Individual Submission Summary
Share...

Direct link:

Datafied Living and the ‘Citizen Score’: Credit Scoring, Soft Power and the Redefinition of Trust

Sun, May 27, 15:30 to 16:45, Hilton Old Town, Floor: M, Mozart I

Abstract

When credit-reporting agency Equifax was hacked in July of 2017, news coverage predictably criticized the failure of the company’s cyber-security mechanisms, which left consumers vulnerable to increased levels of identity theft. No one commented on the conditions that produced this kind of vulnerability – the sheer breadth and depth of consumer data collected by Equifax – or on the ways automated credit-scoring systems have long worked to shape and privilege specific kinds of social identity in the first place. The coverage of the Equifax hack not only demonstrates the degree to which our datafied lives have become unremarkable, but also the extent to which we are now required to trust such computational practices even when they fail, or risk economic and cultural exclusion. Ian Bogost calls this cultural condition ‘computational theocracy’; while automation and datafication are deemed the height of rationality, they simultaneously demand absolute faith from everyday users in their procedures (Bogost, 2015). This form of techno-fetishism obscures both the material conditions of production behind datafication and the ways in which it is displacing traditional truth arbiters and radically redefining the meaning of trust itself. Nowhere is this more evident than in China’s recent plan to establish a countrywide ‘social credit system’, which will assign each citizen a numerical score based on their computed level of trustworthiness and ‘sincerity’. Marketed as a way to ‘forge a public opinion environment where keeping trust is glorious’ (Planning Outline, 2014), the citizen score will consider five dimensions of individual conduct derived from online data, including personal behavior and the quality of social networks. This paper will consider some of the potential effects of living with the ‘citizen score’ via an examination of one the most prominent prototypes being considered for use by the Chinese government – Sesame Credit. Proprietary practices of big data-driven analytics may demand our trust to accumulate capital and entrench new forms of soft political power, but, given their efforts to contain and control our life chances with little accountability or transparency, there is certainly no reason we should oblige them.

Author