QUESTION ASKED: Is California the new China?
The fifty-six-year-old [Gavin Newsom] 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. For example, a person with a poor credit score may find himself unable to enter certain venues, purchase airline tickets or enroll his children in specific schools. The system provides a unified record of all citizens and businesses; it can be monitored and updated in real-time. In other words, you could have a healthy credit score in the morning and find yourself unable to apply for a loan in the afternoon.
According to the aforementioned C2C statement, by “leveraging billions of data points, California’s Cradle-to-Career data system will be a game-changer for improving the quality of life for millions of Californians and highlighting ways to improve opportunity in the classroom and access to the workforce.”
The Golden State, we’re assured, “is leading the nation in equitably connecting our education system to the workforce to ensure every Californian has the freedom to succeed.”
On closer inspection, however, the system will give lawmakers access to intimate information broken down by race, geography and, of course, gender, to, as the statement suggests (or warns) “illuminate and address areas of strength and needed growth and any inequities.” C2C’s partners include the California Department of Education, the Department of Health Care Services, the Department of Social Services and University of California’s Office of the President.
And speaking of California and China, San Francisco is about temporarily become a Potemkin City to better please Xi Jinping:
They cleaned up the streets of San Francisco for China’s dictator. They can fix the crisis plaguing our cities. They just don’t want to because they hate you. pic.twitter.com/4SS4d2FJGU
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 12, 2023