"The gamification of social conformity, overseen by an authoritarian government and mediated by nudge theory, is a thing of beauty and horror; who needs cops with nightsticks to beat up dissidents when their friends and family will give them a tongue-lashing on behalf of the government for the price of a discount off a new fridge? ... You can see your score in real time, get helpful tips on what to do (or not to do) to grind for points, and if you're thinking about doing something a bit naughty a handy app will give you a chance to exercise second thoughts and erase your sin before it is recorded."
A 2014 Chinese planning document for the credit system, https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/plan... said, "... its inherent requirements are establishing the idea of an sincerity culture, and carrying forward sincerity and traditional virtues."
"At the center of Project Cybersyn (for “cybernetics synergy”) was the Operations Room, where cybernetically sound decisions about the economy were to be made ... One wall was reserved for Project Cyberfolk, an ambitious effort to track the real-time happiness of the entire Chilean nation in response to decisions made in the op room. Beer built a device that would enable the country’s citizens, from their living rooms, to move a pointer on a voltmeter-like dial that indicated moods ranging from extreme unhappiness to complete bliss."
By including political loyalty in credit scores, you basically outline your political pain points. Which are usually hidden - in closed societies by censorship and pressure, in pluralistic societies by social conventions.
When you go from "pain points are not known" (to a layperson) to "pain points are known but avoided", it's a step back.
Yes, vocal minority now faces some pressure, instead silent majority now knows what topics are there to be careful about and gives them some thought.
and here in the US its done through proxies who sue to get access to donation lists, list of those who supported petitions, access to previously courted locked documents, and such, in order to shut down speech or actions they don't like. sometimes even government agencies get involved with political activist abusing their position.
so while China might codify affecting people's credit scores and "social" score make no assumption that similar hasn't always been in Western countries, we just like to paint others as bogeymen to avoid looking at our own flaws
One interesting thing to note is that this allows for the exact quantification ("pricing") of various forms of dissent. If a large enough segment of the population is willing to pay a measurable financial cost in order to engage in a certain behavior, the government will be able to monitor (and respond) to that in near real time.
Old-school dictatorships were so brash and clumsy the way they punished dissent with firing squads and trips to the gulag.
It's just as effective to punish dissent by slowly but surely ruining the life of those who express dissenting opinions. That way, instead of making dissenters into martyrs, you just make them look like losers.
Humans have basically been doing this since forever, via models like J.S. Mill's social tyranny. Here in the West we already do it to some degree through upvoting/downvoting, Facebook likes and Twitter followers, Tinder, Hot or Not, and Peeple, among others. It seems less like a new form for evil government oppression so much as one we will gladly push on each other ourselves - another evolution of using technology to streamline age-old human interactions.
"Society can and does execute its own mandates; and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself." -On Liberty
But is it, really? Introducing arbitrary, statistically irrelevant incentives into the rating only goes to undermine the rating's effectiveness: gauging the financial risk. In the end it is a penalty imposed on Chinese banking and overall economy.
Japan has a similar system that isn't even sanctioned by the government. It's created an entire generation of young people who have dropped out of society.
Actually, the Soviet Gulag was mostly about slave labour - they arrested people to make them slaves because they thought this would be efficient - which it wasn't.
If they thought you really were a threat you were executed rather than being sent to a camp.
On the one hand, this is very spooky. On the other, it seems like it could be a precursor to a social currency similar to the Whuffie[0] in Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom". I remember that reading that book, I couldn't help but feel that, as we move closer to a post-scarcity society, the rise of something like that would be inevitable, and might in some ways be much better than what we have now.
You could also get the other edge of the sword like with the social popularity ratings satirized in the TV show Community's "MeowMeowBeenz" app episode -- of which the real-life example, the recently released app "Peeple", was lambasted in the media recently.
I think this idea is intoxicating however the problem is we don't currently live in a post-scarcity society (and I don't see that changing very soon). Inequality is still rampant and something like this could do more harm than good by preventing the pressure and change needed to to get past it.
