China’s social credit system is in full swing and has already blacklisted more than 15 million Chinese residents from travel. Is it coming soon to the U.S.?
Recently, The Organic Prepper reported some shocking news of China’s newest rollout: a social credit system.
It’s a system of surveillance and governance using a social scoring system based on the state’s perceived trustworthiness of the individual. Not only are social media and financial accounts tied into a person’s “score” – much like a credit score number – but also friends and associates are compelled to distance themselves from an offending person, otherwise, their score can be dropped too.
The program is called the Sesame Score. Symbolically this represents “open sesame”or doorways that are eithe r opened or blocked to the individual who tries to move freely.
A totalitarian dream
This is every totalitarian government’s ultimate dream: a society that polices itself, its thoughts, its beliefs and each other.
It’s the ultimate power imbalance and crushes individual will. If such a scoring system should be used it should be in cases of state or institution accountability such as checking politicians’ funding sources or Glassdoor.com where employees and interviewees can evaluate companies to let others know about the real company culture. But social scoring cannot work the other way around in a free society.
The ramifications of this are perfectly encapsulated by the episode of Netflix’s futurist show Black Mirrorcalled “Nosedive” in season 3 episode 1, where a woman trying to boost her social credit status quickly takes a turn for the worse. Out of all the shows in the series, that episode makes my heart pound right out of my chest because it seems the most real of all the surreal dystopian themes.
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