 Okay, so ladies and gentlemen Katinka Kühnreich. So did you all? Thank the angels today No, yes, maybe applause Did you all took your prosium to today? No okay, see Katinka will tell you about the social credit system from China and Will tell you a little bit more about how a human being can be valued She's a Magista in political science and modern and ancient Chinese science She not only has her theoretical knowledge from books, but she always also combines it with a street study So please welcome with a very warm hand of applause cutting Hey guys I'm happy to be here and first I want to thank all the people who made that possible There's conference in this talk So thanks to all you and a special special thanks to all the people translating before we start I like To say a few points the first was the thank you. We already have that the second is I have to apologize English is not my mother tongue So you will have some funny mistakes that I make so the internet has a bit more fun Because the world can be a slice the second thing is I will take you on a journey through China's social credit system its current state and Because we only have half an hour more or less because I'd really like to spend a lot of time with you guys on talks on discussion and Q&A We have to leave a lot of interesting sites out So there were some excellent talks on the CCC about technological aspects of internet and internet usage in China I will concentrate really hard on this social credit system But if you have questions, please ask in the Q&A the Q&A will not be recorded so you can feel free and if you have more questions just contact me after the talk and and It's a China topic and Often when you talk about China people say, oh, yeah. Yeah, that's China This is no China bashing session. I'm sorry for anyone expected that The China has a government and a government Wants to control something So this talk is about social credit systems in China, but it is about a tendency as see Internationally it's the tendency to answer social problems with technological solutions or at least it's the try So please keep in mind. It's happening in China But it's not that we are safe in the West or cozy or anything else So it's meant as an example of an international tendency And I prepared some cards so I will stick to the topic after look at them from time to time This talk presents my current state of research. It's not the truth and This talk sadly represents my current state of my cold as well So I'm not totally fit. Please apologize that as well For a little journey. I prepared a couple of stops The first one will be a video from 2015 made by extra credit on Social credit systems in China So if you don't like the talk, you have seven and a half minutes to just vanish. Nobody will notice The next point will be updates on corrections. It's a video from 2015 and They some faulty information in it and to do that I will give you a quick look at the Chinese Internet landscape The next point will be the current state of social credit systems If I say SCS, it's the same. I'm just lazy and There's one question often not answered When talking about the Chinese credit system, it's why is it happening and again? It's not because it's an evil government It's a government So we'll dive in some ideological aspects of Chinese politics today And in the end I'm really looking forward to that point because I can shut a bit up and listen to your thoughts And I'm really interested in that So everyone already cozy That's wonderful. Thanks Then we can start with the video That is not shown right now. Now we need some technical support or It's much more fun when you see the pictures But we have time so We got free water Gentlemen, I think we have a technical problem here So while the walk and my stage manager is trying to get some people from there Yes, he will do this. He's a good guy. He's the best guy gentlemen ladies applause for the walk so while we're waiting to have the video and It I can trust me it looked really good from here Let's play a little game Later we will have a Q&A session, but unfortunately we are not allowed or we can't record the Q&A session and We will also not video stream the Q&A session So I would like you to have a quick hand of applause for all of you because you will have a great discussion with this nice lady and Therefore we try to make a pause No, no, no, that should be louder. Come on Okay, we still have no video, but I think over there. I did not hear any applause Could you could you could you please try it again? Yeah, better better, I think these guys are way better Are they come on some information I'd present you after the video. Thank you The information you get in the video is based on a press release of the American Civil Liberties Union and That contains some mistakes One thing when you want to know something about China the government is really open in publishing what they're doing and what they're planning to do and It's seems to be much more comfortable to just copy But maybe have a look into what the government says because it's a good way to find out what they are doing and they're scaring the open it works with a lot of governments and I Realized that because this video had a lot of impact and there was a lot of news report on that scary system in China But when you looked at the news report and you have the video before You found out that it was more less The same The very same as in the video even years later, so please if you want to find something out check for facts They might be online too So That's the picture And that's my break Even now looking at this I