we all know it's because of his speech, not because of "financial" crimes when the Ant Group is heavily works with the CCP given the scale of its activities.
How is US being a good place to be at if you are in legal trouble? It is super expensive, trial penalty is huge so you are severely motivated to sign plea deal and not push it. The punishments are huge and incarceration rates among highest in the world. Protections seems to be largely theoretical - technically you have them, practically they do not do much but make you pay more money.
People have started being disappeared by ICE. They've been kidnapped off the streets with no access to a lawyer until after. The difference does matter, but it seems we're uncomfortably close to there now.
Despite the noted slide, it feels accurate. I, for one, would not want to move back to EU despite some QoL notables. At this time, it is still hard to find a better spot for a random nobody ( when you have money and/or power, 'where you can live well' calculus changes ).
Sliding in? Your head of state declared themselves to be a dictator, declared the end of the rule of law, and ignores the constitution. They openly take bribes without consequences. They, or their handlers, unilaterally decide on the application of justice and the progress of investigations. They unilaterally control international relations (eg tariffs) without oversight. They put armed military on the streets. They have taken action to prevent ongoing democratic elections.
At what point does it become authoritarian to you?
Was US ever a liberal democracy? People had much less liberties in the 1950s than today, with people getting arrested for their political views instead of just deported. not to mention segregation and such.
They even put lawyers defending these politicians in prison for defending them... The constitution doesn't seem to matter since the government apparently don't have to care about it.
> Was US ever a liberal democracy? People had much less liberties in the 1950s than today,
Your question deserves an answer.
The US was a liberal (post-Enlightenment) democracy.
Senator McCarthy was eventually kicked out of Congress for his witch hunt.
President Nixon was confronted by Republican members of Congress, and he resigned after this meeting rather than face impeachment.
So when I was a kid, lawmakers largely upheld the norms, the rule of law. Many of those same lawmakers might have today been considered racist or misogynist or might have failed some other standard of 21st century society.
As a liberal democracy, the United States has never been perfect, but it's always been worth improving.
it was a good witch hunt. we very much almost lost the Cold War to the soviets. the US public and government officials had no idea how bad it was in the USSR. The majority of intellectuals glazed the Soviet Union.
We witch hunted. We also got lapped by the FSB most years. What saved us was our economic engine.
> The US public and government officials had no idea how bad it was in the USSR.
My wife's grandparents had a subscription to "Soviet Life" magazine, beautiful postcard photos and articles about the glowing future of mankind, collective posts capitalist society...
From the 1950s. We've got stacks of them. Wild.
So, yes: many intellectuals in the United States had an "I want to believe" attitude.
> It was a good witch hunt.
There's no such thing as a good witch hunt.
When you are targeting innocent people, destroying lives in the name of freedom, there can be no liberty.
Inciting mob justice is playing with fire. It's a form of insanity. Our judicial system was designed to find fact and render judgment as far from that madness as possible. It's imperfect but can be made to work.
> We very much almost lost the Cold War to the Soviets.
Anyone who spent a weekend in a nuclear bomb shelter in the summer of 1983 knows there was no winning in that Cold War. Everyone was losing.
> What saved us was our economic engine.
The short answer is yes, I agree.
There's a much longer answer. I toured a tiny bit of Estonia and Russia in the summer of 1990. I wish I could tell you in just a few words how I saw a thousand acts of bravery, many acts of brutality, and more than anything a million hungry people who wanted better for their children.
What saved us was our economic engine, our mutual commitment to the welfare and defense of our NATO allies, our intelligence service and our diplomatic corps. Career professionals and rational leadership.
> So when I was a kid, lawmakers largely upheld the norms, the rule of law
Only when McCarthy and those policies got unpopular, they let him do it as long as he was popular. So we will likely see the same with Trump, as long as he doesn't make as grave overreaches as they did back then likely nobody will do anything to him.
That isn't rule of law, that is rule of personality.
A core part to liberal democracy is that the government must follow the law. If the government doesn't follow the law due to checks and balances failing then its not a liberal democracy.
Yeah, so not exactly liberal democracy. It is a democracy, but doesn't seem very liberal if the checks and balances doesn't work against popular policies.
I would argue that in that case, liberal democracy is an oxymoron.
Really popular policies have a wide support among the population, which means that they will became law, or even an amendment to the constitution. (Most countries have something like 3/5 supermajority requirements for changing constitutions, which is a lot more practical than the basically-as-of-now-impossible US procedure.)
At this moment, if you want to keep "liberal" character of the country, your "checks and balances" institutions have to act in a fairly authoritarian ways and invalidate laws which attracted supermajority support. What is then stopping such institutions to just rule as they see fit? Even checks and balances need checks and balances.
Nevertheless, I would say that "liberal democracy" isn't one that can always prevent illiberal policies from being enacted. I would say that it is one that can later correct them.
Note that historically, most obvious executive encroachments of liberty (Guantanamo etc.) in the US were later overturned by new administrations.
> Really popular policies have a wide support among the population, which means that they will became law, or even an amendment to the constitution
McCarthyism didn't have that much support from voters, so this isn't the issue, it didn't become law. The issue is that the elected representatives didn't do anything to stop it until it started having massive disapproval from voters.
Voters needing to massively disapprove of government abuse for the "checks and balances" to do their job means the democracy isn't working as it should, the government doesn't need to change the constitution they just need to keep disapproval low enough to continue with their illegal actions. In a true liberal democracy the checks and balances works, ministers who perform illegal acts are investigated and relieved of their duties without needing elected representatives to start that procedure.
I live in Sweden and I can't even find examples of a politician that blatantly ignores laws and procedures that get to stay for years here. I think the two party system is the biggest culprit, then you need support from both parties to remove criminal politicians, but that is very difficult to get when people have to vote against their own. In a multi party system each party is a minority, and allied parties are not friendly to each other, they gladly sink an ally to absorb their votes since the issue was the party and not the alliance, people wont move to the other block over such a thing.
Sweden supports Chat Control on European level, even though the very principle of Chat Control is anathema to basic civic rights.
Is widespread surveillance of private communications popular with Swedish electorate, or do people like Ylva Johansson support and even push such abominable things regardless of what actual Swedes think?
If the latter, it is not that different from what McCarthy once did, and our entire continent is in danger that this sort of paranoid dystopia gets codified into law approximately forever. At least McCarthy's era was short.
I think it's pretty easy to tell the difference. Just imagine the difference in the level of fear that you would feel about 1) getting up in a public square in the US and yelling that Trump is a terrible person who should be removed from power, vs. 2) getting up in a public square in Russia and yelling that Putin is a terrible person who should be removed from power.
> getting up in a public square in the US and yelling that Trump is a terrible person who should be removed from power
I think lot of people I know would feel concerned about what might happen to them if they did that right about now. I don't pretend to know anything about you, but it might be worth examining whether the level of concern you expect people would have about this might vary quite between people with different circumstances than yours. At least to me, it seems pretty likely that if a country were to slide into authoritarianism, not everyone would feel the effects equally all at once, so the fact that you haven't felt a change in your level of concern about this doesn't necessarily mean that a shift isn't happening.
To be clear, I'm definitively not saying that it's impossible for anyone to know whether it's happening or not because we can't know the experience of literally everyone, or that I'm 100% positive what we're experiencing will end up in undeniable strict authoritarianism for everyone. My point is that I do think there's been a genuine shift in how safe a large number of people feel from persecution in the past year and a half that's based on things happening to them or people in similar circumstances to them. It's certainly possible that I'm in a bubble where I'm associating with a lot more people than average who have these concerns, but the reverse is equally true for someone who hasn't been noticing these things, and I do think there's sufficient evidence that the concerns are real. The implicit assumption that everyone feels equally comfortable in their rights protecting them just isn't something that seems accurate right now.
If I did that, I would expect that I would get some dirty looks. I might get yelled at. I might even get beaten up (by private individuals, not by the authorities). The cops might come by and cite me for disturbing the peace.
I would not be disappeared. I would not be charged with a felony. I would not be imprisoned for years or decades.
And, where the rubber meets the road for my personal mental health: I can say what I think to my friends and family. They may disagree. They may even argue. They're not going to report me to the secret police, nor are there secret police waiting for someone to report something.
A lot has changed since January. You absolutely should worry about being disappeared, and about your family and friends ratting you to ICE/FBI/etc (the distinction is moot under the unitary executive theory under which our new regime operates). It may be unlikely today, for you specifically (assuming you're someone from a favored ethnicity and class, espouse only political views within the range of acceptable orthodoxy, etc), but your immigrant/trans/pro-palestine neighbors are not as safe as you are, and the window of acceptable types of American is narrowing.
> It may be unlikely today, for you specifically (assuming you're someone from a favored ethnicity and class, espouse only political views within the range of acceptable orthodoxy, etc), but your immigrant/trans/pro-palestine neighbors are not as safe as you are, and the window of acceptable types of American is narrowing.
Thank you, that's a much more concise way of stating exactly what I meant
In the 90's, DARE got kids to narc on their parents for drug related crimes. You can discount that as being drug related and oh just don't do drugs, but let's not pretend you're not gonna get reported to the unsecret police called the DEA or the FBI if it would be sufficiently to your friends and family's benefit.
Yes, but ICE is not deporting, denaturalizing, or imprisoning US citizens for their political opinions, and I would have very little to no fear about going to Washington DC right now, standing up on a podium, and yelling that Trump sucks while there are 100 National Guardsmen across the street from me.
This is very different from what things are like in places like Russia.
See Mahmoud Khalil's case. They're trying to and would continue to have done so if they weren't blocked. What is there stopping them from changing the rules and doing it again?
they fact that you know about this case at all and how much it has been in the news and the outrage and protest against the executive branch speaks volumes to the differences between the US and real authoritarian regimes.
I disagree with what has been done in the Mahmoud Khalil matter. But it is a far distance between that on the one hand and what happens in places like Russia on the other.
I'm not trying to minimize the dangers of Trump. My point is that there is a huge difference in the level of authoritarianism between today's US and what I consider to be actual authoritarian countries. Today's US is one of the freest countries on the entire planet. We should keep it that way. I don't see what good it does to act as if today's US is anywhere close to actual authoritarian countries.
Have you decided what your personal red line is after which you would conclude that we've entered an authoritarian regime? Have we crossed the neofascist Rubicon yet? [1]
The distance is closing, it's already closer than many Americans would have considered possible. How close does it need to get before we should be concerned?
Blacks were once slaves. Women couldn't vote. Japanese-Americans were put in camps. Worker strikes were met with guards killing people. Rousevelt had amassed all kinds of extra executive powers and control of all aspects of government that would seem over the top excessive before him.
Is today really "closer than many Americans would have considered possible"?
I'm already somewhat concerned. I've been concerned since long before Trump. And Trump has added some new concerns. For example, with that strike against the Venezualan boat today. But that doesn't mean that I believe that we're anywhere actually close to it. Those are two separate questions.
People really should try to understand that if someone says "I think that the US is vastly freer than Russia", it does not mean "I think that there is no reason for concern" or "I think that the US is going in a good direction".
> Yes, but ICE is not deporting, denaturalizing, or imprisoning US citizens for their political opinions
Not yet? Currently, they are only imprisoning and deporting legal permanent residents and people on student visas for their political opinions. But denaturalization is clearly on the table.
Go do it then. See if you can get a permit in DC right now to have a rally and shout that Trump sucks. If you can, try actually doing it. You will not be doing it for very long until some excuse is made to stop you and punish you.
I'm happy for you as a privileged US citizen, enjoying your privilege as someone who's at least currently on the right side of the line, but anyone who's a legal immigrant doesn't feel anywhere near the same degree of security that you do.
The administration recently announced that it will review the visas of 55 million immigrants, and factors like political opinion are on the table when it comes to their choice of who to go after.
"First They Came"[1] was written to try to wake up people like you, whose privilege blinded them to the significance of the events around them. You need to start paying attention before you lose the country you thought you knew.
It's exactly these comments the OP is talking about. This is what they are trying to do, what they said they would do, and it's the kind of authoritarian shit that Trump has publicly praised and envied Putin for.
Singapore might be a state run authoritatively with the same party in power for 60 years, but you're free to walk around at any time without fear of any crime happening to you. Or public projects that "just work" where in the "western liberal" case their deteriorate or are tied up in bureucracy.
And life if "you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble" is not roses in the west either. From murder by police (e.g. "walking while black") to having stuffed being pinned on you because you're a union activist or for civil rights, etc.
And that's not "now with Trump". That was the case under Obama, Bush, Clinton, all the way to McCarthy, and even all the way after and before the Civil War.
Prevalence of masked gangs (ostensibly a Gestapo, but without uniform or id) kidnapping people in government buildings without police intervening appears (as an outside observer) to be ~100% higher than under recent USA administrations.
Are you saying this was already happening, just as much, under Obama, say?
Of course it didn't happen as much, but the fact that we already had active black sites and people getting pulled off the streets and abused at all paved the way towards apathy about its expansion now. If city or state police forces can do such things to random citizens for decades before now, why would we expect federal agencies under the direction of the president and his cabinet to not be able to get away with it too?
>Are you saying this was already happening, just as much, under Obama, say?
Are you saying that only this particular type of government abuse matters, so if prior governments didn't do this particular thing, then they're A-OK no matter whatever else they did?
As for your strawman:
--
According to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data from fiscal years 2009 to 2016, more than 3 million individuals were formally removed from the country during the Obama administration. Annually, between 58% and 84% of these removals were so-called "summary removals" carried out through legal procedures such as "expedited removal" and "reinstatement of removal," which do not involve a hearing before an immigration judge. On average, about 74% of removals during this period fell into these categories.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-deportations-court/
--
No police intervened for those 3 million people either (except to deport them summarily).
But the guys that took them didn't wear masks (maybe), so that's ok.
We've banned this account for abusing HN for political, ideological, and religious flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
>In china, there is a murder wagon with a crematory. Nobody ever finds you..
In China there are portable vans to serve as execution places for executions that are ordered by court - in lieu of having special buildings. No crematory and no 'nobody finds you' nonsense.
This is the same argument from Mussolini's facists - "at least the trains run on time".
I'm unmoved by the argument. If the choice comes down between "the trains run on time" and "I can arbitrarily imprisons for my speech", I'd happily live with trains that don't run on time.
>This is the same argument from Mussolini's facists - "at least the trains run on time"
No, it's an added argument that "and everyday life is the same, if not improved".
Many people would prefer living in an orderly state like Singapore, than in a place they fear for their safety, public order is deteriorating, their cities are dying, public works are crap, politics are a circus, and so on, even if they don't get to vote one of two parties that do mostly the same things in favor of billionaires while their life worsens.
That's no 1920s fascist Italy. Nor is China for that matter.
Setup a site to stream Pixar's latest movie, or post some CSAM, and see if you don't get imprisoned. It's not like totally arbitrary, just don't criticize dear leader. Where the US is though, is that Trump wants to make criticizing him online a crime. We know this is true because of the actions taken by him against people who are immigrants who have been critical of him online. So I'll let a tiny bit of doom out, but he way the US is headed, the trains won't run on time and you can't run your mouth about shit the people in power don't like as well.
Liberal in words. If you don't follow the rules you are expelled anyway. There is a reason why 99% of all politicians and CEOs are coming from the same universities and bubbles.
>> The issue is that American media/discourse paints a very distorted view of what life under authoritarian rule is like. The truth is in many countries, unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west.
Short term maybe. But there are reasons people want(ed) to move to the USA, and I don't mean refugees. A lot of college educated well-to-do folks have always wanted to come here. Also, the innovation, economic strength, and military strength of the USA will all suffer if the level of corruption increases - because corruption is a burden on the systems that produce those results. You can't get rid of it, but you can't let it run rampant either.
The desire to come and immigrate to the US has greatly diminished. This use to be a easy decision for foreign students to stay in the US for work opportunities. Nowadays, a US degree isn't considered prestigious outside of a few elite schools and the cost has completely spiraled out of control. I've talked to numerous colleagues who abandoned waiting for a green card because it's no longer a clear cut decision. Opportunities and quality of life in other countries have either caught up or surpassed the US in certain areas. This would of been unthinkable 10-20 years ago.
>The desire to come and immigrate to the US has greatly diminished
Do you have any data to back up that claim?
E.g. the number of diversity lottery applicants (one of the easiest proxies to judge how many people express their interest in moving to the US) went up from 12 million in 2011 to almost 20 million last year.
This thread is largely about college educated folks who represent a small minority of diversity lottery applicants. As to why the DV lottery has grown, I suspect it has a lot to do with it just having become more visible and known, growing hand in hand with increased access to internet and ability to apply.
Sure, if we are talking about the top end we can check the O-visas, the "extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics" ones, both the applications and the issuance of those went up even more than the DV applications:
They’re right about 1 and 3, but not 2. Life has gotten much better in a good chunk of the world, that the opportunity loss for not moving to US is getting smaller. You can easily see it by immigration application numbers by country.
Visa issuance doubling and having less applications from improving countries can both be true. I think you want issuance by place of birth to make the comparison OP is pointing out.
> I think you want issuance by place of birth to make the comparison OP is pointing out.
I’m not seeing a year to year comparison on the page you linked. It’s calculable from the monthly figures, but I’ll wait and see if the GP responds with his own source.
> But there are reasons people want(ed) to move to the USA, and I don't mean refugees
I think overall you are correct but probably still not safe to generalize. If you're moving to escape persecution then just being "on the other side" achieved this. If you are economically motivated then just leaving doesn't guarantee anything, you can be worse off. This circles back to the idea that the people who are persecuted by a regime paint the public opinion of that regime.
I have friends from Eastern Europe who emigrated to North America (mostly Canada) in the early '90s only to move back shortly after when the reality didn't live up to the hype and their expectations. They had a better life back home. The move was economically motivated, not escaping persecution. Many families under authoritarian regimes had the option to move to a Western country but not being actively persecuted meant they had no hard push and decided for the "comfort of familiarity".
East Berlin slipping into authoritarianism is a good showcase for this. Most people chose to stay in place for long enough to build a wall. We're talking years in which they saw the reality around them but only the ones who actively suffered from persecution chose to leave. Today plenty of East Germans still look back fondly at those times because they didn't feel the objective pain of persecution, only the subjective general suffering of "I could have better but don't".
Yes. I've been to China, daily life for regular people is mostly fine (bad work-life balance notwithstanding, as in other Asian countries). Nothing like the old stories from Russia (written by Russians, mind you) or even the relative material comfort but heavy-handed state control like in the GDR.
Daily life can also be fine in fascism if you don't belong to any "unpopular" groups and don't care about any. Until the customary war starts, that is...
Perhaps the larger point is that war conditions are worse for everyone in autocratic regimes. Regardless of how common (or rare) wars are for societies of any given kind.
Not entirely true. People living authoritarian worry about what they say, they self-censor out of fear, they defer to those in power (even at a local level), they accept a hierarchy of power rather than rights.
I do not entirely disagree without, but lack of freedom does intrude into day to day life to some extent.
How is that genocide? No one is being killed, no culture is being erased, no community is being wiped out. People might be persuaded to change their viewpoints but they are not forced to or sent to re-education camps.
This seems identical to saying that convincing someone with anorexia that they aren't overweight is "social death", and "social death" is (somehow) genocide.
To say nothing of using the same word as what happened in the holocaust or to the Armenians or native Americans or Rwanda or is happening in Xinjiang....
dysphoria is certainly a mental illness, transitioning is merely one possible treatment for it (though, pushed as one of the first rather than as one of the last options, which I personally find concerning.)
Being gay is not generally recognised as mental illness, although it has been in the past. Being trans is less well defined (historically even being gay was not well defined, or defined the same way).
It depends a lot on what kind of authoritarian society it is. It's not a binary, and many are "soft authoritarian" meaning that citizens don't have any effective control over their government, but it doesn't actively try to suppress even minute dissent DPRK-style. In most of those countries, people don't actually worry that much about what they say because it doesn't matter at their level. It only matters if you're a public person saying things in a very public way.
In Germany you literally get your house raided if you critize a politician online. A journalist got a suspended sentence because he posted a pic of then-interior minister holding a sign that was edited to read "I hate freedom of speech".
Picking on not the worst country in the world, but one I know (and was living in at the time this was at its worst). Things have changed there since, thankfully.
its like what the old east german people said after the wall fell. i forget the exact phrase but its something like: "before, i could criticize my boss but i couldn't criticize the government. now i can criticize the government but i can't criticize my boss"
I agree that is a problem, particular with the concentration of power in small industries and the cultural homogenisation of people in power.
I recall in 2016 British employers who said they would fire any employees they discovered voted for Brexit - of course the only way they could find out is if people said how the voted but that is a free speech issue.
I think we need legal protections for things like free speech that we have traditionally had against governments to apply to employers and service providers. I think legislation that prevents various forms of discrimination proves it is achievable.
I live in the free and morally righteous West and I self censor all the time. Every single day. My beliefs would have me ostracized from communities and fired from my job.
True, but at least in prison you're (usually) fed… which may NOT be the case if you're fired from your job, put on a list, and blocked from the industry.
The linked report describes a case study of a prison where rat droppings were falling from the ceiling into the prison kitchen. It also states 75% of surveyed prisoners reported being served spoiled or rotting food.
Only if it is proved to a criminal standard (i.e. beyond reasonable doubt) to be intended to encourage an act of violence. It it is an expression of anger it is legitimate free speech.
So did the one they're replying to. They're just replying like-for-like.
It's typical that when someone is arrested for "X action with Y detail" (e.g. buying a knife with intent to kill someone) people who oppose the arrest will only state the X (and for some reason this works). To correct the record when someone says "I don't expect to be arrested for buying a knife", "I do expect to be arrested for planning to a murder" is a correct response.
So basically, you are OK with total authoritarian control over the population as long as its views that you agree with that are being enforced and views you don't like that are being oppressed. Not to mention that you didn't even care to find out what GP's views actually are - no room for nuance, just the fact that they are not socially acceptable is enough for you to condemn him.
What beliefs are so dangerous in the west today? The supposed leader of the free world is a rapist who openly brags about assaulting women. His mugshot is used on giant banners that he approves of.
We’ve self censored regarding the state narrative on Israel/Palestine our entire lives in the west
Just because the censorship is outsourced to the private sector, mostly, doesn’t make the day to day any different when you rely on support of the private sector, alongside discretionary support from the state
Visa holders are experiencing detainment for this specific thing, this cycle. And in other western democracies anyone can be fined and imprisoned for it as well
Wishful thinking that there is imperviousness to disagreeing with the state narrative in the west
The reality is that it’s not always on the mind 100% of the time and you learn to appreciate the day to day life under Eastern and Western authoritarian systems
They're probably referring to modern day countries that remain controlled by Communist parties officially. However, these went through a decades long process of privatisation to get where they are today, and there is no guarantee they won't backpeddle.
The horrible life in Soviet Union was due to horrible governmental policies, which are not unique to authoritarian governments. Liberal governments have their fair share of bad policies.
Yes thats my point. The average person may feel that they are completely free, because they live their lives within the boundaries of what the ruling party wants.
As first generation out of Salazar's dictorship, what I see is current generations completely ignoring what was taught to them during the last decades.
I can surely tell, the memories of my parents and family members that had to live under the regime isn't really that those were better days, unless one was a collaborator.
Try to do some public comment that can be misused to mean some kind of bad opinion on the regime, and off you go, out of the map.
> And do you think American media really distorts the "other" side more than Chinese or Russian media distorts what life in the west is like?
having lived for a long time in both china and america: yes. chinese people are given a much more accurate view of life in america than americans are given an accurate view of life in china
thats why there was that meme going around earlier this year when tik tok people joined rednote that said americans were shocked to learn their media was lying about how bad chinese people had it, while chinese people were shocked to learn their media was telling the truth about how bad americans had it
that's simply false. according to cnnic, china has 1.267 billion monthly active users of mobile internet services. that's 89.9% of the population, and about 10% of china is over 70 years old which is very likely a big percentage of the people who arent using the internet
having lived for a long time in both china and america: yes. chinese people are given a much more accurate view of life in america than americans are given an accurate view of life in china
I think a lot of people in America (and HN commenters) think that life in China is closer to North Korea than Singapore based on massive media propaganda. In reality, in T1 and T2 cities in China, quality of life has exceeded American cities in my humble opinion. They're quite close to Singapore from my experience.
When I visited Shenzhen and then came back to the US recently, I felt like I went back in time 15 years.
I've been saying on HN for years that the commenters here should buy a ticket and go see China for themselves. It's extremely safe. Far safer than any American city/suburb. No, they're not going to detain you and send you to jail. They don't care about you. People are generally friendly even if you're from the US.
“Reminder: On Chinese social media platforms, please do not mention sensitive topics such as politics, religion and drugs!!!”
"Some Americans reported having their content blocked or accounts suspended for material deemed sensitive by RedNote, as content moderators control what the Chinese audience can see. A search on RedNote for Xi Jinping, China’s leader, comes up blank."
It seems like the Chinese government works pretty hard to make sure its own citizens don't understand how bad things are in China. Maybe they fail at that but it isn't for lack of trying.
"It's hilarious to me that one side is sharing that Chinese people are convincing Americans that they've been fed propaganda about China, and the other side is saying that no, it's the Americans telling the Chinese that THEY are being fed all the propaganda! This is hilarious and dumb, but not as crazy as what happened on the Tiananmen Square in 1989!"
For all its faults I think I trust America's freedom of speech to make information available better. We should be diligent in protecting it as a principle because although the government is somewhat constrained by the first amendment, others are not.
America's freedom of speech is vulnerable to "flooding the zone". I don't have a good suggestion for fixing that, but I would say that as a result the average American is not any better informed than the average Chinese citizen, despite greater freedom of information.
That's a reasonable take. I feel like China has such extreme ends of the spectrum, from the most modern cities to the most distant rural regions. It's hard to think of China in any sort of unified, whole way.
from the most modern cities to the most distant rural regions
Because 30 years ago, the vast majority lived in villages and barely had running water/electricity. Today, these villages are mostly empty. People who live there are older people who do not want to live in cities or can't afford to. But even in villages today, they have electric cars, solar panels, ride hailing, and plenty of conveniences.
This isn't even remotely true. Life is nothing like western countries in most parts of the world, authoritarian or not.There is a reason for such levels of immigration to western countries.
In a lot of cases that reason is that the West has pillaged and/or coup-ed those countries in the past, and doesn't care if it scorches and/or submerges them underwater in the future.
I agree. My country was plundered for hundreds of years. And some now have the gall to say these invaders brought progress to a backward country. However, that is orthogonal to the point being discussed
You only realise you can’t do something when you come into contact with trying to do it. Otherwise you live your life blissfully unaware of how free you arent.
Its like how you feel that driving is safer than flying, despite driving being the most dangerous thing most people do… you only realise how dangerous it is when its too late.
Okay. But you still can’t have repercussions from the government for your speech in America. On this issue Europe is definitely backsliding - for example, see UK police showing up at doorsteps for social media posts). But countries like China and Turkey take it MUCH further. You can be jailed for years for political speech or wrongthink. That does change day to day life. You can’t think or act freely. At best you can live a lie and stay quiet.
> But you still can’t have repercussions from the government for your speech in America.
You absolutely can. The obvious example most frequently talked about is that there are plenty of things you can say, which if the wrong person hears them or they trigger automated alarms, it will get you an unfriendly visit by people flashing badges. They might be there to give you a threatening talking-to, or they might be there to arrest you full-stop.
The less obvious example is that even if you don't cross any lines to trigger a direct response like that, it's recorded all the same. It will shape future interactions with law enforcement agencies. You will be flagged as a person of interest, as a hostile actor, etc. Legal speech can very easily make you suspicious and law enforcement will treat you accordingly before they've ever met you. It's not a recipe for a good outcome when the people with badges start off thinking you're likely to pull a gun on them.
At times, it's been far worse than this. I'll direct you to COINTELPRO, or any of the other mryiad of historical instances where the US government has protected its interests by going after domestic elements it sees as subversive.
> On this issue Europe is definitely backsliding
Europe never had free speech to the degree that America did. In many countries, it's unlawful to speak ill of royal figureheads for example.
> for example, see UK police showing up at doorsteps for social media posts
This absolutely happens in America, as I mention above. You might say it's to a different degree, but the end result is the same.
> You can be jailed for years for political speech or wrongthink.
All it takes is for you and your ideology to be labelled as extremist and terrorist, which is a wholly arbitrary line to draw.
As an outside observer, it absolute looks like that the American government punish people for their speech. Of course, they say something else, like we just kidnap you from the street, or we just revoke your grant, or we just force your university to kick you out. Or simply flat out ban your free speech, like teachers’ one in schools. And even if they do it illegally, and they give you the opportunity to use your rights, lawsuit themselves can be still damaging.
Also, there were several news in the past decades about cases when police was even at the doorsteps of perpetrators before their mass shooting because of their social media posts (but more times, Americans were disappointed that police didn’t prevent the shooting even when there were incriminating social media posts). The problem is not social media posts, it never was. It’s their content. And also, it’s not just social media posts most of the time when the police come to your doorsteps even here in Europe. But that cannot be made to sensationalist headlines.
It’s still worse the law situation in Europe, but an adversarial government can find ways to circumvent even the better laws. And from the outside, it looks like that this would happen exactly in the US.
> The truth is in many countries...day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west.
That's true right up until your infallible dear leader invades your neighboring country, fails, and rapidly starts ratcheting down social controls in a desperate attempt to preserve political stability. I don't think Russians would describe day-to-day life as "mostly similar to the west" anymore. China could be next.
Unfortunately, day-to-day life is mostly similar to the west in Russia. Other than some unfortunate people getting conscripted, it’s the same as usual.
To be fair, the job of infallible dear leader in a major Western democracy is very prone to getting involved in wars, with bad repercussions for the people involved in all sides... (and destabilizing the world in the process). While some people in that country oppose these war adventures, it's difficult to voice because said country has a secular religion of worshipping its own armed forces, and speaking contrary to this can have anyone ostracized.
I'm not talking about Russia, China or North Korea, though of course it can also fit some of those countries.
> The truth is in many countries, unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west.
At a very superficial level, sure -- people get up, go to work, go out to eat, go to the movies, fall in love, get married, pay their bills, get sick, die, etc. -- like humans in the West. But this is all within the bounds of what the government decided you should adhere to. If you step outside of those bounds the consequences can be severe and without any legal recourse.
Because authoritarian regimes are a law to themselves, rather than applying the law, they're highly susceptible to corruption. Whether you get in trouble or not depends on who you know (in China it's called guanxi). I lived in China for 6 years, ran a business there; I can tell you the system runs on guanxi.
Access to information is highly restricted. All public media and social networks are censored and/or self-censored. There is no freedom of expression on anything that is "sensitive". This is _not_ limited to "minorities, politically active or those in legal trouble". Yes, people have learned to walk the line carefully.
It is more relaxed than the Mao days or the USSR (I lived there too) where you literally had someone on every floor of a building whose job was to report on what everyone else was doing. But it _looks_ more relaxed than it is. If you've visited China, or even stayed there a few months, or studied there for a year as an exchange student, you won't notice it. But believe me it's there. The educated class know it but they've either a) accepted it ("mei banfa"), or b) have emigrated or have made contingency plans for their kids, or c) are carefully subversive.
>day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west
The "happy path" is, the major differences start when you have any kind of a problem, then not having any functional institutions makes the experience _very_ different from the west.
Earning minimum wage is a very bad situation in many democratic countries, the US included.
There's nothing special to China in this regard.
There's very little real data on day to day life in NK, mostly fantasizing by the West, but what do you think is day to day life in Iran? I doubt it's crazy. It's probably a lot like in many other countries. Iran is not a hell-hole.
It's been a little over a decade since I lived there, and yes, it was not all that crazy.
As a foreigner I was generally expected to stay away from big protests when they flared up, and internet connectivity sucked (though this was also a time when the world was less dependent on near-constant internet access). Otherwise it was pretty much like any other "middle-tier" country.
I was a teenager back then, so it was especially nice in certain ways: Tehran was pretty safe, so I had a lot of freedom to get around unsupervised that I later did not have in some other "more free" places.
I think this is a big reason why Americans (and other "Westerners") tend to say "Look at them, they're Communist!!!", instead of "Look at them, They're Authoritarian!!!".
If you call it what it actually is, too many Americans might actually connect the dots.
Basically, authoritarian rule shows its nature with the swiftness you are punished if you try to go against the flow. Usually if things go wrong, if you want to change things against the grain.
Free system don't make those easy either, but you have way more layers of protections, safety nets, and way less death sentences looming over your head. Money and who you know matter less the freer a society is.
However, this is an abstract concept that people can't grasp unless you lived it.
That's the problem with building a society: people can't be arsed to do anything unless they felt the pain. They can't picture problems they didn't live through.
This is why you'll see people telling you the UAE is the best things since sliced bread, only to come back years and years later, once they actually paid the price. They had a car accident with the wrong person. They tried to do business by got pwned by corruption. They got sick because of pollution. A family member got in jail for BS reasons.
All that can happen in a free society, it's just less likely, and the consequence are less dire.
Very hard to make people get how important it is. Anything that requires nuances and projection is near impossible to communicate to the mass.
That's why we have tribes and symbols. This is the only way to sell a project to big groups of humans, because then you substitute the complicated concept with a simple us vs them or good vs bad narrative.
Of course, once you do that, people think even less, and you get extremism rising.
This is why, IMO, free systems never last. Our last 80 years run was a statistical anomaly. We got very lucky.
The main problem with living under authoritarian rule is
1. the absenсe of control for the way where the country is going.
2. the value of human life is approaching zero.
Today your life is pretty decent (unless you're some kind of minority (c)), but tomorrow you find yourself with a mobilization order because your country decides to start a war. And nobody cares about your surviving.
You’re being dismissive about the minority part. I guess it varies from country to country but several minority groups combined can actually be the majority like in Iraq, Rwanda, Eastern Europe, SE Asia etc.
In non-democratic nations: You are allowed to do almost anything you please, except for speaking up against political power or in any way challenge them.
In democratic nations: You aren't allowed to do anything, but you are free to speak up against political power and challenge them as much as you please.
I don't think you've lived in one of the countries you're talking about. I lived in Beijing for a couple years, and early on I wanted visit Tian'anmen Square and tourist. I wanted to see what there was to do, how to get there, etc., but any search term (in English, anyway) was blocked. So the CCP's inability to accept their past actions and their insistence on making up a false reality made a legitimate activity difficult. Last time I went you had to stand in long lines because they required you to show your ID card (passport, in my case). I worked for a tech company, and none of us could do our jobs without a VPN, because half of all tech blogs got blocked. (Partly because a lot of them blocked on fonts.google.com, which was blocked because google.com was blocked; probably those would time out if you waited long enough.) I couldn't read more than about three paragraphs of the People's Daily without wanting to throw it across the room because the fake reality and shoulds/oughts were so blatant. Maybe it's more subtle in Chinese, but I doubt it. Fortunately I was not there for the whole Covid disaster.
You could argue that the CCP is totalitarian, which is authoritarianism++. The problem is that since technology can be used for totalitarian ends, it will be. Putin is authoritarian (certainly by no means Communist), yet reports I hear from Russia make it sound much like China. There's the forced conscription bit for his war against Ukraine, too. Erdogan seems a little better, but his economics-denying policies caused rather large inflation, and life seems to be definitely impacted in other ways, censorship being one of them.
Well, how about just old-school kings? That's Trump, or MBS. Trump's changeability is a feature of kings: once you know where to look, you see it lots of places. Grimm's fairy tales have a number of cases of the king looking favorably on someone and then being influenced against them by someone else; it's practically standard if a king shows up. I saw Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale" last week, and it revolves around a king who is having a great time with a visiting king. He wants the other king to stay a while, and has his wife persuade him. But the king thinks he is too easily persuaded, decides this must be because he is sleeping with the queen, tries to murder his friend, and tries the queen for treason. It's a bit sitcom-y, but sitcoms don't work if the premise isn't believable. You see it in Reynard the Fox, where the king is quite easily swayed by smooth words. Darius in the book of Daniel gets manipulated by his courtiers into passing a law against Daniel. Trump does political "fire and motion" (see Spolsky's old blog), so he appears unusually changeable, but random decisions are just a part of kings.
So no, life is not just mostly the same as we have now in the US. What we have in the US is a historical aberration. Unfortunately, we have the authoritarian Left (which denies being authoritarian by redefining words), and we have a foolish authoritarian Right. If the rest of us don't get our act together we are likely to slide back to historical norms.
No, it is not. It seems that way if you are a (s)expat in the honeymoonphase. Then you learn the language and look into the abyss.
In it families who can not trust one another, hierarchies of incompetence with bribes upon bribes, no legal recourse to anything, a caste system of actual misery and no perspective for that to ever change. And that is peace time. In wartime the ethnic majority progroms and kicks everyone else out of the country.
Isn't corruption the reason given by Xi Jinping for removing from their position multiple high ranking CCP members, generals, regional representatives and billionaires?
“Now” implies that this wasn’t being done before. It has always been legal to deport a green card holder over criminal convictions. Are you suggesting that ICE is rounding up these green card holders for the crime of being Mexican and throwing them back over the wall? This seems to be what you want people to believe. I’m aware of at least two cases where naturalized citizens were deported without having their status revoked, but in both cases these deportations were found to be illegal and damages were awarded. This might look like an indication of malice on the part of ICE until you realize that there is something like 40 million immigrants living in America.
