Australia's ABC News on China's plans to leave no dark corner when it comes to monitoring the populace's lives online:
Dandan doesn't object to the prospect of life under the state's all-seeing surveillance network. [...] The 36-year-old knows social credit is not a perfect system but believes it's the best way to manage a complex country with the world's biggest population. [...]
Under an existing financial credit scheme called Sesame Credit, Dandan has a very high score of 770 out of 800 - she is very much the loyal Chinese citizen.
Just for the record, I hated the visual style of this piece - way too much scrolling over images to get to the next piece of the text - but the content is decent. The really worrying prospect of this stuff is how easy a sell a European edition of the Social Credit software is going to be to a certain type of centrist politician.[note]OK, not in the UK marketplace, maybe, not under that label. But a quick rebranding exercise should take care of that and we'll be off to the races.[/note]
The term 'social credit' should be as despised as the term 'meritocracy', properly understood, deserves to be, but give it a decade or so and - barring a backlash against the level of surveillance and the consequences for ordinary citizens having brought down the Chinese government in the meantime - you're going to see a huge bunfight as every careerist with half an eye on Number 10 decides that this is exactly what the UK needs to get the populace to shape up. We can but hope that they get the successors of the Government Digital Service to try to implement a UK version, so that with any luck it'll show up years late and barely functional and the world will have moved on to the next big idea.
[Via Brettterpstra.com]