Navigating the West’s emerging social credit scheme
Express a heterodox opinion and you could end up both deplatformed and debanked
“In the wake of Trump’s 2016 victory, many in Washington and Silicon Valley were too busy blaming social media to consider how the policies they had supported in favour of globalisation and free trade had hollowed out the industrial base that many working-class Americans depended on for good jobs… These disaffected voters resented the cadre of managerial, media, academic, and governmental elites who acted as if they had a monopoly on truth, morality, and decency… now we have this unholy alliance of tech and government coming together to ban ‘misinformation’ and ‘hate’, which they – and they alone – get to define… I implore my successors at PayPal and other Big Tech companies to stop throwing kindling on the fires of populism by locking people out of the online public square and the modern web-based economy. Silenced voices and empty stomachs are fuel for the very extremism you claim to oppose.”
David Sacks, Former PayPal COO and tech entrepreneur
In the same way Russia has sinister oligarchs while Western countries only have admirable entrepreneurs, China has a social credit system while Western countries merely have entirely reasonable curbs on hate speech and hate groups. Of course, you’re not a member of a hate group and, as far as you know, you don’t engage in hate speech, so what do you have to worry about?
Well, especially if you’re a gig economy hustler, it turns out you increasingly need to worry about not just getting deplatformed but also debanked.
In the Before Times
When I first started catching taxis regularly three decades ago, the digital Panopticon we’ve all subsequently adapted to like a frog in boiling water didn’t exist. So, it’s instructive to compare the different experiences of paying to be chauffeured around in 1992 as opposed to in 2022.
First off, there was always some element of luck involved in getting from A to B in ye olden days. It was possible to “ring for a taxi” – that is, ring a taxi company on a landline phone then have them use CB radio to communicate with their fleet of drivers and have one of them come to your home. But this was a risky proposition given there was no more than a 60 per cent chance the booked taxi would ever show up.
A wiser strategy, presuming you were somewhere near a busy traffic area, was to stand on the side of the street and hail a taxi. Especially if you were youngish male – or even worse, a group of youngish males – out late at night, you could expect to have lots of taxis with their vacant light on see you and drive on by. If you could finally get one to stop, you then had to convince the driver it was worth his – it was almost always a man – while ferrying you where you wanted to go. If the trip was deemed either too short or too long, the taxi driver would abruptly roar off mumbling something about shift changeover times.
If you were fortunate enough to be granted entry to a taxi, it was made very clear you were entering the taxi driver’s domain and were expected to abide by his rules. If you were female, especially an attractive young female, there was a good chance you could be quizzed on your sex life, asked whether you had a boyfriend and maybe even outright propositioned. If you were male, the best you could hope for was just to be forced to listen to some talkback radio blowhard at full volume. More often than not, you’d be expected to make encouraging noises as the driver shared his opinions of the government of the day, welfare recipients, single mothers, immigrants, Indigenous Australians and feminists.
There was no star rating system for drivers back then. Indeed, short of sexually assaulting or murdering a passenger, taxi drivers were more or less above the law. There was a small driver identification card with an even smaller photo and ID number comprising a long series of letters and numbers displayed somewhere in the front of the taxi. But in those pre-mobile-phone days, that wasn’t much help. Unless you had either a photographic memory or a pen and paper handy, you wouldn’t be able to record the taxi driver’s ID number. And even if you could record and then report the ID number to the taxi company, they had little incentive to discipline any but the most egregious repeat offenders.
At the end of your journey, you were expected to pay the driver in cash. At some point in the 1990s, EFTPOS machines must have achieved mass penetration in taxi fleets in
Sydney. But for quite some time after their introduction, drivers would sigh heavily if you asked to use your card rather than handing them a stack of notes. (Like the Murdoch press, Australian taxi drivers manage to seamlessly combine a punitively authoritarian worldview with a libertarian attitude towards tax evasion.)
As might be deduced from the above description, I was no fan of the traditional taxi industry. I thought it was a marvellous development when it was disrupted by Uber and its many imitators. Surge pricing aside, I’ve never had an unpleasant Uber experience. I’ve had many enjoyable conversations with Uber drivers, who are instructed to keep their more extreme opinions to themselves.
However, much to my surprise, I’ve been beginning to feel nostalgic for a digitally untransformed era when we weren’t all under constant surveillance and at risk of being shipped off to cyber Siberia for putting a foot out of line.