If you have any concrete figures demonstrating the systematic abuse of the deportation process, I’ll encourage you to share them.
This is quite an ignorant take with rose-tinted glasses towards autocratic statism.
The truth of the matter that you neglect is that in many countries the minorities, allowed political activity, and many other aspects change without proper notice or disclosure following a strategy that originated from Mao China where the government keeps people guessing. Namely, the Anaconda in the Chandelier paradigm.
This is done not only because of issues within government, but also for the benefit of the ruling class to repress the general population using techniques based in torture to promote automaton-like behaviors from induced stress.
The brainwashed masses will always deny reality in such an environment.
When you have subversive elements that have broken the guard rails and caustically destroyed resilient systems making them brittle; bringing things to crisis and then attempting to silently seize power, and they fail to actually do it, you get the natural rise of authoritarianism. This is what happened with Hitler, and in many respects it was the Communists of the time, as well as the post-WW1 reparations, and economics that paved the way for what came after.
Its insidious yes, because people don't recognize or realize the reason the dominoes fall, and the consequences are just a cascading series of generally but not specifically predictable events in history. It certainly also makes matters worse when you have runaway money-printing to further cause issue.
If the cycle was to be stopped before the consequences, it should have been stopped by the cohorts that gradually and subversively put it into action in the first place, but they wanted to seize power instead, have their cake and eat it too. The people of such a group epitomize many of the deadly sins, and they have willfully blinded themselves to it.
In China, if you say anything bad about the CCP they will strap you to a chair in a struggle session and force you to admit you were wrong. That alone is terrifying.
I moved from Canada to California for a new job with a mid six figure salary.
I had a very difficult time finding a place to rent as I had no credit score. Only places that were available without credit score was a room to share. That was not an option with a cat, wife and kids.
Finally, I found a place that was willing to accept the entire year's rent up front. Moving such a large amount of money from Canada to US had its own set of hurdles.
Once that was sorted out, I had to deal with yet more craziness to buy a vehicle. I decided to buy a CPO Mazda from the dealer in cash (using a cheque, of course). Once I signed all the papers, they ran a credit check on my newly created SSN. The system could not find my SSN. So, they denied letting me buy the car because they couldn't accept such a large amount from a person they could not verify. My passport and Canadian driver's license were not acceptable proof of ID for the dealer.
On the flip side, my long history with Amex in Canada was ported over. So, they quickly set me up with very high limit credit cards.
We already live in social credit but I fear the ones maintained by companies might be better for the consumer.
This exact same story pretty much happened to me when I moved to Canada about 15 years ago. I wasn't able to get a credit card for years, and couldn't rent an apartment without a guarantor, despite the fact that I was full-time employed in the tech industry, had zero debt, plenty of savings etc.
What I took from the experience (especially after going through various iterations of it in several other countries) is that most communities are biased against migrants/newcomers. Egalitarianism would be nice, but in practice nepotism and chauvinism are encoded in policy.
Maybe this is why Europe is so popular with migrants? I've lived in four European countries and never had anything like that. To rent a place you just need to pay 1 or 2 months deposit up front. I've never heard of anyone being denied to buy a car with cash (but we don't use cheques... the payment is either successful or not - it doesn't need to clear).
Loans are a different story, it varies a lot - but in my country for example, after working 6 months in a full-time job you can get a mortgage without issues. All they care about is how much you are earning, and that you don't have any other debts so that you couldn't afford the repayments.
It’s not a bias against immigrants, it’s a bias against the unknown.
I’ve had an identical experience as an 19 year old college dropout trying to rent an apartment and buy a car with no established credit history. It at least 5 years to qualify for my first unsecured card with $1,000 credit on a 6-figure salary. I could not qualify for any vehicle, not even a used cheap Honda Civic with my lack of history, and I had to play the Craigslist rental game for years as well.
There's a small difference... at 19, you truly didn't have a credit history. A middle-aged immigrant from Canada likely has a credit history, but for some reason, it's not portable across arbitrary boundaries. Canada-US is a pretty solid example... We're neighbors, we both have stable economies, modern banking, etc. From a consumer's perspective, there's no good reason a credit history shouldn't carry across that border.
> for some reason, it's not portable across arbitrary boundaries
The reason being that you can't be held accountable across borders. I may have good credit in Canada, but my German landlord can't sue me there if I fall behind on rent.
Your credit score IS maintained by companies! Their whole business is maintaining American credit scores. I really have no idea what their business model is.
Yes, the only role of the government was to issue an SSN which has been explicitly said shouldn't be used in such a manner[1].
It is a real pet peeve of mine that people take such hard stands on issues like this when it's so easy to check what's actually happening first. This thread isn't the most egregious example, but it is an example of someone just imagining a system with a big flaw and then suggesting a solution to the problem they made up.
Near instantaneous credit checks is their business model, and they operate worldwide.
Their business replies on collecting and storing vast troves of data that influence your credit score.
Were the likes of Experian and Equifax taken out of the credit system, you would see a massive credit crunch as every business that relies on them would have to manually verify anyone's credit score (which could introduce a whole new set of biases) or forego that completely.
Interestingly, when it comes to business credit checks, i.e. Financial viability and director background checks and history - this is something an LLM could very easily find red flags from publicly accessible data before forking out money for a full report.
The credit score provided by someone like Equifax is just a number - cheap and quickly requested via an API. And yes, bureaus don't have operations in every country - but my point was that credit scores don't just exist in the US.
Take the Netherlands, they don't use scores; rather you would request a report that details any known factors that influence creditworthiness.
The difference is:
- the score is a simple weighting (0-1000) that is systematically calculated by the bureau.
- Without a score provided, you have to make a judgment yourself on that individual's creditworthiness from their report.
What is more common in many European countries is a check of a national debt register, to see if you're a known bad debtor. This is distinct from a credit check, because it's not something you need to build up; just something you need to avoid. Someone fresh into the country won't have a problem here.
I moved to Switzerland and all I needed was a clean debt register entry and my employer contract.
Not sure in Germany, but my country borders it and I rented an apartment several times with no credit history. It also never took more than a few hours to sort everything out (make an appointment, decide if I like the place, exchange my personal info, make a second apointment to sign a contract). No credit score in sight.
What? They don't check your credit score where I live (west-eu). They check your pay slip to see how much you make monthly and if it your rent is less than half your paycheck they can decide to let you rent. After that is a two or three month downpayment that is locked in a seperate bank account specifically for this use and is released at the end of the lease. If there is no damage to the rental unit you get back your full amount, depending on what damage is found, the downpayment is used to fix that.
In the UK they’ll do background checks, and check your salary. They’d ask for six months rent in advance if it wasn’t illegal. And even though it is illegal.
In my experience, in the UK, the rental agency required 12 months rent in advance (plus another 2 months rent as deposit) when I was self-employed. They would have accepted monthly rent if I had 5x the annual rent in cash savings, but I didn't.
And then every year after that they required another 12 months rent up front, when it came to the annual tenancy renewal. Track record of paying the rent wasn't good enough to prove that I could keep paying the rent.
What? They are in no way entitled to see your pay slip, or know how much you make. Whether or not you can pay rent is entirely your problem (North EU).
You have a deposit, typically three months rent, that's typically enough to indicate whether or not you're able to pay rent.
Denmark. To be fair I haven't rented an apartment in 15 years. My understanding is that the rule still are: If you don't pay, you get a 14 day warning, if you don't pay within those 14 days, your lease can be terminated the next day. Assuming that you then refuse to move, the landlord can have the bailiff (not sure if that's the right word) kick you out.
They absolutely do in Germany and Austria. Renting is almost impossible without pay slips from LOCAL employers. Pay slips from your previous EU country don't count. So relocating is a huge bitch.
>Whether or not you can pay rent is entirely your problem (North EU).
It immediately becomes the landlord's problem here when they're legally not allowed to evict you once you stop paying rent. So they're trying to be 110% sure you're the ideal tenant who always pays on time. Especially since for many private landlords the rent you pay them is also their mortgage payment to the bank.
>You have a deposit, typically three months rent, that's typically enough to indicate whether or not you're able to pay rent.
Deposits don't mean you're able to keep paying rent since that deposit might be borrowed money or from illicit activities. Landlords want to see stable employment (well known employer, that you're past probation period, etc), not that you have a lot of random money in your pocket when you sign the contract.
I don't support this status quo, but it is what it is because it's a sellers' market and governments don't want to change that.
> Not really. Try to rent an apartment in Germany (any EU country really).
Been a while for me but afaik nothing has changed: if you lived and worked here before, then a couple of your last salary statements are sufficient (bar the problem of actually finding anything and being accepted, but that is besides the point).
So I am definitely not loving or defending this, but afaik compared to needing years of time to build your credit score in a "smart" way (and by hearsay I would probably mess it up, "just be employed for 3 months" sounds very easy to do?
> bar the problem of actually finding anything and being accepted, but that is besides the point
It isn't besides the point at all. It being a seller's market means landlords can and do ask for whatever paperwork they want which often enough includes a SCHUFA report. You can choose to not provide it but they can also choose to rent to someone else who does.
Amex in general is quite good with this sort of stuff.
Requested a personal card with no credit score and that somehow went through fine despite friends in similar circumstances getting rejected. Best guess is because I had a company issued Amex already they could use that as history
> But would you want the NRA to control the social credit system regulating a firearm purchase?
I prefer that to Chase controlling it: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/19617/00019768782300... (the link details an instance in which Chase was alleged to have debanked a bipartisan, multireligious charity headed by a former U.S. governor, senator and ambassador). The NRA would probably let me buy the gun, after all!
If you read the comment, you’d notice that there were no loans involved whatsoever.
If you can’t rent or buy a car without a credit score, you should only be allowed to buy a gun until you have proven that you’re a trusted member of the society.
>Once that was sorted out, I had to deal with yet more craziness to buy a vehicle. I decided to buy a CPO Mazda from the dealer in cash (using a cheque, of course). Once I signed all the papers, they ran a credit check on my newly created SSN. The system could not find my SSN. So, they denied letting me buy the car because they couldn't accept such a large amount from a person they could not verify. My passport and Canadian driver's license were not acceptable proof of ID for the dealer.
Go to another dealer, I have bought cars with a personal check without having a credit check at all. I think that's a really unusual policy.
It's more complicated than that. If the transaction is over $10,000 it needs to be reported to the IRS. Dealers are often involved on the financing side directly, and their systems are just set up to require a Social Security number to put anything into the system. So because of the financing, some of these "know your customer" rules apply, and they automatically get applied to everyone as universal policy -- employees aren't allowed to use judgement to make personal exceptions. And physical IDs can be forged, whereas the existence of a Social Security number in a database can't be.
SSN's aren't perfect, you can still commit identity fraud. But high value financial transactions get safer the more you can verify about someone.
No, It's absolutely not. Like i said, I've bought multiple cars with personal checks, all over $10,000, never gave SSN or had credit check. Unless it's some sort of local law, it's a ridiculous policy. Find another dealer.
>Dealers are often involved on the financing side directly, and their systems are just set up to require a Social Security number to put anything into the system.
This seems totally made up and doesn't match my experience at all.
I'm not defending it, just explaining it. Different dealerships will have different tolerances for risk, including allowing employees to bypass standardized requirements. I'm not making anything up, just explaining what's most likely going on with this particular dealership, and how it's not unusual.
If your dealership is letting you drive off with a vehicle with a personal check (not even a cashier's) and without any kind of credit check or database identity verification, that's actually pretty wild. I assume you know the owner or salesperson personally. Otherwise, you could be a rando passing them a forged check, and then they'll be out both cash and car. I don't know many businesses willing to take that $10K+ risk.
That's not social credit, that's just credit and it's been around a very long time worldwide. For as long as money has been a thing, people don't let strangers or delinquents borrow it!
Social credit would be like if the government didn't let people lend to you for being a commie or trans. Social credit is not something you can just sort out on the phone.
There was a comment that appeared for a few minutes before getting deleted, that vaguely lined up with what I wanted to say. It didn't reappear, so I'll just repost it:
>real life also has social credit. were you an asshole to the bartender last week? that goes to your reputation at that bar. did you volunteer with a local non-profit? that goes to your reputation with that organization. even without an algorithm, people remember.
You can always move to new town and start again. The problem with all these social credit systems is that they're designed to follow you wherever you go forever. There is also zero recourse if a mistake was made; at least you can try and smooth things over with a bartender.
Yeah, automation and information sharing prevents people slipping through the cracks, and that also prevents leniency, diversity, and reason.
I was musing over something, though. We have creeping Orwellian things like face recognition and the policing of chat histories. But some of this is private, as in, not done by the state. Even when done by the state, it isn't in most places to prop up the regime and prevent dissent. It's big brother mechanisms without a Big Brother. I speculate that it's genuinely motivated by preventing disorder, because (is this true?) over the last couple of decades people have got more disorderly in petty ways to do with thieving and harassing and scamming one another. Then the people don't like it, and so the people politically demand heavy-handed policing of the people.
Nah, there's no increase in disorder, crime in most developed countries is trending down, but we do have a bunch of people that have collected unimaginable wealth and are definitely afraid something will happen to them like the last couple times this has happened. They definitely don't want to repeat history and will use the coercion tools they have to clamp down on the peasants.
Massive wealth aside, I would argue that any decrease in crime is nullified in recent years by the increase in sensationalization of specific crimes. That is, reading "crime rates in <city> drop to historic lows in 2025" does not have as much emotional weight as seeing a social media video of a violent crime happening near one's home, even if the statistic is true.
Consider how many children were terrified to swim in the ocean after seeing Jaws for the first time... statistics do very little to allay existing (irrational) fears for most people.
Imo, what is actually happening is fear of crime far away - like rural people being almost terrified of cities and entirely on board with sending army there.
People are not afraid of sensational crime next door. They want crime to be happening where political opponents live, so that they can feel good about punishing them.
OK, a second theory: the situation is messy and complex. Society tolerates the use of physical force less, and has higher standards of health and safety, and more suing and seeking compensation. The police and security then favor electronic methods over potentially injuring themselves or anybody else. Then there's more potential to be bad in small ways because nobody's going to grab you by the collar. Meanwhile, there's opportunities for internet crime, or electronic organized crime, or just mobs and riots. Then the shift in emphasis to electronic control spills over into the private sphere, and the public kind of support it while resenting it at the same time.
In summary, everybody has started liking doing everything in a hands-off way via the internet, but also everybody hates it.
It’s partially that for sure, but I think it’s also a kind of “common sense” feeling of the public that if people use technology to commit a crime, there must therefore be a record of that crime and therefore the police should be able to use that record to easily stop technology-crime. See: every police show ever.
That was never possible before. Historically, conversations didn’t leave records, and when they did, they were trivially burned. There was no sense that the police should have access to the records because there were no records.
The technical and ethical problems of this “common sense” are far from obvious to most whose primary exposure to and mode of thinking about policing and technology is what we see on TV.
Crime stats, especially for violent crime, are relevant to us, not them. Their wealth, status, and/or insurance policies generally require security details and precautions that insulate most “public” activity from random acts of violent crime. However, the former UHC CEO’s death is an example of the sort of singular, and targeted, crime that does strike fear. However, the comment you’re replying to is alluding to the historical collapses of societies (a.k.a a complex system) where economic inequity exceeds a tipping point leads to system collapse (“heads roll”). “Clamping down on peasants”—social credit, pervasive surveillance, collating movements/associations, uh, Palantir—enables evasion of the tipping point and adds resilience to the system.
Tl;dr: violent crime doesn’t mean anything when you have billions, but instability in the system does. Surveillance state tropes exist for a reason, and that’s b/c they add resiliency to a system that would otherwise collapse.
E.g. if you genuinely believe that AI will result in mass unemployment, it's not a stretch to believe that at least some of those newly unemployed will not take it kindly.
On the topic of social credit, I wonder if credit inequality bothers you more. Markets chase after desirable customers who are economically active. The super-rich with yachts aren't affecting me, because they're away being fleeced in Monte Carlo and not competing with me for the basic peasant stuff that I want. But the desirable customers/tenants/employees, who might have debts, and less money than me, but have great prospects and a drive to keeping moving up and circulating cash, and who tick boxes as reliable and enhance the general tone of the business or area and help promote it - those are monsters.
> Nah, there's no increase in disorder, crime in most developed countries is trending down,
I don't know in which world you're living so here are officials, likely downplayed, numbers for the EU, from an official EU website to get you back to earth:
"In 2023, sexual violence offences, including rape, continued to rise in the EU."
Thefts and violent thefts are on the rise all across the EU. When I was young I didn't hear about being stabbed to death so that their Rolex could be stolen.
In the city were I grew up in now people firing full-auto AK-47 is a weekly occurrence.
Someone who walks into a major EU city and tells me its safer than it was 20 years is very blind.
Meanwhile the risk of my daughter getting raped is very real. And the fault is as much on the rapists as on the ones who try to refute irrefutable numbers.
Rise in reported sexual violence is usually caused by easier, safer, more welcoming reporting, not by actual rise in the base rate.
> When I was young I didn't hear about being stabbed to death so that their Rolex could be stolen.
Exactly, you didn't hear about it, such violence was quite common in some places, but there was no 24/7 online reporting backed by immediate social media outrage. Things are much much more hysterical now.
The mobile phone created an occupation for people who would otherwise be on the street committing crime. It paced people, even common kids, adults, we commit much, much less crime than the previous generation, and even less in unreported crime (bar fights, revenge against a neighbor, etc.). The boomers used their hands!
But the problem is: If you follow the average strength and fight training of citizen from 1970 to today, violence should have been practically zero. It is much higher because some subsets have abnormally high rates.
You claim the average is going down. OP claims it’s going up. Both are right. Violence wins.
> It's big brother mechanisms without a Big Brother.
Big Brother does exist: it's money. If there were some single named entity, people would rebel against it, so it's diluted and realized through financialization of one's interactions with other humans. Big Brother is invisible to individuals because it's us, and no individual thinks “I'm Big Brother” when it's their point of view looking out. It's an illusion that creates and enforces scarcity but only works if everyone else also believes (power word: “Full Faith and Credit”).
It's not done by the state in the west but the state conveniently lets private companies set it up and then directs those companies in various ways as to what policies to adopt.
The US constitution not extending government limitations to society-scale corporations is a very convenient loop hole. Similar situations exist in other liberal-on-the-book countries.
The larger problem is that the owner of the credit scheme, whether a corporation or a government, can use it to punish people and depending on the scheme effectively making people social outcasts, without any due process.
Due process isn't some silver bullet. Jim crow, witch trials, they all followed due process.
But yeah it's better than some capricious bureaucrat just pulling decisions out their ass with no serious recourse, except all those cases there the process is just that.
Nothing in the world is perfect.
Breathing and eating are no silver bullets for staying alive because sometimes people choke on their food and they could also breath toxic fumes.
Still it's a pretty solid choice to keep doing both.
This may be a misunderstanding between us. What is referred to by “due process” is the whole and entire ecosystem of laws and a judicial system with trials, representation, judges and predefined appropriate sentencing structures.
The whole and entire point of all of this, is fairness and reasonableness.
The fact that mistakes are sometimes made, even corruption sometimes, does not really change things.
If corruption becomes common the system starts to fail and either reforms are made or the system decays into authoritarianism.
That's modern technology; the worst of both worlds. The moralistic tyranny of the small town, but the crowded, violent, and lonely social environment of a major city.
No. The old internet had it's problems, but they maintained the boundary between the net and reality. The mainstream didn't, and I believe the attitudes of that larger society are circumstancial and shaped by certain forces.
The following you everywhere is a major problem with these systems imo, mostly because it removed the equivalent of bankruptcy for your reputation.
If you had to move across the country to leave your bad name behind, you used to be able to. And just like bankruptcy you’d start with nothing so it wasn’t exactly easy but it was at least an option. Now what recourse do people have?
Also people turning up in a town one day with no one to vouch for them were assumed to be up to no good as it could be assumed that you'd do just that if you were escaping your previous reputation. You could start with less than nothing by default, and may never shake it, and that's before race or religion.
In small town New England, to this day, the litmus test is whether you graduated from the local high school, meaning you're probably related to other people in town. If you moved here at the age of 19 you're SOL.
Much like bankrupcy - which isn't just a wiping of the blank slate, it's actually a last resort situation - there is the option of changing your name, opening new bank accounts, and creating new digital accounts under the new identity.
Is it easy? No, but neither is declaring bankruptcy or moving across the country.
I'm not so sure about that. Turns out if you lie blatantly and entertainingly enough, a lot of people don't care if you're a criminal. Enough that you can be elected to high office.
The bartender also doesn't sell your behavioral profile to every other bar in town. I mean, unless you're a total asshole and it's a small town, but then they tend to volunteer it.
That feels like an exception that proves the rule, though - i.e. this is something requiring effort and thus reserved for egregious offenders, not a routine thing.
Of course, you are exactly the same person you were in your 20s and didn't improve one bit. Did you make mistakes? Too bad. That's you forever. Learning from mistakes is impossible.
What I've seen with these large services like Google is that once they deem you undesirable (either on purpose or by accident) then they're just done with you forever. They have so many customers and so many bad actors that it's just not worth it to give anyone a second chance. It's pretty horrible for people caught in that situation.
We would need some kind of legislation around this. No company is looking to decay scores over time unless there is some profit motive to be exploited (like there is with credit scores).
What's the tangible financial impact to someone who's been deemed undesirable by Google?
Bear in mind that you can mitigate a lot of risk by operating as a business instead of establishing a relationship in an individual capacity.
And people, much like businesses, need disaster recovery plans. We advise people to have escape plans from their homes; similarly, they should have escape plans for their critical information. Almost nothing in this world is risk-free.
> What's the tangible financial impact to someone who's been deemed undesirable by Google?
Depends how deep you got. I for one would lose access to my mobile phone (Google Fi) and email, so it would be very hard for me to get access to anything that uses my phone number for 2FA. Or the email address for any kind of account recovery. Huge nuisance but maybe no financial consequences, except maybe an involuntary trip to the bank's branch to access the account.
If we're assessing the assholeyness of comments, yours aren't coming across all that favorably IMO, but perhaps this conversation is victim to the loss of context and inflection that other commenters have lamented.
I'm not sure how responding sarcastically is "fine." I've found that in real life, people don't respond well to sarcastic responses to ordinary conversation.
Of course that's the case, but the point is that if you change for the better you have a chance to start with a clean slate. You do not have such a chance when everything is in a centrally managed database.
Legally, yes. Practically, the EU still has borders and barriers. Language, pension systems, degree equivalence, etc.
Oh and also remember that the EU has freedom of movement for labour, not necessarily people. If you don’t have enough money, you can’t just move to another EU country and hope things work out.
Isn't being able to move to a new town and start again also a kind of new thing though too? Cars, moving companies, open borders, globalism, English as a standard language, no serfdom, etc.
I mean, I think you could pick up and move but it was much harder, and how far you could reasonably move when you did move was limited pre-modern era. If you can't move that far, the likelihood of someone knowing you or word spreading is probably higher.
Although I remember seeing an article here on movement of serfs a while back, I think the conclusion was that they were more mobile than one might think.
In the book Fingerprints[0], they mention how, prior to fingerprints, much easier it was to just move to another town/county/state and just start over or even pretend to be somebody else. This was because there was no way to establish your identity with near 100% certainty.
This had pros and cons depending on who you were. For example, thieves loved it as you could drop you criminal record simply by moving somewhere that no one recognized you. On the other hand, there were documented cases of mistaken identity and people being prosecuted just because they looked like someone else. Then there is the case of William West which is better understood by looking at the pictures of two men names William West [1]
Contrast that to today where it doesn't matter which town in the US you live in, there is always a credit record that is tied to you.
What happens if in one town you lose your job, and get evicted from your apartment, or default on your mortgage? You're going to have trouble with housing in that next town.
Most of our social credit systems let you start over.
The big ones (credit score and criminal history) are strongly tied to you, but have recourse to challenge mistakes and remove strikes from your record. The sufficiency of those recourses is open for debate though.
However, all of the private company's social credit systems have a much looser coupling to your actual ID. Often you can just make a new account. If you first get a new credit card, phone, phone number, internet connection, and address, most companies would completely fail to correlate you to their previous profile of you.
Real world social credit is soft and squishy and local and fades or changes over time.
Digital social credit is (potentially) an automatically calculated number with strict and unyielding consequences that follows you around for your entire life.
A lot of digital ones are "local" too in that they are context specific. As long as it stays context specific, your Uber rating is closer to being liked by your local bar tender than it is to the Chinese social credit system. Even your local bartender has a little context leakage.
I agree there is a scarier potential there. And also some do, on occasion, escape their context (mostly credit score). They also have bigger contexts, but not so big that I would jump to the Chinese social credit comparison.
And a digital social credit system can be manipulated to drive behavioral changes en-masse. It centralizes power. Harder to do that with word-of-mouth.
True, reputation has always existed. But after a certain scale, quantity becomes a quality of its own. There’s a big difference between word-of-mouth at a single bar and a centralized, algorithmic reputation score that can follow you across dozens of services. If one bartender thinks you’re rude, you can go to another bar. If one nonprofit doesn’t like you, you can still volunteer elsewhere. But when a social media company or platform blacklists you, it can ripple through your professional, social, and even financial life, because their influence extends far beyond one community. That’s the leap from local memory to systemic gatekeeping.
The difference is the relationship between the bartender, the non-profit or the barista all revolve around physical locations where cash transactions or real work occur. There's actual direct value to be measured in the interaction.
Further my interactions with the bartender aren't likely to be measured or even known about by the non-profit and vice versa. To the extent my "credit" is a factor it doesn't travel with me from location to location.
>the non-profit or the barista all revolve around physical locations where cash transactions or real work occur. There's actual direct value to be measured in the interaction.
I don't see how this is a relevant factor. If you're a karen at a restaurant who constantly sends your food back for the tiniest of issues, how is that any different than if the interaction happened online, such as if amazon gave you a bad customer credit score for your excessive returns?
>Further my interactions with the bartender aren't likely to be measured or even known about by the non-profit and vice versa. To the extent my "credit" is a factor it doesn't travel with me from location to location.
Word travels around, does it not? Moreover why is it relevant whether it's a number sitting on a database somewhere, compared to some vibes sitting in some guy's head?
> such as if amazon gave you a bad customer credit score for your excessive returns?
Is amazon going to tell me that up front? In the restaurant case the manager can explain the issue to the customer and ask them not to come in again. It becomes immediately resolvable whereas in your example I have no idea what just happened to me.
> Word travels around, does it not?
The difference between the analog word and the digital word is extreme.
> compared to some vibes sitting in some guy's head?
I live in a town of 2 million people. These vibes have zero impact. Add them to a database that can be tied to my credit card number? Now they have real impact. I don't think that's a reasonable or desirable outcome.
The problem with these systems isn't their mere existence it's their draconian implementations.
>Is amazon going to tell me that up front? In the restaurant case the manager can explain [...]
In either case they can explain, it's entirely orthogonal to the question of whether it's in-person or not. There's no technical reason why Amazon can't send you a email saying that you were banned for excessive returns, for instance. Moreover I can imagine plenty of reasons why a restaurant manager might not want to explain the precise reason, such as the threat of lawsuits, or not wanting to create an argument/scene. See also, why some HR/hiring managers are cagey about why you were turned down for a job.
>The difference between the analog word and the digital word is extreme.
The difference between a hyper-connected metropolises of today, and a random village in the 1800s is also extreme.
> I don't see how this is a relevant factor. If you're a karen at a restaurant who constantly sends your food back for the tiniest of issues, how is that any different than if the interaction happened online, such as if amazon gave you a bad customer credit score for your excessive returns?
The difference is that the restaurant has a human evaluate if your complaints are valid while Amazon only sees statistics and doesn't care why you might have a high number of returns. The restaurant can also only realistically ban a few worst offenders before that becomes unmanageable for them while Amazon has no such cost associated why banning you. Then there is also the scope of the impact. You likely have many more alternative restaurants you can go to but no one really competes with Amazon as a whole.
> Word travels around, does it not?
Only in extreme cases. You won't be banned from all Restaurants in town just because Bob got offended. With a centralized credit score once you get flagged then those checking it will usually not even talk to you.
In large, dense cities you’re pretty much anonymous; I could dance naked in a main street today and (provided no one’s recording) carry on with my life with zero repercussions.
Some people make a living out of that fact. Tourist traps do not exactly engage recurring customers, every purchase is a customer’s first.
Sure, but without a credit score, the only way people can be prejudiced against you is through your appearance or through gossip. A credit score carries with it a weight that approximates official statements - news coverage, legal judgements - that others are much less likely to take with a grain of salt, as they would a casual hearsay accusation.
Using the author's loose criteria, one could say a criminal record is a social credit system.
These are the emergent fruits of living in a complex society, where one cannot realistically track reputation of everyone they encounter across all areas of life. We could move away from some of the formalized systems, if we decided to go back to shaming people for poor behaviors.
That’s a subjective mess. How do you objectively weight the value of those experiences? It also won’t stop gossip, PR, and propaganda. Just look at the state of Rotten Tomatoes. Now imagine Fandango buying your social credit website and making Harvey Weinstein a 10/10 good person.
I think there's some difference between distributed reputation among many different groups for different purposes and a top-down, centralized reputation from the government that controls most of what you can do in life.
One is more distributed and not controlled by any single entity, the other puts all the power over your life into the hands of a few oligarchs.
Such as system does exist, but it is filled with issues. Halo effect and other biases impact memories, in ways that we would not tolerate being made explicit. We are more forgiving of some people than others, we tolerate some forms of stress as a possible excuse (not a complete removal, but to allow for much quicker redemption) than other forms of stress. Rules are selectively applied, and this all gets fed into confirmation biases where we overlook the bad done by people labeled as good and the good done by people labeled as bad (often with the labels themselves being unjustified in their application).
The larger the social network grows, the worse this system performs. Stereotypes develop because we don't have capacity to judge each individual, confirmation biases reinforce stereotypes until individuals cease to exist, as the stereotype prevents them from becoming close enough to ever overcome it.
So while this system has always existed (well at least as long as recorded history), it continuously worsens and is increasingly at odds with a globalized world.
Not really, because such sites really only use upvotes/downvotes as a ranking mechanism. There's theoretically a lifetime upvote/downvote counter (ie. your karma), but other than a number that shows up on your profile, it doesn't have any real impact. You don't really develop a "reputation", for instance your comments get more or less visibility based on your previous commenting history.
There were a couple occasions on Reddit where someone replied to me in seemingly bad faith. I looked and they had negative karma. As a result, I didn’t engage.
But I will agree that it’s far from perfect. It’s also similar to the bar example. A reputation is built one person at a time. It takes a while, with repeated bad behavior, to build a bad reputation with the entire staff or regulars.
> other than a number that shows up on your profile, it doesn't have any real impact.
Certain subreddits you can't comment on until you have a minimum # of karma, some other subs auto-ban you if you contribute or subscribe to other subs.
Yes. And fails. Trolls don't care about karma and can run about being a dick until they're finally banned (possibly years later) rinse and repeat with a new account.
Did you even read the article? Here is the situation in China:
> Here's what's actually happening. As of 2024, there's still no nationwide social credit score in China. Most private scoring systems have been shut down, and local government pilots have largely ended. It’s mainly a fragmented collection of regulatory compliance tools, mostly focused on financial behavior and business oversight. While well over 33 million businesses have been scored under corporate social credit systems, individual scoring remains limited to small pilot cities like Rongcheng. Even there, scoring systems have had "very limited impact" since they've never been elevated to provincial or national levels.
Compare that to the situation with, say, credit scores in the US --- wholly run by an oligopoly of three private companies, but fully ingrained into how personal finances work here. At least a publicly run credit score would be held accountable, however indirectly, to voters and the law; and its safety might be treated as a matter of national security, rather than having Equifax and Experian leaking data like clockwork.
I've always told people that social credit as used by China was unsed to track dishonest businesses who scammed people and/or other businesses by breaking agreements and not delivering as promised.
The fact there's a credit system that protects banks from the people makes it painfully obvious who is in charge of Western society - consider this:
You take out a loan to contract the company to build you a house. The company defaults and disappears overnight. The bank is protected automatically but it's up to you have to run after your money yourself.
> I've always told people that social credit as used by China was unsed to track dishonest businesses who scammed people and/or other businesses by breaking agreements and not delivering as promised.
To be fair, that's the outcome. But there has been attempts to make more problematic, more intrusive, darker versions of this. They just never worked out for technical or ethical/legal reasons. And they made a nice picture to frame the competing culture, darker than they are.
It's not the borrowers fault, and in case of banks, it's not even their problem thanks to credit score and extensive guarantees built into the system.
However when I'm paying for some work to be done in the future, I'm essentially lending the contractor money predicate on the work being done by a certain deadline, quality or even at all.
So I'm the lender until the job is done, and if the borrower defaults on this it's not my fault, but certainly my problem.
Anyway my point is that if you become a lender for a nontrivial sum of money it might sense to hedge that risk (insurance, credit risk entrustment, ...)
Overview from 2022. One city really did set up a full social credit system, but that was a pilot project and didn't work out.[1] There are some private "social credit" systems, like the one from Ant, but that's more like a rewards program - buy stuff, get points.
China has had a lot of official social control for centuries, but it was local and managed by local cops.[2] As the population became more mobile, that wasn't enough.
But a single national system never emerged.
There was a work record history, the Dang'an, created by the Party but to some extent pre-dating communism. This, again, was handled locally, by Party officials. This system didn't cope well with employee mobility. But it didn't get built into a comprehensive national system, either.
China is authoritarian, but most of the mechanisms of coercion are local. Local political bullies are a constant low-level problem.
You are conflating "social credit score", which hasn't been built out in China (although blacklisting, imprisonment, and torture for wrongthink has been built out), with "financial credit score" which exists in USA via private companies working togther, and "credit reports" which exist in both USA and China. China's is run by the unelected, dictatorial government.
perhaps read the actual first paragraph of the article? the whole point of it is that, whether we call it that or not, our privately run reputation scores (including but not limited to credit scores) functionally are social credit scores --- except we've been boiled frogs, and should take some time for self-reflection before engaging in knee-jerk reactions to China's other failings (which I'm not denying btw) whenever social credit is brought up.
Your credit score in America will never be used to deny your freedom of movement within America or go against you or any of your family members when applying for higher education.
It will, however, be used to determine whether you can rent or buy a home or increasingly even get a job. Freedom: same outcomes, but modulated through the market!
It absolutely works the same way. There are would be doctors everywhere who never got the chance because of their parent's mistakes, or misfortunes, because we've made higher education a privilege in the country.
At this point of extrapolating from second-order/third-order effects, what dosen't count as "social credit" to you? It seems that if society dosen't give everything you want, that's seen as coercion.
The actual distinction here is between positive/negative rights. In OP's case, it's if even if you do have the money to do X thing, you are artifically not allowed to do so. That's a violation of negative rights.
In your case, you're positing that if you couldn't afford it anyways, it's "social credit" if private lenders don't give you help because you have a history of not paying loans back. That's an appeal to positive rights, that people have a active obligation to you, and it's not even from the government but from private lenders. That's a far more contentious assumption that ironically isn't held by the Chinese or the CCP or most of the world for that matter outside of a spoilt corner of the West. And it's a critique that dosen't even land in reality when the Fed does provide easy student loans at a far greater scale than the Chinese Government. A policy that has worked out swimmingly well!
In your case, you're positing that if you couldn't afford it anyways, it's "social credit" if private lenders don't give you help because you have a history of not paying loans back.
Please read it again. It was hypothesized that you could have a hard time getting a college loan if your parents had bad credit. Now, you could construct an argument for why that policy makes sense for credit issuers, such as 'statistics show that 87% of debtors' children go on to become debtors themselves'. But the underlying objection was that you shouldn't need to go into debt to get access to higher education in the first place, ie college should not be insanely expensive and you should be able to manage the academic and financial demands with a part time job.
>But the underlying objection was that you shouldn't need to go into debt to get access to higher education in the first place, ie college should not be insanely expensive and you should be able to manage the academic and financial demands with a part time job.
But we're conflating social credit with credit scores are we? A highly contentious normative claim has little to do with OP's argument and is obviously not a basis for a rebuttal for distinctiying the two systems. Which I would imagine there is a certain intentionality in reaching for highly contrived arguments based on literal hypotheticals rather than accurate description of reality.
That's what I'm saying here. You're the one who's making strange tangents here to try to rebutt OP.
>but it's really not that different.
No it's not. Because others are explaining why the premise is wrong. You using the normative assumption that "university should accessible" to conflate credit scores with the descriptive reality of social credit.
That first assumption is just an opinion that far from everyone holds, and you can effectively construct hypothetical that credit scores would fail to reach to justify your point. That's not good debate, and I'd be be curious to see what dosent count as "social credit" here.
So you believe there is no difference between what Trump is doing today and what Kamala/Biden might have been doing?
Democracy is about balancing different interests. So yeah, it is hard when the change you want isn't neccessairly what others believe in. You do need to compromise with other groups. Which means that large, coaliation parties that emerge will naturally regress to the mean. But ironically, that also is the suremost sign of plurality that things very much are different from authoritarianism where it pretty is just one interest group trampling over all the others. Well, some here might prefer that, but they are almost definetly not going to be the ones in charge.
