China will be the first country in the world to collectively stop taking phone calls: no answering unfamiliar numbers, no answering landlines, no answering numbers from other cities, and even no answering local unfamiliar numbers. Not only don’t they answer—many will also conveniently mark them as harassment calls. On the surface, this looks like a tacit “public agreement” formed by hundreds of millions of people; in essence, it’s the phone-based social credit being overdrawn under the tolerance and assistance of the system. In the past, a phone call meant “someone is looking for you”; now, a phone call first and foremost means “it could be sales, scams, debt collection, harassment, or trouble.” When a communications tool no longer defaults to trust but instead defaults to defense, it is no longer just a technical issue—it’s an opening into a shift in the structure of social trust.