SILICON VALLEY IN CALIFORNIA IS BUILDING A CHINESE-STYLE ‘SOCIAL CREDIT SYSTEM’ THAT GROWS LARGER AND STRONGER WITH EVERY APP YOU DOWNLOAD AND USE
Many Westerners are disturbed by what they read about China’s social credit system. But such systems, it turns out, are not unique to China. A parallel system is developing in the United States, in part as the result of Silicon Valley and technology-industry user policies, and in part by surveillance of social media activity by private companies. Here are some of the elements of America’s growing social credit system.
by Geoffrey Grider
NowTheEndBegins.com
August 26, 2019
In China, scoring citizens’ behavior is official government policy. U.S. companies are increasingly doing something similar, outside the law and the Constitution.
We all gasped in shock and horror when we learned last year about China’s dystopian and chilling social credit system that looked and sounded a whole lot like the George Orwell novel ‘1984‘. But guess what? A very similar system is rising up here in America, not run by our government like the Chinese system is, but created by each and every one of us who download apps and use the “like” and commenting features. All this activity has created a system that is beginning to rate people and allow them access to the system, or to lock them out of it.
“And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.” Revelation 13:16-18 (KJV)
Social media use has created a paradigm shift in our culture on a par with the invention of the automobile and the electric light bulb, that’s how much change has been wrought seemingly overnight. In the movie ‘The Matrix‘, we learn to our astonishment that Neo and all the rest of mankind are actually human batteries living in a pod, generating life for ‘the system’. Isn’t that what we are all doing on social media as well?
We post the everyday moments of our lives which, at the minute we upload them, become the property of the corporation we just gave them to. Even our social media profiles are not our own, evidenced by the fact that they can only be deactivated but never deleted. And that very system which we the people work to build every single day is now beginning to turn on us and decide who is allowed access and who is not. Soulless corporations are making billions and billions from our profiles, all that money gives them power, and all that power is now telling us how we will live.
Uh-oh: Silicon Valley is building a Chinese-style social credit system
FROM FAST COMPANY: Have you heard about China’s social credit system? It’s a technology-enabled, surveillance-based nationwide program designed to nudge citizens toward better behavior. The ultimate goal is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step,” according to the Chinese government.
Punishments can be harsh, including bans on leaving the country, using public transportation, checking into hotels, hiring for high-visibility jobs, or acceptance of children to private schools. It can also result in slower internet connections and social stigmatization in the form of registration on a public blacklist. China’s social credit system has been characterized in one pithy tweet as “authoritarianism, gamified.”
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