Exactly. Amazon might approve my returns (or not cancel my account) because I buy more than someone else, but they don't share my purchase/return ratio with any third parties.
Exactly. Unless all these companies are sharing trustworthiness data I can make a new account and start fresh. The centralization of "worthiness" is what concerns me.
And hopefully you've not done anything that is "problematic" there, or ChexSystems will be along to make sure your new bank might want to know not to do business with you, like they did to me, after KeyBank tried to hit me with $405 in overdraft fees in a single day for a series of transactions that, if played chronologically, would never had had me with a balance below $0 at any point, due to "transaction reordering". Chex refused to remove the derogatory note, even after there was a lawsuit and legislation, until I kept escalating with them.
Those "single authorities" you fear already exist in western countries, the mega-corporations that monopolise entire markets.
The western system creates an illusion of choice, which those in power have found ways to manipulate. It has become merely a convenient tool for them to exploit the rest of the population, while the "free market" and "democracy" keep them oblivious to it.
But whatever people like me say, it will be too hard for most of you to accept the reality.
You describe a real problem and an attack vector on democracy that is being used.
However you make it sound like everything is already lost when it certainly isn’t.
Thinking of it as an attack vector is the problem with people. I'm saying what you have isn't democracy. Your market isn't free. Voting between the same 2 parties or choosing to buy/rent from the same few mega corporations aren't real choices.
Unless you guys start accepting that and find an alternative solution or system, you'll keep digging yourself deeper into the hole you're in. More debt, more wars, more homelessness, more crime, and no future.
I don't know where you are from (I'm really curious though), but where I live there are more than two political parties and more than a few mega corporations to buy or rent from. You seem to have an extremely distorted idea of what live is like in "western countries".
Can you please share your country of residence? Because in Germany I really don’t feel the choice. There are few political parties, but I don’t feel this variety helps in any way. There are few mega corporations for everything else, just check the list of richest germans.
Edit: I might be another troll, but from last few elections I don’t feel any progress. As an engineer I see continuous offshoring of well paid positions to cheaper EU countries. As self employed electrician I see regulatory and tax madness.
I lived in the UK for 10 years, I've also lived in a number of other countries, from democracies, communist (Vietnam), and varying degrees of democratic and economic freedoms.
I'm aware there are more than exactly 2 parties in the ballots in many western countries. It's not about the numbers, but whether any of those choices really give the people real alternatives, or just different ways to screw the majority of the people.
As you can probably can see from the above interaction, people resort very quickly to ad hominem attacks.
> But whatever people like me say, it will be too hard for most of you to accept the reality.
You seem to think awfully highly of your ability to reason about the world, but I find your claim to be fairly lacking. This all reads like the ramblings of a 19 year old who just discovered Chomsky.
> You seem to think awfully highly of your ability to reason about the world, but I find your claim to be fairly lacking. This all reads like the ramblings of a 19 year old who just discovered Chomsky.
Address the argument rather than engaging in ad hominem.
You have tons of meaningful economic choices everywhere in American life. You can bank with any bank and look for competing offers for credit to do useful things. For example you can buy a home and shop for a better interest rate by taking an offer for a loan from one lender to another and 9 times out of 10 you'll come away with a better offer. But you can easily not take on a loan and choose to preference flexibility and therefore rent. This housing choice involves a myriad of sub choices about lifestyle, commuting preferences, school adjacency, and other elements you may want to balance. Because US state are often quite different in character and economic and social opportunity you have a ton of dimension along which you can exercise choice.
Someone posting here likely has access to remote work and can meaningfully choose to live in a quite mountain town in West Virginia with satellite internet where you never see more than a few people every week, or you could live in a mid sized city like I do and get involved in neighborhood organizations. Similarly you could move to NYC and live in a small apartment an spend all of your time going out to bars and restaurants. These are SUPER meaningful choices on an individual level.
Can you not bank, if all the banks are colluding against you? And still have the rest of your rights? Can you rent without a four times yearly inspection by the landlord?
> Can you rent without a four times yearly inspection by the landlord?
I've literally never heard of this.
> Can you not bank, if all the banks are colluding against you? And still have the rest of your rights?
All the banks? There are 3,917 commercial banks and 545 savings and loan associations in the US. It's probably the most banks per-capita of any country. You'd be hard press to not be able to even work with a local credit union.
Show me the Americans stuck in a black hole where nobody processes their payment, banks won't handle their money, they can't vote, they can't travel, etc. because of their deviations?
There are total nutjobs of all walks that are living just fine. There are actual Nazis and commies living just fine.
It's a big country. If our whole society already has dystopian social credit it should be easy to find examples.
Banks talk to each other via ChexSystems/EWS and stick Americans in a black hole where nobody processes their payments and banks won't handle their money. Felons don't have voting rights in 48 states. As far as travel is concerned, being imprisoned makes that hard, but no, we don't (yet) have internal border checks that prevent people from moving from place to place, other than the fact that it's expensive.
That's a lot, about 2025 million people! And while many felons deserve their prison terms, those who have been released have an extremely steep hill to climb to get functional in society again. I feel like there's probably some correlation with recidivism rates.
Credit scores are used for a lot more than finances. You could argue everything they're used for is tied to money some way, but since everything is being sold to us as a service that doesn't leave much out.
The thing about credit scores is that its deterministic. I.e no matter which ideology you come from, you can have a good credit score with deterministic practices.
Meanwhile, in China, social credit is ideological in nature. I.e if you disagree, even if you are factually correct, you get penalized.
housing is definitely a thing -- arguably the largest / main use of a credit score.
clearances don't apply to the population on the whole -- you have to willing apply to a cleared role. and you're going to be spending the gov's money and handling secrets, it makes sense to see if they can handle said money, cuz if they can't they'll sell secrets
I've never heard of a pre-emplyment check requiring a credit score. sexually harassing a fellow employee and getting fired will not end up on your credit as long as you can pay bills, and even if you can't, the lack of bills is what shows up, not bad work behavior
Clearances are a far broader investigation, but to the extent that they look at your credit, I believe it is also to establish your financial status, which is most definitely a significant component of the clearance process.
Preemployment: I admit to not having started a new job in many years... Is there any evidence whatsoever you can present that companies regularly reject candidates not in a position of financial trust for having poor credit?
Hey I see you're quibbling on details, maybe because you feel determined to win an argument to save face or something. I must point out that nobody here cares whether you were wrong, and digging in your heels even after multiple people provided multiple examples just drags the conversation to unproductive places.
As I said in the first reply, there is very little behavior you cannot tie money to in some way, so you can go down this path forever of trying to find a reason why credit scores are totally valid proxies for all human behavior, and you would be technically correct while missing the point entirely.
> Hey I see you're quibbling on details, maybe because you feel determined to win an argument to save face or something.
Ha. Pot, meet kettle.
Two out of the three examples given were not "tied to money in some way", they are examples where the creditworthiness of the person is central to the transaction.
What's your point? If people will extend you credit for things like an apartment (since there is risk you will stop paying) or for a car, it seems sensible to perform credit checks then. What else are scores used for that don't intersect with someone trusting you with their property?
Again, missing the point - it is a system that has become a centralized digital scoring mechanism. This is dangerous because it centralizes power, giving institutions that are not even under democratic control the power to punish individuals or groups as they see fit across all sectors of life.
Many examples were given, please read the linked article. And again, in a society where everything is monetized, you can argue that creditworthiness is a just proxy for anything. So if basic water and electric access or housing access can be, so can anything else where you pay money for a service. You could argue dating apps should have access to credit scores and I wouldn't be surprised if some tried.
What do you think credit is? Anytime someone gives you something and you pay later on, that's on credit. They have to trust you to some extent. If every vendor had to perform due diligence of every potential client I would expect things to get even more expensive or just altogether deny service to people outright.
Then in a subscription economy- where having a poor credit score can result in loss of housing, insurance, and more- opaque unelected beureaus are wielding tremendous power. Perhaps they are not evil or even unfair, but if you'll recall the context of TFA, it bears many of the same failure modes of a social credit system, and will only be as good as the people regulating it.
But it will always be opaque, unelected bureaus, wouldn't it? If credit bureaus were dissolved tomorrow, the decision to extend credit would go back to the opaque, unelected operator of the business.
Is it reasonable to expect concrete examples of ephemeral decision making that happens within opaque organizations, given that the overwhelming majority are not held to explicit disclosure of their decision, let alone a verified paper trail held to such a rigorous standard to count for reasonable proof?
The best you can hope for from a potential employer is to be told they hired someone else. The default experience in America seems to be that they'll simply ghost you.
> Citizens are tracked for every jaywalking incident, points are deducted for buying too much alcohol
The first time I visited China I was under 21 but I had heard the drinking age was 18 so I went to a convenience store to buy a beer. Person running the till was probably 12 and didn’t say a word or ask for ID. Unbelievably lax compared to the US sometimes.
I generally think it’s easier and more effective to track the outputs rather than the inputs: you don’t need to track how many beers they buy, just outlaw public intoxication. And enforce that law.
I think, at least from my interpretation of it from being in China and having Chinese family, that something like underage drinking is seen more as a family issue, than a legal issue. What stops the 16 year old from drinking? The fact that their friends / family will see them being drunk, and think less of the person and their family. A 16 year old being drunk in public is family issue. Sure, the cops will intervene at some point, but China has very little drunken / raucous public behavior than the west does.
What if I want to buy copious amounts for a party? Or there was a discount so you want to stock up? This seems a bit shortsighted, it is not always the case that if you buy something then you need to consume it right away.
> The only difference between your phone and China's social credit system is that China tells you what they're doing.
And that I have a choice of phones, or even no phone at all, and none of my phone options is legally permitted to execute me.
Further down, the article argues that switching costs between private companies are ‘enormous.’ I don’t know if they are that large, but however painful it is to switch from Apple to Google, it’s orders of magnitude easier than moving between nation-states.
It notes that private systems ‘increasingly collaborate.’ Sure, and that can be a problem. But there’s a huge difference between a patchwork of systems which collaborate and a pervasive, inescapable State.
Finally, it notes that governments purchase private data. Sure, but are they using that data to restrict fundamental freedoms? They may be (Canada’s restriction of economic rights for folks who donated to protesters comes to mind — although I don’t think that was actually enabled by purchasing private ‘social credit’ data).
> Utah's House passed a law banning social credit systems, despite none existing in America.
Does the article contend that Americans live in a social credit system, or that none exists in America? It can’t have it both ways!
Finally, the article leads with a definition of ‘social credit’ as evolving beyond an original definition of ‘distributing industry profits to consumers to increase purchasing power.’ Whatever that might mean, it seems completely irrelevant to the meaning of the phrase under discussion, as relevant as mentioning in a discussion on O.J. Simpson that ‘O.J.’ can mean ‘orange juice’ (in Mr. Simpson’s case, it stood for ‘Orenthal James.’
You cannot live without a phone number in China, your phone number is basically your Social Security number and it is used everywhere.
Side note, I have never seen a (street)cop with a gun in China.
We sure do, it seems like a natural progression of a free market. The corporations want to know our worth before they deal with us.
I'm speaking from a Swedish perspective but for a long time already we had these "credit checks", where a company can quickly order a check on a customer to see if they're eligible for paying via invoice, or installments. And the consumer gets a letter in the mail notifying them of each credit check and who requested it. They basically see if you have any large debts, and what your reported income is.
But now some companies have gone even further and actually invented a credit score for us, that you have to pay them a subscription fee to see.
All this is an organic progression driven by corporations who simply want to know if consumers are worth their time and risk.
interesting. you dont get a credit rating but you have an effective credit check. nobody is giving money out to strangers hoping itll get paid back, theyre all checking your credit history - a mortgage is credit, mortgage defaults still count against your borrowing ability. Its a credit check in all but name
Basically what I was saying a week ago about the rise of China as an empire: we already have this at home, and it’s worse because we don’t bother regulating it.
Look, social credit is neither a new concept nor is it destined to be some Orwellian/Black Mirror/Authoritarian tool that keeps undesirables enslaved in low-wage work or targeted for “reeducation” - that’s a decision we allow Governments or Corporations to make on our behalf by refusing to bother regulating these systems or holding bad actors accountable.
The sooner we accept that this is possible, that it’s already here in many cases, the sooner we can begin negotiating regulations in good faith with one another. Maybe it’s placing limits on the data corporations can gather and retain, or maybe it’s preventing the government from acquiring private data without transparent judicial warrants tied to crimes. Maybe it’s something else entirely!
All I know is the current status quo enriches Capital while harming people, governments, and Democracy. I think that’s bullshit, and we should do something about it.
It's actually worse than in China in other ways too:
- China: no records about a person is a good thing
- Elsewhere: no records is a very bad thing
- China: records can be corrected and eliminated
- Elsewhere: records are permanent
TBF it took China decades to centralize the data. Back in the 2010s you can technically marry two persons in different provinces because the system was fragmented along the provinces. I think they finally solved the problem 10 years ago.
China is actually far more fragmented than some people thought. The central government isn’t that all powerful. I mean even today, let alone 20 years ago. It is actually the big businesses like Ali/Tencent that are centralizing the data they collected — exactly like what US corporations are doing.
"Social Credit" doesn't exist in China the way it's portrayed in Western media. It's really just a way of enforcing civil judgments, so you aren't living high on the hog after telling your creditors that you're broke.
Depending on the type of bankruptcy declared, debtor exams happen here.
Why do you think sms "2fa" is suddenly so popular with banks and other fintechs, despite things like passkeys and u2f, you know things that _actually_ prevent people from breaking into accounts, have existed forever?
Any business vaguely money related knows exactly who you are because of KYC requirements. They don't need to ask for you phone number when they already have your full name, address, birthday, and SSN.
Victims can spend hundreds of hours over the course of years navigating corporate and legal bureaucracies before their account balances and credit scores are restored. The system absolutely makes a bank error the victim’s problem to solve. Guilty until proven innocent.
I don't think there's any jurisdiction that puts the identity theft victim on the hook for fraud. Yes, you might get threatening letters or dings on your credit report/score while the issue gets sorted out, but that's not the same as being "blamed" for the identity theft, any more than someone wrongly accused of a crime is "blamed" for the mistaken identity.
There's probably no jurisdiction that says the victim is on the hook, but plenty where the victim is on the hook by default and it's not possible for them to exercise their theoretical rights.
Try convincing your customers to all get a YubiKey... it's not fun. The majority of internet users are able to read an SMS on their phone and copy a code, however.
These keys eventually stop working, need a new battery, etc. Instead of the onus being on the customer to "pull" a new one of these keys, it would be better if you "push" them ( mail a new one proactively every January 1st, give a $20 one-time service credit for activating it, and $5 a month credit for continuing to use it )
They could at least have it as an option. But, for some mysterious reason, of all the services I need a login for, banks tend to be the only ones at this point that don't support it at all.
SMS 2FA is good enough for most people most of the time. It's very bad at preventing high-skill targeted attacks against individuals, but it's perfectly good at preventing mass brute-force attacks.
It's popular because it solves the problem (not ALL problems, but the one they're trying to solve) and it's easy and low-barrier to implement and use.
I come across as rather "stuffy," here, but you won't find instances of me fighting with others (a mild exchange is the most I'll do), or harassing folks.
There's a reason: I used to be a real asshole troll, in the UseNet days (Don't listen to the folks with rose-colored glasses, telling you that things were better in those days; it was really bad).
I feel that I need to atone for that. I'm not particularly concerned whether anyone else gives me credit (indeed, it seems to have actually earned me more enemies, here, than when I was a combative jerk).
I do it because I need to do it for myself. I feel that we are best able to be "Productive members of Society," when we do things because we have developed a model of personal Integrity.
I can't really prove this but I'm pretty sure your ability to get a refund on Amazon is based on their scoring of you. If you're fairly large purchaser with infrequent returns they just approve your return no questions asked, but if you return a lot for your volume they put a lot of barriers in place.
At times it makes me wary of protecting my score (which may not even actually exist), and I'll often just take the loss rather than return something.
While I broadly agree with the article's point, this part stood out to me as the author not really knowing that much about Utah:
> the image [of overt social-credit tech in public] is so powerful that Utah's House passed a law banning social credit systems, despite none existing in America.
More like the LDS Church banned social credit systems that would compete with theirs lol
I don't think this is a very good article. She tries to address the primary rebuttal:
> You may argue there's a fundamental difference between corporate tracking and government surveillance. Corporations compete; you can switch services. Governments have monopoly power and can restrict fundamental freedoms.
By saying:
> This misses three key points: First, switching costs for major platforms are enormous. Try leaving Google's ecosystem or abandoning your LinkedIn network. Second, corporate social credit systems increasingly collaborate. Bad Uber ratings can affect other services; poor credit scores impact everything from insurance to employment. Third, Western governments already access this corporate data through legal channels and data purchases.
This is weak and handwavy.
* People leave Google's ecosystem all the time; it's practically sport here on HN.
* "Bad Uber ratings can affect other services" - is this theoretical or has this actually happened? Without specific citation, I'm calling bullshit.
* Poor credit ratings make it hard to get credit, yep. However, this area is heavily regulated and really only comes into play when you're asking someone to extend credit to you. It won't stop you getting on a train.
* It's not clear what governments are doing with corporate data. She needs to be a lot more specific about the harms here.
Also, saying that social credit systems in China are "limited to small pilot cities" is not particularly reassuring. The pilot programs are what we should freak out about. When it's rolled out en masse it's too late.
> People leave Google's ecosystem all the time; it's practically sport here on HN.
That supports the original argument if anything. If "Here's how I did X" generates interest on HN, it's quite likely that X is very challenging for the average person.
The corporate stuff gets weird too as ... what does leaving entail exactly?
There's no sure thing to be an alternative that is actually different.
I'm reminded of the SCOTUS arguments about cellphones and tracking, or just technology in general (the actual case(s) aren't so relevant as the arguments).
The argument at one point was that since you're carrying a cellphone or using a computer in some way that tracks your location you made a choice and that end result might be to just give up your right to privacy / location data because you chose to carry a cellphone.
Fortunately a few judges recognized that cell phones aren't just an accessory you pick and choose, they're part of daily life now, to operate in society you generally will need / want one, accordingly you should be able to do so without giving up some rights.
Unfortunately, the same arguments didn't carry over into topics like binding arbitration and so on ...
Just to add, if you fall into certain risk profiles, some of which you are born into and you can never get out of, it becomes incredibly hard to get basic banking services. Banks will unilaterally close your account. Payment apps will deny you applications and none of them have to explain why.
The rules of the financial credit system are mostly opaque and work through indirect levers. This AML social credit system also totally global, extending anywhere that the FATF has sway.
Interesting article. On the one hand, it provides insides into how the project actually worked in china, which I didn't know. That's interesting.
But it misses a huge nuance on the whole "dystopian" thing. The main thing about "social score bad" takes is that the government will use that scoring. It's not private <-> private. Everything the author mentions about the various scoring in the US (and EU for that matter, although to a lesser extent in some cases) is between you and private institutions. The government does not "track" or "access" or "use" those 3rd party scores.
It's a bit like 1st amendment in the US. You have the right of free speech with regards to the government. That means the government cannot punish you for your speech. But that says nothing about your relationship with private parties. If you go to a government institution and tell them their boss sux, in theory you shouldn't be punished for that, and they'll keep serving you. But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar. Or any private property. Tell them their boss sux, and you might not get service.
So yeah, there are lots of 3rd party rating services. But they're mainly between you and those 3rd parties. The government mainly stays out.
You're right that the private vs. public is a very important distinction here.
On the other hand, "private" has the downside of falling into unaccountable monopolies/duopolies. You don't have a individual choice about having a credit score, or whether banks can use it, or with which companies. You have no control, there's no accountability.
If credit scores were run by the government, then in theory democratic processes could regulate them in terms of accuracy, privacy, who was allowed to access them, for what purposes, etc. There would be actual accountability to the people, in what that there isn't when it comes to private companies.
While you say "lots of 3rd party rating services... are mainly between you and those 3rd parties", many are not. They're between one 3rd party (a bank, a landlord), and another (Equifax, Experian).
The ones that are, they're eBay, Uber, etc. Which seem more obviously defensible as being privately run.
Your "in theory" is doing a lot of work there. So much work. Have you heard about no-fly lists? The latest ICE actions? The Red Scare? Giving the government MORE power is almost never the answer.
> Giving the government MORE power is almost never the answer.
I've also heard of food safety regulation, airline safety, public schools, libraries, science funding, workplace safety regulation, building safety regulation, the list goes on.
Giving the government more power is quite often the answer. Sometimes it's the best solution, sometimes it isn't. But it's definitely not "almost never", that much we can be sure of.
> The main thing about "social score bad" takes is that the government will use that scoring. It's not private <-> private.
No: The dystopia comes from helplessness and inability to appeal injustice, regardless of who/what manages the system or how it is legally constructed.
We must take care to distinguish between the problem we want to avoid versus the mechanism we hope will avoid it... especially when there are reasons to believe that mechanism is not a reliable defense.
> But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar. Or any private property. Tell them their boss sux, and you might not get service.
The difference here isn't because they're "private", but because you implicitly assume you will have alternatives, other local bakeries or bars which are reliably neutral to the spat.
Things become very different if they're all owned by Omni Consumer Products or subscribed to Blacklist as a Service.
> parties. If you go to a government institution and tell them their boss sux, in theory you shouldn't be punished for that, and they'll keep serving you. But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar. Or any private property. Tell them their boss sux, and you might not get service
Except, of course, it's not that simple. There are a host of behaviors and traits that private businesses are not allowed to consider when choosing whether or not to provide you products or services. These carve-outs to free association exist because at any given time a large enough portion of the population exists of bigots who choose their associations based on characteristics that the rest of society has decided are not acceptable grounds for refusing service. So we compel service if we think not providing it is sufficiently shitty and harmful. Something similar happens when a private institution, or class of institution, is so critical to life or participation in society that exclusion serves as a form of semi-banishment. Such institutions are put under even stricter standards for association.
The idea that social credit or similar are totally fine and peachy so long as it's "only" private institutions using it is a fantasy entertained by rugged individualists who naively narrow their analysis of power dynamics to "big government bad" and discount their dependency on extremely powerful private organizations.
As others have noted, the bad thing about social credit is that any one particular institution does it - its that the social credit is mandated by unaccountable entities with lopsided amounts of power. It doesn't matter if its a government that's doing it, or a company, or a cabal of companies, or even if it was literally a single person - the undue coercion is the problem.
It's much harder to opt-out of a government than a privately-crafted social scoring system. But some become so large that you can't de-facto opt-out, not without significant consequences to your quality of life... And that becomes a problem.
As an exercise, can you construct a version of private social credit that supports opt-out and isn't dystopian? I posit that any such system would interpret and opt-out as an effective negative score, heavily disincentivizing that option, and making it de-facto mandatory.
That's mostly irrelevant. If both Google and Apple banned you it would be difficult to get stuff done. No iPhone, no Android, yes you could find some hacker phone but for many people that would not be enough. Similarly, if all the banks dropped you because your shared social credit said "don't do business with this person".
> Your credit score doesn't just determine loan eligibility; it affects where you can live, which jobs you can get, and how much you pay for car insurance.
> LinkedIn algorithmically manages your professional visibility based on engagement patterns, posting frequency, and network connections, rankings that recruiters increasingly rely on to filter candidates.
>That's mostly irrelevant. If both Google and Apple banned you it would be difficult to get stuff done. No iPhone, no Android, yes you could find some hacker phone but for many people that would not be enough.
Luckily neither google nor apple does any hardcore KYC (yet) so such bans can be avoided with a new phone + phone number. Inconvenient? Yes. Being perma-locked out of digital services for the rest of your life? Hardly.
>But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar.
I always found it strange that they are not allowed to discriminate based on gender/religion etc but they are allowed to discriminate based on if you are likable or not. As in they can refuse to serve you as long as they don't mention it's based on anything that's illegal to discriminate against.
You are making my point though. You'd have a problem if you'd have to fake your religion or your sexual orientation so you get served, but it's fine if we do it with how "likable" we are.
That most people cannot even understand where the problem is.
Downvotes make my point as well. I do not want to say the right thing so people aren't offended so I am granted access (or updoots). I'd rather deal with robots for this reason. Spending my money somewhere should be enough to serve me, like me or not. I think it's crazy that I even have to explain it...
On the other hand, the government staying out of it makes it better, because if you're banned by the main taxi firm or housing market or [insert rhetorical third thing], there remains the chance of using some sketchy unpopular alternative service, and you're not in violation of the law if you find such a option.
I’m reminded of the punishment that Kevin Mitnick received, which included a ban on using any computing device more advanced than a landline phone. I understand that he was agreed to this, but one cannot agree to sell themselves into slavery[0], and yet these supervised release conditions are considered legal and acceptable to most folks not subject to them. Plea deals are a pox on society.
> Mitnick was released from prison on January 21, 2000. During his supervised release period, which ended on January 21, 2003, he was initially forbidden to use any communications technology other than a landline telephone.
The sketchiness of those alternative services frequently means you are in violation of the law by using them. IP law on its own for film and tv is a series of monopolies granted to pieces of content and if the owner doesn’t want to sell it to you, Pirate Bay is not a legal alternative.
Regardless these arguments about whether it’s bad based on if the government is involved or not is ridiculous given how interwoven our corporations and government are. Like just doing business with any company strips your 4th amendment rights on that data.
There’s no sane way to argue that they have a clear delineation throughout society
The clear delineation is the police and prisons, and courts. If the government is a corporation that happens to control the police, despite having that power it still isn't supposed to have everything all sewn up, because laws and courts and institutional resistance prevent it from doing anything it likes. This system is theoretical and supported mostly by wishing, but used to work for quite a long time. Meanwhile the actual corporations don't even have proper police forces and would struggle to get you put in actual prison for violating their rules.
> Meanwhile the actual corporations don't even have proper police forces and would struggle to get you put in actual prison for violating their rules.
You should visit some megacorp campuses and then rethink this view. If you actually believe it then I dare you to do something against their rules while in one of their offices and be marveled at how many people pour out of the literal walls dressed in clothing colored based on their specific job, and then tell us about how they lack police forces
They have to do it by proxy, though, ultimately. You can run away from their territory and be safe, until they think of an actual crime to accuse you of. In my naivety I don't believe megacorps carry out extrajudicial punishments, apart from banning people. They have to go through the law, and try to get people punished, not carry it out themselves.
>They have to do it by proxy, though, ultimately. You can run away from their territory and be safe, until they think of an actual crime to accuse you of.
This is not true, they have their own private security forces, with guns, who will seize you on their property. Managing to run away from an organization's controlled territory to be safe from them, applies to public 0governments too
> The government staying out of it makes it worse.
That's because all that power turns the companies into paragovernamental organizations. Anything with the power to gatekeep human rights is a government.
This was similar to my take. What's dystopian about how the Chinese system was/is/was rumored to be was that it was the government doing the tracking and scoring.
Which ends up harsher than what private entities do as a form of moralistic restrictions than are dubiously related to one's ability to pay back loans. I don't see how barring one from using long distance travel is going to help them better pay back loans beyond punitive punishment.
The wave of CRM is CDP. Customer Data Platform. The key is that it isn't just your basic account data, but all the behavioral data across various system interactions both online and off (if applicable). Shopping Cart abandonment email campaigns are pretty benign. But the outrage around the targeted ad for baby/pregnancy products that made the news from Target a few years ago is just the start for what more insightful data signals can give you. I don't really care about most retailers knowing what I buy. I do care about them reselling that data to big aggregators that know everything I buy, where I go and when, and join that what sites I visit and what mail I get. It is too much and can be abused.
> The government does not "track" or "access" or "use" those 3rd party scores.
This is absolutely untrue. The government is a customer of all of these companies, and can whip up a chorus of brownshirts to loudly complain about any objections to the government doing this. There's a reason everybody who talks about speech should know what a long obsolete device called a "pen register" does. It's what we now refer to as a public-private partnership.
> It's a bit like 1st amendment in the US.
It is, in that the government can pay or blackmail* companies into censoring your speech, and doesn't have to bother with prior restraint.**
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[*] ...through selective application of what is usually antitrust legislation.
[**] ...which the 1st Amendment never mentions, but has been bound to it by people and judges who wanted to censor speech about communism and birth control.
> The only difference between your phone and China's social credit system is that China tells you what they're doing. We pretend our algorithmic reputation scores are just “user experience features.” At least Beijing admits they're gamifying human behavior.
Um no. That is not the only difference by a LONG SHOT.
If I want to evaluate whether or not I want to involve myself with you, in any capacity, then that negotiation is between you and me. I can ask for references. I can ask for a credit check. I can go pay for a police background check. I can read public review sites. Or, I might decide that because you listen to country & western music you're not a real person and I can't know you and leave the vetting at that.
Consequentially, however, that dealing impacts our relationship and none other. You might find other people who don't care about the same "social credit criteria" that I do and you might find yourself dealing with them instead.
That's kind of the beauty of this thing we call "freedom." Anyone gets to choose who they want to deal with (or not) and make their own individual choices. The "systems" they opt in are always opt in (or at least they should be).
The difference between a government "social credit" system and individuals (businesses or people) vetting other individuals based on their own chosen requirements is force.
A government system mandates this across society in a broad authoritarian sweep. Get on the bad side of "the party" and now you are a social pariah and will not have any luck finding anyone who wants to deal with you, country music lovers be damned, because it is forced upon everyone. A business has no choice but to apply "the" system because if they don't they get punished. It is not opt-in, it is a one-sized-fits-all mandated by force of law system that removes individual discretion and choice from the equation.
That's a LOT different than just "we're upfront about it."
Furthermore, while I appreciate when authoritarians are honest about their violations of basic human rights and freedoms, that doesn't suddenly make what they are doing OK. I don't want to deal with a thief who is honest about their thievery any more than I want to deal with one who tries to hide it.
What a weird straw-man. I said that, on an individual by individual basis, people get to decide what criteria are important to them and can discriminate (or not) accordingly. That if one entity doesn't want to work with another, there are lots of other permutations that an environment of liberty allows for. As opposed to a government mandated system where everyone is forced into the same criteria under threat of penalty.
I did not say, or even suggest, that the absence of a social credit system somehow results in everyone wanting to do business with you under any circumstance, and that you can opt out of the criteria that someone else uses to decide if they want to associate with you.
I really cannot understand how you were able to twist the meaning of what I had written so dramatically. Or are you just trolling?
I think here is the difference between your and authors optics. You count businesses (does this include large corporations/organizations?) as individuals.
You misinterpreted my language. What I meant, for clarity, was "individual entities." Be that individual persons or individual businesses.
It's the difference between one party wanting to distance themselves from you, due to their own "individual" reasons, or all of society by decree under penalty of law.
This is a great article. It reminds me of a discussion I had about Russia; in Russia (and China) you are essentially told what you are not allowed to discuss freely... In the west, you are told that you can discuss anything but, in reality, the consequences for discussing certain topics are significant... You only find out once you start using your so-called 'free speech'. In the west, 'free-speech' isn't free at all; it's actually very expensive... It's a cost that's increasingly difficult for honest people to avoid; you have to kind of guess where the boundaries are... While the circle of permissible speech keeps shrinking. The circle has shrunk to a point where a lot of honest topics find themselves outside of the circle.
It's difficult to be an intelligent, honest person in the west because of this.
It's like most people don't understand reality. Everything they believe just happens to fit within the circle of allowed beliefs. They are in alignment with the system and benefiting from it (often unwittingly). It's only when the circle of allowed beliefs shrinks that they start to notice what I described above.
I suspect a lot of people were 'awakened' after the most recent Israel/Palestine conflict because that shrunk the circle of allowed topics a lot. A lot of the people who were morally aligned with the ESG agenda before now found themselves partly outside the circle and you could see the agenda shift. Terms like 'diversity' which were originally conceived primarily as racial and gender-based started to drift towards 'neuro-diversity' as a response to the discomfort created by the shrinking circle having shrunk a little too fast...
If you're outside the circle, you can see it much more clearly. The worst part is that you didn't even get to choose your fate. Kind of ironic as the west prides itself on individual choice. The circle shrinks slowly until you suddenly find yourself caught well outside of it when the consequences have accumulated beyond a certain threshold.
It's crazy right? We've reached a threshold were even basic anti-war activism is de facto prohibited. In the UK, acting or even PROTESTING against the war machinery will get you jailed for 15 years if not deported.
I agree with the article's assessment that the US also has a social credit scores, but:
- it's not at all the same as an aggregated government-assigned score (though we may be on the road to that)
- the take of "things are so bad in China and basically the same here" are very naive; live in China for 5+ years and I guarantee you'll have a different view
Regarding the second point: I know right? If a lot more peeps were to have a chat with the average chinese netizen, I think it would shatter a lot of misconceptions about the People's Republic.
The problem if you’d have to live there quite a while and becomes friends and earn peoples trust before they’ll confide in you what they really think. That’s why so many of these takes about China are wrong.
Non-existent in the country I live in. There's a national registry of debtors and people end up there for a very good reason.
>Linkedin, Amazon
There's no reason to consider these to be essential services, I am not using either and I'm doing perfectly fine in life.
>Instagram
LOL
>Uber, Airbnb
There are several copycats, traditional taxis and hotels are still a thing and public transportation or your own car are valid alternatives
What even is this article? I skimmmed the rest of it and it just seems like the crux of the article is about proving how China's systems are actually fine while ommitng the fact that their systems are mandated by the state. Is Chinese propaganda what makes it to the front page of HN nowadays?
> Is Chinese propaganda what makes it to the front page of HN nowadays?
Yep. Because USA is a country which still ostensibly has free speech norms in its society, so you could get human rights commentary one day, foreign propaganda another day (even though the federal Trump government arrests political opponents), where meanwhile many human rights movements are banned in China. As the Soviets would say in the early 20th century, "And you are lynching Negroes". False equivalence is the bread and butter of authoritarian propaganda. By equating the two, we may fail to distinguish right from wrong and slide further toward authoritarianism.
But by virtue of "tolerance of intolerance" principle and the general lack of editorial quality of much Chinese propaganda, I see no reason why most of it need be present on HN.
We often think of "social credit" as something far away, like in China. But it’s worth noticing how our own systems are starting to blend with state power. Just today, Graham Linehan, a comedy writer, was arrested by five UK police officers over social media posts when entering the country.
We may not call it social credit, but in practice we’re already building it.
I agree with the sentiment but I have seen multiple job applications that have a mandatory 'apply with LinkedIn' button. Of course I could always choose not to apply, but I don't want to do that.
Same thing when some websites require you to sign in with Google- there is no Google user score yet but they can ban you from their platform.
China is controlled by the government. The US is controlled by banks.
The reality is, there's always an entity that controls a society. If not culture or religion, it will be the government or shadow government, or corporations and banks.
Never forget that the main reason WFH was attacked in such a coordinated effort within a short period of time was because it threatened banks' business interests and model. Who's going to pay banks if landlords (commercial and residential) can't milk renters' money? It's a food chain and on top of it are the banks, and at the bottom are you, the average worker living paycheck to paycheck. WFH disrupted that and shifted the power to you. You don't have to rent/own downtown, so you (landlord) don't have to pay hefty property taxes. As a result, the government is losing, banks are losing, landlords will finally have to find real jobs instead of leeching off others, and all of that was a nightmare to them, and thus the push for hybrid or whatever under the fake claims it promotes cooperation and teamwork.
This article reminds me of those silly "Capitalism is the real super intelligent AI" or "is a burrito a sandwich" arguments from a few years ago. Saying a "system with the explicit goal of the government judging legal behavior to try and change it and punish you if you don't" is the same thing as "private entities deciding on how or even if they want to interact with you" is just stretching the definition too far to be taken seriously. By that argument me deciding I don't want to read more by this author is a social credit system.
>Your Uber rating doesn't affect your mortgage rate, and your LinkedIn engagement doesn't determine your insurance premiums. But the infrastructure is being built to connect these systems. We're building the technical and cultural foundations that could eventually create comprehensive social credit systems.
She doesn't provide any citation for this
> Corporate platforms increasingly share reputation data. Financial services integrate social media analysis into lending decisions
Again she doesn't provide any citation for this, but more importantly she doesn't explain why she thinks it's wrong. Someone who posts "Feeling lucky so headed to the craps table" probably shouldn't be lent to, if only for their sake
I think there is no doubt that we are dropping lower and lower into a dystopian world and most of us are actually fine with it, because it doesn’t come upon us suddenly but evolves along the decades.
Gotta get my FU money as quickly as possible and go live in the woods.
Great article and good point. I never articulated this as good as the article but, I've always assumed that when I use Uber/Lyft and rate a driver, if I give too many drivers a low rating I'll be banned from the app. I'm not saying I will actually be banned, I have no idea. Rather, I'm saying I fear I will be banned.
I mean why not? Any customer that effectively makes the company look bad can be banned by the company.
I bring up Uber/Lyft in particular because 99/100 drivers break traffic laws. The speed (10-15 miles per hour above the speed limit), they tailgate which is both putting me in danger, putting other car in danger, and is illegal (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...). They'll do things like stop a full car and half past the waiting point at an intersection (have pictures of this). In other words, there a line behind which a car is supposed to wait. Then there's a crosswalk. They've stopped the car so it's past the crosswalk while waiting for the light to change. They turn right on red when the sign says no right on red. Etc....
