Coming soon to the mind of an authoritarian with dreams of domination near you, the Chinese “Sesame Credit” system:
as of May this year, the government had blocked 11.14 million people from flights and 4.25 million from taking high-speed train trips … 3 million people are barred from getting business class train tickets … slowing internet speeds, reducing access to good schools for individuals or their children, banning people from certain jobs, preventing booking at certain hotels and losing the right to own pets
It should be interesting to see what this results in. it seems that even though the system isn’t yet fully rolled out – won’t be until 2020 – a dozen million people are already being ruined by it. When humans are systematically oppressed, most will just sorta roll over an take it and/or try to survive within the system, up to and including groveling and changing whatever it is that is causing them trouble; some small percent will try to *look* like they’re getting along while working quietly to undermine the oppressors; and some will pick up a rock, a gun or a bomb and launch into all-out revolution.
A dozen million people is, on one hand, a tiny fraction of Chinas 1.3 billion. But on the other hand, that is still whole lot of people… and in a very short time. It may be that china is going about this too far, too fast. They put a clamp down on a hundred million people, they could well be looking at three million people willing to take up arms against the government. And under the system in place, these people could really have no option but to do so. It would not surprise me if Chinese hackers are already working their way into the system. A good way to attack it would not be to try to bring it down, but to “aid” it: ruin the “social credit” of not just government officials – who are probably immune to this sort of thing anyway – but to random millions. If you ban half the country from traveling, you’ll crush the transportation infrastructure every bit as effectively as if half the bus and train riders had decided to boycott the system… with the added bonus of millions of travelers raising a stink at the station when they are told they can’t travel. You think flying with the TSA is bad now? Imagine if there was a 50/50 chance that you would be told at the airport that you can’t go.
Such a system would be very, very difficult to enact within the US due to the Constitution. But then, so would a gun ban or speech codes, and yet here we are. We’ve seen the likes of Gab and people who espouse unpopular politics being “deplatformed” and deprived of their ability to make an income, along with a number of people whose lives and careers have been ruined because of a bad joke or a harmless, thoughtless moment of political incorrectness. “Sesame Credit” or something vaguely similar need not be a government program for it to cause substantial havoc within the US. Look, for example, at the Southern Poverty Law Center: they are the gatekeepers on who is and is not a “hate group.” You can easily have your bank decide to no longer do business with you because you end up on their list… even though the SPLC is a politically slanted organization and all you need to do to be declared a “hate group” is annoy the wrong person at the SPLC with wrongthink.
