by Chet Richards
It will be no picnic for the Chinese rank and file, though.
Is Google a saint or a sinner? Perhaps it once aspired to be a saint. Its old motto, "Don't Be Evil," tells us so. It even remains something of an angel with its powerful delivery of useful information. If it once really was angelic, today, it certainly is a fallen angel. Its new motto, "Do the Right Thing," could easily be interpreted as "Do What's Good for Google": make us money! Increase our power!
Fallen angel or not, Google's leadership is unquestionably strongly left-biased. A remarkable video has surfaced in which Google's leadership was in tears while speaking of Donald Trump's election in front of hundreds of its propeller-head worker-bees.
Google pretends its products are politically neutral. For the most part they are, but in times of political controversy, that neutrality breaks down. We now know that Google puts itself, and its leftist politics, first.
There is something really sinister going on at Google – something congruent with its leftist orientation. "Dragonfly" is its name. Since the spring of 2017, Google has been secretly working on a version of its search engine that permits its administrators to censor contents. Google has been in negotiation with Chinese authorities to install Dragonfly as China's main search engine. According to The Intercept, Dragonfly will "blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest."
Presumably, if the Google software can blacklist websites, it can also report to the government attempts to access such websites. Google's effort has generated strong protests among civil libertarians, including many of Google's employees who had not previously been aware of Dragonfly.
Dragonfly is one piece of a new comprehensive effort by the Chinese government to control its people. Another piece is the installation of millions of cameras. Both are in support of Social Credit, a computerized system to control behavior.
As of 2017, China had installed 176 million CCTV cameras. The current plan is to have 626 million cameras installed by 2020. The software employing these cameras tracks the movements of individuals, even in heavy traffic. More important, face recognition software now allows identification of individuals with reasonable (up to 90%) accuracy. If this sounds like Big Brother, it is Big Brother. Big Brother is watching you! At least in China.
Initiated in 2014 and expected to be fully operational in 2020, the Social Credit system assigns a value to each person based on how well he conforms to government-established criteria. People with a high credit score will have more privileges and freedom (i.e., become nomenklatura). People with lower credit will find themselves restricted according to their score. People with a very low credit score will have their communications cut off and will even be forbidden short-range travel and accommodations. It has taken a while for Orwell's vision to be fully realized, but 2020 should do the trick, at least for Eastasia.
China's communist leaders are afraid. Instituting Social Credit tells the world that things are out of their control and only a flat-out tyranny can salvage the situation. It says that centrifugal forces have nearly reached the tipping point. It's an old, old story.
Until 221 B.C., China wasn't China. Although there had been smaller empires before, only in 221 was all of China unified under Emperor Chi'in. Chi'in was a visionary monster who gave his name to China. He did some good: he developed a common writing script and established uniform weights and measures. He also murdered every scholar he could find and burned their books. To say the least, Chi'in wasn't popular. His dynasty lasted only four years after his death.
If Chi'in sounds like a familiar character, that's because he was the model for Emperor Mao Zedong and the communists. Everyone in China knows the story. That's the trouble.
The Chinese people have tasted freedom and prosperity. They like it, and they want more. But more freedom inevitably means the overthrow of communism and the probable dissolution of the empire and its leadership. The leadership knows it.
Tyranny has a terrible price. It ultimately means failure and dissolution. This is because it is too rigid. It kills the human spirit. Psychologist Jordan Peterson notes that creativity flourishes in the thin boundary between order and chaos. Disciplined chaos is necessary for discovery and advancement. The direction that China has decided to go suppresses creative chaos.
It is easy to predict China's future. It is currently near its economic peak. Until now, China has had the benefit of learning from the West and from Japan. But that learning required a free cadre of creatively talented individuals. Without creative freedom, the talents in China will leave or will cease their efforts. China will become less and less innovative and will progressively fall behind the rest of the world. At some point, stagnation will be too much to bear, and political revolution will be successful. It happened precisely that way to the Empire of the Soviet Union, and it will happen to China.