keep thinking that there's got to be something about this that I just don't understand Like I must be reading this wrong. It's just so clearly something out of dystopian science fiction And yet here it is in our world and people are actually embracing it Apparently China has gamified being an obedient citizen Going under the innocuous name of sesame credit China has created a score for how good a citizen you are and That's one of the scariest things. I've heard in quite a while. It's jointly run by 10 cent Yes, that 10 cent the one that owns riot games and has a significant share in epic and Activision Blizzard and also the ascendant Chinese Competitor to Amazon Alibaba hence the name sesame So the owners of China's largest social networks have partnered with the government to create something akin to the US credit score But instead of measuring how regularly you pay your bills it measures how obediently you follow the party line They dredge data from your social network So if you post pictures of Tiananmen Square or share a link about the recent stock market collapse your sesame credit score goes down Share a link from the state-sponsored news agency about how good the economy's doing and your score goes up But Alibaba and 10 cent are also the largest online retailers in China So sesame credit is also able to pull data from your purchases if you're making purchases The state deems valuable like work shoes or local agricultural products your score goes up if you import anime from Japan though Down the score goes and this score has real-world consequences like many games sesame credit has tears and levels and having a high score Gives you special benefits like making it easier to get the paperwork You need to travel or making it easier to get a loan now currently there are no consequences for having a low score But there's been talk about implementing penalties once the system becomes mandatory in 2020 Penalties like slower internet speeds for low-scoring citizens or even restricting the jobs that a low-scoring person's allowed to hold But there's one more layer to sesame credit and here's where this goes from being repulsive to downright insidious Because this is all part of a social network It also scans your friends So you will lose points for having friends with low-obedient scores and it tells you this at any point Anybody can check anyone else's score and when you check your own score Sesame credit provides a handy map of your friends to show you who's dragging your score down Have you ever had that thing where you play a game with somebody who wasn't doing very well And you've tried to change their behavior to make them do better or maybe after a while You just sort of stopped playing with the people who were holding you back That's at the heart of how this system works and it's also what makes this one of the most terrifying tools of authoritarian oppression I've ever read about because like mass censorship jail time assassinations Those are all big messy implements for keeping a population in line that messiness and severity foster resentment Eventually rebellion they're expensive they're unwieldy in the end those tools are impossible to maintain but social pressure Ostracization those things are free they happen on their own and as a government tool They don't have nearly the same potential for going embarrassingly Disastrously wrong with a system like this in place a government doesn't even have to tell neighbor to spy on neighbor to Rat each other out because that's all built into a seemingly innocuous game system the government need not step in Re-education will be handled for them by friends classmates and relatives who want to maintain a high score And if that doesn't work then potentially dangerous ideas still end up quarantined by the social isolation this game system causes Express or help to spread too many radical ideas and people will stop associating with you And not because some jackbooted thugs showed up at the door with threats But simply because associating with somebody with those ideas will lose them all the privileges They've worked so hard to obtain it Recontextualizes obedience to an authoritarian regime in the past you obeyed such powers because you were afraid fear kept you motivated But fear is negative it fosters resentment the world We're stepping into instead uses positive reinforcement to promote being subservient to the will of the regime It's big brother's kinder gentler hand and the things that make this scary is that we've seen the efficacy of this only too Well in games you may not actually know this but when World of Warcraft was in its early stages of development It had an unrested penalty mechanic that started limiting experience gains for players who had played too much and players hated it They resented it and they complained about it every day So after brainstorming on this for a while Blizzard had the idea to simply change how the mechanic was presented without changing any of The existing numbers or systems they started referring to the unrested experience penalty state as normal and made it the default and They started calling the original normal experience gain state as rested That's all they changed and everybody loved it people would log on every day just to get that bonus positive reinforcement works wonders but unlike World of Warcraft which built a system just to get people to embrace meaningless grinding Sesame credit has built a system to get people to enjoy falling into line now the system's not mandatory yet It's opt-in right now, but it's going to be mandatory in 2020 And there's a terrible