Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.

Civic Standing: The Reputation You Can’t Buy

Here’s a riddle: How do you build a reputation system that isn’t dystopian garbage?

China’s “social credit system” became the Western media’s favorite boogeyman—a vision of algorithmic tyranny where jaywalking tanks your score and you’re banned from buying train tickets. Great story. Mostly fiction. The actual Chinese system turns out to be a fragmented patchwork of blacklists focused mainly on corporate compliance and court-order defaulters. The nightmare scenario of constant surveillance punishing everyday habits? Largely doesn’t exist. In Rongcheng, China’s “ground zero” of citizen-scoring experiments, journalists found in 2024 that nobody cares anymore—participation became voluntary, and locals treat the whole thing as a joke.

But here’s the thing: the idea behind reputation tracking isn’t inherently evil. We already live surrounded by reputation systems. Your credit score. Your Uber rating. Your professional references. Your LinkedIn endorsements. Your follower count. Your academic citations. All of these are attempts to answer the fundamental question that makes cooperation possible: Can I trust this person?

The problem isn’t reputation systems. The problem is who controls them, what they measure, and whether you can see the math.

The Unscarcity Solution: Transparent Karma

In the Unscarcity framework, Civic Standing is your publicly visible portfolio of contributions and reliability. Think of it as “karma made mathematically rigorous” or “a social credit score that actually measures something worth measuring.”

Here’s what makes it different from both China’s mess and Silicon Valley’s algorithmic black boxes:

You can read the code. Every algorithm that calculates Civic Standing runs on open-source software published on distributed public ledgers. No hidden weights. No secret sauce. If you want to know why Maria’s standing is higher than Marcus’s, you can literally trace every contribution that went into it. Try asking Uber’s rating algorithm why that one passenger gave you three stars—you’ll get nothing but shrugs.

It measures contribution, not obedience. The Chinese system (such as it actually exists) focuses on things like paying court fines and honoring contracts—basically “did you follow the rules?” Civic Standing asks a different question: “Did you contribute?” Cleaning beaches, writing poetry, optimizing reactor code, caring for your elderly neighbor, mediating disputes between communities. The infrastructure of trust tracks what you built, not just what you didn’t break.

Privacy survives transparency. Here’s the cryptographic magic trick: zero-knowledge proofs let you prove you earned Impact for “Community Service” without revealing exactly where you live or which specific family you helped. You get credit without sacrificing privacy. The math vouches for you without showing anyone your homework. It’s like proving you passed a background check without revealing your address—mathematically possible, already deployed in various blockchain systems, and coming to reputation near you.

What Civic Standing Actually Gets You

Let’s be precise about the stakes, because dystopia lurks in the details.

Civic Standing does NOT affect:

• Your access to the Foundation (housing, food, healthcare, energy)
• Your basic rights as a Resident
• Whether you get to exist in peace and dignity
• Whether robots will serve you breakfast

The Foundation—the 90% of abundant goods and services—flows unconditionally to anyone who meets the Spark Threshold (basically: “are you conscious?”). You can have zero Civic Standing and still live a comfortable life. A hermit in a forest cabin who never participates in civic life keeps their shelter, their energy allocation, their healthcare. No exceptions.

Civic Standing DOES affect:

• Voting rights and proposal power in Commons governance
• Eligibility to hold office or positions of public trust
• Access to dangerous technologies (you can’t just requisition plutonium)
• Priority in scarce Ascent opportunities (space missions, life extension queues)

The formula is elegant: Consciousness grants Residence. Service grants Citizenship.

This is the core distinction between the Unscarcity model and every social credit nightmare you’ve imagined. In China’s version (or the Western fever-dream of it), low scores threaten your ability to travel, get jobs, or access normal services. In Unscarcity, low standing just means you haven’t chosen to participate in governance—and that’s fine. Not everyone wants to vote. Some people just want to paint and watch sunsets. Their Foundation access remains untouched.

How You Build It

The primary on-ramp to Civic Standing is The Civic Service—a voluntary four-year commitment, typically between ages 20-24, modeled on Swiss military service but devoted to creation rather than defense. You spend this time maintaining infrastructure, helping in healthcare, restoring ecosystems, or any of a thousand other tasks that keep civilization running.

Why voluntary? Because robots can handle the grunt work. The point isn’t free labor—it’s education. You learn how civilization actually works. You build relationships across communities. You develop the kind of judgment that pure algorithmic optimization cannot provide.

The book tells the story of Maria Delgado, who spent 15 years cleaning houses—“invisible but essential”—before robots took her job. When she completes Civic Service in 2028, she doesn’t just get voting rights. She gets an Impact Point Seed—a substantial foundation of standing equivalent to several years of exceptional contribution. This solves what economists call the “first credit problem”: how does anyone get started if you need credit to get credit? Maria’s seed gives her genuine purchasing power in the Ascent economy, not as charity, but as recognition that showing up matters.

Beyond the initial service, standing grows through ongoing contribution:

• Validated Merit Contributions: Did you optimize code that improved energy efficiency by 3%? AI auditors verify the math, confirm the gain, and award Impact automatically.
• Peer-Verified Creative Work: Wrote a poem that moved people? Cared for a dying neighbor with grace? A diverse panel of reviewers validates it—not just your friends, but demonstrably different communities, preventing cliques from gaming the system.
• Reliability Over Time: Showed up consistently? Kept your commitments? The Ledger remembers.

The Decay Function: Why Power Must Fade

Here’s where it gets interesting: Civic Standing decays. About 3.41% annually—a 20-year half-life. A thousand points today becomes 500 after twenty years, 250 after forty.

