*without resorting to complete Russian style government control
The US is not (yet) Russia. The rule of law is definitely being destroyed as we speak, so who knows 5, 10 years down the road, but there are still several prerequisite institutions that need to be destroyed before the US could reliably enforce a VPN ban.
From my reading, the GP comment isn’t claiming otherwise, but just that that sort of VPN ban isn’t enforceable in advance of some of those changes. They do directly suggest they don’t know how long this will remain the case.
>Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad."
This is a pretty bold claim and I'm not sure it matches up with reality.
Karl Marx said that in the first stage of communism there would be a required period of dictatorial control in order to transition from and dismantle capitalist institutions. This is exactly what happened in China and the USSR... there just never was a phase 2.
That's not quite "this will never happen here", more like premeditated dictatorship that never ended because the ruling class preferred being a ruling class rather than return themselves to "communist paradise".
If we’re exhuming odious corpses, Lenin did say the first step would be to control the telegraph and telephone exchanges. Control over the spread of information was understood to be crucial even then. (Admittedly in Lenin’s case he was also talking about battlefield coordination inside a city, what with the absence of portable radios.)
As far as Marx, well, he didn’t provide a recipe for phase 2 either—he just kind of assumed that things would fall into place naturally after the revolution (that needed to be global! the whole communism-within-a-country thing was a later invention / post-hoc rationalization, lampooned masterfully by Voinovich’s Moscow 2042). The entirety of the nascent social sciences field (which Marx was performing to the contemporary standards of, however disastrously that turned out) was rather high on the whole natural law thing around that time. Turns out that, if you created a power vacuum, it would be filled by people who had most ruthlessly optimized for capturing power, as opposed to fairness, your preferred ideology, or anything else. Which at first meant Lenin and then ultimately Stalin, in whose purges died the last true (if at that point very, very bloody) believers. (Notice also how there are very few mentions in history of the eponymous soviets, councils [of workers and peasants], deciding anything whatsoever.) Also most of the intellectual backbone of the nation and the national liberation movements of multiple peoples, but who’s counting.
> Karl Marx said that in the first stage of communism there would be a required period of dictatorial control
Not that it particularly matters, but he didn't say that. Marx never set down specific ideas about how a communist or proto-communist society should organize itself. He thought history was a natural progression of inevitable forces and was more interested in establishing the inevitability of communism (ha) than in describing specifically what a post-capitalist society would look like. (Misleadingly, he did use the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat," though not to describe any type of dictatorial government.)
The whole "vanguard party of elites ruling by fiat" thing was Lenin's idea. Lenin though the working class wasn't educated enough to lead itself, so a ruling Communist Party should act as a steward on their behalf. Naturally, this idea was popular with people like Lenin and Mao, since it justified their being elevated to the status of authoritarian dictators.
> more like premeditated dictatorship
Lenin's communist party was, in theory, meant to represent the public. The pitch was never, "time for our prescribed period of temporary authoritarian dictatorship." Like any other political party, the Communist party was supposed to be democratically selected and represent the public. Obviously it quickly became corrupt and snuffed out the democratic elements, but any government is vulnerable to that sort of thing.
No, I think the USSR's descent into authoritarianism was very much an "it won't happen here" phenomenon, save perhaps for the fact that the Tsar's monarchy had only just ended and authoritarianism would have been nothing new to Russia.
If buying and selling things internationally makes a country capitalist, then Soviet Russia was capitalist. Pre-Soviet Russia was mercantilist, which can be somewhat handwavyly described as capitalism-unless-I-can-kill-you, both between people within a nation and between nations themselves and is still not entirely dead.
Capitalism is circumlocutions of long dead people who provided little to society but the sound of their voice, vacuous writings.
So kind of the educated labor exploiters of the past to explain how the world must work. Very TINA of them.
Capitalism is people socially convincing each other there's a communal upside to capitalism. Sounds almost like socialist communist nonsense, this capitalism.
Strip away endless obfuscation the real economy is anything but physical statistics, it becomes clear capitalism is just empty rhetoric.
You said "if buying and selling things internationally makes a country capitalist," somebody told you that's not what capitalism is, and you said "no true scotsman."
You have to do better than this to convince people of things.
