There was a comment that appeared for a few minutes before getting deleted, that vaguely lined up with what I wanted to say. It didn't reappear, so I'll just repost it:
>real life also has social credit. were you an asshole to the bartender last week? that goes to your reputation at that bar. did you volunteer with a local non-profit? that goes to your reputation with that organization. even without an algorithm, people remember.
You can always move to new town and start again. The problem with all these social credit systems is that they're designed to follow you wherever you go forever. There is also zero recourse if a mistake was made; at least you can try and smooth things over with a bartender.
Yeah, automation and information sharing prevents people slipping through the cracks, and that also prevents leniency, diversity, and reason.
I was musing over something, though. We have creeping Orwellian things like face recognition and the policing of chat histories. But some of this is private, as in, not done by the state. Even when done by the state, it isn't in most places to prop up the regime and prevent dissent. It's big brother mechanisms without a Big Brother. I speculate that it's genuinely motivated by preventing disorder, because (is this true?) over the last couple of decades people have got more disorderly in petty ways to do with thieving and harassing and scamming one another. Then the people don't like it, and so the people politically demand heavy-handed policing of the people.
Nah, there's no increase in disorder, crime in most developed countries is trending down, but we do have a bunch of people that have collected unimaginable wealth and are definitely afraid something will happen to them like the last couple times this has happened. They definitely don't want to repeat history and will use the coercion tools they have to clamp down on the peasants.
> afraid something will happen to them
Because of what, the decrease in crime?
Massive wealth aside, I would argue that any decrease in crime is nullified in recent years by the increase in sensationalization of specific crimes. That is, reading "crime rates in <city> drop to historic lows in 2025" does not have as much emotional weight as seeing a social media video of a violent crime happening near one's home, even if the statistic is true.
Consider how many children were terrified to swim in the ocean after seeing Jaws for the first time... statistics do very little to allay existing (irrational) fears for most people.
Imo, what is actually happening is fear of crime far away - like rural people being almost terrified of cities and entirely on board with sending army there.
People are not afraid of sensational crime next door. They want crime to be happening where political opponents live, so that they can feel good about punishing them.
Who knows, you'll have to go to their leaked private chats to see the madness they're conjuring there.
OK, a second theory: the situation is messy and complex. Society tolerates the use of physical force less, and has higher standards of health and safety, and more suing and seeking compensation. The police and security then favor electronic methods over potentially injuring themselves or anybody else. Then there's more potential to be bad in small ways because nobody's going to grab you by the collar. Meanwhile, there's opportunities for internet crime, or electronic organized crime, or just mobs and riots. Then the shift in emphasis to electronic control spills over into the private sphere, and the public kind of support it while resenting it at the same time.
In summary, everybody has started liking doing everything in a hands-off way via the internet, but also everybody hates it.
It’s partially that for sure, but I think it’s also a kind of “common sense” feeling of the public that if people use technology to commit a crime, there must therefore be a record of that crime and therefore the police should be able to use that record to easily stop technology-crime. See: every police show ever.
That was never possible before. Historically, conversations didn’t leave records, and when they did, they were trivially burned. There was no sense that the police should have access to the records because there were no records.
The technical and ethical problems of this “common sense” are far from obvious to most whose primary exposure to and mode of thinking about policing and technology is what we see on TV.
Crime stats, especially for violent crime, are relevant to us, not them. Their wealth, status, and/or insurance policies generally require security details and precautions that insulate most “public” activity from random acts of violent crime. However, the former UHC CEO’s death is an example of the sort of singular, and targeted, crime that does strike fear. However, the comment you’re replying to is alluding to the historical collapses of societies (a.k.a a complex system) where economic inequity exceeds a tipping point leads to system collapse (“heads roll”). “Clamping down on peasants”—social credit, pervasive surveillance, collating movements/associations, uh, Palantir—enables evasion of the tipping point and adds resilience to the system.
Tl;dr: violent crime doesn’t mean anything when you have billions, but instability in the system does. Surveillance state tropes exist for a reason, and that’s b/c they add resiliency to a system that would otherwise collapse.