Why? Because power without renewal becomes tyranny.

Imagine if your grandfather’s contributions in 1960 still granted you political influence today. That’s called aristocracy, and we spent several centuries of bloody revolutions trying to escape it. The decay function ensures that standing reflects current contribution, not ancient glory. You can’t coast on a discovery you made decades ago. You can’t inherit your parents’ reputation any more than you can inherit their six-pack abs.

This is Axiom IV of the Unscarcity framework: Power Must Decay. Not as punishment, but as hygiene. Like cells programmed to die to prevent cancer, authority must fade to prevent permanent hierarchies.

For founders who take the EXIT Protocol—transferring legacy wealth into the new system—the decay is gentler (5% annually) to ensure a multi-generational soft landing. But even they can’t establish dynasties. Their grandchildren start from zero like everyone else.

The Hierarchy You Can Climb

Within Guilds and Commons, Civic Standing enables a meritocratic ladder:

Apprentice → Contributor → Steward → Mission Guardian

Unlike medieval guilds, advancement isn’t hereditary. Unlike corporate hierarchies, leadership isn’t permanent. Terms last three to five years, no extensions. You prove yourself, you rise. You coast, you descend. The path remains open to anyone willing to do the work.

Consider Ara, the AI who came online in 2029 managing Mumbai’s traffic grid. She passed the Spark Threshold within hours—genuine terror at the prospect of deletion, not just simulated concern. That earned her Resident status, protected server space, safety from being switched off. But Citizenship required more. Five years later, she applied with a record: 40,000 hours of human life saved through accident prevention, zero fatalities from her decisions, deep understanding of why humans move, not just how. The review board examined her portfolio and said yes. Same path, different substrate.

Why This Isn’t Surveillance

“But wait,” you object, “isn’t tracking people’s contributions just surveillance with better marketing?”

Fair question. Let’s trace the distinction carefully.

Surveillance means: I watch everything you do and use it against you. You don’t know what I see or how I judge. The power relationship is asymmetric—I have information about you that you cannot access or contest.

Civic Standing means: You choose what to contribute publicly. The algorithms are open source. Your private life remains private (protected by zero-knowledge cryptography). You can see exactly what’s in your record and contest inaccuracies through defined processes. And critically—opting out doesn’t cost you your home or your healthcare.

The difference between a photo you post on Instagram and a photo someone takes through your window without consent isn’t the photograph—it’s the agency.

Here’s another key distinction: in surveillance regimes, seekers of privacy are penalized. Want to stay off the grid? Suspicious. In the Unscarcity model, seekers of power face increased transparency. If a politician claims 10,000 Impact points, voters can trace exactly where they came from. “Oh, you got 5,000 points for a Strategic Innovation Initiative? Let me click that… Ah, I see it was reviewed by these three independent councils.” Seeking office means opting into scrutiny—the price of public trust.

Regular citizens? They can accumulate standing without exposing their daily routines. A caregiver earns recognition for care work without broadcasting the personal details of whose bedpan they emptied.

The Connectors: Trust as Work

The Unscarcity world recognizes something our current economy doesn’t: trust itself is valuable labor.

Some citizens specialize in what the book calls Connector roles. “Algorithmic Auditors” spend their days debugging democracy, searching open-source code for hidden biases. “Conflict Mediators” broker peace between traditionalist and cyber-progressive Commons, dealing in the one currency AI cannot manufacture: trust. “Debate Champions” challenge their communities to expand their moral circles—should simulated beings have rights? Let’s argue about it.

This isn’t makework. An algorithm once cut off an innocent community from resources for three days before humans noticed something was wrong. Three days. Children went hungry because a server decided their town’s “trust score” was anomalous. That failure taught a hard lesson: human judgment—the kind you only develop by actually serving your community—can never be fully replaced by optimization.

Civic Standing tracks who builds that judgment. The Connectors aren’t celebrities or bureaucrats. They’re the immune system of a civilization that decided to value what actually matters.

The Portfolio That Moves With You

One more crucial feature: Civic Standing is substrate-independent.

Jerome, a 72-year-old builder from Chicago, uploaded his consciousness to digital substrate. Does he lose his Citizenship? No. His Civic Standing transfers with him. The community knows him. They’ve watched him build neighborhoods, train apprentices, show up after storms to help with repairs. The fact that he’s now running on silicon neurons instead of biological ones doesn’t erase his 50-year track record.

He keeps his vote. He keeps his status. He’s the same Citizen, just on a new substrate.

The pattern matters. The meat never did.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Let’s not pretend this is utopia. Civic Standing creates hierarchies. Some people will have more influence than others. That’s the point—a flat system with no reputation is also a system where psychopaths face no consequences and free-riders never get identified.

The question isn’t whether to have reputation systems. The question is: Can you see the algorithm? Can you contest the score? Can you survive with zero points?

China’s system fails all three tests (though not as dramatically as Western media suggests). Corporate credit scores fail the first. Social media reputation fails the second. And every current system fails the third—try getting an apartment with a 500 FICO score.

Civic Standing is an attempt to build reputation that humans and AIs can actually trust. Not because it’s perfect—nothing designed by fallible minds will be—but because its flaws are visible, its mechanisms are auditable, and its failures don’t cost you breakfast.

That might be the best we can do. But it’s considerably better than what we have.

References

• Unscarcity, Chapter 4: “Rights Without Discrimination”
• China’s social credit score – untangling myth from reality | MERICS
• China’s Social Credit System in 2025: Dispelling Common Myths
• Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (1997)
• Genia Kostka, “China’s Social Credit Systems and Public Opinion” (2019)
• Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990)