Your devices are rating you. Behave accordingly.
Chances are you’ve seen “Nosedive,” the infamous Black Mirror episode
depicting a world in which ordinary people rate each other on the basis
of their social interactions. On the popular show—which takes aim at the
pervasive nature of technology in our lives and paints a dystopian
picture of the future—these ratings feed back into a comprehensive
algorithm, computing individual social credit scores that determine
socioeconomic status.
In this fictitious world, having a low score prevents you from going
about your everyday life. You can’t rent a car, book a hotel, or pay for
flights.
But this story hits alarmingly close to home for those subject to
China’s evolving social credit system. Built to replicate the Western
model of financial credit scores, the Chinese system works in a similar
fashion except it rewards good behavior (and punishes bad) beyond just
timely debt repayments.
It’s easy to admonish a state for wielding outsize influence over the
behavior of its citizens. But that would be missing a key point. The
broader force making this unique social credit model possible in the
first place is the proliferation of facial scanners, digital devices,
machine-learning algorithms, and big data models. They are here to stay
and becoming more intelligent over time.
Surveillance is a dark and mysterious force
Technology has the ability to fundamentally transform our social
contracts and could, perhaps, lead to an elimination of the nation state
in its current form.
If you’re reading this, chances are you’re not a fan of surveillance.
You value your privacy and you’d rather the government not know what
you’re doing 24/7. But that’s because we have the choice (some of us, at
least) to live in a world where our rights, to some degree, are
respected.
How would our behavior change if we lived inside a panopticon? Born from
the writings of British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, a panopticon refers
to a building featuring an observation tower in the centre of a circle
of prison cells.
A panopticon is supposed to drive home the perception that your actions
could be monitored at any time. Every prisoner looking out of their
prison cell is able to see the central observation tower. There’s no way
of reliably knowing whether a guard is looking at them at the same
instant, but there’s no way of avoiding it either.
Bentham believed in the notion that power should be visible yet dark and
mysterious. He argued that an individual’s relationship with society
depended on it: Through surveillance, we’d be forced to conform to
societal norms in terms of ethics, morals, and attitudes towards work.
Social credits are already here
Bentham died in the early 19th century, but his work and ideas live on.
And while the panopticon as a behavior enforcement model didn’t really
get off the ground, we can certainly argue that it’s only the tools that
are different.
Let’s take Uber ratings, for example. The company confirmed earlier this
year that it would start banning riders with low ratings. Drivers with
low ratings face similar repercussions: They can’t drive for Uber Black
in some states, and they could receive fewer ride requests.
The message here is simple yet direct: Be polite, friendly, or get cut
off. If that’s not behavior control, I don’t know what is.
And this is far from the only manifestation of technology altering our
lifestyle choices. Insurance companies want your Fitbit data so they can
check how healthy you are and, potentially, adjust your premiums. Smart
toothbrushes are beaming data back to your dental provider, so if you
don’t brush your teeth often enough, get ready to cough up more cash.
We’ve come to rely on these models, too. Would you ever buy a product
from an eBay seller with a low rating? How often do you read reviews
online before trying a new service?
Of course, each of these examples reflects only a small area of
monitoring, not the broad stroke taken by a government-run social credit
system. But this seeming restraint exists, for the most part, because
technology companies have been operating within their limited scopes. If
all these data points were welded together, it could fuel a similarly
wide-sweeping monitoring system.
It’s a moral quandary. Our addiction to technology and the data points
we’re willing to give up make algorithms smarter and tech companies
richer. While it’s easy to complain about a lack of privacy, the fact is
that technology will only serve us better when it knows more about us.
It’s a virtuous or vicious cycle, depending on how you look at it.
There’s a term for it too: surveillance capitalism, coined by Shoshana Zuboff of Harvard Business School.
Is privacy an inevitable casualty of technology?
As social credit systems proliferate throughout society, what’s the use
of the state? Centralized forces to uphold liberty and guarantee
fundamental rights are essential for societies—or are they? If we know
that the devices in our pockets are capable of recording everyday
actions, wouldn’t that automatically lead to behavioral changes?
Is anarchism the next major social movement? It’s certainly possible,
according to professor Andreas Wittel, who argues that “digital
technologies might open up new possibilities for large-scale forms of
anarchist organization.”
Many of us are aware of the privacy risks associated with technology.
Yet we ask Alexa to buy us stuff and Siri to check driving routes. We
play our music on Spotify, order our food through Uber Eats, and split
our checks via Venmo.
Technology is here to stay and privacy concerns won’t wipe it off the
map. The question we should grapple with is whether it will continue to
serve us, or will it eventually be the other way around?
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