“I don’t dare let my mind wander.”
May 28, 2018 8:39 AM   Subscribe

High School in China Installs Facial Recognition Cameras to Monitor Students’ Attentiveness: At Hangzhou Number 11 High School, three cameras at the front of the classroom scan students’ faces every 30 seconds, analyzing their facial expressions to detect their mood, according to a May 16 report in the state-run newspaper The Paper. The different moods—surprised, sad, antipathy, angry, happy, afraid, neutral—are recorded and averaged during each class. A display screen, only visible to the teacher, shows the data in real-time. A certain value is determined as a student not paying enough attention. A video shot by Zhejiang Daily Press revealed that the system—coined the “smart classroom behavior management system” by the school—also analyzes students’ actions, categorized into: reading, listening, writing, standing up, raising hands, and leaning on the desk.
posted by not_the_water (94 comments total) 32 users marked this as a favorite
 
Maybe the students could just be replaced with robots?
posted by The Card Cheat at 8:43 AM on May 28, 2018 [15 favorites]


the future is bad.
posted by poffin boffin at 8:44 AM on May 28, 2018 [85 favorites]


Yeah, give it 10 or 20 years and shit like this is going to seem quaint by comparison.
posted by The Card Cheat at 8:45 AM on May 28, 2018 [15 favorites]


I wonder if the data isn't also being used to assess the teacher's effectiveness? I ask because, if this system came to the US, I am absolutely sure the data would be used as a bludgeon against the teachers.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:45 AM on May 28, 2018 [57 favorites]


Eighth grade me would have been just staring at the cameras in fear all the time.

Teenaged me would deliberately try to time my expressions to thirty-second intervals and see if I could set up some kind of semaphore system with the administrators.
posted by Scattercat at 8:47 AM on May 28, 2018 [14 favorites]


No, no, it's cool.

They just want to raise an army of people who can lie convincingly with their entire being and body, then unleash them into the world.

Because that's how you'd do it.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:48 AM on May 28, 2018 [43 favorites]


I like how they just straight up call it Skynet because why not. Why the fuck not.
posted by poffin boffin at 8:51 AM on May 28, 2018 [26 favorites]


BRB, opening ratburger stand in sewers of China.
posted by Query at 8:51 AM on May 28, 2018 [6 favorites]


The different moods—surprised, sad, antipathy, angry, happy, afraid, neutral—are recorded and averaged during each class.

I think in eighth grade my primary mood was `desperately trying not to pop a public boner` so good luck trying to adjust your curriculum around a constant state of shameful sexuality, overlords.
posted by notorious medium at 8:53 AM on May 28, 2018 [17 favorites]


Mark my words, all this is going to do is create a generation that is really adept at pretending to be in rapt attention while actually being completely out-to-lunch.

You'll have security guards looking right at an assault and continue staring, because they aren't actually paying attention.

You'll have health inspectors looking right past the rats at their feet because they're busy thinking about how disillusioned they are with life.

They just want to raise an army of people who can lie convincingly with their entire being and body, then unleash them into the world.

Yes, this is exactly how you create an entire society of extremely damaged people who will undoubtedly damage those around them, a horrible endless cycle that so much resembles the endless spiral down the toilet bowl.
posted by deadaluspark at 8:54 AM on May 28, 2018 [41 favorites]


Ooh, with the front-facing cameras on most modern computers, you could do the same thing for employees! Plus it's an automatic for-cause firing if you "accidentally" obstruct the camera.

BRB, gonna register the domain name for my new start-up!
posted by spacewrench at 8:54 AM on May 28, 2018 [4 favorites]


School administrators in the U.S. will be all over this—it’s described as “smart!”
posted by corey flood at 8:57 AM on May 28, 2018 [6 favorites]


Mark my words, all this is going to do is create a generation that is really adept at pretending to be in rapt attention while actually being completely out-to-lunch.

You'll have security guards looking right at an assault and continue staring, because they aren't actually paying attention.


The most fundamentally stupid thing about basic training and military drill instruction: standing at attention.

Most other bullshit from basic seemed to have at least some useful purpose. Even all the asinine stuff about packing and arranging your locker just right had its practical reasons, like getting you in the habit of putting stuff where it belongs so nobody would have to search for it in an emergency. But standing at attention? They literally want you to stare off into a single point in space and not move. It's not meditative. It's not teaching you to focus. It's not discipline. They want you to pay less attention, and they call it "attention."
posted by scaryblackdeath at 8:58 AM on May 28, 2018 [13 favorites]


Doesn't this assume everyone is socialised to express emotions in the same way? How would this work with people from a range of cultures?
posted by AnhydrousLove at 8:59 AM on May 28, 2018 [2 favorites]


How would this work with people from a range of cultures?

Who cares? If they can't conform to the ideal expression set by the programmers, they're not really trying, are they? Let somebody who will try take that spot. Lazy slackers.
posted by spacewrench at 9:02 AM on May 28, 2018 [13 favorites]


Oh god, they're going to criminalize resting bitch face.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 9:21 AM on May 28, 2018 [80 favorites]


It’s interesting that this article is in The Epoch Times. This is a newspaper with connections with the Falun Gong movement. Editorially, the paper concentrates on human rights issues in China as exemplified by the crack down on Falun Gong in China. The Falun Gong is arguably a cult. Here in San Francisco they are everywhere, especially outside the Chinese Consulate on a daily basis. So there is an edge to this reporting.
posted by njohnson23 at 9:28 AM on May 28, 2018 [13 favorites]


I was reading the other day about a culture in which witchcraft was thought to reside in a person and be mostly beyond their control, except that it most often caused harm to other people when you had angry or jealous thoughts about them.

