In December
2015, news leaked about China rolling out a new social credit system called
Sesame Credit. Sesame Credit is currently in a voluntary testing phase, but
will become mandatory in 2020. Previously in China, your actions were only monitored
by government agencies (that’s why anything coming or going out of China’s
internet is so damn slow), but Sesame Credit will score your information based
on what the government considers productive versus idle/lazy/wasteful/illegal –
represented by a number between 350 and 950. Sesame Credit amalgamates material known about
an individual from their government and judicial records, internet usage,
spending, and social media. There are lots of articles about the basics of the
system, so rather than repeat what every other site says, I encourage you to do
some background reading about what we know so far.
What I want to talk about is, does this matter?
Is it important? What are the implications? Are we living in, as every other
editorial website has ever so cleverly quipped, 1984?
The sesame
credit system obviously seems despotic, invasive and unnatural, but is it new?
To sum it
up, not really. Credit ratings based
on your financial history have been around since the early 1900’s, and are
fully integrated into North American lifestyles. And while other systems don’t
seem nearly as invasive as China’s proposed system, they are still pretty damn
invasive, especially in a culture where you don’t typically talk about how much
money you make or how much debt you accrue. Credit record systems are important
in a society centered on loans and spending, and major financial institutions
can easily know everything about your debt, the loans you have taken out and
your repayment behavior. This data can affect things such as your ability to
get a cell phone, insurance, a car, or anything where payment will be assumed
to occur in trust. However, while the theoretical question being addressed in
the case of credit ratings would be Can I
trust this person to pay back their debt? It seems like China is asking Is this person a “good” person as defined by
the state?
China, on
the whole, is a very law abiding culture, and systems of social control have
existed for all of the country’s recorded
history. The Mandarin symbol for “good” is a pictogram of a woman and child,
weaving the idea of having a wife and children in with the very fundamental
concept of “goodness”. Confucianism, one of the oldest recorded philosophical
traditions, emphasizes putting one’s
responsibilities toward others ahead of one’s own interests and, generally, being
virtuous. “If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be
given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but have no
sense of shame. If they be led by virtue, and uniformity sought to be given them
by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of the shame, and moreover
will become good." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confucianism) Really
then, a social credit system attempts to move toward obedience to the state as
a guise of pursuit of virtue and away from obeying laws out of fear, which was
Confucius’ ultimate goal. As Wikipedia points out, the rulers would
spread their virtue to people instead of imposing proper behavior with laws and
rules. You can certainly see a Confucian influence on this type of system.
To help
understand the similarity between the proposed sesame credit system in China
and current private ventures that already exist in control of private
corporations, let’s take a look at the major aspects of the sesame credit
system currently being discussed and how they compare to systems in place in the
rest of the world.
Traditional credit information such as major assets, debt, bank and credit information is scored. This can be used to determine if they can receive a bank loan or sign on to a lease.
This is
exactly how the North American credit rating system is set. Financial
institutions share information about you (their patrons) with each other and
give you a score based on your debt, assets, repayment and bank information to
determine if they can trust you with yet another loan. This has never been
formally in place in China, and so the concept seems as reasonable as it is in
other countries, however reasonable you might deem it to be.
Internet usage is monitored to determine what kind of person they are, lazy vs productive based on what they spend their money on, and where they spend time online.
Spending
habits and spending time online is already very closely scrutinized by a number
of organizations, and selling marketing data continues to be ridiculously
profitable. Governments have already admitted to sniffing everyone’s packets
for the purposes of protecting us from terrorists.
Meanwhile, monetization of spending and examining
where people’s eyes look for the purpose of selling them more junk are a much
higher priority for private corporations monitoring us. That information can be
sold for a lot of money when it is analyzed
for targeted advertising, or to prompt people to spend more money. For decades
now, people have been entranced by earning “points” on their shopping cards,
such as Air Miles, Shoppers Drug Mart and Safeway cards. These were just the
beginning: nearly every store now has some form of “points”, or way of tracking
your spending by requesting your phone number or email address when you buy an
item at the till.
Even more
insidious, credit card companies and banks have held the lion’s share of your
marketing data for your whole life, as the most convenient way for you to pay
for items is using your credit or debit cards. All the items you buy (and the
day and time you bought them) are conveniently indexed for credit companies and
banks to sell off to other companies, or to target you in further advertising
and promotions.
As for
assessing the type of person you are -- none of that is important in places
like North America, where you can do just
about whatever you want with yourself, as
long as it doesn’t impact your ability to be a productive citizen; that is,
you can hold down a job, pay your bills and invest in the economy. That’s the
main reason why hard drugs are still illegal.
