As far as I can tell, ‘being a good person’ in this system amounts to being an authoritarian lickspittle…
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Band name!
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Imagine how much better this would be when they upload your mind?
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Your score is affected by the scores of your family and friends So absolutely this can happen.
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That’s not how this system works, you don’t get any points for popularity and you aren’t judged by other people. Its just a question of whether you follow the rules or not.
I’ll add something.
The video is from 2015. The article is more recent. From the article, it seems that sesame credit is similar to our “customer binding programs” (e.g. “frequent flyer”, “store reward cards”, etc…): one gets points for buying the right stuff, yet I see no complaints about these. And, since people were particularly shocked that dudes would get preference access to dating sites (the article explains that this particular reward was dropped), I would add that some of our high roller reward systems give preferencial access to expensive night clubs.
Our customer reward systems are also just as opaque and arbitrary as sesame credit.
So, from the article, it appears to be similar to what we have in the west and don’t complain about. The exception is that it is state-supported and that minor traffic offenses, etc… will cost you points, that appears to be it. Not a very big deal.
What is a huge deal is the social aspect: you need to have the good friends and convince them to get points as well. You need to drop the ones with less points. That is in the video but not in the article. That would have frightening potential.
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Partially. If the social aspects are implemented, I am pretty sure that users will need to indicate some friends and family. That is what social networks are about: know who each person is from the people they associate with. That is what facebook does in the west. Facebook is useless if you don’t have friends using their systems.
Once these links between you and your relatives are established, you are still not judged by your relatives but you are judged by the behaviour of your relatives. If they are bad citizens, you lose. If they are rich and influencial, you win. Like in real life, but with even more power.
That, in turn, makes “popular” people as an advantage, because they have more capabilities to use the social network. We see that in out social networks (facebook, youtube, instagram, tweeter…): people with more contacts are “influencers” and get perks.
So you are right in saying that people are not directly judged by their friends or for being popular, but they still profit indirectly from it. Considerably so. It is not in the rules, but it is built in the system itself.
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Oh, and don’t forget those subsidies! Not even a loan, just free money because we like you. It’s building the economy when it’s given to elites, and freeloading/handouts when it’s given to anyone else.
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This is a terrible system that is unfair, not transparent, arbitrary, ripe for manipulating, and…
aimhacking game-cheaters lose the ability to get loans
Hmmm, well, maybe I spoke too hastily…
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I always get dogpiled for saying this, but the Black Mirror social network’s core functions actually seem like a great idea, at least if it wasn’t obviously designed by an idiot like the show version was.
Seriously, if you removed some of the stuff that made it stupid, like instantly seeing your ratings in real-time, and having things like airport attendants able to punish you arbitrarily, etc., it wouldn’t be so bad. In fact, in-show, there presumably were strong anti-reputation-buying measures in place, because even though the main character was desperate to get a higher rating, the first and most obvious idea was never broached, so clearly they’ve figured out how to make the rating system pretty damn robust, and people were super uncomfortable being “begged” for a higher rating.
Honestly, if you applied modern AI/ML methods to this, had “statistically similar” groupings (like we recently found out FB does with people - I’m off it, but it had my wife accurately fitted into each of like a dozen or more categories) and strong fraud-detection algorithms, as well as “backlash mitigation” systems (e.g. ignoring or heavily down-weighting downvotes from identified toxic users or political downvotes, same with ‘in-group’ upvotes, and so on) it would actually be workable.
Once you corrected for those various sources of statistical noise, you could actually get a pretty good idea of “is this person kind of an asshole, even if they seem charming when you first meet them” as an early-warning system and personality-disorder-screening system for both individuals and businesses.
In my (highly controversial) opinion, I think that we’d be best off if we leveraged social networks in order to detect and marginalize people with heavy narcissistic (and related personality disorders in the Cluster B realm) traits, because some of the greatest social damage is done by these fuckers, not to mention what happens when they get into management positions. I’d personally be willing to accept the negatives of such a system in exchange for the positives, e.g. quarantining these shitheads on social media, allowing organizations to screen out candidates for any kind of supervisory position, and most importantly letting the public get a glimpse of potential candidates’ emotional and psychological fitness for their positions.
