In my recent article series, I document how the US Department of Education's emergency COVID rules for "Distance Learning and Innovation" (85 FR 18638) have deregulated the federal requirements for "adaptive learning" and other ed-tech forms of "artificial intelligence" that are now being bankrolled by floods of stimulus money from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act. I've also documented how such CARES-financed ed-tech, including adaptive-learning and socioemotional-feedback technologies, are set up to be data-mined through public-private partnerships that are being funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's campaign to "Reimagine Education." Through Gates-funded corporate-government partnerships, such as the Gates Foundation's joint venture with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Eric Schmidt, who is a "Technical Advisor" at Google's Alphabet Inc., the Reimagine Education initiative is building a "surveillance capitalist" infrastructure of Big Data to facilitate the tracking of students' cognitive-behavioral and socioemotional algorithms into "Social Credit" systems which will track the "trustworthiness" of students' psychological profiles in order to dictate not only their access to "career pathways" curriculums that determine job placement, but also their access to healthcare, transportation, housing, due process, and even food.
Take a look at a key pillar of the Reimagine Education project: a Gates-funded partnership with the New York-based non-profit corporation, InnovateEDU, which has developed a "Connector" app to help with COVID e-learning by linking Google's BigQuery database to Google Suite for Education (GSFE) in order to streamline the data-mining of student and teacher psychometrics collected by Google Classroom for the purposes of developing "predictive learning analytics" that "personalize" virtual schooling. For a window into how BigQuery is primed to track students' cognitive-behavioral and socioemotional learning analytics from Google Classroom into "Social Credit" or "Trust Score" databases, consider how BigQuery has recently teamed up with a burgeoning "distributed ledger technology (DLT)" corporation known as Hedera Hashgraph, which refers to itself as "a future built on trust."
Hedera Hashgraph, which recently appointed Google to its Governing Council, has also recently partnered with ChainLink: a DLT "middleware" company that also contracts directly with Google's BigQuery through Google Cloud Platform (GCP). ChainLink, which connects hashgraph and blockchain DLTs together while pulling "off-chain" data, such as BigQuery and other Google Cloud data, provides the "middleware" integration necessary to build ubiquitous DLT infrastructure capable of monetizing, or tokenizing, all human behavioral data into digitalized "cryptocurrencies" that can be converted into Social Credit Scores, or Trust Scores, which dictate access to both the civil processes of the "public square" and the commercial exchanges of private business.
In brief, the Gates-financed Reimagine Education project is bankrolling public-private partnerships with edu-corporations such as InnovateEDU, which is setting up digital data-mining that funnels student-teacher data directly from Google Classroom into BigQuery, which is Chainlinked to Hedera Hashgraph: one of the "fastest growing" DLT platforms which can monetize, or tokenize, an exhaustive array of behavioral data, including workforce-training data, through "smart contracts" that calculate "Trust algorithms" for Social Credit.
A "Social Credit" Singularity?
In my book, School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education, I forecast how public departments of education, criminal justice, and health and human services will be merged together through corporate-government partnerships that utilize Big Data to track students for "lifelong learning" in a technocratic digital caste system managed by "Social Credit" algorithms. Now, emergency COVID policies, such as digital "contact tracing" and "distance learning" data-mining, are accelerating the techno-fascist merger of education, healthcare, and criminal justice into a panopticon system of Social Credit surveillance managed by DLTs.
But what is Social Credit? For a case study in Social Credit technocracy, behold China's Sesame Credit System controlled by the Alibaba Corporation, which partners with the USA's BlackRock Inc.: the "world's largest asset management firm."
China's Social Credit System is a mass-surveillance system that uses biometric facial/voice-recognition cameras to track citizens' public behaviors in real time while data-mining the citizens' social media profiles, financial statuses, criminal histories, educational backgrounds, and other public records in order to digitally rank the people with Social Credit Scores which determine not only access to loans and luxury items, but also access to employment, healthcare, housing, education, transportation, online dating services, and even food. It should be noted that, in China, educational records include logs of students' socioemotional-learning algorithms that are tracked by measuring the students' brainwaves through "Focus1" EEG headbands engineered by Harvard neuroscientists who partner with the BrainCo Corporation: an ed-tech company financed by the China Electronics Corporation, which classifies itself as "one of the key state-owned conglomerates directly under the administration of central government, and the largest state-owned IT company in China."
