Adventures of a rambling mind: The other day I chanced to look at a piece of tile that Elaine had placed on the window sill of the guest room bath.
That got me to thinking about a few other such tiles we’ve collected over the years. A few from cruises we’ve been on and such.
Ultimately, a question arose: What are these tiles and why do we keep them? Not like we need knickknacks to move around, dust and care for. After a bit of reflection it dawned on me that people keep “awards” because at our core, humans are problem-solving, stimulus-response, creatures.
It started for me as a Cub Scout. Mrs. Brooks and I think it was Troop 793. The Cub Scout book was filled with awards that we worked on. I remember getting my fire award and several others. Along with each chapter of troop activities there would be awards handed out that, in turn, were sewn on our uniforms… I longed to someday own the Popsicle sticks and glue franchise.
School did somewhat the same thing. Different color stars based on levels of accomplishment and participation. Stars went away and were replaced by letter-grades…so goes brain-washing.
Eventually, as I grew up, the awards of childhood disappeared and the ONLY award that began to matter was the one reported in my Bank Statements; then Investment Performance Reports…you know the drill.
As I was staring at this tile, a familiar old problem reappeared: How do we accredit humans? Especially in the age of social media where everyone is screaming “Me-me-me!!!” at the top of their lungs.
With so many people clamoring for attention, how do we sort the worthwhile views from the crap?
I mean, if this was Boy Scouts, I could look at a uniform and see who had how many patches and that would be a clue. In the military, if you can count stripes and estimate age, you can guess who the producers (or the brown-nosers!) are. But, as you move into adulthood, it becomes increasingly hard to figure out who’s “full of it” and “who’s got creds” on something. We live in “Fake Land.”
Oh, sure, people who write books are considered to have some subject matter expert views (SME’s they’re called), but in general?
People I know are actually frustrated by the this problem. One told me: “I met this personal recently who sounded really cool and who might be a good friend and someone to know…but then I looked at their Facebook page…yikes!)
Hence the “accreditation” problem.
When I got to thinking about it – different name, different label of course, but isn’t this really what China is starting to work on with their social credits program? And, to what extent is Google’s “Dragon-something” project to do search in China linked into social-scoring and social engineering?
Darkly: Will information access be based on social credits? The rise of the Computational Caste System is coming into view.
Information Overload at Work
We can look at problems of modern marketers and sense how the “accreditation” and “credibility” problems are emerging to strangle us as a culture.
If you’re not a professional marketer, you may not be aware of HubSpot, but they offer a number of key insights into how this rising tide of information is resulting is massive cultural tune-out to available information. From their website consider these data:
- More than 200 million phone numbers are on the Do Not Call Registry.
- 44% of direct mail is never opened.
- And 86% of people skip TV commercials.
When I was running marketing in the early 2000’s in Los Angeles, we could see the trend coming. The price of direct-response advertising leads were on the rise.
Moreover, the direct-response advertising model was showing its age. People are looking for more. In short, they’re looking for accreditation of some kind. Buyer reassurance in advance. This spills into personal relations, too.
Which is why we see a general rise in the number of business with Better Business Bureau mentions and things like JD Powers rankings becoming more important in consumer choice-making. Ditto right down to the book-writer level: People make decisions on which books to buy on Amazon as much based on how many stars a book has and what its ranking is, as the title/cover art and content summary.
What’s going on?
Social Accreditation
The solutions in business (more complex, mixed-model sales/customer response systems) work. And the matter of “accreditation” has quietly been slipped into government regulations. Outfits like E-Verify check to see that your I-9 work form matches Social Security and runs it with Homeland Security.
We’ve literally seen a “papers please” regimen installed (ostensibly for the public good) thanks to be biggest make-work project in history: 9/11.
That doesn’t solve the people side when people go home after work. China’s trying to work that side via their social credits program. The problem is a government approach to “accreditation of humans” could be a first-step toward sorting out “Who’s a Useless Eater.” After that, what? Downgraded food, castration of males? Eugenics?