Advantages of high scores: faster loan approval, deposit not required for hotel/cars, VIP reservations, prominent dating profile, fast tracked travel permits
This is the
carrot at the end of the social credit stick, and I have to admit some of these
advantages would be pretty good (fast-tracking anything you need to get through the government sounds amazing).
However, if it is anything like our current credit rating system, only people
who already have a substantial amount of wealth will be able to take advantage
of these benefits, as people with little income will be unable to substantially
increase their scores. One of the problems with gamification is that you can’t
make things too easy, or everyone will have all the benefits and there will be
no motivation to improve. Either getting these scores will be impossible to
achieve except for a small percentage of elite Chinese, or the system will
start to ‘push back’ the benefits, and make the scores higher and harder to
reach. Either way, the bottom 90-95% are pretty much screwed no matter how hard
they try (in which case the real question is, will the average person figure this out, or just keep trying against
the odds?)
Poor people
may appreciate the improved chance of loan approval, but what is the point of
the other perks if you have no money to begin with? How would this possibly
motivate them? How is this anything but another perk for people who are already
wealthy?
A national database will merge information on every citizen, including tax information, traffic tickets, academic degrees, and medical records
To be
honest, I’ve always wondered why this has never happened in North America. Is
the government really unable to compile data on education, criminal records,
taxes and health records? I understand there are a lot of privacy laws in
place, but it does seem like society could benefit from merging these pieces of
information. Other than an infringement of privacy, I’m not really sure what the
downside of this could be, and the advantage could be that things might
actually get done faster.
Now that I
mention it, a form of this actually is
now taking place in the United States; a new “Threat Score” has been created (http://disinfo.com/2016/01/metadata-comes-home-with-new-threat-score-policing-tools/).
This new
system, starting as a piece of software called “Beware” in the California
Police Department, analyses and scores data such as arrest reports, property
records, commercial databases and social media posts to calculate an
individual’s threat score. This is already in place in the U.S. Expect it to
catch on.
Certain professions will face particular scrutiny, including teachers, accountants, journalists, veterinarians, tour guides, doctors, government officials, reporters, CEOs and statisticians. People with low scores will be barred from these positions.
This has
already been trending in North America: the idea of a publicly accessible
database of individuals’ experiences dealing with professionals. There are
multiple websites where you can rate your doctor, professor, job placement, funeral,
landlord, agency or boss. EBay and other shopping websites allow you to rate
sellers. LinkedIn and other job websites let people snoop on one another, and has
started using Salesforce’s employee performance review system to assign scores.
The substantial difference is that Sesame Credit is overtly stating that your
social credit score can prevent you from getting high ranking jobs, while
outside of China, although it isn’t being said explicitly, you can be assured
that any potential employer will read every scrap of gossip about you online
they can find (LinkedIn, Facebook, or just a good old fashioned google search),
which can also prevent you from getting ANY
job at all.
Your rating can be raised by using Alibaba’s money system, Alipay.
This is one
of the stranger sounding decisions to affect your Sesame Credit score. By
simply purchasing a specific brand of online currency, your score goes up? I’m
not sure if this is the case, but if it is, it seems very corrupt. However, the
Sesame Credit system is created by Alibaba’s parent company, Ant Financial, so
maybe this is their way of recouping costs. Again, only people with a lot of
money to spend, or people racking up large amounts of debt, will be able to
improve their score this way. I can’t see this feature being sustainable as it
will be easy for critics to point out as a flaw in Sesame Credit’s measurement.
If all you have to do is buy their money to increase your score, then the
system has no true measurement ability at all. This feature seems like it could
be a fabrication, but only time will tell.
Score can be lowered by posting political opinions without permission, describing history differently from the ”official” one, or publishing news embarrassing or contrary to the Chinese Government, whether it is true or not. *Note: This aspect of Sesame Credit has not been verified, and could possibly be just speculation. But, assuming a worst case scenario, let’s suppose it is true.
Similar to
making terrorist threats or whistleblowing government secrets to sites like
Wikileaks, it is no surprise that the right kind of dissent can be an
arrestable offense, or at least set off a red flag on the profile the
government has on you. It is no secret that if you are sharing secrets online,
the people behind the secrets will get upset and find you. Sure, the Chinese
government is already very strict about what is considered worthy of a red flag
for suspect/detainable material, but this is not new, and this is no secret.
And unless you plan to follow in the footsteps of Ai Wei Wei, Chinese citizens
probably already take precautions to avoid this type of unwanted attention.
Score can be modified by the people you associate with online, depending on what their scores are can lower your score if theirs is lower, but it is not clear if it can raise your score or not. Again this item is more speculation than fact and has not been verified by Chinese authorities. However, even if these associations do not directly lower your score, a person will be more aware of them, and may end connections to people on the fact that the state does not approve of them as a person.
