In line with recommendations being laid out by the World Economic Forum and the UN 2030 Agenda, Bologna, Italy, plans to launch a social credit style app that has striking similarities with Communist China’s social credit system. The app rewards or punishes its citizens for their behavior. Dubbed “Smart Citizen Wallet,” the app will track activities such as recycling, public transportation use, and energy management.
The primary argument for the program is to “save resources” and promote climate-friendly behavior. Those displaying good behavior will collect digital coins and receive discounts at local shops based on the given scores.
The app is already active and in experimental stages in Rome and is set to go live in Bologna in Autumn. Bologna Mayor Matteo Lepore and Massimo Bugani, director of the city’s “Digital Agenda,” discussed the project at a March 29 conference. Bugani indicated the app was part of a more comprehensive effort by the city to invest in digital innovation.
In 2020, Italy and six other nations signed an agreement to become “Agile Nations” in partnership with the WEF. Besides Italy, the deal—co-organized by the OECD—includes Canada, Denmark, Japan, Singapore, UAE, and the UK and sets “each country’s commitment to creating a regulatory environment in which new ideas can thrive.” Expressly—with the Fourth Industrial Revolution front and center.
According to Bugani, the app can be seen as an investment toward the digital renewal of Bologna. “It is like getting a “new sewer system,” Bugani reasoned, adding that more and more services will become digital in Italy in the coming years. The local capitalist media compared the app to collecting points from grocery stores.
Interestingly, Salesforce announced last month that the Municipality of Rome picked the company to create an Integrated Citizen Relationship Management platform. Salesforce Chair and CEO Mark Benioff sits on the Board of Trustees at the WEF. The announcement explains further:
Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, today announced that the Municipality of Rome has chosen Salesforce to create an Integrated Citizen Relationship Management platform.
By bringing together Rome Municipality’s 15 city halls and many public administration services, the platform will help the Municipality build a digital-first, human-centric relationship with its three million citizens.
Leveraging Salesforce Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud will deliver omni-channel self-service capabilities, seamless collaboration between local government departments, and empower citizens to receive the information they need faster through AI-powered chatbots.
The launch of the MyRhome platform is another step on the Municipality’s path to creating a “smart city” — an ecosystem of public and private stakeholders serving citizens wherever they are.
The ‘Social Credit System’ is a national credit rating and blacklist being developed by the government of China. The same state that has implemented a tortorous repressive experiment on its citizens in Shanghai, imprisoning them in their homes, with walls & fences topped with barded wire, forcebly incarcerating them in qurantine concentration camps, starving millions slowly to death or has also rapidly increased the suicide rate, literally people throwing themselves out of their own apartments that have become prisons. This is without even mentioning Elon Musk’s Tesla factory being the only business open, as production continues while the workers sleep and work on the factory floor in a modern galley, because the West has got to have its new eco-friendly green electric cars at any cost to human life.
The ‘Social Credit System’ program initiated regional trials in 2009, before launching a national pilot with eight credit scoring firms in 2014. There are multiple, different forms of the social credit system being experimented with, while the national regulatory method is based on blacklisting and whitelisting. The credit system is closely related to China’s mass surveillance systems such as ‘Skynet’ (yes, we kid you not, it is actually called that!), which incorporates facial recognition, big data analysis, and artificial intelligence.
A social credit system does not only create a surveillance system like nothing we have seen before, but it also pushes further the division of society into those who are included and those who are excluded as we have previously mentioned in other writings and by insurrectionist anarchist Alfredo M Bonnano. The included here will be those who accept and know how to use the new technologies, the new surveillances systems, will be rewarded by them, while the excluded will be those who will refuse intergration or do not know how to use said systems.
In Germany in the 1970’s BKA computerized systems were starting to be used against the Red Army Faction, the “most important thing in the fight against terrorism is to be systematic.” Every address and name found on a captured member or at the scene of an attack was put into the database. The computer’s database was split into two sections – PIOS (persons, institutions, objects, and things) and BEFA (observations and search). By the mid-1980s, PIOS had upwards of 135,000 people, 5,500 institutions, and 115,000 objects and things on file. This system was dubbed the “Nuremberg Model,” where “computers churned out up-to-the minute data and predictions that would be handed over to police.” A key example was the July 1980 car crash that killed RAF members Wolfgang Beer and Juliane Plambeck. 2,500 pieces of information were gathered from the crash, some of which warned of an impending attack.