The anthropologist reported that they were the happiest people he had ever met.

I thought, "I bet they were, if any sign of discontent meant that something bad happening to some other random person could be blamed on any bad mood you had."

Soon, Chinese students will (appear to be) the most attentive and enthusiastic in the world.
posted by clawsoon at 9:50 AM on May 28, 2018 [4 favorites]


Yikes :( :( :( :( :(
posted by spindrifter at 9:51 AM on May 28, 2018


I bet this would increase my productivity at work.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 10:01 AM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


Black Mirror, Handmaid's Tale, Fahrenheit 451. It's a great time for prestige television. It's a terrifying time for the fact that these dystopic adaptations have basically become guidelines/handbooks for the authoritarian systems that seem to be creeping more and more into the public eye. They've always been there, but somehow these things seem more open and more wide-spread. Though maybe we're just more aware of it because of our inter-connectivity.

*sighs*
posted by Fizz at 10:02 AM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


Just wait until they find out that it was the ones who seemed to be inattentive who are actually the top test scorers.
posted by srboisvert at 10:10 AM on May 28, 2018 [7 favorites]


I'm guessing in a few years to prevent school shootings, students in the US will be saying "within cells interlinked" to a gizmo on a turnstyle before being allowed in.
posted by lmfsilva at 10:11 AM on May 28, 2018 [4 favorites]


It's not about improving test scores, it's about asserting dominance and control.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:13 AM on May 28, 2018 [25 favorites]


Next we can use it to identify facial expressions expressing intent to engage in subversive activities. Let's call this Facecrime
posted by newton at 10:15 AM on May 28, 2018 [13 favorites]


three things come to mind.

1. we're all going to die (but that was inevitable anyway)

2. if this is how China wants to game the future, well good luck with that, I guess, but my gut tells me they will lose, because the Borg loses in Star Trek, right? Don't they? I don't think I stuck with Next Generation that far.

3. this confirms me in my belief that here in the Americas, every day of school post about Grade Six should begin with an enforced bong hit, and then doing whatever the fuck you want. Because chaos always wins.
posted by philip-random at 10:22 AM on May 28, 2018 [7 favorites]


njohnson23: It’s interesting that this article is in The Epoch Times. This is a newspaper with connections with the Falun Gong movement. Editorially, the paper concentrates on human rights issues in China as exemplified by the crack down on Falun Gong in China. The Falun Gong is arguably a cult. Here in San Francisco they are everywhere, especially outside the Chinese Consulate on a daily basis. So there is an edge to this reporting.

A lot of reporting on human rights abuses in China doesn't have nearly enough of an edge. I'm not sure about editions in the rest of the world, but the reporting I've seen from Epoch Times here in Canada has been consistently good.
posted by clawsoon at 10:23 AM on May 28, 2018 [6 favorites]


Think how much time that school will save since attendance can be taken by pressing a button. And the homes of truant students can just be automatically targeted for drone strikes.
posted by XMLicious at 10:24 AM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


To me, the most unsettling quote was "...students felt like they were being monitored when the system was first put in place, but have since gotten used to it." Will there be an eventual backlash as humans hit a breaking point or will reinforcing social order be more comforting in an ever more fast paced word?
I have no idea where this kind of technology is going to lead but as the Magic 8 Ball says "Outlook not so good."
posted by Muncle at 10:28 AM on May 28, 2018 [7 favorites]


I tend to be skeptical of these WTF China/Japan (or "Finland/Denmark/Sweden/Norway is awesome") stories.

China is very bad when it comes to digital civil liberties (or civil liberties in general) but it's really hard to tell if this is an outlier or what. Because people love to click on "WTF China???"
posted by JamesBay at 10:28 AM on May 28, 2018 [10 favorites]


I think it’s also notable that it’s happening at the number 11 high school. When I taught in a public school in a different city in Zhejiang, the kids with the highest test scores went to the number 1 school and on down the line with the lowest scoring kids at the school with the highest number.

I wonder why that particular school is piloting it. Maybe kids at the number one school are trusted more? Maybe they thought they’d get better data from a middling school? Maybe the manufacturer’s cousin is the head of that school and he got a kickback.
posted by MsDaniB at 10:32 AM on May 28, 2018 [12 favorites]


To paraphrase George Orwell in 1984:
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a facial recognition software boot stamping on a human face — forever.
posted by y2karl at 10:43 AM on May 28, 2018 [4 favorites]


Fun prank: find a young woman wearing a white dress and pour water on her and have her hide in a classroom closet. Every 45 minutes or so, have her stand in the back with her dripping hair partially obscuring her face during a 'snapshot'. Then one student uses a blocked number to call the teacher's number the following day. Within a week, all the teachers have quit, and now the school seems to be having great difficulty finding more.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 10:52 AM on May 28, 2018 [8 favorites]


Will there be an eventual backlash as humans hit a breaking point or will reinforcing social order be more comforting in an ever more fast paced word?
I know that the facial-recognition stuff is particularly creepy to most of us, but schools in the US are increasingly using student monitoring software that gives parents realtime information about their children. For instance, you can log on and see if your kids have skipped or been late for a class that day. You will be able to see all of your kid's grades on tests, assignments, and quizzes in real time. A lot of these schools also assign points for good behavior and take away points for bad behavior, and you can check and see where your kid stands at any given moment. You never really have to talk to your kid: you can check in on the PowerSchool app and find out all sorts of information about their school day. I don't love the idea in general, but it's also a huge problem for traditionally-aged college students, because they go from extremely tight surveillance, in which their parents are able to monitor every assignment and every second of their days, to complete freedom, in which their parents have no information about them at all. But a lot of students don't think the realtime monitoring systems are weird at all, and they are sort of confused that they aren't able to give their parents similar access to information about them in college. (They're also confused about the fact that they aren't being tracked in the same way in college. You can't necessarily log on anywhere and see how you're doing in every class. They really want the course management system to function in the same way, and it doesn't, which is endlessly confusing to them.)

