Social Credit System

Social credit schemes centrally score citizens for approved or disapproved behaviors, tying benefits to surveillance-driven ratings. The book rejects this model as coercive and corrosive of authentic community, contrasting it with Civic Standing and Merit which are narrow, transparent, and decoupled from Baseline rights.

Historical examples include China’s evolving social credit pilots and corporate credit scoring. Such systems incentivize performative compliance, enable political repression, and devalue unmeasured acts of care or dissent. Unscarcity’s architecture explicitly forbids broad behavior scoring, relying instead on open validation of specific contributions.

The critique underscores the importance of privacy, contestability, and limited scope in any reputational mechanism.

References

• UnscarcityBook, chapter1 and glossary
• Samantha Hoffman, “Programming China” (2019)
• Electronic Frontier Foundation, “China’s Social Credit System” (2022)