Control can go both ways
Often, however, one aspect is overlooked: the opposite of governmental action is possible. The effects of transparency and control can also be applied to the population. Does the blockchain bridge the path into the cradle of the autocrats?
The blockchain is celebrated as a savior for just about any area of life these days. The promise: low transaction costs, efficiency, decentralized, unmanipulable data. Especially in the areas of politics and society, the Blockchain lures with enormous potentials of transparency and comprehensibility. The rusty public administration should breathe life into them, strengthen elections and lead to more trust, security and support for politics. As far as the argument of the enthusiast.
If corruption is impossible because all data is exposed, it strengthens trust in the system and political institutions. The argument seems anything but obscure, at least on paper. But does technology keep its promises?
Social control & surveillance
Here it pays to pause. Because the devil lurks on the famous other side of the coin. Through absolute transparency, the technology not only creates clarity. It opens the door to coercion and surveillance.
Almost every area of life seems to be drifting into the digital world, we are witnessing the transformation of the physical into the smart world, the Internet of Everything, the taxi, the traffic lights and the parking lot are networked together. What effect does this have on government behavior?
Here, it should be especially critical if the government of a state uses all citizen data targeted and even want to practice behavioral control. That this is anything but an empty dystopian rethink of thought, is shown by a glance towards the Far East.
China: welcome to the Orwellian future
In China, for example, the blockchain may soon go through the almost ironic metamorphosis from the anarchic-motivated, decentralized utopian instrument of the state skeptics to the Orwellian nightmare. While the People’s Republic is resolutely transforming itself into a state sponsor of distributed ledger technologies, investing heavily and making Blockchain a vehicle for rapid growth on the journey of the Chinese dream, Beijing is pushing ahead with another major project: the social credit system launched in 2014.
This will provide all Chinese citizens, companies and authorities with a special ‘digital points account’ by 2020. The vision of the People’s Republic: All social trustworthiness should be recorded. This ranges from tax evasion over the committed care of the parents to the disregard of the traffic light circuit. All of this should be summed up using points. Those who do not fit into the grid lose their civil liberties and may not leave their place of residence, for example.
Here, the blockchain could prove to be the most important instrument to link the increasingly smart physical world and the data waves of the citizen — connecting traffic light videos with the smartphone, for example. Such a networked world, which controls itself completely and the citizen, calls the philosophy panic spectrum — based on Jeremy Bentham’s central prison.
What then remains in the middle is a completely see-through individual. Transparent and easy to sanction, bound by a smart world, forced to the right behavior. What makes the heart of the autocrat beat faster is the death sentence for a vibrant society.
BehaviourExchange is a tech startup that promises to end modern-day data slavery and return ownership over personal information to its owners. Learn more about the project on the official website.
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