Do you remember the social strata in High School?  What a nightmare!  Well, Todd Strandberg has written a great article on a definite late precursor to the Beast system that, well, is not unlike the popularity contests of days High School gone by, where standards are arbitrarily created by some select elite and everyone is judged by them, only in this case, it is official government policy.  After eight years under Obama, one can conceive of how this could be implemented on a global scale some day. Makes me shudder!-–S.T. Lloyd

December 5, 2016

The Mark of the Beast System Is Being Field Tested in China

By Todd Strandberg

In the United States “big data” is a major industry. Anytime you buy or show interest in something that can be tracked, a major retailer will try to convince you to buy their products. Last week I looked online for the price of a toner cartridge. Since then, nearly every site I visit has ads for the same toner cartridge. I also regularly get coupons in the mail from office supply firms, so some system is obviously keeping track of my office-related needs.This use of “big data” may be creepy at times in a capitalist system, but the only thing its users are after—is money. For an autocratic government “big data” is a useful tool to keep people enslaved. China is currently plotting to use raw data to create a “social-credit system” that will assign a “personal citizen score” to every single person based on behavior.With Beijing able to draw upon a growing network of data pools, a system of Algorithms could be set up. They could be used to calculate a citizen’s rating, which would then be used to determine a person’s social status.

Source: Nearing Midnight