When Bentham Meets Big Data in Times of COVID-19: Social Credit System of China

Introduction

It would not be hyperbolic to say that literature is a powerful springboard to explore more and gain perspectives. Being a renowned British novelist and social critic, Edward Morgan Forster goes far beyond his time in 1909 with his short sci-fi story The Machine Stops by depicting a future where humans live in isolated rooms in Subterranean Earth. The rooms are in a man made ‘’machine’’, having very few pieces of furniture yet equipped with hi-tech devices which enable them to connect to each other, serve meals, play music, provide hot baths and circulate the air inside. There are hardly no physical encounters and bodily functions are reduced to the essential lower requirements to survive. Believed to be uninhabitable for humans as a result of the over exploitation of the riches of nature, the surface of the Earth can only be seen from the windows of the airships and a request for a visit to the surface of the Earth is hardly welcome in / by The Machine. Like the protagonist Kuno, those who seek for physical, spiritual, mental exploration, meaningful human contact or some touch of the literal natural world are assigned abnormal relative to the general population. Forster’s work is acknowledged to be remarkably prescient in that he foresees the internet technology which nearly leads to dehumanization of people in the dystopian society of his fictional universe of The Machine (Forster, 1909).

Nearly over a century later after the breakdown of Forster’s Machine, the world fell apart at the seams with the arrival of Covid-19 in Wuhan, China in the last quarter of 2019. Covid-19 was accepted and announced a pandemic by World Health Organization on March 2019 as over 180 countries were already affected by the corona virus that was taking lives ceaselessly. As one of the gravest global crises of the 21st century, the Covid-19 pandemic can be said to bring about some inevitable global changes in the lives of humans parallel to the ones of The Machine as a result of the threat caused by the virus and the measures taken by the governments to avoid the spread of the virus and keep the risk at its lowest level. As for the similarities between the post-covid era and Forster’s dystopian universe pictured in his short story, Will Gompertz of BBC writes: ‘’ The Machine Stops is not simply prescient; it is a jaw-droppingly, gob smackingly, breath takingly accurate literary description of lockdown life in 2020’’ in his review on 29th May 2020 (Gompertz, 2020). The period after the breakout of the pandemic is referred to as “the new normal’’ era which is commonly associated with restrictions of the daily human activities, agendas full of deathrates, quarantines, lockdowns, social distancing, masks and hygiene, economic crisis, the rise of online deeds such as online education and online shopping, digitalization and digital divide. The most often-heard sentence, motto per se, is that in the years after the pandemic, nothing will be as it was before. The world is at a crossroads and governments, decision makers, economists, investors, sociologists, conglomerates, tradesmen, PR specialists, academicians and individuals have already taken their share in terms of this global crisis, trying to find a way out of the chaos brought by the pandemic. Meanwhile digitalization and the phenomenon relevant to it such as big data, surveillance, AI, Iot, machine learning have all become the hottest topics of the post-covid period to meet and discuss the rising needs of the digital age in which humans- digital citizens of the cyber world of the 21st century- strive to lead a life, being mostly locked down in their apartments, struggling not to be infected and knocked down by an invisible enemy named Covid-19.