China’s dystopian push to revolutionize surveillance
[I recently talked to Chinese scholars and activists about this, who broadly shared the worries expressed in this article, but they were also aware that theirs was probably a minority position. For most people, they said, surveillance is not the problem (it's a given). More worrying for them is the experience of the total breakdown of social bonds and trust after a generation of breakneck transformation. Against this background, social credit systems can be seen a way of reestablishing trust in society. Felix] China’s dystopian push to revolutionize surveillance By Maya Wang | August 18 at 10:09 AM Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/08/18/chinas-dystopian-push-to-revolutionize-surveillance/?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.df73d813863e As part of a new multimillion-dollar project in Xinjiang, the Chinese government is attempting to “build a fortress city with technologies.” If this sounds Orwellian, that’s because it is. According to the Sina online news portal, the project is supposed to strengthen the authorities’ hands against unexpected social unrest. Using “big data” from various sources, including the railway system and visitors’ systems in private residential compounds, its ultimate aim is to “predict … individuals and vehicles posing heightened risks” to public safety. And this isn’t the only project in China that aims to expand surveillancewhile denying people privacy rights. Across the country, local governments are spending billions of dollars implementing sophisticated technological systems for mass surveillance. The consequences for human rights are ominous. subscribe The story must be told. Your subscription supports journalism that matters. Try 1 month for 99¢ Beijing’s impulse to surveil is certainly not new. But mass migration and privatization during the transition to a market economy have undermined the power of older practices that allowed the state to keep tabs on people, such as the “hukou” residency registration system. To bolster and broaden surveillance, the Ministry of Public Security turned to new technologies, launching the Golden Shield Project in 2000. The project aims to build a nationwide, intelligent digital surveillance network capable of identifying and locating individuals, as well as offering the state immediate access to personal records at the push of a button. This dystopian project is bearing fruit. China’s pervasive Internet censorship and its use of countless security cameras in public spaces are well known. Recent reporting reveals authorities’ aspirations to enable facial recognition through upgraded cameras, to calculate citizens’ “social credit” scores based on economic and social status and to establish a national DNA database that logs genetic code irrespective of anyone’s connection to a crime. But we still know little of China’s full range of efforts to revolutionize surveillance. We have few details about China’s use of voice and speech recognition. There has not been any investigation into China’s nationwide “safe city” projects that vow to promote public safety using technology. We know even less about how China plans to use big data for crime prediction. What we do know is that China has no effective privacy protections and that it often treats peaceful speech as a crime. It is also worrying that some of these systems are designed to identify “focus personnel” — a catchall term for both those with a criminal record and those whom authorities deem threatening or antisocial, including peaceful critics, political activists, minorities or people with a drug use record. The story of Wu Bing may offer a taste of what is to come. Wu is one of nearly 3 million individuals whose name is logged into a police database known as the “Online Dynamic Control and Early Warning System for Drug Addicts.” Wu kicked the habit in 2005, but whenever he uses his ID — when he checks into a hotel, for example — the police are alerted and sometimes force him to take a drug test. What’s worse, the Chinese government is promoting its surveillance model abroad. It has pushed the concept of “Internet sovereignty” — the idea that, instead of a free World Wide Web, a country’s rulers should determine what netizens can say and read. And its efforts are aided by Chinese companies eager to peddle their wares. In 2014, a Human Rights Watch report found that Chinese telecom giant ZTE sold technology and provided training to monitor mobile phones and Internet activity to Ethiopia’s repressive government. Meanwhile, closed-circuit television cameras and monitoring systems made by Chinese companies — some high-definition and equipped with facial and movement recognition powers — have been sold to countries around the world, including Brazil, Ecuador, Kenya and Britain. But we are beginning to see a backlash against Chinese companies with strong ties to the Chinese government, prompted by security concerns. In July 2017, Germany became the first European Union
Rutger Bregman: Look at the phone in your hand – you can thank the state for that (Guardian)