I'd give them all 1 star out of 5 except for the fear mentioned above. That my "social credit" with the company would have them drop me as a customer.
All of this sounds like normal driving behavior to me? I see it every time I commute to work. I think if you want a driver who doesn't do this you'd need a real commercially registered driver with specific training.
It is, but it shouldn't be. We don't pay all of the other drivers on the road, but we do pay for the uber we're in. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone performing a commercial driving act to need to do so safely and correctly.
I think it was a mistake too, but we let Uber use random people without a CDL do this job, so I can hardly say it's surprising they drive like the average?
Taxis admittedly aren't that much more careful but a professional chauffeur probably fits the bill, and charges accordingly.
Asking a random LLM to give reasons they might do this. Again, I'm not saying they do this. I'm saying my fear that they might isn't unfounded
* To Prevent Unfair and Unfounded Ratings: Uber could argue that some riders misuse the rating system. They might give a driver a low rating for reasons outside of the driver's control, such as traffic, a bad mood, or a simple misunderstanding. This policy would be presented as a way to protect drivers from being unfairly penalized, which could affect their livelihood.
* To Combat "Rating Terrorism" or Coercion: A rider might threaten a driver with a low rating to get a free ride, demand an unscheduled stop, or force them to violate a rule. By banning riders who frequently give low scores, Uber would be taking a stance against this kind of behavior, ensuring that the rating system is used as a genuine feedback mechanism, not a tool for coercion.
* To Discourage "Troll" Behavior: Some users might be incentivized to give consistently low ratings just to cause trouble or get attention, a practice often referred to as "trolling." This policy would be framed as a way to filter out users who are not participating in the community in good faith and are instead just trying to cause problems.
* To Maintain Driver Confidence in the Platform: Drivers rely on their ratings to maintain their account status. If they feel that riders are unfairly giving them low scores without consequence, they may become disillusioned with the platform and switch to a competitor. Banning riders who give consistently low ratings would be a way to show drivers that Uber has their back.
* To Improve Service by Identifying and Removing "Unreasonable" Riders: Uber could frame this as a data-driven approach. They might claim that their internal data shows a small percentage of riders who give low ratings to virtually every driver, regardless of the quality of the service. By removing these outliers, they would be improving the overall efficiency and health of the marketplace for the vast majority of drivers and riders. The goal would be to cultivate a community of "reasonable" users who understand and use the ratings system as it was intended.
To continue, for me, my experience is I would rate low probably 7 of 8 drivers for the reasons I gave above. They all break traffic laws and drive recklessly. I kind of wish the app would let me set a driver preference. I'd chose
(*) drive at the speed limit. Don't break any laws. Drive cautiously.
others might choose
(*) get there as fast as possible - (implying ignoring speed limits, weaving through traffic, cutting people off, ignoring turn lanes, etc...)
At least that way the driver would know up front what the user expects. Me, I'd give them 5 stars for not risking my life. Others would give them 5 stars for going as fast as possible.
As it is, I don't rate them low. I just don't rate at all because of the fear of being banned.
> The gap between Western perception and Chinese reality is enormous, and it reveals something important: we're worried about a system that barely exists while ignoring the behavioral scoring systems we actually live with.
This rings very true. It's pervasive online, and HN is no exception. The "China scare" is pervasive, "in China they do (some imagined nasty thing that of course the US or Europe would never do, no siree!)".
"The only difference between your phone and China's social credit system is that China tells you what they're doing. We pretend our algorithmic reputation scores are just “user experience features.” At least Beijing admits they're gamifying human behavior."
I've said this before in many ways to other Americans and they just join the very vocal "china bad, usa good, you're weird for liking china" while then wondering why they don't understand their own credit score, etc.
Imagine having a less than 600 credit score and buying a car, buying a house, renting an apartment, opening a bank account, even getting insurance lol you are auto denied.
i think that's actually a weak part of the article. she goes on to clarify that china's social credit system doesn't even really exist. so it would have been better to say it like this:
"the only difference between your phone and china's social credit system is that your phone is real"
we're all more similar than we have been told to think.
it's in our respective government's interests to tell us that of course the system we live in is the best, hey look at those other people living under tyranny 'over there', aren't you lucky to be living over here, under us?
> As of 2024, there's still no nationwide social credit score in China.
> The gap between Western perception and Chinese reality is enormous
They inserted "nationwide".
The social credit score in one China region (khm Xinj... khm) is truly dystopian, and I bet people there don't care whether it's "nationwide" or not, if they can literally be sterilized or get sent to concentration camps because of that.
You don't care until the corporation is big enough or starts crossing information with enough companies. Amazon already owns healthcare companies. Facebook has shared more information than we can think about with all sort of parties.
One day you'll be denied care or your insurance premiums will quadruple because you buy too much sweets in Amazon, or because you once said you fell off a chair while drunk in a party in Instagram. Then you'll care.
Then we'll vote in legislation to break up Amazon. You're assuming the hypothetical worst case in capitalism, but applying the same to the government it's going to be a far more difficult situation if the government is doing the same.
Imo some social credit/reputation mechanism is needed. As it is there is very little you can do to judge trustworthiness of your business partners. Bad apples make services worse and more expensive for everyone. Honest people are in effect subsidizing behavior of dishonest people. It's often talked about in context of insurance but it happens everywhere.
I want to rent a hotel room or Airbnb: risk of me ruining or stealing from the place is include in the price. I want hire a contractor: I may run into the same guy who scammed 10 people already and changed name of his business again. I want to rent a car: it's more expensive because of reckless drivers renting it as well and the owner have no way to tell if I am a responsible one. We pay idiot/scammer premium everywhere.
There is a real need for that mechanism and if we keep putting our head in the sand big corps with proprietary solutions will cover that need. That is the worst of both worlds.
The real problem here is privacy and anonymity. These discrete "rating systems" used by various companies aren't particularly dangerous as long as they cannot identify users by some common identifier such as name, DOB or address. Got banned by Uber or Amazon? Just create a new account.
Both Uber and Amazon accounts involve payment methods and typical delivery / pickup addresses. All these, combined or separately, can be used as a proxy of "the same person" notion.
Well, delivery addresses can be somehow anonymized by the use of PO boxes; names on credit cards, not so much.
Of all companies, the systems at Uber and Amazon definitely know it's you starting the new account. They just don't openly mention it, and quietly link your old accounts via monitoring and analytics. As soon as the FBI comes knocking, they're able to provide your current account and all linked accounts. Even the ones they previously closed.
(Not that the FBI has to come knocking nowadays to get that information, but Uber and Amazon are able to provide comprehensive help to law enforcement if it's required.)
>Got banned by Uber or Amazon? Just create a new account.
use the same phone number, email address or credit card and they know you are the same person, use the same wifi spot or IP address with the same behaviour and they can intimate you are the same.. Even badly written data analysis can do this and a VPN from another country and different username wont convince any system with an ounce of sense.
It's trivial to use a different name, email, and phone number. Obfuscating your payment information is a bit harder, but you can request a new credit card from your bank, use a new PayPal account or similar to hide the underlying payment method, or use a prepaid card. The WiFi hotspot cannot be identified across the Internet, only the IP and other fingerprinting information leaked by the browser can, but generally speaking IPs are not fixed and tied to an individual.
My point however was not to provide an exhaustive list of workarounds, just to point out that it is the lack of privacy and anonymity in our lives and enables such surveillance.
I've been trying to "create a new account" for Facebook in order to have the privilege of using the WhatsApp for my business. Not sure why I can't since I left the platform voluntarily.
>Open your phone right now and count the apps that are scoring your behavior.
Zero. Are everyone really that terminally online? I reject most things that use an app. Yesterday I encountered a coffee vending machine that required an app. I walked away. Uncle Ted was right.
Agreed. I categorically refuse to install non-FOSS apps on my phone. I don't use social media, and refuse to use Uber for various reasons (including those explained in this article). I do buy things on Amazon, but only those that are physically delivered to my door (rather than "subscriptions" aka buying things that you won't own).
How about banking apps? In my part of Europe a growing number of banks require installing an app via Google or Apple story. The Android ones are known to use sdks that at full of "telemetry". Cash is no longer an alternative.
Can you not use a browser to access banking services? If not, you should vehemently complain and/or move to another bank. And while cash is better for privacy, you can always use a credit card instead of your phone.
If nothing else works, my suggestion would then be to buy a cheap Android phone just for that indispensable banking app. Just leave it home in a drawer powered off when not in use, and use your a degoogled phone for your daily business.
The issue is that American media/discourse paints a very distorted view of what life under authoritarian rule is like. The truth is in many countries, unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west. But people don’t want to hear that, because we want to feel better than them. Like we wouldn’t tolerate that kind of life.
Of course the most frustrating part about that is as the US and other western countries start sliding into authoritarianism, people deny it because they don’t feel like it’s authoritarian.
Edit: To clarify, I don’t think life is exactly the same - just that the consequences of authoritarianism are much more insidious than they’re portrayed.
Yeah, this is it. I've lived under governments of a variety of different stripes in some very different parts of the world, I've lived in war zones. Day to day life has been more or less the same across all of them.
You go shopping, go to work, see friends, have a few beers or maybe a smoke, eat out, go to weddings, birthdays and funerals, play sports. People run businesses, post memes.
The way non-OECD, "non-democratic" countries are portrayed in the West gives us a very false sense of superiority.
We have the same problems: gilded elites, crushing poverty, persecuted minorities, illusory participation in governance, terrifying police, rampant corruption.
I'm not saying everywhere is identical, there's a spectrum. There's just more similarities between countries than differences, in my experience. The things that often distinguish are more cultural and geographical than political.
It sure is good being a foreigner in an autocratic country. You are most likely there there for business. You don’t really care about anything because you will leave anyway. Most of my coworkers in Singapore were all like that. Who cares about the mass deportation of bus drivers after their strikes for better working condition? Why look at what’s behind the curtain when you can enjoy the pool?
I have met people who have fled autocratic countries. Life sure looks ok there from a surface level. Unless of course you are from the extended family of someone who displeased someone better connected. Or you are in the way of someone. Or you happen to have said something which displeased someone. Then life is not ok at all and there is approximately nothing you can do about it.
Of course everyone there knows that’s how it works. That’s why everyone there shuts up and lower their head because they don’t want to be the idiot having a run up with the power that be.
> Then life is not ok at all and there is approximately nothing you can do about it.
To return to parent's point, we want to say it applies only in autocratic countries, when we have similar pockets of despair as well.
Not everyone can just "fight the man" if they feel prayed upon or abused. Most here can probably solve critical issues with money or even move countries if/when shit hits the fan.
But lower social class people aren't in that mindset, and the power local authorities hold on their life is a lot heavier.
It certainly is. I’m not pretending that liberal democracies are perfect. Ensuring that the one with the least power or at the margin don’t become victims and remain free is a constant struggle but people are fighting it. It can be a dispiriting one when you go through times like the one of the USA are currently traversing
It would be a deep mistake however to fall from the traditional defence of illiberal countries and think that the imperfection of liberal democracies somehow make authoritarian countries as legitimate and acceptable. Oppression there is not an imperfection. It is the system working as designed.
I look at it from a different lens: the political system and what people's life look like isn't a predefined matrix.
To take a mild example, we don't look at federal countries and assume it affects citizen's life in a radical way that can be straight attributed to the federal nature of it. Germany biggest differences from France probably aren't because of that. Sure it has an impact, but not in an easily predictable way.
Authoritarian regime are prone to abuse, but that's not enough to guarantee it will be managed worse than the worse democratic countries. We've have democracies fully melt down and becoming literal hell on earth.
I don't intend to praise authoritarian regimes and don't see them as sustainable, but IMHO there is a lot more to a country than just that.
> Authoritarian regime are prone to abuse, but that's not enough to guarantee it will be managed worse than the worse democratic countries.
You are missing my points by orienting the discussion towards an abstract concept such as well managed.
Authoritarian countries mistreat part of their populations in a way which makes them morally abhorrent and that’s by design. You will hardly find people pointing it out and defending the marginalised in authoritarian countries because they themselves become the target of the state.
I’m not blind to the fact that most of the apologists I have met in my life who are always happy to point that it’s relative and what about the majority actually happy often want nothing more than to be the authoritarian power themselves. This seems particularly relevant in the current American context.
My general point would be that mistreating part of the population is a tool in a toolbox, and countries from all boards use it way more than we acknowledge.
We have democracies that either hang people on public places, pass eugenic laws, sentence gays to prison, or will engage in ethnic cleansing under official orders. Even in milder areas, prventing whole sections of the population from getting citizenship or limiting their reach (mass incarceration etc.) are well know levers that help a country be nice to its most vocal population while shutting down a whole section of the population. Those are readily available tools, whatever the political system.
And being well managed isn't abstract, you might be better off living in Monaco or Morocco, which are full fledge kingdoms, than a democracy like Nigeria for instance.
You might notice that I have carefully talked about liberal democracies in my previous comments. This is not a flourish. Democracy is not a panacea. The liberal part is essential.
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I'll respond to this one, as it's at the top and it started off unpleasantly personal. Do try and avoid making assumptions about the person you're speaking to, please.
I live in a post-Soviet country taking an autocratic turn, I have friends fleeing. I will probably have to leave myself and it's making me miserable. I do not mean to diminish their experience or the experience of anyone suffering under an authoritarian government.
If you'll read the context of the post, I was talking about how Western (predominately US) media portrays other countries, which is frankly dehumanizing for the most part.
I grew up thinking that war starts, life stops; that a different form of government radically and instantly transmogrifies every aspect of a society. We are a peaceful, normal, democratic society and everywhere else is war or repression. A primitive dualism which has not stood up to my experience.
This is what's implied in the news and the movies, and forms a basis for the acceptance of the Western versions of the shared problems I discussed. It is often exaggerated in a way that lines places up for a bomb-driven democratization process.
It also means that, as GP noted, we don't feel the problems coming along when they do.
Do you get where I'm coming from?
Precisely.
It's easy living as a foreigner in autocratic countries. You've got a "get out of jail" card called a foreign passport which not only protects you for political reasons, but also gives you an escape hatch for any reason, government or not.
For locals its entirely different. You don't get the "they're a foreigner, so be nice". Victim of crime? Don't bother with the police unless you have a fat bribe. Ripped off in your business? The courts won't care. Accused of a crime? Bribes are your only recourse.
So yes, the mundane day to day is the same, but when problems pop up the difference is like night and day. In authoritarian country you're at the complete mercy of those with more power than you.
It can't be understated the physiological impact of living in countries with functional liberal institutions. Having grown up in a country where crime and corruption were the norm, then coming to a country where I could reliably depend on the systems to be fair felt like meeting a nice girl after escaping an abusive relationship. As much as I sometimes miss my old country, and feel a twinge of nationalistic pride, I never want to go back. It honestly makes me emotional to see people in the "the West" say that things aren't so bad in illiberal countries. You are a fish that doesn't even know they're in water.
> Day to day life has been more or less the same across all of them.
This is a wild take, unless you mean that in thw sense of wake up, eat, work and sleep kind of way.
If I call the prime minister a criminal liar - worst that will happen is I get a defamation lawsuit. In authoritarian countries I go to a prison camp, and the neighbors are the one to report me. Even if I'm not political - if step on toes of people in party I can disappear and the rest will know not to ask questions.
I’ve seen a couple Reddit threads recently where someone says something like “my neighbor has been doing [insert major nuisance here], I think they might not be citizens. I’m not in favor of ICE taking people away, but should I report them since it might solve [nuisance]?”
The couple I’ve seen, the people aren’t that direct in their comments.
And I’ve seen reports of citizens being arrested for a day or two while they’re investigated about whether they’re legal or not, before being released, all without warrants or even probable cause. Sure, not a prison camp, but far from what I’d expect in a free society.
But the seeds of disappearing and detaining people without cause are already sprouting in the US among the general population, even if only among a tiny minority of shitty people. And that’s scary.
OK but that's something that's beginning to happen in the US versus the default of authoritarian regimes - my point is that is not "pretty much the same" as OP put it.
You might get physically attacked by some neanderthal if you're openly gay in public in the west, and in some middle eastern countries you get stoned on a public square - but hey we all unwind and have some fun when we can, so it's pretty much the same ?
I believe the OP's point was that if you are in the ingroup, you can expect life to be pretty much equivalent to what you'd experience in the US. It's only if you are in the outgroup (like being gay) that you start to see state violence.
This is pretty true of most authoritarian regimes. State violence isn't publicly broadcast or when it is it's usually framed as "fighting crime".
To Godwin this, life for a non-jewish, non-communist, non-disabled citizen in 1940s germany was typical, even pleasant. I mean, heck, the german government at the time was taking the Jewish citizens property and giving it to favored classes.
The deceptive part of an authoritarian regime is that the outgroup is almost always a minority. The number of people that experience outgroup treatment is almost always a small portion of the general population.
Even in the strictest and most brutal governments like north korea, so long as you abide by state rules things are just fine. You can even go on vacations out of the country if you are obedient enough.
A measure of government is how it treats internal state enemies. Crime exists everywhere, so the question is what's criminalized and how are criminals punished. Also importantly, what crimes does the state look away from if they hit political enemies.
But the distinction is that in-group requires blind obedience in authoritarian countries. Half this forum is calling their political leaders idiots and will work (vote) against them, they are still in group. This is not a small distinction.
Also the path upwards in society changes a lot.
Only the most extreme authoritarians will attempt to silence all dissonance. Most will have a controlled opposition as the illusion of choice and a release valve for anger.
Russia, for example, runs elections and up until recently allowed the opposing party on the ballot. Same with Belarus. China and Iran also have elections, but the candidates are vetted through the state party. I know now Americans from each of these countries (except Iran). One who still votes in the Belarus elections even though they know it won't change anything.
NK is about the only modern regime I know where all opposition is punished. And even then, there's been reports of a loosening of enforcement.
They have argued in court against normal or indeed any due process; for stopping people purely based on race, language, and accent; against recognition of birthright citizenship and said that the next job after purging illegals is getting rid of the citizens who don't belong here.
Remember the immigration czar said if he had his way only 100M white folks would remain.
If those who are asserted without proof to be illegal can be sent to die in a foreign prison camp so can you.
Oh that's tame, go to Facebook where boomers are falling over themselves tagging ICE in comments with their neighbors' names and addresses
> If I call the prime minister a criminal liar - worst that will happen is I get a defamation lawsuit. In authoritarian countries I go to a prison camp, and the neighbors are the one to report me. Even if I'm not political - if step on toes of people in party I can disappear and the rest will know not to ask questions.
Try implementing direct political action and see how Western governments treat you. You'll be deemed a terrorist, and if you're caught alive, you'll never see the sun again.
What would happen if you deeply insulted a cop at night during a routine check ?
What would be the impact on your life of publicly calling names your company's CEO on social media ? You make it sound like a defamation lawsuit is peanuts, when you'd probably be fighting against an army of lawyer while you're unemployed, if you're in the US that definitely sounds like a life defining event.
I also wonder if most authoritarian régimes even have prison camps ?
When U.S. neighbors report you to the police because you tell them to stop harassing you, you're in an HOA knowingly but without knowing it's absolutely turning authoritarian.
It is worth noting that the EOP OSC is investigating Jack Smith and the DOJ is investigating Letitia James.
This suggests the worst that could happen if you called the US President a criminal liar is that you would go to federal prison.
I suppose the conclusion is that the US is an autocracy.
>unless you mean that in thw sense of wake up, eat, work and sleep kind of way.
this is what 99% of people spend 99% of their time on. If you give most people the choice between a place that has jobs, clean trains and where women can walk safely at night and one that looks like the Purge but you can insult the prime minister we can make a bet how people will vote with their feet.
This is why China makes the claim that it is actually more democratic[1]. This is not merely propaganda. They are making the case that delivering material goods to people rather than exhausting yourself in some idiocracy-like circus of abstract rights is what should be the point of government.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole-process_people%27s_democ...
> This is why China makes the claim that it is actually more democratic[1]. This is not merely propaganda.
That absolutely is propaganda.
The very fact that you can't have any political party of the CCP makes it undemocratic.
However hard China tries to change the definition of "democracy", won't change that fact.
> The very fact that you can't have any political party of the CCP makes it undemocratic.
That is only undemocratic if it is against the will of the population. If the population is choosing to only allow selecting employees from one party, then that is perfectly in line with democracy. A "political party" is just a labor union by another name, after all.
Western countries by and large value free and fair elections, but that isn't what defines democracy. Hosting free and fair elections to select the autocrat of your choosing would not make a democracy. What ultimately defines democracy is the population at large having control. How they choose to use that control is up to them.
There are plenty of good indicators revealing why China isn't democratic, but that statement in isolation isn't telling. Keep in mind, though, that the claim wasn't being strictly democratic — rather, it claims that on the spectrum it is more democratic than the alternatives in use.
>What ultimately defines democracy is the population at large having control.
Politics is the question of how political heterogenity is resolved. The political system is the range of acceptable methods used in that resolution and how power is distrbuted amongst those competing groups. In that restrospect, Democracy and Authoritarianism exist on the same axis. The former resolves things peacefully through voting, the latter has a single interest overriding all others violently.
Hence if you say "population at large having control", it's largely a meaningless statement because if a population is in agreement there is no need for politics and thus no need for a political system. In reality, politics always exist, groups are not homogenous, especially not a group on the size of billions. 99% of people don't really care about what OP says, in so much that they would forsake that for more pettier thing. We will all disagree over the tiniest of issues, and thus from there heterogenity springs and a political system is formed.
Hence, the issue of "delivering results" is largely tangenital and irrelevant because that occurs after Politics. It's a given after all that a interest group would achieve it's goals without the political restraining it. So no, China isn't "more democratic" because the CCP is effective in achieving it's goals when it already has total political control. That's axiomatic.
But there is explicit rejection of plurality, and thus the expression of political heterogenity, there is only one center of power allowed, and political decision-making is resolved violently. So it is Authoritarian, full stop. It is not "Democratic", in the same way it is a oxymoron to state a "Democratic Absolute Monarchy" or a "Democratic Military Dictatorship" even when the latter two can produce results. If you want to call it something, just call Authoritarian Populism.
> Hence if you say "population at large having control", it's largely a meaningless statement because if a population is in agreement there is no need for politics and thus no need for a political system.
Control does not imply lack of negotiation. The population at large still has to gather and sort out their issues and contentions, ultimately settling upon an agreement in the end.
A representative democracy takes that model and decentralizes it, seeing the population at large gather only at a local level, hiring messengers to carry the final determination at the local level to a central meeting place where it is compiled with the results of all other localities, but the idea of people gathering, communicating, negotiating, and ultimately reaching an agreement remains the same.
> Hence, the issue of "delivering results" is largely tangenital and irrelevant because that occurs after Politics.
Right, but we're talking about government, not politics. "Delivering the results" is the role of government. Politics takes place during the time when the people have gathered. Once they figure out what they want, then it is handed off to the hired workers in the business known as government to fulfill the wishes of the people. To reiterate: Politics comes before government gets involved.
... Well, it does in a democracy. I expect what you are trying to say is that in China the politics happens inside government? That's fair. But what China is saying is that in many so-called 'democracies' the politics is also happening inside government, thereby making them not really democratic either. So, while it doesn't claim to be democratic, it is saying it is closer to being democratic by more accurately serving the wishes of the people — as opposed to "corporations", for example.
> That absolutely is propaganda.
Of course it is, and so is the opposite claim.
But that wasn't what the parent post said. The word "merely" does work in that sentence - i.e. "This is not propaganda" has a different meaning to "This is not merely propaganda"
"merely" here makes the claim that it is not only propaganda, it is not just propaganda. It has substance beyond being propaganda. It is that and more.
> This is why China makes the claim that it is actually more democratic[1]. This is not merely propaganda.
It's wild to me that you believe this.
I've spent a few years in China and have made close Chinese friends. One constant I see is Chinese will not admit publicly, but they'll whisper to you in quiet corners that that know their government is authoritarian and the West is more free.
>If you give most people the choice between a place that has jobs, clean trains and where women can walk safely at night and one that looks like the Purge but you can insult the prime minister we can make a bet how people will vote with their feet.
Well, umm, far more people (rich, middle, poor) are emmigrating out of China with preference for Western Liberal Democracies than Westeners immigrating in. The thing is, in terms of job opportunities, the USA still far surpasses China for same amount of individual effort. And if I want to just live comfortably, Japan, Australia, Korea are all valid options.
Like even the abysmally poor birthrate dosen't reflect on China with regards to the long viability of what you describe.
Plenty of people are emigrating from China to Singapore, which is not particularly less authoritarian.
Singapore is much less authoritarian than China. The PAP plays dirty in a legal way, but they very much obey rule of law as opposed to explicit Rule By Law in the CCP. They also don't effectively declare themselves God as the ultimate authority and moral arbiters of the nation.
Like, having mandatory bomb checks in your metro systems is already on the excessive and comical side of authoritarianism here. Most countries, even poorer ones don't do that.
Has this happened to you or someone you know or else how do you know better about what happens in other countries than someone who's lived there?
> I'm not saying everywhere is identical, there's a spectrum.
That's the point. You have the same type of problems everywhere, but not the same quantity and quality. But people seem to not care or understand those differences, and weaponize the concepts, instead of looking at the outcome.
> But people seem to not care or understand those differences, and weaponize the concepts, instead of looking at the outcome.
This is politics.
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The superiority of democracy is not that it will produce the best leadership. It's that bad leaders can be removed by the governed.
In theory the last 10-15 years show that it might be easier to overthrow a radical regime...
The huge volume of immigration, both where people leave and where they go to reveals this to be false. The experience may be similar for whatever class you belong to, but the reality is demand to live in western democracies is massive for a reason.
1.1 million dead Russians would beg to differ.
Your day-to-day life may have been the same, but that does not mean everyone's lives would be.
right.
and if we wanted to give ANY society a geometric representation it would have a point at the very top that would represent the most powerfull person, and would then widen out to represent the average and then taper down to another singal point, that would represent the single person in that society whoes life was composed of nothing but horror not of thier own fault and who will die with no chance of any help or redress. We can name those living at the top, but pretend that the wieght of society is not carried by a succesion of nameless inocents , comunist, socialist, religious and other societies give lip service to this, but all fall short of declaring a policy that no one will ever be ignored, forgotten and abandoned, but each and everyone of these systems has an elaborote way of doing reputation management or credit score, merit, titles,etc to signal virtue/worth, that can be gamed, so it is. And here we are, and my time/attention must now, be diverted back to the game, lest I loose more than the few points of carma it costs me to speak out here.
> I'm not saying everywhere is identical, there's a spectrum
Why such drama with many words, when all can be summed up with that. Yet somehow, people consider life much better on one side of the spectrum, while other side is considered utter shit. So much that many people are risking their lives, and some are dying just to 'move across spectrum'. It may be a hard concept to grok for typical western kids who often struggle with finding noble worthy hard-to-achieve goals in their lives, who got good life served at literal plate without moving a finger, but trust me its damn real.
I've grown up during communism, in country heavily oppressed by soviet russia and littered with many of their military bases, ready for that WWIII battles that never came. Not 'spent some time someplace so I am an expert', my whole identity was only that and nothing else.
Yes we all need to go shopping, its just that my parents couldn't buy any fresh vegetables nor fruits for their son, who suffered mild malnutrition due to that. And sometimes the shelves were empty or full of one type of canned sardines (I mean whole supermarket, nothing else, beauty of constantly failing central planning, unless you were part of regime/communist party).
Yes we all went to some form of school, but I was being brainwashed to be obedient future soldier for absolutely rubbish ideologies. If I would say something bad about regime even with utmost innocence of a small kid, my parents could easily end up in jail, lives ruined, even distant family torn apart for good.
Yes we all could travel, its just that I could not travel even within different communist countries, not without regime's special approval stamp in passport. Neutral, or god forbid proper western countries were off limits, unreachable, you would be shot on sight on the border, or torn apart by dogs.
And so on and on. Yeah, its just a spectrum, what a joke.
Heh, what country are you from? What time period are you talking about? Is it your lived experience or the second-hand memory?
I lived in Bulgaria & Czechoslovakia in 70's and 80's, and my memories are quite different than yours.
You can buy fresh vegetables and fruits (in-season, local, not shipped from Peru) & dairy products & bread & eggs as much as you can afford (and the prices were affordable, stable for a dozen years). Bananas, oranges & other exotic stuff was not available, maybe around Christmas if you had the right information and waited in a long queue. Slightly better but nor really good with better cuts of meat.
I never ever saw empty shelves in shops, not in Bulgaria, not in Czechoslovakia. I am pretty sure of that, because in 1982+- we were on a 'friendly exchange trip' to Kiev (elementary school organized, with a school in Kiev reciprocally coming to us a couple months later) and saw those there, and still remember the shock.
Jeans and such stuff was for kids with connections or family in the west. Few people had cars, mostly skoda/lada/moskvich/wartburg/trabant/polski fiat. Small, very basic shit. Public transport worked, to every little village. Nothing fancy, but functional. You could live without car, not like in USA.
I have never met a soviet soldier in my life at that time, those poor souls were closed-off at military bases and were forbidden getting out (maybe to prevent them seeing than life in Czechoslovakia was so much better than in CCCP).
The education in schools was focused more on math/engineering/hard sciences, and kids of those times had better background in those than the kids growing today, although humanities are another thing. We did not sing the hymn, like they do in USA. Everyone knew those are lies. But a photo of the current leader of the communist party was hanging there. Communist indoctrination was everywhere, you learnt to live with it and filter it out. Unlike the west, where most people still believe the official narratives.
I could see Austria behind the iron fence from the window of my bedroom, seeing the lights of the cars driving there, but thinking I will never see those places in my life.
One afternoon, I saw my younger brother (late elementary school at that time) walking across the field towards the fence, too curious and stupid. Suddenly, from a well-hidden bunker, a couple of guys with rifles and a german shepherd appeared, and escorted him out. No shooting at sigh, no beating, no record of 'dangerous anti-communistic element'.
My uncle, serving as a young conscript at Shumava forest, late 50's (he had no choice about that), on the border between Czechia and Western Germany, got knifed in back by somebody trying to flee to the West. Survived, 2cm from kidneys. Ended up living most of his life (since 1969) in USA.
My mother threw away her communist card, shouting, at the face of the local party committee, with the words 'to hell with such party, when I, a widow with two small kids, have to live in such apartment (small room + small kitchen, dark, a toilet and a kitchen sink with only cold water (no bathroom), small coal stove the only heating). She did not go to jail, eventually we got better apartment (central heating, real bathroom and toiled, hot water).
You know, those are real life anecdotes. Not the propaganda tropes endlessly replicated.
If you were politically active, anti-communist, you lost your engineering/science/arts/whatever fancy job and ended up e.g. as boiler operator of the local heating plant for municipal heating. 50's were wild with several highly-politicized processes ending up in capital punishment (so was McCarthyism in the USA at that time), but 70's and 80's were relatively tame.
In the next class, there was a son of a well-known dissident. Had no problems getting into high-quality high school (merit-based entry exams, mostly math), not sure how would the thing went with the university studies (math/engineering probably OK, law/philosophy probably not), but the fall of communism came.
There was widespread small-scale stealing from the state ('if you are not stealing from the state, you are stealing from the family'), although the real large-scale looting came after the fall of the communism.
I think your view is a tad optimistic. Many people had difficult lives just because they didn’t want to be members of the party. Thier kids didn’t get to good schools, or got to the one 30 minutes by train, they lost jobs and were forced to dry laundry with engineering degrees.
There was even a joke about this:
⸻
In Poland, during the times of hard socialism, a math associate professor calculated that a shipyard worker earned three times more than he did. So he thought “screw this,” crossed out the titles before and after his name, and went to work in a factory.
Of course, he was doing well in the factory — he didn’t strain himself too much and earned three times more than at the school. Then the factory introduced an evening school for workers, with the promise that whoever attended would get a raise. So the associate professor signed up and started going.
On the very first lesson — bam — mathematics. The level was like the first year of high school, so the associate professor was just dozing off, not paying attention. The teacher noticed him, called him up to the board, and asked him to calculate the area of a circle.
The professor started writing, but for the life of him couldn’t remember the formula for the area of a circle. So he decided to derive it. He wrote the conversion to polar coordinates, then integrated it, and ended up with –πr². So he stood there, wondering where the minus sign had come from.
And from the back row, someone whispered: “Reverse the integration interval.”
⸻
Also, behold, people queueing for toilet paper in 88 in Czechoslovakia: https://youtu.be/O6qUqFy2FEU
>were forced to dry laundry with engineering degrees.
This sort of thing is happening in the states. Maybe we're the commies now.
1) maybe it was different in 50's, 60's, when I was around, plenty of profs at the university were non-communists in 1989. The communists as a percentage of working population was always low (<11%?), so what you suggest could not have been a generally applied rule, the math just does not work. I assume if you wanted to get to a leading position in a plant/office/university, you needed to be communist. If you refused, that typically meant no promotion. You must have really pissed off the local party boss if it came to your kids could not get to good school. Never a smart move. Probably not a smart move to piss off Irwings if you live in New Brunswick, Canada, either.
2) jokes are jokes, exxagerating a kernel of truth to the point of absurdity is what makes the joke. The truth is, the salary of prof was never anything special, but was marginally better than the salary of average worker. There were some highly (i.e. 2x, maybe even 3x?, salary scales overall were really flat) paid worker occupations, miners were one of them (maybe due to work hazard). The way to get the luxuries was not through money, but through connections (yes, mostly communistic ones).
3) shit happens (the accompanying text talks about a fire in the main/only paper-mill making toilet paper in Czechoslovakia), there were queues when the rumor spread 'there will be bananas in the local fruit&vegetables shop'. There were people panic buying toilet paper at the start of COVID also, maybe its a local specialty :-)
One anecdote I remember from my youth was people routinely taking their windshield wipers off when parking somewhere out (those were notoriously in short supply and easy to steal). So yes, there were supply problems, no rose glasses, but nothing extreme.
As with everything, there is too much polarization: some people remember only the bad stuff and it was a hell on earth for them, others remember only the good stuff and emphasize that. As always, the truth is in between.
>Unlike the west, where most people still believe the official narratives.
Tell me what these narratives are. I do not disagree, but I am a westerner who never left home.
We (the west) are the force of good, spreading democracy and freedom around the world.
And our socio-economic system is the best there can be, don't even think about changing anything about it (questioning this is a total taboo).
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Well here in the West we were also sent to some kind of school to be brainwashed to be obedient soldiers for rubbish ideologies, so we have that in common
yet, many people claim they were happier back then. At least in the country where I’m from. No options in life, no hard decisions or responsibility for their lives. Our current PM said he didn’t notice the fall of communism. shrug
The only difference in the United States is that you have a better chance of being the head authoritarian, and by that I mean a business owner.
We have had a pretend democracy in the US for the last 60 years.
"pretend democracy"
I rarely offer an opinion here, expecting in advance it will gray into oblivion, however politely or sincerely it's presented. I see it happen to others often enough to remember.
In most cases I see the word democracy used, I have the exact thought, "pretend democracy". I don't deliberately try to be a morose cynic. I've just become incapable of thinking the very word without the subjunction "pretend".
The corporatism burgeoning here makes this seem undeniable to me. Am I that delusional? Is it really not that bad? Do the so called people really have a level of influence over their society befitting of the word? I don't see it. I just see words.
Democracy is the opium for the masses.
I won't try to evaluate that.
For me, as a born eccentric, aspects of the concept terrify me. I tend to favor the principles of a Republic, with unassailable foundations impervious to popular fervors and whims. Ideally with heavy democratic principles fortifying the Republic. I don't see either.
I look at recent affairs with FTC for example, and too many things to list. I don't even know what to call what I see. Recipe for nightmares comes to mind, but I know the flaws of emotions well enough.
Personally I find myself retreating into a quasi spiritual state, remotely bordering asceticism. Fading into an in but not of it.
I'm convinced it's a brutally complicated situation. Evey day, though, I think it could be drastically simplified with kindness, but that's a subject where I'm inclined to go full macabre and will hush now.
We should try sortition.
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> unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west
Okay but that is exactly why I would prefer a western liberal government. It is better and that is ideal is worth criticizing authoritarians for, and fighting to keep in the west.
Sure; I think his point was that people much less likely to even notice/acknowledge the slide towards authoritarianism when their own individual experience isn't changing much. Not that it changes authoritarianism's moral standing.
There isn't an "authoritarian bit", it's not binary. When I was young the idea that your own computer would spy on you, or the one in your phone, or in your car? That was a William Gibson novel, wiretaps happened to mob bosses, you didn't worry about it happening to you as part of a dragnet. Security camera? You mean in a bank right?
Microsoft bundling IE was so egregious that the department of justice took time off from chasing drug dealers and terrorists and came within an inch of being split up if it didn't back the fuck off on strangling the web. Financial fraud on Wall St or in the boardroom? Skilling, Fastow, Ebers. Hard prison time. Clinton lied about chasing skirt in the office, ended his career, real consequences.
Even once the Internet was becoming common, the idea that something typed into it might get you fired? Preposterous!
