Share Facebook

Twitter

Whatsapp

Mail

Whatsapp China sees a social credit system as a way to solve the problem of 'a lack of trust'.

China is set to implement a 'social credit' system, rating its 1.3 billion citizens on everything from their credit score to their criminal record and even their behaviour on social media. Is the rating and ranking of human behaviour inevitable, and is it already happening in our offices? Antony Funnell reports.

China has more than 1.3 billion people: some of them virtuous, some of them corrupt, some of them rich, many of them poor. It's a huge, disparate populous held together by the heavy and often brutal hand of the central government in Beijing.

Consumers, people, humans have always had a natural instinct to rate, to rank ... This is fundamentally about human behaviour.

Enforcing compliance has long involved censorship, detention and even execution. But come 2020 it will also involve something called the Social Credit System. The SCS will effectively assign a personal character score to every citizen of China—a government-approved rating that will influence all aspects of a person's life.

The information and material used to decide on a person's social rating is expected to come from a multitude of sources, including tax details, records of law violations such as traffic fines, and even data about personal behaviour drawn from security cameras and social media—all pulled together, says Dr Rogier Creemers, by the 'wonders of technology'.

Creemers, a lecturer in politics and the history of China at Oxford University, says Chinese authorities have wanted to establish such a system since at least the late 1940s. But in that era it would have meant a paper filing system for hundreds of millions of people.

'Paper files tend to be expensive, they tend to be difficult to maintain, difficult to transfer,' he says. 'In that sense, what we are seeing now is that the cost of data generation, storage and analysis is approaching zero.'

The Chinese government has historically been quite technocratic, or even technophiliac, with a belief that technology will be able to solve all problems, Creemers says. The major dilemma they're now trying to address is a 'lack of trust'.

At one level, Beijing sees the system as a more effective way of assessing the financial worthiness of individuals. Despite enormous economic growth in China over the past three decades, procedures for lending to consumers are still underdeveloped. So the SCS is intended to make it easier for government organisations and financial institutions to assess who should be allowed to borrow money and who should be labelled a credit risk.

The system will also be employed for reviewing professionals and the services they provide, Creemers says: 'Is your lawyer a good lawyer? Is your doctor a good doctor? Is your teacher a good teacher? That kind of evaluation by clients and customers or students will apparently also be part of that system.'

Of course, given that it's been created by the Chinese Communist Party, there is also a heavy emphasis on using the SCS as a tool for social control.

'There is a very large sense among the leadership that China is currently facing a moral crisis, where the disappearance of a commonly understood ideology or framework, urbanisation and so on, have threatened a certain sense of social cohesion,' Creemers says. 'They see the social credit system as one way of curbing that.'

From reviewing restaurants to reviewing humans

The whole notion of a scoring system for citizens has predictably drawn criticism and concern from privacy advocates and those concerned about human rights abuses. Though to many in the west it will seem egregious, Creemers believes that many ordinary Chinese will accept the SCS as a way to bring greater certainty to their lives.

He also notes that many democracies have also shown themselves partial to state surveillance, and that reviewing and rating is now a major part of global digital culture: think TripAdvisor, Yelp and Rotten Tomatoes.

'Consumers, people, humans have always had a natural instinct to rate, to rank, to produce top 10s, top 20s, top 50s, et cetera. This is fundamentally about human behaviour,' says Ben Perkins, Deloitte's head of consumer business research.

Perkins estimates that more than 80 per cent of western consumers now read and are influenced by anonymous customer reviews, while 40 per cent actively post their own reviews. 'They are recognising the role that they can play in both influencing what they buy and also influencing what others buy,' he says.

Should a line be drawn at rating and reviewing humans, though? It's hard to imagine any western government moving to develop its own form of China's Social Credit System.

However, there are those who see the rating and ranking of human behaviour as inevitable.