Advocates of Social Credit tout this system of surveillance capitalism as an innovative and efficient means of using technology to condition people to behave in officially "trustworthy" manners. However, according to the Globe and Mail, China's "social-credit system is being used to silence dissent" as award-winning journalist, Liu Hu, who was listed on Reporters Without Borders' 2014 list of "One Hundred News Heroes," was "barred from buying property, taking out a loan or travelling on the country's top-tier trains" as a consequence of accrued "fines" resulting from his reporting. Meanwhile, China has been issuing punitive Social Scores that "blacklist" people who belong to "illegal social organisations" which the Chinese government deems to be in violation of "correct political direction." One example of a "blacklisted" social organization is a Turkic-Islamic ethnic "minority" group known as the Uyghurs. Located in China's Western province of Xinjiang, the Uyghurs are targeted by social creditors who operate detention camps that re-educate these Turkic-Islamic people by brainwashing them into self-censoring their own ethnic-religious identities in order to conform to the "correct political direction" of the Chinese Communist Party.
Now that COVID-19 panic is prompting draconian lockdowns to ostensibly mitigate the spread of the virus, the Alibaba company that runs China's Social Credit system is expanding their network to track digital "immunity passports" which the Chinese people must download through cellphone "contact tracing" apps that use green, yellow, and red color codes to determine whether people can travel or whether they must be quarantined.
If you think Social Credit Scores that track students' brainwaves and immunization records can't happen here in the USA, consider how American schools are already attempting to manage the post-COVID "New Normal" by integrating an arsenal of new "distance learning" and "contact tracing" technologies which collect troves of not only students' learning analytics, but also their biological and mental health data, including their "socioemotional" biometrics and psychometrics. Essentially, the US school system is building the same Big Data surveillance grid as the Chinese Social Credit infrastructure, which is itself funded by globalist American finance corporations such as BlackRock. In fact, Joe Biden has nominated two BlackRock executives for his presidential cabinet: Brian Deese, the "Global Head of Sustainable Investing" at BlackRock, is appointed to be Biden's Director of the US National Economic Council; and Biden's US Deputy Secretary of the Treasury will be BlackRock Senior Advisor, Adewale Adeyemo, who was President Barack Obama's chief negotiator for the Trans-Pacific Partnership. At the same time, China's Focus1 BrainCo headbands have been gaining traction in the US at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas where investors from the United States have promoted the use of BrainCo's EEG headbands in American schools.
In brief, the only thing missing from the USA's Social Credit infrastructure is the legislative greenlight to digitally plug all educational, healthcare, and criminal justice data into Big Databases that aggregate all these psychometrics and biometrics into Social Scores, or Trust Scores, which technocratically micromanage every aspect of human behavior in real time for the purposes of centralized workforce planning and social engineering.
Reimagine "Social Credit" by Spending CARES Money to Pay for Deregulated AI Data-Mining
As the CARES Act dishes out hundreds of millions of stimulus dollars to pay schools to "upgrade" their technology infrastructures under the newly deregulated rules for federal "Distance Learning and Innovation" (85 FR 18638), massive pools of students' cognitive-behavioral and socioemotional algorithms are being tracked and traced into Big Databases, such as BigQuery, Learnsphere, and Cortex. These Big Data enterprises "reimagine education" by deploying artificial intelligence to scan students' psychometrics for the purposes of calculating "predictive learning analytics" that could be converged with healthcare and criminology datasets to build digital psychological profiles for Social Credit dossiers.
To be sure, there is a network of data collaboration between Cortex, Learnsphere, and Google's BigQuery through the Gates Foundation's public-private "reimagine" partnership with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Eric Schmidt, who is an "advisor" at Alphabet Inc., which is Google's parent company. In particular, the Gates Foundation is financing the New York-based InnovateEDU, which just developed a "Connector" application that links student data from Google Classroom to Google's BigQuery repository where large datasets are aggregated together for the purposes of conducting broadscale predictive analytics that can be fed into "Social Credit DLTs." Meanwhile, InnovateEDU owns and operates Cortex ed-tech, which integrates a "student information system (SIS)," a "learning management system (LMS)," and a "formative assessment engine" into a distributed learning-analytics platform. At the same time, InnovateEDU's Cortex is partnering with Learnsphere: another massive "learning science" datahub that aggregates student and teacher data for the purposes of engineering "personalized" AI ed-tech.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
