China’s social credit system is getting creepier by the day. Not that this is surprising, given how creepy the idea itself is.

The idea behind the system is pretty simple: modernize and update the means by which a totalitarian society can monitor, influence, and punish citizens and businesses to ensure conformity throughout society. Early in this century China finally began implementation of a credit monitoring system similar to those found in the West. They were initially far behind the West in keeping track of basic financial information, but as with many things they have zoomed ahead rapidly.

Some genius in China liked the idea so much that they proposed expanding the system to behaviors that weren’t related to financial matters. If you can score people based upon financial performance, what else could be kept track of and score? It turns out that a lot of information fits the bill, including compliance with political diktats and perceived Wrongthink.

Privileges and punishments can be tied to your social credit, and through the use of apps on everybody’s phones people can be tracked and identified. In some cases, others around them can be notified about the social credit rating of any person. They can literally be geolocated, identified to others, and information collected by the government can be shared with people near the “offender.”

Internal passports required for travel within China, and of course visas to visit other countries can be granted or denied based upon the accumulated social credit, and a range of other activities allowed or limited based upon the whims of officials. The scores can be used to blacklist or whitelist citizens, extending benefits to those who are compliant and punishments to those who are not.

It’s really creepy. And perhaps coming to a country near you.

A news item popped up in my feed that details the expansion of the system in one Chinese province: China App Shows Map of People in Debt for Social Credit System: Report (businessinsider.com)

• A province in northern China developed an app to tell users whether they are within a 500-meter radius of someone in debt, state media said.
• It’s called a “map of deadbeat debtors,” the China Daily state-run newspaper reported.
• It hopes to get citizens to monitor the so-called debtors and report them to authorities if they seem “capable of paying their debts.”
• It’s part of China’s invasive “social credit” system, designed to judge a person’s trustworthiness. People have already been punished by it.

One key fact that most people don’t know about how the system is being developed is mildly surprising: the Chinese government has chosen a method of development that strikingly mirrors federalism, allowing provinces to experiment with how they implement the system. So far.

Rather than having a centralized development of a single database and software application that applies to the entire country, the provinces are given a basic outline of what is being proposed and then encouraged to expand upon it. Presumably this “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach is intended to eventually become one wholistic system once the bugs have been ironed out and the best ideas for how to monitor and oppress citizens are identified.

The Chinese themselves are quite well aware that the system is very unpopular in China, and more so in the rest of the world among ordinary citizens. They insist that it is not being used to punish citizens, only to provide benefits–all carrot and no stick.

The obvious problem with that explanation is that if you start with zero benefits, you really are ostracized from society. Each step up the ladder is really a step to having rights at all to conduct basic life activities. When you start with no rights, you are starting at the bottom of society. What are called “benefits” in China are really just basic rights in most countries.

So in my judgment the Chinese version of how the system supposedly works is all spin, no substance. Some American companies who do business with or conduct analysis of China downplay the coercive aspects of the system, but frankly I think they are shilling for the Chinese. Lots of Chinese money floats around these days, infiltrating our academic and non-profit sector, so I advise skepticism when reading these analyses that downplay the dystopian aspects. And of course major corporations these days do billions in business in China, so they are very quiet about the whole thing.

My concern with the development of a social score is twofold: even were it restricted to China, it is a huge human rights violation in a country that respects human rights as much as I do trans-activists; and it is pretty clear that Western governments are salivating at the prospect of implementing a similar system here in Western countries.

Our rights to commerce, banking, travel, and of course communications are all being squeezed by increasingly coercive governments under the guise of health, “misinformation,” and a range of other unapproved activities. The government, the news media, social media, financial institutions, and major corporations are cracking down on individuals for thinking, doing, or saying things of which they don’t approve.

This de facto social credit system could easily be expanded to a wider scale, if less obvious system here in the US and elsewhere. Having a centralized database of approved and unapproved individuals would be more efficient than rooting out individual malefactors, and could be done relatively easily given the amount of data collected about us.

It’s genuinely scary, and you should be genuinely scared of it.