tratalmir ulkith

The Fault, Dear Humans, Is Not In Our Tools, But In Ourselves

Posted by

An interesting little article here from Charlie Stross (h/t Winchell Chung), concerning China’s new “credit score” system that incorporates all sorts of other social information and which looks to be shaping up into a horrendous mechanism of total social control, the way they’re using it.

This, of course, is relevant to our SFnal interests around here, seeing as the Empire, among other polities of the Worlds, is very much into the use of reputation networks and gamification for all sorts of purposes.

…of course, confronted with this sort of thing, the great and the good *there* pretty much shrug. Of course outworlder barbarians turn simple, benign technologies into grotesque engines of mass oppression! That’s what barbarians do, definitionally – what do you expect from korasmóníë–dwelling madmen, hardwired for conformity and for seeing said conformity as a virtue, with no civilized sense of tratalmir ulkith? It certainly shouldn’t be that they’d use empowering technologies in rational, life-enhancing ways like us decent, civilized, letter-and-spirit-of-the-Contract-adherent folks.

In short: shit happens in the Periphery.

Sigh.

(It ruins their society-level rep score, though.)

More Transparency

Posted by

2

And another thing…

…influencing all this, which I meant to mention in the last post, is more of a species-nature issue.

Humans have a hard-wired norm-seeking instinct. Our monkey-brains are hardwired to generate error signals when they perceive that we are being disagreed with by other human-shaped objects. It is from this – and the need to escape, therefore, receiving negative feedback for doing anything that the neighbors disagree with – that our secretiveness tends to spring, along with certain related things like desire for anonymity, desire for privacy in public actions, the right to be forgotten, the GIFT, and so forth.

Eldrae don’t have that instinct. They find peer pressure a weird, alien, and disturbing notion.

(And also, culturally, they are very much of the opinion that an important part of proper etiquette is respect for other people’s choices, and even tratalmir ulkith, which compound glosses as “proper indifference (to the affairs of others)”; it is proper to permit others their legitimate freedom of choice without interference, and grossly improper to interfere with or pass personal judgment upon that which is none of your rightful business. Upon such care for boundaries does the ability of a society of individuals to function rest.)

As such, no-one particularly cares about keeping many of their affairs secret, because no-one with any decency cares negatively and anyone who does care negatively is irrelevant, because they eo ipso have no decency.