Nosebleed
It’s become cliche to point out how Black Mirror is reflection of ourselves, right now and soon in the future. So I’d like to cut the straight to chase on this article and talk about a technological phenomenon that’s impacting people right now. It’s China’s social credit systems, which are used as inspiration for the dystopian backdrop of Nosedive. If you haven’t watched it, you should probably hold off. You don’t need another thing to worry about.
Contrary to popular coverage you might’ve read on this topic, things haven’t gone full Orwellian just yet. There are three major social credit systems being used in China currently: Alibaba’s Sesame Credit scoring system, Tencent’s credit scoring system, and the mandatory government one (which isn’t actually mandatory yet, but is reported to be so by 2020). For the purposes of Alibaba’s and Tencent’s business operations, these systems aren’t a far stretch. Alibaba, an international E-commerce platform, uses its system to track user’s online purchase and payment history, while Tencent (a holding company responsible for popular entertainment and social media apps) mines data from its users’ social networks. While the implications can appear profoundly troubling, from a business perspective this isn’t anything new; they’re leveraging the wealth of data being generated through their services to generate profit-optimizing analytical insights.
The same thing is happening in the West, no doubt. Companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple all require thriving repositories of user information to provide competitive services on the marketplace. New technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning are the drivers behind incredibly personalized, optimized, automated user experiences. These companies want nothing more than to have a long, profitable relationship with you — and to do that they need to have a good clue of what you’re like. Who your friends are. Where you live. What you might do next. The big difference between the systems at play in the West and those in the East currently are that China’s are outward facing. They’ll tell you what your social status is. And for the most part, they enjoy great success as centralized platforms.
In my opinion, this centralization is where we need to focus our attention. For example, let’s take a look at one of Tencent’s most valuable products: WeChat. It’s most popular mobile messaging in China, with over a billion accounts created and 700 million active monthly users in 2016. It started as a free, cross platform messaging app — but now its much, much more. Here’s a brief description of its many features, ripped straight from Wikipedia:
WeChat provides text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, video conferencing, video games, sharing of photographs and videos, and location sharing.[16][17] It can exchange contacts with people nearby via Bluetooth, as well as providing various features for contacting people at random if desired (if these are open to it, 找一找), next to integration with social networking services such as those run by Facebook and [18]Tencent QQ.[19] Photographs may also be embellished with filters and captions, and a machine translation service is available.
In China, users who have provided bank account information may use the app to pay bills, order goods and services, transfer money to other users, and pay in stores if the stores have Wechat payment option. Vetted third parties, known as “official accounts”, offer these services by developing lightweight “apps within the app”.[20]
The sheer amount of services and functions is bewildering in its own right, but the fact that its all in one app is unlike anything available on the market right now in the West. You could text a friend for lunch, order a taxi, order the meal, pay for both, rate the taxi-ride and the restaurant, and share the foodie photo with your social networks without ever leaving the app. It’s total service convergence; what takes the fractured jumping between Facebook, Uber, JustEat, banking apps, and Instagram can be achieved seamlessly within WeChat. A level of convenience that many of us in the West simply don’t even know we could have. For those outside of tech, its not even on the radar. For everyone inside tech, its the end-zone; to be the one-stop-shop for everyone’s digital needs is to afford those golden toilets you’ve always wanted. And all that sweet, sweet, multi-dimensional data, owned by one centralized mega-corporation… Sounds like a little too much power, no?
For those of us who’ve seen Nosedive, I believe it would be fair to agree that Lacie’s experience at the airport was nothing short of traumatizing. Making your flight is stressful enough, but to be denied at check-in because of your social score is a terror much worse than any TSA pat-down. Suddenly, its not enough to even be able to afford a ticket! Unfortunately, this has already become reality for some 4.9 million Chinese citizens with low credit scores. 1.65 million can’t ride the train anymore, and hundreds of thousands of people have been denied access to bank loans and credit cards. These punishments are the result of a recent improvement to China’s social credit system, where they assigned a unified central credit code to every citizen and corporation. China’s social credit systems are still in their relative infancy, but the implications they’ll have on their citizen’s lives are already being seen. As information flows through massively centralized businesses to a massively trusted, centralized government, the ability to pass these sort of punishments (and rewards, of course) on citizens will grow exponentially.
Right now, China’s three social credit systems are relatively separate entities. But this is exactly why I think its so important to pay attention to the massive service convergence of these giant Chinese tech players. As the date rolls closer towards making the government system mandatory in 2020, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if Alibaba and Tencent start feeding their respective analytics towards the government. This will happen in the spirit of cooperation, not coercion. Cultural differences are at play here —speaking broadly, the Chinese are more socially open and trusting of the government than us in the West. And when you’re tasked with governing a population of roughly 1.3 billion people, the trust dynamics need to be a little different to maintain order. These social credit systems might be an arguably practical way to keep track of people, but whether they end up being used to keep or enforce this order is yet to be seen.
While it’s easy to see how this can quickly escalate into a dystopian scenario like the one seen in Nosedive, I don’t want to close this article with any sort of negative impression on China and its ever-evolving technological society. It’s a mistake to make an appeal to traditional Western views, holding on to the sacred viewpoint that we’re morally and technologically righteous while other’s aren’t. We may praise Google and Facebook, but don’t discount international competitors like Baidu and Tencent. I sincerely believe that all of these companies are trying to leverage technology to make the world a more awesome place, while of course making a fat profit in the process. With the advent of artificial intelligence dawning upon us, we’re living in the most competitive era ever for multinational corporate competition. To win this technological race is to effectively win the world — but what that might end up looking like is anyone’s guess.
DISCLAIMER: I’m no expert on China, and I don’t claim to be. Posted below are my references for this article. If you believe I got something wrong or that I’m painting an unfair picture, please let me know so I can revise this article. Just a fan of technology and curious as to where it will go next.
What are your opinions on social ranking systems? Do you think we’ll ever see total app convergence like WeChat in the West? How soon until things nosedive? Let me know in the comments!
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