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E.g. if you genuinely believe that AI will result in mass unemployment, it's not a stretch to believe that at least some of those newly unemployed will not take it kindly.
Because of the increase in wealth inequality and increase in peoples' desperation.
On the topic of social credit, I wonder if credit inequality bothers you more. Markets chase after desirable customers who are economically active. The super-rich with yachts aren't affecting me, because they're away being fleeced in Monte Carlo and not competing with me for the basic peasant stuff that I want. But the desirable customers/tenants/employees, who might have debts, and less money than me, but have great prospects and a drive to keeping moving up and circulating cash, and who tick boxes as reliable and enhance the general tone of the business or area and help promote it - those are monsters.
It's not logical; this is why "deranged" has become a necessary prefix to "billionaire" in most cases.
Because more people are waking up to the fact that the entire system is rigged against them.
> Nah, there's no increase in disorder, crime in most developed countries is trending down,
I don't know in which world you're living so here are officials, likely downplayed, numbers for the EU, from an official EU website to get you back to earth:
"In 2023, sexual violence offences, including rape, continued to rise in the EU."
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Rape numbers are through the roof in France (nearly 40 000 a year now): they went x6 in 20 years.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1072770/number-of-rapes-...
"The number of violent crimes in Germany increased in 2024 with a sharp increase in rapes and sexual assaults.":
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-sees-rise-in-sexual-violence-a...
Thefts and violent thefts are on the rise all across the EU. When I was young I didn't hear about being stabbed to death so that their Rolex could be stolen.
In the city were I grew up in now people firing full-auto AK-47 is a weekly occurrence.
Someone who walks into a major EU city and tells me its safer than it was 20 years is very blind.
Meanwhile the risk of my daughter getting raped is very real. And the fault is as much on the rapists as on the ones who try to refute irrefutable numbers.
Rise in reported sexual violence is usually caused by easier, safer, more welcoming reporting, not by actual rise in the base rate.
> When I was young I didn't hear about being stabbed to death so that their Rolex could be stolen.
Exactly, you didn't hear about it, such violence was quite common in some places, but there was no 24/7 online reporting backed by immediate social media outrage. Things are much much more hysterical now.
Now now, let's not be racist.
> there is no increase in disorder
The mobile phone created an occupation for people who would otherwise be on the street committing crime. It paced people, even common kids, adults, we commit much, much less crime than the previous generation, and even less in unreported crime (bar fights, revenge against a neighbor, etc.). The boomers used their hands!
But the problem is: If you follow the average strength and fight training of citizen from 1970 to today, violence should have been practically zero. It is much higher because some subsets have abnormally high rates.
You claim the average is going down. OP claims it’s going up. Both are right. Violence wins.
This is total, unadulterated nonsense. Violent crime is down since 1970. There's no "who is to know" on this one. Look it up!
> It's big brother mechanisms without a Big Brother.
Big Brother does exist: it's money. If there were some single named entity, people would rebel against it, so it's diluted and realized through financialization of one's interactions with other humans. Big Brother is invisible to individuals because it's us, and no individual thinks “I'm Big Brother” when it's their point of view looking out. It's an illusion that creates and enforces scarcity but only works if everyone else also believes (power word: “Full Faith and Credit”).
Check out “Wishes and Rainbows” from The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston for a primer on our road to rootα: https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/economic-education/wi... (favorite panel, top-right on page fifteen: ◀ 1̵1̵ + 9 ／ = 20 ▷)
>Big Brother does exist: it's money.
Then in most places it's increasingly scarce in presence and continue to exercise influence on a very tiny part of the population.
It also ignores context or interpretation, and forces one perspective on incentives that doesn't necessarily reflect reality.
It's not done by the state in the west but the state conveniently lets private companies set it up and then directs those companies in various ways as to what policies to adopt.
The US constitution not extending government limitations to society-scale corporations is a very convenient loop hole. Similar situations exist in other liberal-on-the-book countries.
The watchmen in pieces by david rosen and aaron santesso is the book you want to reach.
Total Surveillance but fractional. We live in a society but people only see parts of the whole. No one has all the interactions
The larger problem is that the owner of the credit scheme, whether a corporation or a government, can use it to punish people and depending on the scheme effectively making people social outcasts, without any due process.
