Undemocratic Means: The rise of the surveillance state

Abstract

In Chap. 11, I already raised the ‘what if’ question regarding the imagined slippery slope from liberal democracies to more authoritarian and far less liberal or democratic states. In this chapter, I show where this ‘what if’ journey towards ever more safety and security could eventually lead by discussing the Chinese government’s current plans to roll out a ‘Social Credit Score’ system that assigns each Chinese citizen an individual ‘social score’ – a score that can go up and down depending on their action and how ‘trustworthy’ they are. I argue that this total surveillance goes for beyond ‘nudging’ as employed in Western democracies, but that for those who score high, it actually does not look like surveillance but like a game – hence, we basically witness the ‘gamification’ of social control. I then compare these developments to surveillance measures already existing in the West and conclude that we are actually not that far removed from China’s version of Huxley’s ‘Brave New World.’