Unreal. How long until this takes root in the west?
What happens to people who don't use social media, don't necessarily like being social, and just want to sit at home and play video games or reball some BGP's? Does this mean they're a bad person?
Fraud is bad when individuals and corporations do it, but when your government begins to commit fraud it's a lot worse. It's bad when individuals suppress ideas, but when the government starts censoring things that the powerful few find uncomfortable it's a lot worse.
So, with social scores: when corporations organize to share information against people it's bad, but when the government formalizes, legalizes and makes mandatory the entire system it's a whole lot worse.
I'm inclined to agree with you but consider this alternative point of view. The credit system in the country is essentially mandatory and fraud isn't necessary for it to hurt ordinary people. If someone (a poor person!) is denied a job (with which they hoped to remedy their poverty!) based on the ordinary operation of the credit system with correct information in it irrelevant to the position, that's a travesty.
Power and who has it can be more subtle than guns. However, I agree that the guns add quite a kick. One step deeper though one might interrogate the extent to which government power is used to support corporations. People get shot and go to jail over such things.
The government has a little more than the guns (in the form of the police, the jails), it also has the ability to force resolutions to prisoner's dilemmas and tragedies of the commons that are currently working in our favor. If corporations ever cut out a group of people that should actually be served (for example, denying loans to capable individuals on grounds that have nothing to do with their financial stability), then there is a Schindler's list motivation for corporations to "defect" and include the group. Then, the market dynamics make everyone else a lot worse off unless they also defect.
America already has one experience with a mechanism that can coordinate non-equilibrium behaviors among companies that would individually benefit from defecting: racism. Government fiat is another such mechanism, and as far as the similarities go, it could produce something of the same results. (Groups cut out of society with nowhere to turn.)
Using a lot of bandwidth? That's a mark against your social credit score.
You don't have a Facebook account? That's minus some points too.
Cable companies can already track what and how much you watch. If you use Steam for video games, they can track what you play and for how long. Soon your xBox or Playstation won't work without an internet connection.
>Citizens with low social credit would also be prohibited from enrolling their children at high-paying private schools
that's the most fucked up part. sure, I can see why you want to punish people who smoke on train platforms, but punishing children for their parents misdeeds? how's that even remotely justifiable? would it be justifiable during a bank robbery hostage situation for the state to take their kids/spouse/family hostage for leverage?
>Being publicly named as a bad citizen. [...] However, people will be notified by the courts before they are added to the list, and are allowed to appeal against the decision within ten days of receiving the notification.
I'm sure that the CCP will provide a fair and impartial trial for those people.
False. This is unjustified double punishment for kids whose parents don't care.
I notice you tried to justify immorality by splitting the response into "morally" and "pragmatically". Implying both (1) morality can be argued against in this case and (2) that it has the weaker argument. I also disagree with this approach here.
Hmmm. Perhaps I wasn't clear. You are reading a _lot_ more into my post than I intended.
I'm an Objectivist Libertarian who thinks that (a) what China is doing in this case is positively evil, and (b) that any level of resistance up and to including violent revolution on the part of the Chinese people would be entirely moral and justified.
By explaining the pragmatic 'justification' for this abhorrent system, I was trying to make the point that the Chinese Government gives exactly no shits about the morality involved; they want to exercise power, and this is seen as a cost-effective means of doing so.
The implied point I was _trying_ to make (and, clearly, failing) was that pragmatism in politics is the devil.
No idea where 2) comes from. He's just saying that the Chinese government is intent on making it's own job easier and certainly it is. If anything he's implying this is an instance of a "principle-agent problem". Managers very often do what's best for them, regardless of general consequences, 'cause they can.
>Citizens with low social credit would also be prohibited from enrolling their children at high-paying private schools
This is what leads to a sort of caste system, Because the children of people with bad social credit cannot go to good schools, they are stuck in a perpetual cycle of bad social circles which leads to bad social credit and poverty.
