After I finished talking, one friend put down his chopsticks, looked around the table, and proclaimed, “Someday the same thing will happen in China. Then I’ll know who my real friends are.” The table fell silent. If and when China does change, that day of reckoning may never come. In the age of broadband and smart phones, state security agents no longer depend so heavily on human informants. Not only are software and hardware more efficient and omniscient than humans, but conveniently they also lack consciences.
Lacking consciences is not the nature of software and hardware, it's more about the creatures who trained them. It remind of me the powerful algorithm of recommendation used in Toutiao and Tiktok. The core of their data digging and AI recommendation lies in the purpose of get the audience indulged in the content they have searched for. Also part of the model is about the judgement on people by their social status, gender, age and some of the private informations.
One example which shocked me is Jindong and his grandma. It's an popular idol created for the left-behind elderly, which is marked and targeted by Tiktok I assume. This idol is good looking, seems to be like a good listener, giving the elderly the faked warmness in his live stream and earned money from that. The one who design this model use tech to enlarge the human fragility, and take advantages from that.
Most Western journalists and diplomats in China at the time assumed that the Communist Party’s grip on power could never survive this new globally networked technology... Though the Internet has transformed Chinese society in many ways, the regime has also succeeded in adopting technology to its advantage in ways I had not imagined—ways I have spent much time over the past several years trying to understand. — Preface
Two related works : Disturbing the peace 老妈蹄花- Weiwei Ai Dragonfly Eyes - Xu Bing
In China, as a common people, you can feel that the power control in legal form is super strong. When I took my flight from Frankfurt to Shanghai, landed in China, I was overwhelmed by excitement of coming back home. Then, when I was in the airpot, as a possible virus carrier waiting for test, I was shocked by the way they put their instructions on me. Almost everything, even if every step I took, is instructed by the signs saying "Please do as we say, otherwise we will deal with it according to law." The existence of law seems to be so strong, and we lived in surveillance everyday during our quarantine. But as the networked things, the structure of the roles here is highly hierarchical. The surveillance video watcher is always there, out of the surveillance, which might the things never changed after Cultural Revolution.
The work Disturbing the Peace 《老妈蹄花》 is trying to do the converse of that. The monitors became monitored unknowingly, then their daily behaviors reveal the ignorance and non-compliance of the rule-maker.
Today, more than two decades later, the message remains tremendously powerful: innovative technology in the hands of brave people can free us all from tyranny...The Internet is a politically contested space, featuring new and unstable power relationships among governments, citizens, and companies...All governments, from dictatorships to democracies, are learning quickly how to use technology to defend their interests.
The conflicts are highly abstracted in this chapter, which really makes sense to me. When internet platform empower the citizens, the governments is also trying to take advantage for their interests. The Internet cooperations, their have to balance the trust of its customers and the regulatory support form the government, which makes their interests and loyalties divided.
In the Internet age, the greatest long-term threat to a genuinely citizen-centric society—a world in which technology and government serve citizens instead of the other way around—looks less like Orwell’s 1984, and more like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World: a world in which our desire for security, entertainment, and material comfort is manipulated to the point that we all voluntarily and eagerly submit to subjugation. If we are to avoid this dystopian fate, political innovation will have to catch up with technological innovation.
The dystpopian fate mentioned here, for me, seems to be irresistible. And our desire for security and comfort what we desire to have and no need to get rid of as human beings. But who is manipulating that? Some people who have power in hands believes they could manipulate our natural desires as creatures, also as citizens. The purpose of this manipulation might be something like harassment, which already created a hard, concrete environment around us. However, their ability of manipulation is unsustainable, and their belief on this ability is too arrogant, and also could be disastrous. The political innovation microscopically relies on the acknowledgement of the incompleteness, contradiction, chaos and fragmentation inside people; and the acknowledgement of that, the definition of human beings is corruptible. With this acknowledgement, those in power should be conservative and restrict each other, and respect the existence of the omniscient.