So yeah, it gets normalized, and it's not just China, although I don't think the facial recognition stuff is coming to the US anytime soon.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:11 AM on May 28, 2018 [18 favorites]


This is going to go in every retail store, restaurant, and office as soon as we can swing it. If you thought "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean" was the bane of your existence, wait until your employer wants to know why you were staring off into space for 20 seconds when you could've been productive. I worked at a call center and they were already working on machine learning and sentiment analysis for our voices to make sure we hit the right tone of voice. I can already hear the "Ah ah ahh, you need to be smiling when you say that, but you were scowling."
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 11:12 AM on May 28, 2018 [12 favorites]


And that is today's entry in the "why thinking about the implications of technology is a really good idea" file. I'm not even sure where to start with the fallacies here from a basic science standpoint, but it's a long list.

To start with, the code that runs this thing is likely some flavor of neural network (e.g., a CNN or something similar). You can totally train them to do this kind of discrimination task, but unless you train them really broadly, their classification parameters (e.g., distinguishing attentive from intent from plotting the overthrow of the state from facial expression) are brittle. As in, feed them data outside their training set (e.g., someone with odd makeup, or maybe something that looks enough like a face for it to treat it as one) and it'll classify it, but it'll be wrong. Do that enough, and you can break its training completely, so when you go back to normal, it'll be far less accurate.

The other big piece here is that facial expression is a crappy first-line assessment of mental state, particularly of attention. Hell, eye movements are a lousy measure of visual attention (you can attend where you aren't looking, and, in fact, need to in order to plan eye movements, but the idea that facial expression is a good measure of this? Um, no.

In fact, for what they're trying to measure, they don't even need cameras. Humans are actually really good at looking at a crowd and judging mean facial expression (research on this, if anyone is interested, is usually under the name of "ensemble perception"). You don't need to look at individuals, you can glance at the audience and perceive the mean emotion of the group... and even people who can't recognize faces (prosopagnosics) can do this.
posted by Making You Bored For Science at 11:20 AM on May 28, 2018 [48 favorites]


The other big piece here is that facial expression is a crappy first-line assessment of mental state

The problem is, the people championing this use case probably don't know and don't really care about this. We tend to think technology is always implemented with purpose, but sometimes technology is implemented for completely irrational and illogical "reasons".
posted by JamesBay at 11:22 AM on May 28, 2018 [6 favorites]


I wonder how long it'll be til fashion adapts to confuse the monitors. Like assymetrical eye makeup or reflective contacts.
posted by eustacescrubb at 11:23 AM on May 28, 2018 [5 favorites]


Will there be an eventual backlash as humans hit a breaking point or will reinforcing social order be more comforting in an ever more fast paced word?

I've seen this TV commercial! The asian student rebellion will start with a styling product.
posted by srboisvert at 11:27 AM on May 28, 2018


wait until your employer wants to know why you were staring off into space for 20 seconds when you could've been productive.

No, it will be dressed up in corporate speak. There will be some study that gets cited (probably being done in the classroom in China right now) that the median amount of time spent zoning out while doing a focused task is 7 minutes per hour or something. You’ll get called into your manager’s office to go over your data. “This isn’t a punishment, we just want to help you get to where most of your co-workers are so you can reach your full potential. How are things at home? Why don’t you talk to our “employee assistance program?” And here, take these pills. I’ve been going over these budget numbers and next year, we might have to implement a variable incentivized salary system based on median attention span and we really want to get you up to speed so it doesn’t hurt you.” This is really not that different than how a lot of cubicle farms work now.

Fuck capitalism.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 11:37 AM on May 28, 2018 [25 favorites]




"The problem is, the people championing this use case probably don't know and don't really care about this."

Yep. Absolutely.

Which is why they piss me off, because there's what we know, and there's what we wish we knew, and building a system around the latter does nothing other than measure something other than what the insufficiently aware fools who did so think they're measuring. Or, to paraphrase a professor from grad school: using tools they don't understand to ask questions they don't understand.
posted by Making You Bored For Science at 12:06 PM on May 28, 2018 [8 favorites]


I have access to my ten year old son's Google Classroom account, and it has helped my wife and I assist him in areas he is struggling in and help him understand and meet deadlines. We have to restrain ourselves from doing work for him or giving him answers or making excuses for lapses, but this is and has been the eternal struggle of parents or students.

I volunteer in his classroom every Friday to help students with reading comprehension, and have a pretty good idea of the challenges that kids are faced with. One of the biggest challenges is self-regulation and dealing with stress. I think that my son's teacher strikes a good balance. He expects strong effort and good work, but there are just times when students - even the "good" students - need to lay their heads on their desks, or run across the playground a couple of times, or walk across the classroom to chat with a friend about something. Sometimes it's a bit chaotic, especially for my son, who relishes his peace and quiet, but the occasional release of the pressure valve seems to be a healthy and realistic approach. Most importantly, it's an acknowledgment that students need to develop self-regulation and not depend on an outside entity to tell them how they feel and what they should do at any given moment.