This just leads to a cycle of poverty and discrimination without any opportunity for people to redeem themselves.
Also reminds me of a Black mirror episode on social credit.
But the existence of high-cost private schools that, ostensibly, only the well-off can afford, already reinforces a "caste system" of sorts, no? I'm not sure how adding another dimension to this, namely social credit, could make it worse.
This one looks a little weird (the original quote is very sketchy with little detail) so I researched on it a little. If you search for "私立学校 老赖" you can get a picture of what is going on. You can try Google Translate if you don't read Chinese.
Laolai 老赖 refers to those who can afford to pay debts but refuse the court orders to do so. High cost private school tuition is considered luxury spending. So the ability to afford private school is considered constructive evidence of ability to pay debt outstanding.
China needs to figure out a personal bankruptcy system. But it also needs to figure out how to deal with people who hide assets through friends and relatives.
As it stands I doubt this has much to do with social mobility, as some seem to be worried about here.
Don't you feel your capacity and willingness to do some research and your knowledge of a foreign language and being aware of what is actually being said limits your ability to easily participate in outbursts of online moral outrage?
Not really. It only impacts the ability to be xenophobhic with a specialization in antinonromancy. There are many other opportunities to engage in reactionary outrage, especially in areas of scientific research.
Hiding piles of cash in a neighbours shed or by giving all your possessions to family members, then claiming inability to pay is the problem this is trying to solve.
According to the linked article, social credit can be moved up or down for many reasons: "examples infractions include bad driving, smoking in non-smoking zones, buying too many video games and posting fake news online."
That means that if your social credit goes down for any of these reasons, which are not all financial, then you can be barred from the best schools.
I think it's far more likely to be used to keep top schools (which feed into top gov't/industrial positions) clean of any rabble-rousers.
Private schools aren’t the top ones in China. The top schools are all public (e.g., 人民中学). Private schools are where rich Chinese and foreigners send their kids because (a) they couldn’t get into better schools or (b) they couldn’t get into any public school because the hukou system is so screwed up. There used to be a range of lower cost private schools for migrant worker kids (and probably still is outside of Beijing).
Do you mean that the private schools could use social credit scores to select students? That is possible, maybe even likely. But one would think or at least hope that there will be diversity, as some private schools may then cater to the unmet demands by others. Remember private schools are in the business of competing for both revenue and talents. A "best" private school that refuses to accept the best students may soon find that they are no longer the "best" school anymore.
OP was talking about a government ban. I could only find cases of courts enforcing civil judgement this way at some cities.
It's culture. In China, you are your family/clan and your family is you. Family in China does not refer to just your immediate, but rather your entire family including 2nd cousins. Individualism isn't as strong there. Why? Due to China's society being 'low trust', you need to rely on your family to survive and thrive.
Parents without enough credit don't get to send their kids to private school in America either. I'm not sure how you could overlook the fact that our whole civilization is founded upon a social credit system far more pervasive and malicious than this thing the Chinese are introducing. We should really sort out the problems in our own backyard before criticizing the chinks for having a system that picks winners and losers based on how they behave.
In the US, we're moving away from the time when black people could not board flights. In China, they are moving towards a similar system but for perhaps different people groups.
Also, please be aware that the social credit system that we have in the west has not blackballed you for the comment you just made speaking against it. There is no way for me to report you for your distaste for the biases in the US system, even though you are clearly "inciting unrest." (In repressive countries your comment would be off-limts.)
There are tens of millions of Americans who don't have enough credit banked to board a flight. Or to get healthcare. Or to live in humane conditions. Or to eat 3 swuare meals a day.
And there all kinds of things I can't say at work or else I'll be denied credit needed for pretty much everything.
