cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/536301
The Russia’s State Social University (RSSU) has launched a “social rating” platform that claims to build a person’s “social portrait” with possible applications in future government policies.
Named “We,” the platform promises to determine a user’s comparative “social status” based on a survey that includes questions about income, family status, benefits, creditworthiness, criminal record, lifestyle and state awards, among others.
“The social rating figures don’t affect [a person’s] life, the availability of services or the career trajectory in any way,” RSSU said on the platform’s website. “But who knows what these figures will mean for you in the future?”
Observers on social media compared the platform’s name “We” to the highly influential 1921 dystopian novel of the same name by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin. [The novel “We” describes a world of harmony and conformity within a united totalitarian state. It inspired British author George Orwell to write his own novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, which was published in 1949.]
Oh shit it’s meow meow beans
People keep commenting this. What’s the context?
It’s a from a Community episode.
…but who knows…
Yeeaaaahhhhh, about that. We are totally not going the China way, its just that we are because fuck you.
Russia is a maffia state and should be dismantled, prove me wrong.
We are totally not going the China way
The thing that allows China (and increasingly Russia) to function is the domestic industrialization and steadily rising standard of living that makes these governments popular back home. Their surveillance states exist to gatekeep access to the higher ranks of industrial control and economic authority.
The NATO block has largely divested of its industrial base and focused entirely on industrial imports to sustain the respective economies. Our surveillance state is far more concerned with enforcing a social caste system and propping up an increasingly fragile financial system.
Russia is a maffia state
I’ve heard it described as a glorified gas station. But that was 20 years ago, when the Russians were pivoting to mirror the Saudi petro states. Now that they’ve been cut off from the US/UK banking system and the third world cheap labor import network, they’ve heavily reinvested in aerospace, automotives, and other manufactured goods.
The end result is a Russian economy that is outpacing all other “advanced economies” according to the IMF, with the fastest industrial growth its enjoyed in 18 years.
They’re not just a bunch of aging mafiosos shaking down local businesses for spare change. They’re a trillion dollar economy with vast mineral wealth, enormous capital stocks, and a highly educated labor force. And they’re reasserting themselves in a way they haven’t done since glasnost and the end of the USSR.
China is about to dive into a shitshow of unseen proportions thanks to its 1 child policy in the past. The Chinese populace is set to shrink to 800 million in the next 50 or so years which will cause a shitload of economical problems for China. It’s the single biggest reason why China is prepping to invade Taiwan now because it’s either now or never, as in a decade from now it won’t be able to financially support said invasion. China could grow like crazy because of its cheap labour but those times are gone. Wages rose, wealth rose, and the advantages they had are gone. Now they will face a rapidly aging work force with way WAY too little people to replace the retirees that need taking care of.
Russia is fucked. If they win the Ukraine Invasion, they are fucked, if they lose it, they are fucked. If they win, they’ll get an utterly destroyed country that needs some half trillion dollars of investment to be able to repair itself. Take with that that the Ukrainian people hated eachother before the war, yet now are more United than ever. Russia will face terrorism from there for a long time to come. If they lose, the world will keep blocking them until they pay said billions for Ukrainian repairs, and it will cost Putin his head.
Meanwhile they had a huge outflux of knowledge and experience with loads of capable men fleeing the country to escape roundups to be sent to the front lines. They are currently running a war time economy which keeps them afloat until this war is over, then shit will start hitting fans everywhere.
My take: China will slowly fade to a medium player over the next decades, Russia is on the brink of a heavy collapse. India is a big contender of being the next evil empire with its current leadership being a bunch of extremists.
It would be nice if people toxoukd stop with the imerialistic bullshit and just start caring about all the people in the world. Listen to scientists, elect government officials that are actually responsible. Don’t go for crazy growth, it will come back to bite you in the ass.
China is about to dive into a shitshow of unseen proportions
Ooohhh you must be one of those tankies i keep hearing about…
Lets not read the comment, lets just post a meme…? Great argument.
None of what I said is particularly controversial, the Chinese population distribution is a shitshow in the making. But lets post a meme.
You know what, good boy, you get an extra social point !
Ooohhh you must be one of those tankies i keep hearing about…
the Chinese population distribution is a shitshow in the making
A thing people have been repeating for centuries.
How about: no.
Also how about: even China admits is a shit show, and they’re desperately trying to fix the issue by not only loosening the baby laws, they are actively pushing people to have babies and for some “unknown” reason they don’t wanna.
