"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.
Imagine if someone were able to fund a service to provide financial benefits based on inverting the scoring....
More realistically: It provides a (though presumably risky) means of identifying who the Chinese government is concerned about, which would potentially be of interest to dissidents as well... (risky because I presume they'll be keeping a close eye on accesses to this system, and because it of course would be trivial for them to ensure there's plenty of "plants" there to cause problems if dissidents were to use it to find likeminded people)
Every bank teller is accessing this system. At the moment when they face the person whose score they see. An ideal moment for conversion if you ask me.
Having said that, dissidents usually don't have problems with finding their ilk, neither they're looking to assemble a rank-and-file army.
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
Proxies like college professors? Students gain points by telling professors what the professors want to hear and if the students thoughts manifest in submitted papers are dissimilar from the professors they are penalized. So, while writing and thinking more important the thinking students are trying to figure out what the professors want to hear.
Of course, this doesn't apply to any discipline that is a system like math, STEM, physics, ect.. But in humanities, what students are learning is to think like their teachers.
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
I find it quite ironic that you're being downvoted for this.
The amount of discussions about voting even on HN makes it quite clear that even here we are engaging in social-engineering through votes. We see all over the place how people are starting comments with "I know I'll be downvoted for this, but...". Implicit in that is the admission that it takes an extra temptation or push to post something we know will face social sanctions.
Of course this scoring mechanism is worse than getting downvoted on HN or Reddit, but that does not make the comparison irrelevant.
>here we are engaging in social-engineering through votes.
Engineering implies some kind of plan. This is just people projecting their individual opinions in aggregate. It looks like social engineering because the majority of people's opinions in a group like this don't differ all that much.
It's all a stupid game. People say "I know I'll be downvoted but..." to make themselves seem brave against the overwhelming oppression of people on the internet disagreeing with their opinions. Then other people see that and think "that is a brave person, have an upvote." All of this relies on implicit buy-in of the notion that bad things happen if people know how your opinions are different.
Especially in the West, it's very easy to opt out of this game. Just stop worrying if people in your network like you. The people close to you will love you regardless of your stupid opinions and character flaws. There's not much reason to worry about anyone else, especially with how fast people cycle in and out of social networks.
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.
You evaluate this as a credit score. It is not. It is a "citizen score", where the Chinese state is in effect levying an extra tax on business in order to finance financial benefits for those it considers well behaved, and where a credit score is just one of the components.
They could have done the same with direct cash transfers, but here they're leveraging the credit system to make it less blatant (you can pretend to yourself the loan you got wasn't because you pushed your neighbour into withdrawing those posts) and seemingly more rewarding (they just need to finance whatever increased bad credit it causes, so the overall amounts will be larger than if they spent the same on direct transfers).
As a credit score, yes, it's clearly flawed. As a means of controlling the population? It remains to be seen how it'll work for them, but the cost/benefit tradeoff for the Chinese government is whether it costs more or less than maintaining the same control with police and censors.
Yes it's a clear attempt to fund the Little Red Book on the private dime. But if the social rating will prove a loss driver for finance sector, it will near inevitably be circumvented in one way or another by the actors while advertising formal compliance.
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.
I recommend the book "Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation" by Michael Zielenziger. The main topic is Hikikomori, a group of (mostly young, mostly male) Japanese people who, unable to handle to immense pressure to conform to Japanese society, shut themselves in their rooms 24/7 and depend on their parents.
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.
"If they thought you really were a threat you were executed rather than being sent to a camp."
True, but the threat of deportation was nonetheless one of the Nomenklatura's weapon of choice. Someone's death was, even in the aftermath of the WW2 mass carnage, perceived as brutal mean of "solving" problems and could spur further backslash/dissidence. Someone's separation from their social circle however, was a much more safer method and the perpetrators were able to sleep at night because there could hardly be any retribution for such a thing.
There was a very specific intent of extermination in the slave labour thing, not just utilization of slave labour. Political prisoners would be killed by having too little food when doing heavy work, while ordinary criminals, who would have been equally useful as slave labour, were given a privileged position. [0]
While at this, Soviets also made experiments with people, and I think this was to some extent done out of sheer curiosity for information.
For instance, take a group of men, split them to three and send them to build a canal (dig earth with shovel, cut down trees with hand saw, use these methods to build embankments for a canal).
One of the groups gets "normal" rations (which are far below what is needed to survive). One group gets a little bit more bread, another group gets even less. Then set them to work, and observe how quickly each of them dies. This enables you to optimize a conversion ratio of bread-and-people to kilometres-of-canal.
Soviets studied this, and their then-friends the Nazis came to observe and study and then refined the methods later on.
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.
Money is a curious sort of behavioral information network, in that the information is destroyed at every hop. If you pay five dollars at my hot dog stand, I accept the exchange in value without the slightest clue if the money came from tutoring orphans, or human trafficking. I'm honestly unsure which has greater perverse incentives and moral hazard: behavioral opacity, or behavioral transparency. (Note that the only entities that have access to at least some of the information of each money hop are governments, banks, credit agencies, and to some extent online silos like Amazon.)
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.
In some other areas, it would be a disaster. I have a habit of ditching game parties where I don't like the outcome. Do we want people to take risk and then just drop it and leave when it doesn't work? Because we've been there with top management compensation.
Most players are lousy at games they play, because they make movies they enjoy instead of movies that are proven best.
Enlightened despotism used to be a popular idea. I don't think it works because there is no guarantee they despot will optimize for country outcome rather than personal enjoyment.
Even Bible notes at some point that you have no guarantee that the son of the enlightened despot will be as good as his father. Still, the effectiveness of that type of rule is very appealing, especially comparing to the impotence of democracy and the fact that we have serious global problems that need to be solved right fucking now.
My main worry about enlightened despotism is "what happens when the despot kicks the bucket?". No guarantee their successor will be as enlightened as them.
If you solve the succession problem, enlightened despotism starts sounding very good.
That's good enough. It's better to have a stable and reasonable ruler that tries to do the Right Thing (i.e. optimize globally in the scale of country) than everyone trying to have it their - however smart or stupid - way.
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.
"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."