A topic of great personal interest is the massive social engineering experiment now well underway in China, discussed here and here.
The point of the experiment is to apply modern technology to monitor and control people's movement, purchases, behaviors and thoughts with ever increasing pressure and effectiveness. For example, China is about midway through installing a social credit scoring system that rewards behaviors the tyrants at the top, mostly President Xi, see as acceptable, while punishing behaviors deemed unacceptable. The system is highly invasive and builds very powerful social and legal pressure to conform to the tyrants' social, political and commercial norms. People's movements and their buying habits are tracked by GPS in their cell phones, leisure time and works time activities are all monitored. Almost 500,000 million stationary cameras will monitor the streets and buildings. Police are now equipped with sunglasses with scanners wirelessly linked to facial recognition software. Places to hide are shrinking.
The New York Times describes a new tool to force compliance the government has dreamed up. This one is a real whopper.
The Chinese government has released a new cell phone app called Study the Great Nation. This fun little toy forces people to play for points or face the consequences of their slackness. The NYT writes:
CHANGSHA, China — Inside a fishing gear store on a busy city street, the owner sits behind a counter, furiously tapping a smartphone to improve his score on an app that has nothing to do with rods, reels and bait.
The owner, Jiang Shuiqiu, a 35-year-old army veteran, has a different obsession: earning points on Study the Great Nation, a new app devoted to promoting President Xi Jinping and the ruling Communist Party — a kind of high-tech equivalent of Mao’s Little Red Book. Mr. Jiang spends several hours daily on the app, checking news about Mr. Xi and brushing up on socialist theories.
Tens of millions of Chinese workers, students and civil servants are now using Study the Great Nation, often under pressure from the government. It is part of a sweeping effort by Mr. Xi to strengthen ideological control in the digital age and reassert the party’s primacy, as Mao once did, as the center of Chinese life.
“We must love our country,” said Mr. Jiang, one of the top scorers on the app in Changsha, the capital of the southern province of Hunan. “We are getting stronger and stronger.”
Since its debut this year, Study the Great Nation has become the most downloaded app on Apple’s digital storefront in China, with the state news media saying it has more than 100 million registered users — a reach that would be the envy of any new app’s creators.
But those numbers are driven largely by the party, which ordered thousands of officials across China to ensure that the app penetrates the daily routines of as many citizens as possible, whether they like it or not.
Schools are shaming students with low app scores. Government offices are holding study sessions and forcing workers who fall behind to write reports criticizing themselves. Private companies, hoping to curry favor with party officials, are ranking employees based on their use of the app and awarding top performers the title of “star learner.”
Many employers now require workers to submit daily screenshots documenting how many points they have earned.
One can see both mind and behavior control in the app. People accept the app, even if it is forced on them. Human nature being what it is, many or most of the people resistant to this will have no choice but to fall in line and over time, most of these reluctant minds will conform.
This social engineering experiment is of great personal interest because it could be the model for how the future will be for the entire human species. Authoritarians all over the world would love to have this level of surveillance and control. In time, this model of society could be the fate of about 99.99% of humanity.
The question for the China situation is simple: Will it ever be possible for the people to rebel and overthrow this level of intrusiveness and control, either peacefully or by force? At present, it looks like this deep surveillance state model could be very durable because it affords no means for people to rebel.
Just how much misery and loss of freedom can human societies take before hitting a breaking point? Looking at modern North Korea, Germany under Hitler and Russia under Stalin as evidence, the answer appears to be an awful lot. Maybe so much that the human spirit is broken such that rebellion simply is not possible, like it appears to be the case in North Korea today.
We live in interesting, scary times.
B&B orig: 4/8/19
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