China takes Big Brother into the metaverse

CCP-owned China Mobile aims to create a ‘digital identity system’ that tracks and stores a user’s ‘social scores’ to their digital ID.

Beijing’s tyranny over its people is becoming more terrifying than anything described in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

China has implemented a highly controversial ‘social credit score’ system measuring citizens’ loyalty to the CCP metrics since 2014. A low score can result in individuals being blacklisted from public services and other inconveniences and violations of civil liberties. A document the CCP released in November 2022 detailed a plan to finally roll out the system on a unified national scale.

Now, the totalitarian regime also wants to apply its spy and control tactics to virtual worlds. They will accomplish this by tracking a person’s ‘natural’ and ‘social’ characteristics and ‘identifiable signs’ to their digital ID so ‘law enforcement’ can peruse and store this invasive personal data permanently. The proposals, drafted by the state-owned telecoms operator China Mobile, floated a ‘Digital Identity System’ for all users of online virtual worlds, or metaverses. 

The CCP is also leveraging TikTok and smartphone data, and other tactics to build a centralized, national facial recognition database that can identify any of China’s 1.4 billion people within three seconds. Already, China has more cameras per person than any other country in the world, and their cities are the most surveilled in the world.

The bottom line is that the CCP is creating a system of commercial rewards and state controls. Most Chinese people have been convinced that surveillance provides a safe environment and the credit system keeps citizens trustworthy. Perhaps this is where the comparisons to the bleak and relentless iron fist in the velvet glove Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World foretold.

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, he forecasted a managerial industrialism, in which man builds machines that act like men and develops men who act like machines, where the protagonist is doomed. The only thing Big Brother can’t monitor is your inner thoughts.

Sounds like the CCP’s playbook—and could be our own as well, if we do not seize on the decentralization compurting opportunity, and take back the power!