[ Repub ] Progressivism, Big Tech, and Social Credit: Welcome to Feudal Society 2.0
What’s being sold to us as “Chinese-style” social control isn’t Chinese at all. It’s old fashioned western totalitarianism.
To keep stirring the pot, we’re republishing our March 31, 2022 piece—where we explained why the so-called “Chinese social credit system” is mostly smoke and mirrors. There is no such thing in China as the Orwellian social credit system Western media keep describing.
In our next article, we’ll explore how our Chinese friends—and yes, friends; they’re not enemies, not even adversaries, just competitors—have cleverly played on Western prejudices to make us chase our own tails. And they’ve done so with the enthusiastic help of Silicon Valley’s financial gluttons and its brigade of techno-fascists—your Peter Thiels, your Larry Ellisons et al.—and the crooked world of venture capital, private equity, and Western elites who still haven’t realized globalization effectively died with the subprime crisis back in 2007.
Maybe our Chinese friends have been doing their homework after all—perhaps they studied that 1950s series Fu Manchu closely, and decided to “Fu Manchu” us for real.
“Let’s start by defining what a social credit system actually is.A social credit system claims to protect individual freedoms. It doesn’t throw you in the gulag for expressing a dissenting opinion. Instead, it makes participation in society—and access to everything that comes with it, from economic activity to the ability to spend your own money—conditional on expressing the approved opinions.Fail to do so, and you’ll find yourself partly or completely banned from online platforms.
That, in a nutshell, is the direction we’re steadily heading toward.
David Sacks, venture capitalist and entrepreneur in Bari’s Weiss’s podcast “Honnestly”. Upate 10/08/2025, David Sacks is today the Trump administration’s AI and crypto czar.
David Sacks knows the game inside out. He was part of the original PayPal Mafia—rubbing shoulders with the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. He was an early investor in companies like Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, and Reddit.
One of Silicon Valley’s most famous venture capitalists, Sacks is now loudly condemning the overwhelming power of the very same Big Tech empires—the GAFAMs—he helped build. Dr. Frankenstein would understand.
There’s definitely something rotten in the “start-up nation”.
Has there been some kind of moral transmutation—where the founding ideal of radical individual freedom has curdled into a paranoid, panopticon-style obsession with control?
The very technologies once hailed as tools of liberation—and, to be fair, they were for a good fifteen years, from about 1995 to 2010—have they become, by their very nature, instruments of submission?
Or worse—were they designed that way from the start?
Only human beings enslave other human beings. Technology itself is neutral; it’s only as good—or as evil—as the use we make of it. If you decide to trim your toenails with a hatchet, you shouldn’t be surprised to lose a toe.
It’s also worth noting that we misuse the word technology. Properly speaking, it refers to the language of the technical arts—the jargon—not the tools themselves or their application. When we say “technology,” what we usually mean is “technique.”
What has truly driven the digital revolution are the exponential advances in microelectronics and semiconductors—the processing power of microchips and the vast increases in data storage—alongside the explosion of bandwidth, whether through fiber optics (another French gem sold off under Macron) or radio waves (4G, 5G). These have enabled the rise of increasingly complex and powerful software and algorithms—the birth of so-called artificial intelligence.
Yet the ambition—both paranoid and childishly naïve—of certain technocrats to model the totality of a human being through data for the sake of control is doomed to fail. To achieve it, one would have to live literally inside the Matrix—suspended in a state not far from artificial coma.
Through a series of gradual capitulations, we’ve already seen a large-scale implementation of vaccine passes—something noted by Loïc Hervé, senator from Haute-Savoie, France, in our own pages. Its effectiveness is nil; its enforcement, at best, haphazard.
A lire également: Loïc Hervé : "ce passe, on le verra réapparaître à d’autres fins"
We’ve witnessed a privileged, wannabe dictator in Canada crush a social upheaval using state violence, trampling fundamental freedoms—denying protesters access to the fruits of their labor, freezing their bank accounts, and effectively stripping them of the ability to live.
Today, we have the tools to monitor and control nearly every aspect of an individual’s social life. Following the model of the health pass, it could be as simple as selectively revoking a range of personal freedoms—granting them only to those deemed “well-behaved.”
What about the development of artificial intelligence in China—the country furthest ahead in this field and reputed to have implemented a social control system over its citizens?
This fascinating video by Glenn Loury lays out all the essential details.
China has adopted a three-pronged approach to regulating artificial intelligence.
First, a set of 30 rules that apply to all algorithms used on the internet. One particularly striking rule requires an algorithm to provide an explanation and correction whenever it infringes on the rights or interests of a user. This is fascinating because, in the West, platforms like YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter rarely offer explanations for, say, account suspensions—not necessarily out of malice, but often because no one actually understands what the algorithm did. In short, no one has a holistic view of these systems’ operations.
Second, tools and systems to test and certify “trusted algorithms” on criteria like robustness, bias, and the ability to provide explanations.
Third, a set of ethical rules governing AI development, coupled with mandatory ethics committees in every organization working in the field—responsible for enforcing the rules and overseeing compliance.
Yes, you read that correctly. The totalitarian, communist dictatorship of China requires that any decision made by an algorithm or AI be explainable and correctable whenever it harms the rights or interests of a user.
In fact, the “social credit system” portrayed in Western media does not exist in China. What currently exists targets legal entities or individuals under court decisions, not the general population. The goal isn’t to control everyone, but to ensure that those required to comply with regulations or judicial rulings actually do so.
