Well the USA lost against vietnam, afganistan,… actually everything since ww2. Overwhelming force is nothing when the people believe they have the moral high ground.
No one could claim that not being able to face your accuser, being held to stand for crimes not formally charged, being robbed of life, property or liberty without due process is good.
That is the real crime here… Not that people are watching or that there is a score but that it is used to punish without any say from the people being punished.
That is tyranny. And although tyranny can exist in capitalist systems, by far the home of tyranny and fascism today is that popular ism called socialism. Hands down.
If you need convincing you could look at… O I don’t know. China?
That gif is from an episode of the Netflix show Black Mirror (S03 E01 - Nosedive). It’s often cited alongside these stories about China’s Citizen Scores because the episode revolves around a social status scoring system not too dissimilar to the one in use in China.
One of the more insidious aspects of the Black Mirror system that seems to have crept into the China system is that votes from higher ranked people count much more than votes from lower ranked people. So only people who play the game well really have a say in it. One thing the Black Mirror episode didn’t touch on but would definitely happen in real life is that “elites” would be able to artificially inflate their scores through some mechanism. Party officials would never be seen with anything less than a “4”. Celebrities might get special protections against downvotes “to protect their public persona” or some other doubletalk. It’s all about keeping the common man down and at each other’s throat.
One of last season’s episodes of The Orrville dealt with a planet where every aspect of your life was controlled by social media and ratings. One of the characters made a major social gaffe during a diplomatic contact, and was going to be executed for offending social norms, until the crew figured out how to game the system.
eta: Orenwolf beat me to it!
I agree, this is terrible. Yes, dystopian. But I can remember a time, only maybe fifty years ago, when he would have simply been executed. Or sent to a “re-education” camp - same result only slower. That doesn’t make it right; but if China (or the U.S. for that matter) keeps taking two steps forward and one step back, it will eventually get to a good (or at least better) place.
Yes, and we know how everybody loves credit scores. You will be hard pressed to find someone who ranks them above “necessary evil” anywhere in the civilized world. They are lazy, and destructive, and prone to abuse, but at least they’re mostly derived from a small number of circumstances that you control. Pay your bills on time and don’t rack up huge debts and you don’t have to worry about them too much (except when you do because someone is stealing your identity or there is a paperwork error somewhere in a big faceless opaque corporation). There is little evidence for political tampering or organized corruption with them, mostly just ordinary people getting ground up in the gears of capitalism. So as bad as they are, they could be a lot worse and they do serve a purpose. A necessary evil.
Credit scores do not stop you from flying because you are Clinton supporter or a Trump supporter, which this system could. Why? Because who decides who is undesirable and the criteria?
If you think it will be fair youre mistaken. It will be used to to leverage political pressure on whole groups of people silently pushing them into oblivion.
Definitely not a credit score which at least you could enjoy the process of getting by buying too much not paying bills, spending all you rent money on partying, tvs, etc.
Ok, I should have added “but do use some credit” to the list. That’s not a problem most people have. It doesn’t even take a lot. One card that you put gas & groceries on and pay off at the end of every month will easily get you in the 700+ range unless you’ve got some other weirdness with your bank or something.
Yes, they are still dumb and evil, but when you need to evaluate how trustworthy someone is on a single number what are your other options? Ultimately it’s the cheapest and most available answer to the question “Is this person going to flake out on me?”
FICO scores weren’t introduced until 1989. Somehow the financial world functioned prior to that.
It would be possible to design a useful score-generating system that worked using transparent rules and criteria. The current system is most definitely not that.
The fundamental problem I have with any system that generates a score using secret proprietary algorithms or data that you don’t have access to is that when you’re denied a government benefit (such as a FHA loan) or a job or apartment or whatever based on your score (or lack of one) then you’ve got no recourse. It goes against the basic principle of habeas corpus - the right to see the evidence against you. It may well be the “cheapest and most available” way to judge the trustworthiness of people but that doesn’t convince me it should be allowed for anything other than deciding who will qualify for certain types of credit cards.
Did China ever move past state capitalism to actual socialism at any point? My research suggests they didn’t and I think they were just like Russia/USSR in that respect. (State capitalism was Lenin’s own description for the SFSR’s economy, before anyone attempts to claim No True Scotsman)
