In the US we call this process credit reporting.
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Touche!
Nice rhetoric but you and I know that while the credit reporting system sucks, it isnât anything like this dystopian nightmare. My credit score doesnât reflect the political views or statements of my twitter and facebook connections.
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Yet.
(i ftfy)
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If there are correlations between political expressions (or other variables) and creditworthiness, the Big Data software may already be connecting these dots.
Self-learning systems donât care if there is a causality. Correlation is enough.
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How do you know? Facebook is selling activity data to insurance, why not finance? Honestly I have no idea, how open is the credit rating system? Can you see why you have the rating you have?
Otherwise like @George_Black says, give it time.
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Other articles are casting doubt on the accuracy of this report:
Chinaâs New Social Credit System
The interpretation of the new policy as an imposition of a âBig Brotherâ type of invasive tracking system may be largely exaggerated, and how this understanding was arrived at is unclear.
China wants to use social data to rank its citizens
A social credit system has been in the works since 2003, but as of yet there are only a few government departments that collect information on a personâs behavior to contribute to their score.
There seems to be a bit of xenophobia and future shock in the ACLUâs article, causing the correspondent to assert things for which there is little actual evidence.
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Because I know and interact with a lot of rather politically questionable hackers and my credit score is over 800 (I had a report run two weeks ago for other reasons).
Achievement Unlocked:
Damn High Score
(Iâve never been able to crack 760)
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Hypothesis: politically questionable hackers usually pay their debts.
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I have no idea how it happened!
This is a perfect example of one of the huge blind spots that the prevailing attitude of cultural relativism and postmodernism has wrought. This is essentially saying:
âWe would object to your oppression, but the self appointed elite of the group you were born into have assured me that it is culturally appropriate for you to be oppressed in this particular manner. Why, it would be unethical to us to complain or intervene, thus denying you your traditional rightsâ
Freedom of thought, the equality of all persons, and universal human rights are universals and are worth defending and need to be defended against such hand-waving, with greater intensity than ever before. Because let us be clear- there is no time and place in which slavery is acceptable. There is no context which makes bigotry acceptable. There is no such thing as a justification for mutilating a childâs genitals. These are all things which I have seen excused by this type of spineless relativistic argument, and it makes me incredibly annoyed.
So in short, If the âcultureâ dictated by the Chinese Politburo says that this is an acceptable thing to introduce, then theyâre objectively wrong. If any other âcultureâ contains this, or any of my other examples as their âvaluesâ, then they are objectively wrong too.
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Hereâs another one, also suggesting that the ACLU report is a bit of a muddled mess: Chinaâs âcitizen scoresâ credit system isnât as Orwellian as the ACLU thinksâŚyet
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Of course, thatâs only true if you subscribe to the Modern Project.
My culture dictates that deranged men stock up on firearms, go to schools, and shoot students. No one should judge this. They just need to accept it.
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I will respond more forcefully than is probably warranted in this argument, but lets have a full on disagreement, for the heck of it.
This measure, in and off itself, does not limit freedom of thought, equality of persons or other universal human rights, with the exception of effectively curtailing the freedom to express political opinions.
The Chinese political system is not democratic and thus probably does not adequately reflect preferences of the population. But by the same token, many western systems - and American political system certainly - do not really reflect the preferences of their respective electorates either. Our oligarchy may be somewhat more permeable and political freedoms looser, the elites are appointed by expenditures of their wealth, not through a single party system, but I would contend these are differences of degree, not kind.
We have our own ways to suppress dissent and block out opinions that do not conform to the needs of the rulers. Only we are accustomed to them and no longer consider them an affront to our liberties.
Meanwhile, the Chinese system has real results. Itâs not a totalitarian kleptocracy, as someone above has suggested, thought there are of course individual profiteers and powerful groups of a varying degree of criminality (but again, lets look in the mirror first). It has brought very real economic growth (which would count from our perspective) and elevated China back to its place as a leading world power (which I suspect is something the average Chinese citizen cares a whole lot about.)
That last point is essentially the core of my historical argument: China had for a very long time considered itself (mostly justifiably) the center of the world and a bastion of civilization surrounded by filthy barbarians. The humiliations of the 19th and 20th centuries at the hands of the newly industrialized western powers were a very rude shock and essentially the whole development since the beginning of the civil war has been one prolonged series of various attempts to regain the lost ground - and the latest directive authoritarian blend of pragmatic etatism and free market elements has been very successful at this.
With the lack of democratic feedback itâs difficult to confirm or deny this, but I think it should not be ruled out that the situation of forced political unity and suppression of dissent may be overall considered by the Chinese nation an acceptable price for this success .
Now - we would look at this and say that itâs unacceptable for the interest of a nation to trample over the sacred liberties of the individuals. But that is precisely our subjective perspective and a point at which I feel we differ from a more collectivist view of another civilization. I may be wrong about this. Iâm not Chinese and Iâm making a whole lot of assumptions about their way of thinking as it is - but I am speaking against perceiving this approach through our narrow lens of unacknowledged apriori judgments about which values count and which donât.
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Man, all that and nowhere the acknowledgment that the Chinese arenât all one mono-mind. Youâre talking about their view, how they think, what they consider, what they accept as if China was a single person playing Civilization. Treating them as a collective, without considering how the actual people may vary from that, and then going on about how collectivism has worked out for them is begging the question.
Sure, people like the ones making objections here â Doctorow, the ACLU, etc. â donât consider the various ways dissent is suppressed here to be affronts at all. They definitely donât campaign against them all the time. This is an excellent point, and certainly not the opposite of true. 
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At no point do I claim anything about Chinese people forming a mono-mind. But a state has to make decisions as if it were a single entity. That is precisely the point of disconnect. All we are talking about is the degree of agreement between the decisions of the single player and the opinions of the represented population - and I say that I find it conceivable that the policy of the politburo has, in the light of its success, an overall approval of its citizens, even though the policy isnât formed from below. Cf. the role of the dictator in the Roman republic.
The second point I concede. I rather intended that remark to highlight the usual blindness to the shortcomings of oneâs own civilization (taken for granted and business as usual), compared to the horrors of the Others doing something similar, in an unfamiliar way. In all fairness, it is not really applicable to most people on BB.
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Or let me put it like this: What if the suppression of political liberties was a necessary prerequisite for the economic success and lifting of half a billion people from subsistence-farming levels of poverty? What if it could not have been achieved in any other way? (in a giant, diverse, fractured country with minimal infrastructure)
Is there a clear and objective way to measure the payoffs between political freedom and death by starvation?
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Wait, are you suggesting this is actually the case, something that applies to the modern PRC, or that such a government simply believing it is the case is enough that we shouldnât criticize whatever affronts are the result?
Because for the most part trolley problems only serve to confuse the topic in question, find ways to justify murder or whatever in theory but with no real connection to practice. Hard cases make bad law. If this is only that kind of hypothetical, Iâm afraid Iâm going to have to decline letting you put it that way.
That hasnât been all the rest of us were talking about! You know, many of the affronts to liberty here have been popular enough, or at least gone unquestioned by even people they were horrible to. They have worked if you insist on that only considering the overall result, the mean if you will, and not the deviation. This is a very short-sighted way to define things, has been more or less my whole point.
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