"The gamification of social conformity, overseen by an authoritarian government and mediated by nudge theory, is a thing of beauty and horror; who needs cops with nightsticks to beat up dissidents when their friends and family will give them a tongue-lashing on behalf of the government for the price of a discount off a new fridge? ... You can see your score in real time, get helpful tips on what to do (or not to do) to grind for points, and if you're thinking about doing something a bit naughty a handy app will give you a chance to exercise second thoughts and erase your sin before it is recorded."
A 2014 Chinese planning document for the credit system, https://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/plan... said, "... its inherent requirements are establishing the idea of an sincerity culture, and carrying forward sincerity and traditional virtues."
In the 1970s, Chile tried cybernetics at a national scale, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machin...
"At the center of Project Cybersyn (for “cybernetics synergy”) was the Operations Room, where cybernetically sound decisions about the economy were to be made ... One wall was reserved for Project Cyberfolk, an ambitious effort to track the real-time happiness of the entire Chilean nation in response to decisions made in the op room. Beer built a device that would enable the country’s citizens, from their living rooms, to move a pointer on a voltmeter-like dial that indicated moods ranging from extreme unhappiness to complete bliss."
By including political loyalty in credit scores, you basically outline your political pain points. Which are usually hidden - in closed societies by censorship and pressure, in pluralistic societies by social conventions.
When you go from "pain points are not known" (to a layperson) to "pain points are known but avoided", it's a step back. Yes, vocal minority now faces some pressure, instead silent majority now knows what topics are there to be careful about and gives them some thought.
More realistically: It provides a (though presumably risky) means of identifying who the Chinese government is concerned about, which would potentially be of interest to dissidents as well... (risky because I presume they'll be keeping a close eye on accesses to this system, and because it of course would be trivial for them to ensure there's plenty of "plants" there to cause problems if dissidents were to use it to find likeminded people)
so while China might codify affecting people's credit scores and "social" score make no assumption that similar hasn't always been in Western countries, we just like to paint others as bogeymen to avoid looking at our own flaws
Of course, this doesn't apply to any discipline that is a system like math, STEM, physics, ect.. But in humanities, what students are learning is to think like their teachers.
It's just as effective to punish dissent by slowly but surely ruining the life of those who express dissenting opinions. That way, instead of making dissenters into martyrs, you just make them look like losers.
Very clever, China.
"Society can and does execute its own mandates; and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself." -On Liberty
The amount of discussions about voting even on HN makes it quite clear that even here we are engaging in social-engineering through votes. We see all over the place how people are starting comments with "I know I'll be downvoted for this, but...". Implicit in that is the admission that it takes an extra temptation or push to post something we know will face social sanctions.
Of course this scoring mechanism is worse than getting downvoted on HN or Reddit, but that does not make the comparison irrelevant.
But is it, really? Introducing arbitrary, statistically irrelevant incentives into the rating only goes to undermine the rating's effectiveness: gauging the financial risk. In the end it is a penalty imposed on Chinese banking and overall economy.
They could have done the same with direct cash transfers, but here they're leveraging the credit system to make it less blatant (you can pretend to yourself the loan you got wasn't because you pushed your neighbour into withdrawing those posts) and seemingly more rewarding (they just need to finance whatever increased bad credit it causes, so the overall amounts will be larger than if they spent the same on direct transfers).
As a credit score, yes, it's clearly flawed. As a means of controlling the population? It remains to be seen how it'll work for them, but the cost/benefit tradeoff for the Chinese government is whether it costs more or less than maintaining the same control with police and censors.
If they thought you really were a threat you were executed rather than being sent to a camp.
I can recommend Anne Applebaum's book:
True, but the threat of deportation was nonetheless one of the Nomenklatura's weapon of choice. Someone's death was, even in the aftermath of the WW2 mass carnage, perceived as brutal mean of "solving" problems and could spur further backslash/dissidence. Someone's separation from their social circle however, was a much more safer method and the perpetrators were able to sleep at night because there could hardly be any retribution for such a thing.
While at this, Soviets also made experiments with people, and I think this was to some extent done out of sheer curiosity for information.
For instance, take a group of men, split them to three and send them to build a canal (dig earth with shovel, cut down trees with hand saw, use these methods to build embankments for a canal).
One of the groups gets "normal" rations (which are far below what is needed to survive). One group gets a little bit more bread, another group gets even less. Then set them to work, and observe how quickly each of them dies. This enables you to optimize a conversion ratio of bread-and-people to kilometres-of-canal.
Soviets studied this, and their then-friends the Nazis came to observe and study and then refined the methods later on.
[0] https://books.google.fi/books/about/Kremlin_kellot.html?id=K... (written by Arvo "Poika" Tuominen, a Finnish communist who was in close contact with Stalin in 1930's. Unfortunately only in Finnish)
http://www.baenebooks.com/10.1125/Baen/0743436075/0743436075...
For example: isn't China supposed to be Communist? How are there so many ludicrously rich people? Clearly, I'm missing some part of the equation in there that explains why I have this perception.
It's vexing because I tend to want to "fix" problems in understanding as soon as I identify them, yet I have no idea how one would gain an accurate image of China from the outside, given how much I've been told they control information flow.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Party-Secret-Chinas-Communist/dp/0...
No. It is state capitalism. The communist label is used in the same manner as the democratic label of the democratic people's republic of korea.
“All that behaviour will be integrated into one comprehensive assessment of you as a person”
The ultimate simplification, condensing a human being to a simple number. Gods have always been used to rationalise entitlement to and application of power. This one is electrified and fully programmable.
As a concept, this is so predictable that it's already boring (was only a question of time until machines become capable of implementing this nightmare). There should exist a ton of science fiction literature that explores this scenario. How dumb would people have to be to not see through it? We already had a period of enlightenment that disposed of the “old gods”. And they seriously believe an electrified god artefact would fare any better?
Plenty of people think that way about money, with the ends often justifying the means to astonishing degrees. We create things, then worship them. Plenty of people get manipulated to elect people, and that makes what those do right by definition in their eyes, rationalizing even hard facts away once they're taken; people basically get deceived and "voluntarily" make choices against their own interests as a matter of daily business; that's just more sustainable coercion, not freedom. There's one thing worse than not being free, that's not being free and thinking you are.
Where "dissidents" will happen to your country, and you have to implement "measures" to make them go away, and then you call it a day. Because game rules incentivize you to do exactly that.
The reality is: Life happens to your country. People happen to your country. Things happen to your country that are outside of your control. DDR's Stasi had kilogramms of dossiers on every its citizen, and it got scrapped in a few days with as little as a handshake.
Most players are lousy at games they play, because they make movies they enjoy instead of movies that are proven best.