Original to: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/12/phone-state-private-sector-products-investment-innovation (bwo Barbara Strebel, with thanks) Look at the phone in your hand – you can thank the state for that Rutger Bregman, The Guardian Opinion, 12 July 2017 We know the private sector has given us life-changing products. But we forget that it is state investment that makes innovation possible in the first place • Rutger Bregman is the author of Utopia for Realists (translated by Elizabeth Manton) Who are the visionaries who drive human progress? The answer, as we all know, is the geeks, the free spirits and the crazy dreamers, who thumb their noses at authority: the Peter Thiels and the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world; the likes of Steve Jobs and the Travis Kalanick; the giants with an uncompromising vision and an iron will, as though they have stepped fresh from the pages of one of Ayn Rand’s novels. “Innovation,” Steve Jobs once said, “distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” Now, if ever there were a prototypical follower, it would have to be the government. After all, why else would nearly all the innovative companies of our times hail from the United States, where the state is much smaller than in Europe? Media outlets including the Economist and the Financial Times never tire of telling us that government’s role is to create the right preconditions: good education, solid infrastructure, attractive tax incentives for innovative businesses. But no more than that. The idea that the cogs in the government machine could divine “the next big thing” is, they insist, an illusion. Take the driving force behind the digital revolution, also known as Moore’s law. Back in 1965, the chip designer Gordon Moore was already predicting that processor speeds would accelerate exponentially. He foresaw “such wonders as home computers”, as well as “portable communications equipment” and perhaps even “automatic controls for automobiles”. And just look at us now! Moore’s law clearly is the golden rule of private innovation, unbridled capitalism, and the invisible hand driving us to ever lofty heights. There’s no other explanation – right? Not quite. For years, Moore’s law has been almost single-handedly upheld by a Dutch company – one that made it big thanks to massive subsidisation by the Dutch government. No, this is not a joke: the fundamental force behind the internet, the modern computer and the driverless car is a government beneficiary from “socialist” Holland. Our story begins on 1 April 1984 in a shed knocked together on an isolated lot in Veldhoven, a town in the south of the Netherlands. This is where a small startup called ASML first saw the light of day. Employing a couple of dozen techies, it was a collaborative venture between Philips and ASM International set up to produce “hi-tech lithography systems”: in plain English, machines that draw minuscule lines on chips. Fast-forward 25 years, and ASML is a major corporation employing more than 13,000 engineers at 70 locations in 16 countries. With a turnover of over €5.9 billion (£5.2bn) and earnings of €1.2bn, it is one of the most successful Dutch companies, ever. It controls over 80% of the chip machine market – the global market, mind you. In point of fact, the company is the most powerful force upholding Moore’s law. For them, this law is not a prediction: it’s a target. The iPhone, Google’s search engine, the kitty clips – it would all be unthinkable without those crazy Dutch dreamers from Veldhoven. Naturally, you’ll be wondering who was behind this paragon of innovation. The story told by the company itself fits the familiar mould, of a handful of revolutionaries who got together and turned the world upside down. “It was a matter of hard work, sweat and pure determination against almost insurmountable odds,” explains ASML in its corporate history. “It is a story of individuals who together achieved greatness.” Government isn’t just there to administer life-support to failing markets. Without it, many would not even exist There’s one protagonist you never find mentioned in these sort of stories: government. But dive deep into the archives of newspapers and annual reports – back to the early 90s – and another side to this story emerges. From the get-go, ASML was receiving government handouts. By the fistful. When in 1986 a crisis in the worldwide chip industry brought ASML to its knees, and while several big competitors toppled, the chip machine-maker from the south of Holland got a leg-up from its national government. “Competitors who had survived the crisis no longer had enough funds to develop the next big thing,” explains the company’s site. So while its rivals licked their wounds, ASML shot into the lead. Is ASML an anomaly in the history of innovation? Not quite. A few years ago the economist Mariana Mazzucato published a fascinating
Re: Return to feudalism
