Singapore's Tech-utopia Dream is Turning Into a Surveillance State Nightmare (restofworld.org) 52
In the "smart nation," robot dogs enforce social distancing and flying taxis are just over the horizon. The reality is very different. From a report: Singapore is often rendered as an aspiring techno-utopia. In World Economic Forum videos, in-flight magazines and its own pliant state-backed media, it offers a soft-focus science fiction backdrop where driverless buses ply routes between beach clubs and tech hubs, where robot dogs enforce social distancing and flying taxis flit between glass-fronted public housing overflowing with lush "sky gardens." It's a place where pilot projects hint at a future -- just over the horizon -- where the intractable problems of today are automated out of existence. Where vertical farms and "NEWater" made from treated sewage cut the island's reliance on neighbouring Malaysia for food and water. Where robots care for the elderly and drones service freighters. Where warehouses and construction sites are staffed by machines, obviating the need for the migrant workers who make Singapore function, but make Singaporeans uncomfortable. Technology keeps them safe, fed and independent; secure in a scary world, but connected to it through telecoms and air travel.
That safety requires constant vigilance. The city must be watched. The smart cameras that are being trialled in Changi are just a part of a nationwide thrust towards treating surveillance as part of everyday life. Ninety-thousand police cameras watch the streets, and by the end of the decade, there will be 200,000. Sensors, including facial recognition cameras and crowd analytics systems, are being positioned across the city. The technology alone isn't unique -- it's used in many countries. But Singapore's ruling party sees dangers everywhere, and seems increasingly willing to peer individually and en masse into people's lives. "What [technology] will do for people is make our lives a hell of a lot easier, more convenient, more easily able to plug into the good life," Monamie Bhadra Haines, an assistant professor at the Technical University of Denmark, who studies the intersection between technology and society. "But ... the surveillance is what is here, now."
That safety requires constant vigilance. The city must be watched. The smart cameras that are being trialled in Changi are just a part of a nationwide thrust towards treating surveillance as part of everyday life. Ninety-thousand police cameras watch the streets, and by the end of the decade, there will be 200,000. Sensors, including facial recognition cameras and crowd analytics systems, are being positioned across the city. The technology alone isn't unique -- it's used in many countries. But Singapore's ruling party sees dangers everywhere, and seems increasingly willing to peer individually and en masse into people's lives. "What [technology] will do for people is make our lives a hell of a lot easier, more convenient, more easily able to plug into the good life," Monamie Bhadra Haines, an assistant professor at the Technical University of Denmark, who studies the intersection between technology and society. "But ... the surveillance is what is here, now."
Re: "The Beating of a Liberal" (Score:3, Informative)
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So your view of the Marines is that they are simply a mob of thugs. Your Dear Leader would be proud.
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So your view of the Marines is that they are simply a mob of thugs. Your Dear Leader would be proud.
I've worked and socialized with many Marines, and haven't found one yet that wasn't decent. Active duty grunt and General, Retired too (there is no such thing as a "former" Marine unless they were drummed out) and I think the meme is based on some sort of fear of strong confident no-nonsense people.
Privacy is going away. What will replace it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Privacy is an imperfect, stop-gap solution to the problem of information and power imbalance. Some people have more power, and more information, and can use that to hurt others. But privacy is going away, surveillance is too cheap and easy these days. The question is, will privacy be replaced by the type of ubiquitous surveillance that increases power and information imbalance, or the type that decreases it?
If we had ubiquitous surveillance, where everyone had access to all information, and everyone was informed whenever anyone else accessed information about them, I believe that would serve the same purpose as privacy rights: reducing the information and power imbalance. In fact, I think it might do an even better job.
But the only alternative is one where only a few have access to information from ubiquitous surveillance, and that is much much worse. Keeping our current privacy regime is simply wishful thinking, it won't happen. The choice is between egalitarian or authoritarian ubiquitous surveillance.
Re: Privacy is going away. What will replace it? (Score:1)
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sadly the egalitarian choice isn't really feasible. actual activism is anecdotal, the population is overwhelmingly oblivious, indifferent or even gullible and even if it weren't, the technological divide is higher than ever plus the odds of the ruling class giving up that power for the greater good are zero.
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That's defeatism, and plainly refuted by a cursory glance at history. The general trend of history is for the meek to band together and bayonet the powerful right in the ass. The population is the least oblivious, indifferent, and gullible than they have ever been. We have more information, and more tools at our disposal to organize. The ruling class never gives up their power, the people take if from them. As it was, is and ever shall be. Or as they say "Thus always to tyrants."
