It's amazing how different the mentality is in Liberal Democracies versus, say, Communist or Islamic regimes. Personally, I think the evidence is clear that concentration of power, especially a "rating" like this, is a prelude to about the worst tools of oppression one can imagine.
But even back here at home, little by little, we are on the way to being enslaved by the machines. If something can be more efficient (for consumers, say) it will be made more efficient and put pressure on all the humans (workers). Already our attention span is not what it used to be because as humans we have to deal with a huge volume of things being thrown at us. Already demand for human labor is decreasing. But what's next is much more efficient ways to punish people for certain behavior, and make them conform. The hive mind dominates the individual, with better and better tools. China rates its citizens, not the other way around. All the "soviet russia" joke formulas come true. The assumption is: one is permanent, the other is not.
Consumer credit rating agencies already essentially do this, and a number of subprime lenders only make credit decisions if they can connect to social media accounts. There are specialists in "connecting the dots" of all your various life activities right here in the West. Already certain sectors require a clean credit score to get a job. It's really not very different from this Chinese scheme, since this dot-joining will inevitably profile your political and social leanings, your secrets, your very personality and its inevitable flaws. China will do centrally what we do in a distributed fashion, but the end result is the same.
But even back here at home, little by little, we are on the way to being enslaved by the machines. If something can be more efficient (for consumers, say) it will be made more efficient and put pressure on all the humans (workers). Already our attention span is not what it used to be because as humans we have to deal with a huge volume of things being thrown at us. Already demand for human labor is decreasing. But what's next is much more efficient ways to punish people for certain behavior, and make them conform. The hive mind dominates the individual, with better and better tools. China rates its citizens, not the other way around. All the "soviet russia" joke formulas come true. The assumption is: one is permanent, the other is not.
I wrote a piece on this. The genie is out of the bottle: welcome to the Big Data revolution: http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169