>There are tens of millions of Americans who don't have enough credit banked to board a flight
what is this "credit" required to board a flight that you speak of? you can pay for tickets with debit or cash at the counter, so it's not like you need a credit card to fly. if you mean payment for the ticket, i think that's a very reasonable requirement in exchange for the service provided. i did a quick search for a roundtrip flight from new york to chicago on google flights, and it works out to $168 on amirican airlines and $50 on spirit airlines. there might be "tens of millions of Americans" who don't have that much money saved up, if you can't save $50 for a plane ticket, you probably have bigger things to worry about than not being able to get from new york to chicago.
Agreed, if you don't have 50 credits for a plane ticket you've got bigger things to worry about. Money is credit. It controls our behavior and everything we do. It decides winners and losers. If you don't act a certain way, and do certain things, then you don't get money and you don't get to fly on a plane, amongst many other things. The capitalist system is a type of social credit system. It's a harsh, unforgiving, cruel and unjust system, and we're as immersed in it as fish in water, so we take it for granted. We take it for granted, that is, until we're introduced to a slight variant and you think about it for a few minutes, and 'Oh my gosh, keeping score on people? That's terrible!'
But if you think about it, a system that rewards people based on whether or not they're an asshole does make more sense than one that rewards people only on their ability to accumulate points- it seems to me that such a system would lead to pathological outcomes. Which, of course, it does.
I'm so deeply disappointed by the Chinese people right now. Here China has an opportunity to enter the 21st century as a the world's most rapidly improving country with the world's biggest economy.
Instead, this is the absolute worst of American-style private contractor bullshit (private prisons, etc.), rolled up with the absolute worst of Chinese-style opacity and oppressiveness.
Who on earth would think that a hidden (known to few) objective function for being a good citizen would help create a better society? Why would anyone think that the private sector in China is even remotely transparent or credible enough to hold this kind of responsibility? Who on earth believes that China has the ability to administer this system with even a modicum of fairness (that might not be a shared value, to be fair)?
Nothing is black and white on this earth, and I genuinely hope this can work, but I think it is a transparently awful idea and I am disappointed in any group of people who would yoke themselves to it.
[edit] It's the worst of neither American private contractor bullshit or Chinese oppressiveness and opacity, that's a deep dark well that it would be pretty tough to scrape the bottom of. It's a crude fusion of both, and it's going to hurt a lot of people in ways little and big, but it isn't the worst of either.
I've never really understood liberal opposition to the possession of firearms in the United States, given the country's founding principles. That said, I'd be more concerned about the right to vote, the right of the free press, the 10th amendment (which why aren't people more angry about?), the right to privacy as currently understood by the courts, and the fact that class-action lawsuits on behalf of people harmed unlawfully by such a system would cripple any corporate version of it.
I don't really understand the political spectrum in the United States, tbh. Obviously you need to be willing to take up arms against an oppressive federal government, should such a thing happen (and who would be deluded enough to think that a military coup would be categorically impossible in any country - if not now, what about a century from now?)
If you can’t fault the US for it’s gun laws based on its founding (which was violent revolution), then you surely can’t fault China’s human right abuses, because they are similarly a product of its founding.
You need to be willing to take up arms against a government if the need arises but there's a line in how much harm you are willing to inflict now to make that happen. For an absurd example chemical weapons would help to fight an oppressive government but even if they weren't against international law it would be a little silly if they were legal for normal citizens to own.
> I've never really understood liberal opposition to the possession of firearms in the United States, given the country's founding principles.
You are making an unjustified leap in assuming that "liberals" are in opposition to owning firearms.
Most liberals have no real problem with people owning guns. You don't hear the vast majority of people clamoring to ban hunting rifles or shotguns.
What most people (liberal and conservative) want are sensible regulations to prevent the genuinely mentally ill or disturbed from getting guns and ammo.
The problem is that the NRA plays outrage politics in order generate funding for itself and this short circuits any useful discussion. Although, it is looking like the NRA has just been functioning as a Russian stooge for quite a while now.
