“So Creepy It Must Be True!”: Techno-Orientalism, Technonationalism, and the Social Credit Imaginary Available to Purchase

Almost immediately upon its release, the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive” became sutured to China’s social credit system in popular media outlets. Report after report came to deploy images and facets of “Nosedive” to describe features like mandatory “citizen ranking” or “citizen scoring” using advanced artificial intelligence and big data that simply did not, and still do not, exist as national policy. Rather than the texts of statecraft or entertainment themselves, this chapter takes these inaccurate dystopian sci-fi descriptions of China’s social credit system and the presumed prophetic quality of the show as technologically creepy and symptomatic of new instantiations of techno-Orientalism and rising technonationalisms. This is demonstrated through a theorization of a social credit imaginary that codes US digital surveillance technologies themselves as Chinese while displacing their roles in broader trends of control in postindustrial economies.