brilliance to phasing that in the early adopters are gonna be people excited about this system people who are Already patriotic and are eager for anything that'll help display that patriotism to the world and as early adopters They're gonna talk it up. They're gonna give it an air of being positive and fun Then it'll be foisted on the society as a whole more than that though the early adopters are gonna compete Already you can see hundreds of thousands of tweets displaying people's high scores or showing off the new milestones They've hit giving a hard numbers to their patriotism and giving them bragging rights for being the most patriotic most right thinking person They know and that's gonna set the tone for how sesame credit is intended to be used as a competition to see who can agree with the government The most we've talked about propaganda games on this channel before but for all the time We've spent examining and deconstructing terrible games that a spouse hate and for all the studies on propaganda games James has done this is the use of game systems that frightens me the most because to most people sesame credit will seem benign perhaps even fun It's a conversation starter something to share with your friends But it's making heavy use of all the psychological motivators that we game makers deploy and scoring systems and ladders and levels Systems that we built to shape play habits and to keep people coming back Like I said, I'm still kind of in a state of disbelief looking at this If any of you are watching this from China, please tell me if I'm misunderstanding this thing because I would love to be wrong about it If not, well, I hope this episode can do some small amount to help the fight to keep such a system from becoming mandatory For everyone in the rest of the world I hope this helps remind us all how important it is to be aware and to be vigilant all of these Gamification techniques we've learned through making games offer incredible opportunities for making this world a better more engaging place But every great tool carries with it the potential for misuse and it's on us as a community who understands this amazing new medium To do what we can to stop that. We'll see you next week so we had the schedule and Thank you to XR credit for this video and Thank you for concentrating on gamification Because a lot of time when I talk to social scientists Without a lot of technological knowledge, it was like, okay, it's a new system and The whole gamification thing Triggered me and I wondered about a lot of people who didn't seem too interested in it Because I said The video contains some faulty information First, I'd like to concentrate on key aspects. They told us in with as a video There's a social rating system in China now The system will become mandatory in 2020. That's alright it works on big data algorithms artificial intelligence and your online and offline data and It uses technologies Like gamification and nudging and if you hear it's a William system. No, it's not 1984 was about force Gamification is about feeling good and cozy so In the updates and corrections, I promise you a quick look at the Chinese Internet landscape What most people already know From the beginning the Chinese government started to control the internet as much as it could and its users So some Vocapularies you might have heard are the great firewall or it's new extra or newer extra the golden shield The great cannon, which is a DDoS weapon. It would be really fascinating to dive in there But we have to watch from far Another point that's really interesting for us looking at social credit system is true name or real name registration Which means you can't use a lot of services if you don't give them your ID number And the mandatory system in 2020 will work on ID numbers as far as we know so We watch the other side the users there millions of users. It's one more than 1.4 billion people in China and I See teas are really popular Much more than in Germany for example And another thing that please keep in mind Cash is vanishing in China a couple of years ago. For example when I lived in China 2004. I Paid my rent in cash Have a year in advance When I paid for anything I paid cash you could couldn't find a lot of places Accepting carts, but now China didn't have this development of carts They just jumped right through paying with mobile apps and you can buy noodles or snack or magazine with your mobile phone And the Chinese users found multiple ways to deal with censorship and to trespass it it's a Wonderful thing to look up And now the big players of the Chinese internet because we learned some names in the film. I Might something very Chinese. I made something colorful Okay, you have three big players. It's Ali Baba and Tencent we heard about them and Baidu is the third biggest player Each millions of users or billions So to explain this I will use some American companies names to have understanding and Baidu is Known for that was the wrong Yeah, Baidu is known for by do barker This is like the Chinese Wikipedia. It's just a bit much controlled And they have Baidu pay and Baidu is huge in artificial intelligence So the next one is Tencent we learned about the gaming thing and A developed QQ. This is a matter that some of you might remember ISEQ Yeah, it's just a bit bigger Another app a lot of people don't think it's Chinese it is Chinese. It's called WeChat It's I can say the even M. What's up, right and guess what we chat developed we chat pay and There's another little company Tencent holds some parts in its snapshot. It's 12% owned by Tencent Ali Baba has Ali pay, which