This system feels like straight up fascism, mind control, state overreach, you name it. When you're denying children the opportunity to learn to regulate their own feelings and actions, and remind them that they are continually being monitored and evaluated, that is denying them the opportunity to become healthy adults.
posted by vverse23 at 12:16 PM on May 28, 2018 [29 favorites]


I don’t think they care if the system works; the fact that it exists serves to control students with fear.

We’re joking, but this seems like a great way to traumatize an entire generation of not-wealthy-enough kids.
posted by schadenfrau at 12:57 PM on May 28, 2018 [7 favorites]


Somehow I don't think that this will get installed in Congress first, even though that might be a useful first deployment for any number of reasons.
posted by clawsoon at 1:21 PM on May 28, 2018 [3 favorites]


This is going to go in every retail store, restaurant, and office as soon as we can swing it. If you thought "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean" was the bane of your existence, wait until your employer wants to know why you were staring off into space for 20 seconds when you could've been productive.

This already exists. Those cameras, that are so ubiquitous in retail spaces and elsewhere, can be accessed live by those who control them, which means "the boss", if they so desire, and many do, can check up on employees all the time and even fast forward through entire shifts to make sure their underlings are behaving as they wish them to. These systems are expressly used to make sure people aren't "wasting time" at least as much as for any security purposes. Facial recognition just helps automate the process to save the bosses effort in checking up. There was never any question that the development of the technology was going to be put to such uses, no matter what blather about public good the asses who developed it might have claimed.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:35 PM on May 28, 2018 [5 favorites]


It's pretty evident that, in the near future, the only sane people are going to be living rough in sewers, vacant houses, and scrub woods, doing what they can to thwart detection by drones.

The garbage future that the moral simpletons of Silicon Valley are bringing us drives me closer on an almost weekly basis to getting ahead of that curve now.
posted by ryanshepard at 1:42 PM on May 28, 2018 [5 favorites]


I tend to be skeptical of these WTF China/Japan (or "Finland/Denmark/Sweden/Norway is awesome") stories.
For now, technically, participating in China's Citizen Scores is voluntary. But by 2020 it will be mandatory. The behaviour of every single citizen and legal person (which includes every company or other entity)in China will be rated and ranked, whether they like it or not.
...
For instance, people with low ratings will have slower internet speeds; restricted access to restaurants, nightclubs or golf courses; and the removal of the right to travel freely abroad with, I quote, "restrictive control on consumption within holiday areas or travel businesses". Scores will influence a person's rental applications, their ability to get insurance or a loan and even social-security benefits. Citizens with low scores will not be hired by certain employers and will be forbidden from obtaining some jobs, including in the civil service, journalism and legal fields, where of course you must be deemed trustworthy. Low-rating citizens will also be restricted when it comes to enrolling themselves or their children in high-paying private schools.
(Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens)
However, there are signs that the use of social credit scoring on domestic transport could have started years ago. In early 2017, the country’s Supreme People’s Court said during a press conference that 6.15 million Chinese citizens had been banned from taking flights for social misdeeds.
(China to bar people with bad 'social credit' from planes, trains)
People using the toilet in Tiantan Park in Beijing – one of the city’s major tourist sites – will only receive a 60 centimetre serving of paper after they have conducted a facial scan.
(Beijing park uses face recognition software to wipe out toilet paper theft)

Wikipedia: Social Credit System

The typical WTF Japan story tends to pick something super-niche and generally stigmatised in Japan and present it as an ordinary, representative thing (otaku culture, hikikomori, underwear vending machines etc.). What's starting to happen in China is both way more banal and much bigger - mass surveillance of 1.4 billion people with real-time facial recognition and data fed into what's effectively a black box that can make life-altering decisions and, as a black box, can be gamed at will to target dissidents or any other group the government doesn't like.
posted by kersplunk at 1:47 PM on May 28, 2018 [18 favorites]


if this is how China wants to game the future, well good luck with that, I guess, but my gut tells me they will lose, because the Borg loses in Star Trek, right?

I'm uncomfortable with comparing Chinese people to the Borg. Let's please not do that.
posted by FJT at 1:51 PM on May 28, 2018 [4 favorites]


More often now-a-days I think that the Mennonites may have some good ideas about technology and the adoption thereof.
posted by fimbulvetr at 1:56 PM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


The typical WTF Japan story tends to pick something super-niche and generally stigmatised in Japan and present it as an ordinary, representative thing (otaku culture, hikikomori, underwear vending machines etc.)

Well, there is another difference between those stories: The WTF Japan stories seem to usually depict Japanese men as extremely misogynistic and/or extremely unmasculine (as the examples you provided). While WTF China stories seem to go with the more traditional "yellow hordes are a threat" narrative.
posted by FJT at 2:04 PM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


More often now-a-days I think that the Mennonites may have some good ideas about technology and the adoption thereof.
Mennonites have a variety of ideas about technology. I know a Mennonite who met his wife on eHarmony and often posts pictures of youth group outings from his Mennonite church on Facebook.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 2:10 PM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


I think it’s also notable that it’s happening at the number 11 high school.
Reminds me of my odd high school experience. My parents, in order to keep me away from the 'scary LA public schools' (and this was in 1969!), enrolled me in a Catholic School with a quota for 'non-caths', most of which landed in the Honors Class. But they also had a ranking system for a Merit Scholarship program, with the top 10 students getting a free ride. They were all 'caths' and I was #11. (#12 was a nice Jewish kid with a family connection to Hollywood who grew up to be co-Exec-Producer of Walker, Texas Ranger, but I digress.) That was this white cishet Presbyterian male's first exposure to discrimination, aka 'how the other half lives'. But it also taught me the special honor of being "just outside the top 10". But I really digress.