As for opposing a coup? That's gonna be tough. The US is BIG. No amount of firearms in Arizona is going to help opposition in Washington DC to fight off a coup.
Perhaps I should have been more explicit, but: it's my opinion (one widely shared) that one of the reasons this sort of programme hasn't taken root in the USA already is that your Constitution effectively prohibits it. In principle with the entire document, and in practice with the 2nd.
Furthermore, I think that both the 1st and 2nd Amendments act as handy mineshaft canaries. You should mistrust the motivations of anyone who seeks to abrogate either.
Not sure what you're talking about... nothing in our Constitution prevents this outright.
This is already in action to some degree in the US: employers are already able to use criminal background, public records, and (in many places) credit checks to make hiring decisions. The difference is that it's primarily private companies doing this research/scoring and some states have protections in place for prospective employees.
The 2nd amendment does nothing about these private companies using your information to limit your career options (indirectly restricting your free movement.) Anyone taking arms to protest this would rightly be considered a terrorist in the eyes of the law.
I don't think he's introduced a new topic - clearly relevant. And I'm on the other side, mind. I'm not from the U.S., I don't agree with Jefferson that guns are necessary for liberty, don't own a gun and likely never will... but I understand that Jefferson would and did point to the ease of armed revolution as being necessary to avoid such oppressive govt behavior. It's not off-topic, and it was a new thought to me: I hadn't made the connection, perhaps only because I'm not an American.
Xi suffered during the "Cultural Revolution," so he must honestly believe this system won't progress to the same ugly state; but how that sort of mission creep could be prevented over decades hasn't been mentioned (to my knowledge) and may never even have been discussed. Perhaps Xi sees the period of the Cultural Revolution as a time when there was an absence of sufficient bureaucracy, and is therefore predisposed to view red tape (pardon the pun), control and rigidly-defined rule systems quite favorably, therefore. To him, highly-defined systems of control may seem to be the opposite of oppression since they eliminate anarchy (of the kind he experienced back then.)
But rules systems can end up being highly arbitrary too, of course, especially over time. A sufficiently convoluted bureaucratic system bluntly or sloppily implemented can be anarchic (random) in its effects. Witness the Canadian policy of refusing to allow babies to board airplanes if they have the same name as someone on the "no fly list," since the rules don't make an explicit exception for babies.
Xi suffered during the cultural revolution but was also deeply shaped by it. For example, most of his education got cut, and he was only able to get a nominal education afterwards (the first Chinese president to not even bother practicing as a non-official). Xi is basically part of the lost generation that is severely limited compared to those before and after it.
The next generation of Chinese leaders will be the first modern ones to have been completely untouched by Maoism. Well, that’s assuming they are allowed to take power...
Indeed, I've never known anyone who lived through the Cultural Revolution as an adult who wasn't left with a deep visceral emotional reaction to it. Even those few who got through untouched knew the axe could fall at any time.
The people don't have a choice, and the leaders want to maintain control. if they maintain control, and growth continues for a while, I think they are okay with it.
Wasn't there a Black Mirror episode about this? Seems like a terrible idea, but will inevitably end up being required by many companies, just like credit scores.
Some thought on why an explicit social credit score might be better than the current system.
The current system already has surveillance. And it's very likely that some hidden score system is already in place (because surveillance is basically useless without some kind of data-analaysis/filtering tools, which boils down to giving scores to people...) So with the current system, you may be denied government jobs or access to some services based on this hidden scoring system already in place. You will be denied but without knowing why, with no clues on how to fix this.
With an explicit social score, contrary to the current system, you see your score going down whenever you do something that does not please the gov. You also get an explicit score increase or (whatever reward) if you manage to change your behavior to please the gov. This makes it possible to understand why your score might go down and to game the system to bring your score back to normal. Gaming the system and understanding how to regain access to denied services is not possible with the (probably) currently implemented hidden scores.
