(Under the new Social Credit System, what Chinese shoppers purchase will help or hurt individual ratings. Customers shop at a supermarket in Shanghai. Photo Reuters).
You have heard me rail about the husband of US Ambassador Samantha Powers before. Birds of a feather and all that- both members of the power couple are archetypes of the train-wreck that is American foreign and domestic policy. Sam’s husband is Cass Sunstein, a former senior government official, Harvard law professor and author of dozens of books on the principles of public policy- or better said, public manipulation. He was Mr. Obama’s administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. In that capacity he was an advocate of using Government communications to “nudge” people to do things that they might not ordinarily have done.
His ideas raise all sorts of hackles, since I have been down this road before, and even tried my hand at it in the “Office of Strategic Influence (OSI)” back in 2002. We thought- and I still think- that something needs to be done to combat the agitprop that comes from our adversaries in the Middle East. The ISIS script-kiddies are very good at using social media to recruit and spread propaganda. Our concept in the OSI was to fight fire with fire- defeat malicious themes like “All the Jewish people who worked in the Twin Towers were told to leave the buildings before the attack because the whole thing was a Mossad operation.
We ran afoul of the media, who viewed us as attempting to spread propaganda in the United States. We didn’t want to do that, of course, and it is illegal. But trying to keep the messaging overseas where it was legal got too complicated with the internet and all the rest of the global information grid, and the Office was sunk amid implacable and hostile coverage by the press, which was suspicious of anything the government was doing.
No such hostile coverage slowed up Cass Sunstein, whose direct targeting of the American people is apparently OK with the Fourth Estate. His books about “The Nudge” seemed to appeal to the Nanny State sort of Michael Blumberg approach to telling people what to do. It was insidious, and a lot of the people on the White House staff came out of the Mayor’s office in New York, and espoused an allegedly good-natured paternalism that left individual choice intact.
You know the New York approach: restrictions for our own good, banning smoking and skateboarding because they’re unsafe, or limiting the size of sugary sodas. They even advocated making fast food restaurants not provide trays, since that would encourage people to load them up with food and drinks and napkins they don’t need.
In Sunstein’s scheme, you could order a supersized sugary beverage if you wanted it bad enough, but it wouldn’t be convenient to carry it to your table because there wasn’t a tray. He claims that this policy could lower food and beverage waste by as much as half. I don’t trust him further than I can throw him, and that is not far.
But there is something really troubling coming out of China that I think Mr. Sunstien is watching closely, and thus I think we ought to be watching the watchers to see what is going to come next.
China launched an official paper called the “Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System (2014-2020)” last year. I have tried to wade through the bureaucratese in the translation, and it is chilling in its banal evil. Here it is in a nutshell: every Chinese citizen will be scored on a numerical rating system based on financial standing, criminal record and moral choices, and that of their friends and associates. The Government will use “Big Data” to hold all citizens accountable and rated for compliance as they use a new national identity card for transactions.
While using financial, Internet and other data to evaluate individuals is not new (Cass and his ilk do that all the time, as do the marketing boffins here), China will be the first nation to do it publicly and track the resulting numerical index.
The East Germans used to try similar things in monitoring their people, but the goal was different. The Stasi goons were trying to maintain a system to identify troublemakers and defend the regime against revolt.
The Chinese system intends to create a new citizen by promoting ‘socialist core values’ like “patriotism, respecting or the old, hard work and limits to extravagant consumption.”
What is wrong with that, right? And besides, Eddie Snowden blew the whistle on the data mining programs at NSA which he maintained were doing the same thing though exploitation of information held by the phone companies, Twitter, Facebook and Google.
The folks in Silicon Valley denied they were cooperating with the Spooks, and NSA said that the contents of phone calls were not being examined, only the external information on the “wrappers” to the communications.
But here is the difference: The Chinese want their people to know that they are being watched and graded. The quality of their lives will depend on how well they behave.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, Asia’s equivalent of Amazon has already begun compiling a rating system based on the spending habits of users on a scale of 350 to 950, based on not only lending and spending, but also on what is being purchased, and by whom. Having friends with poor credit scores, who play too many video games, or who act out in anti-social manners will also impact the ratings.
It is a system that out-Orwells “1984.”
And you can bet that Mr. Sunstein is watching. Considering that 1984 was so long ago, I suppose it is a surprise that Big Data took this long to take on a life of its own.
But I am going to be watching the watchers intently. I think you might want to consider doing the same thing. Caveat Emptor, you know?
Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303