I'm glad I haven't seen anyone commenting that this was happening in a country "where everyone looks alike", but I suspect this would require a lot more lines of code for a classroom containing a seriously "multicultural" mix of students. So it'll likely take a while to be exported to America, except maybe for compsci classes full of cookie-cutter techbros.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:14 PM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


In my classes for my teaching certification, I got a whole lot of consistent messaging about keeping the kids On Task all the time, no matter what. Limiting chatter, limiting off-topic discussion, not talking about my personal life or non-classroom subjects (tv, movies, anyone's drama, etc), and limiting bathroom passes. It was constant. Anything distracting had to become all about getting the kids to re-focus. And yes, this is important stuff, and learning how to re-focus your class and get kids on-task is critical...but there was no nuance to it. Ever.

A lot of it felt like our instructors were trying to correct our habits, too. Like they were afraid we wanted to go in and make friends with our students and lose perspective on being the adults in the room and all that. Thankfully, I had one instructor (it was a general health topics class, I think) who broke with all this. Dude was incredibly knowledgeable about stuff kids have to deal with, everything from depression or ADHD to child abuse (wow, did we talk about abuse). And he made points like:

*If you have a kid who needs to go to the bathroom...maybe they actually need to go? Or maybe they just need a break? How is that bad?

*If your kids want to talk about off-task stuff, consider: maybe no other teacher will let them? What if you're the one they'll open up with?

*If a kid is out of his or her seat a lot, ask yourself why. Is it possible something is going on besides just boredom? Is boredom a crime? Also, maybe they don't want to sit because it literally hurts to sit down? These things can be warning signs.

You can't treat everything kids do like it's a crime. And if you open up about your own life, they start to realize you're a real human being yourself and not some pod person who has to go back to the hive after school and plug into the collective.

When I was teaching, I was the Crazy Stories Teacher. If students brought up a question that was off-topic but it sounded important, I'd stop class to discuss it. Students responded to that. Sometimes other teachers and staff would criticize me for it, 'cause it was inefficient and whatnot, and yeah maybe I lost a couple points off of test score averages or whatever. But I feel like all those human moments are worth so much more than those scores. What's worth more, a higher test score average or actual human connections? The school district may have a different opinion on that, but it's not hard to think of what a teenager would say.

It's really crushing to think of how much will be lost when we're constantly monitoring every kid's attention span. And every teacher's.
posted by scaryblackdeath at 2:15 PM on May 28, 2018 [40 favorites]


Those cameras, that are so ubiquitous in retail spaces and elsewhere, can be accessed live by those who control them, which means "the boss", if they so desire, and many do, can check up on employees all the time and even fast forward through entire shifts to make sure their underlings are behaving as they wish them to.

Yeah, I had a boss who used to do this at one of my retail jobs. Sometimes, when he wasn’t at the store and there weren’t any customers, we’d get a call suggesting that we needed to spend less time standing around and talking. I never got a raise when everyone else did, because he didn’t think I was productive enough, even though he and I were rarely at the store at the same time. He drew his conclusions from the security footage.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 2:34 PM on May 28, 2018 [3 favorites]


Now we're just on the cusp of retail video analytics. Facial recognition allows retailers to track individual customers through the store and, among other things, analyze their purchasing decisions.
posted by JamesBay at 2:50 PM on May 28, 2018


As if China wasn't already claustrophobic enough and traumatized enough, now there's this? sigh.
posted by yueliang at 3:24 PM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


While the students learn, the government learns how to recognize them. With weeks to years of training data.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 3:46 PM on May 28, 2018


Mennonites have a variety of ideas about technology.

Oh, I know, it is more the idea of thoughtful and careful consideration of tech before adoption of it, rather than complete abrogation of modern technology.
posted by fimbulvetr at 3:51 PM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


ArbitraryAndCapricious: Oh god, they're going to criminalize resting bitch face.

And this... this is how I end up in the electric chair.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 3:53 PM on May 28, 2018 [8 favorites]


I'm uncomfortable with comparing Chinese people to the Borg. Let's please not do that.

I'm comparing a Chinese high school's policy of installing facial recognition cameras to monitor students’ attentiveness to the Borg. Though that said, I did also reference China gaming the future, so point taken, I guess.
posted by philip-random at 4:07 PM on May 28, 2018 [3 favorites]


For now, technically, participating in China's Citizen Scores is voluntary. But by 2020 it will be mandatory. The behaviour of every single citizen and legal person (which includes every company or other entity)in China will be rated and ranked, whether they like it or not.
...
For instance, people with low ratings will have slower internet speeds; restricted access to restaurants, nightclubs or golf courses; and the removal of the right to travel freely abroad with, I quote, "restrictive control on consumption within holiday areas or travel businesses". Scores will influence a person's rental applications, their ability to get insurance or a loan and even social-security benefits. Citizens with low scores will not be hired by certain employers and will be forbidden from obtaining some jobs, including in the civil service, journalism and legal fields, where of course you must be deemed trustworthy. Low-rating citizens will also be restricted when it comes to enrolling themselves or their children in high-paying private schools.
In some ways, this is the logical extension of an Equifax-style credit score, which we all have whether we want it or not.
posted by clawsoon at 5:26 PM on May 28, 2018 [5 favorites]


In some ways, this is the logical extension of an Equifax-style credit score, which we all have whether we want it or not.

Not "in some ways." It was the explicit model for China's scheme.
posted by adamgreenfield at 5:40 PM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


“‘Papers, please’ was the symbol of living under tyranny in the past. Now, government officials don’t need to ask.”

