As I wake up, I put my company issues AR googles on. I know I’m going to take some hell for leaving them off while I slept. As my eyes adjust to being awake and the bright lights, I see the familiar warning message that my name is once again on the shame board for the sleep issue. I also notice something else. Dammit. I forgot to take my mandatory security training. And it was due last night.

I flip open the training with a glance and start taking it all in. The impacts of the great container catastrophe of 2025 are still felt around the world. We used to joke about picking USB drives in the parking lot. Now the joke is about downloading containers and open source packages from the internet. The training reminds me about the harsh consequences of non-compliance, showing biographies of people who recently ignored the training. A lot has happened in the past 8 years. The problems of 2022 seem pedestrian by comparison.

This sort of public shaming would have been utterly unheard of, and indeed criminal just a few years ago. Most governments took radical steps in 2026, once they were able to reconvene, to protect their infrastructure. Governments sacrificed privacy writ large, forcing companies to implement draconian social techniques to ensure compliance. I already have a few points off my social score. I’ve pretty much accepted that I’m just not cut out for the new way of working and that score will always be too low for a to rent my own place.

@jerry To be honest, I have lost capacity to be impressed by such supposedly dystopian fiction since the reality in China easily gets bleaker. You all are too kind a people to have the truly cruel imagination of the authoritarian leaders.

Public shaming is merely a tradition practiced in China for centuries if not millennia. Unheard of? Criminal? That boots me right out of immersion and makes me wonder which nice part of the world the author grew up in.

Credit score is a buffer layer between the debtor and creditor, protecting the privacy of the debtor. No privacy, no need for a score. The government already has a complete profile of you, your family relations, your education history, your medical history, your career history, etc. They may have an internal summarizing score for administrative convenience, but why disclose it to you? To the contrary, no score, no rules on how it’s calculated, no rules on what affects it. They have more control of you that way.

Compliance in China means literally having to have a government sponsored computer in your network (nominally for accounting), as well as a political advisory committee in your org chart. The government legally has access to all your data, no need for a court review like in the US. You might know that WeChat, the WhatsApp of China, has been providing Chinese police with a real time feed of the messages through its system.

OTOH, they could not care less about when you get up in the morning. Obsession with productivity and schedule is capitalism, antithesis of security. As long as you don’t disrupt the security, you can do nothing and burn for all they care. Literally, like in the Urumqi fire.