I don't know what being a "western liberal" government means to you, but this thing where all the walls have ears and billionaires do fucking anything they want and no scandal can damage a politician and all the surveilance and technology is an ever-tightening noose and everything is on a permanent record?
Sounds pretty damned Soviet to me.
I haven't seen anything more authoritarian than the fact that, when you travel, someone will open your suitcase, rifle through your stuff, then close it again, and maybe leave you a little "you are being watched" note, just to make sure you know you shouldn't try anything funny.
I think we’re in violent agreement about what is bad and what we should fight for.
My point is that there is a difference and throwing your hands up and saying everywhere is bad obscures what is being lost and how democracies allow nonviolent ways to seize it back.
Okay but no scandal can damage a politician because you the American people are currently choosing to let that be the case.
Same with the billionaires.
The entire problem gets painted as "other" but it's you: you're actually promulgating it by your very choice of language here!
I'm not saying that the decline of Enlightenment values and the rise of crony-nepo-central-committee surveilance nightmare is "other", I'm saying it is indifferent to the stated political system, it's about the de facto political system no matter what you call it.
What I care about is outcomes, what actually happens, what norms and institutional posture actually obtains in reality.
And on that basis, "western liberal" society has very little business holding its nose up about "authoritarianism" as a blanket term for rival nations in 2025. No one here is talking about Sudan or Turministan, they're talking about other advanced nations with participatory politics, robust social welfare programs, limited influence for oligarchs, and highly competent governance.
You could explain any authoritarian regime this way, but how much of what we believe and do is some kind of pure, unconditioned-by-our-surroundings choice?
Sure, but its a boiling frog with cancer. Certain states made choices to skew far right and other states mde choices to "keep business open" and others made choices to remain ignorant.
This becomes diffusion of responsibility because every cycle maybe 1% were directly embracing far white religious authoritarian. The consistency of those choices were sticky because the oligarchy spent decades ensuring.
The point being, very few people actively participated and there was no progressive decadal length comspiracy. But the reverse isnt true.
There was and is a decadal length conspiracy to become a far right ethnostate run by religious minority.
Authoritarianism is not a left v right thing, and failing to recognize this is a big part of the problem.
The left is completely comfortable with censorship. It is completely comfortable with DEI statements being required for college admissions or with establishing issues related to gender or race discourse that the population doesn't agree on as a matter of law.
A rule doesn't stop being authoritarian just because you agree with what is being pushed. Nor does it stop being authoritarian when it doesn't come explicitly from the government. I do believe the right has worse intentions on these matters, but the left has so, so, so much more power that it's absurd to even try to draw a comparison. The idea of college requiring statements aligning with right-wing values being tolerated in any way, shape or form for example is just unthinkable.
The left has… vastly less power than the right, especially the christian right, because the right has money.
Money? More money than Hollywood? California? Both of which lean left pretty hard? It's not 1980 anymore.
"Vastly less power", pray tell, would you rather piss on a Christian cross and post it on social media or a LGBT flag? What do you think would have worse consequences? Can you even imagine a prevalence of corporations showing to align themselves with the Christian right for a month every year?
The "Christian right" would, no doubt, sell their soul to have half as much power the left has. It doesn't even come close, it's off by orders of magnitude for crying out loud. If anything this power is exerted so widely you barely even recognize it. You see a pride parade, or any entity making an effort to promote or signal multiculturalism and it doesn't even register as left wing when it evidently is.
Can you even picture anything comparable to BLM, on the right? Can you imagine the right managing to pull a display of power comparable to disturbing the meaning of a word as basic as "woman"?
Where is this vast amount of power manifested? It's surely not in the form of respect, it's definitely not in the form of demographics, which dwindle year by year. Culture? What references are even there, Jordan Peterson? Nick Fuentes??? I'm just baffled by this perspective.
People who are afraid of the "left authoritarians" seem to think that you can just sum up human history and cherry pick some great "left-branded" authoritarian and equate that to todays.
You're arguing that the people kidnapping people without due process and zero consequences, masked police, are equal to some arbitrary "leftist" in some time that's not relevant to todays political climate.
It truly is bizarre how mental gymnasts survive in this logical incapacity.
Sorry but I can't take this seriously. I've given more than enough contemporary examples, if you want to dismiss the whole of it and pretend nothing makes sense, that's a choice and I can't help you.
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The current difference in the US context is bureaucratic authoritarianism vs autocratic authoritarianism. They're both authoritarian, and they're both oppressive and stifling. But their actual specific dynamics/mechanisms/effects can be quite different. For example autocratic authoritarianism has a much higher variance (for better and for worse) - look at the current autocrat in the White House coming up with idiotic ideas by the week/month, It's done in the name of unchaining greatness, and it would be nice if that were indeed the outcome. But in reality the chaos from the unrestrained terrible ideas is actually quite stifling. Whereas bureaucratic authoritarianism is more of a beige tyranny of the mediocre, which creates a drag on greatness, but at least provides a stable foundation for building on (as long as you can outrun the bureaucrats)
(disclaimer: I've gotten more conservative as I've gotten older. It will happen to you, too)
Yeah sure, but todays market is monopolized by the right.
The bogeyman of authoritarian left is just amusing.
Well, if you're in this category in the US (equivalent is being on some kind of arbitrary list that you're not allowed to see and have no way to appeal) your life will also be horrible.
The US being imperfect, or currently on an authoritarian swing, in no way makes it equivalent to countries that are all-in on authoritarianism. The US is still among the very best places in the world to be a minority, politically active, or in legal trouble.
I think you are greatly underestimating how hard it has been, historically, in the US, to be a minority, politically active, or in legal trouble. Note that in the Cold War, many people, especially minorities, were indefinitely imprisoned with show trials (e.g. Mumia Abu-Jamal, Assata Shakur, Leonard Peltier) or extrajudicially killed (Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Marsha P. Johnson, the victims of the MOVE bombing) because of being politically active.
Let's not perfect be the enemy of good. OP is making a relative judgement, not an absolute one. And in authoritarian countries, figures like Jack Ma are dissappeared for far less, while radicals like you mention are just shot and silenced. You are not going to be allowed to build a alternative power structure that can challenge authority regardless if your views are valid or not.
Might be a hard metric for some people to confront, but the USA is one the least racist countries in the world. The gridlock in many ways is strongest signal of excessive plurality and minoritarianism (of marginalized groups) than of single power groups unilaterally controlling things.
Jack Ma was not, in fact, disappeared, though? He lay low for several months while being investigated for financial crimes. He is still the largest stakeholder in Alibaba, and still has a net worth around $27B. It's not even like his assets were frozen.
Disappearing for 6 months immediately after making a controversial speech about the financial system dosen't look good to investors. And we all know it's because of his speech, not because of "financial" crimes when the Ant Group is heavily works with the CCP given the scale of its activities.
How is US being a good place to be at if you are in legal trouble? It is super expensive, trial penalty is huge so you are severely motivated to sign plea deal and not push it. The punishments are huge and incarceration rates among highest in the world. Protections seems to be largely theoretical - technically you have them, practically they do not do much but make you pay more money.
"It's super expensive" is still different from "you disappear". Yes, the US system is flawed, but the difference really matters.
But it is not "The US is still among the very best places in the world"
And the incidence of 'being in legal trouble in USA' vs 'being disappeared in BAD COUNTRY XXX' is quite different, for almost all bad countries.
People have started being disappeared by ICE. They've been kidnapped off the streets with no access to a lawyer until after. The difference does matter, but it seems we're uncomfortably close to there now.
Despite the noted slide, it feels accurate. I, for one, would not want to move back to EU despite some QoL notables. At this time, it is still hard to find a better spot for a random nobody ( when you have money and/or power, 'where you can live well' calculus changes ).
I mean I live in the US and people are getting persecuted right now for being a minority, being politically active, or being in legal trouble.
So not seeing a huge difference between liberal democracies and authoritarians.
Yes, because we’re sliding into authoritarianism and we need to criticize and correct course
Sliding in? Your head of state declared themselves to be a dictator, declared the end of the rule of law, and ignores the constitution. They openly take bribes without consequences. They, or their handlers, unilaterally decide on the application of justice and the progress of investigations. They unilaterally control international relations (eg tariffs) without oversight. They put armed military on the streets. They have taken action to prevent ongoing democratic elections.
At what point does it become authoritarian to you?
if mid-term elections and the next presidential election are cancelled then i'll call it authoritarian. Until then you're just trolling.
Trolling? They were stating facts.
We might get a peak much sooner if the supreme court shoots down his tariffs.
So Putin isn't authoritarian because he stages elections. And you require two _cancelled_ elections before declaring someone authoritarian?
Reminder that Trump declared Zelensky a dictator for following his country's established democratic process.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cjev2j70v19o
Perhaps the US is no longer a liberal democracy?
Was US ever a liberal democracy? People had much less liberties in the 1950s than today, with people getting arrested for their political views instead of just deported. not to mention segregation and such.
They even put lawyers defending these politicians in prison for defending them... The constitution doesn't seem to matter since the government apparently don't have to care about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
> Was US ever a liberal democracy? People had much less liberties in the 1950s than today,
Your question deserves an answer.
The US was a liberal (post-Enlightenment) democracy.
Senator McCarthy was eventually kicked out of Congress for his witch hunt.
President Nixon was confronted by Republican members of Congress, and he resigned after this meeting rather than face impeachment.
So when I was a kid, lawmakers largely upheld the norms, the rule of law. Many of those same lawmakers might have today been considered racist or misogynist or might have failed some other standard of 21st century society.
As a liberal democracy, the United States has never been perfect, but it's always been worth improving.
>Senator McCarthy was eventually kicked out of Congress for his witch hunt
"Eventually discarded when no longer useful" would be a more accurate phrasing. The witch hunts continued under other schemes and for other targets.
>As a liberal democracy, the United States has never been perfect, but it's always been worth improving.
Well, isn't that the case with every government?
it was a good witch hunt. we very much almost lost the Cold War to the soviets. the US public and government officials had no idea how bad it was in the USSR. The majority of intellectuals glazed the Soviet Union.
We witch hunted. We also got lapped by the FSB most years. What saved us was our economic engine.
> The US public and government officials had no idea how bad it was in the USSR.
My wife's grandparents had a subscription to "Soviet Life" magazine, beautiful postcard photos and articles about the glowing future of mankind, collective posts capitalist society...
From the 1950s. We've got stacks of them. Wild.
So, yes: many intellectuals in the United States had an "I want to believe" attitude.
> It was a good witch hunt.
There's no such thing as a good witch hunt.
When you are targeting innocent people, destroying lives in the name of freedom, there can be no liberty.
Inciting mob justice is playing with fire. It's a form of insanity. Our judicial system was designed to find fact and render judgment as far from that madness as possible. It's imperfect but can be made to work.
> We very much almost lost the Cold War to the Soviets.
Anyone who spent a weekend in a nuclear bomb shelter in the summer of 1983 knows there was no winning in that Cold War. Everyone was losing.
> What saved us was our economic engine.
The short answer is yes, I agree.
There's a much longer answer. I toured a tiny bit of Estonia and Russia in the summer of 1990. I wish I could tell you in just a few words how I saw a thousand acts of bravery, many acts of brutality, and more than anything a million hungry people who wanted better for their children.
What saved us was our economic engine, our mutual commitment to the welfare and defense of our NATO allies, our intelligence service and our diplomatic corps. Career professionals and rational leadership.
Not witch hunts.
> So when I was a kid, lawmakers largely upheld the norms, the rule of law
Only when McCarthy and those policies got unpopular, they let him do it as long as he was popular. So we will likely see the same with Trump, as long as he doesn't make as grave overreaches as they did back then likely nobody will do anything to him.
That isn't rule of law, that is rule of personality.
> Only when McCarthy and those policies got unpopular, they let him do it as long as he was popular.
isn't this democracy at work? will of the people and all that?
Democracy? Yes. Liberal democracy? No.
A core part to liberal democracy is that the government must follow the law. If the government doesn't follow the law due to checks and balances failing then its not a liberal democracy.
Or popularity rather.
Yeah, so not exactly liberal democracy. It is a democracy, but doesn't seem very liberal if the checks and balances doesn't work against popular policies.
I would argue that in that case, liberal democracy is an oxymoron.
Really popular policies have a wide support among the population, which means that they will became law, or even an amendment to the constitution. (Most countries have something like 3/5 supermajority requirements for changing constitutions, which is a lot more practical than the basically-as-of-now-impossible US procedure.)
At this moment, if you want to keep "liberal" character of the country, your "checks and balances" institutions have to act in a fairly authoritarian ways and invalidate laws which attracted supermajority support. What is then stopping such institutions to just rule as they see fit? Even checks and balances need checks and balances.
Nevertheless, I would say that "liberal democracy" isn't one that can always prevent illiberal policies from being enacted. I would say that it is one that can later correct them.
Note that historically, most obvious executive encroachments of liberty (Guantanamo etc.) in the US were later overturned by new administrations.
> Really popular policies have a wide support among the population, which means that they will became law, or even an amendment to the constitution
McCarthyism didn't have that much support from voters, so this isn't the issue, it didn't become law. The issue is that the elected representatives didn't do anything to stop it until it started having massive disapproval from voters.
Voters needing to massively disapprove of government abuse for the "checks and balances" to do their job means the democracy isn't working as it should, the government doesn't need to change the constitution they just need to keep disapproval low enough to continue with their illegal actions. In a true liberal democracy the checks and balances works, ministers who perform illegal acts are investigated and relieved of their duties without needing elected representatives to start that procedure.
I live in Sweden and I can't even find examples of a politician that blatantly ignores laws and procedures that get to stay for years here. I think the two party system is the biggest culprit, then you need support from both parties to remove criminal politicians, but that is very difficult to get when people have to vote against their own. In a multi party system each party is a minority, and allied parties are not friendly to each other, they gladly sink an ally to absorb their votes since the issue was the party and not the alliance, people wont move to the other block over such a thing.
Sweden supports Chat Control on European level, even though the very principle of Chat Control is anathema to basic civic rights.
Is widespread surveillance of private communications popular with Swedish electorate, or do people like Ylva Johansson support and even push such abominable things regardless of what actual Swedes think?
If the latter, it is not that different from what McCarthy once did, and our entire continent is in danger that this sort of paranoid dystopia gets codified into law approximately forever. At least McCarthy's era was short.
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Yes, never happened under Biden. Completely new and unheard of.
I think it's pretty easy to tell the difference. Just imagine the difference in the level of fear that you would feel about 1) getting up in a public square in the US and yelling that Trump is a terrible person who should be removed from power, vs. 2) getting up in a public square in Russia and yelling that Putin is a terrible person who should be removed from power.
> getting up in a public square in the US and yelling that Trump is a terrible person who should be removed from power
I think lot of people I know would feel concerned about what might happen to them if they did that right about now. I don't pretend to know anything about you, but it might be worth examining whether the level of concern you expect people would have about this might vary quite between people with different circumstances than yours. At least to me, it seems pretty likely that if a country were to slide into authoritarianism, not everyone would feel the effects equally all at once, so the fact that you haven't felt a change in your level of concern about this doesn't necessarily mean that a shift isn't happening.
To be clear, I'm definitively not saying that it's impossible for anyone to know whether it's happening or not because we can't know the experience of literally everyone, or that I'm 100% positive what we're experiencing will end up in undeniable strict authoritarianism for everyone. My point is that I do think there's been a genuine shift in how safe a large number of people feel from persecution in the past year and a half that's based on things happening to them or people in similar circumstances to them. It's certainly possible that I'm in a bubble where I'm associating with a lot more people than average who have these concerns, but the reverse is equally true for someone who hasn't been noticing these things, and I do think there's sufficient evidence that the concerns are real. The implicit assumption that everyone feels equally comfortable in their rights protecting them just isn't something that seems accurate right now.
> I think lot of people I know would feel concerned about what might happen to them if they did that right about now.
don't be ridiculous there are anti-trump protests every single day. Even on Labor Day (last Monday).
If I did that, I would expect that I would get some dirty looks. I might get yelled at. I might even get beaten up (by private individuals, not by the authorities). The cops might come by and cite me for disturbing the peace.
I would not be disappeared. I would not be charged with a felony. I would not be imprisoned for years or decades.
And, where the rubber meets the road for my personal mental health: I can say what I think to my friends and family. They may disagree. They may even argue. They're not going to report me to the secret police, nor are there secret police waiting for someone to report something.
That distinction really matters.
A lot has changed since January. You absolutely should worry about being disappeared, and about your family and friends ratting you to ICE/FBI/etc (the distinction is moot under the unitary executive theory under which our new regime operates). It may be unlikely today, for you specifically (assuming you're someone from a favored ethnicity and class, espouse only political views within the range of acceptable orthodoxy, etc), but your immigrant/trans/pro-palestine neighbors are not as safe as you are, and the window of acceptable types of American is narrowing.
> It may be unlikely today, for you specifically (assuming you're someone from a favored ethnicity and class, espouse only political views within the range of acceptable orthodoxy, etc), but your immigrant/trans/pro-palestine neighbors are not as safe as you are, and the window of acceptable types of American is narrowing.
Thank you, that's a much more concise way of stating exactly what I meant
In the 90's, DARE got kids to narc on their parents for drug related crimes. You can discount that as being drug related and oh just don't do drugs, but let's not pretend you're not gonna get reported to the unsecret police called the DEA or the FBI if it would be sufficiently to your friends and family's benefit.
Have you heard of what ICE has been doing for the last six months? And that Trump has militarized Washington DC?
Yes, but ICE is not deporting, denaturalizing, or imprisoning US citizens for their political opinions, and I would have very little to no fear about going to Washington DC right now, standing up on a podium, and yelling that Trump sucks while there are 100 National Guardsmen across the street from me.
This is very different from what things are like in places like Russia.
See Mahmoud Khalil's case. They're trying to and would continue to have done so if they weren't blocked. What is there stopping them from changing the rules and doing it again?
> See Mahmoud Khalil's case
they fact that you know about this case at all and how much it has been in the news and the outrage and protest against the executive branch speaks volumes to the differences between the US and real authoritarian regimes.
I disagree with what has been done in the Mahmoud Khalil matter. But it is a far distance between that on the one hand and what happens in places like Russia on the other.
I'm not trying to minimize the dangers of Trump. My point is that there is a huge difference in the level of authoritarianism between today's US and what I consider to be actual authoritarian countries. Today's US is one of the freest countries on the entire planet. We should keep it that way. I don't see what good it does to act as if today's US is anywhere close to actual authoritarian countries.
Have you decided what your personal red line is after which you would conclude that we've entered an authoritarian regime? Have we crossed the neofascist Rubicon yet? [1]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YFdwfNh5vs
The distance is closing, it's already closer than many Americans would have considered possible. How close does it need to get before we should be concerned?
Blacks were once slaves. Women couldn't vote. Japanese-Americans were put in camps. Worker strikes were met with guards killing people. Rousevelt had amassed all kinds of extra executive powers and control of all aspects of government that would seem over the top excessive before him.
Is today really "closer than many Americans would have considered possible"?
Is it really worse than McCarthyism era? I feel that time was much worse than currently.
I'm already somewhat concerned. I've been concerned since long before Trump. And Trump has added some new concerns. For example, with that strike against the Venezualan boat today. But that doesn't mean that I believe that we're anywhere actually close to it. Those are two separate questions.
People really should try to understand that if someone says "I think that the US is vastly freer than Russia", it does not mean "I think that there is no reason for concern" or "I think that the US is going in a good direction".
> Yes, but ICE is not deporting, denaturalizing, or imprisoning US citizens for their political opinions.
Actually, they do. If you have the wrong color, they take any reason as a pretext for action.
> Yes, but ICE is not deporting, denaturalizing, or imprisoning US citizens for their political opinions
True, but ICE is imprisoning and deporting US citizens simply for being an immigrant with the wrong skin color.
> Yes, but ICE is not deporting, denaturalizing, or imprisoning US citizens for their political opinions
Not yet? Currently, they are only imprisoning and deporting legal permanent residents and people on student visas for their political opinions. But denaturalization is clearly on the table.
Go do it then. See if you can get a permit in DC right now to have a rally and shout that Trump sucks. If you can, try actually doing it. You will not be doing it for very long until some excuse is made to stop you and punish you.
I'm happy for you as a privileged US citizen, enjoying your privilege as someone who's at least currently on the right side of the line, but anyone who's a legal immigrant doesn't feel anywhere near the same degree of security that you do.
The administration recently announced that it will review the visas of 55 million immigrants, and factors like political opinion are on the table when it comes to their choice of who to go after.
"First They Came"[1] was written to try to wake up people like you, whose privilege blinded them to the significance of the events around them. You need to start paying attention before you lose the country you thought you knew.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Came
yet.
right now they are "deporting" (without due process it's kidnapping/trafficking) in order of skin colour. they will work their way down towards you.
It's exactly these comments the OP is talking about. This is what they are trying to do, what they said they would do, and it's the kind of authoritarian shit that Trump has publicly praised and envied Putin for.
In certain things it can be better.
Singapore might be a state run authoritatively with the same party in power for 60 years, but you're free to walk around at any time without fear of any crime happening to you. Or public projects that "just work" where in the "western liberal" case their deteriorate or are tied up in bureucracy.
And life if "you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble" is not roses in the west either. From murder by police (e.g. "walking while black") to having stuffed being pinned on you because you're a union activist or for civil rights, etc.
And that's not "now with Trump". That was the case under Obama, Bush, Clinton, all the way to McCarthy, and even all the way after and before the Civil War.
Prevalence of masked gangs (ostensibly a Gestapo, but without uniform or id) kidnapping people in government buildings without police intervening appears (as an outside observer) to be ~100% higher than under recent USA administrations.
Are you saying this was already happening, just as much, under Obama, say?
Of course it didn't happen as much, but the fact that we already had active black sites and people getting pulled off the streets and abused at all paved the way towards apathy about its expansion now. If city or state police forces can do such things to random citizens for decades before now, why would we expect federal agencies under the direction of the president and his cabinet to not be able to get away with it too?
>Are you saying this was already happening, just as much, under Obama, say?
Are you saying that only this particular type of government abuse matters, so if prior governments didn't do this particular thing, then they're A-OK no matter whatever else they did?
As for your strawman:
--
According to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) data from fiscal years 2009 to 2016, more than 3 million individuals were formally removed from the country during the Obama administration. Annually, between 58% and 84% of these removals were so-called "summary removals" carried out through legal procedures such as "expedited removal" and "reinstatement of removal," which do not involve a hearing before an immigration judge. On average, about 74% of removals during this period fell into these categories. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/obama-deportations-court/
--
No police intervened for those 3 million people either (except to deport them summarily).
But the guys that took them didn't wear masks (maybe), so that's ok.
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We've banned this account for abusing HN for political, ideological, and religious flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>In china, there is a murder wagon with a crematory. Nobody ever finds you..
In China there are portable vans to serve as execution places for executions that are ordered by court - in lieu of having special buildings. No crematory and no 'nobody finds you' nonsense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_van
Still bad, but same for the "land of the free" that still has and carries the death penalty (for comparison, no EU or European country has it).
Right, other places also have evil people in charge and lack of rule of law. Agreed.
This is the same argument from Mussolini's facists - "at least the trains run on time".
I'm unmoved by the argument. If the choice comes down between "the trains run on time" and "I can arbitrarily imprisons for my speech", I'd happily live with trains that don't run on time.
>This is the same argument from Mussolini's facists - "at least the trains run on time"
No, it's an added argument that "and everyday life is the same, if not improved".
Many people would prefer living in an orderly state like Singapore, than in a place they fear for their safety, public order is deteriorating, their cities are dying, public works are crap, politics are a circus, and so on, even if they don't get to vote one of two parties that do mostly the same things in favor of billionaires while their life worsens.
That's no 1920s fascist Italy. Nor is China for that matter.
Setup a site to stream Pixar's latest movie, or post some CSAM, and see if you don't get imprisoned. It's not like totally arbitrary, just don't criticize dear leader. Where the US is though, is that Trump wants to make criticizing him online a crime. We know this is true because of the actions taken by him against people who are immigrants who have been critical of him online. So I'll let a tiny bit of doom out, but he way the US is headed, the trains won't run on time and you can't run your mouth about shit the people in power don't like as well.
Liberal in words. If you don't follow the rules you are expelled anyway. There is a reason why 99% of all politicians and CEOs are coming from the same universities and bubbles.
Yes, I agree
>> The issue is that American media/discourse paints a very distorted view of what life under authoritarian rule is like. The truth is in many countries, unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west.
Short term maybe. But there are reasons people want(ed) to move to the USA, and I don't mean refugees. A lot of college educated well-to-do folks have always wanted to come here. Also, the innovation, economic strength, and military strength of the USA will all suffer if the level of corruption increases - because corruption is a burden on the systems that produce those results. You can't get rid of it, but you can't let it run rampant either.
The desire to come and immigrate to the US has greatly diminished. This use to be a easy decision for foreign students to stay in the US for work opportunities. Nowadays, a US degree isn't considered prestigious outside of a few elite schools and the cost has completely spiraled out of control. I've talked to numerous colleagues who abandoned waiting for a green card because it's no longer a clear cut decision. Opportunities and quality of life in other countries have either caught up or surpassed the US in certain areas. This would of been unthinkable 10-20 years ago.
>The desire to come and immigrate to the US has greatly diminished
Do you have any data to back up that claim?
E.g. the number of diversity lottery applicants (one of the easiest proxies to judge how many people express their interest in moving to the US) went up from 12 million in 2011 to almost 20 million last year.
This thread is largely about college educated folks who represent a small minority of diversity lottery applicants. As to why the DV lottery has grown, I suspect it has a lot to do with it just having become more visible and known, growing hand in hand with increased access to internet and ability to apply.
Sure, if we are talking about the top end we can check the O-visas, the "extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics" ones, both the applications and the issuance of those went up even more than the DV applications:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_visa#Number_of_visas_issued_...
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They’re right about 1 and 3, but not 2. Life has gotten much better in a good chunk of the world, that the opportunity loss for not moving to US is getting smaller. You can easily see it by immigration application numbers by country.
> You can easily see it by immigration application numbers by country.
Where are you getting this information? Visa issuance more than doubled between 2020 and 2024.
https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Annual...
Visa issuance doubling and having less applications from improving countries can both be true. I think you want issuance by place of birth to make the comparison OP is pointing out.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v...
> I think you want issuance by place of birth to make the comparison OP is pointing out.
I’m not seeing a year to year comparison on the page you linked. It’s calculable from the monthly figures, but I’ll wait and see if the GP responds with his own source.
> But there are reasons people want(ed) to move to the USA
Yes, primarily because its the richest country in the world and it's "easy" to make money.
> But there are reasons people want(ed) to move to the USA, and I don't mean refugees
I think overall you are correct but probably still not safe to generalize. If you're moving to escape persecution then just being "on the other side" achieved this. If you are economically motivated then just leaving doesn't guarantee anything, you can be worse off. This circles back to the idea that the people who are persecuted by a regime paint the public opinion of that regime.
I have friends from Eastern Europe who emigrated to North America (mostly Canada) in the early '90s only to move back shortly after when the reality didn't live up to the hype and their expectations. They had a better life back home. The move was economically motivated, not escaping persecution. Many families under authoritarian regimes had the option to move to a Western country but not being actively persecuted meant they had no hard push and decided for the "comfort of familiarity".
East Berlin slipping into authoritarianism is a good showcase for this. Most people chose to stay in place for long enough to build a wall. We're talking years in which they saw the reality around them but only the ones who actively suffered from persecution chose to leave. Today plenty of East Germans still look back fondly at those times because they didn't feel the objective pain of persecution, only the subjective general suffering of "I could have better but don't".
Yes. I've been to China, daily life for regular people is mostly fine (bad work-life balance notwithstanding, as in other Asian countries). Nothing like the old stories from Russia (written by Russians, mind you) or even the relative material comfort but heavy-handed state control like in the GDR.
Daily life can also be fine in fascism if you don't belong to any "unpopular" groups and don't care about any. Until the customary war starts, that is...
> Until the customary war starts
It's good to know liberal democratic progressive countries such like the US would never start a war.
Perhaps the larger point is that war conditions are worse for everyone in autocratic regimes. Regardless of how common (or rare) wars are for societies of any given kind.
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Not entirely true. People living authoritarian worry about what they say, they self-censor out of fear, they defer to those in power (even at a local level), they accept a hierarchy of power rather than rights.
I do not entirely disagree without, but lack of freedom does intrude into day to day life to some extent.
Even if you live in a western country you do all of that anyway. Self-censor at work and online so I don’t get fired or banned from w/e.
Accept elected officials whose policies don’t match up with popular opinion and accept standard employment hierarchy.
That's very different than worrying about going to jail for life or getting disappeared.
So what? Lose your job, lose your housing.
Prison is at least 3 hots and a cot.
> Prison is at least 3 hots and a cot.
Decent prison conditions tend to overlap with countries with decent human rights.
IN authoritarian countries you might very well be starved or tortured in prison.
You might also just disappear and your body may or may not be found in an identifiable state.
Some people value freedom more than comfort.
What freedom?
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This hyperbolic take hurts your causes more than helps them.
I'm against extrajudicial deportations to El Salvador, but those people are not being deported for their political opinions.
As for trans/LGBTQ+ genocide, it does not exist in the West.
Repeatedly denying GAC or banning PrEP as Republicans try to do every few months does indeed lead to death, yes.
Granted we're not under Reagan, but Republicans are practically praying for another AIDS crisis and doing everything in their power to make it happen.
Straight people largely don't know this because, well, it's not their problem.
Calling this genocide is ridiculous levels of hyperbole
This sort of nonsense is why many people do not take LGBT issues very seriously
If there was an LGBT genocide happening in America, there would not be open pride celebrations, come on
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How is that genocide? No one is being killed, no culture is being erased, no community is being wiped out. People might be persuaded to change their viewpoints but they are not forced to or sent to re-education camps.
This seems identical to saying that convincing someone with anorexia that they aren't overweight is "social death", and "social death" is (somehow) genocide.
I.e. it's nonsense.
Using the same word “genocide” for what is happening in Gaza and what is happening in the US seems to make language pretty useless.
To say nothing of using the same word as what happened in the holocaust or to the Armenians or native Americans or Rwanda or is happening in Xinjiang....
This is what I have been saying for years. The far-left progressives have literally raped language beyond all recognition.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Men are women.
The obvious difference is that people with anorexia die and people who transition live happily.
Uh, some do.
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dysphoria is certainly a mental illness, transitioning is merely one possible treatment for it (though, pushed as one of the first rather than as one of the last options, which I personally find concerning.)
Body dysphoria is a recognised mental illness.
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Being gay is not generally recognised as mental illness, although it has been in the past. Being trans is less well defined (historically even being gay was not well defined, or defined the same way).
It depends a lot on what kind of authoritarian society it is. It's not a binary, and many are "soft authoritarian" meaning that citizens don't have any effective control over their government, but it doesn't actively try to suppress even minute dissent DPRK-style. In most of those countries, people don't actually worry that much about what they say because it doesn't matter at their level. It only matters if you're a public person saying things in a very public way.
In Germany you literally get your house raided if you critize a politician online. A journalist got a suspended sentence because he posted a pic of then-interior minister holding a sign that was edited to read "I hate freedom of speech".
Lots of bad things in the west, certainly, but there is a huge difference between a suspended sentence and getting murdered: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/sri-lanka-failing-to...
Picking on not the worst country in the world, but one I know (and was living in at the time this was at its worst). Things have changed there since, thankfully.
> worry about what they say, they self-censor out of fear, they defer to those in power
Sounds a lot like having a job.
its like what the old east german people said after the wall fell. i forget the exact phrase but its something like: "before, i could criticize my boss but i couldn't criticize the government. now i can criticize the government but i can't criticize my boss"
I agree that is a problem, particular with the concentration of power in small industries and the cultural homogenisation of people in power.
I recall in 2016 British employers who said they would fire any employees they discovered voted for Brexit - of course the only way they could find out is if people said how the voted but that is a free speech issue.
I think we need legal protections for things like free speech that we have traditionally had against governments to apply to employers and service providers. I think legislation that prevents various forms of discrimination proves it is achievable.
I live in the free and morally righteous West and I self censor all the time. Every single day. My beliefs would have me ostracized from communities and fired from my job.
> My beliefs would have me ostracized from communities and fired from my job.
but not landed you in prison or disappeared, I take it?
True, but at least in prison you're (usually) fed… which may NOT be the case if you're fired from your job, put on a list, and blocked from the industry.
> True, but at least in prison you're (usually) fed…
Not adequately or safely.
https://impactjustice.org/new-report-provides-first-ever-nat...
Still better than the in the average US school.
The linked report describes a case study of a prison where rat droppings were falling from the ceiling into the prison kitchen. It also states 75% of surveyed prisoners reported being served spoiled or rotting food.
Was your school worse than that?
They might, if not now then possibly in the future. See e.g. people in the UK getting arrested for tweets.
If you’re telling people to punch other people in the balls maybe you should be arrested.
Only if it is proved to a criminal standard (i.e. beyond reasonable doubt) to be intended to encourage an act of violence. It it is an expression of anger it is legitimate free speech.
Your comment has deliberately omitted the context needed for honest discourse. Thus, one can only conclude you are trolling.
So did the one they're replying to. They're just replying like-for-like.
It's typical that when someone is arrested for "X action with Y detail" (e.g. buying a knife with intent to kill someone) people who oppose the arrest will only state the X (and for some reason this works). To correct the record when someone says "I don't expect to be arrested for buying a knife", "I do expect to be arrested for planning to a murder" is a correct response.
A lot of US citizens have been imprisoned for their political ideas, though [1].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_prisoners_in_the_Uni...
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So basically, you are OK with total authoritarian control over the population as long as its views that you agree with that are being enforced and views you don't like that are being oppressed. Not to mention that you didn't even care to find out what GP's views actually are - no room for nuance, just the fact that they are not socially acceptable is enough for you to condemn him.
What beliefs are so dangerous in the west today? The supposed leader of the free world is a rapist who openly brags about assaulting women. His mugshot is used on giant banners that he approves of.
Self responsibility and chronic social problems.
Intelligence and genetics.
Genders and gender specific spaces.
Gender and social/professional roles.
Those are topics which have "sky is blue" level ideological certainty, and not open for debate.
We’ve self censored regarding the state narrative on Israel/Palestine our entire lives in the west
Just because the censorship is outsourced to the private sector, mostly, doesn’t make the day to day any different when you rely on support of the private sector, alongside discretionary support from the state
Visa holders are experiencing detainment for this specific thing, this cycle. And in other western democracies anyone can be fined and imprisoned for it as well
Wishful thinking that there is imperviousness to disagreeing with the state narrative in the west
The reality is that it’s not always on the mind 100% of the time and you learn to appreciate the day to day life under Eastern and Western authoritarian systems
This is a naive view. Life under the Soviet Union was horrible. Talk to nearly everyone who lived in fear that their neighbors would rat on them.
That affects everyone.
They're probably referring to modern day countries that remain controlled by Communist parties officially. However, these went through a decades long process of privatisation to get where they are today, and there is no guarantee they won't backpeddle.
The horrible life in Soviet Union was due to horrible governmental policies, which are not unique to authoritarian governments. Liberal governments have their fair share of bad policies.
I wonder why people voted for those bad Soviet policies.
> some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble
That's... Sufficiently concerning, don't you think?
Yes thats my point. The average person may feel that they are completely free, because they live their lives within the boundaries of what the ruling party wants.
As first generation out of Salazar's dictorship, what I see is current generations completely ignoring what was taught to them during the last decades.
I can surely tell, the memories of my parents and family members that had to live under the regime isn't really that those were better days, unless one was a collaborator.
Try to do some public comment that can be misused to mean some kind of bad opinion on the regime, and off you go, out of the map.
Like how Amnesty International came to be,
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/amnesty-inte...
This is kind of a pointless statement when you make it that broadly. Are you talking about life in North Korea or in China?
And do you think American media really distorts the "other" side more than Chinese or Russian media distorts what life in the west is like?
> And do you think American media really distorts the "other" side more than Chinese or Russian media distorts what life in the west is like?
having lived for a long time in both china and america: yes. chinese people are given a much more accurate view of life in america than americans are given an accurate view of life in china
thats why there was that meme going around earlier this year when tik tok people joined rednote that said americans were shocked to learn their media was lying about how bad chinese people had it, while chinese people were shocked to learn their media was telling the truth about how bad americans had it
A quarter of their population doesn’t even have Internet access.
that's simply false. according to cnnic, china has 1.267 billion monthly active users of mobile internet services. that's 89.9% of the population, and about 10% of china is over 70 years old which is very likely a big percentage of the people who arent using the internet
When I visited Shenzhen and then came back to the US recently, I felt like I went back in time 15 years.
I've been saying on HN for years that the commenters here should buy a ticket and go see China for themselves. It's extremely safe. Far safer than any American city/suburb. No, they're not going to detain you and send you to jail. They don't care about you. People are generally friendly even if you're from the US.
“Reminder: On Chinese social media platforms, please do not mention sensitive topics such as politics, religion and drugs!!!”
"Some Americans reported having their content blocked or accounts suspended for material deemed sensitive by RedNote, as content moderators control what the Chinese audience can see. A search on RedNote for Xi Jinping, China’s leader, comes up blank."
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2025/0129/Ameri...
