IIn the Flensburg Federal Motor Transport Authority, the “Driving Suitability Register” is intended to educate road users to “acceptable behavior in road traffic”. Schufa AG maintains a “score” for almost every consumer that calculates their financial trustworthiness. And many health insurance companies offer their customers a bonus program: those who behave healthier than others are rewarded with money or non-cash bonuses. Simply download the app, tick the data protection regulations, and off you go: The cell phone counts the steps and reports them to the insurance company. This is how we help you achieve your exercise goals in a “playful way,” according to the website of a major health insurance company.
But when are such feedbacks no longer a game? What if the state installs control loops consisting of data collection and rewarding feedback, not just in road traffic, but in general, in order to achieve desired behavior?
Parking spaces against speed discipline
Technical progress raises the question. Why do cities only resort to traffic monitoring using speed cameras on the side of the road when GPS users have long been able to voluntarily transmit their driving behavior to the authorities without any gaps? Why not collect points by strictly adhering to speed regulations that can be redeemed for use in public parking spaces, for example? The Chinese metropolis of 12 million people, Hangzhou, is said to have solved its traffic problems with a similar system and also relieved the burden on the city’s police.
Wessel Reijers, Liav Orgad and Primavera de Filippi now appeared in an article for the magazine Citizenship Studies the question of how this new type of “cybernetic citizen” challenges our beliefs about the correct relationship between state and citizen. They are not just concerned with the “Social Credit” systems (SCS) in China or the Russian social points system “My” (“We”), which the State Social University in Moscow is currently testing. The cybernetic citizen has long been a global phenomenon. “Connectivity”, i.e. uninterrupted networking through data-sending devices, has long been a reality. This makes it possible to measure and count people’s interactions with public institutions and, based on this data, to calculate what makes a good citizen.
In the West there is still only reward, not punishment
This already works in European democracies, for example in Cascais, Portugal: There, the municipal “InnoWave Citypoints” system enables its residents to collect points using a “good deeds catalog”, which can be used for free entry to city museums or can redeem a free monthly ticket on local public transport. Altruism for the community does not become any less valuable if the citizens allow the city to buy it from them, so to speak. Even the not so altruistic citizen of Cascais is still allowed to go to the museum – he just has to pay for it.
However, the Chinese are further along. According to the authors of the study, the SCS have not yet achieved the dystopian status that Western media ascribe to them. These are more fragmented and heterogeneous approaches of individual urban initiatives, some of which differ considerably in terms of their implementation and technical execution.
And yet: The approach shows how the concept of the cybernetic citizen fundamentally changes the idea of citizenship. From a bundle of rights to an acquired sum of rights based on electronically storable behavioral data. Inequality in the fulfillment of rights is literally calculated from equality before the law. A status – you have a right to something – becomes a process – you have to acquire something through behavior that promotes the common good. SCS also have sanctions if citizens lose points through their behavior and thereby fall in the hierarchy of social value.
In contrast, systems like the one in Cascais still seem harmless. They reward, but they don’t punish. But it is not so much technical progress that makes their use more and more attractive, but rather the social expectation that the common good actually demands more and more correct behavior. So in traffic, in health, in consumption or in questions of nutrition. The state intervenes in more and more areas of society to guide and warn – and encounters citizens who are very divided on the question of whether it is not even their civic duty to willingly allow themselves to be guided.
#Systems #social #control #cybernetic #citizen