Seriously, all toundo is post dumb memes and slogans.
Are you 14 or something? I thought I was talking to an adult but I seem to have been mistaken
even China admits is a shit show
Go ahead. Lets see your work. Are you referring to a specific statement or is this bluster?
they’re desperately trying to fix the issue by not only loosening the baby laws, they are actively pushing people to have babies
They’ve been ratcheting and loosening their One Child Policy (now closer to a 2.3 Child Policy) for half a century. But then so has every other country with a functioning census bureau.
all toundo is post dumb memes and slogans
Westerners were outright panicked about “Overpopulation” for half my adult life. Then the 2008 financial crash happened and someone noticed a change in the second derivative of population trends. And now we get an article a week about how we’ll be entirely babyless inside the next generation.
Are you 14 or something?
That would make me, what? Three years your senior? Show some respect.
Are you joking or are you a shill? All of Western world has multiple protections and amenities in place firmly yet. If you talkn about economy, where is the money? I mean we would not have stories about soldiers being asked to use tampons, dealing with North Korea out of all countries. Are you sure you are talking about v same russia we are seeing in 2024?
I linked directly to the IMF Report. Is the International Monetary Fund a shill for the Russian government, too?
Omg, the RSSU, lmao. How is this not the Onion?
What’s wrong with RSS-- Oh. Well, Putinism is opposite of communism.
One could argue that the USSR as a dictatorship is not much different than modern Russia as a dictatorship, and that claims of communism contradict the reality of the Stalin era, but there are certainly a lot of nuance that I’m avoiding with such a statement.
One could argue that the USSR as a dictatorship is not much different than modern Russia as a dictatorship
Totalitarian and autoritarian dictatorships work differently. USSR promised better future and mostly delivered with occasional purges during Stalin era, while Putinism promises stagnation at best. First was ultrareformist, while second is ultraconservative, even regressional. First collapsed from stagnation of 80-ies, second is still going.
and that claims of communism contradict the reality of the Stalin era
Indeed, Stalin era is opposite of being soviet(parlamentary) and socialist.
Putinism as it is. Oligarchy and survailance.
Named “We,” the platform promises to determine a user’s comparative “social status” based on a survey that includes questions about income, family status, benefits, creditworthiness, criminal record, lifestyle and state awards, among others.
Criminal record: putin’s scoreboard of excellency https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3174724/russias-putin-decorates-army-unit-accused-ukraine-war-crimes
How many putinpoints do they get for using a 3 to 13million$ Kh-101 cruise missile to bomb a children’s hospital chemo ward?
What about personality? You know the thing that actually matters in a person…
I’d say bombing children’s hospitals says a lot about someone’s personality.
Ok. That’s not the majority of the population.
approximately the same thing an idf soldier gets for doing the same thing.
Are you saying that Ukrainians are the same as Hamas?
Nah, probably just that idf and the Russian army are both filled with ear criminals.
But why do you need to go fetch Israel as the ultimate measure that you need to understand the egregiousness of what russia is doing to Ukraine…when what russia is doing to Ukraine is both the crimes of Israel and hamas combined:
the crime of Israel’s brutality without regard for human life
and
the crime of hamas’s terroristic persistent attempt to destroy their neighbour at the expense of its own people
…there is no comparison here.
The comparison is that they both have large amounts of war criminals. You can compare sections of subjects, you know.
If you’re going to do that, you may as well just jump to american war crimes e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike or hamas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas_war_crimes I’m just pointing out that with russia it clear to see that there is an aggressor and a victim. When you throw in Israel-hamas in the conversation, you muddy the waters by comparing it with a 76-year-old war with brutality and a lot of bad decisions on both sides that has turned the leadership on one side into morally-bankrupt fanatics and the leadership on the other side into genocidal fascists.
Israel has neighbours telling them they should disappear every day and those neighbours will not settle for anything less, even after palestinian statehood on the table multiple times, how do you resist that?
On the other hand, nobody wants to make russia disappear, yet russia acts as desperate to destroy Ukraine, a sovereign nation as if they had been the ones invaded. It is much more despicable than hamas and israel.
Ear criminals? Are their covers that bad?
War… Not ear :)
they have social credit scores in Israel too? Is is netanyahupoints or just putinpoints as well? (better have a universal currency for war crimes, including building military headquarters under hospitals with stolen aid like hamas)
so, Facebook?