Due process isn't some silver bullet. Jim crow, witch trials, they all followed due process.
But yeah it's better than some capricious bureaucrat just pulling decisions out their ass with no serious recourse, except all those cases there the process is just that.
Nothing in the world is perfect. Breathing and eating are no silver bullets for staying alive because sometimes people choke on their food and they could also breath toxic fumes. Still it's a pretty solid choice to keep doing both.
My point is that due process is tangential to fairness or reasonableness.
This may be a misunderstanding between us. What is referred to by “due process” is the whole and entire ecosystem of laws and a judicial system with trials, representation, judges and predefined appropriate sentencing structures.
The whole and entire point of all of this, is fairness and reasonableness.
The fact that mistakes are sometimes made, even corruption sometimes, does not really change things. If corruption becomes common the system starts to fail and either reforms are made or the system decays into authoritarianism.
And your locks aren't perfectly secure so you may as well hand me the keys.
That's modern technology; the worst of both worlds. The moralistic tyranny of the small town, but the crowded, violent, and lonely social environment of a major city.
That's what the mainstream chose, not what technology was by itself.
The "moralistic tyranny" is arguably the natural consequence of how humans are, but technology is what allowed it to scale.
No. The old internet had it's problems, but they maintained the boundary between the net and reality. The mainstream didn't, and I believe the attitudes of that larger society are circumstancial and shaped by certain forces.
The following you everywhere is a major problem with these systems imo, mostly because it removed the equivalent of bankruptcy for your reputation.
If you had to move across the country to leave your bad name behind, you used to be able to. And just like bankruptcy you’d start with nothing so it wasn’t exactly easy but it was at least an option. Now what recourse do people have?
Also people turning up in a town one day with no one to vouch for them were assumed to be up to no good as it could be assumed that you'd do just that if you were escaping your previous reputation. You could start with less than nothing by default, and may never shake it, and that's before race or religion.
> "If you weren’t born and raised here, you’re an outsider even though you’ve lived here for thirty-five years. That’s just kind of typical in small communities." https://dokumen.pub/small-town-america-finding-community-sha...
In small town New England, to this day, the litmus test is whether you graduated from the local high school, meaning you're probably related to other people in town. If you moved here at the age of 19 you're SOL.
Much like bankrupcy - which isn't just a wiping of the blank slate, it's actually a last resort situation - there is the option of changing your name, opening new bank accounts, and creating new digital accounts under the new identity.
Is it easy? No, but neither is declaring bankruptcy or moving across the country.
The Music Man would have been a very different story in the post-internet world.
I'm not so sure about that. Turns out if you lie blatantly and entertainingly enough, a lot of people don't care if you're a criminal. Enough that you can be elected to high office.
Therapy and rehabilitation within the society, paying your dues and making amends.
The bartender also doesn't sell your behavioral profile to every other bar in town. I mean, unless you're a total asshole and it's a small town, but then they tend to volunteer it.
SF bartenders united to try and ban this serial check-skipper: https://www.tiktok.com/@ktvu2/video/7459844103635733803
That feels like an exception that proves the rule, though - i.e. this is something requiring effort and thus reserved for egregious offenders, not a routine thing.
Good. If the legal system won't do it, people SHOULD.
but the Stripe or Square credit card reader you use to pay for drinks does ["but I use Apple Pay ...."].
> You can always move to new town and start again.
Contra: "Wherever you go, there you are." (i.e., you don't stop being an asshole just because you move.)
Of course, you are exactly the same person you were in your 20s and didn't improve one bit. Did you make mistakes? Too bad. That's you forever. Learning from mistakes is impossible.
Like credit scores events can be made to decay overtime.
What I've seen with these large services like Google is that once they deem you undesirable (either on purpose or by accident) then they're just done with you forever. They have so many customers and so many bad actors that it's just not worth it to give anyone a second chance. It's pretty horrible for people caught in that situation.
We would need some kind of legislation around this. No company is looking to decay scores over time unless there is some profit motive to be exploited (like there is with credit scores).