To the extent that my understanding of European current events is aided by shared culture and a much better coverage of history, even including many more modern events, I find my near-complete lack of understanding of Chinese culture is a serious impediment to my understanding of articles like this. My university history classes basically ended at the Boxer Rebellion, with a brief interlude into using the Great Leap Forward as a hit piece against Mao (which, to be fair, he seems to have deserved, but that's all it was meant as. It wasn't meant as history of China).
For example: isn't China supposed to be Communist? How are there so many ludicrously rich people? Clearly, I'm missing some part of the equation in there that explains why I have this perception.
It's vexing because I tend to want to "fix" problems in understanding as soon as I identify them, yet I have no idea how one would gain an accurate image of China from the outside, given how much I've been told they control information flow.
They control their citizen's access to information, but from outside it's not difficult to get a relatively accurate picture. This book [0] for instance was quite helpful in understanding how the CCP controls the country and, as a result, how many things work in China.
And the arms race between freedom and control goes on.
“All that behaviour will be integrated into one comprehensive assessment of you as a person”
The ultimate simplification, condensing a human being to a simple number. Gods have always been used to rationalise entitlement to and application of power. This one is electrified and fully programmable.
As a concept, this is so predictable that it's already boring (was only a question of time until machines become capable of implementing this nightmare). There should exist a ton of science fiction literature that explores this scenario. How dumb would people have to be to not see through it? We already had a period of enlightenment that disposed of the “old gods”. And they seriously believe an electrified god artefact would fare any better?
> We already had a period of enlightenment that disposed of the “old gods”. And they seriously believe an electrified god artefact would fare any better?
Plenty of people think that way about money, with the ends often justifying the means to astonishing degrees. We create things, then worship them. Plenty of people get manipulated to elect people, and that makes what those do right by definition in their eyes, rationalizing even hard facts away once they're taken; people basically get deceived and "voluntarily" make choices against their own interests as a matter of daily business; that's just more sustainable coercion, not freedom. There's one thing worse than not being free, that's not being free and thinking you are.
It seems that people (in power; but especially ones commenting on such articles; those with cynical spin mostly) perceive life in a country as a computer game.
Where "dissidents" will happen to your country, and you have to implement "measures" to make them go away, and then you call it a day. Because game rules incentivize you to do exactly that.
The reality is: Life happens to your country. People happen to your country. Things happen to your country that are outside of your control. DDR's Stasi had kilogramms of dossiers on every its citizen, and it got scrapped in a few days with as little as a handshake.
In some areas, it would be so much better if countries were really ruled like sim games. You need more energy for growth and global warming threatens your future? You start building goddamn nuclear power plants. No political bickering, no clueless citizens protesting everything at random because of fear or propaganda.
Looks like all this does is cause people to waste time optimizing the score, and make the wealthy better off since they can hire the service of consultants specializing in this.
Pretty much like our current financial system then. You can send ages moving your money from one investment to another. The rich already pay professionals for that and genrally come out on top. Just sticking your money in a normal account and it effectively diminishes over the years.
[+] [-] walterbell|10 years ago|reply
"The gamification of social conformity, overseen by an authoritarian government and mediated by nudge theory, is a thing of beauty and horror; who needs cops with nightsticks to beat up dissidents when their friends and family will give them a tongue-lashing on behalf of the government for the price of a discount off a new fridge? ... You can see your score in real time, get helpful tips on what to do (or not to do) to grind for points, and if you're thinking about doing something a bit naughty a handy app will give you a chance to exercise second thoughts and erase your sin before it is recorded."
A 2014 Chinese planning document for the credit system, https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/plan... said, "... its inherent requirements are establishing the idea of an sincerity culture, and carrying forward sincerity and traditional virtues."
In the 1970s, Chile tried cybernetics at a national scale, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machin...
"At the center of Project Cybersyn (for “cybernetics synergy”) was the Operations Room, where cybernetically sound decisions about the economy were to be made ... One wall was reserved for Project Cyberfolk, an ambitious effort to track the real-time happiness of the entire Chilean nation in response to decisions made in the op room. Beer built a device that would enable the country’s citizens, from their living rooms, to move a pointer on a voltmeter-like dial that indicated moods ranging from extreme unhappiness to complete bliss."
