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Less Than A Week After Black Mirror Series 3 Drops – Another Episode Comes True

No, not the one with the pig. No, not the one with the social media afterlife. Nor the one where we become human batteries, charging out tech. Or the device that records all your audio around you forever, for instant playback. Not even the one about the industrialisation of a populist entertainer as a replicable model for political success worldwide.

No, this is from the new series of Black Mirror for Netflix. The first episode, Nosedive, set in a world where everyone rates everyone and everything out of five. Where your social – and legal – status is determined by your overall algorithm score – out of five. And yes, we already do this for Uber, for Amazon, for AirBNB… Nosedive just extends that to a point where society changes., breaks and remodels itself as a result.

And, it turns out, that's just what the Chinese are planning. The Independent reports,

The ambition is to collect every scrap of information available online about China's companies and citizens in a single place – and then assign each of them a score based on their political, commercial, social and legal "credit."

The government hasn't announced exactly how the plan will work – for example, how scores will be compiled and different qualities weighted against one another. But the idea is that good behaviour will be rewarded and bad behaviour punished, with the Communist Party acting as the ultimate judge. This is what China calls "Internet Plus," but critics call a 21st-century police state.

Harnessing the power of big data and the ubiquity of smartphones, ecommerce and social media in a society where 700 million people live large parts of their lives online, the plan will also vacuum up court, police, banking, tax and employment records. Doctors, teachers, local governments and businesses could additionally be scored by citizens for their professionalism and probity.

The only difference in Black Mirror is that, rather than a state-down initiative, in Nosedive we do this to ourselves….

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