Thursday, October 15, 2015

China Steps Into The Abyss

This is scary. Very scary. 

China’s Communist government is rolling out a plan to assign everyone in the country “citizenship scores.” According to the ACLU, “China appears to be leveraging all the tools of the information age—electronic purchasing data, social networks, algorithmic sorting—to construct the ultimate tool of social control. It is, as one commentator put it, ‘authoritarianism, gamified.’ ” In the system, everyone is measured by a score ranging from 350 to 950, and that score is linked to a national ID card. In addition to measuring your financial credit, it will also measure political compliance. Expressing the wrong opinion—or merely having friends who express the wrong opinion—will hurt your score. The higher your score, the more privileges the government will grant you.

Everything we email, post on FB, instagram, twitter, everything we post on this forum and others...the state knows us. Big Brother is watching. Could this happen here? Political scores for what? The privilege of buying a house or car? Of having vacation time? Having a child? Or even...buying food? And water?

The whole thing sends a shiver down my spine.

3 comments:

  1. Of course it can happen here. The gov't of the US has spent the last few decades reducing the rights and freedoms of American citizens, and undermining the power of individual states, in order to concentrate more and more power in the hands of Washington.

    Now there are reports that medical researchers have found a way to change attitudes through magnetic waves directed a portions of the brain.

    "Don't like socialism? - We'll fix that!"
    "Think sharia law is not compatible with the Constitution? - Now you don't think so!"
    Believe homosexual marriage is a perversion? Nuh-uh!"

    Of course it can happen here

    ReplyDelete
  2. One of these days I'll be outed as one of those hated tea-baggers, and my days of doing business in Portland will be over.

    "But he seems so smart, so nice! How could he be, you know, one of them?"

    How indeed.

    We've been working on plan B; need to keep that up and get some stuff done before it snows in the hills.

    ReplyDelete