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|10 years ago|reply
By including political loyalty in credit scores, you basically outline your political pain points. Which are usually hidden - in closed societies by censorship and pressure, in pluralistic societies by social conventions.
When you go from "pain points are not known" (to a layperson) to "pain points are known but avoided", it's a step back. Yes, vocal minority now faces some pressure, instead silent majority now knows what topics are there to be careful about and gives them some thought.
[+] [-] Shivetya|10 years ago|reply
so while China might codify affecting people's credit scores and "social" score make no assumption that similar hasn't always been in Western countries, we just like to paint others as bogeymen to avoid looking at our own flaws
[+] [-] FelixP|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hugh4|10 years ago|reply
It's just as effective to punish dissent by slowly but surely ruining the life of those who express dissenting opinions. That way, instead of making dissenters into martyrs, you just make them look like losers.
Very clever, China.
[+] [-] qrendel|10 years ago|reply
"Society can and does execute its own mandates; and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself." -On Liberty
[+] [-] varjag|10 years ago|reply
But is it, really? Introducing arbitrary, statistically irrelevant incentives into the rating only goes to undermine the rating's effectiveness: gauging the financial risk. In the end it is a penalty imposed on Chinese banking and overall economy.
[+] [-] intopieces|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arethuza|10 years ago|reply
If they thought you really were a threat you were executed rather than being sent to a camp.
I can recommend Anne Applebaum's book:
http://www.anneapplebaum.com/gulag-a-history/
[+] [-] falcor84|10 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie
[+] [-] bmn_|10 years ago|reply
http://www.baenebooks.com/10.1125/Baen/0743436075/0743436075...
[+] [-] Wingman4l7|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Frqy3|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taterbase|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moron4hire|10 years ago|reply
For example: isn't China supposed to be Communist? How are there so many ludicrously rich people? Clearly, I'm missing some part of the equation in there that explains why I have this perception.
It's vexing because I tend to want to "fix" problems in understanding as soon as I identify them, yet I have no idea how one would gain an accurate image of China from the outside, given how much I've been told they control information flow.
[+] [-] laurent123456|10 years ago|reply
[0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Party-Secret-Chinas-Communist/dp/0...
[+] [-] monstruoso|10 years ago|reply
No. It is state capitalism. The communist label is used in the same manner as the democratic label of the democratic people's republic of korea.
[+] [-] tempodox|10 years ago|reply
“All that behaviour will be integrated into one comprehensive assessment of you as a person”
The ultimate simplification, condensing a human being to a simple number. Gods have always been used to rationalise entitlement to and application of power. This one is electrified and fully programmable.
As a concept, this is so predictable that it's already boring (was only a question of time until machines become capable of implementing this nightmare). There should exist a ton of science fiction literature that explores this scenario. How dumb would people have to be to not see through it? We already had a period of enlightenment that disposed of the “old gods”. And they seriously believe an electrified god artefact would fare any better?
[+] [-] PavlovsCat|10 years ago|reply
Plenty of people think that way about money, with the ends often justifying the means to astonishing degrees. We create things, then worship them. Plenty of people get manipulated to elect people, and that makes what those do right by definition in their eyes, rationalizing even hard facts away once they're taken; people basically get deceived and "voluntarily" make choices against their own interests as a matter of daily business; that's just more sustainable coercion, not freedom. There's one thing worse than not being free, that's not being free and thinking you are.
[+] [-] privong|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guard-of-terra|10 years ago|reply
Where "dissidents" will happen to your country, and you have to implement "measures" to make them go away, and then you call it a day. Because game rules incentivize you to do exactly that.
The reality is: Life happens to your country. People happen to your country. Things happen to your country that are outside of your control. DDR's Stasi had kilogramms of dossiers on every its citizen, and it got scrapped in a few days with as little as a handshake.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevetrewick|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devit|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] collyw|10 years ago|reply