Have you read Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom? This reminds me of Whuffie. I harbor a slow-developing theory that we are headed towards a post-money society, because money is an inefficient and game-able proxy for value. The technology isn't there yet, but the need is. I see trust-less digital scarcity as one necessary step towards this reality. I suspect that we will move through an uncomfortable phase of centralized social credit before we can arrive at decentralized social credit, but maybe not.Importantly, Yang's social credit never goes negative, thereby making it an incentive rather than a mechanism of punishment. Of course you could obviously restrict voting to people with a lifetime social credit of 5000 or some other dystopian shit but it's an interesting idea.
I read nine-tenths of that shitty-ass book just so I could make this comment: Yang's social credit has exactly fuckall to do with Doctorow's Whuffie because Doctorow's Whuffie is a poorly-thought-out strawman argument for esteem to replace not just money, not just commerce, but also criminal justice just so that he can make a really shitty argument about social media. WHILE Doctorow was writing that book, ample evidence was documented in fucking Boing Boing no less that trolls liked trolls and that provocative acts earned plenty of prestige from people who liked provocative acts. Which did not prevent Doctorow from writing a shitty 1-world-government cautionary tale that didn't pay the scarcest attention to either the underpinnings nor the outcome of his system at an economic, social, geopolitical, physical or emotional level. I'm mad at this book. I'm mad at you for making me read this book.