Of course, I am fully against this type of surveillance and thankful of not living in such country. But the idea the the new, more explicit social credit scores will be worse than the current system can be challenged.
I think you may be wrong, on a technicality. While such “shadow scores” may exist, that’s a part of security clearance. It would only be on applying for a clearance that your score is evaluated. So while you may be denied for a govt. or a specific service, it would only be because you did not pass the clearance you applied for; not because the establishment systematically measures your worth throughout your life.
Disclaimer: I live in Australia, where the situation may or may not be the same as the US/Europe.
There's a difference between institutional discrimination and casual discrimination. For a hidden system, it may only apply to a few scenarios, but if the information is widely available, everyone has the information with which to discriminate against you. Now that's a negative reinforcement spiral which has very few vectors of escape.
Edit: to make matters worse, if someone knows you're being discriminated against, and know you know that, they have a lot more power to abuse against you, because you're likely a lot more desperate to recover any score.
Creating an accurate numeric ranking of the tens of thousands of varieties of criminal, civil, financial, social and etiquette crimes and infractions, which may or may not be written down, is impossible. If you don't know the methodology, you can't effectively "game" the system.
For example, is spitting on the sidewalk remedied by volunteering as an unpaid political canvasser for two months? Or by buying a new car and making the payments on time for at least year? Are these in different slots? Did a coder forget to test an expiration date on certain types of demerits? Are others off by a magnitude factor? You'd never know.
The benefit of a lawful society is that the laws are open source. (Takes a lot of meetings to get commit privileges, but that's often more of a feature than a bug)
Yeah but then you just have these closed-source, buggy, imperfect algorithms run by private corporations instead. And some of those corporations have proven themselves to be very incompetent. Maybe if these numbers are fully gamified in terms of social credit, we would actually have a chance of knowing how and why the government and corporations are judging us the way they are. It doesn't sound much worse to the current situation.
> You will be denied but without knowing why, with no clues on how to fix this.
I agree with you that things like DHS scores are problematic because they are invisible.
However, even if you consider your "credit score" to be a hidden system in the US, the usage of that system is not hidden. For example, people in the US have started fighting back against prospective employers using your credit score to deny you employment. In the Chinese system, this is positively encouraged.
Personally, I hope China does this more and more and more. The more of this that China implements, the less we have to worry about them on the world stage.
It's gamification isn't it. They seem to think that this farmville/15 millian credits approach will work on humans, and the end result is a perfectly compliant citizenry.
But I don't think such an experiment has been tried out on such a massive scale over a nation of billion plus humans.
This is the next great social experiment after the failure of the Soviet Union, so it will be interesting to see the end results.
Americans and the West should recognize this a legitimate threat to their civilization, because the success of this system will result in its spread similar to the spread of communism during the cold war days.
What the Chinese Social credit system is way beyond simple discrimination.
You must be really naive. The way the chinese system works is that you are silently put on blacklists and your appeals to be removed from the blacklist will be silently rejected for random reasons.
>When Mr. Li, the lawyer, was first blacklisted in 2016, it took three weeks before an official talked to him. The court requested a second apology, which he wrote, leading to his removal from the travel blacklist. But he remains on another list, about which he had not been previously informed, this one prohibiting him from applying for credit cards. The court has told Mr. Li to write another apology.
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Putting aside the idea that this is a bit creepy by western standards; it might also be a bad idea more generally.
I'm reminded of Alan Turing; there was a really nice quote by some Briton to the tune of "If we had known he was gay we might have lost the war". There are a lot of social norms that simply haven't withstood the test of time. I look at the 10 Commandments and I think about half of them still hold for me.
Linking social norms, which are significantly arbitrary, to a powerful surveillance state and enforcement? Ignoring the personal risk the citizens would face, this might have economic and military consequences to China's detriment.
