Lodging Denied: Privatized Social Credit & Guilt by Association

A social credit system, like the one implemented by China, is an infrastructure that assigns ratings to citizens of the country it’s established within. If you are thinking of Black Mirror, then you are not too far off as a social credit system can be used to treat individual citizens better or worse on the basis of their assigned social credit score. Although the West has not quite established a formal social credit system, it is well on its way but doing so by waging cultural battles and applying political pressure on corporations to act as the private sector enforcers of the ruling class doctrine.

Privatized social credit is in motion and the moral enforcers are out in full force. Corporations will not only punish you for your views but also for views held by your loved ones. Guilt by association is enough for sentencing as we saw in one disturbing case with Lauren Southern.

Southern’s parents were apparently banned from Airbnb for being related to a political thinker who had committed a thought crime. Particularly concerning is Airbnb’s rhetoric in the screenshot attached by Southern, especially the following portion:

For the safety of our community, we may remove accounts that are closely associated with people who aren't allowed to use Airbnb.

This explicitly lays out that simple association, with the strength of the association not being specified, with someone, deemed guilty of wrongthink by the Airbnb Thought Police can be cited as a reason for being denied lodging through the platform.

Gregg Re reached out to Airbnb for comment on the situation and had the following conversation with an individual representing Airbnb, Ben Brait.

Breit, as the Airbnb representative, gives condescending replies and effectively dodges inquiries into the situation.

Adding to the confusion, Southern’s parents apparently had their account reinstated but no formal appeal was filed. One is left to assume Airbnb noticed the public backlash and restored the accounts to avoid further bad publicity. If bad publicity was the driving reason Airbnb reversed its decision, then how can private individuals who lack a large platform like Southern fight back on corporate abuses of power?

There’s something gross about Airbnb canceling memberships of a family for being related to a political figure. It’s likely that many Americans will be renters at some point in their lives given economic conditions. Do we want a culture where lodging is denied over politics? I certainly don’t, but Airbnb, through its ideological gatekeeping, is pushing American society in that direction. As for Southern, she and her family had enough of Airbnb’s shenanigans and have decided to no longer use the service again for ideological discrimination by affiliation.

It’s one thing to directly deny services to someone your company dislikes and something else entirely to deny services on the basis of affiliation. If one subscribes to the theory of Kevin Bacon, humans are separated by no more than six degrees of connection meaning we’re at most six people away from meeting any individual on the planet. If loose affiliations are enough to justify actions against someone, then how many degrees of Kevin Bacon is any random individual away from being canceled for some obscure connection? Is it one? Is it two? Is it four? Is it six? Given the situation surrounding Southern’s family, we are left to ponder these questions and the implications of Private Sector Social Credit.