I don’t know if you’ve heard but China has recently started to implement their social credit system. I won’t really get into it here but basically it is the the allocating rights and privileges to those who can manage a healthy credit score which is accrued through social and economic behaviour.
What makes this system controversial is that there is no bottom to the score. Meaning the lower your score, the more rights and privileges are taken away from you. People are drawing the comparisons to Orwell’s 1984 because of its efforts to essentially “unhuman” people. So instead of waiting for a problematic person to break a law to enable action against them you can proactively nit pick and pull apart their entire life which can even extend to their family (like barring one’s children from attending school). There really is no limit to how far they’ll go to prevent things like being politically outspoken against the government.
But before you go thinking to yourself, “gee, I sure am happy that I’m not living there,” I challenge you to first observe what is becoming the post-modern western civilization. I believe we established our own form of social credit scoring only we haven’t fully implemented the consequences yet. But day by day we add one more brick to the great wall of censorship. Censorship of wrongspeak. Or the replacing of free speech with “better speech”. School uniforms are a thing of the past when true conformity comes from the self censorship that only the best peer pressure fueled mob justice public shaming can provide.
China gets the 1984 comparison because they already have their citizens at gun point. There is no free speech or any real individual sovereign rights. You do what I say or I’ll jail you and you then formally become my property and slave. This social credit system is nothing more than another order to be complied with like every other order that’s demanded of the people. They’re reaction is probably more along the lines of, “oh, you mean there is a chance I might be able to have things for how much I bust my ass already? Great!” For countries who have a foundation in freedom and liberty for all, it’s a hell of a lot trickier to remove rights and privileges that are already deeply seeded in citizens.
So how do you get a capitalist to give up their rights and privileges? You sell it to them. There’s a reason why steve jobs was so successful, standing before a big crowd There’s a reason why Google has removed their logo “don’t be evil”. Tired of cleaning your home? How about a roomba who does all the cleaning for you? As long as you’re cool with it digitally mapping the rooms and uploading the schematics to a cloud server where it’s data is collected and only used to make your life better, I’m sure. Don’t have enough time to stay organized? Wish someone could just throw on that playlist for you while you’re trying to prepare dinner? How about a Google home device or Amazon Alexa to be your “digital assistant“. Now we can all have our own personal assistant, LOOK AT YOU GO! If you don’t mind all your smart phones, digital assisstants, webcams, mics, and all other “smart” devices to be recording your every detail and uploading it to the cloud for “marketing purposes.”
Right now Google is promoting their home hub device which will allow you to do things like look at recipes in the kitchen. Thank you Google, now I can finally modernize my love for cook books so I can stop feeling like a cave man! I mean, how many trees were killed to bring me my first world privilege of Jamie Oliver? And now Google has patented an AI “babysitter” system to “protect unattended children”. I mean, who am I to care if Google, Amazon and Apple are watching, listening and storing data on everything that’s going on in my house 24/7? “I’ve got nothing to hide, I’m not doing anything bad, this will only improve my life.” So it is fed to us and it is widely received very well. We went from boycotting unethically made clothing brands to not giving a single shit that people were working in sweatshops to make our iphones.
There was a story out of new mexico where a digital assistant saved a woman from a home invasion because it called the sherif’s office while it was listening to what was going on. Well, that sure sounds like a plus. For now. But now this is proof that your devices are doing more than simply “listening”. They’re also judging. And this takes me to the real thing I want to talk about here but first needed lost of word salad rambling to lead up to. We need to start asking what the cost is of all these free websites, services and apps. Ever Google search something only to find ads for it on facebook? Let’s not forget the Zuckerberg hearings. As AI becomes much more complicated we need to stop talking about chicks with dicks and start having an adult conversation about the companies who are designing this software. THEIR biases and how ideological possession manifests itself in programming. And why privacy actually matters.
The James Damore debacle should have disturbed us all way more than it did. Not just how James Damore was treated, especially considering he is on the autism spectrum, but the actual scary campaign that was launched against him by Google and the mainstream media. Most media outlet other than fox news would even entertain the idea of an interview with him but were more than happy to report on the story with a sexist tech-bro narrative. NBC literally called it a “sexist manifesto“. Hell, I even bought a science magazine at my local Rexall which featured an article on the sex differences in the brain and even THAT started out referencing Damore’s memo and how wrong and sexist he was and went on to say that though there are some differences in the brain, it’s very small. Damore never even talked about differences in the brain. It was as if no one had actually read the memo. A scarier thought is that they actually did. Thank God for youtube and independent media like Quillette. Otherwise the truth may have never gotten out.
