Inside China's Vast New Experiment in Social Ranking
wired.com
wired.com
The main character actually worsens her fate by acting entitled and being self-centered. Had she maintained her higher status, she both wouldn't have been in situations of pain in the first place, nor found it necessary to make a (here, social) effort to get out of them. In real life, being considerate to people serving you pays off in the short term, and in aggregate makes for a better society to live in (it is generally accepted in Western society that insulting your waiter is really rude and antisocial, for example).
Interestingly, both people with low rankings (brother, truck driver) appear to have bad manners (because they are direct) but are nice people deep down; the point being the rating system is imperfectly implemented or optimising for the wrong thing.
The parallel with the Chinese rating breaks down precisely because the show rating is focused on this shallow idea of visible manners whilst the Chinese system appears to correct fundamentally inconsiderate, widespread behaviour (like stealing a shared bike), just as credit scoring in the West was originally a means of increasing general welfare (by lowering rates for most at the expense of the few who game the system).
The real parallel between the article and Black Mirror is this: the author, who is privileged (he already lives in a considerate society where everybody cooperates and the rule of law is a given) cannot understand the need for Sesame; upon losing that privilege (by moving to China with a blank score) and having to earn it back, he is upset just as the heroine of the episode was ("but I'm an honest guy, why should I pay a deposit to rent a bike?").
In the Black Mirror episode, there just isn't room for being genuine and maintaining a nice lifestyle because of social pressure. But it probably worked a lot better when the system just started.
Another worrisome case is of blacklists/rankings that you can't see. No-fly lists that no one knows why you are on. Secret watch lists. Conspiracies against people with opposing political views with no clear way to know what views may have triggered this and no path to straighten a misunderstanding up.
I oppose oppression in all forms but if we are going to have it, explicit is better than implicit. (And flat is better than nested:).
There are myriad ways people try to get out of paying for things -- returning them, cancelling last minute, filing complaints -- that leave the merchant holding the bag even after a sale is seemingly complete.
> Sesame Credit, controlled by a private organization (Alipay)
> The government's List of Dishonest People, a blacklist of people who haven't paid fines.
(The article conflates them because the Sesame Credit scores are downgraded based on whether the person has unpaid fines. However, Sesame Credit doesn't affect the government list)
The "credit" list has no impact on trains/flying; nonpaying of government fines does. This isn't too dissimilar from other countries, where failing to pay government-issued fines results in disciplinary measures.
They call it a “social credit system” in china (the one that can get you barred from flights), besides not paying your fines you can get on the list if you happen to be a unharmonious dissident. It’s no wonder it is confused with the sesame credit system, since they are both credit systems that run in china. Here is a state-owned press link if you doubt tech Asia:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI
Being a game design channel, they discuss Sesame Credit as obedience to the party, gamified.
a. How is this data accessed? Can anyone in my network access this? Because even if we draw a parallel to credit scores, not everyone can access my credit scores.
b. What kind of behavior is this encouraging? Most credit scores track bigger picture items - credit card payment, loan payments etc. But, suppose I can see my credit score go up and down then I might end up trying to avoid a specific behavior.
c. How does the scoring work? If I buy say from a company known to sell VPN services, do I lose points?
>"To understand the allure that social engineering holds for Chinese leaders, you have to go back decades, to long before apps and big data. In the years after the 1949 Communist Revolution, the government assigned everyone to local work units, which became the locus of surveillance and control. Individuals spied on their neighbors while also doing everything they could to avoid black marks on their own dang’an, or government files. But maintaining the system required massive state effort and oversight. As economic reforms in the 1980s led millions of people to leave their villages and migrate to cities, the work unit system fell apart. Migration also had a secondary effect: Cities filled up with strangers and pianzi."