Western cultures do a variant of the same thing. Your prospective employer will not only look stuff up about you online (over much of which you have no control), they will also run a pretty deep background check, and if that doesn’t work out in your favor your offer can be withdrawn. God forbid if you had any run-ins with the law, you’re screwed for the rest of your life. Bad credit rating could disqualify you from a lot of jobs as well.
The major difference is that this is merely enabled by the government, not run by it.
The most important point was overlooked in this article: when your credit score is partly computed from the credit scores of your social links, you tend to form elitist cliques. People with less wealth or financial skill or poltical demerits are shunned. They far further behind because they cant make the better links that they would help them. I hear even family members disavow each sometimes.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadhttps://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-credit/china-to-bar...
Unreal. How long until this takes root in the west?
What happens to people who don't use social media, don't necessarily like being social, and just want to sit at home and play video games or reball some BGP's? Does this mean they're a bad person?
For example, in some states, you can be denied a job based on your credit score.
https://www.selflender.com/blog/can-an-employer-not-hire-me-...
http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/pf/employer-credit-checks/in...
So, with social scores: when corporations organize to share information against people it's bad, but when the government formalizes, legalizes and makes mandatory the entire system it's a whole lot worse.
Power and who has it can be more subtle than guns. However, I agree that the guns add quite a kick. One step deeper though one might interrogate the extent to which government power is used to support corporations. People get shot and go to jail over such things.
America already has one experience with a mechanism that can coordinate non-equilibrium behaviors among companies that would individually benefit from defecting: racism. Government fiat is another such mechanism, and as far as the similarities go, it could produce something of the same results. (Groups cut out of society with nowhere to turn.)
You don't have a Facebook account? That's minus some points too.
Cable companies can already track what and how much you watch. If you use Steam for video games, they can track what you play and for how long. Soon your xBox or Playstation won't work without an internet connection.
that's the most fucked up part. sure, I can see why you want to punish people who smoke on train platforms, but punishing children for their parents misdeeds? how's that even remotely justifiable? would it be justifiable during a bank robbery hostage situation for the state to take their kids/spouse/family hostage for leverage?
>Being publicly named as a bad citizen. [...] However, people will be notified by the courts before they are added to the list, and are allowed to appeal against the decision within ten days of receiving the notification.
I'm sure that the CCP will provide a fair and impartial trial for those people.
Morally? It's not.
Pragmatically? Keeps the parents in line, just like physically threatening their family would, but without the cost of all that personal attention.
I notice you tried to justify immorality by splitting the response into "morally" and "pragmatically". Implying both (1) morality can be argued against in this case and (2) that it has the weaker argument. I also disagree with this approach here.
Hmmm. Perhaps I wasn't clear. You are reading a _lot_ more into my post than I intended.
I'm an Objectivist Libertarian who thinks that (a) what China is doing in this case is positively evil, and (b) that any level of resistance up and to including violent revolution on the part of the Chinese people would be entirely moral and justified.
By explaining the pragmatic 'justification' for this abhorrent system, I was trying to make the point that the Chinese Government gives exactly no shits about the morality involved; they want to exercise power, and this is seen as a cost-effective means of doing so.
The implied point I was _trying_ to make (and, clearly, failing) was that pragmatism in politics is the devil.
The CPC already does that, seriously. They threaten family of oversea critics.
Foreign Policy recently published an excellent piece on just that:
http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/29/the-disappeared-china-re...
This is what leads to a sort of caste system, Because the children of people with bad social credit cannot go to good schools, they are stuck in a perpetual cycle of bad social circles which leads to bad social credit and poverty.
This just leads to a cycle of poverty and discrimination without any opportunity for people to redeem themselves.
Also reminds me of a Black mirror episode on social credit.
Laolai 老赖 refers to those who can afford to pay debts but refuse the court orders to do so. High cost private school tuition is considered luxury spending. So the ability to afford private school is considered constructive evidence of ability to pay debt outstanding.
