{"id":20,"date":"2026-11-04T05:02:09","date_gmt":"2026-11-04T05:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phililovestory.org\/?p=20"},"modified":"2026-11-04T05:02:09","modified_gmt":"2026-11-04T05:02:09","slug":"philsugar-quantifying-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/phililovestory.org\/?p=20","title":{"rendered":"PhilSugar | Quantifying Love"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fall 2018 issue
\nApril 4, 2019
\nThe most successful Internet companies, it seems, all learned the lesson of Tom Sawyer. By outsourcing labor to their users, it is as if they have cordially invited friends and neighbors to delight in painting their fence. Instagram does not need to hire photographers; users snap, post, and comment on photos, and their hashtags are a filing system, a taxonomy as meticulously curated as a filing cabinet. Instagram\u2019s parent company, Facebook, relies on all of us to keep each other amused, as does the Chinese platform Weibo. Even Google, Amazon, and Alibaba, operating far afield from social most popular sugar dating platform Philippines<\/a> media, rely on combined consumers and producers (\u201cprosumers\u201d) to let find a sugar baby faster<\/a> how to choose a sugar baby<\/a> them know when their algorithms are helpful. Every society depends on free labor\u2014work that is vital but which goes unpaid. They also allow customers to police the quality of products and websites so that they don\u2019t have to pay someone to do that work. Airbnb, Uber, and eBay apply similar methods, shifting the burden of quality control by having both sides in commercial transactions rate one another. We all give up small treasures\u2014our data\u2014to paint the fence of platform capitalists.
\nWe may soon do the same for government. Every society depends on free labor\u2014work that is vital but which goes unpaid. Smart governments realize that they need to strike some sugar dating GCash scam<\/a> balance between market activity and the free labor that supports families and communities. Policymakers promote business and growth, but they also realize that if every moment were commodified, the foundations of social reproduction would wither away. Index funds may prove a better investment than children. And if you don\u2019t get credit for being civil, paying attention in class, or taking care of your aging parents, why would you?
\nThere are standard solutions to such problems. Courts can drain the bank accounts of \u201cdeadbeat dads.\u201d Churches and civil society groups can stigmatize deviants, and the carceral state can further find sugar babies Quezon City<\/a> scare scofflaws. But these approaches take resources. The perfectly efficient neoliberal state would cut out the middleman. It would learn from Silicon Valley that you can motivate people not only to rate and rank one another, but also to positively enjoy the power and responsibility that rating (and being rated) entails.
\nThe Chinese government is now implementing just such a system at the national level. Called the Chinese Social Credit System (SCS), it has some familiar foundations. Its early iterations (pioneered by private firms) allow users to share images of their scores with one another. As with safe sugar baby sites Philippines<\/a> financial credit scores used by many lenders, the system rewards people for repaying debts promptly. But the SCS does not stop with credit; it factors in court judgments, criminal records, academic dishonesty, jaywalking, moving violations, and failing to pay transit fares.
\nThe Chinese Social Credit System factors in court sugar dating photo verification<\/a> judgments, criminal records, academic dishonesty, jaywalking, and more.
\nSurveillance, software, and relatively simple artificial intelligence can supply a fearsomely panoptic dossier. But this monitoring alone does not address the concern of Chinese Communist Party authorities that cornerstones of their authority are eroding. Thus the SCS will also dent your score for posting \u201cunreliable\u201d information or engaging in nebulously defined negative interactions online. Conversely, the system will reward volunteer activity and \u201cfilial piety\u201d\u2014devotion to one\u2019s sugar baby asking for load<\/a> parents, grandparents, and perhaps other relatives. To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, scoring is \u201cthe method; the object is to change the heart and soul.\u201d
\nHow can a government judge the relative value of working in the market versus visiting a lonely aunt? For the architects of the SCS, these spheres diverge: cash rules commerce, and a new currency will govern culture. That Cebu sugar daddy<\/a> currency is reputation, a single score to express a person\u2019s social value. As China\u2019s SCS approaches its full implementation around 2020, the scoring of activities will spread, assigning points for a wider range of antisocial and social behaviors. Eventually China may make a Great Leap to Commensuration, in which every activity (or inactivity) is judged and converted to points, giving lived reality the feel of a never-ending video game.
\nThe Chinese government claims that the SCS simply reflects the values now embodied in Chinese families, schools, and courts. But with no appeal mechanism\u2014a basic aspect of due process in any scored society\u2014the SCS\u2019s relentless logic of commensuration threatens to supplant, rather than supplement, the authority of families, schools, and courts. The SCS could safe sugar dating sa Philippines<\/a> easily end up serving as a quant-driven power grab, enabling its authors to assert authority over vast swathes of social life in a way they could never achieve via legislation. Such quantitative governance of culture is a paradox: the very effort to articulate the precise value of manners and emotions threatens to unravel them entirely, as spontaneous affections and interactions are instrumentalized into points.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fall 2018 issue April 4, 2019 The most successful Internet companies, it seems, all learned the lesson of Tom Sawyer. By outsourcing labor to their users, it is as if they have cordially invited friends and neighbors to delight in painting their fence. Instagram does not need to hire photographers; users snap, post, and comment […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/phililovestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/phililovestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/phililovestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phililovestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phililovestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/phililovestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23,"href":"https:\/\/phililovestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions\/23"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/phililovestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phililovestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phililovestory.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}