Authoritarian states treat intensified connectivity as an advantage over freedom.

Evidence

For a state like China, a more intensely connected system is likely to be an advantage, making freedom the problem and internal data colonialism potentially the solution. This helps us make sense of China’s revolutionary new “social credit system”—rather shocking to the West. The program aims to launch in 2020 and is expected to pool all information about the creditworthiness and social worth of Chinese citizens into a single interlinked system for monitoring and evaluation. China’s huge platform growth (especially of Alibaba and Tencent) in the past five years provides the core infrastructure for this project, but those platforms are building their own supposedly separate systems of credit rating (Sesame Credit and Tencent Credit). — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 124

Categorization

• XREF: The tension between platform-built private credit and state-run pooled credit echoes a public-private ordering question; connects to reader’s platform-governance interests. — connects to: Authoritarian states learned to use the internet for their own ends — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 297
• ADDENDUM: The claim that connectivity can serve state control rather than emancipation parallels themes from the trees-as-infrastructure piece about infrastructure carrying political projects.

Broader Connections

• Authoritarian states learned to use the internet for their own ends #expands (0.92) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 297