From the introduction: The world of The Undesirables is not too removed from our own - maybe a couple of decades in our future, but let's not get bogged down in trying to pin down a year. It is a world where corporations and the rise of authoritarianism have created a handful of techno-autocracies, where citizens are monitored constantly. Social credit scores, a system of assigning a numerical value to the state's calculation of the worth of each citizen to the state, are in use across the globe, and this is completely fine and normal.