Okay, this
one is potentially scary, as they seem to be taking the next step to shape the
social lives of China’s citizens. However, it seems much more likely that the
system would not directly impose these rules on your credit score and instead would
merely imply that you should reconsider your friendship with certain individuals.
People concerned with their score will already be the type of person to rid
themselves of damaging friendships. People who are indifferent to the effect on
their scores will continue their friendships, so I suspect this will not be
directly implemented in the long term. Even if you have to remove someone as a
friend on social media, it doesn’t stop you from being friends in real life,
and people are already becoming familiar with the logic of adding and removing
friends from particular accounts (and setting up fake or secondary accounts)
for different reasons.
Gamification of the score by being able to download the app to show your score to others, and play a game where you try to guess if your score is higher or lower than your friends/acquaintances/enemies?
The
gamification can serve a few different purposes, first of all by sharing scores to put social pressure on to “keep up with the
Joneses”, and secondly to try to appeal to people with a predisposition to
the appeal of gaming and to give them a
motivation to strive for this particular high score. To try to convince a
gambling addict to stop gambling so he can improve his social credit score
would be a misguided approach, since gambling appeals to the idea of luck and
an easy solution to financial problems, while improving a social credit score
would require hard work without a guarantee of a reward. This may have an
appeal to gamers, but I can’t imagine the ‘rush’ of increasing a social credit
score would compare to the rush of fragging bozos in an online video game.
Other speculation: while they may have lifted China’s one child policy, it is always a possibility they could tie the ‘privilege’ of child birth with social credit score.
Sure, this
seems insidious for anyone with the fundamental belief that everyone is
entitled to have children. But unfortunately, in the present day, the earth is
dealing with problems of overpopulation and raising a child now is incredibly
expensive. The problem here would more rest with the concept of eugenics, in
that the state would be controlling the right to breed by only giving the
privilege to obedient citizens, breeding further obedience in future
generations, while the party overlords and their children continue on the path
of European style nobility.
Making Sense of Social Credit: A Global Perspective
To attempt
to address the problem of how a society will be affected by the imposition of social
credit, let’s look at another prominent problem – the rise of heroin use.
Ever since
the Opium Wars in the 1800’s, heroin use has been cracked down on in China.
However, since the 1990’s there has been another surge in opiate addiction
despite potentially harsh consequences. Possession of any amount will guarantee
you prison time, and possessing 50+ grams or proof of trafficking can result in
the death penalty (http://www.kcba.org/druglaw/pdf/ChineseDrugPolicy.pdf)
Yet,
despite China’s harsh drug penalty, drugs continue to be used, for as long as
people have known of their existence. Currently there are about 900,000
registered drug addicts in china, but total regular use estimates are as high
as 12 million. With a recorded population of 1.376 billion, that is 0.9% of the
population (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade_in_China#Drug_law_enforcement_agencies_and_legislation).
Compare
this to neighboring country Pakistan, where 4.2 million people are addicted to
narcotics, according to a 2014 assessment. With a population of 199 million,
that’s 2.1% of the population. More recent estimates are closer to 6.45 million,
or 3.2% (http://www.medicalnewspk.com/report-on-drug-abuse-statistics-in-pakistan/). Trafficking heroin can also be punishable
by death in Pakistan, and Pakistan has similarly draconian drug possession
penalties to China. So while having drug use rates 2-3 times higher than what
is reported in China, drugs are also more available, as Pakistan is as a major
exporter of opiates and is next door to the largest producer, Afghanistan. Understanding
Pakistan’s drug problems through the drug’s availability and government corruption
can help us understand China better. China has very strict control on the flow
of information coming out of the country, so more specific details about
government corruption and true opiate usage rates may be far from accurate.
The Sesame
Credit system seems more as if this system serves to give people with money
more perks and incentives, rather than to motivate the average citizen to tow
the communist party line. For a country that claims to be communist, China’s government’s
actions seem to function more like the world’s largest corporation; only now is
China stepping up their efforts to understand their citizens as consumers -- opening
up ‘opportunities’ for people to take on more debt, engage in only state-approved
activities, and spend their credit granted ‘perks’ (which all just happen to consist
of ways to spend more and more money). While these are things to be concerned
about, these tactics are used by
corporations outside of China, only with more diffused and seemingly-benign
methods. If you feel like something needs to be done about the manipulation and
data collection of everyday citizens in China’s Sesame Credit system, ideas to
thwart the systems that are currently in place in your own country seems like
the best place to start.