One exasperated local said Xinjiang had become hell: “I would prefer to be a Syrian refugee than Chinese.”

I find this stuff horrifying. I remember stories from Ceaușescu's Romania where every public and private space is bugged and watched and virtually anyone could be a spy reporting on you. This seems to me where China is heading full speed ahead, openly, without even token arguments to the contrary.

Americans embracing, in fact preferring, news they know to be false, opting for a propaganda state. Chinese lining up to spy and report on one another. The world is going mad.
posted by xammerboy at 5:45 PM on May 28, 2018 [5 favorites]




Having lived in China, some parents... quotes like "I don't dare to let my mind wander" would be answered with "Good." For chill, reasonably good parents, they're probably framing this as "for" the kids' future competitiveness, which sounds reasonable for parents desperately seeking an edge to keep their kids in the middle class. For abusive parents, this can extend the reach of a really shitty family situation, especially with parents receiving reports about their kids' average attentiveness.
posted by storytam at 7:39 PM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


state-run newspaper The Paper

The point where parody becomes impossible.
posted by q*ben at 7:43 PM on May 28, 2018 [4 favorites]


I wonder how many of these systems are basically just sweetheart IT contracts that don’t actually work because they don’t need to. Hopefully all of them.
posted by vogon_poet at 7:47 PM on May 28, 2018 [5 favorites]


You can't treat everything kids do like it's a crime.

I hate to say it, but this is reminding me of the last article I read about that woman who went to teach in North Korea. Everyone was always keeping tabs on everybody already, and if we have the technology...

Oh god, please let a portal open up somewhere so I can jump into it and get out of this world. Even if it's Pylea, anywhere else has got to be better than where this world is going.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:42 PM on May 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


There was a time when I was reassured that hackers, nerdy teens fueled by Jolt cola and Skittles, would always be ahead of the government on things like this and throw monkey wrenches. Now, hackers are people who want to control the technology with an even more nefarious agenda for power and control than the stated one.

We are all Mennonites now.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 9:45 PM on May 28, 2018 [2 favorites]


So I brought this story up in class today, because I was running a university tutorial (3rd year level) on how digital technology is changing the workplace and the idea of what work is, and coincidentally just about everyone in the class is enrolled in a teaching degree as their major, so we were discussing how technology is changing the high school and primary school classroom.

After I summarised the story, I asked for reactions. I can report that the reactions (from 18 year old Australian university students) consisted of:

80% - "meh"
1 student - "My employer already monitors me with a camera and calls me up when it looks like I'm not paying enough attention or being friendly enough to customers, and that's just what I expect in the workplace. I never thought about it as a problem"
1 student - "What about non-neurotypical kids or people from different cultures where attention looks different?"
1 student - "Why can't teachers just look at kids and know whether they are paying attention? This is an unnecessary use of technology."
all the rest - "Seems legit. How else would you know whether kids are paying attention? And employers should use this in the workplace. They have a right to make sure they are getting what they pay for in terms of our time and energy."

I fear for our future.
posted by lollusc at 10:19 PM on May 28, 2018 [16 favorites]


I'm glad I haven't seen anyone commenting that this was happening in a country "where everyone looks alike", but I suspect this would require a lot more lines of code for a classroom containing a seriously "multicultural" mix of students. So it'll likely take a while to be exported to America, except maybe for compsci classes full of cookie-cutter techbros.

Well, I think maybe that's because Chinese people don't all look alike. There's less diversity in hair and eye colour, sure, but that's not what facial recognition algorithms are paying attention to. But even if your premise were correct, I sadly suspect that wouldn't slow the adoption of this system elsewhere: it would just make it work worse for people who look most different from the majority in the training data, i.e. ethnic minorities. And for many places in the white Western world, software not working as intended for people who aren't young white men isn't seen as a sufficient problem to do anything about (see e.g. cameras and skin colour, 'beauty filters', and then gendered experience of Twitter and basically all social media.)
posted by lollusc at 10:29 PM on May 28, 2018 [4 favorites]


An old boss used to watch us work out of similar impulses, and asked me sometimes why it looked like I was doing nothing.

I explained that I was thinking. I mentioned that if she liked, I could type so I would look busy.
posted by eyeofthetiger at 12:39 AM on May 29, 2018 [2 favorites]


Whether in China or elsewhere, the powerful invest in and deploy ever greater means of control and exploitation to overcome the natural freedom and rebellion to oppression of the weak; technology is making the goal of control ever closer. In the 20th century, we failed left and right to give freedom and equality to all people, we lurched instead to unequal prosperity and ubiquitous surveillance. The twenty-first century is one of global totalitarean technology, heck we are discussing it publically giving them the rope they need to hang us. In america its credit scores, race and reputation.com; but yeah developing technology without a just society is going to amplify and augment injustice. Oppression anywhere teaches would be oppressors everywhere. Is it paranoia if we live in the panopticon prison?
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 12:52 AM on May 29, 2018 [5 favorites]


Slarty Bartfast: We are all Mennonites now.

Mennonites have had to do a lot of fleeing persecution because of their beliefs. It's often easier to forget your beliefs and just blend in.
posted by clawsoon at 3:42 AM on May 29, 2018


The Mennonite thing is about being intentional about your choices of technology, and whether each "labour saving device" will improve your community, or leave it worse off. Not jumping face-first into every shiny bit of excitement but making a more studious approach.

Up in Waterloo there's farming communities you can't tell apart from mainstream people, and there's communities who still e.g. scythe their crops manually in the raw heat of summer. The Home Depot on the edge of town has a horse & buggy barn in the parking lot.