What's the tangible financial impact to someone who's been deemed undesirable by Google?
Bear in mind that you can mitigate a lot of risk by operating as a business instead of establishing a relationship in an individual capacity.
And people, much like businesses, need disaster recovery plans. We advise people to have escape plans from their homes; similarly, they should have escape plans for their critical information. Almost nothing in this world is risk-free.
> What's the tangible financial impact to someone who's been deemed undesirable by Google?
Depends how deep you got. I for one would lose access to my mobile phone (Google Fi) and email, so it would be very hard for me to get access to anything that uses my phone number for 2FA. Or the email address for any kind of account recovery. Huge nuisance but maybe no financial consequences, except maybe an involuntary trip to the bank's branch to access the account.
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They are surely not the only one to have make mistakes in their life.
It's literally a lesson from the Bible: "Let him who is without sin among you, cast the first stone at her."
I'm telling on myself too, yeah.
Of course people should learn from their mistakes and constantly improve.
But if you respond like an asshole to a comment, it means you haven't learned the lessons you should have. IOW, the commenter is proving my point.
If we're assessing the assholeyness of comments, yours aren't coming across all that favorably IMO, but perhaps this conversation is victim to the loss of context and inflection that other commenters have lamented.
I admit I could have been more eloquent in my response.
Their comment was fine. Also, nothing says they were talking about themselves, so no they didn't prove your point.
I'm not sure how responding sarcastically is "fine." I've found that in real life, people don't respond well to sarcastic responses to ordinary conversation.
>But if you respond like an asshole to a comment, it means you haven't learned the lessons you should have. IOW, the commenter is proving my point.
The irony here is palpable. Buy a mirror.
I appreciate the feedback.
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Of course that's the case, but the point is that if you change for the better you have a chance to start with a clean slate. You do not have such a chance when everything is in a centrally managed database.
Being an "asshole" is often subjective so no, it does not apply equally wherever you go.
And also, many places are big enough that you don't need to move, just go to the place a few blocks over.
> You can always move to new town and start again.
This is accurate. And taken for granted in the US.
Someone once remarked to me: "I think it's cool you can just pick up and go anywhere (on a huge scale)" - They were from the Netherlands.
Well they can move anywhere in the EU, visa free.
Legally, yes. Practically, the EU still has borders and barriers. Language, pension systems, degree equivalence, etc.
Oh and also remember that the EU has freedom of movement for labour, not necessarily people. If you don’t have enough money, you can’t just move to another EU country and hope things work out.
You can as long as it "works out" (i.e. you find a job) within 3 months.
Isn't being able to move to a new town and start again also a kind of new thing though too? Cars, moving companies, open borders, globalism, English as a standard language, no serfdom, etc.
I mean, I think you could pick up and move but it was much harder, and how far you could reasonably move when you did move was limited pre-modern era. If you can't move that far, the likelihood of someone knowing you or word spreading is probably higher.
Although I remember seeing an article here on movement of serfs a while back, I think the conclusion was that they were more mobile than one might think.
In the book Fingerprints[0], they mention how, prior to fingerprints, much easier it was to just move to another town/county/state and just start over or even pretend to be somebody else. This was because there was no way to establish your identity with near 100% certainty.
This had pros and cons depending on who you were. For example, thieves loved it as you could drop you criminal record simply by moving somewhere that no one recognized you. On the other hand, there were documented cases of mistaken identity and people being prosecuted just because they looked like someone else. Then there is the case of William West which is better understood by looking at the pictures of two men names William West [1]
Contrast that to today where it doesn't matter which town in the US you live in, there is always a credit record that is tied to you.
0 - https://amzn.to/47XN9Id
1 - https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/will-william-west-case-fing...
> at least you can try and smooth things over with a bartender.
Hahah... You never offended a bartender for sure.
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What happens if in one town you lose your job, and get evicted from your apartment, or default on your mortgage? You're going to have trouble with housing in that next town.
Most of our social credit systems let you start over.
The big ones (credit score and criminal history) are strongly tied to you, but have recourse to challenge mistakes and remove strikes from your record. The sufficiency of those recourses is open for debate though.
