Why Study Chinese Social Credit (or More Generally Data Driven Governance) Systems

 

I was delighted to have the opportunity to meet with graduate students at the University of Vienna to talk about data driven governance systems and automated law in its Chinese form usually shorthanded as Chinese "social credit systems" (SCS). My thanks to Christoph Steinhardt for making this possible.  

Whether one likes it or not, and most lawyers and traditionalists will not like this (though they will use it strategically to advance their own interests). The challenge is to better understand what "this" is. Data driven governance--an objectives based, compliance oriented, accountability system grounded in the the use of technology of quantify governance  has become a central element in government (public) and governance (private). The foundations are eschatological--almost religious (an irony since its core premises are deeply held by ostensibly irreligious actors). 

SCS like systems(whether Chinese Marxist Leninist, post-colonial/development, theocratic, or liberal democratic markets driven) like systems are grounded on this theology: (1) a belief that framing collective ideology can define the ideal of every aspect of social life, (2) that this ideal can be quantified and that this quantified ideal can be used to measure the gap between actual conduct or conditions and that ideal, (3) that those in charge can use that information to move all actors closer to that ideal, (4) that this task of perfecting individuals, collectives, and society serves as the fundamental responsibility of managerial (public and private) actors; (5) that predictive and social modeling provides the ideal means of managing society comprehensively (or its social sub-systems); and (6) that such actions must be grounded in systems of the exercise of administrative discretion managed tightly by the rules and expectations of punishments and rewards targeting behavior to Shepard them toward the ideal. The alignment of perfecton and the ideal will fulfill the responsibility of those charged with the management of society.  And that perfection can only be understood in relation to a world-view shaping ideology that must be developed, protected and interpreted (by someone) and that provides the cage of reality within which it is possible to engage in this task.  

Whether these trajectories will be realized in whole or part, and whether the movement toward the alignment of compliance, datafication, measurability, analytics, governance, and law, will produce a new language of rule and behavior shaping structures may prove to be one of the most interesting elements of the development of politics and jurisprudence in the next decade. The temptations of those movements are not ideological in the sense that it is a "left" or "right" agenda.  Right authoritarianism, and left totalitarianism are both ends of the spectrum of corruption of these approaches to governance--as was text based legalities in another prior era. The issue of the language of law and its performance  exists autonomously of the ruling ideologies and practices of legitimization within which it is manifested.

The PPT that we used to organize the discussion follows below.