We’ve already got personal wealth as a social credit system pretty much everywhere.
Best explaination of why Putinism as bad as capitalism.
Well this sounds a bit familiar…
Next step is adding a scoring system with penalties for certain behavior and it will be quite similar to the social system that is rolling out in China…
That’s probably the inspiration, but like hell they’ll manage to actually build something as functional.
I wouldn’t underestimate the engineering competence of Russians especially when it comes to autocratic surveillance tools. There are plenty of Russian-built tools and web apps that function quite well - Yandex, VK, etc. The west does not have a monopoly on innovation.
The west does not have a monopoly on innovation.
Nope - but it does look like we have the “monopoly” of being able to call out bullshit openly and not fear falling out of a window. Or being stabbed.
That’s a monopoly I appreciate. Although it’s marginal depending on a number of factors.
Oh that’s coming. Stay tuned.
Well, until the President decides otherwise, anyway.
Luckily “the West” isn’t just the U.S. - it’s also France, the U.K., Mexico and even Australia…
True! I’ve been too focused on our local politics lately!
I’ve been, too. Even though I’m neither in the US, nor a US citizen… It’s scary right now…
Yandex is a good example, VK - I’m not certain of that.
Anyway, what I meant is that such kind of social rating needs to source data from somewhere. That means integration with quite a lot of systems built for the Russian state, which often suck a lot. It’s normal that half the time remote payments for utilities don’t work, for example.
I mean, yeah, they can. But if it’s going to be some nation-wide system for the government, the bureaucracy will practically kill this.
Comparing run of the mill government services with something as advantageous as a social credit app is not apples to apples. It’s not like they assign utility administrators to work for GRU hacking units. The people that build this tool will be highly paid technical experts. And there is no shortage of them in Russia. It’s definitely not 100% but there’s a decent chance they can cobble together a working system that tracks social scores for the vast majority of Russian citizens.
Social scores would logically depend on the data sourced from things working as I described.
But you may be right, of course.
Ah I see what you mean(t). You would have to have working systems with clean-enough data in the first place to integrate with in order to develop a system like this. Not just the expertise to develop it.
How do you mean remote payments for utilities. Buying something in Russia from a foreign country or the other way around ? Or just remote payments through Russia ?
I meant - submitting water counters’ data and such via their website and paying there. It’s not about payments themselves.
Observers on social media compared the platform’s name “We” to the highly influential 1921 dystopian novel of the same name by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin.
They actually couldn’t choose a different name than the novel that was written specifically about this very dystopian subject? Did they use it as inspiration? Because that seems more than coincidence…
Weibo and WeChat hide
It’s a blocking method. If 90% of the people who search a term are looking for the social platform it becomes much harder to find the book. Think of it like trying to find archival news articles about a perennial topic. You have to wade through all the recent shit and then there’s 2 hits from the time period you’re checking.
These students either designed it as a subtle protest or they are in serious need of some dystopian literature in their curriculum.
It’s likely both. A compromise between hoping to build something real in the half-assed world that is Russia, and between wish to protest against its half-assed totalitarianism.
The social rating figures don’t affect [a person’s] life, the availability of services or the career trajectory in any way
unless you’re gay…
There are no gay people in Russia.
shoots gun
Not anymore
The social rating figures don’t affect [a person’s] life, the availability of services or the career trajectory in any waywink
Then what are they for? Like the government just puts up a leaderboard and leaves it at that.
This is literally the plot for a Black Mirror episode.
This is literally the plot for *China.
From. Nosedive to be specific.
I think for was actually the right word choice there, because Black Mirror in no way came up with the concept
Sure, makes sense from that perspective. 👌
or, for an example with better writing, a Community episode
They made meow meow beans?
They’ve taken everything subjective and unspoken about human interaction and reduced it to explicit, objective numbers. I’ve never felt so alive.
good timing, its my birthday today
Happy Birthday!
Cool.
Cool cool cool.
I see the North Korea visit was pretty useful
“The social rating figures don’t affect [a person’s] life, the availability of services or the career trajectory in any way,” RSSU said on the platform’s website. “But who knows what these figures will mean for you in the future?”
Well that’s a relief…
“But who knows what these figures will mean for you in the future?”
Well that’s not ominous at all
When was the last time an entity that generated stats about someone didn’t end up with those stats being used to the detriment of the individual - or at the very least for the profit of another?
There was me thinking it could be used for something sinister.