However, all of the private company's social credit systems have a much looser coupling to your actual ID. Often you can just make a new account. If you first get a new credit card, phone, phone number, internet connection, and address, most companies would completely fail to correlate you to their previous profile of you.
Real world social credit is soft and squishy and local and fades or changes over time.
Digital social credit is (potentially) an automatically calculated number with strict and unyielding consequences that follows you around for your entire life.
A lot of digital ones are "local" too in that they are context specific. As long as it stays context specific, your Uber rating is closer to being liked by your local bar tender than it is to the Chinese social credit system. Even your local bartender has a little context leakage.
I agree there is a scarier potential there. And also some do, on occasion, escape their context (mostly credit score). They also have bigger contexts, but not so big that I would jump to the Chinese social credit comparison.
And a digital social credit system can be manipulated to drive behavioral changes en-masse. It centralizes power. Harder to do that with word-of-mouth.
True, reputation has always existed. But after a certain scale, quantity becomes a quality of its own. There’s a big difference between word-of-mouth at a single bar and a centralized, algorithmic reputation score that can follow you across dozens of services. If one bartender thinks you’re rude, you can go to another bar. If one nonprofit doesn’t like you, you can still volunteer elsewhere. But when a social media company or platform blacklists you, it can ripple through your professional, social, and even financial life, because their influence extends far beyond one community. That’s the leap from local memory to systemic gatekeeping.
I think that comment overestimated how much people really remember.
That bartender most likely has 3 to 5 worse assholes every shift and dozen usual assholes . He is not going to remember he doesn’t care.
Local non profit after 2 years most likely won’t have the same people and top guys won’t remember all one off volunteers.
Believing any of it having more significance would be attributed to “spotlight effect” in my opinion.
The difference is the relationship between the bartender, the non-profit or the barista all revolve around physical locations where cash transactions or real work occur. There's actual direct value to be measured in the interaction.
Further my interactions with the bartender aren't likely to be measured or even known about by the non-profit and vice versa. To the extent my "credit" is a factor it doesn't travel with me from location to location.
>the non-profit or the barista all revolve around physical locations where cash transactions or real work occur. There's actual direct value to be measured in the interaction.
I don't see how this is a relevant factor. If you're a karen at a restaurant who constantly sends your food back for the tiniest of issues, how is that any different than if the interaction happened online, such as if amazon gave you a bad customer credit score for your excessive returns?
>Further my interactions with the bartender aren't likely to be measured or even known about by the non-profit and vice versa. To the extent my "credit" is a factor it doesn't travel with me from location to location.
Word travels around, does it not? Moreover why is it relevant whether it's a number sitting on a database somewhere, compared to some vibes sitting in some guy's head?
> such as if amazon gave you a bad customer credit score for your excessive returns?
Is amazon going to tell me that up front? In the restaurant case the manager can explain the issue to the customer and ask them not to come in again. It becomes immediately resolvable whereas in your example I have no idea what just happened to me.
> Word travels around, does it not?
The difference between the analog word and the digital word is extreme.
> compared to some vibes sitting in some guy's head?
I live in a town of 2 million people. These vibes have zero impact. Add them to a database that can be tied to my credit card number? Now they have real impact. I don't think that's a reasonable or desirable outcome.
The problem with these systems isn't their mere existence it's their draconian implementations.
>Is amazon going to tell me that up front? In the restaurant case the manager can explain [...]
In either case they can explain, it's entirely orthogonal to the question of whether it's in-person or not. There's no technical reason why Amazon can't send you a email saying that you were banned for excessive returns, for instance. Moreover I can imagine plenty of reasons why a restaurant manager might not want to explain the precise reason, such as the threat of lawsuits, or not wanting to create an argument/scene. See also, why some HR/hiring managers are cagey about why you were turned down for a job.
>The difference between the analog word and the digital word is extreme.
The difference between a hyper-connected metropolises of today, and a random village in the 1800s is also extreme.
> I don't see how this is a relevant factor. If you're a karen at a restaurant who constantly sends your food back for the tiniest of issues, how is that any different than if the interaction happened online, such as if amazon gave you a bad customer credit score for your excessive returns?