I think that I can understand where your interpretation came from, but wouldn't really draw that connection here
Neighbors and friends and family "whistleblowing" each other to the government certainly was an aspect of Cultural Revolution, but it never really struck me as a distinctive/defining feature. The same things happened before Cultural Revolution as well (note that the time period pointed out in the article is 1949, which is the year Communist China was established and revolutionary zeal was high, but 17 years before the Cultural Revolution began), and the same tattling can also be found during McCarthy-era America, and briefly in post-9-11 America ("If You See Something, Say Something")
The more defining features of the Cultural Revolution (at least to Chinese) is the persecution specifically of educated people (professors being harassed and shamed into committing suicide. "the more educated, the more reactionary"), the shunning of education (My grandpa had to shut the doors and teach his kids in secret at home, quite a risky move if anyone found out), the scheduled public demonstrations of loyalty to the party via everyone getting together to dance the loyalty dance every morning, and a dogmatic adherence to party lines, no rational or logic debate allowed (you will be shunned and reported). Don't really see those features in this policy.
The commercial surveillance enabling this has been with us a long time, long enough that people working in that industry casually refer to their databases' keys as a person's identity! The recent innovations in commercial surveillance just make it harder to run away and start fresh, while enabling more efficient extraction through fine-grained price discrimination.
Probably a lot. My cousin (Nth generation rich white dude) took a class (at an ivy league school) on the more technical side of terrorism where the professor outright told them that the research they would need to do to get a good grade they would result in them getting a lot more "random" searches at airports and the like. He said other students confirmed that statement (I don't think he had had occasion to travel via air between taking the class and our conversation).
FB definitively know a lot folks' "political leaning" base everyone's "likes" in global scale and has profit from the info in the last elections.
Quantifying karma is a good idea, if implemented correctly and within limitations of accuracy.
Why? Many people hold many opinions about me, almost all of which are wrong. I don't see the value in a global database of opinions about me which I can't control and which will affect me in ways I can't predict.
But I’d give you a chance first.
The fact that people are rushing to downvote me for voicing a contrary opinion (and emboldening others to disagree and downvoting me too) is the exact embodiment of what I just described. Like it or not, human beings don't like outsiders and people that others dislike
Especially in the context of cultural production. We wouldn't have the Beatles ("more popular than Jesus" controversy, drugs, bed-in for peace) or probably any other rock/punk related music... also anti-racism, LGBT rights, feminism, and other social movements we look back on as positive would all have significant impediment to making progress if possible at all.
In a very narrow per-use-case context like rating a contractor on quality of work, or restaurants on quality it's obviously not a problem but the key difference is social-wide aggregation and enforcement of norms that sound good at the time (to a critical mass of people) but leave no room for society to evolve and improve through new ideas and beliefs.
Growing up in a racist area and taking a public stand against racism would give one a very poor score, even after leaving.
What you said you'd find helpful is a "global database of opinions" whereas being down-voted on this particular site is a very limited context.
Would you find it helpful if I happened to be in the key interviewer for a job that you really want and are fully qualified for and reject you based on my perception of you here, bubbling up through data processing and aggregation into a "global" system that's totally opaque to you? And further, that my negative reaction adds more data and pushes your score down?
Up/Down voting comments here is totally appropriate as limited to this context. Applying that type of data, invisibly aggregated across all aspects of your life is what's seen as a problem, correctly in my view.
It’s hard to argue those systems are not useful if implemented properly. Yes it can lead to prejudice if done improperly, and some prejudice is unavoidable (the whole point of the review is to do a lot prejudging for you to save time) to save on time and effort.
Those are reviews of businesses and products, not individuals. It's not equivalent.
The core thing that they are attempting to do is to declare that the internet is no longer a river of information that they just pass along. Making this change is really important if you want more control over what people say and do on the internet.
Without net neutrality, it is easier to start funnelling more and more people through monopolies that cooperate with the government. The Chinese apps are a good example of that.
Make no mistake, the United States is no longer the bastion of freedom you believe it to be. And many in government would _love_ to be able to more effectively stifle political dissent and move to a one party system.