It seems like the Chinese government works pretty hard to make sure its own citizens don't understand how bad things are in China. Maybe they fail at that but it isn't for lack of trying.
"It's hilarious to me that one side is sharing that Chinese people are convincing Americans that they've been fed propaganda about China, and the other side is saying that no, it's the Americans telling the Chinese that THEY are being fed all the propaganda! This is hilarious and dumb, but not as crazy as what happened on the Tiananmen Square in 1989!"
https://imgur.com/gallery/idea-that-bunch-of-americans-flood...
For all its faults I think I trust America's freedom of speech to make information available better. We should be diligent in protecting it as a principle because although the government is somewhat constrained by the first amendment, others are not.
America's freedom of speech is vulnerable to "flooding the zone". I don't have a good suggestion for fixing that, but I would say that as a result the average American is not any better informed than the average Chinese citizen, despite greater freedom of information.
I think the common US view of life in North Korea and China is probably about 90% distorted, more propaganda than reality.
I'm not vouching for any country, I'm just saying the public perception in the US is completely distorted.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese had a slightly more realistic view of the US.
That's a reasonable take. I feel like China has such extreme ends of the spectrum, from the most modern cities to the most distant rural regions. It's hard to think of China in any sort of unified, whole way.
In this case, we are less likely to notice our own countries becoming authoritarian. Because we will compare it to a version that is exaggerated.
This isn't even remotely true. Life is nothing like western countries in most parts of the world, authoritarian or not.There is a reason for such levels of immigration to western countries.
In a lot of cases that reason is that the West has pillaged and/or coup-ed those countries in the past, and doesn't care if it scorches and/or submerges them underwater in the future.
I agree. My country was plundered for hundreds of years. And some now have the gall to say these invaders brought progress to a backward country. However, that is orthogonal to the point being discussed
Well, day to day life is similar until it isn't, then you realize you have no options. Your life is nothing more than bubbles in the pond.
Thats exactly the parents point.
You only realise you can’t do something when you come into contact with trying to do it. Otherwise you live your life blissfully unaware of how free you arent.
Its like how you feel that driving is safer than flying, despite driving being the most dangerous thing most people do… you only realise how dangerous it is when its too late.
As Rosa Luxemburg put it:
> Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.
Day to day is of course generally the same, until the day it isn't the same, or you want to deal with the government in some way.
Or god forbid you want to have some say in policy ... are concerned about opportunities.
Let alone the fact that how authoritarian varies wildly, just like how free ... but they're not the same.
Okay. But you still can’t have repercussions from the government for your speech in America. On this issue Europe is definitely backsliding - for example, see UK police showing up at doorsteps for social media posts). But countries like China and Turkey take it MUCH further. You can be jailed for years for political speech or wrongthink. That does change day to day life. You can’t think or act freely. At best you can live a lie and stay quiet.
> But you still can’t have repercussions from the government for your speech in America.
You absolutely can. The obvious example most frequently talked about is that there are plenty of things you can say, which if the wrong person hears them or they trigger automated alarms, it will get you an unfriendly visit by people flashing badges. They might be there to give you a threatening talking-to, or they might be there to arrest you full-stop.
The less obvious example is that even if you don't cross any lines to trigger a direct response like that, it's recorded all the same. It will shape future interactions with law enforcement agencies. You will be flagged as a person of interest, as a hostile actor, etc. Legal speech can very easily make you suspicious and law enforcement will treat you accordingly before they've ever met you. It's not a recipe for a good outcome when the people with badges start off thinking you're likely to pull a gun on them.
At times, it's been far worse than this. I'll direct you to COINTELPRO, or any of the other mryiad of historical instances where the US government has protected its interests by going after domestic elements it sees as subversive.
> On this issue Europe is definitely backsliding
Europe never had free speech to the degree that America did. In many countries, it's unlawful to speak ill of royal figureheads for example.
> for example, see UK police showing up at doorsteps for social media posts
This absolutely happens in America, as I mention above. You might say it's to a different degree, but the end result is the same.
> You can be jailed for years for political speech or wrongthink.
All it takes is for you and your ideology to be labelled as extremist and terrorist, which is a wholly arbitrary line to draw.
As an outside observer, it absolute looks like that the American government punish people for their speech. Of course, they say something else, like we just kidnap you from the street, or we just revoke your grant, or we just force your university to kick you out. Or simply flat out ban your free speech, like teachers’ one in schools. And even if they do it illegally, and they give you the opportunity to use your rights, lawsuit themselves can be still damaging.
Also, there were several news in the past decades about cases when police was even at the doorsteps of perpetrators before their mass shooting because of their social media posts (but more times, Americans were disappointed that police didn’t prevent the shooting even when there were incriminating social media posts). The problem is not social media posts, it never was. It’s their content. And also, it’s not just social media posts most of the time when the police come to your doorsteps even here in Europe. But that cannot be made to sensationalist headlines.
It’s still worse the law situation in Europe, but an adversarial government can find ways to circumvent even the better laws. And from the outside, it looks like that this would happen exactly in the US.
> The truth is in many countries...day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west.
That's true right up until your infallible dear leader invades your neighboring country, fails, and rapidly starts ratcheting down social controls in a desperate attempt to preserve political stability. I don't think Russians would describe day-to-day life as "mostly similar to the west" anymore. China could be next.
Unfortunately, day-to-day life is mostly similar to the west in Russia. Other than some unfortunate people getting conscripted, it’s the same as usual.
Russians support Putin on average.
To be fair, the job of infallible dear leader in a major Western democracy is very prone to getting involved in wars, with bad repercussions for the people involved in all sides... (and destabilizing the world in the process). While some people in that country oppose these war adventures, it's difficult to voice because said country has a secular religion of worshipping its own armed forces, and speaking contrary to this can have anyone ostracized.
I'm not talking about Russia, China or North Korea, though of course it can also fit some of those countries.
> The truth is in many countries, unless you’re some kind of minority, politically active, or in legal trouble, day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west.
At a very superficial level, sure -- people get up, go to work, go out to eat, go to the movies, fall in love, get married, pay their bills, get sick, die, etc. -- like humans in the West. But this is all within the bounds of what the government decided you should adhere to. If you step outside of those bounds the consequences can be severe and without any legal recourse.
Because authoritarian regimes are a law to themselves, rather than applying the law, they're highly susceptible to corruption. Whether you get in trouble or not depends on who you know (in China it's called guanxi). I lived in China for 6 years, ran a business there; I can tell you the system runs on guanxi.
Access to information is highly restricted. All public media and social networks are censored and/or self-censored. There is no freedom of expression on anything that is "sensitive". This is _not_ limited to "minorities, politically active or those in legal trouble". Yes, people have learned to walk the line carefully.
It is more relaxed than the Mao days or the USSR (I lived there too) where you literally had someone on every floor of a building whose job was to report on what everyone else was doing. But it _looks_ more relaxed than it is. If you've visited China, or even stayed there a few months, or studied there for a year as an exchange student, you won't notice it. But believe me it's there. The educated class know it but they've either a) accepted it ("mei banfa"), or b) have emigrated or have made contingency plans for their kids, or c) are carefully subversive.
Authoritarian governments wield their economy as a tool for political power, which affects everyone living there.
>day-to-day life is mostly similar to life in the west
The "happy path" is, the major differences start when you have any kind of a problem, then not having any functional institutions makes the experience _very_ different from the west.
How different your experience is when diverging from the "happy path" in the West depends a lot on your wealth and your skin color.
Authoritarianism rarely feels like a switch flipping — it's more like water slowly boiling
Day-to-day life depends on your social class. I wouldn't want to be in China earning minimum wage.
There are also crazy countries like Iran and North Korea.
I wouldn't want to be anywhere earning minimum wage for that location.
Earning minimum wage is a very bad situation in many democratic countries, the US included.
There's nothing special to China in this regard.
There's very little real data on day to day life in NK, mostly fantasizing by the West, but what do you think is day to day life in Iran? I doubt it's crazy. It's probably a lot like in many other countries. Iran is not a hell-hole.
It's been a little over a decade since I lived there, and yes, it was not all that crazy.
As a foreigner I was generally expected to stay away from big protests when they flared up, and internet connectivity sucked (though this was also a time when the world was less dependent on near-constant internet access). Otherwise it was pretty much like any other "middle-tier" country.
I was a teenager back then, so it was especially nice in certain ways: Tehran was pretty safe, so I had a lot of freedom to get around unsupervised that I later did not have in some other "more free" places.
I think this is a big reason why Americans (and other "Westerners") tend to say "Look at them, they're Communist!!!", instead of "Look at them, They're Authoritarian!!!".
If you call it what it actually is, too many Americans might actually connect the dots.
Basically, authoritarian rule shows its nature with the swiftness you are punished if you try to go against the flow. Usually if things go wrong, if you want to change things against the grain.
Free system don't make those easy either, but you have way more layers of protections, safety nets, and way less death sentences looming over your head. Money and who you know matter less the freer a society is.
However, this is an abstract concept that people can't grasp unless you lived it.
That's the problem with building a society: people can't be arsed to do anything unless they felt the pain. They can't picture problems they didn't live through.
This is why you'll see people telling you the UAE is the best things since sliced bread, only to come back years and years later, once they actually paid the price. They had a car accident with the wrong person. They tried to do business by got pwned by corruption. They got sick because of pollution. A family member got in jail for BS reasons.
All that can happen in a free society, it's just less likely, and the consequence are less dire.
Very hard to make people get how important it is. Anything that requires nuances and projection is near impossible to communicate to the mass.
That's why we have tribes and symbols. This is the only way to sell a project to big groups of humans, because then you substitute the complicated concept with a simple us vs them or good vs bad narrative.
Of course, once you do that, people think even less, and you get extremism rising.
This is why, IMO, free systems never last. Our last 80 years run was a statistical anomaly. We got very lucky.
The problem of authoritarianism is the preparedness paradox.
They are less prepared for problems. And so suddenly problems happen all the time.
But when there are no problems... Things are going well for the average person.
The main problem with living under authoritarian rule is 1. the absenсe of control for the way where the country is going. 2. the value of human life is approaching zero. Today your life is pretty decent (unless you're some kind of minority (c)), but tomorrow you find yourself with a mobilization order because your country decides to start a war. And nobody cares about your surviving.
Only 1 in 3 are straight white Christians in the US.
Fascism only doesn't have an effect in the early stages in the sense that loading a gun has little effect on those not frightened by it.
Actually using it is going to become impossible to ignore.
Until an asshole comes to power and decides that genociding half of population is ok. Happens al the time.
You’re being dismissive about the minority part. I guess it varies from country to country but several minority groups combined can actually be the majority like in Iraq, Rwanda, Eastern Europe, SE Asia etc.
In non-democratic nations: You are allowed to do almost anything you please, except for speaking up against political power or in any way challenge them.
In democratic nations: You aren't allowed to do anything, but you are free to speak up against political power and challenge them as much as you please.
Or that's how it used to be.
I don't think you've lived in one of the countries you're talking about. I lived in Beijing for a couple years, and early on I wanted visit Tian'anmen Square and tourist. I wanted to see what there was to do, how to get there, etc., but any search term (in English, anyway) was blocked. So the CCP's inability to accept their past actions and their insistence on making up a false reality made a legitimate activity difficult. Last time I went you had to stand in long lines because they required you to show your ID card (passport, in my case). I worked for a tech company, and none of us could do our jobs without a VPN, because half of all tech blogs got blocked. (Partly because a lot of them blocked on fonts.google.com, which was blocked because google.com was blocked; probably those would time out if you waited long enough.) I couldn't read more than about three paragraphs of the People's Daily without wanting to throw it across the room because the fake reality and shoulds/oughts were so blatant. Maybe it's more subtle in Chinese, but I doubt it. Fortunately I was not there for the whole Covid disaster.
You could argue that the CCP is totalitarian, which is authoritarianism++. The problem is that since technology can be used for totalitarian ends, it will be. Putin is authoritarian (certainly by no means Communist), yet reports I hear from Russia make it sound much like China. There's the forced conscription bit for his war against Ukraine, too. Erdogan seems a little better, but his economics-denying policies caused rather large inflation, and life seems to be definitely impacted in other ways, censorship being one of them.
Well, how about just old-school kings? That's Trump, or MBS. Trump's changeability is a feature of kings: once you know where to look, you see it lots of places. Grimm's fairy tales have a number of cases of the king looking favorably on someone and then being influenced against them by someone else; it's practically standard if a king shows up. I saw Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale" last week, and it revolves around a king who is having a great time with a visiting king. He wants the other king to stay a while, and has his wife persuade him. But the king thinks he is too easily persuaded, decides this must be because he is sleeping with the queen, tries to murder his friend, and tries the queen for treason. It's a bit sitcom-y, but sitcoms don't work if the premise isn't believable. You see it in Reynard the Fox, where the king is quite easily swayed by smooth words. Darius in the book of Daniel gets manipulated by his courtiers into passing a law against Daniel. Trump does political "fire and motion" (see Spolsky's old blog), so he appears unusually changeable, but random decisions are just a part of kings.
So no, life is not just mostly the same as we have now in the US. What we have in the US is a historical aberration. Unfortunately, we have the authoritarian Left (which denies being authoritarian by redefining words), and we have a foolish authoritarian Right. If the rest of us don't get our act together we are likely to slide back to historical norms.
No, it is not. It seems that way if you are a (s)expat in the honeymoonphase. Then you learn the language and look into the abyss.
In it families who can not trust one another, hierarchies of incompetence with bribes upon bribes, no legal recourse to anything, a caste system of actual misery and no perspective for that to ever change. And that is peace time. In wartime the ethnic majority progroms and kicks everyone else out of the country.
Literally none (0%) of this applies to China.
Burma, maybe. But even that's a stretch. You're exaggerating for dramatic or comedic effect, that much is certain.
But have you considered that China Bad?
> Literally none (0%) of this applies to China.
Isn't corruption the reason given by Xi Jinping for removing from their position multiple high ranking CCP members, generals, regional representatives and billionaires?
Spoken like a Han with a good hukou https://archive.is/lRne7
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> Trust in the justice system has severely degraded.
Among whom? By how much? Since when?
> Trump's deportation program.
The people being deported are not lawful residents. It is not even remotely comparable to the situation the GP is describing.
They’re deporting green card holders now.
“Now” implies that this wasn’t being done before. It has always been legal to deport a green card holder over criminal convictions. Are you suggesting that ICE is rounding up these green card holders for the crime of being Mexican and throwing them back over the wall? This seems to be what you want people to believe. I’m aware of at least two cases where naturalized citizens were deported without having their status revoked, but in both cases these deportations were found to be illegal and damages were awarded. This might look like an indication of malice on the part of ICE until you realize that there is something like 40 million immigrants living in America.
If you have any concrete figures demonstrating the systematic abuse of the deportation process, I’ll encourage you to share them.
It's almost like increasing the speed and discarding process safeguards increases the rate of error! Imagine that! Who could have predicted?
This style of commentary is incredibly obnoxious and doesn’t belong here.
Pardon, I'm a little too distracted by the fascism to care much for decorum these days.
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This is quite an ignorant take with rose-tinted glasses towards autocratic statism.
The truth of the matter that you neglect is that in many countries the minorities, allowed political activity, and many other aspects change without proper notice or disclosure following a strategy that originated from Mao China where the government keeps people guessing. Namely, the Anaconda in the Chandelier paradigm.
This is done not only because of issues within government, but also for the benefit of the ruling class to repress the general population using techniques based in torture to promote automaton-like behaviors from induced stress.
The brainwashed masses will always deny reality in such an environment.
When you have subversive elements that have broken the guard rails and caustically destroyed resilient systems making them brittle; bringing things to crisis and then attempting to silently seize power, and they fail to actually do it, you get the natural rise of authoritarianism. This is what happened with Hitler, and in many respects it was the Communists of the time, as well as the post-WW1 reparations, and economics that paved the way for what came after.
Its insidious yes, because people don't recognize or realize the reason the dominoes fall, and the consequences are just a cascading series of generally but not specifically predictable events in history. It certainly also makes matters worse when you have runaway money-printing to further cause issue.
If the cycle was to be stopped before the consequences, it should have been stopped by the cohorts that gradually and subversively put it into action in the first place, but they wanted to seize power instead, have their cake and eat it too. The people of such a group epitomize many of the deadly sins, and they have willfully blinded themselves to it.
In China, if you say anything bad about the CCP they will strap you to a chair in a struggle session and force you to admit you were wrong. That alone is terrifying.
I moved from Canada to California for a new job with a mid six figure salary.
I had a very difficult time finding a place to rent as I had no credit score. Only places that were available without credit score was a room to share. That was not an option with a cat, wife and kids.
Finally, I found a place that was willing to accept the entire year's rent up front. Moving such a large amount of money from Canada to US had its own set of hurdles.
Once that was sorted out, I had to deal with yet more craziness to buy a vehicle. I decided to buy a CPO Mazda from the dealer in cash (using a cheque, of course). Once I signed all the papers, they ran a credit check on my newly created SSN. The system could not find my SSN. So, they denied letting me buy the car because they couldn't accept such a large amount from a person they could not verify. My passport and Canadian driver's license were not acceptable proof of ID for the dealer.
On the flip side, my long history with Amex in Canada was ported over. So, they quickly set me up with very high limit credit cards.
We already live in social credit but I fear the ones maintained by companies might be better for the consumer.
This exact same story pretty much happened to me when I moved to Canada about 15 years ago. I wasn't able to get a credit card for years, and couldn't rent an apartment without a guarantor, despite the fact that I was full-time employed in the tech industry, had zero debt, plenty of savings etc.
What I took from the experience (especially after going through various iterations of it in several other countries) is that most communities are biased against migrants/newcomers. Egalitarianism would be nice, but in practice nepotism and chauvinism are encoded in policy.
Maybe this is why Europe is so popular with migrants? I've lived in four European countries and never had anything like that. To rent a place you just need to pay 1 or 2 months deposit up front. I've never heard of anyone being denied to buy a car with cash (but we don't use cheques... the payment is either successful or not - it doesn't need to clear).
Loans are a different story, it varies a lot - but in my country for example, after working 6 months in a full-time job you can get a mortgage without issues. All they care about is how much you are earning, and that you don't have any other debts so that you couldn't afford the repayments.
It’s not a bias against immigrants, it’s a bias against the unknown.
I’ve had an identical experience as an 19 year old college dropout trying to rent an apartment and buy a car with no established credit history. It at least 5 years to qualify for my first unsecured card with $1,000 credit on a 6-figure salary. I could not qualify for any vehicle, not even a used cheap Honda Civic with my lack of history, and I had to play the Craigslist rental game for years as well.
There's a small difference... at 19, you truly didn't have a credit history. A middle-aged immigrant from Canada likely has a credit history, but for some reason, it's not portable across arbitrary boundaries. Canada-US is a pretty solid example... We're neighbors, we both have stable economies, modern banking, etc. From a consumer's perspective, there's no good reason a credit history shouldn't carry across that border.
> for some reason, it's not portable across arbitrary boundaries
The reason being that you can't be held accountable across borders. I may have good credit in Canada, but my German landlord can't sue me there if I fall behind on rent.
That's assuming a person's creditworthiness and trustworthiness changes as they cross a border. I tend to doubt that happens.
Your credit score IS maintained by companies! Their whole business is maintaining American credit scores. I really have no idea what their business model is.
Yes, the only role of the government was to issue an SSN which has been explicitly said shouldn't be used in such a manner[1].
It is a real pet peeve of mine that people take such hard stands on issues like this when it's so easy to check what's actually happening first. This thread isn't the most egregious example, but it is an example of someone just imagining a system with a big flaw and then suggesting a solution to the problem they made up.
[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/social-security-n...
Near instantaneous credit checks is their business model, and they operate worldwide.
Their business replies on collecting and storing vast troves of data that influence your credit score.
Were the likes of Experian and Equifax taken out of the credit system, you would see a massive credit crunch as every business that relies on them would have to manually verify anyone's credit score (which could introduce a whole new set of biases) or forego that completely.
Interestingly, when it comes to business credit checks, i.e. Financial viability and director background checks and history - this is something an LLM could very easily find red flags from publicly accessible data before forking out money for a full report.
What do you mean they operate worldwide? There are many countries that operate without credit scores.
The credit score provided by someone like Equifax is just a number - cheap and quickly requested via an API. And yes, bureaus don't have operations in every country - but my point was that credit scores don't just exist in the US.
Take the Netherlands, they don't use scores; rather you would request a report that details any known factors that influence creditworthiness.
The difference is: - the score is a simple weighting (0-1000) that is systematically calculated by the bureau. - Without a score provided, you have to make a judgment yourself on that individual's creditworthiness from their report.
Data and access to said data is their business model
I'm sure that running credit checks costs money somehow. Accurate credit information facilitates profitable loans.
On paper, credit scores are supposed to measure financial reliability, but in practice they’re more like an arbitrary gatekeeping mechanism
Are credit scores transnational?
Holy moly the US is kafkaesque. Gee.
Duly noted. I might be in your position one day in the far future. Will prep for it.
Thanks :)
> Holy moly the US is kafkaesque.
Not really. Try to rent an apartment in Germany (any EU country really).
Canada / USA is a breeze in comparison.
What is more common in many European countries is a check of a national debt register, to see if you're a known bad debtor. This is distinct from a credit check, because it's not something you need to build up; just something you need to avoid. Someone fresh into the country won't have a problem here.
I moved to Switzerland and all I needed was a clean debt register entry and my employer contract.
Not sure in Germany, but my country borders it and I rented an apartment several times with no credit history. It also never took more than a few hours to sort everything out (make an appointment, decide if I like the place, exchange my personal info, make a second apointment to sign a contract). No credit score in sight.
What? They don't check your credit score where I live (west-eu). They check your pay slip to see how much you make monthly and if it your rent is less than half your paycheck they can decide to let you rent. After that is a two or three month downpayment that is locked in a seperate bank account specifically for this use and is released at the end of the lease. If there is no damage to the rental unit you get back your full amount, depending on what damage is found, the downpayment is used to fix that.
In the UK they’ll do background checks, and check your salary. They’d ask for six months rent in advance if it wasn’t illegal. And even though it is illegal.
In my experience, in the UK, the rental agency required 12 months rent in advance (plus another 2 months rent as deposit) when I was self-employed. They would have accepted monthly rent if I had 5x the annual rent in cash savings, but I didn't.
And then every year after that they required another 12 months rent up front, when it came to the annual tenancy renewal. Track record of paying the rent wasn't good enough to prove that I could keep paying the rent.
That's crazy
They absolutely do ask for a SCHUFA report in Germany. You might eventually find an apartment without one but it's going to limit your options.
What? They are in no way entitled to see your pay slip, or know how much you make. Whether or not you can pay rent is entirely your problem (North EU).
You have a deposit, typically three months rent, that's typically enough to indicate whether or not you're able to pay rent.
>Whether or not you can pay rent is entirely your problem (North EU).
This doesn't sound right. In which "North EU" country sis this BTW?
Denmark. To be fair I haven't rented an apartment in 15 years. My understanding is that the rule still are: If you don't pay, you get a 14 day warning, if you don't pay within those 14 days, your lease can be terminated the next day. Assuming that you then refuse to move, the landlord can have the bailiff (not sure if that's the right word) kick you out.
>They are in no way entitled to see your pay slip
They absolutely do in Germany and Austria. Renting is almost impossible without pay slips from LOCAL employers. Pay slips from your previous EU country don't count. So relocating is a huge bitch.
>Whether or not you can pay rent is entirely your problem (North EU).
It immediately becomes the landlord's problem here when they're legally not allowed to evict you once you stop paying rent. So they're trying to be 110% sure you're the ideal tenant who always pays on time. Especially since for many private landlords the rent you pay them is also their mortgage payment to the bank.
>You have a deposit, typically three months rent, that's typically enough to indicate whether or not you're able to pay rent.
Deposits don't mean you're able to keep paying rent since that deposit might be borrowed money or from illicit activities. Landlords want to see stable employment (well known employer, that you're past probation period, etc), not that you have a lot of random money in your pocket when you sign the contract.
I don't support this status quo, but it is what it is because it's a sellers' market and governments don't want to change that.
That’s blatantly not true, before or recently. As it is obvious you never relocated to Europe, at least provide a reference to refute.
> Not really. Try to rent an apartment in Germany (any EU country really).
Been a while for me but afaik nothing has changed: if you lived and worked here before, then a couple of your last salary statements are sufficient (bar the problem of actually finding anything and being accepted, but that is besides the point).
So I am definitely not loving or defending this, but afaik compared to needing years of time to build your credit score in a "smart" way (and by hearsay I would probably mess it up, "just be employed for 3 months" sounds very easy to do?
> bar the problem of actually finding anything and being accepted, but that is besides the point
It isn't besides the point at all. It being a seller's market means landlords can and do ask for whatever paperwork they want which often enough includes a SCHUFA report. You can choose to not provide it but they can also choose to rent to someone else who does.
Amex in general is quite good with this sort of stuff.
Requested a personal card with no credit score and that somehow went through fine despite friends in similar circumstances getting rejected. Best guess is because I had a company issued Amex already they could use that as history
> We already live in social credit but I fear the ones maintained by companies might be better for the consumer.
Seems to me to be dependent on how the incentives line up.
A credit bureau WANTS you to part with any money you might have for a car. So it works out when they control the issuance of your loan.
But would you want the NRA to control the social credit system regulating a firearm purchase?
> But would you want the NRA to control the social credit system regulating a firearm purchase?
I prefer that to Chase controlling it: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/19617/00019768782300... (the link details an instance in which Chase was alleged to have debanked a bipartisan, multireligious charity headed by a former U.S. governor, senator and ambassador). The NRA would probably let me buy the gun, after all!
Yes…
If you read the comment, you’d notice that there were no loans involved whatsoever.
If you can’t rent or buy a car without a credit score, you should only be allowed to buy a gun until you have proven that you’re a trusted member of the society.
>Once that was sorted out, I had to deal with yet more craziness to buy a vehicle. I decided to buy a CPO Mazda from the dealer in cash (using a cheque, of course). Once I signed all the papers, they ran a credit check on my newly created SSN. The system could not find my SSN. So, they denied letting me buy the car because they couldn't accept such a large amount from a person they could not verify. My passport and Canadian driver's license were not acceptable proof of ID for the dealer.
Go to another dealer, I have bought cars with a personal check without having a credit check at all. I think that's a really unusual policy.
It's more complicated than that. If the transaction is over $10,000 it needs to be reported to the IRS. Dealers are often involved on the financing side directly, and their systems are just set up to require a Social Security number to put anything into the system. So because of the financing, some of these "know your customer" rules apply, and they automatically get applied to everyone as universal policy -- employees aren't allowed to use judgement to make personal exceptions. And physical IDs can be forged, whereas the existence of a Social Security number in a database can't be.
SSN's aren't perfect, you can still commit identity fraud. But high value financial transactions get safer the more you can verify about someone.
>It's more complicated than that.
No, It's absolutely not. Like i said, I've bought multiple cars with personal checks, all over $10,000, never gave SSN or had credit check. Unless it's some sort of local law, it's a ridiculous policy. Find another dealer.
>Dealers are often involved on the financing side directly, and their systems are just set up to require a Social Security number to put anything into the system.
This seems totally made up and doesn't match my experience at all.
I'm not defending it, just explaining it. Different dealerships will have different tolerances for risk, including allowing employees to bypass standardized requirements. I'm not making anything up, just explaining what's most likely going on with this particular dealership, and how it's not unusual.
If your dealership is letting you drive off with a vehicle with a personal check (not even a cashier's) and without any kind of credit check or database identity verification, that's actually pretty wild. I assume you know the owner or salesperson personally. Otherwise, you could be a rando passing them a forged check, and then they'll be out both cash and car. I don't know many businesses willing to take that $10K+ risk.
Wow. Thank you for sharing this. I have never been to the US (Germany, Singapore)... this sounds just completely and utterly bonkers to me.
That's not social credit, that's just credit and it's been around a very long time worldwide. For as long as money has been a thing, people don't let strangers or delinquents borrow it!
Social credit would be like if the government didn't let people lend to you for being a commie or trans. Social credit is not something you can just sort out on the phone.
youre talking solely about financial credit there bud. different thing entirely
There was a comment that appeared for a few minutes before getting deleted, that vaguely lined up with what I wanted to say. It didn't reappear, so I'll just repost it:
>real life also has social credit. were you an asshole to the bartender last week? that goes to your reputation at that bar. did you volunteer with a local non-profit? that goes to your reputation with that organization. even without an algorithm, people remember.
You can always move to new town and start again. The problem with all these social credit systems is that they're designed to follow you wherever you go forever. There is also zero recourse if a mistake was made; at least you can try and smooth things over with a bartender.
Yeah, automation and information sharing prevents people slipping through the cracks, and that also prevents leniency, diversity, and reason.
I was musing over something, though. We have creeping Orwellian things like face recognition and the policing of chat histories. But some of this is private, as in, not done by the state. Even when done by the state, it isn't in most places to prop up the regime and prevent dissent. It's big brother mechanisms without a Big Brother. I speculate that it's genuinely motivated by preventing disorder, because (is this true?) over the last couple of decades people have got more disorderly in petty ways to do with thieving and harassing and scamming one another. Then the people don't like it, and so the people politically demand heavy-handed policing of the people.
Nah, there's no increase in disorder, crime in most developed countries is trending down, but we do have a bunch of people that have collected unimaginable wealth and are definitely afraid something will happen to them like the last couple times this has happened. They definitely don't want to repeat history and will use the coercion tools they have to clamp down on the peasants.
> afraid something will happen to them
Because of what, the decrease in crime?
Massive wealth aside, I would argue that any decrease in crime is nullified in recent years by the increase in sensationalization of specific crimes. That is, reading "crime rates in <city> drop to historic lows in 2025" does not have as much emotional weight as seeing a social media video of a violent crime happening near one's home, even if the statistic is true.
Consider how many children were terrified to swim in the ocean after seeing Jaws for the first time... statistics do very little to allay existing (irrational) fears for most people.
Imo, what is actually happening is fear of crime far away - like rural people being almost terrified of cities and entirely on board with sending army there.
People are not afraid of sensational crime next door. They want crime to be happening where political opponents live, so that they can feel good about punishing them.
Who knows, you'll have to go to their leaked private chats to see the madness they're conjuring there.
OK, a second theory: the situation is messy and complex. Society tolerates the use of physical force less, and has higher standards of health and safety, and more suing and seeking compensation. The police and security then favor electronic methods over potentially injuring themselves or anybody else. Then there's more potential to be bad in small ways because nobody's going to grab you by the collar. Meanwhile, there's opportunities for internet crime, or electronic organized crime, or just mobs and riots. Then the shift in emphasis to electronic control spills over into the private sphere, and the public kind of support it while resenting it at the same time.
In summary, everybody has started liking doing everything in a hands-off way via the internet, but also everybody hates it.
It’s partially that for sure, but I think it’s also a kind of “common sense” feeling of the public that if people use technology to commit a crime, there must therefore be a record of that crime and therefore the police should be able to use that record to easily stop technology-crime. See: every police show ever.
That was never possible before. Historically, conversations didn’t leave records, and when they did, they were trivially burned. There was no sense that the police should have access to the records because there were no records.
The technical and ethical problems of this “common sense” are far from obvious to most whose primary exposure to and mode of thinking about policing and technology is what we see on TV.
Crime stats, especially for violent crime, are relevant to us, not them. Their wealth, status, and/or insurance policies generally require security details and precautions that insulate most “public” activity from random acts of violent crime. However, the former UHC CEO’s death is an example of the sort of singular, and targeted, crime that does strike fear. However, the comment you’re replying to is alluding to the historical collapses of societies (a.k.a a complex system) where economic inequity exceeds a tipping point leads to system collapse (“heads roll”). “Clamping down on peasants”—social credit, pervasive surveillance, collating movements/associations, uh, Palantir—enables evasion of the tipping point and adds resilience to the system.
Tl;dr: violent crime doesn’t mean anything when you have billions, but instability in the system does. Surveillance state tropes exist for a reason, and that’s b/c they add resiliency to a system that would otherwise collapse.
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E.g. if you genuinely believe that AI will result in mass unemployment, it's not a stretch to believe that at least some of those newly unemployed will not take it kindly.
Because of the increase in wealth inequality and increase in peoples' desperation.
On the topic of social credit, I wonder if credit inequality bothers you more. Markets chase after desirable customers who are economically active. The super-rich with yachts aren't affecting me, because they're away being fleeced in Monte Carlo and not competing with me for the basic peasant stuff that I want. But the desirable customers/tenants/employees, who might have debts, and less money than me, but have great prospects and a drive to keeping moving up and circulating cash, and who tick boxes as reliable and enhance the general tone of the business or area and help promote it - those are monsters.
It's not logical; this is why "deranged" has become a necessary prefix to "billionaire" in most cases.
Because more people are waking up to the fact that the entire system is rigged against them.
> Nah, there's no increase in disorder, crime in most developed countries is trending down,
I don't know in which world you're living so here are officials, likely downplayed, numbers for the EU, from an official EU website to get you back to earth:
"In 2023, sexual violence offences, including rape, continued to rise in the EU."
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Rape numbers are through the roof in France (nearly 40 000 a year now): they went x6 in 20 years.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1072770/number-of-rapes-...
"The number of violent crimes in Germany increased in 2024 with a sharp increase in rapes and sexual assaults.":
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-sees-rise-in-sexual-violence-a...
Thefts and violent thefts are on the rise all across the EU. When I was young I didn't hear about being stabbed to death so that their Rolex could be stolen.
In the city were I grew up in now people firing full-auto AK-47 is a weekly occurrence.
Someone who walks into a major EU city and tells me its safer than it was 20 years is very blind.
Meanwhile the risk of my daughter getting raped is very real. And the fault is as much on the rapists as on the ones who try to refute irrefutable numbers.
Rise in reported sexual violence is usually caused by easier, safer, more welcoming reporting, not by actual rise in the base rate.
> When I was young I didn't hear about being stabbed to death so that their Rolex could be stolen.
Exactly, you didn't hear about it, such violence was quite common in some places, but there was no 24/7 online reporting backed by immediate social media outrage. Things are much much more hysterical now.
Now now, let's not be racist.
> there is no increase in disorder
The mobile phone created an occupation for people who would otherwise be on the street committing crime. It paced people, even common kids, adults, we commit much, much less crime than the previous generation, and even less in unreported crime (bar fights, revenge against a neighbor, etc.). The boomers used their hands!
But the problem is: If you follow the average strength and fight training of citizen from 1970 to today, violence should have been practically zero. It is much higher because some subsets have abnormally high rates.
You claim the average is going down. OP claims it’s going up. Both are right. Violence wins.
This is total, unadulterated nonsense. Violent crime is down since 1970. There's no "who is to know" on this one. Look it up!
> It's big brother mechanisms without a Big Brother.
Big Brother does exist: it's money. If there were some single named entity, people would rebel against it, so it's diluted and realized through financialization of one's interactions with other humans. Big Brother is invisible to individuals because it's us, and no individual thinks “I'm Big Brother” when it's their point of view looking out. It's an illusion that creates and enforces scarcity but only works if everyone else also believes (power word: “Full Faith and Credit”).
Check out “Wishes and Rainbows” from The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston for a primer on our road to rootα: https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/economic-education/wi... (favorite panel, top-right on page fifteen: ◀ 1̵1̵ + 9 ／ = 20 ▷)
>Big Brother does exist: it's money.
Then in most places it's increasingly scarce in presence and continue to exercise influence on a very tiny part of the population.
It also ignores context or interpretation, and forces one perspective on incentives that doesn't necessarily reflect reality.
It's not done by the state in the west but the state conveniently lets private companies set it up and then directs those companies in various ways as to what policies to adopt.
The US constitution not extending government limitations to society-scale corporations is a very convenient loop hole. Similar situations exist in other liberal-on-the-book countries.
The watchmen in pieces by david rosen and aaron santesso is the book you want to reach.
Total Surveillance but fractional. We live in a society but people only see parts of the whole. No one has all the interactions
The larger problem is that the owner of the credit scheme, whether a corporation or a government, can use it to punish people and depending on the scheme effectively making people social outcasts, without any due process.
Due process isn't some silver bullet. Jim crow, witch trials, they all followed due process.
But yeah it's better than some capricious bureaucrat just pulling decisions out their ass with no serious recourse, except all those cases there the process is just that.
Nothing in the world is perfect. Breathing and eating are no silver bullets for staying alive because sometimes people choke on their food and they could also breath toxic fumes. Still it's a pretty solid choice to keep doing both.
My point is that due process is tangential to fairness or reasonableness.
This may be a misunderstanding between us. What is referred to by “due process” is the whole and entire ecosystem of laws and a judicial system with trials, representation, judges and predefined appropriate sentencing structures.
The whole and entire point of all of this, is fairness and reasonableness.
The fact that mistakes are sometimes made, even corruption sometimes, does not really change things. If corruption becomes common the system starts to fail and either reforms are made or the system decays into authoritarianism.
And your locks aren't perfectly secure so you may as well hand me the keys.
That's modern technology; the worst of both worlds. The moralistic tyranny of the small town, but the crowded, violent, and lonely social environment of a major city.
That's what the mainstream chose, not what technology was by itself.
