Fast Company has caught on to what Breitbart News has been highlighting for some time: that the Big Tech Masters of the Universe are developing systems to monitor and regulate personal behavior that closely resemble China’s totalitarian “social credit” system.
China’s state-run newspaper Global Times revealed in a column defending the nation’s authoritarian “social credit system” Monday that the communist regime had blacklisted 13.49 million Chinese citizens for being “untrustworthy.”
If we are suitably wired in—as just about everyone is nowadays—we might not just be watching the show, we could actually be the show.
An offshoot of the Chinese Communist Youth League published a video featuring Chinese celebrities promoting the nation’s totalitarian social credit system to young people, urging them to give “thumbs up to integrity,” Australia’s ABC News reported on Wednesday.
Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping has used “a blend of soft and hard power to boost China’s international image,” Time magazine noted Wednesday in its list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
China’s “social credit” system–a dystopian surveillance nightmare that monitors people in countless ways and automatically dishes out punishments for poor citizenship and political dissidence–is humiliating “discredited individuals” by forcing them to use an embarrassing ringtone on their cell phones.
Details have been revealed about Mastercard’s controversial “digital identity” system, which will “bind” your identity to a smartphone or other device, and which has been compared to China’s social credit system and the bleak futurism of Netflix series Black Mirror.
Donald Trump Jr. warned in an article for the Hill, Sunday, that Big Tech companies could soon construct a communist-style social credit system if “left unchecked.”
Actress and former Miss Chinese International Michelle Ye Xuan, whose resume includes numerous films and television shows, has become the highest-profile “untrustworthy” citizen to be banned from travel by China’s social credit system, a massive surveillance and data-mining operation that grades Chinese for the quality of their citizenship and punishes those with poor scores.
The UK Guardian reported on Friday that China’s “social credit system,” a vast surveillance network and database system designed to punish Chinese for poor citizenship, has blocked travelers from buying 17.5 million airplane tickets and 5.5 million train tickets.
Canada has assembled a “Risk-Driven Tracking Database” (RTD) that collates a great deal of information about people who are vulnerable to crime and misfortune, making them known to social service agencies and law enforcement so they can benefit from proactive services.
China’s creepy “social credit system,” a vast surveillance network that rates both companies and individual citizens for “good behavior” and has a variety of tools for punishing those who behave badly, is also proving useful for accumulating socioeconomic data. A report released this week by China’s National Public Credit Information Center used data from the social credit system to determine that a large percentage of “untrustworthy businesses” are operating in China’s wealthiest regions.
Beijing announced an “action plan” this week for monitoring residents’ behavior, adding that the city expects to have its social credit system fully implemented by the end of 2020.
Chinese telecoms giant ZTE is helping the socialist dictatorship in Venezuela to create a social credit system known as the “Fatherland Card,” similar to the system already implemented by Beijing.
China’s state-run Global Times newspaper reported on Monday that over 11.14 million instances of individuals not being able to board flights – and 4.25 million similar incidents on trains – had occurred “by the end of April.”
