Chairman Mao is smiling

In PJ Media, Roger L. Simon takes a look at the Chinese Social Credit system.

…But where did this ability to control such a giant country come from in the first place? As Pogo would say, I have seen the enemy and he is us! Namely, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Oracle, Intel, Cisco, and all those other American high-tech companies eager to get a piece of the fat Chinese pie. The technology was taken piece by piece by the Chinese from all of them to execute, with some local improvements, the social credit system. In a certain sense, these companies provided the inspiration for it—and the impetus. The Chinese copied them. That’s what they do.

Did the companies care?

Not enough.

Did they allow it on purpose?

Not quite. They largely ignored it. After all, basically, the companies were doing the same thing to us.

Witness just the other day when YouTube instituted a social credit system of its own, demonetizing a whole host of conservatives. That’s almost identical to what the Chinese are doing, penalizing people who are ranked poorly in their system by denying them mortgages, etc.

…Actually, it may be worse because our tech companies are more deluded than the Chinese. YouTube, etc., think they are doing good (while suppressing free speech). The Chinese are more realistic, merely finding a new way to exercise maximum social control, something that has gone on in that country since the days of Confucius.

…What our tech companies are doing is ignoring (or stomping on) the wisdom of the Founders of our country—the Federalist Papers or even the Bill of Rights not being on the reading lists of the average programming classes. Be that as it may, both these systems (American and Chinese) have more similarities than differences. It’s almost as if they are about to converge. China, after all, has its own Amazon, Alibaba. And we—both our companies and our government— sometimes working together, are monitoring all of us in a Chinese manner. Facial recognition is poised to take over our lives. Video cameras are ubiquitous. Chairman Mao is smiling.

As many have written, it seems a grim Orwellian-Huxleyian future is already upon us. Privacy is not only dead but decomposed. Yet there is an iota of hope in the form of anti-trust legislation, at least in America. As someone once said, faster, please.

Read more here.