If you had said "Buying and selling things internationally makes a country capitalist" rather than posing a pointless hypothetical, you would have had to defend that, and you weren't ready to.
Capitalism and communism couldn’t be more different, in the true definition of the terms.
Communism is literally a ruling class dictating the lives of an entire country. Capitalism at least gives the opportunity of individual action.
You are allowed to hate capitalism, clearly you do, and advocate for socialism, et. al. Whatever point you think you just made with your post is completely devoid of substance.
Russia was primarily an agricultural exporter, but it was most certainly a capitalist society prior to revolution. It bought and sold many things, and was an industrial nation, on par with many others in Europe, with a capacity to build war ships, tanks, artillery, trains and so on. It had other tremendous inequalities, but without factories, without lower officers in the navy and army, without the first revolution where the capitalists took over, there would be no second revolution of the bolsheviks, or soviets.
Not really, that’s just the type the EFF gins up. The problem is the regulation of speech and requiring verification.
The VPN stuff is a misapplication of security “best practices”. Tech companies are amoral and happily facilitate the use of their technology for oppression in other places.
I would argue it's more accurate to say tech companies take the "old-style" US approach. It's based on the idea that propaganda doesn't actually work. There weren't many actual communists in Russia, it was a dictatorship with mostly prisoners/hostages who were threatened into lying, and knew full well that they were threatened, and after the teenage phase is over, actually start asking "why are we being threatened over this?".
So as soon as they left with little intention to return, they suddenly become the problem that socialists really hate to discuss: ex-Soviets hate socialism. It's like cults, or, if we're honest, there's other repressive groups and repressive ideologies that have loooooooooong lost their any usefulness and really only the repression remains.
In other words, if tech companies show Chinese that non-communist democratic states exist and how it is to live there, then no amount of CCP censorship will ever actually convince those people that the CCP has good intentions.
Judging by my conversations with Chinese, it's working.
Hierarchies are fractal; at every level of an ideological authoritarian society, comfort and influence are only granted in exchange for affirming and regurgitating state ideology. Cognitive dissonance forces people who take that deal to choose between losing self-respect and accepting the ideology. I think you'd be surprised how well this works. People always want to believe that they deserve the things they have.
> ex-Soviets hate socialism
Naturally, they change their minds when they leave. There's no longer any psychological incentive to believe. Besides, people who choose to leave have typically already broken with the ideology. You compare it to a cult, but the thing about cults is that the members generally do believe.
> non-communist democratic states exist and how it is to live there
Life in many authoritarian states is fine for most people. It is what it is; if you don't make a fuss, you can live pretty comfortably. Obviously many dictatorships are not like this, but China is fairly stable.
For almost all of human history, people have lived under authoritarian governments. It's unpleasant to think about, but authoritarianism can be stable and durable. There's no guarantee that democracy wins.
> Life in many authoritarian states is fine for most people. It is what it is; if you don't make a fuss, you can live pretty comfortably. Obviously many dictatorships are not like this, but China is fairly stable.
I've always found Chinese who left are either rich or not. If they're rich, they've seen other rich suddenly fall out of grace, suddenly "relocate" or outright disappear.
If they're not rich, they've always been miserable in China, and don't want to go back.
Well, most are not rich and the biggest complaint is hukou, ie. that you can't actually live where you want in China. The state assigns you a city and you go there. There's a huge set of consequences if you don't, and a lot of people aren't happy with the choice made for them. People outside of China think China is like the US. You want to live in, oh, say Washington, or Anchorage, you can just go live there, find a job and live life.
Which also means your basic question is kind-of wrong. There's a lot of Chinese who want to leave but can't. The only Chinese who actually leave were asked by the government to leave, for a purpose (often studying), usually only for a limited time. Now it's not like it's 100% forced, they do ask for volunteers and what you want but it's certainly not a free choice to leave China or go back.
