[bpodgursky]

If you frame it this way in your mind you will be surprised when people pick surveillance over public disorder. If you don't like that world (I don't either) you can't bury your head in the sand about the problems it is solving, you need a "No, but... " framing where you give answers that actually work.

There is a ground-level appeal of the China-style panopticon because it delivers public order and clean streets. Larry didn't just buy his way to digital dictator by bribing the right people, it answers a question in a way other people are avoiding, because answering it requires a lot of work and uncomfortable tradeoffs.

[overfeed]

> There is a ground-level appeal of the China-style panopticon because it delivers public order and clean streets

Clean streets and high speed rail are not a bundled deal with the panopticon - there is no causative linkage. Surveillance - as Ellison plainly mentioned - is for controlling anti-establishment behaviors.

[doctorpangloss]

Haha, ground level appeal in a one party government? How would you know? Of course someone likes China's system, but who? How do you know?

[lurk2]

He’s talking about shifting attitudes towards China online, not within China itself.

[toephu2]

Lookup China subreddits and on YouTube. Tons of Americans wish they could just pick up and move to China. Most Americans that visit China for the first time love it. It is pretty awesome. Have you been?

[overfeed]

What I've seen is visitors loving Chinese high speed rail and endless markets, but not loving the Great Firewall.

An average tourist visiting a country - any country - has a much rosier experience of the country than the average person living there long-term.

[datsci_est_2015]

> There is a ground-level appeal of the China-style panopticon because it delivers public order and clean streets.

Does it? Japan is also famously clean, so maybe it’s the ethnic homogeneity? On the other hand, Singapore is very heterogeneous and clean, and eastern Kentucky is very homogenous and run-down. So maybe this whole attributing outcomes of society to singular factors isn’t very founded in science or reason but just gives people an opportunity to confirm whatever biases they have.

[bpodgursky]

Japan has historically been a clean and high-trust society.

China was a ground-level low-trust mess even 25 years ago, with fairly rampant fraud and theft by just about anyone you met on the street. That has completely changed — why? I don't think culture evolves that rapidly ex nihilo, when there's an obvious technology answer.

[maxglute]

The secret is shame. You can enforce behavior through shame culture slowly (JP) or rapidly with technology, half the reason PRC cleaned up fast is people didn't want their faces plastered on misdemeanour jumbotron. Probably won't work if you live in a shameless society where social humiliation has little or even opposite effect.

[lurk2]

> There is a ground-level appeal of the China-style panopticon because it delivers public order and clean streets.

Correct.

> Larry didn't just buy his way to digital dictator by bribing the right people

Incorrect.

> it answers a question in a way other people are avoiding, because answering it requires a lot of work and uncomfortable tradeoffs.

Larry Ellison is not interested in public order. The surveillance system isn’t going to be for normal people, it’s going to be for Larry Ellison. California isn’t filthy because it lacks a panopticon; it was cleaned for visiting Chinese dignitaries without one. If Ellison had wanted to clean up the street and has the appeal you think that he does, he could have just run for governor.