So is Google a saint or a sinner? It is both: a sinner because it is helping the Chinese establishment to kill intellectual and physical freedom in China and (from an American perspective) a saint because, partly through Google's efforts, China will cease to be an economic and strategic threat to the United States.
Fallen angel or not, Google's leadership is unquestionably strongly left-biased. A remarkable video has surfaced in which Google's leadership was in tears while speaking of Donald Trump's election in front of hundreds of its propeller-head worker-bees.
Google pretends its products are politically neutral. For the most part they are, but in times of political controversy, that neutrality breaks down. We now know that Google puts itself, and its leftist politics, first.
There is something really sinister going on at Google – something congruent with its leftist orientation. "Dragonfly" is its name. Since the spring of 2017, Google has been secretly working on a version of its search engine that permits its administrators to censor contents. Google has been in negotiation with Chinese authorities to install Dragonfly as China's main search engine. According to The Intercept, Dragonfly will "blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest."
Presumably, if the Google software can blacklist websites, it can also report to the government attempts to access such websites. Google's effort has generated strong protests among civil libertarians, including many of Google's employees who had not previously been aware of Dragonfly.
Dragonfly is one piece of a new comprehensive effort by the Chinese government to control its people. Another piece is the installation of millions of cameras. Both are in support of Social Credit, a computerized system to control behavior.
As of 2017, China had installed 176 million CCTV cameras. The current plan is to have 626 million cameras installed by 2020. The software employing these cameras tracks the movements of individuals, even in heavy traffic. More important, face recognition software now allows identification of individuals with reasonable (up to 90%) accuracy. If this sounds like Big Brother, it is Big Brother. Big Brother is watching you! At least in China.
Initiated in 2014 and expected to be fully operational in 2020, the Social Credit system assigns a value to each person based on how well he conforms to government-established criteria. People with a high credit score will have more privileges and freedom (i.e., become nomenklatura). People with lower credit will find themselves restricted according to their score. People with a very low credit score will have their communications cut off and will even be forbidden short-range travel and accommodations. It has taken a while for Orwell's vision to be fully realized, but 2020 should do the trick, at least for Eastasia.
China's communist leaders are afraid. Instituting Social Credit tells the world that things are out of their control and only a flat-out tyranny can salvage the situation. It says that centrifugal forces have nearly reached the tipping point. It's an old, old story.
Until 221 B.C., China wasn't China. Although there had been smaller empires before, only in 221 was all of China unified under Emperor Chi'in. Chi'in was a visionary monster who gave his name to China. He did some good: he developed a common writing script and established uniform weights and measures. He also murdered every scholar he could find and burned their books. To say the least, Chi'in wasn't popular. His dynasty lasted only four years after his death.
If Chi'in sounds like a familiar character, that's because he was the model for Emperor Mao Zedong and the communists. Everyone in China knows the story. That's the trouble.
The Chinese people have tasted freedom and prosperity. They like it, and they want more. But more freedom inevitably means the overthrow of communism and the probable dissolution of the empire and its leadership. The leadership knows it.
Tyranny has a terrible price. It ultimately means failure and dissolution. This is because it is too rigid. It kills the human spirit. Psychologist Jordan Peterson notes that creativity flourishes in the thin boundary between order and chaos. Disciplined chaos is necessary for discovery and advancement. The direction that China has decided to go suppresses creative chaos.
It is easy to predict China's future. It is currently near its economic peak. Until now, China has had the benefit of learning from the West and from Japan. But that learning required a free cadre of creatively talented individuals. Without creative freedom, the talents in China will leave or will cease their efforts. China will become less and less innovative and will progressively fall behind the rest of the world. At some point, stagnation will be too much to bear, and political revolution will be successful. It happened precisely that way to the Empire of the Soviet Union, and it will happen to China.
So is Google a saint or a sinner? It is both: a sinner because it is helping the Chinese establishment to kill intellectual and physical freedom in China and (from an American perspective) a saint because, partly through Google's efforts, China will cease to be an economic and strategic threat to the United States.
Chet Richards
Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/09/google_may_help_the_us_by_setting_up_big_brother_in_china.html
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