China needs to figure out a personal bankruptcy system. But it also needs to figure out how to deal with people who hide assets through friends and relatives.
As it stands I doubt this has much to do with social mobility, as some seem to be worried about here.
garnishing wages or seizing money from bank accounts isn't a thing in china?
That means that if your social credit goes down for any of these reasons, which are not all financial, then you can be barred from the best schools.
I think it's far more likely to be used to keep top schools (which feed into top gov't/industrial positions) clean of any rabble-rousers.
OP was talking about a government ban. I could only find cases of courts enforcing civil judgement this way at some cities.
It's culture. In China, you are your family/clan and your family is you. Family in China does not refer to just your immediate, but rather your entire family including 2nd cousins. Individualism isn't as strong there. Why? Due to China's society being 'low trust', you need to rely on your family to survive and thrive.
Also, please be aware that the social credit system that we have in the west has not blackballed you for the comment you just made speaking against it. There is no way for me to report you for your distaste for the biases in the US system, even though you are clearly "inciting unrest." (In repressive countries your comment would be off-limts.)
And there all kinds of things I can't say at work or else I'll be denied credit needed for pretty much everything.
what is this "credit" required to board a flight that you speak of? you can pay for tickets with debit or cash at the counter, so it's not like you need a credit card to fly. if you mean payment for the ticket, i think that's a very reasonable requirement in exchange for the service provided. i did a quick search for a roundtrip flight from new york to chicago on google flights, and it works out to $168 on amirican airlines and $50 on spirit airlines. there might be "tens of millions of Americans" who don't have that much money saved up, if you can't save $50 for a plane ticket, you probably have bigger things to worry about than not being able to get from new york to chicago.
But if you think about it, a system that rewards people based on whether or not they're an asshole does make more sense than one that rewards people only on their ability to accumulate points- it seems to me that such a system would lead to pathological outcomes. Which, of course, it does.
Instead, this is the absolute worst of American-style private contractor bullshit (private prisons, etc.), rolled up with the absolute worst of Chinese-style opacity and oppressiveness.
Who on earth would think that a hidden (known to few) objective function for being a good citizen would help create a better society? Why would anyone think that the private sector in China is even remotely transparent or credible enough to hold this kind of responsibility? Who on earth believes that China has the ability to administer this system with even a modicum of fairness (that might not be a shared value, to be fair)?
Nothing is black and white on this earth, and I genuinely hope this can work, but I think it is a transparently awful idea and I am disappointed in any group of people who would yoke themselves to it.
[edit] It's the worst of neither American private contractor bullshit or Chinese oppressiveness and opacity, that's a deep dark well that it would be pretty tough to scrape the bottom of. It's a crude fusion of both, and it's going to hurt a lot of people in ways little and big, but it isn't the worst of either.
I don't really understand the political spectrum in the United States, tbh. Obviously you need to be willing to take up arms against an oppressive federal government, should such a thing happen (and who would be deluded enough to think that a military coup would be categorically impossible in any country - if not now, what about a century from now?)
You are making an unjustified leap in assuming that "liberals" are in opposition to owning firearms.
Most liberals have no real problem with people owning guns. You don't hear the vast majority of people clamoring to ban hunting rifles or shotguns.
What most people (liberal and conservative) want are sensible regulations to prevent the genuinely mentally ill or disturbed from getting guns and ammo.
The problem is that the NRA plays outrage politics in order generate funding for itself and this short circuits any useful discussion. Although, it is looking like the NRA has just been functioning as a Russian stooge for quite a while now.
As for opposing a coup? That's gonna be tough. The US is BIG. No amount of firearms in Arizona is going to help opposition in Washington DC to fight off a coup.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Perhaps I should have been more explicit, but: it's my opinion (one widely shared) that one of the reasons this sort of programme hasn't taken root in the USA already is that your Constitution effectively prohibits it. In principle with the entire document, and in practice with the 2nd.