When the OWS' twitter account and website got hijacked by certain Justine Tunney and co., it was rare. Those days when Tunney got hired by Google and started to promote her boss and the working conditions at Google campus -like free lunch- it was pretty awkward. Then she went on promoting minocracy on twitter, even publicly campaigning for Eric f.ink Schmidt as CEO for the US.. it was like a sci-fi Things changed when Snowden leaked about the PRISM, and all other stuff.. and Assange published the book about Google's visit.. This was Wikileak's first effective sabotaging to the upcoming US elections. Schmidt lost all his chance to make a serious candidate, He became publicly as a bad candidate as say Anne Marie Slaughter, George Soros, or Henry Kissenger's, excellency. Hillary was not any better though. Trump + Bennon, and Industrial Internet guy behind Cambridge Analytica, ran a counter-campaign, not against a Clinton but against Tunney's premature US CEO campaign for Google Party's Schmidt candidate. Hillary was so unpopular after Wikileak's intervention that she looked even worse to (global) public then Schmidt. Then, Trump took over as the CEO of US. Silicon Valley is in grief but there emerges a new contender candidate.. Elon Musk. What is common in Musk, Schmidt, Soros, Slaughter, Kissinger,.. less but also with Clinton and Trump being the worse of the worse? We are looking at the realisation of Platos' dream of philosopher king. These people do not belong to capitalist class anymore. They are philosopher kings to be. Especially Musk and Schmidt.. Kissinger and Soros do belong to the previous generation, still have to bear an adviser position. The agency of managerial class, which is preparing to claim full economic and political power, unified, absolute is Musk, and Schmidt. The way Trump translates such thrust, and by reversing towards national capitalists, sounds and looks like fascism Which was a form of managerial class power-claim; though was not aiming absolute power. Its contemporary varieties was developmental-nationalist and Keynesian-corporatist, and nomenclature-socialist forms of state. Managerial class,did not have the economic means to forge a full-scale attack then. It has today captured both Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley, Beijing, Moscow, and Brussels.. Capitalists this time might really be f.cked up. But worse then the capitalists, is the situation of those non-capitalist and non-managerial ones. Billions of whose lives are at fire as of today. Some of those amongst the billions are against all forms of domination, they are divergent class, los unmanagables giving the fight. We are at the dawn of a last major fight to be given between the ruling/to be classes hungry for absolute power and those who would never accept to be ruled and bullied like this, also on be half of the passivized. On 17 September 2017 at 20:39, Morlock Elloi wrote: > This meme cannot be repeated often enough (even if one starts to resemble > RMS). > > While esoteric discourses about consequences can be amusing, we really > need to get back to the root causes. They are not novel, just often > forgotten. > > From https://theconversation.com/the-internet-of-things-is-sendin > g-us-back-to-the-middle-ages-81435 : > > The underlying problem is ownership > <> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Return to feudalism
On 18/09/17 00:58, Morlock Elloi wrote: > Using the concept of property is legitimate and effective action. It > exists, is enforced, works, and however biased it may be, or however > odious one may think it is (alternative being ... ?), it is far too > ingrained into the society to be 100% biased. Rejecting it on moral > grounds (in favor of what?) would be like Indians rejecting use of > firearms. Indeed. Property relations: social relations with regard to things. Rather difficult to do without. How (and by who) they are configured is what matters. “It is not wrong to say that the nature and intent of a society reveal themselves in the legal and customary concepts of property held by the various members and classes of that society. These property concepts do not change without an incipient or fundamental change in the nature of the society itself. The history of property relations in a given society is thus, in a way, the history of the society itself .” (Schurmann 1956: 507) “No doubt the eighteenth century preferred rational treaties expounding the theory of property to historical essays describing the theories of property. But … we … know that the institution of property has had its history and that that history has not yet come to an end … We begin with the knowledge that there must be as many theories of property as there have been systems of property rights. Consequently we abandon the search for the true theory of property and study the theories of the past ages. Only thus can we learn how to construct a theory suitable to our own circumstances” (Schlatter 1951: 10). and from the thesis where these quotes feature: "...The commons is seen as the paradigmatic non-property case. Yet both commoning and private property concern the same subject matter: how we relate to each other with regard to things and with regard to the rest of the world. Who has access to what resource, what are those with access allowed to use the resource for, who takes responsibility for the resource, what happens to the wealth that can be generated from the resources, who can sell, buy or otherwise transfer the privilege of access to a resource and its wealth effects, who makes the decisions about these things, how are the decision-making processes organised in cases where more than one individual holds the decision-making authority and, finally, with reference to what values are these decisions legitimised? Once we uncover the elements which both share, these