The fifty-six-year-old recently announced the creation of California’s new “Cradle-to-Career” (C2C) system. According to this official statement, the system will integrate “over 1 billion data points — providing unprecedented insight and transparency,” ostensibly “to improve career outcomes for millions of Californians.” C2C’s integration of data, notes the statement, “will provide the public, researchers and lawmakers unprecedented insight that could improve education and quality of life for millions of Californians.”

But it could also make citizens’ lives many times worse. After all, these data points, like oil from the ground, must be extracted.

Which brings us back to China’s “social credit system.” By integrating a multitude of data points, the CCP monitors, manipulates and modifies the behaviors of its 1.4 billion citizens. As someone who previously lived and worked in China, I am intimately familiar with its credit system. In short: individuals and businesses are all given a score. If they fall below this arbitrary number, all sorts of bad things occur.

[I’m so old that I can still recall when Americans had a consensus view that China’s social credit system was *bad*. Of course, I’m so old that I actually know that Orwell’s ‘1984’ is a cautionary tale rather than a blueprint, and that ‘Animal Farm’ didn’t actually endorse selective liberty. Get off my damn lawn, too. — Ed]