by Jason Snell
Gamifying obedience to the state
Samuel Osborne in The Independent:
With a concept straight out of a cyberpunk dystopia, China has gamified obedience to the State. China has created a social tool named Sesame Credit which gives people a score for how good a citizen they are. The system measures how obediently citizens follow the party line, pulling data from social networks and online purchase histories.
Stanley Lubman in The Wall Street Journal:
The article quotes planning documents stating that the system would “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.” It is no wonder that one Chinese human rights-activist is quoted as saying “Tracking everyone that way, it is just like ‘1984’.”
Hard to argue with the references to cyberpunk dystopias and ‘1984’. This is Orwell by way of William Gibson.
(The Extra Credits video is pretty good, too.)