two different kinds of property can be brought together under one analytical umbrella. The purpose is to reveal the way in which each of them functions and the different kinds of social relations that they give rise to. In this way the applicability of either of the two in a given context – for instance a particular resource or class of objects – can be assessed on the same terms. A normative evaluation can start from there. Because property in general has come to be understood as synonymous with private property, the way in which analysts are able to think about property has been greatly limited. By opening up the analytical framework of property to include at once commoning and private property, both will be seen in a new light. Moreover, given the anti-capitalist starting point of the thesis, understanding commoning in the same terms as property can better facilitate a transfer of land, its resources, and the means of production and distribution, from being organised with private property rights to become organised through modes of commoning. It should here be noted that I am in no way arguing that private property should be done away with [1], rather I am hoping to reveal its anatomy, so that we may assess its usefulness for different purposes and in different domains. While the idea is to better be able to limit its range, my account of property should not be understood as a normative exercise. While I point to certain normative implications throughout my discussion, it is not my primary objective to provide a thorough moral analysis of property. Many of these have been provided by others more skilled in such matters. Rather, I will address the way in which property is understood to function in liberal jurisprudence. Specifically, I will draw upon J.W. Harris’s work, whose analytical approach and framework describes with most accuracy the way in which the institution of property in capitalist democracy functions legally as well as economically. His account is consistent with, and indeed clarifies, many preceding accounts of property in liberal jurisprudence on the one hand, and on the other, economic policy which implements and regulates property." Property is a code. Happy hacking. m [1] I prefer dominion over a few things, like, generally, underwear, toothbrush and, sometimes, bed. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics o
Re: Return to feudalism
On 18 September 2017 at 22:28, mp wrote: > > > and from the thesis where these quotes feature: > > Interesting. Has this thesis a name, an author, and is it available ? -- Frederic # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Return to feudalism
On 19/09/17 00:18, Frederic Janssens wrote: > On 18 September 2017 at 22:28, mp wrote: > >> >> >> and from the thesis where these quotes feature: >> >> Interesting. Has this thesis a name, an author, and is it available ? “Property, Commoning and the Politics of Free Software” (PhD, 2010) It was published here: http://www.commoner.org.uk/?p=107 And here: https://commoning.wordpress.com/essay/ Instead of a license: The words of “Property, Commoning and the Politics of Free Software” that you can read on your screen or print on paper belong to everyone. There is only one mind. However, by default they seem to belong to me exclusively in (copyright) law and in certain customs. These customs I wish to change. A culture where the word needs no protection from enclosure should be a minimum demand. Sharing is caring. If you use substantial parts or make money – ha! – on any of this, then do please get in touch, and if you forget to refer to where “your” ideas came from in an academic context, well that’s your problem. I don’t really believe in that system anyway, so what happens there is of little interest. Attribution is not only to be nice, but also to provide links between words with ideas, arguments and other trains of thought. Think carefully. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Return to feudalism
Whomever, whatever controls the protocols, controls the device and reaps the rewards that the device brings. This is because the protocol is a proxy for the actualized projection of energy or the pathway that energy is mandated to follow. A protocol determines the characteristics of the energy flow: where power accumulates, where it is sourced -- at the scale of electronic circuits up to the widest expression of the techno-social system. An electronic circuit is simply a set of parameters/protocols to confine and direct the flow of electrons. Allowing them to temporarily persist before being shunted along by the 'force' of electric current. Did you ever consider that electrical generation is a 'push' service? When we 'pay' attention to the dominant flows -- of what is labeled, for the Marxist to understand, 'social capital**', but is actualized as 'social energy' -- we give our personal energy to those dominant flows: we are paying with our invaluable and limited life-time. The accumulation of power and energy in the socio-political sphere ultimately rests on the ability of protocols within that system to accumulate and direct the energies of the human lives of those 'participating' in that system. The statement "Kim Jong-Un would have less power if the population of North Korea were 250,000 instead of 25 