Consider this Wikipedia extract of what China has planned for their Social Credit System *(SCS):
Implications for citizens
From the Chinese government Plan for Implementation, the SCS is due to be fully implemented by 2020. Once implemented the system will manage the rewards, or punishments, of citizens on the basis of their economic and personal behavior. Some types of punishments include: flight ban, exclusion from private schools, slow internet connection, exclusion from high prestige work, exclusion from hotels, and registration on a public blacklist.
Travel ban
By May 2018, several million flight and high-speed train trips had been denied. The people denied were on a blacklist. The exact reasons for people being placed on the list are unknown. Business Insider speculated that the reason could be the debtors list created by the SPC. (Supreme People’s Court.)
Exclusion from private schools
If the parents of a child score below a certain threshold, their children would be excluded from top schools in the region.
Social status
One’s personal score could be used as a social symbol on social and couples platforms. For example, China’s biggest matchmaking service, Baihe, already allows its users to publish their own score.
Other
The rewards of having a high score include easier access to loans and jobs and priority during bureaucratic paperwork. Likewise, the immediate negative consequences for a low score, or being associated to someone with a low score, ranges from lower internet speeds to being denied access to certain jobs, loans and visas.
The Computational Caste System
This is really the danger This is how American-style freedom and the ability to rise or fall on personal merit can be stolen with the power to “make or break lives” wrested from individuals and seized by governments.
It’s underway in China right now. And we can almost safely predict that the next ‘fad” (as a kind of bogus award) on social media will be some cobbled-up social credit-like scam. It’s another reason we aren’t big participants in Social Media – I mean in addition to they can’t seem to keep passwords secret…
There are some groups like Mensa that have some creds. The Special Forces Association, too. Retired Fire Fighters and Retired Police. But, when comes to social scoring, there’s a huge – non-government – opportunity for someone to come up with a public voluntary system before the US Government seizes the high ground and goes China-like on US population.
I’ve got some ideas on a business plan for such a program, But, it will take some capital and some energy which would fit with a social platform. The risk? That each of the social platforms will come up with their own ranking systems and these in turn will be mostly those causes and beliefs that drive traffic, not those that promote personal excellence and the achieving of something other than han ding out “social activism badges.”
Meantime, remember that the first big press for social engineering (via credits) was a bad idea of the mid 1920’s – and it’s yet-another predictable replay of bad ideas from the past in the lead-in to the next Depression which will be along soon-enough.
Write when you get rich,
george@ure.net
I’m thinking that you are ignoring that a system that you describe is already in place in the U.S.A. – namely one’s credit score. Try doing some things if you have a bad ‘number’ – you are ranked, both figuratively and actually.
Was it Dire Straits that used to sing a song with the words, “Money, money, money”? Ha!
When you have sufficient assets, you can essentially ignore the credit system. You can afford extra premiums for insurance, and can put down a sufficient deposit that people will rent an apt or car to you. If they won’t, then just buy it.
The Dire Straits phrase was “money for nothin’ and your chicks for free”. That particular song doesn’t get much airplay anymore since they use the word “fagg*t” at least twice. Not PC.
Thanks – I knew it wasn’t quite right! But I remembered the feeling of the song . . .
MDA. I was a small business owner most of my life. Being a small business owner at one time or another you are going to run into the IRS a & a poor credit score when the economy goes into a recession, it’s inevitable. If you study how to play their game & don’t cave in under the pressure, you can slide right by it like it never existed.
It’s a great financial system if you know how to work it, ask President Trump, he went bankrupt 4 times & became President. And now he is playing the democrats like a fiddle, but in a good way that will benefit America.
Could be that the Chinese system is actually fairer than Experia/TransUnion/Equifax. Never missed a payment in my life and am financially secure but I rarely crack 800.
There is a tune with the chorus “money, money, money”….it’s by a black goup who’s name escapes me.
I’m fully retired and off the job market, however one of my grandchildren, age about 17, tells me that prospective summer-job employers all ask for their social media references. I presume they read them “additional useful information” on who to hire and trust.
A Social Credit System, as such, is probably already here.
There are several dark jokes and witty comments I could make at this point, but I’ll leave that to you.
