The Social Credit Score

It was about a century back that Purohit Dube figured out a covert way of assigning a social credit score to individuals in the largest democracy. Since then it has gone on to spread like a contagion across continents to subterfuge the entire world in its grasp. Once entrenched, governments all across covertly sponsored studies showcasing that the benefits of a social credit score outweighed its cons. And then, it reared its head publicly to let know everyone that all but were slaves to it. You couldn’t escape it, just learn how to cope.

The idea itself was epitome of simplicity.

You see, despite the loud proclamation of free will and all, the entire world even then was a large social experiment laboratory. Not by government but by corporates who were looking to maximize profit by increasing revenue or lowering costs. Instead of the direct machinations, far sinister indirect nudges. For example, asking cheese or extra cheese for your burger instead of the obvious no cheese, putting dark patterns all across the internet etc.

Purohit who was a political analyst, on a fateful day, got enraged when he tried explaining to his wife that it seemed obvious to him (from all that she had told him) that her company was doing a covert targeted campaign of reward and recognition for disgruntled employees but she didn’t accept it. While it seemed extraordinary that they were able to identify disgruntled employees somehow, they were using timely rewards and recognitions to keep them hooked on for a bit more. (Just for our readers, as to how the company were able to identify disgruntled employees, they were actually doing targeted disgruntlement i.e. make employee disgruntled and then push in the reward and recognition at the last moment to hook them. It seemed to optimize their per rupee outcomes.) After a bout of heavy drinking during which the anger dissipated and his mind moved towards oblivious clarity, it struck him - it was a goldmine. And then in that inebriated state, he wrote that famous WhatsApp message to his political boss (the then reigning Prime Minister) - “Eureks…Wureka”.

What followed that fateful night was a secret meeting with business top honchos and the government where unequivocally the honchos were issued a diktat to start collecting data on these “social experiments” they were conducting. And by data they meant, the “social experiment” itself and each customer’s reaction to it. Further, they were warned, inability to do so would result in a fate worse than “hell”. Thence, started the project brahmastra. Outcome of which was that every citizen was classified as a “blind follower”, “somewhat conscious” or a “sage”. Then, their political inclinations were gathered and what we had was a way for the ruling government to define targeted plans for each citizen to sway them or take them out of the picture to ensure recurring political success. Eventually, all political parties figured out what was going on and wanted access to this data to make it a fair game again. For obvious reasons, the ruling government had to oblige. And then, in a sly move taking advantage of the data addiction created, the honchos aligned the political parties to their ambition of incessant growth. So, we had the companies collecting and feeding this data to the political parties who used it for targeted campaigning and whichever got elected then aligned their policies to incessant growth objective. And once this objective was aligned to, it was easy to make it public for capitalism is non-political. The basis of the non-partisan studies. Phew - a century in thirteen sentences. (Just to be clear, somewhere in the above travelogue the contagion had spread from one country to all countries)

So, we are here. A social credit score which classifies each citizen as a “blind follower”, “somewhat conscious” or a “sage” in a democratic context. A social credit score accepted by the citizens like a financial credit score because it let them partake in capitalism.

It’s Purohit’s birthday today. He died way before his idea was able to take the whole world under its arm. But through his idea, he lives on. Purohit Score - that’s what the social credit score is called. And we are supposed to take a moment today to remember the great man whose brilliance “transformed” our lives, our society and our world.

P.S. - Just as a clarification, social credit score basically measures our deviance to perceived normalcy or societal normalcy or what should appropriately be called expected normalcy. Basis the deviance, we get classified as a “blind follower”, “somewhat conscious” or a “sage”.