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China’s Chilling ‘Social Credit System’ Is Straight Out of Dystopian Sci-Fi, And It’s Already Switched On

September 20th, 2018

It’s been in the pipeline for years: a sprawling, technological mass surveillance network the likes of which the world has never seen. And it’s already been switched on.

China’s “Social Credit System” – which is expected to be fully operational by 2020 – doesn’t just monitor the nation’s almost 1.4 billion citizens. It’s also designed to control and coerce them, in a gigantic social engineering experiment that some have called the “gamification of trust”.

That’s because the massive project, which has been slowly coming together for over a decade, is about assigning an individual trust score to each and every citizen, and to businesses too.

According to China’s Communist Party, the system will “allow the trustworthy to roam freely under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step”.

To pull this off, the unprecedented scheme will harness the immense reach of China’s technological infrastructure: some 200 million CCTV cameras, according to a report by Australia’s Foreign Correspondent.

The idea is these ever-watchful eyes will be hooked up to facial recognition systems, and cross-checked with financial, medical records, and legal records – with the whole apparatus regulated and interpreted by advanced, big-data-crunching AI networks.

The sweeping dystopia of it all is uncannily reminiscent of the TV show Black Mirror – in particular the eerily prescient episode “Nosedive” – but while several outlets have pointed the similarities out, China’s ultimate goal goes even further.

“This is potentially a totally new way for the government to manage the economy and society,” economist Martin Chorzempa from the Peterson Institute for International Economics told The New York Times in July.

“The goal is algorithmic governance.”

Posted in Dictatorship, Police State, Rise of the Machines, Social Engineering, Surveillance, Technology | Top Of Page