Nathan Radke

And at first, this idea seems sort of satisfying.

I mean, this is the problem with a lot of these texts is that they kind of promise something that almost tempts you a little bit.

Because we already do this, this sort of social credit rating for Uber drivers and eBay sellers.

Why not everyone we encounter in our daily lives?

Think about how satisfying it would be you get cut off in traffic and instead of just flipping the bird at the guy, you give the driver of the car a bad review, which maybe makes it hard for him to buy a house.

Just imagine how much better behaved everyone would be if they knew that they were being publicly ranked all of the time.

But of course, in classic Black Mirror fashion, this could and will go extremely poorly.

I mean, if you're an Uber passenger and you start drifting below four and a half stars, you can start finding yourselves waiting longer to get a ride or maybe not getting a ride at all.

Now, because you were having a bad day a few weeks earlier, you're trapped in a rainstorm instead of hopping into a car.

For drivers, they operate on slim margins anyway, and losing their star status can cause them financial peril.

And on a society-wide level, who is it exactly that gets to decide what's antisocial and what's prosocial?

The people in power?

Exactly.

That's how it always goes.

It's easy to see how it could switch from what's good for society to what's good for the people in charge.

And as you mentioned, we did sort of see this implemented.

In 2020, the Chinese city of Suzhou implemented a new system of digitally ranking and evaluating citizens for their behavior.

Everybody starts with a thousand points.

You lose points for antisocial activity.

You gain points for prosocial activity.