Last year the Australian-based founders of a company called Karma received considerable attention and criticism for developing an online site where individuals are encouraged to post personal reviews of each other's character and demeanour.

'Karma is the best way to learn and write about anyone,' declares the website. 'We're a wiki of open letters about people—a social network where the world creates your profile.'

A similar app called Peeple, which is still in beta testing phase, invites users to publicly rank other human beings by giving them a 'character score' on a scale between 1 and 100.

Calling their platform a sort of 'Yelp for people', its founders declared: 'We want character to be a new form of currency. Peeple is an app that allows you to recommend and be recommended by the people you interact with in your daily lives.'

Tracking technology makes its way to the workplace

As with Karma, the public and media backlash against Peeple was widespread and immediate—the platforms were labelled both extreme and potentially libellous. But London-based futurist and author Richard Watson sees as greater cause for concern in the way in which tracking, measuring and ranking technologies have slowly been making their way into the office.

Dubbed 'workplace analytics', such technologies employ sensors and software to keep track of staff and to measure their performance.

'We've always had appraisals, we've always had measurement, but it's now getting absolutely ridiculous,' Watson says.

'I heard that in a casino in Las Vegas people are measured according to how many people they smile at. We are getting to the point where we might actually get daily measurement or real-time measurement, and I think we will then start worrying about the measurement more than our jobs, we will start trying to game the system, et cetera.'

New York University's Christian Parenti agrees. He first started writing critically about the growing use of tracking and measuring technology in the workplace more than a decade ago in a book called The Soft Cage, and he says the only thing that's changed in the past 10 years is the scope and scale of the measuring technology deployed.

'At least in America, but I think throughout the core capitalist economies of the world, there is a compulsion to use technology when it's available,' Parenti says.

'But there's also the interest of employers to maintain control over their workforces, to have a sense of what workers are doing and to also use that information to control individual workers, and to instil a generalised ethos in the workplace of essentially a type of obedience and intimidation ... a type of second-nature obedience that is born of the fact that we all know we are constantly under surveillance.'

Tools for accountability or for control and domination?

Kris Duggan, the California-based co-founder of a workplace analytics firm called BetterWorks, disagrees with Parenti. His technology allows both employees and managers in a firm to track each other's work schedules and performance in real-time. The results are then made accessible to everyone in the company on a common digital platform.

Such transparency makes it immediately apparent whether or not a worker or manager is meeting his or her goals. There's also a mechanism by which a co-worker can encourage or 'cheer' a colleague on, or 'nudge' them when they are seen to be falling behind their stated target.

Duggan rejects any suggestion that the system is meant to intimidate employees. On the contrary, he says the BetterWorks rating system is liberating. 'We are careful to not make things overly competitive, because in the workplace you actually want to foster coordination and collaboration,' he says.

'I think what it really creates is a social contract and social reinforcement to perform, because if I said I was going to do this and then I didn't do it and everybody else is getting their stuff done, then I'm the one that left the team behind or let them down. By bringing that into the open I do think that it does increase accountability to perform.'

Parenti remains unconvinced. 'When you talk with workers who work under these kinds of regimes, where workers are constantly ranked against each other, it has a very corrosive effect on the solidarity of the workplace, and it's profoundly demoralising,' he says.

'Sometimes this is the work of a bullying, pernicious, HR department. Sometimes this is an idiotic compulsion by mid-level managers: "Why would you be against this piece of technology that purports to boost productivity? Everybody is for productivity." So it operates beyond the level of intent.

'It's not just that all these managers want to intimidate their employees, because I'm sure there are managers who use this stuff and will think, "Well, I'm not a bully; I don't want to degrade my team." And that's true. But the logic of control and domination is built into this stuff and transcends the intentions of the managers that deploy it.'

Listen to the full program Future Tense explores our obsession with rating everything.

Exploring new ideas, new approaches, new technologies—the edge of change. Future Tense analyses the social, cultural and economic fault lines arising from rapid transformation.

