China’s unified social credit system remains fragmented and untested at scale.

Evidence

The Chinese government’s vision may be impossibly ambitious: the big dream of total awareness and perfect certainty mediated by algorithms that filter a perpetual flood of data flows from private and public supplies, including online and offline experience culled from every domain and able to ricochet back into the individual lives of 1.5 billion people, automating social behavior as the algorithms reward, punish, and shape action right down to the latest bus ticket. So far the project is fragmented across many pilots, not only in the tech companies but also in cities and regions, so there is no real test of the scale that the government envisions. There are plenty of experts who believe that a single system of that scale and complexity will be difficult if not impossible to achieve. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1248

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth watching whether the fragmented pilots converge; the feasibility doubt is itself a live empirical question.
• XREF: Contrasts with Zuboff’s claim that surveillance capitalism is distinct from state authoritarianism; the mixing of private and state data here blurs that line. — connects to: China’s social credit blacklist coerced repayment through restricted mobility and purchases. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1246