Since the 1980’s technology, surveillance and computer systems have become more advanced, to the extent now that such systems as the ‘social credit system’ can be used in the same way the computer systems were used against any individual or group wanting to actively attack the state and capitalist targets, by using the lack of records of social credit, not paying for services digitally as suspicious behaviour, as was the case with possible members of RAF being suspected if they didn’t have a job, didn’t claim benefits, paid for rent, bills, etc. only in cash.
In this new technological prison system being constructed around us, with the onset of the 4th and 5th Industrial Revolutions, it is paramount to comprehend how technologies are used to surveil us, that as anarchists who want to destroy the existent, we need to assess whether certain devices are really weapons in our hands or not. The social credit systems are not some distant dystopian future anymore, they are already arriving.
There is a storm on the horizon and we need to move towards it before it is too late.
Destroying the networks, the infrastructure that these new systems of control will rely upon will be the key.
The Uncivilized
THE DYSTOPIA CONTINUES: ITALY LAUNCHES A “SOCIAL CREDIT” SYSTEM
On March 28, Matteo Lepore, mayor of Bologna, and Massimo Bugani, councilor for Digital Agenda and Civic Use of Data, announced the city’s Digital Innovation Plan 2022-2024.
“We will start with a pilot project for the city: at the center is the virtuous citizen, the one who, for example, sorts waste well or does not waste energy, or uses public transport and is not fined, or is always active with the Bologna Welcome Card. The city council tells these people ‘we’re going to give you a score,’ as part of a circular reward with economic benefits for individual users.”
Social credit scores are already in use in various parts of the world, but nowhere more so than in the communist hellhole that is China. This dystopian measure acts in the same way as a traditional credit score. However, as the name implies, a person’s score has little to do with their financial prospects or their ability to pay their debts on time. When this dystopian coercive tool is used in an authoritarian dictatorship, such as China, individual rights and freedom of speech are non-existent.
Governments in the Western world are exploring the use of this tool, especially in the wake of the Covid “pandemic”, which demonstrated that governments can gain almost unlimited power in a crisis setting the stage for the next phase of the World Economic Forum’s “own nothing and be happy” plan.
Italy will be the first in the EU, and in the West, to implement a government-sponsored social credit system with the launch of its new rewards-based program that aims to change citizens’ climate change behavior by scoring their compliance.
The program will launch its pilot project in autumn 2022 in Bologna. Citizens who comply with the radical climate change program by showing “good behavior,” such as recycling correctly or using public transportation, will be rewarded with cryptocurrencies and discounts at local retailers, according to local newspaper Bologna Today.
People who sign up will receive a “smart citizen wallet” where they can access their rewards. The higher their score, correlated with good behavioral changes, the more benefits they will receive.
Initially, enrollment in social credit will be voluntary, but there are legitimate concerns that the system will become mandatory in the future, like the dystopian vaccine passport that has become a staple of everyday life in the EU.
MEPs warned last year that such control measures were in the pipeline. At a third press conference – held on November 24, 2021 at the European Parliament in Strasbourg – four MEPs explained why the green certificate violates citizens’ fundamental rights and other related issues. During the press conference, Romanian MEP Cristian Terhes said:
“It is clear that we are currently witnessing the chinification of Europe. Because we see what is happening in China right now with social credit scoring – where the government controls and supervises all the people from the beginning to the end. Everything they do, everything they do, everywhere they walk, it’s all, you know – they control everything and monitor everything. This is an example of tyranny.
“When the government knows everything about you – where you go, what you’ve done while you were there, where you come in – that’s the tyrannical system. And we have seen this system being enforced, right now, under the leadership of Ursula von der Leyen, slowly but surely, in the European Union.
“The green certificate was only a first step. Other proposals are being discussed in Parliament: the European identity card, for example, the European social security card. All this is creating a system that will control, monitor and condition the rights of all European citizens.”
Source: Contra Toda Nocividad