When China began rolling out its social credit system earlier this year, there was a wave of articles calling it a totalitarian’s dystopian wet dream.
If you haven’t heard of it, basically every citizen is assigned a rating based on what they do in public and online. If you do something that the government frowns upon, they can punish you by throttling your internet speed, restricting your travel, and even preventing you from getting management-level jobs with the state.
I couldn’t find a single western publication that thinks this is a morally sound idea. But the Chinese government thinks it’s a good idea. And I’m gonna invoke Hanlon’s razor and say it’s not because they love controlling people for the sake of ruining their lives.
There’s a few countries that’ve done well in their hope of creating a utopia. Japan stands out in my mind as a country with very little crime as a result of having a strict, orderly culture.
The two biggest factors to establish order are 1) social norms and 2) laws.
Social norms have light but immediate punishments. If you do something out of the ordinary, people just think you’re weird. At worst, someone calls you an asshole.
Laws have strong but delayed punishments. You’ve got law enforcement officers, lawyers, judges, appeals all of which can take years from the moment someone commits a crime to the time that they’re punished.
China is cutting out the middlemen. They want instant justice.
China has long had a judicial system that’s convicted people under the assumption that they’re guilty until proven innocent. But now with face-recognition AI, the prevalence of CCTV, and online monitoring, they have all the evidence they need.
This is what a justice system looks like at scale. A justice system that’s been optimized for speed. How else are you going to police 1.4 Billion people?
Outsiders see this as dystopia. Its creators see it as potential utopia. It’s an opportunity to not only eradicate crime, but all social chaos, and they decided it was worth sacrificing what little privacy and freedom that remains.
