[ddiq]

It's the year 2027. You get a notification from the H8Watch™ by the ADL app, default installed on every phone, and can't be deleted without jailbreaking. You open the notification, and it shows a video of you from 2 weeks ago, from a camera embedded in the table of the fast food restaurant from where you were eating lunch with your friend. Your voice has been reconstructed through lipreading software and played back to you. "You're such a feandra, I paid last time!" you said to your friend playfully, using the new insult people just started using to refer to someone thrifty.

After the video and reconstructed voice plays back to you twice, it changes to a message. "Minor class-based insult detected." The nonsense word "feandra" had been added to the H8Watch™ database 2 hours ago, and your offense had come up as part of their program to catch racists and classists retroactively. This prevents the use of new words or euphamisms that may otherwise be used to bypass H8Watch™ detection.

Moments later, you get more notifications. Twitter: account suspended for 1 day, your bank: $25 has been deducted from your account for terms of service violation, Facebook: 2 offenses so far this month, 1 more and all three videos will be posted to your Facebook feed.

You quickly swipe away the rest of the notifications, you'll deal with them later, and text the friend you were going to meet for dinner. "Hey John, I can't make it tonight. Cash is a little tight after another violation, and I can't risk a public conversation this week."

[dang]

This account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's against the site guidelines and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of which ideology they're battling for or against. It's not what this site is for.

Breaking the site guidelines will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[tomkarho]

Actually the year is 2032.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rVQGT01Kzg

[varjag]

It's remarkable how someone living in 2019 still finds grounds to complain about stiffing political correctness.

[nabnob]

A man in the UK was investigated by the police for retweeting a limerick about transwomen - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/24/man-investigated...

>After Mr Miller questioned why the complainant was being described as a “victim” if no crime had been committed, the officer told him: “We need to check your thinking”.

[goatinaboat]

In 2019 the hand symbol for OK has been retconned as hate speech. There is no sign yet of this trend reversing.

[6nf]

We live in a world where you can lose your job just for making the OK hand sign at the wrong time.

[varjag]

There are people still sore about swastikas and roman salute "retconned" too. But well maybe don't use them for supremacist signaling in the first place, that sure could help.

[ddiq]

If you think this story is limited to, or even about, political correctness, you are mistaken. It could be your insurance rates going up for jaywalking, even with no cars around. It could be your credit score dropping if you have too many drinks at a bar. It's about your personal activities all being tracked, measured, and in the end, controlled by corporations.

[rapnie]

I don't know why you are downvoted. Think the dangers are real with social credit systems on the rise. Much has been written on them, e.g.

> The social credit system is used to punish citizens for bad behavior with numerous blacklists preventing them from traveling, getting loans or jobs, or staying in hotels, and even by limiting internet access.

https://www.businessinsider.com/china-social-credit-system-b...

Maybe people find it hard to believe these will be implemented in western countries?

[rauhl]

> I don't know why you are downvoted.

I don’t agree with the downvoters at all, but I think it’s fairly obvious why he’s being downvoted: either folks think he’s wrong that such a thing is possible, or folks think he’s right but don’t care (i.e., they think that the society he describes is desirable, or at worst neutral).

I don’t think that his described society is impossible, and indeed we already see a slow, less-regimented version of that playing out.

I cannot emotionally understand someone who would find such a society desirable, but intellectually it kind of makes sense: one needs to be just authoritarian enough to want to control non-violent behaviour, while just naïve enough not to realise that there are aspects of one’s own behaviour which would be controlled, too (i.e., every one of us disagrees with the majority on at least one or two items).

[squiggleblaz]

It's shocking to me that here, on Hacker News, posts like these get voted down. I could understand them being regarded as unpopular on mainstream media, but HN? Wow.

[ddiq2]

It already is implemented in America. Political dissidents are harassed by airport security, get their bank accounts closed and credit cards canceled, are banned from services like AirBNB, and get railroaded in the courts.

[hirako2000]

Source?

[ddiq]

Chase Bank shuts down prominent conservatives https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/chase-bank-conservati...

AirBnB seeks out and blocks people going to the American Renaissance conference https://gizmodo.com/airbnb-doesnt-want-extremists-on-its-pla...

Credit cards cancel payments to "hate" groups https://nypost.com/2017/08/16/credit-cards-are-clamping-down...

These are all political censorship against people or groups that aren't doing anything illegal, and the standards are applied differently based on ideology rather than any objective standard.

[chillwaves]

Maybe you should have used one of those examples instead.

[ddiq]

Doesn't seem to matter, since that comment is getting downvoted as well.

I guess technologists don't want to see the future they're creating, and would rather just come up with tactics that barely defend against the surveillance we have now.

[hirako2000]

Technologists are for hire. They get paid. They need to get paid for something. They do see the future it's creating, some of them build tools (for free) to counter what they or they peers are building.