In the dystopian world of the TV show "Black Mirror," the episode "Nosedive" describes a world where social media ratings determine one’s socioeconomic status and access to essential services. Using a mobile application, everyone constantly rates others on a five-point scale. Those with higher scores can access to better services and exclusive clubs, while those with low scores are penalized in many ways. While this may seem like a far-fetched fiction, the reality of today may be not too distant from this portrayal.

The first example that comes to mind is China’s Social Credit System (SCS), developed between 2014 and 2020. The SCS uses artificial intelligence "to develop comprehensive data-driven structures for management around algorithms that can produce real time reward-punishment structures for social-legal-economic and other behaviors" (Larry Cata Backer, Next generation law: data-driven governance and accountability-based regulatory systems in the west, and social credit regimes in China, 2018). The SCS in reality does not actually rely on a universal score but rather on a series of blacklists and redlists managed at different levels (municipal, local, or national). Each authority can manage its own blacklist (e.g., on those who failed to pay fines or child support) and they all converge into the National Credit Information Sharing Platform. As mentioned by Kevin Werbach in his 2022 article “Orwell that ends well? Social credit as regulation for the algorithmic age”, this makes possible that "grade A taxpayers receive customs fee waivers and low-interest loans, in addition to the "home" benefits offered by the tax collection authority". Prof. Werbach however believes that western's depiction of the SCS is is exaggeratedly negative, especially in a world where governments and corporations are extensively tracking our behavior. He sees the Nosedive scenario as more resembling to the ratings system on Uber or eBay, expanded beyond the boundaries of one service.

As noted by Yuval Noah Harari, free-market capitalism and state-controlled communism can be regarded as distinct data processing systems: the former is decentralized and the latter is centralized. It shouldn't come as a surprise then that western's versions of social credit experiare being made mainly by private corporations, especially in the financial sector.