The "moralistic tyranny" is arguably the natural consequence of how humans are, but technology is what allowed it to scale.
No. The old internet had it's problems, but they maintained the boundary between the net and reality. The mainstream didn't, and I believe the attitudes of that larger society are circumstancial and shaped by certain forces.
The following you everywhere is a major problem with these systems imo, mostly because it removed the equivalent of bankruptcy for your reputation.
If you had to move across the country to leave your bad name behind, you used to be able to. And just like bankruptcy you’d start with nothing so it wasn’t exactly easy but it was at least an option. Now what recourse do people have?
Also people turning up in a town one day with no one to vouch for them were assumed to be up to no good as it could be assumed that you'd do just that if you were escaping your previous reputation. You could start with less than nothing by default, and may never shake it, and that's before race or religion.
> "If you weren’t born and raised here, you’re an outsider even though you’ve lived here for thirty-five years. That’s just kind of typical in small communities." https://dokumen.pub/small-town-america-finding-community-sha...
In small town New England, to this day, the litmus test is whether you graduated from the local high school, meaning you're probably related to other people in town. If you moved here at the age of 19 you're SOL.
Much like bankrupcy - which isn't just a wiping of the blank slate, it's actually a last resort situation - there is the option of changing your name, opening new bank accounts, and creating new digital accounts under the new identity.
Is it easy? No, but neither is declaring bankruptcy or moving across the country.
The Music Man would have been a very different story in the post-internet world.
I'm not so sure about that. Turns out if you lie blatantly and entertainingly enough, a lot of people don't care if you're a criminal. Enough that you can be elected to high office.
Therapy and rehabilitation within the society, paying your dues and making amends.
The bartender also doesn't sell your behavioral profile to every other bar in town. I mean, unless you're a total asshole and it's a small town, but then they tend to volunteer it.
SF bartenders united to try and ban this serial check-skipper: https://www.tiktok.com/@ktvu2/video/7459844103635733803
That feels like an exception that proves the rule, though - i.e. this is something requiring effort and thus reserved for egregious offenders, not a routine thing.
Good. If the legal system won't do it, people SHOULD.
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> You can always move to new town and start again.
Contra: "Wherever you go, there you are." (i.e., you don't stop being an asshole just because you move.)
Of course, you are exactly the same person you were in your 20s and didn't improve one bit. Did you make mistakes? Too bad. That's you forever. Learning from mistakes is impossible.
Like credit scores events can be made to decay overtime.
What I've seen with these large services like Google is that once they deem you undesirable (either on purpose or by accident) then they're just done with you forever. They have so many customers and so many bad actors that it's just not worth it to give anyone a second chance. It's pretty horrible for people caught in that situation.
We would need some kind of legislation around this. No company is looking to decay scores over time unless there is some profit motive to be exploited (like there is with credit scores).
What's the tangible financial impact to someone who's been deemed undesirable by Google?
Bear in mind that you can mitigate a lot of risk by operating as a business instead of establishing a relationship in an individual capacity.
And people, much like businesses, need disaster recovery plans. We advise people to have escape plans from their homes; similarly, they should have escape plans for their critical information. Almost nothing in this world is risk-free.
> What's the tangible financial impact to someone who's been deemed undesirable by Google?
Depends how deep you got. I for one would lose access to my mobile phone (Google Fi) and email, so it would be very hard for me to get access to anything that uses my phone number for 2FA. Or the email address for any kind of account recovery. Huge nuisance but maybe no financial consequences, except maybe an involuntary trip to the bank's branch to access the account.
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They are surely not the only one to have make mistakes in their life.
It's literally a lesson from the Bible: "Let him who is without sin among you, cast the first stone at her."
I'm telling on myself too, yeah.
Of course people should learn from their mistakes and constantly improve.
But if you respond like an asshole to a comment, it means you haven't learned the lessons you should have. IOW, the commenter is proving my point.
If we're assessing the assholeyness of comments, yours aren't coming across all that favorably IMO, but perhaps this conversation is victim to the loss of context and inflection that other commenters have lamented.
I admit I could have been more eloquent in my response.
Their comment was fine. Also, nothing says they were talking about themselves, so no they didn't prove your point.
I'm not sure how responding sarcastically is "fine." I've found that in real life, people don't respond well to sarcastic responses to ordinary conversation.
>But if you respond like an asshole to a comment, it means you haven't learned the lessons you should have. IOW, the commenter is proving my point.
The irony here is palpable. Buy a mirror.
I appreciate the feedback.
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Of course that's the case, but the point is that if you change for the better you have a chance to start with a clean slate. You do not have such a chance when everything is in a centrally managed database.
Being an "asshole" is often subjective so no, it does not apply equally wherever you go.
And also, many places are big enough that you don't need to move, just go to the place a few blocks over.
> You can always move to new town and start again.
This is accurate. And taken for granted in the US.
Someone once remarked to me: "I think it's cool you can just pick up and go anywhere (on a huge scale)" - They were from the Netherlands.
Well they can move anywhere in the EU, visa free.
Legally, yes. Practically, the EU still has borders and barriers. Language, pension systems, degree equivalence, etc.
Oh and also remember that the EU has freedom of movement for labour, not necessarily people. If you don’t have enough money, you can’t just move to another EU country and hope things work out.
You can as long as it "works out" (i.e. you find a job) within 3 months.
Isn't being able to move to a new town and start again also a kind of new thing though too? Cars, moving companies, open borders, globalism, English as a standard language, no serfdom, etc.
I mean, I think you could pick up and move but it was much harder, and how far you could reasonably move when you did move was limited pre-modern era. If you can't move that far, the likelihood of someone knowing you or word spreading is probably higher.
Although I remember seeing an article here on movement of serfs a while back, I think the conclusion was that they were more mobile than one might think.
In the book Fingerprints[0], they mention how, prior to fingerprints, much easier it was to just move to another town/county/state and just start over or even pretend to be somebody else. This was because there was no way to establish your identity with near 100% certainty.
This had pros and cons depending on who you were. For example, thieves loved it as you could drop you criminal record simply by moving somewhere that no one recognized you. On the other hand, there were documented cases of mistaken identity and people being prosecuted just because they looked like someone else. Then there is the case of William West which is better understood by looking at the pictures of two men names William West [1]
Contrast that to today where it doesn't matter which town in the US you live in, there is always a credit record that is tied to you.
0 - https://amzn.to/47XN9Id
1 - https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/will-william-west-case-fing...
> at least you can try and smooth things over with a bartender.
Hahah... You never offended a bartender for sure.
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What happens if in one town you lose your job, and get evicted from your apartment, or default on your mortgage? You're going to have trouble with housing in that next town.
Most of our social credit systems let you start over.
The big ones (credit score and criminal history) are strongly tied to you, but have recourse to challenge mistakes and remove strikes from your record. The sufficiency of those recourses is open for debate though.
However, all of the private company's social credit systems have a much looser coupling to your actual ID. Often you can just make a new account. If you first get a new credit card, phone, phone number, internet connection, and address, most companies would completely fail to correlate you to their previous profile of you.
Real world social credit is soft and squishy and local and fades or changes over time.
Digital social credit is (potentially) an automatically calculated number with strict and unyielding consequences that follows you around for your entire life.
A lot of digital ones are "local" too in that they are context specific. As long as it stays context specific, your Uber rating is closer to being liked by your local bar tender than it is to the Chinese social credit system. Even your local bartender has a little context leakage.
I agree there is a scarier potential there. And also some do, on occasion, escape their context (mostly credit score). They also have bigger contexts, but not so big that I would jump to the Chinese social credit comparison.
And a digital social credit system can be manipulated to drive behavioral changes en-masse. It centralizes power. Harder to do that with word-of-mouth.
True, reputation has always existed. But after a certain scale, quantity becomes a quality of its own. There’s a big difference between word-of-mouth at a single bar and a centralized, algorithmic reputation score that can follow you across dozens of services. If one bartender thinks you’re rude, you can go to another bar. If one nonprofit doesn’t like you, you can still volunteer elsewhere. But when a social media company or platform blacklists you, it can ripple through your professional, social, and even financial life, because their influence extends far beyond one community. That’s the leap from local memory to systemic gatekeeping.
I think that comment overestimated how much people really remember.
That bartender most likely has 3 to 5 worse assholes every shift and dozen usual assholes . He is not going to remember he doesn’t care.
Local non profit after 2 years most likely won’t have the same people and top guys won’t remember all one off volunteers.
Believing any of it having more significance would be attributed to “spotlight effect” in my opinion.
The difference is the relationship between the bartender, the non-profit or the barista all revolve around physical locations where cash transactions or real work occur. There's actual direct value to be measured in the interaction.
Further my interactions with the bartender aren't likely to be measured or even known about by the non-profit and vice versa. To the extent my "credit" is a factor it doesn't travel with me from location to location.
>the non-profit or the barista all revolve around physical locations where cash transactions or real work occur. There's actual direct value to be measured in the interaction.
I don't see how this is a relevant factor. If you're a karen at a restaurant who constantly sends your food back for the tiniest of issues, how is that any different than if the interaction happened online, such as if amazon gave you a bad customer credit score for your excessive returns?
>Further my interactions with the bartender aren't likely to be measured or even known about by the non-profit and vice versa. To the extent my "credit" is a factor it doesn't travel with me from location to location.
Word travels around, does it not? Moreover why is it relevant whether it's a number sitting on a database somewhere, compared to some vibes sitting in some guy's head?
> such as if amazon gave you a bad customer credit score for your excessive returns?
Is amazon going to tell me that up front? In the restaurant case the manager can explain the issue to the customer and ask them not to come in again. It becomes immediately resolvable whereas in your example I have no idea what just happened to me.
> Word travels around, does it not?
The difference between the analog word and the digital word is extreme.
> compared to some vibes sitting in some guy's head?
I live in a town of 2 million people. These vibes have zero impact. Add them to a database that can be tied to my credit card number? Now they have real impact. I don't think that's a reasonable or desirable outcome.
The problem with these systems isn't their mere existence it's their draconian implementations.
>Is amazon going to tell me that up front? In the restaurant case the manager can explain [...]
In either case they can explain, it's entirely orthogonal to the question of whether it's in-person or not. There's no technical reason why Amazon can't send you a email saying that you were banned for excessive returns, for instance. Moreover I can imagine plenty of reasons why a restaurant manager might not want to explain the precise reason, such as the threat of lawsuits, or not wanting to create an argument/scene. See also, why some HR/hiring managers are cagey about why you were turned down for a job.
>The difference between the analog word and the digital word is extreme.
The difference between a hyper-connected metropolises of today, and a random village in the 1800s is also extreme.
> I don't see how this is a relevant factor. If you're a karen at a restaurant who constantly sends your food back for the tiniest of issues, how is that any different than if the interaction happened online, such as if amazon gave you a bad customer credit score for your excessive returns?
The difference is that the restaurant has a human evaluate if your complaints are valid while Amazon only sees statistics and doesn't care why you might have a high number of returns. The restaurant can also only realistically ban a few worst offenders before that becomes unmanageable for them while Amazon has no such cost associated why banning you. Then there is also the scope of the impact. You likely have many more alternative restaurants you can go to but no one really competes with Amazon as a whole.
> Word travels around, does it not?
Only in extreme cases. You won't be banned from all Restaurants in town just because Bob got offended. With a centralized credit score once you get flagged then those checking it will usually not even talk to you.
That heavily depends on where you live.
In large, dense cities you’re pretty much anonymous; I could dance naked in a main street today and (provided no one’s recording) carry on with my life with zero repercussions.
Some people make a living out of that fact. Tourist traps do not exactly engage recurring customers, every purchase is a customer’s first.
Reputation has always been a kind of "social credit," the difference now is scale and opacity
Sure, but without a credit score, the only way people can be prejudiced against you is through your appearance or through gossip. A credit score carries with it a weight that approximates official statements - news coverage, legal judgements - that others are much less likely to take with a grain of salt, as they would a casual hearsay accusation.
Using the author's loose criteria, one could say a criminal record is a social credit system.
These are the emergent fruits of living in a complex society, where one cannot realistically track reputation of everyone they encounter across all areas of life. We could move away from some of the formalized systems, if we decided to go back to shaming people for poor behaviors.
That’s a subjective mess. How do you objectively weight the value of those experiences? It also won’t stop gossip, PR, and propaganda. Just look at the state of Rotten Tomatoes. Now imagine Fandango buying your social credit website and making Harvey Weinstein a 10/10 good person.
I think there's some difference between distributed reputation among many different groups for different purposes and a top-down, centralized reputation from the government that controls most of what you can do in life.
One is more distributed and not controlled by any single entity, the other puts all the power over your life into the hands of a few oligarchs.
yep.
and people don't just remember. sometimes they set you up to test you and or to give you a chance.
some other times they set someone else up to test you and or to give you a chance.
and sometimes people poison others to increase their and or your social credit.
as Austin Powers (or was it Ali G?) said quite eloquently: "behave".
Such as system does exist, but it is filled with issues. Halo effect and other biases impact memories, in ways that we would not tolerate being made explicit. We are more forgiving of some people than others, we tolerate some forms of stress as a possible excuse (not a complete removal, but to allow for much quicker redemption) than other forms of stress. Rules are selectively applied, and this all gets fed into confirmation biases where we overlook the bad done by people labeled as good and the good done by people labeled as bad (often with the labels themselves being unjustified in their application).
The larger the social network grows, the worse this system performs. Stereotypes develop because we don't have capacity to judge each individual, confirmation biases reinforce stereotypes until individuals cease to exist, as the stereotype prevents them from becoming close enough to ever overcome it.
So while this system has always existed (well at least as long as recorded history), it continuously worsens and is increasingly at odds with a globalized world.
I wish this type of social credit existed online.
This is what karma scores on site like this or Reddit try to replicate.
Not really, because such sites really only use upvotes/downvotes as a ranking mechanism. There's theoretically a lifetime upvote/downvote counter (ie. your karma), but other than a number that shows up on your profile, it doesn't have any real impact. You don't really develop a "reputation", for instance your comments get more or less visibility based on your previous commenting history.
There were a couple occasions on Reddit where someone replied to me in seemingly bad faith. I looked and they had negative karma. As a result, I didn’t engage.
But I will agree that it’s far from perfect. It’s also similar to the bar example. A reputation is built one person at a time. It takes a while, with repeated bad behavior, to build a bad reputation with the entire staff or regulars.
> other than a number that shows up on your profile, it doesn't have any real impact.
Certain subreddits you can't comment on until you have a minimum # of karma, some other subs auto-ban you if you contribute or subscribe to other subs.
Yes. And fails. Trolls don't care about karma and can run about being a dick until they're finally banned (possibly years later) rinse and repeat with a new account.
No there is a major difference when social credit is centralized to a single authority , and people cannot use the law to protect from that authority.
otherwise, people have always judged each other with any way they could
Did you even read the article? Here is the situation in China:
> Here's what's actually happening. As of 2024, there's still no nationwide social credit score in China. Most private scoring systems have been shut down, and local government pilots have largely ended. It’s mainly a fragmented collection of regulatory compliance tools, mostly focused on financial behavior and business oversight. While well over 33 million businesses have been scored under corporate social credit systems, individual scoring remains limited to small pilot cities like Rongcheng. Even there, scoring systems have had "very limited impact" since they've never been elevated to provincial or national levels.
Compare that to the situation with, say, credit scores in the US --- wholly run by an oligopoly of three private companies, but fully ingrained into how personal finances work here. At least a publicly run credit score would be held accountable, however indirectly, to voters and the law; and its safety might be treated as a matter of national security, rather than having Equifax and Experian leaking data like clockwork.
I've always told people that social credit as used by China was unsed to track dishonest businesses who scammed people and/or other businesses by breaking agreements and not delivering as promised.
The fact there's a credit system that protects banks from the people makes it painfully obvious who is in charge of Western society - consider this:
You take out a loan to contract the company to build you a house. The company defaults and disappears overnight. The bank is protected automatically but it's up to you have to run after your money yourself.
> The bank is protected automatically but it's up to you have to run after your money yourself.
oh yeah and whos guaranteeing borrowers for these banks? source would be nice but I bet you dont reply
> I've always told people that social credit as used by China was unsed to track dishonest businesses who scammed people and/or other businesses by breaking agreements and not delivering as promised.
To be fair, that's the outcome. But there has been attempts to make more problematic, more intrusive, darker versions of this. They just never worked out for technical or ethical/legal reasons. And they made a nice picture to frame the competing culture, darker than they are.
If your borrow money and give it to someone else and that someone else loses it how is it the borrower's fault or even problem?
It's not the borrowers fault, and in case of banks, it's not even their problem thanks to credit score and extensive guarantees built into the system.
However when I'm paying for some work to be done in the future, I'm essentially lending the contractor money predicate on the work being done by a certain deadline, quality or even at all.
So I'm the lender until the job is done, and if the borrower defaults on this it's not my fault, but certainly my problem.
Sorry I meant lender.
Anyway my point is that if you become a lender for a nontrivial sum of money it might sense to hedge that risk (insurance, credit risk entrustment, ...)
Overview from 2022. One city really did set up a full social credit system, but that was a pilot project and didn't work out.[1] There are some private "social credit" systems, like the one from Ant, but that's more like a rewards program - buy stuff, get points.
China has had a lot of official social control for centuries, but it was local and managed by local cops.[2] As the population became more mobile, that wasn't enough. But a single national system never emerged.
There was a work record history, the Dang'an, created by the Party but to some extent pre-dating communism. This, again, was handled locally, by Party officials. This system didn't cope well with employee mobility. But it didn't get built into a comprehensive national system, either.
China is authoritarian, but most of the mechanisms of coercion are local. Local political bullies are a constant low-level problem.
Kind of like rural Alabama.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/22/1063605/china-an...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dang%27an
You are conflating "social credit score", which hasn't been built out in China (although blacklisting, imprisonment, and torture for wrongthink has been built out), with "financial credit score" which exists in USA via private companies working togther, and "credit reports" which exist in both USA and China. China's is run by the unelected, dictatorial government.
perhaps read the actual first paragraph of the article? the whole point of it is that, whether we call it that or not, our privately run reputation scores (including but not limited to credit scores) functionally are social credit scores --- except we've been boiled frogs, and should take some time for self-reflection before engaging in knee-jerk reactions to China's other failings (which I'm not denying btw) whenever social credit is brought up.
Your credit score in America will never be used to deny your freedom of movement within America or go against you or any of your family members when applying for higher education.
It is a fundamentally flawed comparison.
It will, however, be used to determine whether you can rent or buy a home or increasingly even get a job. Freedom: same outcomes, but modulated through the market!
> determine whether you can rent or buy a home
Yes, that's the point of a credit score.
> increasingly even get a job
Do you have any citation of proof of this? I've never heard of this happening even once.
It might be used to deny your kid a college loan, though - which might work out the same as denying them higher education.
It absolutely works the same way. There are would be doctors everywhere who never got the chance because of their parent's mistakes, or misfortunes, because we've made higher education a privilege in the country.
At this point of extrapolating from second-order/third-order effects, what dosen't count as "social credit" to you? It seems that if society dosen't give everything you want, that's seen as coercion.
The actual distinction here is between positive/negative rights. In OP's case, it's if even if you do have the money to do X thing, you are artifically not allowed to do so. That's a violation of negative rights.
In your case, you're positing that if you couldn't afford it anyways, it's "social credit" if private lenders don't give you help because you have a history of not paying loans back. That's an appeal to positive rights, that people have a active obligation to you, and it's not even from the government but from private lenders. That's a far more contentious assumption that ironically isn't held by the Chinese or the CCP or most of the world for that matter outside of a spoilt corner of the West. And it's a critique that dosen't even land in reality when the Fed does provide easy student loans at a far greater scale than the Chinese Government. A policy that has worked out swimmingly well!
In your case, you're positing that if you couldn't afford it anyways, it's "social credit" if private lenders don't give you help because you have a history of not paying loans back.
Please read it again. It was hypothesized that you could have a hard time getting a college loan if your parents had bad credit. Now, you could construct an argument for why that policy makes sense for credit issuers, such as 'statistics show that 87% of debtors' children go on to become debtors themselves'. But the underlying objection was that you shouldn't need to go into debt to get access to higher education in the first place, ie college should not be insanely expensive and you should be able to manage the academic and financial demands with a part time job.
>But the underlying objection was that you shouldn't need to go into debt to get access to higher education in the first place, ie college should not be insanely expensive and you should be able to manage the academic and financial demands with a part time job.
But we're conflating social credit with credit scores are we? A highly contentious normative claim has little to do with OP's argument and is obviously not a basis for a rebuttal for distinctiying the two systems. Which I would imagine there is a certain intentionality in reaching for highly contrived arguments based on literal hypotheticals rather than accurate description of reality.
> But we're conflating social credit with credit scores are we?
Yes, we are. "Your credit score is social credit." is the first sentence in the original post.
If you want to reject the entire premise of this article/blog post, thats your prerogative, but it's really not that different.
>Yes, we are.
That's what I'm saying here. You're the one who's making strange tangents here to try to rebutt OP.
>but it's really not that different.
No it's not. Because others are explaining why the premise is wrong. You using the normative assumption that "university should accessible" to conflate credit scores with the descriptive reality of social credit.
That first assumption is just an opinion that far from everyone holds, and you can effectively construct hypothetical that credit scores would fail to reach to justify your point. That's not good debate, and I'd be be curious to see what dosent count as "social credit" here.
I don't believe that simply because of the predatory nature of student loans. They'll give them to literally anyone.
In effect, the difference is much less than you imply.
In US they have just one more party than in China. Also 1 person is not automatically 1 vote.
"The United States is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance, they have two of them." -- Julius Nyerere
So you believe there is no difference between what Trump is doing today and what Kamala/Biden might have been doing?
Democracy is about balancing different interests. So yeah, it is hard when the change you want isn't neccessairly what others believe in. You do need to compromise with other groups. Which means that large, coaliation parties that emerge will naturally regress to the mean. But ironically, that also is the suremost sign of plurality that things very much are different from authoritarianism where it pretty is just one interest group trampling over all the others. Well, some here might prefer that, but they are almost definetly not going to be the ones in charge.
Of course individual people judge each other.
In this case a corporation is judging me and then offering those judgments as a service.
Quite a difference.
Exactly. Amazon might approve my returns (or not cancel my account) because I buy more than someone else, but they don't share my purchase/return ratio with any third parties.
You didn’t read the article. There is no single authority social credit system in China.
Once a single authority controls the "score," though, it stops being just social feedback and becomes structural power
Exactly. Unless all these companies are sharing trustworthiness data I can make a new account and start fresh. The centralization of "worthiness" is what concerns me.
How do I make new Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax account to reset my credit score?
Declare bankruptcy and wait 5 or 10 years.
If you are doing any sort of financial transactions you will likely need a new debit/credit card.
And hopefully you've not done anything that is "problematic" there, or ChexSystems will be along to make sure your new bank might want to know not to do business with you, like they did to me, after KeyBank tried to hit me with $405 in overdraft fees in a single day for a series of transactions that, if played chronologically, would never had had me with a balance below $0 at any point, due to "transaction reordering". Chex refused to remove the derogatory note, even after there was a lawsuit and legislation, until I kept escalating with them.
Those "single authorities" you fear already exist in western countries, the mega-corporations that monopolise entire markets.
The western system creates an illusion of choice, which those in power have found ways to manipulate. It has become merely a convenient tool for them to exploit the rest of the population, while the "free market" and "democracy" keep them oblivious to it.
But whatever people like me say, it will be too hard for most of you to accept the reality.
You describe a real problem and an attack vector on democracy that is being used. However you make it sound like everything is already lost when it certainly isn’t.
Thinking of it as an attack vector is the problem with people. I'm saying what you have isn't democracy. Your market isn't free. Voting between the same 2 parties or choosing to buy/rent from the same few mega corporations aren't real choices.
Unless you guys start accepting that and find an alternative solution or system, you'll keep digging yourself deeper into the hole you're in. More debt, more wars, more homelessness, more crime, and no future.
I don't know where you are from (I'm really curious though), but where I live there are more than two political parties and more than a few mega corporations to buy or rent from. You seem to have an extremely distorted idea of what live is like in "western countries".
Can you please share your country of residence? Because in Germany I really don’t feel the choice. There are few political parties, but I don’t feel this variety helps in any way. There are few mega corporations for everything else, just check the list of richest germans.
Edit: I might be another troll, but from last few elections I don’t feel any progress. As an engineer I see continuous offshoring of well paid positions to cheaper EU countries. As self employed electrician I see regulatory and tax madness.
I lived in the UK for 10 years, I've also lived in a number of other countries, from democracies, communist (Vietnam), and varying degrees of democratic and economic freedoms.
I'm aware there are more than exactly 2 parties in the ballots in many western countries. It's not about the numbers, but whether any of those choices really give the people real alternatives, or just different ways to screw the majority of the people.
As you can probably can see from the above interaction, people resort very quickly to ad hominem attacks.
> But whatever people like me say, it will be too hard for most of you to accept the reality.
You seem to think awfully highly of your ability to reason about the world, but I find your claim to be fairly lacking. This all reads like the ramblings of a 19 year old who just discovered Chomsky.
> You seem to think awfully highly of your ability to reason about the world, but I find your claim to be fairly lacking. This all reads like the ramblings of a 19 year old who just discovered Chomsky.
Address the argument rather than engaging in ad hominem.
It really isn't an argument.
You have tons of meaningful economic choices everywhere in American life. You can bank with any bank and look for competing offers for credit to do useful things. For example you can buy a home and shop for a better interest rate by taking an offer for a loan from one lender to another and 9 times out of 10 you'll come away with a better offer. But you can easily not take on a loan and choose to preference flexibility and therefore rent. This housing choice involves a myriad of sub choices about lifestyle, commuting preferences, school adjacency, and other elements you may want to balance. Because US state are often quite different in character and economic and social opportunity you have a ton of dimension along which you can exercise choice.
Someone posting here likely has access to remote work and can meaningfully choose to live in a quite mountain town in West Virginia with satellite internet where you never see more than a few people every week, or you could live in a mid sized city like I do and get involved in neighborhood organizations. Similarly you could move to NYC and live in a small apartment an spend all of your time going out to bars and restaurants. These are SUPER meaningful choices on an individual level.
Can you not bank, if all the banks are colluding against you? And still have the rest of your rights? Can you rent without a four times yearly inspection by the landlord?
> Can you rent without a four times yearly inspection by the landlord?
I've literally never heard of this.
> Can you not bank, if all the banks are colluding against you? And still have the rest of your rights?
All the banks? There are 3,917 commercial banks and 545 savings and loan associations in the US. It's probably the most banks per-capita of any country. You'd be hard press to not be able to even work with a local credit union.
I've been renting for 20 years and only ever had an inspection once.
Show me the Americans stuck in a black hole where nobody processes their payment, banks won't handle their money, they can't vote, they can't travel, etc. because of their deviations?
There are total nutjobs of all walks that are living just fine. There are actual Nazis and commies living just fine.
It's a big country. If our whole society already has dystopian social credit it should be easy to find examples.
Banks talk to each other via ChexSystems/EWS and stick Americans in a black hole where nobody processes their payments and banks won't handle their money. Felons don't have voting rights in 48 states. As far as travel is concerned, being imprisoned makes that hard, but no, we don't (yet) have internal border checks that prevent people from moving from place to place, other than the fact that it's expensive.
Go into a busy gas station in the US. Ask "Hey, is anybody here a felon?" (Doesn't matter if customer or if they're working there)
Only about 6% of Americans have felony records as of 2023.
That's a lot, about 2025 million people! And while many felons deserve their prison terms, those who have been released have an extremely steep hill to climb to get functional in society again. I feel like there's probably some correlation with recidivism rates.
That should be 20-25, not 2025.
So over 20,000,000 people.
> Show me the Americans stuck in a black hole
Stop right there, then you'll see them :) Millions of them
“The only difference between your phone and China's social credit system is that China tells you what they're doing.”
Weird take. There’s a massive difference between a centralized government-run system and a decentralized system run by individual companies.
Credit scores are closest but limited to financial behaviors
Credit scores are used for a lot more than finances. You could argue everything they're used for is tied to money some way, but since everything is being sold to us as a service that doesn't leave much out.
They are also very much not decentralized.
The thing about credit scores is that its deterministic. I.e no matter which ideology you come from, you can have a good credit score with deterministic practices.
Meanwhile, in China, social credit is ideological in nature. I.e if you disagree, even if you are factually correct, you get penalized.
> Credit scores are used for a lot more than finances.
Such as? I'm wracking my brain, but I can't think of a single non-financial situation where someone has asked to pull my credit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_credit_scoring_sy...
housing? security clearance? preemployment checks?
housing is definitely a thing -- arguably the largest / main use of a credit score.
clearances don't apply to the population on the whole -- you have to willing apply to a cleared role. and you're going to be spending the gov's money and handling secrets, it makes sense to see if they can handle said money, cuz if they can't they'll sell secrets
I've never heard of a pre-emplyment check requiring a credit score. sexually harassing a fellow employee and getting fired will not end up on your credit as long as you can pay bills, and even if you can't, the lack of bills is what shows up, not bad work behavior
Housing is categorically a financial transaction.
Clearances are a far broader investigation, but to the extent that they look at your credit, I believe it is also to establish your financial status, which is most definitely a significant component of the clearance process.
Preemployment: I admit to not having started a new job in many years... Is there any evidence whatsoever you can present that companies regularly reject candidates not in a position of financial trust for having poor credit?
Hey I see you're quibbling on details, maybe because you feel determined to win an argument to save face or something. I must point out that nobody here cares whether you were wrong, and digging in your heels even after multiple people provided multiple examples just drags the conversation to unproductive places.
As I said in the first reply, there is very little behavior you cannot tie money to in some way, so you can go down this path forever of trying to find a reason why credit scores are totally valid proxies for all human behavior, and you would be technically correct while missing the point entirely.
> Hey I see you're quibbling on details, maybe because you feel determined to win an argument to save face or something.
Ha. Pot, meet kettle.
Two out of the three examples given were not "tied to money in some way", they are examples where the creditworthiness of the person is central to the transaction.
What's your point? If people will extend you credit for things like an apartment (since there is risk you will stop paying) or for a car, it seems sensible to perform credit checks then. What else are scores used for that don't intersect with someone trusting you with their property?
Again, missing the point - it is a system that has become a centralized digital scoring mechanism. This is dangerous because it centralizes power, giving institutions that are not even under democratic control the power to punish individuals or groups as they see fit across all sectors of life.
This is sensational. You said
> Credit scores are used for a lot more than finances.
but you can't provide a concrete example.
> giving institutions that are not even under democratic control
Which institutions? Banks? Landlords? Other people trusting you with their property?
> the power to punish individuals or groups as they see fit across all sectors of life.
Where? How?
Many examples were given, please read the linked article. And again, in a society where everything is monetized, you can argue that creditworthiness is a just proxy for anything. So if basic water and electric access or housing access can be, so can anything else where you pay money for a service. You could argue dating apps should have access to credit scores and I wouldn't be surprised if some tried.
> Which institutions?
Credit bureaus...
What do you think credit is? Anytime someone gives you something and you pay later on, that's on credit. They have to trust you to some extent. If every vendor had to perform due diligence of every potential client I would expect things to get even more expensive or just altogether deny service to people outright.
Then in a subscription economy- where having a poor credit score can result in loss of housing, insurance, and more- opaque unelected beureaus are wielding tremendous power. Perhaps they are not evil or even unfair, but if you'll recall the context of TFA, it bears many of the same failure modes of a social credit system, and will only be as good as the people regulating it.
But it will always be opaque, unelected bureaus, wouldn't it? If credit bureaus were dissolved tomorrow, the decision to extend credit would go back to the opaque, unelected operator of the business.
Is it reasonable to expect concrete examples of ephemeral decision making that happens within opaque organizations, given that the overwhelming majority are not held to explicit disclosure of their decision, let alone a verified paper trail held to such a rigorous standard to count for reasonable proof?
The best you can hope for from a potential employer is to be told they hired someone else. The default experience in America seems to be that they'll simply ghost you.
> Citizens are tracked for every jaywalking incident, points are deducted for buying too much alcohol
The first time I visited China I was under 21 but I had heard the drinking age was 18 so I went to a convenience store to buy a beer. Person running the till was probably 12 and didn’t say a word or ask for ID. Unbelievably lax compared to the US sometimes.
I generally think it’s easier and more effective to track the outputs rather than the inputs: you don’t need to track how many beers they buy, just outlaw public intoxication. And enforce that law.
I am not Chinese, my wife is though.
I think, at least from my interpretation of it from being in China and having Chinese family, that something like underage drinking is seen more as a family issue, than a legal issue. What stops the 16 year old from drinking? The fact that their friends / family will see them being drunk, and think less of the person and their family. A 16 year old being drunk in public is family issue. Sure, the cops will intervene at some point, but China has very little drunken / raucous public behavior than the west does.
> but China has very little drunken / raucous public behavior than the west does
they were big on the opium, as I recall
> they were big on the opium, as I recall
That's what happens when you get systematically manipulated by the biggest empire in the world smuggling in illegal drugs...
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> points are deducted for buying too much alcohol
What if I want to buy copious amounts for a party? Or there was a discount so you want to stock up? This seems a bit shortsighted, it is not always the case that if you buy something then you need to consume it right away.
> The only difference between your phone and China's social credit system is that China tells you what they're doing.
And that I have a choice of phones, or even no phone at all, and none of my phone options is legally permitted to execute me.
Further down, the article argues that switching costs between private companies are ‘enormous.’ I don’t know if they are that large, but however painful it is to switch from Apple to Google, it’s orders of magnitude easier than moving between nation-states.
It notes that private systems ‘increasingly collaborate.’ Sure, and that can be a problem. But there’s a huge difference between a patchwork of systems which collaborate and a pervasive, inescapable State.
Finally, it notes that governments purchase private data. Sure, but are they using that data to restrict fundamental freedoms? They may be (Canada’s restriction of economic rights for folks who donated to protesters comes to mind — although I don’t think that was actually enabled by purchasing private ‘social credit’ data).
> Utah's House passed a law banning social credit systems, despite none existing in America.
Does the article contend that Americans live in a social credit system, or that none exists in America? It can’t have it both ways!
Finally, the article leads with a definition of ‘social credit’ as evolving beyond an original definition of ‘distributing industry profits to consumers to increase purchasing power.’ Whatever that might mean, it seems completely irrelevant to the meaning of the phrase under discussion, as relevant as mentioning in a discussion on O.J. Simpson that ‘O.J.’ can mean ‘orange juice’ (in Mr. Simpson’s case, it stood for ‘Orenthal James.’
> is legally permitted to execute me.
Plenty of cops have shot/executed innocent people, and were declared not guilty due to qualified immunity.
Plus, a phone in China can't execute you either. It'd be the police goons who do that.
You cannot live without a phone number in China, your phone number is basically your Social Security number and it is used everywhere. Side note, I have never seen a (street)cop with a gun in China.
> is legally permitted to execute me.
Luckily not a single US citizen was ever executed by the US government
We sure do, it seems like a natural progression of a free market. The corporations want to know our worth before they deal with us.
I'm speaking from a Swedish perspective but for a long time already we had these "credit checks", where a company can quickly order a check on a customer to see if they're eligible for paying via invoice, or installments. And the consumer gets a letter in the mail notifying them of each credit check and who requested it. They basically see if you have any large debts, and what your reported income is.
But now some companies have gone even further and actually invented a credit score for us, that you have to pay them a subscription fee to see.
All this is an organic progression driven by corporations who simply want to know if consumers are worth their time and risk.
the entire first world has credit checks. china is doing behaviour checks
> the entire first world has credit checks
No it doesn't.
give me a country in the first world that doesnt have credit checks
France
interesting. you dont get a credit rating but you have an effective credit check. nobody is giving money out to strangers hoping itll get paid back, theyre all checking your credit history - a mortgage is credit, mortgage defaults still count against your borrowing ability. Its a credit check in all but name
Basically what I was saying a week ago about the rise of China as an empire: we already have this at home, and it’s worse because we don’t bother regulating it.
Look, social credit is neither a new concept nor is it destined to be some Orwellian/Black Mirror/Authoritarian tool that keeps undesirables enslaved in low-wage work or targeted for “reeducation” - that’s a decision we allow Governments or Corporations to make on our behalf by refusing to bother regulating these systems or holding bad actors accountable.
The sooner we accept that this is possible, that it’s already here in many cases, the sooner we can begin negotiating regulations in good faith with one another. Maybe it’s placing limits on the data corporations can gather and retain, or maybe it’s preventing the government from acquiring private data without transparent judicial warrants tied to crimes. Maybe it’s something else entirely!
All I know is the current status quo enriches Capital while harming people, governments, and Democracy. I think that’s bullshit, and we should do something about it.
It's actually worse than in China in other ways too:
- China: records are centralized - Elsewhere: records are fragmented
Although Meta is trying to "fix" that last part of course.
TBF it took China decades to centralize the data. Back in the 2010s you can technically marry two persons in different provinces because the system was fragmented along the provinces. I think they finally solved the problem 10 years ago.
China is actually far more fragmented than some people thought. The central government isn’t that all powerful. I mean even today, let alone 20 years ago. It is actually the big businesses like Ali/Tencent that are centralizing the data they collected — exactly like what US corporations are doing.
