“Buying too much alcohol might suggest dependence; she’ll lose a couple of points.”<p>Credit card companies are already doing things like this.<p><i>What one of the executives there did, he looked at how people were using Canadian Tire credit cards and tracking what products they actually purchased. Then he found out that people, who for instance buy premium wild bird seed, it turns out that they very infrequently went bad on their debts. Whereas people who bought chrome accessories for their car, they walked away from their debts more frequently.</i><p><a href="https://www.marketplace.org/2009/05/15/business/how-credit-card-companies-track-you" rel="nofollow">https://www.marketplace.org/2009/05/15/business/how-credit-c...</a>
As much as it seems like a foreign concept, I wonder what parallels can we derive from a state-backed social credit system to say something like our corporate-backed financial credit scores. We see that companies from health insurers to cell phone providers are already adopting skimming through your or your demographic's purchase history to see if you are worthy of success or not.<p>Not defending China, but boogeymen pieces like this evoke responses like this is a truly non-western concept and not just a "hardcore" version of what we have
I'm genuinely curious to see how this works out. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I'm not part of it - but I can't help be fascinated.<p>Growing up, we cared what the neighbours thought. They were our "social score". If we skipped school, it'd be noticed. If we misbehaved, they knew it. And little old ladies ensured bad news travelled faster that twitter.<p>Now life feels anonymous, and it feels like this has been lost. Anonymity, while sometimes valuable, often leads to toxic behaviour online. A lot of things we'd never have dreamt of doing with the 'old lady brigade' judging us. And now the real world feels much more anonymous, and I fear the same happening here too.<p>On the face of it, it seems like China have figured out how to scale the little old ladies. This could be horribly interesting, or simply horrible. But I think I'm glad to see someone (else) give it a shot.
What was the reasoning behind social credit system? To keep track of bad actors or create surveillance nation?<p>On a side note, this is what happens when "technocrats" become the ruling class in overwhelming majority. Ability to apply technical solution to societal problems. Most of the China's ruling class are technocrats. We need anthropologists, social scientists, philosophers as law makers. Yes technocrats should be there in the mix too but they alone won't fix societal problems.
Defenders say this is just the latest version of traditional Chinese ways, but that is not the case. Traditionally social trust and good behavior was enforced by the whole network of social relations and basic values.<p>But in the modern era this has broken down, in part because China has gone through 4 different basic political and economic systems in the last century, and is now on its fifth.<p>So the government is now trying to enforce good behavior and social trust from the top down. Unfortunately, unlike in Confucianism, there is no way to ensure the people at the top are trustworthy, so the whole thing will likely become quite dysfunctional at some point.
It is a system that results in rich and poor, where rich are holding stakes and incentivized to maintain and grow their status and the poor are insignificant to do anything. Then there is the vast middle class who don't see the poor but only aspires for the rich. Such system exploits human nature and has proven to be quite stable -- isn't that any society's goal after all?<p>It takes compassion and faith in truth, in sufficiently large doses, to challenge such systems.
According to this guy, the Western media has a habit of getting this story very wrong: <a href="https://twitter.com/ChinaLawTransl8/status/1042040372766027781" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ChinaLawTransl8/status/10420403727660277...</a><p><i>There are so many things wrong with China and the world today, there is simply no reason to make things up, and much of what is in this piece is wild speculation or outright fabrication, belittling the real struggles of some featured in it.</i><p>More: <a href="https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/seeing-chinese-social-credit-through-a-glass-darkly/?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/seeing-chinese-social-cred...</a>
The results will absolutely be total success. How could it result in anything but success? Anyone who complains about any aspect of the social score system will have their score lowered until they are effectively silenced.<p>Marginalizing minority views and other edge-cases is a feature of the system.<p>I feel very sad that there is likely to be an entire generation of Chinese whom are crushed into the most extreme pressure to conform and obey.<p>#Resist #QuestionAuthority #Disobey
Can anyone Chinese or who knows more about China provide any insight into why they're doing this? Is there some local political reality?<p>My reading is that they're worried about their explosive GDP growth leveling out and the political instability a debt crisis might cause.
China has had a "police census" for centuries. Under communism, they had the dang'an, a lifetime work record maintained by each citizen's work unit. But with a more mobile population and more private employers, the paper based dang'an system didn't scale. So, now the social credit system. It's not new, just more automated.
Didn't we have this exact same story yesterday? And the day before? And the day before that?<p>When the EU, Australia and Canada does it, the news frames it positively as combating "hate" speech. When china does it, it's digital dictatorship.<p>For an industry, especially so in australia, that loves censorship and digital dictatorship, the media sure do love to criticize china about theirs. Maybe it's just envy.