I assume if you have a lower score you get more access because you’ve demonstrated you need more help?
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It is the ONLY episode that contains happy.
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This just puts together stuff that is already in effect.
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Duly noted.
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You do understand, that is a feature, not a bug, right?
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While I think we are moving toward systems of social capital economics, and could be much better-off for it, numerical scoring of social credit is primitive, easy to game, easy to corrupt, and fundamentally flawed in that it tells you nothing useful about a person. It’s the kind of thing that would, unfortunately greatly appeal to reptile-brained bureaucrats and authoritarian conservatives who can’t really deal with complex in-colour reality and it’s based on an assumption that to automate things one must reduce them to numbers. We’re no longer in an age where computing is so crude that it must deal entirely in a realm of numbers without meaning.
In a real automated social capital economics system what we want to get at is an understanding of the collective intentions of society and how the intentions of the individual relate to them, arriving at relative ‘trust’ based on their congruency, and thus a basis of capital. All capital is, essentially, social capital. Capital is a bet of resources by society on likely individual behavior. A measure of trustworthiness. But since we can’t look into people’s heads and see their intentions, we’ve long had to deal with rather silly unscientific basis for this trust which generally comes down to how much you are perceived by upper-class gatekeepers of capital to be just like them; born the right color, class, religion, and location… These are the biases we would hope to get away from. We want a more rational basis of trust.
But to do that we need means to get into society’s and individuals heads in such a way as to understand their mutual intentions --and ideally in a non-intrusive way. In some science fiction we see this reduced to tracking the ‘network presence’ of individuals on social media. How often are people talked about online and how positive or negative the context? But this is still very crude and easily gamed.
Some years ago I came up with another idea called the Digital Tao. It derives from a concept some friends in the P2P Community have been exploring called Netention --networked intention-- based on Semantic Web technology. The Semantic Web links information through associative analysis based on metainformation applied to base information. So it approaches a meaning of information, not just the parsing and matching of crude letter and number patterns. Netention is an imagined future Social-Semantic Network functioning as a kind of Semantic Desktop application. It works sort of like a personal assistant, organizer, and communication app combined with a social media platform, but decentralized and anonymized as it deals mostly in that metadata. It creates a local/private semantic web about the user and a global/public semantic web about society, and then seeks to find associations between them as a means of pushing helpful information to the user.
Netention seeks to curate a story about the life, likes, needs, desires, and intentions of the user and relate it to public information that advances ones needs and goals, linking you up with services and people that might help you. (and which you might be of help to) And so I imagined this becoming the basis of a new economic system when integrated into future on-demand production and resource management systems. This system is like a universal polling system that knows the public’s collective opinion on just about everything. And so it knows --right to the moment-- what society collectively sees as important, necessary, and good. And it knows what individuals want and need and what they are doing day-to-day. Thus it can relate the intentions of society to the intentions of the individual on a case-by-case, context-specific basis. It can give your activity a ‘congruence weight’ which can be a basis of social capital.
Now, knowing what society actually wants is very important to a future automated production/distribution network. It wants to understand demand. If you can quantify demand, that’s as good as currency. It you can qualify demand, that’s as good as capital. If machines can get on top of that, globally, they can play Fuller’s World Game all by themselves and we can get rid of all that money and finance BS with all their exploitation and archaic biases. It can measure demand at the point of consumption and apply predictive quantitative analysis to that, but that only covers routine human needs. We also want to get at what society wants long-term, and what the global environment needs so we can balance those sustainably. Netention offers that very organic understanding of demand. And we can include the environment itself into this network as a very important, very connected, ‘individual’ in the network with its own semantic web encompassing its state and needs.
So by linking this production/distribution network to Netention we have a way of linking this congruence of individual, social, and environmental intention to an automated response by that production/distribution network, stigmergically opening or limiting flows of resources to the geographical points of consumption near each user. And so this dynamic social capital becomes a TTD; time to delivery at whatever place you happen to be when you order things online. And we can thus define a common Basic Income as a regional baseline TTD modified by the congruence weight --the social value-- of the activity an individual’s or group’s orders relate to.
And so, a Digital Tao. A kind of ‘current’ of collective human and environmental intention manifest in the global digital infrastructure that facilitates your activity when you are aligned with it and otherwise ignores you when you’re not. Much better than some crude numerical method of triage based on a presumption of scarcity and some distant faceless tweed-suited elites’ definition of personal worth.
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Exactly. I’m thinking about how in the US some stores offer credit based on the score provided by a company that uses social media use and other data such as which phone a person owns to decide whether a person is a good risk or not. In some other countries this trend is more entrenched, with companies like Lenddo providing credit scores that are not that different from Sesame Credit. In other words, we already have social credit outside of China, it’s just not evenly distributed, well known or publicly discussed.
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Your post is long, so I’m going to pick out this one statement. I think it’s the root of your misperception.
All “social capital” is, essentially, normal human behavior that has been overcome by the logic of capitalism. It is not a helpful term. If you really want to “get rid of all that money and finance BS,” then think about it. Capitalism is a power dynamic. To my mind, your proposal makes the dynamic stronger, not least because it makes it even more invisible. But, there are contemporary communists who support similar ideas (using very different language).
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I can’t stand that the three different sized gears in the video rotated at the same speed
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You noticed too late that someone had already beat ya to it, huh?
*lolz
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We are all unwitting participants in a video game - and we are being played.
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No.
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It’s almost certainly the same for me. I became a Communalist on my own without having read Murray Bookchin or knowing what Communalism is. Libertarian-socialist ideas always scare those in power.
I don’t know what happens when we in the underclasses start using Communalism as a counterpower to the state.
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It’s a UK government project - what did you expect?
(And each of the gears is pointing at the other two saying it’s their fault.)
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Certain people get to hide their score without it ‘reducing’ it.
I imagine politicians would shoot right to the top of that list.
Also I suspect of the things that can reduce your score “making decisions that harm others” is the first one that would be special cased otherwise most senior politicians would be excluded from everything immediately.
Nicely put
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tl;dr
It’s a real contrast to the video, which sells the same speculated end-product of Californian Ideology techno-utopianism in a more slick form. Note especially the mini-essay’s lack of explanatory/definitional hyperlinks for the non-techies in the audience.
It’s useful in diagnostic terms of making a distinction between financial capital and other forms of capital that confer privilege under the current system, but I agree it’s not helpful as the basis of a prescription. In this context all it does is promote the Libertarian impetus to turn every last human interaction into a quantifiable transaction.
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