What if a government was able to monitor everything you did online then rated you on what it deemed desirable and undesirable behavior?
What if that rating was used to reward or punish you as an individual?
What if you were also rated by who you associated with? Spend too much time with someone with a low rating and your rating goes down too.
Introducing China’s new means of population manipulation, Sesame Credit.
Officially, it’s a credit assessment tool that is going to allow lenders more means to determine the creditworthiness of more people, thus making more loans and credit payment arrangements available to more Chinese citizens.
Or it could be a tool for social control that will make simple jackbooted thugs a thing of the past.
“China and the U.S.A. to take manipulation of the masses to a whole new level”
Then there would be a massive increase in “bot” activity on the net.
Where a scripted, automatic cruising of the net to all the right places gets you a high score.
Then we will achieve universal awesomeness! We’ll all be the same and approved of by our dear leaders.
This will drive many actively online people to bury the jack-booted geeks with a lot of useless noise. It is a simple matter to set up a browser extension that make it look like you are clicking on a very large number of links that you actually do not ever see. Similar add-ons already exist, by the way. I know very little about AdNauseam and so I am neither pro nor con on this one, but it illustrates the principle.
Yes, indeed! I was writing the related post below when your good observation appeared.
Bet our pols in DC suffer widespread priapism in envy.
My daughter has spent time in China. She says most everyone uses VPN for just this reason. This has been going on for decades it just doesn’t get much press here. Ain’t Communism wonderful?
You mean like the IRS?
“Missa Gates and Zuckabug been velly good to us!”
We know the human spirit will persevere when faced with obstacles. Not hard to extrapolate from there.
The soul yearns for freedom whether the brain knows it or not.
…oh man, ….I am soooooooo busted!!!!!
Dear TheMule,
Your online score for 2015 is -6,009,833… Please report to the nearest gulag for “reeducation”. No need to pack a bag.
Sincerely,
Mother Country