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Real world social credit is soft and squishy and local and fades or changes over time.

Digital social credit is (potentially) an automatically calculated number with strict and unyielding consequences that follows you around for your entire life.

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A lot of digital ones are "local" too in that they are context specific. As long as it stays context specific, your Uber rating is closer to being liked by your local bar tender than it is to the Chinese social credit system. Even your local bartender has a little context leakage.

I agree there is a scarier potential there. And also some do, on occasion, escape their context (mostly credit score). They also have bigger contexts, but not so big that I would jump to the Chinese social credit comparison.

And a digital social credit system can be manipulated to drive behavioral changes en-masse. It centralizes power. Harder to do that with word-of-mouth.

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