The thing to respect there is that someone is taking the time to think about what to bring into their way of life. (There are many, many problematic aspects of such a rigid community, too.)

This mindfulness is something that we do not do enough of in mainstream society.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:11 AM on May 29, 2018 [2 favorites]


We are all Mennonites now.

Not me. I'm a technopeasant Luddite.
posted by y2karl at 7:02 AM on May 29, 2018


Americans embracing, in fact preferring, news they know to be false, opting for a propaganda state. Chinese lining up to spy and report on one another. The world is going mad.

I think it's mostly cities going seriously mad. People are packed too close to each other in numbers greater than the human brain is wired to deal with in any healthy way. Living in termite mounds is just not good for us.

I moved out of the city because the longer I lived there, the uglier the city craziness was getting; took me forty years to do it, because the city was where I was born and raised and it was home. Now I live in a small country town.

The craziness around these parts is pretty healthy, on the whole.

If you're able to move out of the big city you live in, do. You'll be healthier for it, and you'll take a tiny bit of pressure off those you leave behind.
posted by flabdablet at 7:47 AM on May 29, 2018 [1 favorite]


seanmpuckett: The Mennonite thing is about being intentional about your choices of technology, and whether each "labour saving device" will improve your community, or leave it worse off. Not jumping face-first into every shiny bit of excitement but making a more studious approach.

That's a fair point. I was trying to take it a step further than that, specifically in the context of this story. Sometimes, like now, Mennonites have had the luxury of having their major challenge be whether it's wrong to use tractors or not. At other times, their major challenge has been whether to accept state violence and control, or flee. This story is a little bit about technology, but it's a lot about Inquisitorial attitudes.
posted by clawsoon at 8:02 AM on May 29, 2018


If you're able to move out of the big city you live in, do.

In 2018 I can't imagine anything less personally safe than being the One Village Jew.
posted by poffin boffin at 8:02 AM on May 29, 2018 [6 favorites]


I think it's mostly cities going seriously mad. People are packed too close to each other in numbers greater than the human brain is wired to deal with in any healthy way. Living in termite mounds is just not good for us.

Well, in the US it’s not the people in cities who keep voting for a genocidal authoritarian technostate, so...no. I’m going to posit that living in small, isolated, homogenous communities is a necessary precondition to being bugfuck frightened of things you don’t know and people who don’t look like you, and overall that is pretty fucking terrible for humanity.
posted by schadenfrau at 8:26 AM on May 29, 2018 [8 favorites]


Well, in the US it’s not the people in cities who keep voting for a genocidal authoritarian technostate,

Right, but the people building the authoritarian technostate are libertarian techbros who live in some of the most "liberal" cities on the West Coast.

And yes, they vote for absolute bullshit (including being heavily anti-union), so you can't blame this all on the old fuddy duddies in the midwest.

Ask me all about it, I live amongst these fucking worthless assholes that are ruining our fucking world.

Like my rich "liberal" friends who are now depressed because they can't make money on a liberal news site, so they're making the big bucks by giving crazy conservatives exactly what they want. They feel "sad" about it, but not sad enough to leave their six figure jobs. Not sad enough to change the content and stop pushing fake news.
posted by deadaluspark at 8:40 AM on May 29, 2018 [4 favorites]


I've lived in suburbs, small towns, rural nowhere, downtowns, and now finally a fairly central urban neighbourhood. About half of my 45 years of life was rural/small town living. I would never choose to go back to to that and I don't miss small town and rural attitudes, ideas, or opinions at all. I love my extremely diverse and vibrant multicultural neighbourhood. Rural life was just depressing and full of closed minded people.
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:46 AM on May 29, 2018 [4 favorites]


Those close minded people in small towns are propped up by the rich liberal dipshits in my city who sell them the fake news that re-enforces their fucking backwards ass opinions.

Also, I've met a lot of quality, intelligent people who come from small towns. Hell, I'm one of them.

Part of me wants to ask, when it comes to small towns and lack of diverse opinion: Since all of the intelligent small towners I knew moved to big cities to find a variety of opinion, isn't the whole situation our own fault really? Because all the educated, thoughtful, intelligent, open minded people keep bailing on small towns, and only leaving small minded dipshits behind, gee, I wonder why no one can find diversity of opinion in small towns. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that all the diverse opinions leave and then turn around and make money by propping up the dumb beliefs of small minded small towners?
posted by deadaluspark at 8:52 AM on May 29, 2018


You'll be healthier for it

I can walk to everything in the city ... work, groceries, shopping, restaurants, everything. In small town and rural areas I had to drive everywhere. It sure as heck was not healthier living out there.
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:52 AM on May 29, 2018 [3 favorites]


Maybe it has something to do with the fact that all the diverse opinions leave and then turn around and make money by propping up the dumb beliefs of small minded small towners?

This is such a bizarre and specific complaint. If it makes you feel any better, I work as a scientist and am not propping up any dumb beliefs.
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:58 AM on May 29, 2018 [3 favorites]


I think it's mostly cities going seriously mad. People are packed too close to each other in numbers greater than the human brain is wired to deal with in any healthy way. Living in termite mounds is just not good for us. [...] The craziness around these parts is pretty healthy, on the whole.

I'm currently living in a rural community. Maybe working from a smaller overall population leads to a skewed impression of things, but I'm encountering at least as much crazy here as I ever did in the World Class City where I spent most of the previous fifty years of my life.

In 2018 I can't imagine anything less personally safe than being the One Village Jew.

Where I am, it would be more about presenting as "visible minority". Though that is changing. And, of course, that change is inspiring some of the craziness.

