Sesame Credit will (eventually) make fully automated luxury queer space anarcho-communism possible
A story about Sesame Credit recently went around my streams again. It didn’t contain any new reporting, but it provoked a lot of reaction, most of it overwhelmingly negative. In my streams, that discussion mostly takes one of two (not exclusive) forms:
- Awe at our dystopian reality: “This is scary!” “China is scary!” “Big Brother is here!” etc.
- Cynical resignation: “Credit scores in the US are basically the same thing,” “We’ll be doing this here soon enough,” “If the NSA is monitoring us anyway, might as well gamify it” etc.
There’s an obvious third alternative.
3. Ur doing it wrong: Social credit scores are a Good Idea, except when they are controlled by the State. The goal of these systems is to eventually render the State redundant and obsolete, thus paving the way to Fully Automated Luxury Queer Space Anarcho-Communism (FALQSAC).
In this essay I’ll defend the alternative view.
What is Sesame Credit?
Sesame credit is a “social credit scoring system” that China is using to track the performance of its citizens across a number of dimensions. The system is already in use, and will become mandatory in 2020. The video below provides a general introduction, especially to the concerns it generates in the West.
All I know about Sesame Credit comes filtered through western media. However, two important features to note about the service:
- It uses social pressure to generate conformity to social norms. This indirect control is preferable in some ways to direct violence that has historically been the preferred tool of the State. It is also known to be an effective way to manage social networks.
- It is used by the State to induce conformity to State expectations of its citizens. Gamifying social activities is one thing, but when those games extend to players with a monopoly on violence the game must be considered more carefully.
It is fairly obvious how these tools can be used in the service of social oppression. This scares people, and with good reason, and so people conclude that these tools are dangerous and should be resisted.
If we are careful, however, we might distinguish between these powerful tools for organizing social control, and the State authorities who want to use them for oppressive ends. There’s nothing about the software design that requires it serves the ends of an authoritarian State or their corporate affiliates.
We can easily imagine an alternative service, managed with complete open transparency and standardized moderation, whose values and metrics were determined by an genuinely democratic and all-inclusive consensus procedure. The resulting score would reflect the evaluation of will of the people, without any need for the State to assert itself as the sole arbiter of the people’s interest.
Of course, such a system would face the opposite challenges, of resisting the populist authoritarianism that is increasingly common on the world stage. But before addressing those challenges, we should have a vision of the success conditions clearly in mind.
What is Fully Automated Luxury Queer Space Anarcho-Communism (FALQSAC) ?
FALQSAC (pronounced “falk sack”) is a generic label for a utopian vision worth fighting for. FALQSAC includes:
Full Automation: the robots have all the essential jobs, so you are not obligated to work for your survival and well-being. You are free to spend your time as you choose, with access to sufficient resources to do Really Big Things.
Luxury: Full automation leads to abundance of creative capacity. The formerly 99% will be better off than they are now, and the formerly 1% will be dumbfounded into conformity by the marvelous ingenuity of a self-organizing integrated transhuman community.
Queer: An inherently intersectional term signalling the radical inclusion of all identity categories and their rich overlapping dynamics. All perspectives on race, gender, and culture will find an avenue for expression in FALQSAC, whereas differences in class, education, and access are systematically reduced to naught. You are encouraged to let your flags fly; fully automated luxury gives us ample resources for nonviolent conflict resolution and cross-community integration wherever our bubbles intersect. “Q” may be taken as inclusive of all the following terms, and may be exchanged for any without sacrificing meaning, intent, or movement solidarity (eg, FALBSAC): Black, Women, Gay, Trans, Immigrant, Subaltern, Integrated, Intersectional, Interspecies, Ecological, …
Space: The luxury of automation and open expression come at the expense of serious community organizing, scientific research, and infrastructural investment. Climate change and globalization are forcing humanity to conceive of itself in ecological terms and planetary scales. Not just that we wish to flee to space as escapist fantasy, but that we can take on the perspective of space as a coordinated interplanetary species. The term signals the desire to take on projects bigger than ourselves, and a commitment to the science and engineering required to realize it.
Anarcho-communism: The term signals the shared ownership and thoughtful, consensus-driven distribution of common resources. The term signals the systematic replacement of the State not with private enterprise or individualist isolation but with the direct, open, public, democratic management of the common interest. Anarcho-communism holds that we can self-organize a distribution of labor and resources without requiring any specific person, group, or institutional body hold the final reigns. Anarcho-communism holds that we can organize for our collective interests without any reigns whatsoever.
FALQSAC is a package deal. Compromise on any one pillar and the ideal is irrevocably compromised. For instance, China might be understood as advancing the Fully Automated Space Communism aspects of FALQSAC, but without an identity inclusion, universal luxury, or determined state resistance, you end up with something closer to the authoritarian dystopia that has people concerned.