For example, if a company fails a workplace safety inspection, it will automatically trigger follow-up inspections by other regulatory agencies. The more compliant a company is, the fewer inspections it will face. This system has existed in France for at least forty years: a serious labor violation can trigger a tax audit or social security investigation under the principle of “he who steals an egg will steal an ox.” The French tax authorities are even allowed to use social media content to target tax payers for audits.
For individuals, the system applies to those fined or involved in civil litigation. A person who hasn’t paid a court-ordered fine might be barred from purchasing a high-speed train ticket until the debt is settled. In essence, it functions as a supplementary punishment for failing to respect the rules of the collective.
We are very, very far from the dystopian nightmare so often painted in the West. Yes, every Chinese citizen has an electronic ID card capable of storing multiple data points—but that’s no different from a French dgital health card introduced in 1998 (you read that right) or the new biometric national ID card.
The much-touted “digital wallet” pushed by European technocrats goes far beyond what exists in China. The Chinese state has explicitly refused to link ID cards to credit scoring systems developed by banks or platforms like Alibaba.
To date, there is no social credit system applied systematically to individuals in China.
What Western observers fail to grasp is that the Chinese state isn’t trying to control individuals. Like most Asian societies, China is a group-based society. The Communist Party doesn’t fear lone citizens; it fears groups. A stark example is the Uyghurs, some of whom have posed radicalization and jihadist terrorism challenges far greater than anything Europe has seen since the early 1990s—while the largest Muslim group in China, the Huis, remains quiet, as do other Mongol Muslim communities. This is not to condone China’s heavy-handed methods or human rights violations in addressing the Uyghur issue.
Stories about social credit being rooted in Confucianism or Legalism are pure fantasy. Reality is far more mundane. Chinese society is not the orderly, well-drilled ant colony Westerners imagine. It is complex, often chaotic, and subject to an astonishing mountain of laws and regulations. China’s economic boom—the fastest the world has ever seen—has triggered changes of such unprecedented magnitude that massive population movements and rural exoduses could not possibly have been managed in any other way in such a short time.
We often forget that China, like Russia, is an empire—a country composed of multiple peoples who today coexist in sprawling megacities. This is not to absolve the Chinese regime, which is authoritarian by our standards. It’s simply a reminder not to ascribe intentions to it that it does not actually have.
The obsession with controlling individuals is distinctly Western—particularly Anglo-Saxon, deeply Calvinist in flavor. To understand it, we have to go back to the first half of the 20th century, to the era’s great fear of “degeneration” and the pseudosciences it spawned in England and the United States: eugenics.
Today, the great existential fears have changed—climate change and pandemics dominate—but we are witnessing a resurgence of Eugenics 2.0, hinted at as far back as the 1960s by the work of Arne Naess, steeped in a profound disdain for humanity.
Beyond the “experiments in human improvement”—forced sterilizations and other grim exploits—this period also saw the rise of cognitive sciences. It was the era that gave birth to mass propaganda and advertising, theorized by Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. By curious coincidence, this is also when McKinsey was founded.
Scott Noble’s excellent documentary, Human Resources, traces the dark art not just of manufacturing consent, but of shaping behavior itself.
The sauce they’re trying to serve us is an old recipe, now cooked in a state-of-the-art, touchscreen-connected, sustainable pressure cooker. Democracies are no more peaceful than dictatorships. They are also no less violent toward dissident citizens, as the Yellow Vest protests in France made abundantly clear.
In truth, when it comes to digital surveillance and social credit, the only real difference between the West and China is this:
In China, an authoritarian state regulates algorithms in what it considers the public interest.
In the West, democracies delegate the regulation of algorithms to private multinationals, whose interest lies not in the common good, but in profit.
In both cases, the result is arbitrary.
France’s anti-fake news law, the Avia law, the Bronner commission, and the European Commission’s endless initiatives to fight disinformation all amount to delegating censorship power to quasi-monopolistic private entities—and perhaps, tomorrow, the power to selectively deny certain individual liberties.
This is what happened in Canada, where platforms froze funds that didn’t belong to them, without any legal basis, since the “state of emergency” law was never passed by Parliament.
Ideally, democratic states would regulate algorithms themselves. We are not heading in that direction, because the issue will be decided at the level of the European Union—a body that does not act in the interest of the people.
We are not heading that way because the very companies that built our digital lives in the name of individual freedom—the same companies that disrupted the old world and amassed colossal fortunes—are run by fifty-something billionaires. They are as jealous of their power as they are terrified of being “disrupted” in turn by the next generation. Just look at how blockchain terrifies everyone, banks first among them.
Instead, we are moving toward a feudal society, where the very conditions of life for the many will be controlled by a tiny minority. Like serfs, we will arrive with our domain—pardon, our domain name.
And social credit already exists in France—it’s been around for thirty years. What, after all, is the points-based driving license1 if not exactly that?
The French points-based driver’s license system (le permis à points) is a system designed to encourage safe driving and penalize traffic violations. Here’s how it works:
Starting Points:
A full, standard French driver’s license starts with 12 points.
New drivers (during their probationary period, usually 3 years, or 2 years if trained under an accelerated program) start with 6 points, which gradually increase to 12 if no infractions occur.
Losing Points:
Points are deducted for traffic violations, depending on the severity of the offense.
Minor violations (like forgetting a seatbelt) may cost 1 point, while serious violations (like drunk driving) can cost 6 points or more.
License Suspension or Revocation:
If a driver loses all 12 points, their license is suspended or revoked.
The driver may have to retake driving exams to regain the license.
Regaining Points:
Points can be regained automatically after 3 years without infractions.
Drivers can also regain points by taking official road safety courses.