But I remember some story about Ali CEO dissappeared for a while... So, not exactly like US corporations.
Ah yes, for good or bad.
"Social Credit" doesn't exist in China the way it's portrayed in Western media. It's really just a way of enforcing civil judgments, so you aren't living high on the hog after telling your creditors that you're broke.
Depending on the type of bankruptcy declared, debtor exams happen here.
That's just isn't true. That's financial credit, social credit is more nefarious as you don't know what counts for or against you.
Why do you think sms "2fa" is suddenly so popular with banks and other fintechs, despite things like passkeys and u2f, you know things that _actually_ prevent people from breaking into accounts, have existed forever?
Any business vaguely money related knows exactly who you are because of KYC requirements. They don't need to ask for you phone number when they already have your full name, address, birthday, and SSN.
> Any business vaguely money related knows exactly who you are because of KYC requirements.
They also will happily give your money to any thief pretending to be you, and then blame you for their mistake.
The bank would be responsible for getting the user their money back under US law, actually - even if it was the user’s fault due to bad security
Victims can spend hundreds of hours over the course of years navigating corporate and legal bureaucracies before their account balances and credit scores are restored. The system absolutely makes a bank error the victim’s problem to solve. Guilty until proven innocent.
Unless you’re in a jurisdiction in which they’re liable for that mistake.
I don't think there's any jurisdiction that puts the identity theft victim on the hook for fraud. Yes, you might get threatening letters or dings on your credit report/score while the issue gets sorted out, but that's not the same as being "blamed" for the identity theft, any more than someone wrongly accused of a crime is "blamed" for the mistaken identity.
There's probably no jurisdiction that says the victim is on the hook, but plenty where the victim is on the hook by default and it's not possible for them to exercise their theoretical rights.
Try convincing your customers to all get a YubiKey... it's not fun. The majority of internet users are able to read an SMS on their phone and copy a code, however.
HSBC used to distribute hardware keys to its retail customers just a few years ago
These keys eventually stop working, need a new battery, etc. Instead of the onus being on the customer to "pull" a new one of these keys, it would be better if you "push" them ( mail a new one proactively every January 1st, give a $20 one-time service credit for activating it, and $5 a month credit for continuing to use it )
I had a hardware token for paypal 20 years ago
They could at least have it as an option. But, for some mysterious reason, of all the services I need a login for, banks tend to be the only ones at this point that don't support it at all.
seems like a small price to pay to prevent coughing up literal millions in fraud payments every year
Passkeys are pretty new - most the major platforms didn't gain support until 2023.
2023 was fifty years ago
TOTP was definitely common decades ago. E-Trade for example supported it before KYC was mandated.
SMS 2FA stops enough would-be criminals and checks the compliance box. They don't lose enough money to sophisticated thefts to do something better.
SMS 2FA is good enough for most people most of the time. It's very bad at preventing high-skill targeted attacks against individuals, but it's perfectly good at preventing mass brute-force attacks.
It's popular because it solves the problem (not ALL problems, but the one they're trying to solve) and it's easy and low-barrier to implement and use.
Passkeys shouldn't even exist
I come across as rather "stuffy," here, but you won't find instances of me fighting with others (a mild exchange is the most I'll do), or harassing folks.
There's a reason: I used to be a real asshole troll, in the UseNet days (Don't listen to the folks with rose-colored glasses, telling you that things were better in those days; it was really bad).
I feel that I need to atone for that. I'm not particularly concerned whether anyone else gives me credit (indeed, it seems to have actually earned me more enemies, here, than when I was a combative jerk).
I do it because I need to do it for myself. I feel that we are best able to be "Productive members of Society," when we do things because we have developed a model of personal Integrity.
I can't really prove this but I'm pretty sure your ability to get a refund on Amazon is based on their scoring of you. If you're fairly large purchaser with infrequent returns they just approve your return no questions asked, but if you return a lot for your volume they put a lot of barriers in place.
At times it makes me wary of protecting my score (which may not even actually exist), and I'll often just take the loss rather than return something.
While I broadly agree with the article's point, this part stood out to me as the author not really knowing that much about Utah:
> the image [of overt social-credit tech in public] is so powerful that Utah's House passed a law banning social credit systems, despite none existing in America.
More like the LDS Church banned social credit systems that would compete with theirs lol
I don't think this is a very good article. She tries to address the primary rebuttal:
> You may argue there's a fundamental difference between corporate tracking and government surveillance. Corporations compete; you can switch services. Governments have monopoly power and can restrict fundamental freedoms.
By saying:
> This misses three key points: First, switching costs for major platforms are enormous. Try leaving Google's ecosystem or abandoning your LinkedIn network. Second, corporate social credit systems increasingly collaborate. Bad Uber ratings can affect other services; poor credit scores impact everything from insurance to employment. Third, Western governments already access this corporate data through legal channels and data purchases.
This is weak and handwavy.
* People leave Google's ecosystem all the time; it's practically sport here on HN.
* "Bad Uber ratings can affect other services" - is this theoretical or has this actually happened? Without specific citation, I'm calling bullshit.
* Poor credit ratings make it hard to get credit, yep. However, this area is heavily regulated and really only comes into play when you're asking someone to extend credit to you. It won't stop you getting on a train.
* It's not clear what governments are doing with corporate data. She needs to be a lot more specific about the harms here.
Also, saying that social credit systems in China are "limited to small pilot cities" is not particularly reassuring. The pilot programs are what we should freak out about. When it's rolled out en masse it's too late.
> People leave Google's ecosystem all the time; it's practically sport here on HN.
That supports the original argument if anything. If "Here's how I did X" generates interest on HN, it's quite likely that X is very challenging for the average person.
The corporate stuff gets weird too as ... what does leaving entail exactly?
There's no sure thing to be an alternative that is actually different.
I'm reminded of the SCOTUS arguments about cellphones and tracking, or just technology in general (the actual case(s) aren't so relevant as the arguments).
The argument at one point was that since you're carrying a cellphone or using a computer in some way that tracks your location you made a choice and that end result might be to just give up your right to privacy / location data because you chose to carry a cellphone.
Fortunately a few judges recognized that cell phones aren't just an accessory you pick and choose, they're part of daily life now, to operate in society you generally will need / want one, accordingly you should be able to do so without giving up some rights.
Unfortunately, the same arguments didn't carry over into topics like binding arbitration and so on ...
Just to add, if you fall into certain risk profiles, some of which you are born into and you can never get out of, it becomes incredibly hard to get basic banking services. Banks will unilaterally close your account. Payment apps will deny you applications and none of them have to explain why.
The rules of the financial credit system are mostly opaque and work through indirect levers. This AML social credit system also totally global, extending anywhere that the FATF has sway.
Interesting article. On the one hand, it provides insides into how the project actually worked in china, which I didn't know. That's interesting.
But it misses a huge nuance on the whole "dystopian" thing. The main thing about "social score bad" takes is that the government will use that scoring. It's not private <-> private. Everything the author mentions about the various scoring in the US (and EU for that matter, although to a lesser extent in some cases) is between you and private institutions. The government does not "track" or "access" or "use" those 3rd party scores.
It's a bit like 1st amendment in the US. You have the right of free speech with regards to the government. That means the government cannot punish you for your speech. But that says nothing about your relationship with private parties. If you go to a government institution and tell them their boss sux, in theory you shouldn't be punished for that, and they'll keep serving you. But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar. Or any private property. Tell them their boss sux, and you might not get service.
So yeah, there are lots of 3rd party rating services. But they're mainly between you and those 3rd parties. The government mainly stays out.
You're right that the private vs. public is a very important distinction here.
On the other hand, "private" has the downside of falling into unaccountable monopolies/duopolies. You don't have a individual choice about having a credit score, or whether banks can use it, or with which companies. You have no control, there's no accountability.
If credit scores were run by the government, then in theory democratic processes could regulate them in terms of accuracy, privacy, who was allowed to access them, for what purposes, etc. There would be actual accountability to the people, in what that there isn't when it comes to private companies.
While you say "lots of 3rd party rating services... are mainly between you and those 3rd parties", many are not. They're between one 3rd party (a bank, a landlord), and another (Equifax, Experian).
The ones that are, they're eBay, Uber, etc. Which seem more obviously defensible as being privately run.
Your "in theory" is doing a lot of work there. So much work. Have you heard about no-fly lists? The latest ICE actions? The Red Scare? Giving the government MORE power is almost never the answer.
> Giving the government MORE power is almost never the answer.
I've also heard of food safety regulation, airline safety, public schools, libraries, science funding, workplace safety regulation, building safety regulation, the list goes on.
Giving the government more power is quite often the answer. Sometimes it's the best solution, sometimes it isn't. But it's definitely not "almost never", that much we can be sure of.
> The main thing about "social score bad" takes is that the government will use that scoring. It's not private <-> private.
No: The dystopia comes from helplessness and inability to appeal injustice, regardless of who/what manages the system or how it is legally constructed.
We must take care to distinguish between the problem we want to avoid versus the mechanism we hope will avoid it... especially when there are reasons to believe that mechanism is not a reliable defense.
> But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar. Or any private property. Tell them their boss sux, and you might not get service.
The difference here isn't because they're "private", but because you implicitly assume you will have alternatives, other local bakeries or bars which are reliably neutral to the spat.
Things become very different if they're all owned by Omni Consumer Products or subscribed to Blacklist as a Service.
> parties. If you go to a government institution and tell them their boss sux, in theory you shouldn't be punished for that, and they'll keep serving you. But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar. Or any private property. Tell them their boss sux, and you might not get service
Except, of course, it's not that simple. There are a host of behaviors and traits that private businesses are not allowed to consider when choosing whether or not to provide you products or services. These carve-outs to free association exist because at any given time a large enough portion of the population exists of bigots who choose their associations based on characteristics that the rest of society has decided are not acceptable grounds for refusing service. So we compel service if we think not providing it is sufficiently shitty and harmful. Something similar happens when a private institution, or class of institution, is so critical to life or participation in society that exclusion serves as a form of semi-banishment. Such institutions are put under even stricter standards for association.
The idea that social credit or similar are totally fine and peachy so long as it's "only" private institutions using it is a fantasy entertained by rugged individualists who naively narrow their analysis of power dynamics to "big government bad" and discount their dependency on extremely powerful private organizations.
As others have noted, the bad thing about social credit is that any one particular institution does it - its that the social credit is mandated by unaccountable entities with lopsided amounts of power. It doesn't matter if its a government that's doing it, or a company, or a cabal of companies, or even if it was literally a single person - the undue coercion is the problem.
The relevant freedom is the freedom to opt-out.
It's much harder to opt-out of a government than a privately-crafted social scoring system. But some become so large that you can't de-facto opt-out, not without significant consequences to your quality of life... And that becomes a problem.
As an exercise, can you construct a version of private social credit that supports opt-out and isn't dystopian? I posit that any such system would interpret and opt-out as an effective negative score, heavily disincentivizing that option, and making it de-facto mandatory.
That's mostly irrelevant. If both Google and Apple banned you it would be difficult to get stuff done. No iPhone, no Android, yes you could find some hacker phone but for many people that would not be enough. Similarly, if all the banks dropped you because your shared social credit said "don't do business with this person".
> Your credit score doesn't just determine loan eligibility; it affects where you can live, which jobs you can get, and how much you pay for car insurance.
> LinkedIn algorithmically manages your professional visibility based on engagement patterns, posting frequency, and network connections, rankings that recruiters increasingly rely on to filter candidates.
>That's mostly irrelevant. If both Google and Apple banned you it would be difficult to get stuff done. No iPhone, no Android, yes you could find some hacker phone but for many people that would not be enough.
Luckily neither google nor apple does any hardcore KYC (yet) so such bans can be avoided with a new phone + phone number. Inconvenient? Yes. Being perma-locked out of digital services for the rest of your life? Hardly.
>But the same does not extend to a private bakery. Or a bar.
I always found it strange that they are not allowed to discriminate based on gender/religion etc but they are allowed to discriminate based on if you are likable or not. As in they can refuse to serve you as long as they don't mention it's based on anything that's illegal to discriminate against.
Why is that strange?
You are making my point though. You'd have a problem if you'd have to fake your religion or your sexual orientation so you get served, but it's fine if we do it with how "likable" we are.
How am I making your point?
That most people cannot even understand where the problem is.
Downvotes make my point as well. I do not want to say the right thing so people aren't offended so I am granted access (or updoots). I'd rather deal with robots for this reason. Spending my money somewhere should be enough to serve me, like me or not. I think it's crazy that I even have to explain it...
The government staying out of it makes it worse. The companies have so much power over your life without any oversight.
On the other hand, the government staying out of it makes it better, because if you're banned by the main taxi firm or housing market or [insert rhetorical third thing], there remains the chance of using some sketchy unpopular alternative service, and you're not in violation of the law if you find such a option.
I’m reminded of the punishment that Kevin Mitnick received, which included a ban on using any computing device more advanced than a landline phone. I understand that he was agreed to this, but one cannot agree to sell themselves into slavery[0], and yet these supervised release conditions are considered legal and acceptable to most folks not subject to them. Plea deals are a pox on society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick#Arrest,_convicti...
> Mitnick was released from prison on January 21, 2000. During his supervised release period, which ended on January 21, 2003, he was initially forbidden to use any communications technology other than a landline telephone.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_agreement
The sketchiness of those alternative services frequently means you are in violation of the law by using them. IP law on its own for film and tv is a series of monopolies granted to pieces of content and if the owner doesn’t want to sell it to you, Pirate Bay is not a legal alternative.
Regardless these arguments about whether it’s bad based on if the government is involved or not is ridiculous given how interwoven our corporations and government are. Like just doing business with any company strips your 4th amendment rights on that data.
There’s no sane way to argue that they have a clear delineation throughout society
The clear delineation is the police and prisons, and courts. If the government is a corporation that happens to control the police, despite having that power it still isn't supposed to have everything all sewn up, because laws and courts and institutional resistance prevent it from doing anything it likes. This system is theoretical and supported mostly by wishing, but used to work for quite a long time. Meanwhile the actual corporations don't even have proper police forces and would struggle to get you put in actual prison for violating their rules.
> Meanwhile the actual corporations don't even have proper police forces and would struggle to get you put in actual prison for violating their rules.
You should visit some megacorp campuses and then rethink this view. If you actually believe it then I dare you to do something against their rules while in one of their offices and be marveled at how many people pour out of the literal walls dressed in clothing colored based on their specific job, and then tell us about how they lack police forces
They have to do it by proxy, though, ultimately. You can run away from their territory and be safe, until they think of an actual crime to accuse you of. In my naivety I don't believe megacorps carry out extrajudicial punishments, apart from banning people. They have to go through the law, and try to get people punished, not carry it out themselves.
Im not sure I was clear
>They have to do it by proxy, though, ultimately. You can run away from their territory and be safe, until they think of an actual crime to accuse you of.
This is not true, they have their own private security forces, with guns, who will seize you on their property. Managing to run away from an organization's controlled territory to be safe from them, applies to public 0governments too
> The government staying out of it makes it worse.
That's because all that power turns the companies into paragovernamental organizations. Anything with the power to gatekeep human rights is a government.
> private <-> private
the more I think about it, the more I think this is the core of a rePUBLIC
there's a bunch of private actors, the "citizens" who get together to form the republic, and thereby establish "the public space" aka the commons
This was similar to my take. What's dystopian about how the Chinese system was/is/was rumored to be was that it was the government doing the tracking and scoring.
Which ends up harsher than what private entities do as a form of moralistic restrictions than are dubiously related to one's ability to pay back loans. I don't see how barring one from using long distance travel is going to help them better pay back loans beyond punitive punishment.
at this point, "doing that" is called having a "CRM" system.
it's all part of how there's widely available social media technology and academic graph languages.
of course the government is going to track the citizens, it's all a matter of how, how much, and to what end.
The wave of CRM is CDP. Customer Data Platform. The key is that it isn't just your basic account data, but all the behavioral data across various system interactions both online and off (if applicable). Shopping Cart abandonment email campaigns are pretty benign. But the outrage around the targeted ad for baby/pregnancy products that made the news from Target a few years ago is just the start for what more insightful data signals can give you. I don't really care about most retailers knowing what I buy. I do care about them reselling that data to big aggregators that know everything I buy, where I go and when, and join that what sites I visit and what mail I get. It is too much and can be abused.
> The government does not "track" or "access" or "use" those 3rd party scores.
This is absolutely untrue. The government is a customer of all of these companies, and can whip up a chorus of brownshirts to loudly complain about any objections to the government doing this. There's a reason everybody who talks about speech should know what a long obsolete device called a "pen register" does. It's what we now refer to as a public-private partnership.
> It's a bit like 1st amendment in the US.
It is, in that the government can pay or blackmail* companies into censoring your speech, and doesn't have to bother with prior restraint.**
-----
[*] ...through selective application of what is usually antitrust legislation.
[**] ...which the 1st Amendment never mentions, but has been bound to it by people and judges who wanted to censor speech about communism and birth control.
I have zero of the apps on the phone that the author mentions.
> The only difference between your phone and China's social credit system is that China tells you what they're doing. We pretend our algorithmic reputation scores are just “user experience features.” At least Beijing admits they're gamifying human behavior.
Um no. That is not the only difference by a LONG SHOT.
If I want to evaluate whether or not I want to involve myself with you, in any capacity, then that negotiation is between you and me. I can ask for references. I can ask for a credit check. I can go pay for a police background check. I can read public review sites. Or, I might decide that because you listen to country & western music you're not a real person and I can't know you and leave the vetting at that.
Consequentially, however, that dealing impacts our relationship and none other. You might find other people who don't care about the same "social credit criteria" that I do and you might find yourself dealing with them instead.
That's kind of the beauty of this thing we call "freedom." Anyone gets to choose who they want to deal with (or not) and make their own individual choices. The "systems" they opt in are always opt in (or at least they should be).
The difference between a government "social credit" system and individuals (businesses or people) vetting other individuals based on their own chosen requirements is force.
A government system mandates this across society in a broad authoritarian sweep. Get on the bad side of "the party" and now you are a social pariah and will not have any luck finding anyone who wants to deal with you, country music lovers be damned, because it is forced upon everyone. A business has no choice but to apply "the" system because if they don't they get punished. It is not opt-in, it is a one-sized-fits-all mandated by force of law system that removes individual discretion and choice from the equation.
That's a LOT different than just "we're upfront about it."
Furthermore, while I appreciate when authoritarians are honest about their violations of basic human rights and freedoms, that doesn't suddenly make what they are doing OK. I don't want to deal with a thief who is honest about their thievery any more than I want to deal with one who tries to hide it.
> If I want to evaluate whether or not I want to involve myself with you, in any capacity, then that negotiation is between you and me.
Congratulations on opting out of your business relationship with Experian, then.
What a weird straw-man. I said that, on an individual by individual basis, people get to decide what criteria are important to them and can discriminate (or not) accordingly. That if one entity doesn't want to work with another, there are lots of other permutations that an environment of liberty allows for. As opposed to a government mandated system where everyone is forced into the same criteria under threat of penalty.
I did not say, or even suggest, that the absence of a social credit system somehow results in everyone wanting to do business with you under any circumstance, and that you can opt out of the criteria that someone else uses to decide if they want to associate with you.
I really cannot understand how you were able to twist the meaning of what I had written so dramatically. Or are you just trolling?
> individuals (businesses or people)
I think here is the difference between your and authors optics. You count businesses (does this include large corporations/organizations?) as individuals.
You misinterpreted my language. What I meant, for clarity, was "individual entities." Be that individual persons or individual businesses.
It's the difference between one party wanting to distance themselves from you, due to their own "individual" reasons, or all of society by decree under penalty of law.
The article sounds like a damage control
How do you mean?
Well it is basically pure apologeticism for the social credit system mixed with whataboutism.
Sounds like CCP cope to me.
This is a great article. It reminds me of a discussion I had about Russia; in Russia (and China) you are essentially told what you are not allowed to discuss freely... In the west, you are told that you can discuss anything but, in reality, the consequences for discussing certain topics are significant... You only find out once you start using your so-called 'free speech'. In the west, 'free-speech' isn't free at all; it's actually very expensive... It's a cost that's increasingly difficult for honest people to avoid; you have to kind of guess where the boundaries are... While the circle of permissible speech keeps shrinking. The circle has shrunk to a point where a lot of honest topics find themselves outside of the circle.
It's difficult to be an intelligent, honest person in the west because of this.
It's like most people don't understand reality. Everything they believe just happens to fit within the circle of allowed beliefs. They are in alignment with the system and benefiting from it (often unwittingly). It's only when the circle of allowed beliefs shrinks that they start to notice what I described above.
I suspect a lot of people were 'awakened' after the most recent Israel/Palestine conflict because that shrunk the circle of allowed topics a lot. A lot of the people who were morally aligned with the ESG agenda before now found themselves partly outside the circle and you could see the agenda shift. Terms like 'diversity' which were originally conceived primarily as racial and gender-based started to drift towards 'neuro-diversity' as a response to the discomfort created by the shrinking circle having shrunk a little too fast...
If you're outside the circle, you can see it much more clearly. The worst part is that you didn't even get to choose your fate. Kind of ironic as the west prides itself on individual choice. The circle shrinks slowly until you suddenly find yourself caught well outside of it when the consequences have accumulated beyond a certain threshold.
It's crazy right? We've reached a threshold were even basic anti-war activism is de facto prohibited. In the UK, acting or even PROTESTING against the war machinery will get you jailed for 15 years if not deported.
If it is going to happen anyway the goal should be to design it properly.
disagree on the first line "credit score is social credit". the chinese also have credit scores ya dummy
If you’re going to be commenting a lot, consider reading the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Specifically all of the parts about commenting. Looking at your posts it seemed like you had no idea these exist.
I agree with the article's assessment that the US also has a social credit scores, but:
- it's not at all the same as an aggregated government-assigned score (though we may be on the road to that)
- the take of "things are so bad in China and basically the same here" are very naive; live in China for 5+ years and I guarantee you'll have a different view
oops - I mistakenly omitted the word "not"; meant to say "things are not so bad in China and basically the same here"
Regarding the second point: I know right? If a lot more peeps were to have a chat with the average chinese netizen, I think it would shatter a lot of misconceptions about the People's Republic.
The problem if you’d have to live there quite a while and becomes friends and earn peoples trust before they’ll confide in you what they really think. That’s why so many of these takes about China are wrong.
>credit score
Non-existent in the country I live in. There's a national registry of debtors and people end up there for a very good reason.
>Linkedin, Amazon
There's no reason to consider these to be essential services, I am not using either and I'm doing perfectly fine in life.
>Instagram
LOL
>Uber, Airbnb
There are several copycats, traditional taxis and hotels are still a thing and public transportation or your own car are valid alternatives
What even is this article? I skimmmed the rest of it and it just seems like the crux of the article is about proving how China's systems are actually fine while ommitng the fact that their systems are mandated by the state. Is Chinese propaganda what makes it to the front page of HN nowadays?
> Is Chinese propaganda what makes it to the front page of HN nowadays?
Yep. Because USA is a country which still ostensibly has free speech norms in its society, so you could get human rights commentary one day, foreign propaganda another day (even though the federal Trump government arrests political opponents), where meanwhile many human rights movements are banned in China. As the Soviets would say in the early 20th century, "And you are lynching Negroes". False equivalence is the bread and butter of authoritarian propaganda. By equating the two, we may fail to distinguish right from wrong and slide further toward authoritarianism.
But by virtue of "tolerance of intolerance" principle and the general lack of editorial quality of much Chinese propaganda, I see no reason why most of it need be present on HN.
This is a predominantly American website with American users. Your experience is of little relevance here.
The author appears to be Chinese and the articles they have written on the site have something to do with China
If nationality would matter here I would be geoblocked and yet I am not.
I never understood why employers do credit checks, seems like that's an overreach and should be illegal.
At least in the Chinese pilots you know what counts against you
We often think of "social credit" as something far away, like in China. But it’s worth noticing how our own systems are starting to blend with state power. Just today, Graham Linehan, a comedy writer, was arrested by five UK police officers over social media posts when entering the country.
We may not call it social credit, but in practice we’re already building it.
I have the choice to not use LinkedIn or uber
I agree with the sentiment but I have seen multiple job applications that have a mandatory 'apply with LinkedIn' button. Of course I could always choose not to apply, but I don't want to do that.
Same thing when some websites require you to sign in with Google- there is no Google user score yet but they can ban you from their platform.
Weirdly, banks in China also use statistical algorithms when assessing their loan books!
China is controlled by the government. The US is controlled by banks.
The reality is, there's always an entity that controls a society. If not culture or religion, it will be the government or shadow government, or corporations and banks.
Never forget that the main reason WFH was attacked in such a coordinated effort within a short period of time was because it threatened banks' business interests and model. Who's going to pay banks if landlords (commercial and residential) can't milk renters' money? It's a food chain and on top of it are the banks, and at the bottom are you, the average worker living paycheck to paycheck. WFH disrupted that and shifted the power to you. You don't have to rent/own downtown, so you (landlord) don't have to pay hefty property taxes. As a result, the government is losing, banks are losing, landlords will finally have to find real jobs instead of leeching off others, and all of that was a nightmare to them, and thus the push for hybrid or whatever under the fake claims it promotes cooperation and teamwork.
illogical, you are confusing quality assessment with the concept of dictatorship
This article reminds me of those silly "Capitalism is the real super intelligent AI" or "is a burrito a sandwich" arguments from a few years ago. Saying a "system with the explicit goal of the government judging legal behavior to try and change it and punish you if you don't" is the same thing as "private entities deciding on how or even if they want to interact with you" is just stretching the definition too far to be taken seriously. By that argument me deciding I don't want to read more by this author is a social credit system.
>Your Uber rating doesn't affect your mortgage rate, and your LinkedIn engagement doesn't determine your insurance premiums. But the infrastructure is being built to connect these systems. We're building the technical and cultural foundations that could eventually create comprehensive social credit systems.
She doesn't provide any citation for this
> Corporate platforms increasingly share reputation data. Financial services integrate social media analysis into lending decisions
Again she doesn't provide any citation for this, but more importantly she doesn't explain why she thinks it's wrong. Someone who posts "Feeling lucky so headed to the craps table" probably shouldn't be lent to, if only for their sake
I think there is no doubt that we are dropping lower and lower into a dystopian world and most of us are actually fine with it, because it doesn’t come upon us suddenly but evolves along the decades.
Gotta get my FU money as quickly as possible and go live in the woods.
Great article and good point. I never articulated this as good as the article but, I've always assumed that when I use Uber/Lyft and rate a driver, if I give too many drivers a low rating I'll be banned from the app. I'm not saying I will actually be banned, I have no idea. Rather, I'm saying I fear I will be banned.
I mean why not? Any customer that effectively makes the company look bad can be banned by the company.
I bring up Uber/Lyft in particular because 99/100 drivers break traffic laws. The speed (10-15 miles per hour above the speed limit), they tailgate which is both putting me in danger, putting other car in danger, and is illegal (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...). They'll do things like stop a full car and half past the waiting point at an intersection (have pictures of this). In other words, there a line behind which a car is supposed to wait. Then there's a crosswalk. They've stopped the car so it's past the crosswalk while waiting for the light to change. They turn right on red when the sign says no right on red. Etc....
I'd give them all 1 star out of 5 except for the fear mentioned above. That my "social credit" with the company would have them drop me as a customer.
All of this sounds like normal driving behavior to me? I see it every time I commute to work. I think if you want a driver who doesn't do this you'd need a real commercially registered driver with specific training.
Being normal doesn't mean "not bad". If I'm rating a driver, then I'm rating him. It's irrelevant how other drivers behave.
It is, but it shouldn't be. We don't pay all of the other drivers on the road, but we do pay for the uber we're in. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone performing a commercial driving act to need to do so safely and correctly.
I think it was a mistake too, but we let Uber use random people without a CDL do this job, so I can hardly say it's surprising they drive like the average?
Taxis admittedly aren't that much more careful but a professional chauffeur probably fits the bill, and charges accordingly.
why even have traffic laws then?
There's no logical sense for Uber to ban or punish you for giving drivers low scores. The only reason would be if drivers gave you a low score.
Asking a random LLM to give reasons they might do this. Again, I'm not saying they do this. I'm saying my fear that they might isn't unfounded
* To Prevent Unfair and Unfounded Ratings: Uber could argue that some riders misuse the rating system. They might give a driver a low rating for reasons outside of the driver's control, such as traffic, a bad mood, or a simple misunderstanding. This policy would be presented as a way to protect drivers from being unfairly penalized, which could affect their livelihood.
* To Combat "Rating Terrorism" or Coercion: A rider might threaten a driver with a low rating to get a free ride, demand an unscheduled stop, or force them to violate a rule. By banning riders who frequently give low scores, Uber would be taking a stance against this kind of behavior, ensuring that the rating system is used as a genuine feedback mechanism, not a tool for coercion.
* To Discourage "Troll" Behavior: Some users might be incentivized to give consistently low ratings just to cause trouble or get attention, a practice often referred to as "trolling." This policy would be framed as a way to filter out users who are not participating in the community in good faith and are instead just trying to cause problems.
* To Maintain Driver Confidence in the Platform: Drivers rely on their ratings to maintain their account status. If they feel that riders are unfairly giving them low scores without consequence, they may become disillusioned with the platform and switch to a competitor. Banning riders who give consistently low ratings would be a way to show drivers that Uber has their back.
* To Improve Service by Identifying and Removing "Unreasonable" Riders: Uber could frame this as a data-driven approach. They might claim that their internal data shows a small percentage of riders who give low ratings to virtually every driver, regardless of the quality of the service. By removing these outliers, they would be improving the overall efficiency and health of the marketplace for the vast majority of drivers and riders. The goal would be to cultivate a community of "reasonable" users who understand and use the ratings system as it was intended.
To continue, for me, my experience is I would rate low probably 7 of 8 drivers for the reasons I gave above. They all break traffic laws and drive recklessly. I kind of wish the app would let me set a driver preference. I'd chose
(*) drive at the speed limit. Don't break any laws. Drive cautiously.
others might choose
(*) get there as fast as possible - (implying ignoring speed limits, weaving through traffic, cutting people off, ignoring turn lanes, etc...)
At least that way the driver would know up front what the user expects. Me, I'd give them 5 stars for not risking my life. Others would give them 5 stars for going as fast as possible.
As it is, I don't rate them low. I just don't rate at all because of the fear of being banned.
I see the word "LLM" made people stupid. No one actually used engaged their brain once they saw the word "LLM"
I'm not interested in having a discussion with a machine.
> The gap between Western perception and Chinese reality is enormous, and it reveals something important: we're worried about a system that barely exists while ignoring the behavioral scoring systems we actually live with.
This rings very true. It's pervasive online, and HN is no exception. The "China scare" is pervasive, "in China they do (some imagined nasty thing that of course the US or Europe would never do, no siree!)".
Obligatory link to the relevant Black Mirror episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive_(Black_Mirror)
"The only difference between your phone and China's social credit system is that China tells you what they're doing. We pretend our algorithmic reputation scores are just “user experience features.” At least Beijing admits they're gamifying human behavior."
I've said this before in many ways to other Americans and they just join the very vocal "china bad, usa good, you're weird for liking china" while then wondering why they don't understand their own credit score, etc.
Imagine having a less than 600 credit score and buying a car, buying a house, renting an apartment, opening a bank account, even getting insurance lol you are auto denied.
i think that's actually a weak part of the article. she goes on to clarify that china's social credit system doesn't even really exist. so it would have been better to say it like this:
"the only difference between your phone and china's social credit system is that your phone is real"
we're all more similar than we have been told to think.
it's in our respective government's interests to tell us that of course the system we live in is the best, hey look at those other people living under tyranny 'over there', aren't you lucky to be living over here, under us?
> Open your phone right now and count the apps that are scoring your behavior.
I counted 0, but I do not live in US/China. It will probably came here as well.
... some stuff we have kinda resembles china's social credit score if you really think about it ...
ok, maybe
... so yeah, it's totally fine lets do it ...
WHAT
We = Americans. typical.
> As of 2024, there's still no nationwide social credit score in China.
> The gap between Western perception and Chinese reality is enormous
They inserted "nationwide".
The social credit score in one China region (khm Xinj... khm) is truly dystopian, and I bet people there don't care whether it's "nationwide" or not, if they can literally be sterilized or get sent to concentration camps because of that.
But they said it's not nationwide! As of 2024.
Amazon? Who cares. Air BnB? Not really an issue unless you trash a place. Same with Uber. Instagram? Please.
You don't care until the corporation is big enough or starts crossing information with enough companies. Amazon already owns healthcare companies. Facebook has shared more information than we can think about with all sort of parties.
One day you'll be denied care or your insurance premiums will quadruple because you buy too much sweets in Amazon, or because you once said you fell off a chair while drunk in a party in Instagram. Then you'll care.
Then we'll vote in legislation to break up Amazon. You're assuming the hypothetical worst case in capitalism, but applying the same to the government it's going to be a far more difficult situation if the government is doing the same.
A: Amazon break up is years due already. B: I haven't said the government should do it instead.
> Bad Uber ratings can affect other services
Really?
Imo some social credit/reputation mechanism is needed. As it is there is very little you can do to judge trustworthiness of your business partners. Bad apples make services worse and more expensive for everyone. Honest people are in effect subsidizing behavior of dishonest people. It's often talked about in context of insurance but it happens everywhere.
I want to rent a hotel room or Airbnb: risk of me ruining or stealing from the place is include in the price. I want hire a contractor: I may run into the same guy who scammed 10 people already and changed name of his business again. I want to rent a car: it's more expensive because of reckless drivers renting it as well and the owner have no way to tell if I am a responsible one. We pay idiot/scammer premium everywhere.
There is a real need for that mechanism and if we keep putting our head in the sand big corps with proprietary solutions will cover that need. That is the worst of both worlds.
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Lol Americans have no clue what real social credit systems are like
Since you have first hand knowledge, why don't you share?
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I hate it but this is true. The differences between this and the "social credit" system in China are trivial at best.
The real problem here is privacy and anonymity. These discrete "rating systems" used by various companies aren't particularly dangerous as long as they cannot identify users by some common identifier such as name, DOB or address. Got banned by Uber or Amazon? Just create a new account.
Both Uber and Amazon accounts involve payment methods and typical delivery / pickup addresses. All these, combined or separately, can be used as a proxy of "the same person" notion.
Well, delivery addresses can be somehow anonymized by the use of PO boxes; names on credit cards, not so much.
I was gonna say.
Of all companies, the systems at Uber and Amazon definitely know it's you starting the new account. They just don't openly mention it, and quietly link your old accounts via monitoring and analytics. As soon as the FBI comes knocking, they're able to provide your current account and all linked accounts. Even the ones they previously closed.
(Not that the FBI has to come knocking nowadays to get that information, but Uber and Amazon are able to provide comprehensive help to law enforcement if it's required.)
>Got banned by Uber or Amazon? Just create a new account.
use the same phone number, email address or credit card and they know you are the same person, use the same wifi spot or IP address with the same behaviour and they can intimate you are the same.. Even badly written data analysis can do this and a VPN from another country and different username wont convince any system with an ounce of sense.
It's trivial to use a different name, email, and phone number. Obfuscating your payment information is a bit harder, but you can request a new credit card from your bank, use a new PayPal account or similar to hide the underlying payment method, or use a prepaid card. The WiFi hotspot cannot be identified across the Internet, only the IP and other fingerprinting information leaked by the browser can, but generally speaking IPs are not fixed and tied to an individual.
My point however was not to provide an exhaustive list of workarounds, just to point out that it is the lack of privacy and anonymity in our lives and enables such surveillance.
I've been trying to "create a new account" for Facebook in order to have the privilege of using the WhatsApp for my business. Not sure why I can't since I left the platform voluntarily.
Instaban. Every. Time.
>Open your phone right now and count the apps that are scoring your behavior.
Zero. Are everyone really that terminally online? I reject most things that use an app. Yesterday I encountered a coffee vending machine that required an app. I walked away. Uncle Ted was right.
Agreed. I categorically refuse to install non-FOSS apps on my phone. I don't use social media, and refuse to use Uber for various reasons (including those explained in this article). I do buy things on Amazon, but only those that are physically delivered to my door (rather than "subscriptions" aka buying things that you won't own).
How about banking apps? In my part of Europe a growing number of banks require installing an app via Google or Apple story. The Android ones are known to use sdks that at full of "telemetry". Cash is no longer an alternative.
Can you not use a browser to access banking services? If not, you should vehemently complain and/or move to another bank. And while cash is better for privacy, you can always use a credit card instead of your phone.
You may be able to at the moment, but web banking is being increasingly phased out in a lot of countries.
If nothing else works, my suggestion would then be to buy a cheap Android phone just for that indispensable banking app. Just leave it home in a drawer powered off when not in use, and use your a degoogled phone for your daily business.
My bank recently asked me to "re-identify" due to regulations about fraud and me being a customer for more than five years.
Rather than asking me to come into a building in real life, the asked me to:
- download yet another app
- make a picture of my id card (front and back)
- hold my id card to bank of phone
- show my face in the front camera
This process got stuck in step 3, because my phone has no RFC support.
The morale? So much for using a cheap Android phone just for that indispensable banking app.