is one of the biggest payment apps and You can even use it in Germany now. I think in Some shops it's running Taoba one, which is like ebay just a bit bigger and And Sina way bow way bow man's micro blogging or Twittering and Sina is the biggest company in China and they hold more or less a third now. We come to something really interesting It's and financials because and financials Created something called sesame credit Sesame credit is Ali Baba's child not Tencent and Ali Baba's Tencent developed their own system so updates and corrections without colors 2014 was the year the Chinese State Council released a planning Outline on the construction of social credit systems in China and it gave us a lot of information but only Very few specific information so They started and in 2020 it will be managed mandatory, but they worked on for as long as at least 2005 It allows governmental and private SCS. So you have both and Eight companies are allowed to form their own private social credit systems We learned Tencent and Ali Baba two of them In different regions high and I'm for example. It's an island you have social credit systems run by the government So you see you have a lot of different systems running at the same time in different regions And sometimes you can choose between different social credit systems at the same same place and Sesame credit we have learned Is the biggest and run by Ali Baba and Sesame time is sesame credit is not the one who will be mandatory. I had one other point that I forgot it might Come back later so To give you a bit more information Let's have a quick look at recent developments that I thought of would be really interesting for you when you have that scenario of a Society That is formed by a rating system In 2016 there were some new guidelines on the SCS New cyber security laws and you might expect it. They are getting a bit harder and harder every time And there was a police robot. I don't know if you heard about it I was going to write an article but then we had a really nice conference that made us a lot of work and my article died in the way so You might have watched Wally. What was the movie a couple of years ago? You might remember Eve. That was a little cute white robot. I had a specialty. It could taser Some someone in China must have watched that movie too because guess what? It looks like Eve and it can taser You find pictures and clips online And the People's Bank of China announced its own digital currency to come soon They are working on it for years And the real-name registrations for online comments. So no real-name registrations No online comments and in 2020 The mandatory social credit system The next question is usually how does the social credit system work? And we take a quick look at sesame credit because they added more and more services That extra credit guys couldn't know about So we learned a lot of data mining they do For example when you use Alipay It goes to your score. So your score goes higher and higher the more you shop with Alipay Than other Alibaba services We know there are different millions of services and Now it's getting special because it draws information from officials as well. So we have information from courts debtors, records frees and Because love as always makes everything better you get your data from the biggest dating app in China It's bachel so you can see if the person you want to fall in love with had a good score And of course they're including more and more services And there are penalties now If you forgot to pay your child support for a couple of months or years or I have heard people can forget that for quite a long time There are penalties for example, you can't take high speed trains or first-class flight tickets Which is a very intelligent way again. It's a very intelligent way to Add penalties because if you start with people nobody likes nobody likes openly It's clever and of course the companies do not tell you a lot about the technologies like They use in the systems So and then people want to know about the mandatory system What it can do? How will it look? Answer on and there's a very simple answer We don't know The chinese government doesn't give you a lot of information on how it will look But we can guess In having a look on how the government worked in the last 20 30 years so We can have a look How they prepare the mandatory system like I said Different systems at the same time and they will learn from this and my guess is They will have like a little medley of the best features Of the existing systems and get rid of the faulty ones. So By best, I mean best From the point of view of the government, of course So now we are a bit later because of our technological difficulties Thanks again for solving Why do you have a social credit system? Let's dive a bit back in history Some people might remember the year 1989 before you had a lot of countries that called themselves socialists But after you had only a few and china is one of them And how did they make it in the 80s? They had something called The era of reform and opening up where they opened up to the west mostly and to capitalism and You might Know what that means China's called a transformation society And with some people getting rich quickly and a lot of people getting poorer and poorer and watching the rich You have a lot of social tension And remember china is a huge country With a vast amount and people and you know people are really good in getting on each other's nerves So you have problems I give you one number that I really like in 2014 The official count of mass incidents every day was