Pasquale
system will reward volunteer activity and “filial piety”—devotion to
one’s parents, grandparents, and perhaps other relatives. To paraphrase
Margaret Thatcher, scoring is “the method; the object is to change the
heart and soul.”
How can a government judge the relative value of working in the
market versus visiting a lonely aunt? For the architects of the SCS, these
spheres diverge: cash rules commerce, and a new currency will govern
culture. That currency is reputation, a single score to express a person’s
social value. As China’s SCS approaches its full implementation around
2020, the scoring of activities will spread, assigning points for a wider
range of antisocial and social behaviors. Eventually China may make
a Great Leap to Commensuration, in which every activity (or inactiv-
ity) is judged and converted to points, giving lived reality the feel of a
never-ending video game.
The Chinese government claims that the SCS simply reflects the
values now embodied in Chinese families, schools, and courts. But
with no appeal mechanism—a basic aspect of due process in any scored
society—the SCS’s relentless logic of commensuration threatens to
supplant, rather than supplement, the authority of families, schools, and
courts. The SCS could easily end up serving as a quant-driven power
grab, enabling its authors to assert authority over vast swathes of social
life in a way they could never achieve via legislation. Such quantitative
governance of culture is a paradox: the very effort to articulate the precise
value of manners and emotions threatens to unravel them entirely, as
spontaneous affections and interactions are instrumentalized into points.
what the scs lacks in legitimacy, it makes up for in efficacy. Aspects
of it are already being felt. Millions of people with low scores have