Nick Merrill! This guy is awesome! I met him a few times back around 2014 when I sold him a bunch of old Dell server racks, presumably for use by his organization Calyx. This was a few years after his case against the FBI ended and he was able to talk freely about it. I’d been following the case previously so it was like meeting a personal hero, even though we were just manually humping Dell pizza boxes into his van. Legit guy, really cares.

Right in the first half, extremely wrong in the second half (But you should be forgiven, we all get heavily propagandized about this stuff). What we know of the Chinese “social credit” score in the west is largely a tall tale / myth. Here, from the top of the English wikipedia article about the Chinese system:

There has been a widespread misconception that China operates a nationwide and unitary social credit “score” based on individuals’ behavior, leading to punishments if the score is too low. Media reports in the West have sometimes exaggerated or inaccurately described this concept.[4][5][6] In 2019, the central government voiced dissatisfaction with pilot cities experimenting with social credit scores. It issued guidelines clarifying that citizens could not be punished for having low scores and that punishments should only be limited to legally defined crimes and civil infractions. As a result, pilot cities either discontinued their point-based systems or restricted them to voluntary participation with no major consequences for having low scores.[4][7] According to a February 2022 report by the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), a social credit “score” is a myth as there is “no score that dictates citizen’s place in society”.[4]

It’s still a credit score system, so it’s still one of those dumb monolithic systems a large authoritarian country implements when it can’t be bothered to keep track of it’s citizens on a qualitative level - Like FICO in the US - But it doesn’t leak outside of that context in the way we westerners are told. In fact, our myths about that probably came out of the incidents in 2019 when the central government tamped down on local abuses of the system.

The Chinese social credit system is largely a myth. It was a thing that got instituted city by city and was originally intended to be something like the Better Business Bureau or the FICO credit score in the US, but after a few cities used it to justify punishing individuals instead of championing good business it got rolled back in most places, with a new edict from the central government that such systems must never be used for punishment or restriction. Most Chinese have never had a “social credit score” and it was never a nationally-managed program.

I’m in the market for a house, so I got my first credit card at the pleading of my broker and have just been putting my essentials on it to push my score over 800. It’s fucking stupid, I’m 40 and financially comfortable with a long history of fiscal responsibility, but I’ll play the stupid credit line game for a year or two to appease the algorithm and then shred the thing once I buy.

I have a feeling that there are a lot of ex-Occupy types like me coming up on that average homebuyers age, having eschewed the banking system for the past 20 years and now being forced to begrudgingly “play ball” like this just to get qualified to pay the money that they already have.