Darrell Castle talks about the social credit system now being tested in China and soon to be mandatory there.  Could this system be headed to America in  the near future?

Transcipt / Notes

WE WILL CREATE AND CONTROL OUR OWN DYSTOPIA

Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. Today is Friday, April 6, 2018, and on today’s Report I will be talking about what is and what is to come in the world of social credit.  You are all familiar with credit scores and how important they are to everyday living.  Whether or not you can buy a house, a car or get a credit card all depend on your credit score and so does the interest rate you must pay for the money you are allowed to borrow.

In my law practice I am immersed in credit scores because they are very important and very valuable to my clients.  I have an online program that I offer my clients to show them how to rebuild or raise their credit score so the money they borrow will be cheaper.  In a sense, we could say that our credit score, which is compiled by private organizations from private transactions, determines how trustworthy we are in the world of credit which as we all know, is money today.  When you reach and maintain a credit score high enough you are trusted with credit, with other people’s money, which then has to be paid back, but for a while at least, you can live a life that most of us accept as normal today.

Why limit this trustworthiness to the credit realm?  Perhaps we could devise a similar system which we could call social credit.  The all powerful, all seeing government, if involved at all, would only have to be involved as a partner, rule-setter, or overseer of private organizations.  Our desire for a higher and higher score would make the system self-policing.

That system of social credit I just described is here now in China, and coming our way very quickly.  In what it calls an attempt to promote “trustworthiness” in its economy and society, China is experimenting with a social credit system that mixes familiar Western-style credit scores with more intrusive measures.  It includes everything that can be assembled about a person, including such things as rankings by online payment providers to scores compiled by neighborhood associations or companies you work for or do business with.  High scores are rewarded with perks, such as discounts on heating bills and lower interest loans while lower scores are restricted from buying train or plane tickets.  In other words, if you have a low score your movements are restricted.

By 2020, the Chinese government plans to make the social credit system national and mandatory. According to the plan’s founding document, the system would “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”  It’s hard for me to imagine anything more Orwellian, more frightening than the type of social control I just mentioned.  Can’t you imagine people scrambling to get a few extra points added to their score so they will be allowed to roam and not be one of the “discredited.”

Get a traffic ticket and lose points, earn a city award, such as their "you’ve been a good boy or girl award" and get points, commit an offense against the state and get hurt badly, from triple A scores to D scores everyone scrambles to please their owners.  Yes, China is rating its citizens on their daily activities.  Think of when this comes to America and everything you do every day is rated and evaluated; what you buy and where you buy it, where you are at any given time; who your friends are and what scores they have; what you watch, and what on line games you play; what bills you pay, and what taxes you pay or don’t pay.

Does that sound impossible for America?  Well, it’s already happening in the sense that all the above information is already compiled by Google, Face book, Instagram, and others.  Now just imagine all that information,