I came across this article the other day and couldn’t stop thinking about it. So obviously I had to chime in with my two cents.

Your Phone Already Has Social Credit. We Just Lie About It:

Your credit score is social credit. Your LinkedIn endorsements are social credit. Your Uber passenger rating, Instagram engagement metrics, Amazon reviews, and Airbnb host status are all social credit systems that track you, score you, and reward you based on your behavior.

The ‘merican in me thinks this reads a bit like some soft Chinese propaganda, but the author makes some good points. And I’ll wholeheartedly admit a lot of what Americans hear about China is through the lens of capitalist sensationalism and our own propaganda.

The author compares China’s social credit score to things like your Uber and Airbnb rating — which are quite literally a social credit score, but not like that.

Every time an algorithm evaluates your trustworthiness, reliability, or social value, whether for a loan, a job, a date, or a ride, you’re participating in a social credit system. The scoring happens constantly, invisibly, and across dozens of platforms that weave into your daily life.

True, but they’re centralized to those services; you’re not going to have a bad reputation on Lyft if you’re a bad passenger on Uber. If you’re a bad Uber Eats driver, you’re not going to get penalized on the DoorDash app.

The only difference between your phone and China’s social credit system is that China tells you what they’re doing. We pretend our algorithmic reputation scores are just “user experience features.” At least Beijing admits they’re gamifying human behavior.

Do they really admit they’re gamifying human behavior? And wait… do apps not tell you how they’re scoring you?

With our actual credit score system, they do show you what your score is and how it ended up there. Same with food delivery and ride share apps – they don’t hide it from you if you get a bad review. If they fire you because your orders keep being delivered missing items, I’m pretty sure they’d let you know that’s why.

I agree our credit score system sucks; at the beginning of the year I paid off a big chunk of credit card debt, and my score shot up. Then I opened a new account and bought a riding mower, and it shot right the fuck back down, because I utilized over 50% of the credit I was allowed for the purchase.

But then after a few months it leveled out.

I’d be happy if I could get financed for a $750,000 house without a credit check, but there’s no way I’m realistically paying that back in this lifetime on this salary. The credit scoring system makes sense in that respect.

It’s one thing for services to judge you based on your behavior while using that service; if you get into an Uber, start eating sauerkraut out of a Tupperware container and spill half of it between the seats, you deserve to get knocked down a couple pegs in the Uber community, if not outright banned. Your next driver should at least be some asshole who chain smokes Newport reds with the windows up.

But it shouldn’t, and doesn’t, affect your chances of getting hired for a job, or getting approved for a Discover card.

What actually gets tracked? Primarily court judgment defaults: people who refuse to pay fines or loans despite having the ability. The Supreme People’s Court’s blacklist is composed of citizens and companies that refuse to comply with court orders, typically to pay fines or repay loans. Some experimental programs in specific cities track broader social behavior, but these remain isolated experiments.

Most of that just sounds like the legal system. It’s that last part I don’t love, and I feel like they’re downplaying that there is indeed some kind of social score in some places.

So when China’s explicit social credit approach inevitably influences Western platforms, when your apps start showing you the behavioral scores they’ve always been calculating, when the rules become visible instead of hidden, don’t panic.

The scary part is that America is so fucked up right now I don’t know how we don’t already have some kind of government enforced social credit system. I cannot argue with the author’s assertion that it’s probably coming.

There are plenty of unsettling parallels between China’s social credit systems and the apps and services we use every day. I can’t deny that. But I think it paints a more vivid picture of just how much an authoritarian communist state has in common with an authoritarian capitalist state.