The difference is that the restaurant has a human evaluate if your complaints are valid while Amazon only sees statistics and doesn't care why you might have a high number of returns. The restaurant can also only realistically ban a few worst offenders before that becomes unmanageable for them while Amazon has no such cost associated why banning you. Then there is also the scope of the impact. You likely have many more alternative restaurants you can go to but no one really competes with Amazon as a whole.
> Word travels around, does it not?
Only in extreme cases. You won't be banned from all Restaurants in town just because Bob got offended. With a centralized credit score once you get flagged then those checking it will usually not even talk to you.
That heavily depends on where you live.
In large, dense cities you’re pretty much anonymous; I could dance naked in a main street today and (provided no one’s recording) carry on with my life with zero repercussions.
Some people make a living out of that fact. Tourist traps do not exactly engage recurring customers, every purchase is a customer’s first.
Such as system does exist, but it is filled with issues. Halo effect and other biases impact memories, in ways that we would not tolerate being made explicit. We are more forgiving of some people than others, we tolerate some forms of stress as a possible excuse (not a complete removal, but to allow for much quicker redemption) than other forms of stress. Rules are selectively applied, and this all gets fed into confirmation biases where we overlook the bad done by people labeled as good and the good done by people labeled as bad (often with the labels themselves being unjustified in their application).
The larger the social network grows, the worse this system performs. Stereotypes develop because we don't have capacity to judge each individual, confirmation biases reinforce stereotypes until individuals cease to exist, as the stereotype prevents them from becoming close enough to ever overcome it.
So while this system has always existed (well at least as long as recorded history), it continuously worsens and is increasingly at odds with a globalized world.
Reputation has always been a kind of "social credit," the difference now is scale and opacity
Sure, but without a credit score, the only way people can be prejudiced against you is through your appearance or through gossip. A credit score carries with it a weight that approximates official statements - news coverage, legal judgements - that others are much less likely to take with a grain of salt, as they would a casual hearsay accusation.
That’s a subjective mess. How do you objectively weight the value of those experiences? It also won’t stop gossip, PR, and propaganda. Just look at the state of Rotten Tomatoes. Now imagine Fandango buying your social credit website and making Harvey Weinstein a 10/10 good person.
Using the author's loose criteria, one could say a criminal record is a social credit system.
These are the emergent fruits of living in a complex society, where one cannot realistically track reputation of everyone they encounter across all areas of life. We could move away from some of the formalized systems, if we decided to go back to shaming people for poor behaviors.
I think there's some difference between distributed reputation among many different groups for different purposes and a top-down, centralized reputation from the government that controls most of what you can do in life.
One is more distributed and not controlled by any single entity, the other puts all the power over your life into the hands of a few oligarchs.
yep.
and people don't just remember. sometimes they set you up to test you and or to give you a chance.
some other times they set someone else up to test you and or to give you a chance.
and sometimes people poison others to increase their and or your social credit.
as Austin Powers (or was it Ali G?) said quite eloquently: "behave".
I wish this type of social credit existed online.
This is what karma scores on site like this or Reddit try to replicate.
Not really, because such sites really only use upvotes/downvotes as a ranking mechanism. There's theoretically a lifetime upvote/downvote counter (ie. your karma), but other than a number that shows up on your profile, it doesn't have any real impact. You don't really develop a "reputation", for instance your comments get more or less visibility based on your previous commenting history.
There were a couple occasions on Reddit where someone replied to me in seemingly bad faith. I looked and they had negative karma. As a result, I didn’t engage.
But I will agree that it’s far from perfect. It’s also similar to the bar example. A reputation is built one person at a time. It takes a while, with repeated bad behavior, to build a bad reputation with the entire staff or regulars.
> other than a number that shows up on your profile, it doesn't have any real impact.
Certain subreddits you can't comment on until you have a minimum # of karma, some other subs auto-ban you if you contribute or subscribe to other subs.
Yes. And fails. Trolls don't care about karma and can run about being a dick until they're finally banned (possibly years later) rinse and repeat with a new account.