In China you're effectively locked into your city/town/village, and often a specific building and job (you can leave for a weekend or ..., that's not usually a problem, though sometimes it is)
For the rich the fear is kind-of the same, just with much more pressure and much more consequences, essentially being asked to relocate, give up a company (apparently much more common under Xi), forced to hire someone and give them a high position, buy or sell certain things, and being arrested, even tortured (in some kind of torture chair) if you are even suspected of not complying with often corrupt requests from government officials. The issue with that is just how many corrupt governments or de-facto governments there are. State, province, city, 1000 special purpose governments (e.g. one for the coal industry). Of course, the state can't be bothered with having a standard for identifying/authorizing themselves, so there's scam requests too. Then there's the local police, and 10+ police services that all operate where you live for one reason or another.
Makes you wonder. I always thought a communist state would be like a gigantic bureaucracy. And it is, but it's also a mafia.
Second complaint you keep hearing is about the consequences of failing the Gaokao, or even succeeding but getting selected wrong/not what you want. There are no second chances.
And I do get almost all of Asia is less "do what you want" than the US or Europe is, but some aspects of China are absurdly controlling.
Don’t exaggerate the level of control required. For all that things are bad and getting worse, Russia has not reached the North Korea percolation point where every facet of government control is tied to every other one. (Neither has Russia reached a NK-style total war economy, partly through bureaucratic dysfunction and partly by design; but I digress.) The things that it does are still pretty modular and don’t require $YOURCOUNTRY becoming Russia in its entirety. Hell, London had more outdoor surveillance than Moscow until after Covid. As far as Internet censorship, here’s what the playbook was:
1. Have a dysfunctional court system. (Not a powerless one, mind you; it’s enough that it basically never rule against the government. It would probably even be enough if it never ruled against any of the following.)
2. Mandate page-level blocks of “information harmful to the health and development of children” (I wish I were joking) for consumer ISPs, by court order; of course, that means IP or at least hostname/SNI blocks for TLS-protected websites, we can’t help that now can we. The year is 2012.
3. Gradually expand the scope throughout the following steps. (After couple of particularly obnoxious opposition websites and against an unavoidable background of prostitution and illegal gambling, the next victim, in 2015, was piracy including pirate libraries. Which is why I find the notion of LibGen or Sci-Hub being Russian soft power so risible, and the outrage against Cloudflare not being in the moderation business so naïve.)
4. Make sure the court orders are for specific pieces of content not websites (as they must be if you don’t want the system to be circumventable by trivial hostname hopping), meaning the enforcement agency can find a particularly vague order and gradually start using it for whatever. Doesn’t hurt that the newly-blocked website’s owner will be faced with a concluded case in which they don’t even have standing.
5. Ramp up enforcement against ISPs.
6. Use preexisting lawful intercept infra at ISPs to ramp up enforcement even further. Have them run through the agency-provided daily blacklist, fine the offenders. Any other probe you can get connected to the ISP will work too.
7. Offer ISPs a choice (wink, wink) of routing their traffic through agency-controlled, friendly-contractor-made DPI boxes they will need to buy, promising to release them from some liability. (First draft published 2016, signed into law 2019.)
8. Mandate the boxes.
9. It is now 2021 or so and you’ve won, legally and organizationally speaking, the rest is a simple matter of programming to filter out VPN protocols, WhatsApp calls and such. Pass additional laws mandating blocks of “promotion” of block evasion if you wish, but the whole legal basis thing is a pretence at this point. For instance, you can de facto block YouTube absent any legal order by simply having the DPI boxes make it very slow, a capability not mentioned in any law whatsoever, then cheerfully announce that in the national press.
See how very easy it is? How each legal or technical capability logically follows from very real deficiencies of the preceding ones so even a reasonable court would be disinclined to rule against them? Understand now why I’m furious when reasonable people on this forum defend the desires of their—mostly good and decent!—governments to control the Internet?
(See also how most of this happened before “Russia bad” became the prevailing sentiment, and how most of it went largely unnoticed in the EU and US, aside from a couple of reputable-but-fringe orgs like RSF to whom very few listen because they cry wolf so much? The ECtHR didn’t even get to the cases, IIRC, before the trap snapped shut and Russia was drummed out of the Council of Europe to widespread cheering, making the matter de facto moot.)
You know that road. You know exactly where it ends.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
*without resorting to complete Russian style government control
The US is not (yet) Russia. The rule of law is definitely being destroyed as we speak, so who knows 5, 10 years down the road, but there are still several prerequisite institutions that need to be destroyed before the US could reliably enforce a VPN ban.