Your citizen score

By Jason Lim

On June 14, 2014, the State Council of China published the "Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System" that contained a rather radical and disturbing proposition: that the government could rank your trustworthiness based on your behavior and custom curate public good and commercial privileges based on your ranking.

This is how a WIRED article described this proposed system: "Imagine a world where many of your daily activities were constantly monitored and evaluated: what you buy at the shops and online; where you are at any given time; who your friends are and how you interact with them; how many hours you spend watching content or playing video games; and what bills and taxes you pay (or not)… imagine a system where all these behaviors are rated as either positive or negative and distilled into a single number, according to rules set by the government. That would create your Citizen Score and it would tell everyone whether or not you were trustworthy. Plus, your rating would be publicly ranked against that of the entire population and used to determine your eligibility for a mortgage or a job, where your children can go to school ― or even just your chances of getting a date."

Not sure how the government could affect your chances of getting a date, but let's take this description at face value. Most people focus on the pervasive surveillance aspect of this proposed system and blame technology for enabling it. True, this system isn't possible without the recent advent of big data analytics, artificial intelligence, internet of things sensor systems, smartphones, social media platforms, chat apps, etc. Basically, all the technology that has made our lives easier and better has also made our lives more open and transparent to select companies and the government with the right access.

Take a little step back, however, and you will soon realize that this isn't anything new. Technology enabled it to be more pervasive and far-reaching, but the basic idea of rating people on their behavior has been around. In the U.S., credit rating agencies have been collecting our spending habits for a long time. In effect, they collect far more than just spending. I can go into my credit report to find out where I lived 20 years ago. My credit report is basically a history of my life _ not a comprehensive history, but a good chunk of it is in there. This is why credit scores are used to adjudicate your "trust-worthiness" not only for getting loans but for getting a job, applying for different types of memberships, and, even, getting married.

These credit rating agencies are also largely unregulated and each has a black box of mysterious and proprietary algorithm to determine your credit score. So, perhaps it's not a bad idea to have the government do it. Not.

What really worries me about the Chinese proposed system is that "all these behaviors are rated as either positive or negative and distilled into a single number, according to rules set by the government." In other words, there is a value judgment to everything you do. Every post you make on Weibo, everything you buy through Alibaba, every text you send through WeChat will be judged. But according to what standard? Whenever there is a value judgment, there is a value norm that the judgment is based on. And the government is the creator and steward of that norm.

WIRED goes on to write, "The Chinese government is pitching the system as a desirable way to measure and enhance ‘trust' nationwide and to build a culture of ‘sincerity.'" We are concerned about unintentionally inserting our biases and prejudices into AI algorithms; the Chinese are actively and centrally injecting theirs into this surveillance technology to build a culture of sincerity based on enhanced trust. Yawn. Are they trying to make China the most boring place on earth?

Further, by proposing to incentivize certain behaviors over others through carrots and sticks, the Chinese government wants to shape how its 1.2 billion citizens behave. But do you really want your citizens to behave consistently and collectively in certain ways? It might facilitate a law and order worldview of governance, but what about the cultural, social, and economic costs of being a nation of lemmings? China is a complex, dynamic, and heterogeneous nation of entrepreneurial people. This has served China's resurrection to great power status superbly. But now you want to intentionally shape that wonderful, organic mess that drove the resurgence of China? Beware of unintended consequences.

This system reminds me of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel because it smacks of the unchecked hubris of technocrats who are drunk on their own belief that they can control anything through a combination of policies, technology and coercion, without thinking whether more control is better. I can't get my six-year old son to abide by the very few rules of the house that I laid out, and he's always looking for imaginative ways to circumvent them. 1.2 billion people might find ways to do the same with this system.

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006.

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