If what you said were even r
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We are not serfs because serfs are good at getting rid of nobles. The reason is economical. Giving people some freedom, letting them bear their expenses and pay them for their work is cheaper (per given amount of economic output) than trying to manage them as serfs. If feudalism would be the most efficient economic system then we would have it widespread even now. It is just cheaper and easier to control people through finances.
If egalitarian society is more economically efficient then we will come to it e
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You know there are more important things than efficiency. If I were very efficient at killing your family, would that be a good thing?
The thing about authoritarians is, they can never just let you have some freedom. They will always keep taking more and more, until they take too much, and the people rise up and bayonet them in the ass. Did you see how Ghaddafi went down? That's the norm, not the exception. Bank on it.
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Nature is not about freedom or some other ideals. It is about who survives. You cannot exclude capital loses of an occasional revolt against a dictator from overall economic efficiency of a dictatorship. As I said, it is often easier to control people through finances than through force. There is a reason why most dictatorships are in countries with a lot of natural resources. Wealth can be extracted from natural resources with less cooperation from working class.. Elimination of a noble by his serfs did no
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The ruling class never gives up their power, the people take if from them. As it was, is and ever shall be. Or as they say "Thus always to tyrants."
If what you said were even remotely true, we'd still be serfs.
"we" still are serfs in some sense. history also shows that the tyrants have systematically been replaced by new tyrants, or more recently by democracies that are essentially still soft-power grips except that are largely revolution-proof, the most resilient power structures to date. most if not all regime changes in existing democracies have been result of deliberate (mostly external) destabilizations, not internal discontent.
btw history also shows that the main benefits of large populations (military and
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The powerful will never, and have never, given anyone but their offspring anything of value. But we have taken the things we want from them, again and again and again. We just have to try. History is a story about how the meek overthrow their powerful oppressors, then get complacent and have to do it again. It's not a story about decreasing human freedom, it's a story about increasing human freedom.
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How often have the meek overthrown their powerful oppressors and come out ahead rather then replacing them? I can't think of many, some like the French revolution, after a period of terror, did come out ahead but the immediate result was terror, not freedom, and afterwards the move to freedom was mostly peaceful. Most of the improvements seem to have been through peaceful means such as the fall of the Soviet block and even there it seems to be reverting to Fascism in many of those countries. Likewise with t
I see you read Manna (Marshall Brain) (Score:2)
I wouldn't want to live in either of the dystopias he describes.
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I have not. But I read about it on Wiki just now and it seems right up my alley! Will put it on my book list.
I wouldn't be surprised if I picked up the idea from someone who had read the book though. I remember reading an essay about the idea years ago, in the mid 2000s.
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You aren't thinking this through. Why is privacy a human right? It's not a natural right at all, in a state of nature, you can look wherever you want to look. Privacy is an obligation not to look at certain things, not a right. The right it purports to protect is the right to life and liberty. But there are other ways to protect that right.
The right to repair is different, it speaks to a part of the bundle of rights we call "ownership." Ownership has always meant the right to do whatever you want with a thi
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Privacy is an imperfect, stop-gap solution to the problem of information and power imbalance.
I don't care, as long as they track down and arrest that monster who brought a durian onto the public transit.
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Did they EAT the durian on public transit?!? Death by surströmming is too good for that sort of monster.
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I say go the other way, starting with police officer body cams - record everything in the public sphere, but it goes to disk encrypted, and can only be decrypted with a court order in response
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The problem with that is it lets the powerful cheat the system, and you've got no way of knowing they did it. If a thing can be hidden until a crime is brought to trial, any number of shady things will be swept under the table, like abusing the surveillance system. Fully open total information is the only way forward.
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I get that power corrupts, but the judicial branch is separate for a reason, and public/private key encryption gives us the tools to enforce this.
If you start out with the assumption that the whole system is so corrupted that it is useless and the only solution is to make it weak, then we are already hosed. But I don't think that is the case. Attention is always g
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The solution I'm proposing makes the system stronger, not weaker. I'm looking ahead, to a time when we have things like dust sized surveillance bots. It's not that far from now. The rich will have access to tech like that, while we won't. Government will have access to that tech, but will keep it from us. The courts? Please. The CIA isn't supposed to be operating inside the USA, but we all know it does. The FBI can get warrantless wiretaps on you just by asking a friendly judge, and nobody is allowed to tel
Re: Privacy is going away. What will replace it? (Score:2)
Technology may change, people don't (Score:5, Insightful)
If a technology can be used for surveillance and control then ultimately it will be. Unfortunately a lot of this tech has been pushed by a combination of naive techno-utopians, borderline sociopath CEOs who simply want to make a lot of money and a gullible population who believe all the shiny shiny marketing BS and never think of the downsides.
