The American version

Ask an American whether they would accept a social credit system and the answer is no, across every party. Ask whether they have ever been cut off from something — an account, a platform, a service — with no stated reason and no route of appeal, and the answers change.

What it actually is

Not one government registry. A patchwork of private and quasi-public gatekeepers that between them decide what a person can do:

• De-banking and payment cut-off. An account closed, the reason withheld, no appeal. Losing access to payments is losing access to employment, housing and most of ordinary life.
• Platform and marketplace removal. Access to reach people, or to earn, revoked under a rule the person is not permitted to read.
• Scoring by inference. Assessments assembled from data a person never handed over and cannot inspect or correct. They do not have to be accurate to have consequences.
• Access conditioned on compliance. A service that is effectively mandatory, granted or withheld on terms nobody voted on.

The definition that matters

What makes something a social credit system is not its branding.

Consequences assigned to a person by an unaccountable process, with no due process attached.

By that definition, the question is not whether America could get one. It is how much of one is already assembled — and the honest answer is: quite a lot of it, built piece by piece by parties who each only built one piece.

The worked example: vehicles

The clearest current case, because it is physical and documented as a named problem:

• Vehicle surveillance — a car that continuously reports where it has been, to parties the owner did not choose.
• Remote shutdown — the capability to disable a vehicle from outside it.
• Older vehicles regulated off the road — removing the option of driving something that can do neither of the above.

Put the three together and you have a permission to travel that can be revoked. Each piece arrived separately with its own justification, which is exactly how the rest of it arrived too. The files are in Problems.

Also in this area

• Why it is not called that — distribution as a defence against being named.
• How we remove it — due process where consequence lands.