million" may seem obvious, but to generate a nuclear weapon requires a certain minimal 'infrastructure' which, again, ultimately rests on human shoulders to create and maintain. For generating the same weapon system, the population size will differ somewhat from nation-state to nation-state, based on other energy sources available to the system (in whatever form: relative ease of access to hydrocarbons, intellectual development, etc), but there is a certain minimum cumulate energy level necessary to 'build a (nuclear) bomb'. The bomb, with its purpose to direct concentrated destructive energy to the 'enemy' is a cumulative expression of many interlocking protocols that actually 'gather' energies together for that energized expression. That minimum energy level is also necessary to control the process to the high degree of precision necessary to materialize the technologies necessary to construct a bomb. This is why there is a difference between simply building a bomb (where size doesn't matter), and fabricating one that fits in the nose-cone of an ICBM: smaller size equilibrates with higher degree of precision which means greater energy consumption per unit device: therefore more difficult to do unless you tap more energy from the given population base, or you have a larger population base... If you starve 23 of the 25 million North Koreans to near-death you might make a dent in the energy procurement system necessary to construct a bomb, though perhaps not. The elites drive the process, though they need to eat as well. We in the west exist in a different energy-harvesting regime, but one that concentrates our attentions with impressive thoroughness. It has many tentacles, many of them screen-related, though as pointed out, IoT quickly insinuates itself into tampons, medicine, wine bottles, toilets, ... everything ... IoT represents another dimension of the acquisition and control of power flows: regulation via feedback. Regulation saps energy from a system by forcing it into rigid flow patterns. Regulation exists on a sliding scale that spans anarchism to state-sponsored sclerosis. Regulate what is 'necessary' to reach the goals of the system, let the rest go. Regulation demands constant feedback to ensure the sweet spot, feedback costs energy. Big data is regulation run amok, and one [energy] price is CO2-generating, hydrocarbon-burning server farms. When everything is known about every living consumer, then the planet will be covered with server farms. **capital is far too mechanistic/materialist word to be using anymore (or should have ever been!), rooted as it is in Newtonian relations -- capital is an expression that reifies what is a temporal concentration of energy (gold in Ft. Knox, bbl of petroleum reserves, well-fed human slaves, explosives, buildings, anything human-constructed, human-compiled, etc, etc...). These concentrations of energized matter persist only for a time, they are transitory and cannot be maintained except through the addition of energy to the system to maintain their order (ever own a house?). jh On 17/Sep/17 12:39, Morlock Elloi wrote: This meme cannot be repeated often enough (even if one starts to resemble RMS). While esoteric discourses about consequences can be amusing, we really need to get back to the root causes. They are not novel, just often forgotten. -- ++ Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD hanging on to the Laramide Orogeny twitter: @neoscenes http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/ ++ # distributed via : no
Re: Return to feudalism
As Karl M. analyzed relationships of labor, reproduction and capital in
the era when there was pervasive need for human labor, we need new
analysis for the era when no one needs any human labor (5-6% of
population needing to work is practically "no one").
What is the value of the attention when the purchasing power is zero?
The most likely uplifting answer is, after the redundants are given some
food and shelter ("basic income"), pacification. The dystopian
prediction being kill them all.
The human drive to be useful to the society - the most dangerous drive
in the new context - needs to be managed, channeled and neutered. I
think that we can see the outlines of the things to come in gaming and
VR. As porn has domesticated sex, these industries have potential to
domesticate this last link we have with the so-called "humanity". This
requires more production ingenuity than porn, and if we're lucky it
cannot be fully automated, so some jobs after all. Panem et circenses,
this time industrial strength.
Back to the new economy, the direct value of the attention will be
proportional to the savings on brute-force pacification. Which means
that increasing the costs of brute-force pacification is the end game,
the new objective of the class struggle in the 21st century: unruliness,
Nixon's Madman doctrine trickling down to level of the individual.
On 9/18/17, 17:06, John Hopkins wrote:
We in the west exist in a different energy-harvesting regime, but one
that concentrates our attentions with impressive thoroughness. It has
many tentacles, many of them screen-related, though as pointed out, IoT
quickly insinuates itself into tampons, medicine, wine bottles, toilets,
... everything ...
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