How does Sesame Credit make FALQSAC possible?
I’m presuming that any effective FALQSAC will require some method for social credit monitoring to manage the distribution of labor and resources such that they are effectively abundant and accessible to all participants in a fair and democratic way. We can argue about the details of such a system (with regards to privacy, design, ethics, social and political implications, etc). But if we assume that some happy consensus does exist on these issues, then we ought to encourage the development and rigorous testing of the tools, and we should be closely monitoring the results with an eye towards these ends.
The worry expressed above is that social credit systems are used as a method for oppressive State control. But if this control expresses the democratic will of the people demonstrably independent of state interests, then anyone who endorses democratic self-governance should endorse the results of such a system. The problem is not the mere presence of control; the problem is who has control, and how it is deployed.
Whether a quantified self in a quantified network advances the cause of freedom or oppression depends entirely on which selves and which networks we build.
So instead of objecting to Sesame Credit outright, we ought to be thinking very carefully about the civil, social, and humanitarian rights that are threatened by this kind of software, and the genuine opportunities for democratic social and political change it presents. We should put systematic pressure on governments to take these rights seriously and to develop these tools with explicitly democratic values at their foundations. And we should keep the ultimate goal of transitioning to a viable FALQSAC, where State control is redundant and unnecessary, vividly in mind at all times.
A watchdog campaign, organized by and for the people, can create systematic institutional pressure on the development and use of tools like Sesame Credit. More importantly, such organizations will help draw the lines between the interests of the people and those of the State. When these two come into conflict, sufficient popular outcry might result in the State conforming to the results suggested by the tool and its users, rather than the converse. If things go well, we’ll increasingly see cases where the network consensus is given priority over corporate or State interests, and the failure to do so will increasingly result even stronger popular objection and protest. In this way, State power can be eroded as the network begins to take over itself.
Coda: Anonymity and the State
The reasoning developed above suggests to me that algorithmic social control is more of a threat to State power than to individual autonomy. The average citizen is already under substantial surveillance and pressure to conform; the app changes this pressure relatively little more than to give it a user-friendly interface. On the other hand, deploying these tools provides massive feedback to the States seeking to control their population. China will have unprecedented insight into the dynamics of the social order and how it responds to systematic control. I suspect this will have an incredible impact on the structure, function, and organizational presumptions of their governing operations into the future.
But of course, things might not go well. People aren’t the best at thinking critically about the tools they find lying around. It is entirely possible (and rather likely) that most people will complacently submit to the tool despite the oppression, instead of recognizing the ease with which the tool can be used to subvert their oppressors. It is also very likely that the State will strictly oppose any attempt to erode its control.
The U.S. alternative to Sesame Credit is instructive. It doesn’t have a unified name, and is managed by a multitude of distinct entities in many different economic sectors, often with sharply divergent interests. Most people are familiar with one’s credit score, but we’re less aware of the profiles used on social media to track our behavior and interests and to evaluate our value as a participant on the network (Hint: your FB profile is worth about $12). All the quantification, monitoring, and media pressure exists with the same strength in the US, but the myth of a “free market” provides enough cover to treat these cooperating interests as independent and distinct.
In fact, the State works in cooperation with banks and financial institutions, and with Facebook and other social media and communications technology companies, to generate the same kind of monitoring and social control. The presumption in the US is that these resources are for the purposes of security in an effort to stop terrorism. This justifies keeping these monitoring efforts in secret, and offering legal immunity to their corporate partners. Thus, in the US we’re often entirely ignorant of both the methods and consequences of State control.
We can admit that the Chinese system is problematic while still recognizing the U.S. system to be significantly worse, both in terms of effectiveness and control, but also in terms of justice and values like political autonomy. The US system is less democratic with less room for deliberate democratic control and organization, since it is controlled largely by private interests who operate entirely outside the scope of democratic institutions charged with protecting the public interests. U.S. “capitalism” increasingly takes the form of private, quasi-independent operation of vital public resources, allowing State access to infrastructural operations without the challenges of operating them within the explicit constraints of the constitution. There is nothing attractive about this alternative.
But we can put the point constructively, by adding a fifth demand to Srnicek & William’s list of post-work demands:
Demand 5: Self-organizing social networks
What: We must have digital tools for generating spontaneous direct actions and broad democratic consensus as the political needs arise. These tools must operate openly, transparently, and independent of any centralized State or corporate control.
Why: State and corporate interests often diverge from the collective interests of the people. Self-organizing social networks ensure that control stays on the side of the people.
Barriers: Social networking tools are currently controlled in the service of State and corporate interests. Organizing an effective collective resistance to the abuse of social media requires access to those same media channels, and no effective alternative media services provide the same access or organizational potential.
