“Nosedive (Black Mirror)”: Are We Heading Towards a Digital Colonization of Reality?

Thus, the episode Nosedive depicts the social and psychological downfall—nosedive—of Lacie, a young woman in a world where daily behaviors are constantly sanctioned by a social credit score.

Perspective of Fiction and Reality

Dating back to 2016, Nosedive should be re-watched in parallel with a documentary from 2021. It is the film My Wife Has Credit, by Sébastien Le Belzic, a French journalist based in Beijing since 2007. In this documentary, he follows the daily life of Lulu, his Chinese wife, for a year. He films her in a society where social credit has become a norm, just like in Nosedive. We have definitively transitioned from fiction to reality.

The main difference between My Wife Has Credit and Nosedive lies in the identity of the entity that imposes “good” behavior on citizens. In the Black Mirror episode, the commands come from the community of people one encounters daily. Imagine the colonization of reality by social networks: everyone becomes excessively benevolent to ensure good social credit scores.

In the documentary, the incentive for good behavior comes from the state. Using each citizen’s social credit, it seeks to ensure the construction of a society aligned with the contemporary ideology of the Chinese Communist Party. In both cases, the result is the same: individuals striving to maintain their social credit to secure their social status.

Towards New Social Behavior Laws?

During the filming of the documentary, Lulu, the filmmaker’s wife, gains points. This filming even gives her the opportunity to discover the benefits offered by her “good” social credit score: easier access to public services, the ability to travel, access to better services, and access to loans, among other things.

Conversely, in the fiction, we witness the heroine Lacie’s descent into hell. In search of a new apartment, she seeks a few more points that will allow her to access the much-desired residence, but this quest ultimately leads her to a minimum social credit score. For the viewer’s pleasure, Murphy’s law comes into play, and everything that can go wrong does go wrong. With a deteriorating social credit, Lacie will also have to degrade her way of living.

In Nosedive, we see a flourish of hypocrisies because it’s the people around each individual who rate them. Unlike on social networks, there is no possible anonymity—through connected lenses, everyone sees the identity and social credit score of their interlocutor in augmented reality—daily life then takes politically correct and overly sweet turns, all tinged with genuine slyness.

On the side of My Wife Has Credit, one can legitimately question the sincerity of the communist citizens who, thanks to their social credit, benefit increasingly from the advantages of consumer society à la Chinese style. This sincerity is further challenged when we learn that the latest innovation from the Chinese authorities consists of installing giant screens displaying the names of people with “non-conforming behaviors,” even for something as minor as “jaywalking.”

Towards New Resistance Behaviors?

Before hitting rock bottom, Lacie, in her nosedive, meets a woman who has chosen to live outside the social rating system, in a form of digital marginality. She doesn’t seem any worse off for it. But we only see her briefly. At least she has a bluntness that stands out. In My Wife Has Credit, it’s an artist who provides an alternative discourse to the more or less resigned approval of Chinese citizens. To understand this activist’s approach, one must note another difference between Black Mirror fiction and Chinese reality.

Means of Social Credit Scoring

In Nosedive, the scoring is done via the phone that everyone constantly carries. There is no difference from our present, except that the default interface is the rating tool. The phone synchronized with connected lenses, with a thumb gesture, one rates a person identified. Instantly, she is notified by a chime: the short melody changes if the rating is positive or negative.

In My Wife Has Credit, social credit is established by the sum of digital data that citizens produce in their daily lives. Each citizen thus has a digital clone in the government servers, fed by all this data. Some of it has shorter cycles than others. These are well-paid taxes and repaid loans. It’s the medical file indicating responsible or irresponsible behavior. These are the purchases of more or less virtuous products, etc.

Other data has much shorter cycles and almost immediate consequences on Chinese social credit. These data are generated by cameras that, throughout China, spy on citizens. In the documentary, we learn that in major Chinese cities, there is up to one surveillance camera for six inhabitants, compared to one for 130 in Nice, the most equipped city in France. Thus, the entire Chinese territory seems under video surveillance with increasingly shorter data analysis cycles as seen with the “digital pillory” screens.

Staying Under the “Radars”?

This generalized video surveillance takes such a dimension that an artist tried an action to warn his fellow citizens; this action must surely also cost him a drop in his social credit score. After weeks of investigation and measurements, he invited volunteers to follow him on a strange path: walking down a street without ever entering the field of one of the 90 cameras with which it is equipped. In single file, the small group walked along the walls, crouched, or hid behind billboards. To stay anonymous, it took the group two hours to cover the kilometer of this street. Edifying, isn’t it?

On Privacy and Citizenship in Digital Times

It’s clear, the notion of privacy no longer exists, neither in Nosedive nor in My Wife Has Credit. Lulu, the Chinese woman, says it at least twice. Once, she is not surprised when her face is used to validate a payment without her prior consent. Another time, she says that familiar phrase that nevertheless sends chills down one’s spine: “I have nothing to hide. Let them [the government] watch me, I don’t care…”

In Nosedive as in My Wife Has Credit, we could also talk about fiat currency being replaced by electronic transactions and wallets. In this regard, there is a moment of irony in the documentary, when the destruction of banknotes is mentioned: it’s the face of Mao Zedong that, every day, disappears a little more from the daily life of the Chinese.

Speaking of money, we should spend a few moments on the word “fiduciary” attached to currency. Its etymology comes from the Latin fides, meaning faith or trust. Thus, when “with a third party, I engage in a financial transaction using fiduciary money, I have the state’s guarantee on the value of the cash I use. Beyond this trust, do I need it to know the identity of the two parties and the object of the transaction?”

In the documentary, it is said that the Covid-19 crisis accelerated the deployment of social credit scoring across almost the entire Chinese territory. And we watch Nosedive and My Wife Has Credit thinking this could never happen in France or Europe. Are we so sure? What guarantee do we have that our territories would remain free from these developments? Conversely to this perhaps very French reserve, a Chinese academic declared: “And if the direction of history was to accept all this!” And you, what do you think? What if all we had left was the anger and madness that Lacie falls into at the end of the episode?