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Isn’t this the start of one of the potential paths to us all being ‘Down and out in the Magic Kingdom’ ?
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Smile, or else.
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Simple solution. Disown all family and friends. 
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You mean I get to lick spittle? I’m in!
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Yep, it’s all Cory Doctorow’s fault. The Chinese read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and took their ideas from there. It’s always the same. Just look at how authoritarians read 1984 or Brave New World, not as warnings but as guidebooks.
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God speed my friend!
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To be fair to the Chinese, this seems less like an “absolute social control program” issue, and more of a “Holy shit, turns out all the wealthy parts of the world really actively hate dealing with the majority of our people because of how we’ve accidentally incentivized being a really awful person in like, every aspect of our urban and business culture”.
From a practical perspective, they’re trying to reform their entire society’s social interaction attitude because it’s such a hindrance for them on the world stage; has anybody here read the many, many complaints of Westerners when dealing with the upper-middle-class-or-above Chinese people? For every good story you hear, there’s like 1000 bad. Between rudeness, ignoring the social contract, ignoring any inconvenient laws, and all kinds of other shit, they’re just not getting along great, and I think that reputation is a source of great concern for the Chinese government - they need to really rapidly fix this issue, or else they’re going to be excluded from a lot of business deals in the future, simply because a lot of the big money companies don’t like doing business with the Chinese unless they have to.
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It’s the application of “interest” to such social capital that indicates the real difference. If I told you that me doing a favour now obligates you to pay it back with steadily-larger favours if it takes a long time to do me a good turn, you’d say, “no, wait, it doesn’t work like that”.
And philosophies for millenia have decried ALL interest as “usury”, a sin.
So, yeah, reputation credits would be just like money, if I braked to let you in to a busy traffic lane in 1993 and you repaid me in 2018 by painting my whole house. Like that kid with the $250 student loan that ballooned up to $12,000 under rising interest rates and penalties and finally was arrested by six sheriffs. If six sheriffs came to your house and made you paint mine, then it would be handled by society just like money.
No, wait, you’d have to be able to loan out your social credits, arrange to have people done favours for by OTHER people who you’ve done a favour to, and this came out in a significant net-positive for you, with society owing you several percent more favours every year once you’d built up a large pile to loan out to people who badly needed a favour and were willing to pay high favour-interest.
But then there would be also predatory favour-doing, where somebody would get a good deed done for them now, and only have to pay back 5% more favours every year, except in year two, their interest would balloon to 12%. Also, you’d do favours to people who couldn’t possibly pay you back, and then lie to 3rd parties that this debt was in fact good and would be paid back, so they’d give you a pile of favours in exchange, but then be screwed when nobody could actually retire the favour-debt. Meanwhile, you’ve used your huge pile of favours to get a whole house built. In the Hamptons.
At this point, we should be clear on the actual difference between social debts and money debts: money is by definition and design inhumane: it has no meaning except as itself, as a value. It can be used by parties who hate each other and are trying desperately to screw each other throughout the transaction. But “favours” between people are social bonds that only have meaning between people of actual goodwill who are not trying to screw each other.
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I will not “dogpile” you. I will just point out that our present society already leverages social networks (the non computer kind) in order to detect people with heavy narcissistic and related personality disorders in the Cluster B realm traits, and then elevates them to positions as CEO of large companies or, in the case of most extreme personality disorders, President of the USA.
Why would a computerized social network be different?
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Subsidies are different because the money actually exists before it is distributed (or in the case of elites, is a reduced obligation to shoulder a fair share of taxes, some free construction by a city, access to resources, etc).
Loans are literally crazy “outa nowhere” money. A bank simply says the recipient of the loan has money in their account, and the money then exists. Where does that money come from? Well, its listed as a liability on the banks balance sheet, but it doesn’t “come from” anywhere… its literally just a way of keeping score. Even the money the government gives out is created this way (is the job of the federal reserve, which despite the name is a commercial bank, just with special client base).
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