Tencent and Alibaba are among the firms that assist authorities in hunting down criminal suspects, silencing dissent and creating surveillance cities
The Chinese government is building one of the world’s most sophisticated, high-tech systems to keep watch over its citizens, including surveillance cameras, facial-recognition technology and vast computers systems that comb through terabytes of data. Central to its efforts are the country’s biggest technology companies, which are openly acting as the government’s eyes and ears in cyberspace.
Companies including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. , Tencent HoldingsLtd. and Baidu Inc., are required to help China’s government hunt down criminal suspects and silence political dissent. Their technology is also being used to create cities wired for surveillance.
.. The political and legal system of the future is inseparable from the internet, inseparable from big data,” Alibaba’s Mr. Ma told a Communist Party commission overseeing law enforcement last year. He said technology will soon make it possible to predict security threats. “Bad guys won’t even be able to walk into the square,” he said.
.. Tencent, the world’s largest online videogame company, dominates Chinese cyberspace with news, video-streaming operations and its WeChat app
.. “Experience has proven that WeChat is completely compromised,” especially for people on the government’s watch list, Mr. Hu said. “Everyone has a spy watching them. That spy is their smartphone.”
Quit Modifying Capitalism
Profits should be pure, generated from price signals between buyers and sellers.
- .. Bernie Sanders offers a fine place to start. “Do I consider myself,” he asked at an October 2015 rally, “part of the casino capitalist
- .. Mr. Gore co-wrote “A Manifesto for Sustainable Capitalism,”
- .. Thomas Piketty’s now largely discredited book, was published in English. Mr. Piketty called for a tax on dynastic wealth .. the emergence of a new patrimonial capitalism.”
- .. Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz tried to one-up Mr. Piketty, complaining in a 2014 article for Harper’s magazine about “phony capitalism.”
- .. The conspiracy theorist and occasional filmmaker Oliver Stone .. surveillance capitalism
- .. It never ends. In 2012, Britain’s then-Prime Minister David Cameron talked about “socially responsible and genuinely popular capitalism” and blamed Labour for “turbo capitalism.”
- .. China practices state-directed capitalism. The jury is still out.
.. Drop the modifiers. There is only one type of capitalism that works, and it goes like this: Someone postpones consumption, invests his savings to produce a good or service, delights customers, generates profits, and then consumes and invests what’s left in further production. These profits are pure, generated from price signals between buyers and sellers, without favoritism from experts or elites. It isn’t hard to grasp.
.. Most of this was once self-evident, but in 2017 capitalism is losing the mind-share game. Where does all this end up? For something scary, skip the next Stephen King clown movie. Instead read up on postcapitalism and progressive mutualism. It sounds like Venezuela.