nearly 250 And the number is rising so it will be much more today And a mass incident can be Anything from pensioners holding up banners demanding more money because they work their whole life I'm sorry. I really have to concentrate on not swearing To like riots full-grown riots petrol bombs burning buildings For example g20 in hamburg. You might have heard That's a mass incident. That's nothing To get crazy about that's just a little thing that happened. Hamburg is still standing and thank you Hello, hamburg And keep in mind organized societies are controlled on different levels. That's not only china And social control It's usually done by groups. So it's much easier if we control it at each other And it has a long history in china too and a lot of social socialist countries Do there are new forms of social control? So in china you have a hookah. That means you can only get social services Where you're permitted to live? I just give you a really really short version of everything. It's not it's a bit more complex as you know The dangan which you can say it's an analog version a lot of your stuff what you've done goes in there You needed a marriage permit if you wanted to get married And it wasn't easy to live without a marriage permit And as china became more and more digitized You might know what comes next Oh two in one Control became digitized as well And as people are using icts more and more they create a huge amount of data And the bloody thing with data is you don't feel smell Or see anything vanishing do you and People it's hard for us humans to develop Something towards something we can't see smell or feel And more and more technologies are used in civilians and social control But that still leaves the question Why is china doing it? Let's Go to another point. I'd really interested in Ideological influences the way we see the world and the way We think about it is formed by theories by ideologies And what's the chinese flag? You see it again. Maybe you remember some of you it's red with the yellow stars that usually is a code for socialist and This is Mao Zedong He was kind of big in china and so you have Here you have three socialist symbols It really helps to know a bit about marxism in researching china And especially in Mao Zedong thought it's not called Maoism. It's called more The young thought it's about what he thought and In this reform of Opening up i'm trying to feed you a bit of chinese history The chinese government opened up to more For example, they opened up fun to nationalism And if you know a bit about socialism, usually you wouldn't put socialism and nationalism in one room because they didn't like each other the chinese government Found a way They like each other They got really interested in pr and they really Researched other countries how governments there stood in power And someone not so well known to most of us. This is confucius Confucianism shaped and molded the chinese societies for more than 2000 years And if you have that big influence you can't just get rid of it It's in people's memories. It's in the whole society And confusionism came back as an ideology where Some parts of the socialists ideology vanished Confusionism came back and confusionism Is about a society where everyone is on her or his place and her place is always below And with all this new ideological influences the way of communication changed as well Before it was the masses and now it's the public All campaigns and programs had revolutionary names Or poetic ones like hundred flowers yet the great leap forward and all these campaigns Molded our picture of china or the picture most people up in their hearts people in blue red flags But now it changed you have new campaigns and programs and they have other names as well You have socialist harmonious society as a goal for the society And a couple of years ago before you couldn't put socialism and harmony in one room either And you have the chinese dream Yes, it sounds a bit like american dream Yeah And We learned that all governments are interested in control and feedback because you can control something If you don't pay attention and can't blow up anyway So like we have an autonomous nervous system that tells every part what's going on You have one electronic autonomous nervous system now in many societies not only china people using icts And a social credit system Just creates a wonderful opportunity of feedback And on the same time on influence so We come to the end of this talk and To the summary So Again, this I think is really important. It's an international tendency To solve social problems with technological solutions And as far as I'm concerned, this is not the best way maybe And The chinese government They do not count and think in years They think in decades at least And they looked at the internet and found out that this is a good tool And they're using it successfully But we know at least since Edward Snowden That other governments are capable of using the internet as a tool as well A social credit system exists of the use of big data algorithm icts and gamification And it will become mandatory and this game When it becomes mandatory Will define your life and not only your life it will define the life of the people is surrounding you as well The schools your children for example will go to will be Chosen on your rate And there's the opportunity To put this together with a national cryptocurrency So Thank you all for listening. That was my current state of research and my current state of my cult We both presented you this talk and I'm really looking forward to q&a and discussing Thanks