Evil Empire 107We may soon do the same for government. Every society depends on
free labor—work that is vital but which goes unpaid. Smart governments
realize that they need to strike some balance between market activity
and the free labor that supports families and communities. Policymakers
promote business and growth, but they also realize that if every moment
were commodified, the foundations of social reproduction would wither
away. Index funds may prove a better investment than children. And if
you don’t get credit for being civil, paying attention in class, or taking
care of your aging parents, why would you?
There are standard solutions to such problems. Courts can drain the
bank accounts of “deadbeat dads.” Churches and civil society groups can
stigmatize deviants, and the carceral state can further scare scofflaws. But
these approaches take resources. The perfectly efficient neoliberal state would
cut out the middleman. It would learn from Silicon Valley that you can
motivate people not only to rate and rank one another, but also to positively
enjoy the power and responsibility that rating (and being rated) entails.
The Chinese government is now implementing just such a system
at the national level. Called the Chinese Social Credit System (SCS), it
has some familiar foundations. Its early iterations (pioneered by private
firms) allow users to share images of their scores with one another. As with
financial credit scores used by many lenders, the system rewards people for
repaying debts promptly. But the SCS does not stop with credit; it factors
in court judgments, criminal records, academic dishonesty, jaywalking,
moving violations, and failing to pay transit fares.
Surveillance, software, and relatively simple artificial intelligence
can supply a fearsomely panoptic dossier. But this monitoring alone
does not address the concern of Chinese Communist Party authorities
that cornerstones of their authority are eroding. Thus the SCS will
also dent your score for posting “unreliable” information or engaging
in nebulously defined negative interactions online. Conversely, the