Bottom line for me: there really is no running away from the world's craziness anymore. It either catches up with you soon enough (internet, smartphones, etc) or (as has been thoughtfully put to me by some of the first generation hippies that started settling hereabouts in the late 1960s), you brought the craziness with you when you came via un-examined biases, neuroses, other internal stuff (there sure are a lot of problem drinkers and druggers hereabouts, for instance). Not saying it's all hopeless. Am saying, there's no long term destination to run to.

Which gets me reflecting on something someone said to me way back when the Punk thing was happening. How it was the natural other-shoe dropping of the hippie "get away from it all" trajectory. Punk erupted from places that couldn't be gotten away from, hence the "No Future" rallying cry. Which was not nihilism so much as informed and angry pragmatism.

(and the rest of this is from the archives)

This reality cannot be escaped from. It's here to stay. So the only thing to do is transform it. But this transformation starts with a loud negation. NO, I WILL NOT RETREAT TO THE HILLS BECAUSE SOON THE HILLS WILL BE FUCKING DESTROYED. No, I will not otherwise buy into the evil media machines and their bullshit dreams and hallucinations. No, this is not a political revolt. No, this won't get settled in the courts. NO TO ALL THAT STUPID BUREAUCRATIC SHIT. Yes however to action, emotion, NOISE. Some might call it art or music, but it's certainly not nice art or music, something to hang on the wall or listen to in the background while you sip your cocktail and watch the sun set through the lovely haze (which is in fact the distant smoke of burning civilizations). No this NOISE is a means. Toward what, you might ask? Toward itself. THE MEANS ARE THE END. Or whatever. I don't know what comes next. And neither do you.

(sorry for shouting)
posted by philip-random at 9:13 AM on May 29, 2018 [2 favorites]


Mod note: One deleted. We've had the conversation about "people who live in cities suck" vs "people who live outside of cities suck" vs. "people who leave small towns for cities suck" vs. "my life was threatened in my small town and that's why I left, you suck" and so on. Let's not have it again here, and let's bring this back around to China, schoolchildren, this technology, etc.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:54 AM on May 29, 2018 [3 favorites]


humans easily divided and distracted are humans easily conquerored. Ladies and Gentlemen i present to you: the solution to this injustice is everyone should just become a partisan of [insert idiosyncratic polarising binary lifestyle choice here]. Hey, whats all the fighting about?

I personally like "this wouldnt be a problem if people would just stop eating X " as my non-solution of choice to create anarchy in any otherwise productive argument.
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 10:08 AM on May 29, 2018 [2 favorites]


Won't work. Doesn't allow for healthy and necessary variation in human cognitive styles.

Both Chinese society and many individual members of it will pay a terrible price for some numpty's control lust fairy tale.

Again.

*sigh*
posted by Pouteria at 6:09 PM on May 29, 2018 [3 favorites]


"2. if this is how China wants to game the future, well good luck with that, I guess, but my gut tells me they will lose, because the Borg loses in Star Trek, right? Don't they? I don't think I stuck with Next Generation that far."

Ignoring the problems with comparing Chinese to the Borg, it's not the worst analogy in terms of collectivism vs individuality. In real life, I think the Borg would simply take over the universe quite handily. I'd wager collectivism will eventually beat out selfish individualism. Western individualism has obviously led to countless woes, not the least of which is a mass extinction event due to climate change we're responsible for. I think one of the harsh realities of coping with that in the future will be letting go of the "I'm a special individual and I do what I want" and having to adopt a more collectivist approaching, recognizing you're simply one of billions of nearly identical beings who all equally deserve a sustainable future and present.
posted by GoblinHoney at 7:25 AM on May 31, 2018




I'd wager collectivism will eventually beat out selfish individualism. Western individualism has obviously led to countless woes, not the least of which is a mass extinction event due to climate change we're responsible for. I think one of the harsh realities of coping with that in the future will be letting go of the "I'm a special individual and I do what I want" and having to adopt a more collectivist approaching, recognizing you're simply one of billions of nearly identical beings who all equally deserve a sustainable future and present.

I don't think it's this simple. Some of the most fiercely individual folks I know are some of the most committed ecologically speaking. And even a quick look at tightly organized states (old USSR, China) tends to reveal some of the most horrific eco-messes on record.

If you're looking for a future that works ecologically, it seems to me that places like Germany, the Netherlands, Iceland are good places to start ... where there seems to be a balance between collectivist and individualist extremes. Like if I were to re-imagine the Star Trek Next Gen universe, I suspect I'd have the BIG WAR being a sort of three-way affair -- The Borg, some kind of mirror-opposite Borg that ends up being every bit as evil (ie: Hitler's Germany to Stalin's USSR or whatever) ... and our good guys (who really just keep, learning, exploring, adapting as they go).
posted by philip-random at 8:53 AM on May 31, 2018


three cameras at the front of the classroom scan students’ faces every 30 seconds, analyzing their facial expressions to detect their mood, according to a May 16 report in the state-run newspaper The Paper. The different moods—surprised, sad, antipathy, angry, happy, afraid, neutral—are recorded and averaged during each class. A display screen, only visible to the teacher, shows the data in real-time. A certain value is determined as a student not paying enough attention.

For some reason, what springs to mind when I read this is the scene (which I may be slightly misremembering, as I haven’t seen it in 25 years) in Schindler’s List where the Nazi times a Jewish factory worker demonstrating a task, sees it takes eleven seconds or whatever, and demands to know why this task is not done in eleven seconds each time.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:28 PM on June 10, 2018


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