Furthermore, I think that both the 1st and 2nd Amendments act as handy mineshaft canaries. You should mistrust the motivations of anyone who seeks to abrogate either.
This is already in action to some degree in the US: employers are already able to use criminal background, public records, and (in many places) credit checks to make hiring decisions. The difference is that it's primarily private companies doing this research/scoring and some states have protections in place for prospective employees.
The 2nd amendment does nothing about these private companies using your information to limit your career options (indirectly restricting your free movement.) Anyone taking arms to protest this would rightly be considered a terrorist in the eyes of the law.
But rules systems can end up being highly arbitrary too, of course, especially over time. A sufficiently convoluted bureaucratic system bluntly or sloppily implemented can be anarchic (random) in its effects. Witness the Canadian policy of refusing to allow babies to board airplanes if they have the same name as someone on the "no fly list," since the rules don't make an explicit exception for babies.
The next generation of Chinese leaders will be the first modern ones to have been completely untouched by Maoism. Well, that’s assuming they are allowed to take power...
The current system already has surveillance. And it's very likely that some hidden score system is already in place (because surveillance is basically useless without some kind of data-analaysis/filtering tools, which boils down to giving scores to people...) So with the current system, you may be denied government jobs or access to some services based on this hidden scoring system already in place. You will be denied but without knowing why, with no clues on how to fix this.
With an explicit social score, contrary to the current system, you see your score going down whenever you do something that does not please the gov. You also get an explicit score increase or (whatever reward) if you manage to change your behavior to please the gov. This makes it possible to understand why your score might go down and to game the system to bring your score back to normal. Gaming the system and understanding how to regain access to denied services is not possible with the (probably) currently implemented hidden scores.
Of course, I am fully against this type of surveillance and thankful of not living in such country. But the idea the the new, more explicit social credit scores will be worse than the current system can be challenged.
Disclaimer: I live in Australia, where the situation may or may not be the same as the US/Europe.
Edit: to make matters worse, if someone knows you're being discriminated against, and know you know that, they have a lot more power to abuse against you, because you're likely a lot more desperate to recover any score.
The benefit of a lawful society is that the laws are open source. (Takes a lot of meetings to get commit privileges, but that's often more of a feature than a bug)
I agree with you that things like DHS scores are problematic because they are invisible.
However, even if you consider your "credit score" to be a hidden system in the US, the usage of that system is not hidden. For example, people in the US have started fighting back against prospective employers using your credit score to deny you employment. In the Chinese system, this is positively encouraged.
Personally, I hope China does this more and more and more. The more of this that China implements, the less we have to worry about them on the world stage.
But I don't think such an experiment has been tried out on such a massive scale over a nation of billion plus humans.
This is the next great social experiment after the failure of the Soviet Union, so it will be interesting to see the end results.
Americans and the West should recognize this a legitimate threat to their civilization, because the success of this system will result in its spread similar to the spread of communism during the cold war days.
What the Chinese Social credit system is way beyond simple discrimination.
>When Mr. Li, the lawyer, was first blacklisted in 2016, it took three weeks before an official talked to him. The court requested a second apology, which he wrote, leading to his removal from the travel blacklist. But he remains on another list, about which he had not been previously informed, this one prohibiting him from applying for credit cards. The court has told Mr. Li to write another apology.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/12/12/chinas-chilling-social-c...
I'm reminded of Alan Turing; there was a really nice quote by some Briton to the tune of "If we had known he was gay we might have lost the war". There are a lot of social norms that simply haven't withstood the test of time. I look at the 10 Commandments and I think about half of them still hold for me.
Linking social norms, which are significantly arbitrary, to a powerful surveillance state and enforcement? Ignoring the personal risk the citizens would face, this might have economic and military consequences to China's detriment.
The major difference is that this is merely enabled by the government, not run by it.
[0]: http://scmp.com/sport/hong-kong/article/1901082/hong-kong-fo...