Beijing’s social engineering mirrors Silicon Valley’s technological solutionism

Evidence

Oxford University China scholar Rogier Creemers, who translated some of the first documents on the social credit system, observes that “the trend towards social engineering and ‘nudging’ individuals towards ‘better’ behavior is also part of the Silicon Valley approach that holds that human problems can be solved once and for all through the disruptive power of technology.… In that sense, perhaps the most shocking element of the story is not the Chinese government’s agenda, but how similar it is to the path technology is taking elsewhere.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1253

Categorization

• XREF: Reinforces the book’s framing that surveillance capitalism is a logic shared across regimes, contrasting with assumed East-West opposition. — connects to: Enlightenment knowledge’s sovereignty enabled state-citizen engineering projects — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 36; Chinese social credit systems apply the identical logic as Western surveillance capitalism — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1251
• SHARE: Send to a friend writing or thinking about tech ethics — Creemers’s quote neatly collapses the usual China-vs- West moral panic framing.

Broader Connections

• Enlightenment knowledge’s sovereignty enabled state-citizen engineering projects #expands (0.75) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 36
• Chinese social credit systems apply the identical logic as Western surveillance capitalism #exemplifies (0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1251