Travis Bickle - one of the saner taxi drivers who worked during the pre-Uber era
Debanking is the new deplatforming
There’s been no shortage of media attention given to the phenomenon of deplatforming. So, I won’t get into the cancel-culture culture war here other than to observe that individuals can find themselves banished from the digital public square for an ever-growing list of offences.
Some on the Left, particularly old-school feminists judged guilty of TERFdom, have been deplatformed. But, so far, it’s mainly been those on the Right who’ve incurred the censorious wrath of social media’s ‘Safety’ commissars. A sizeable number of conservatives, including Donald Trump, have now been banned from platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. (Twitter founder Jack Dorsey says he agonised over deplatforming a US President, describing the move as a “dangerous precedent” and lamenting the power a single corporation now has to shut down online conversations.)
But this isn’t a Substack about deplatforming; it’s a Substack about deplatforming’s evil twin brother – debanking.
While certain groups, notably poor people and sex workers, have long complained about being given the cold shoulder by financial institutions, the ‘big bang’ of debanking appears to have occurred in 2018. That’s when seemingly every tech company in existence decided to unperson conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
After YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Spotify, Pinterest, Periscope, LinkedIn, Instagram, Mailchimp, Roku, Vimeo and the Google Play Store all kicked off Jones, PayPal banned him as well.
Despite his deplatforming and PayPal suspension, Jones wasn’t expunged from the Internet. He continued to make many millions of dollars a year and obviously found at least one financial institution willing to keep doing business with him. But after the (partial) debanking of Jones, what Jack Dorsey might call a “dangerous precedent” had been set.
Sliding down the slippery slope
Admittedly, there hasn’t yet been an explosion of debanking to rival the rampant deplatforming of recent years. But there are worrying signs that those who depart from the prevailing orthodoxy now risk not just being silenced but also being cast into the digital wilderness at a time when the financial system has been almost entirely digitised.
Several Republican politicians in the US have discovered in recent times that their banks no longer want their business because it “creates possible reputational risk to our company”. PayPal has now partnered with the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to identify and close any accounts belonging to individuals associated with “extremist and hate movements”. Worryingly, the SPLC and ADL, which now take an expansive view of what constitutes racism or antisemitism, haven’t explicitly defined what constitutes an extremist or hate movement.
Judging by recent events, being a blue-collar type sceptical of the laptop class’s hysteria around Covid is enough to warrant designation as a hateful extremist. When Canadian truckers gathered in Ottawa to protest mandatory vaccinations, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked an anti-terrorism law that required financial institutions to cease “providing any financial or related services” to anyone associated with the protests.
It wasn’t just the truckers who were targeted, anybody who donated money to them was also in the government’s sights. At the height of the protests, a minister in the Trudeau government warned that anyone donating to the truckers had reason to be “worried” their bank accounts and other assets would be frozen. This wasn’t just heated rhetoric; some of the protest leaders did have their bank accounts and credit cards frozen.
What digital exile in a cashless economy looks like
People can live with, and businesses can survive, being deplatformed. A debanking is a whole other matter. A comprehensive debanking in a digital economy is the modern-day equivalent of being exiled from the tribe and left to die. If you were to be debanked, money could no longer flow from your employer or customers into your bank account. Even if it did, you wouldn’t be able to spend it anywhere. Very quickly, you would be reduced to relying on support from others – support that may not be forthcoming if those others fear they could suffer a similar fate for helping you.
Acquire a low social credit score in China and you will have to endure slower internet, travel restrictions and restricted employment opportunities. Get debanked in a Western country and you soon won’t be able to pay for food, shelter or medicine.
What David Sacks describes as the “cadre of managerial, media, academic, and governmental elites” now have a powerful weapon at their disposal. Sacks argues that using that weapon in any but the most extreme cases is likely to be counterproductive. “What the woke Left doesn’t seem to realise is that the sort of economic desperation they seek to inflict on their enemies is what produced Trump in the first place,” he notes. “The last thing [elites] should do is create hordes of desperate people, denied a voice and livelihood, and primed to be rallied to a future autocrat’s cause”.
I believe Sacks is right, but I’m worried nobody is paying much attention to his warnings. I fear that the ‘cadre of elites’ – having had their wishes thwarted by gilet jaunes, Brexiters, Trump voters and Canadian truckers in recent years – won’t be able to resist the temptation to increasingly deploy financial sanctions to bring inconvenient dissenters to heel.
So, if you’re a gig economy worker with any unconventional views, I’d recommend you think carefully about sharing them, especially online.