You can extend this metaphor to employment and job performance as well, as explored by Marshall Brain in his short story "Manna" [0]:
> You can imagine what would happen. Manna fires you because you don't show up for work a couple times. Now you try to go get a job somewhere else. No other Manna system is going to hire you. There had always been an implicit threat in the American economy -- "if you do not have a job, you cannot make any money and you will therefore become homeless." Manna simply took that threat and turned the screws. If you did not do what Manna told you to, it would fire you. Then you would not be able to get a job anywhere else.
As we get better at collecting and analyzing data on employees (a hot topic whenever tech interviews are discussed on HN), we should remember to exercise a certain amount of "social forgiveness."
My life history shows this isn’t hypothetical. Rising star from midwest now on a life raft in SF, rent 6+ wk overdue, most accounts closed, no cash and bank account frozen/thawed if I can get funds, and most everyone’s abandoned me. Can’t even afford a bus ride/parking meter to get to a meetup/friends’ game demo.
Simple conversation with old friends from home show I am a good guy but it’s invisible. Instead we see InstantCheckMate telling the world I was arrested for something. They don’t talk about the nuance of the situation, people only see the Red Bang (!) and stop. Add to that two frivolous firings possibly derived from that image, followed by some shit rung jobs I quit because they were the only ones who’d hire me and hold my lack of options over my head.
Now working like a mad man to do something somebody will pay me for. I like to say it always works out in the end. The good part about being choked nearly to death is I fear nothing anymore, including the latter. So this body is a vessel to show the dangers of this type of system via Internet Archive. Block chain terrifies me in this regard.
I now feel why people run around in fear like I used to. I go to the beach every day and the universe seems to bring me exactly what I need. I feel better than ever.
I'm unsure Manna is the best anti-social-credit parable, given that one of the prerequisites for being a member of its utopia is having the government AIs surveil you 24/7 through a brainstem implant. (http://marshallbrain.com/manna7.htm, search for "They watch everything?")
Such a legal environment existed in the US between the Civil War and WWII.[1]
> On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with "vagrancy." Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed [...] capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables [...] and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham's offense was blackness.
> After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees assessed on every prisoner—fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses—Cottenham's sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.
The description goes on to describe how his hard labor was sold to US Steel, and he was sent down into a mine. There he was subject to whipping for not delivering a required 8 tons of coal per day, and threatened with torture for disobedience. More than a thousand other black men were subjected to the same slavery at "Slope 12", 45 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
> You can imagine what would happen. Manna fires you because you don't show up for work a couple times. Now you try to go get a job somewhere else. No other Manna system is going to hire you. There had always been an implicit threat in the American economy -- "if you do not have a job, you cannot make any money and you will therefore become homeless." Manna simply took that threat and turned the screws. If you did not do what Manna told you to, it would fire you. Then you would not be able to get a job anywhere else.
As we get better at collecting and analyzing data on employees (a hot topic whenever tech interviews are discussed on HN), we should remember to exercise a certain amount of "social forgiveness."
[0] http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
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