Nope (Score:2)
Scratch Singapore off my list of places to visit. I get spied on enough in my own country, I don't need another tyrannical government keeping tabs on me.
This is not a new direction for Singapore (Score:4, Informative)
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Singapore has one of the highest home ownerships in the world
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Singapore has one of the highest home ownerships in the world
I think what the PP meant was single-family homes. Singapore has very high home ownership, but almost all of those are condos in government-built flats. Only 5% of households own a free-standing house. Land is very expensive.
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Yeah. I am equally in awe at just how often Singapore's "public housing" system and the HDB flats are grossly misunderstood; just how well it actually works; and the fact that, given how it really does work fantastically, that we are so provincial and myopic that we don't duplicate it to solve our own housing problems here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I do like their chewing gum policy. Too many people were spitting out gum and sticking it in public places. The government said tough shit chewing gum is now illegal, you fucked up.
Oversight (Score:1)
Re:Oversight (Score:5, Insightful)
They say "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." But what you need to hide depends on who is looking at the moment. Think of Nicaragua right now, or Venezuela. Honest opposition politicians have a lot to hide right now.
Inferior race or inferior goverment? (Score:2)
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Singapore is a loooong way away from Japan - 5000km away across the sea.
Singapore's neighbours are Malaysia to the North and Indonesia to the South.
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Here's another option. In Singapore you have laws enforced from the outside (facism), in Japan you have laws enforced from the inside (over politeness, honor, repression).
While type of governement is something that greately affects your freedom, I recommend that you don't ignore the effect of culture of one's fellow men.
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It's my understanding that the only punishment for being overweight is that you need to see a doctor about it once a year. It's not a big deal, doctors cost like $5 a visit here.
Nothing new there (Score:5, Informative)
More than 40 years ago, I saw an article about how young people who had 'long' hair could be rounded up by the Singaporean police and forced to have it cut.
Long meaning, a bit long in the neck and a bit over the ears, more Beatle-esque than hair farm.
Singaporese governments have always been control freaks.
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At least freedom loving Texas just kicks boys with hair past their ear out of school. First hit out of many, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/u... [nbcnews.com]
Utopia? (Score:3)
I think not
Seems like a really crappy place to live
They like it (Score:4, Insightful)
I was born in Singapore, though I'm not a citizen—I would have had to go back when I was in my 20s and do 2 years of National Service to claim it, I believe—but I still have a lot of family there.
They LIKE the rules and the strict laws and the surveillance. I mean, this story is about an activist that doesn't, and I identify more strongly with him than my family in this regard, but don't be fooled into thinking that these people are oppressed. There's a large Chinese majority, and they've been voting in the same party since independence because they have that stereotypical love of order and duty.
I remember talking to my uncle about the littering laws, and most people know that Singapore is famous for fines, but if you keep littering despite the fines, they'll eventually make you sweep up litter in a bright vest that identifies you as a person that broke the law (not just an ordinary sanitation worker), because it's very embarrassing for you and your family.
I cannot stress enough that this story is mostly for us—outsiders in Western countries—that value individual freedoms over orderly states. The common good for them means making laws and adhering to them. Order is inherently moral. Tattoos and long hair immediately singled me out when I went back to visit for the first time as an adult.
I would wager that most people there feel like they ARE living in a Techo-Utopia. The surveillance state is just taking care of the undesirables. It doesn't hurt that there's a significant migrant-worker underclass that will probably bear the brunt of these policies.
But if you ever get the chance to visit, absolutely go. There's no better city for eating food from all over Asia. Indian, Arabic, Chinese, Malay, Indonesian...the food is cheap and plentiful and I love going back every few years to soak up the atmosphere. But every time my mother tells me to go there and get a job and make big money for a few years, I flat out tell her there's no way I'll ever live there.
WHOSE nightmare? Who is even inconvenieced? (Score:2)
Humans are a savage lot while Singapore is impressively safe and orderly. The greatest threat to individuals is from other individuals, not the state in the vast majority of cases worldwide.
The West today lives in a moral panic where it's deemed desperately necessary to allow anarchy and not protect citizens from each other. That is not the only way to run a nation.
Contrast Singapore and "Chiraq" then tell us how awful Singaporeans have it vs when the beast classes are free to devour each other.