I’m old: I’m outta here before too very long — but I pity and weep for the children who will never enjoy the degree on personal freedom and mobility and self-determination as I did.
Alas, Babylon: The Time approaches.
Additonal:
See an old “Twilight Zone” episode called, “The Obsolete Man.” Probably it’s on YooToob…
YouTube and Google are in the Forbidden Zone.
…This “is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.”
https://archive.org/details/TheObsoleteManS2TwilightZoneFullEpisode
I, too, am glad to be well past third and heading for home. IMO the USA has diminished so much in my lifetime that I doubt Millenials would believe me if I told them what life was like in the 50’s. In one of my favorite movies, ‘The Secret of NIMH’, the crow explains that his kind is drawn to and must have “sparklies” which is why they take any ‘bling’ they find. The Millenials IMO have been deliberately designed to crave the “sparklies” produced and promoted by our culture. Such a shame. So much opportunity and possibility is being squandered or ignored just to be “acceptable”.
The reality is that most men evaluate women by their looks alone, and they evaluate other men by the looks of their wives or girlfriends. No S.O. – no status.
Guess what? Women evaluate people in exactly the same way. A man is evaluated by the looks of the girl he’s with and a female is evaluated primarily by her looks.
This is really an important topic. Rather than becoming an outlaw by violating real laws, the entire conventional society will shun someone with a published bad “social credit score”. This is imminent in China and is nosing under the tent in America. I have no “social media” site ID’s, and really have nothing I’d want to post there if I did. Is it really possible that you don’t get a good job here in the USA without these things?
In the “better old days”, your reputation was generally local and if you screwed up badly enough, you could move. Now that no longer applies, unless you move to Africa, and tech has a way of ramifying quickly even there. Obviously, the idea is to constrain people to the primary culture for a lifetime. I don’t see an easy way out of this short of a Carrington event.
NM Mike,
It is true if you don’t have a LinkedIn profile or Indeed or Monster page, you will not get hired at most if not all white collar jobs. For those sites, there is also a cost associated with them for job seekers.
On the overall subject of Social media…It can be productive if used correctly, but like anything else tech or not (loan sharks, con men that prey on the elderly, slimey used car dealers, insurance fraudsters, ambulance chasing lawyers, etc) , there are the bad eggs that spoil it for everyone.
We have our own scores! Credit rating, bank accounts, big houses, shiny cars! It’s just a different “scoring” system. Trophy wife! Score! lol
O N the last, I must be filthy rich! Thanks Elaine!
Social mediocre is already doing it.
My farcebook account is locked-down as tightly as their settings will allow me to lock it. My “friends list” numbers ~50. It includes family and a few long-time friends, and a couple nonvirtual friends of my kids. Its function is to enable me to contact them, or they me, when I’m in a place where cellphones don’t work… PERIOD!
That said, I dropped in earlier. My farcebook displays exactly three pages: two personal “shares” from “friends,” an ad for Facebook, one for AT&T, and one for a restaurant chain, and it displays the “friend requests” and “people you may know” widgets TWICE. At the bottom of the third page is a farcebook note which says: “Want to see more posts? Get more friends.”
I assume this means their software hasn’t enough information on me yet, to make the minimum number of interpersonal and interrelational connections required by their fauxAI, to properly populate the account database they’ve associated with my account. I’m strangely okay with that.
However, I also assume that in the 21st Century World, I am, and will forever be a member of the lowest caste. Never a fan of specious or frivolous talk, idle chat, gossip, or braggadocio, I’m strangely okay with this, too. I’d much rather DO SOMETHING then spend endless hours thinking up ways to impress people I don’t care about, with stuff that doesn’t matter…
“I’d much rather DO SOMETHING than spend endless hours thinking up ways to impress people I don’t care about, with stuff that doesn’t matter.”
Very well put! I’ve recently defriended some relatives and likewise restrict “friends” to close relatives and long-time friends. Strange how people who know enough to avoid certain subjects (e.g. Reps/Dems, atheism/religion) when talking face to face feel free to spout their beliefs (i.e. in my view, ignorance) on Facebook. I value Facebook for family pictures and travel pix from friends and family — and nothing more.