The kind of social credit score system we’re subjecting ourselves to is one that is being sold to us in a means-justify-the-ends style utopian vision of the future. A future where sexism, racism, homophobia, all forms of discrimination have been completely eradicated and we’ve all become totally egalitarian where all men and women of all genders, ethnicities, and ages have completely accurate visible and ideological representation at all levels of the workplace, government, stores and entertainment. A world where we are able to literally shit rainbows and be free of all physical, symbolic, metaphorical barriers who would seek to limit or restrict any aspect of any wish or desire. A lot like being on vacation forever and pretending that wouldn’t become hell after week #2. When you put it that way, this marxism utopia stuff sure sounds like a great idea!
But what is that kind of change going to cost us? What will the brave new world look like? Art, science and religion are going to be rather “problematic” for the utopia. So the first domino has fallen. Twitter has updated it’s “hateful conduct policy” to include “misgendering” and “deadnaming” as promotion of violence. Or incitement of harm. Whatever that means. I’m not about to start defending anyone who wants to call gender dysphoria a sickness or wrong. But should simply using the name “Bruce Jenner” qualify as hate speech? Hate speech is becoming so watered down that it’s no longer an accurate term. It should be called disagreement speech because when words are violence everything is just hate. I read through the policy and found some very interesting details I will feature in photos below.
Now because twitter refuses to be up front about who exactly their “specific protected category” consists of all you need to do is check out who meets their own criteria for punishment where no enforcement is present. A great example of this would be when Louis Farrakhan tweeted “I’m not an anti-semite. I’m anti-termite”. If you’re not convinced enough even Chelsea Clinton called it out as dehumanizing rhetoric. It couldn’t be more black and white. If that’s not “promoting harm” against a “religious affiliation” then what exactly is? But upon closer inspection, you’ll notice that Louis is a leader at the Nation of Islam. If being a muslim grants Farrakhan “membership” in Twitters self described “specific protected category” then this changes the context of his comments and would provide a “protected status” on the grounds that his comments might have been “part of a consensual conversation”. I wonder if a priest or pastor were to tweet “I’m not anti-islam. I’m anti-termite.” if twitter would consider that a “protected category” as well. hmm. But Jesse Kelly was clearly worth banning, eh?
We have gone from it being controversial to suggest that there is gender identity that extends beyond male and female to now it’s controversial to suggest that male and female ever existed in the first place. I don’t buy for a single second the excuse that any of this is out of compassion for anyone. This is deeply rooted doctrine out of the marxist camp and if you look at the people who these movements attack, it aligns perfectly with who marxism opposes. And they embed their marxist principles in the identity groups they put forward so in order for you to oppose the idea you must oppose the person. And in the landscape of “white privilege” they have created you don’t need to be right in an argument if the optics look bad enough. But who am I as a cisgender, white, imperialist colonizer, oppressor, benefactor of privilege, normie, angry young male, mysogynist, biological essentialist, conservative, islamophobic, climate denier, bigot, transphobic, hyperbolic, dog whistling, rape apologist, straw manning, sexist, patriarchal tyrant, nationalist, racist, homophobe, cave man. What right do I have to criticize compassionate twitter policies?
One youtuber who I follow who frankly does an amazing job of analyzing these culture wars we find ourselves in is the self proclaimed Boyce of reason, Benjamin Boyce. He is working on a documentary of the Evergreen college debacle. But he’s covered other stories like that of Lindsay Shepherd of Laurier University and other relevant developments in the news. He recently sat down with a trans writer who came out with an article (I regret my tactics at a trans rights protest. Here’s why – Esther Betts) beautifully timed along side of this twitter insanity which challenges the politics of “shut up” as actually more harmful to trans people. I will link below here a handful of fantastic videos that really help you wrap your mind around the marxist language of the extreme left:
Benjamin A Boyce: Transitioning from Radical Trans Activism with Esther Betts
Benjamin A Boyce: Gendering Violence at Laurier
Benjamin A Boyce: Surrogate Offendedness at Laurier
Benjamin A Boyce: Is Academic Feminism Literally Cancer?
Benjamin A Boyce: University Student Chastised for Sharing Statistics
So to wrap this up, I ask you this. What next? At what point do we draw the line and where do we draw it? There was already a leaked Google seminar about how they could use their power to influence people politically. Unfortunately that’s the one story I can’t seem to find so I can’t share it at this time. But I ask you, if our smart devices are constantly recording and judging us and this “progressive” doctrine continues to be promoted by all virtue signalling leftists then what about when our devices decide we have broken one of these social rules? At what point will we be unable to uphold the terms and conditions of what is considered the correct view points? What would that world look like? I’d have to say that what comes to mind is an episode from “black mirror” where they explore that rabbit hole. I highly recommend you watch it. It’s not about being right or wrong, it’s about removing the bias from the software that will some day be installed into the brain of the AI who plans to solve the human “problem”. We can only chuckle at skynet jokes for so long. Let’s not let chicks with dicks to lead us down the path of the age of ultron.
Black Mirror: Nose Dive (find it on netflix)
“Compassion: that’s the one things no machine ever had. Maybe it’s the one thing that keeps men ahead of them.” — Dr. McCoy (Star Trek)
Rule #8 