Month: September 2020

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Dinner with the Singapore Air Force

The Mouse Ran Up the Clock

In 2006, when I was working in Singapore, an officer in the local Air Force invited me to dinner.   President Bush and Cheney had just invaded Iraq on the pretext that Saddam had instigated 9/11. Cheney had recently been CEO of Halliburton, and maps of Iraq had figured in a secret meeting of oil executives in the vice president’s office. Things were unsettled in the Middle East and there was anxiety about fuel scarcity and cost: fear that “the low hanging fruit”  had been picked.  

So during dinner in Singapore I argued that the Bush/ Cheney invasion of Iraq was a dishonest imperialistic attempt to capture one of the last top oil reserves in the world using 9/11 as a bold  smash-and-grab maneuver unlike, say, the secretive grab of Iranian oil with the installation of Mr Pahlavi as Shah.

The Air Force officer disapproved of my grumbling about the invasion of Iraq.   Singapore is a wealthy island the size of a golf course, and very vulnerable. What I didn’t realize was that the officer was looking ahead to China’s hegemonic ambitions in Southeast Asia and the world.

Lo, not two decades later, China has become on economic and authoritarian powerhouse.   China has subsumed the Tibetans, Uighurs, and Hong Kong,  and global influence through the checkbook diplomacy,  including “The Belt and Road” initiative. As the country expands, the reliance on technology for social control is breathtaking—see  the previous post, “Measuring Up.”

Now President Trump seems to be confronting China with his tariff wars and lately skirmishes over the Covid flu, 5G, TikTok, and weChat. Supposedly the threat—even all of the juvenile TikTok—is that the company gathers data on naïve Americans which the communist government can command.

The shuddering joke is that American corporations have been gathering big data without limits.  The Internet has become a market for big data. Social media such as Facebook and Twitter pretend that truth matters, but their real business is buying and selling big data, which gives pricing power to advertising. Unlike European countries,  the US has few laws protecting privacy. Politicians are free to use big data in their propaganda and outright lies.

Measurement is a tool. The computer makes  measurement a powerful tool. As population grows, science itself becomes a tool.  As the powerful become more anxious about the political imbalance, the  appetite for newer and more powerful tools seems inexhaustible. How will it be used?  Is the Singapore Air Force right?

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Measuring Up;

1984 Points of Light

(From Psychology Today, June 12, 2017

China is developing a digital system to track and evaluate its population of 1.3 billion people. The system excites comparisons to Orwell’s 1984 and dystopian films, but it is only one use of big data to manage people.  Kai Strittmatter, who has reported on Chinese culture for the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, summarizes the new program in “Punkteregime” or “Points Regime” (May 19, 2017). 
 
Some apps for the system are already in trials. When you download “Honest Shanghai,” the app scans your face as you register, and retrieves data about you from the Internet. Like a credit rating in the U.S., the app uses algorithms to evaluate your financial transactions (bills paid on time?) and rank your creditworthiness.

By 2020, the system is planned to include all Chinese in a “system for social trustworthiness.” The idea is not only to facilitate more, and more secure, business transactions but also to improve individual behavior.  As in Orwell’s 1984, big data, social media, and a digital point system will use rewards and disincentives or outright punishments to create a new model person. An official in the town of Rongchen declares “We want to civilize people.”

Zhang Zheng, Dean of Faculty of Economics at Beijing University, explains, “How do you treat your parents and your spouse, all your social actions, whether and how you comply with moral rules—does not that also tell you about your trustworthiness?”

According to the Director of the pilot project in Rongchen, the system will rank every company and citizen in China. In the pilot project everyone starts with 1000 points. Approved behavior improves your score. You “can be an AAA citizen (“model of honesty”, more than 1050 points). But a slip to 849 points is the “warning level.” Below 599 points, rated “dishonest,” your name will be blacklisted, published, and you become the “object of significant monitoring.” This is specified in the Rongcheng official handbook of the “Administrative Measures for the Reliability of Natural Persons.”

You can see some deep metaphors in the system. It resembles games based on scoring, combined with the standardized processes of a factory. Measuring worth by scores evokes trade and business, especially bookkeeping. Like most computer technology, it makes a trait theory and a decision tree more important than inner life.  

Enthusiasts make the system sound wholesome as a TV game show, with built-in safeguards for flexibility and fairness.  But if history is any guide, the Communist Party and big business will prefer a muscular system that enhances social control. It remains to be seen if any design can rule out incompetence or  corruption. 

In some ways the scheme echoes the corporate promotion of privileges in the U.S., where a certain level of spending or customer “loyalty” qualifies you for special treatment. But when Chinese dissenters disagree with the Party, they’re not usually disappeared into an airline’s Elite Club lounge.

The enthusiasts avoid the specter of punishment by suggesting that negative ratings might reshape the citizen by limiting social privileges, such as access to library books or travel. But no matter how gentle the euphemisms, influence over others is bound to have a coercive element.  Even utopia needs the protections of law and due process.

The dream of the New Man was the 20th century nightmare of totalitarianism.  Who will control the controllers? Who will police the police? Who will sort out the confusion of business practice with governance? The goal is to spur self-policing while disguising the controller.

In the U.S., as advertising and recent election cycles have shown, miners of big data envision algorithms that can predict people’s choices. The dream is that given enough information, a program will be able to tease out and control the consumer or voter’s intuitive and still-unconscious preferences.

Social media such as Facebook and academic endeavors such as The World Well-Being Project and myPersonality promise to enhance individual freedom. They assume that psychological machinery can actualize authentic values otherwise merely latent in us. But in all such efforts to help the butterfly out of the cocoon, the tools and assumptions of the project color the butterfly. 

And of course some butterfly hunters are frankly interested in perfecting the tools for sale to the highest bidder. In a YouTube presentation, the CEO of Cambridge Analytica claims to have combined personality test responses with data from social media to produce “psychographic profiles.” Supposedly his “models that predict personality traits for every adult in America” played a role in the last election.  But “it is important to remember that this much-discussed video is a sales pitch.” [1]  

Despite different emphases, Chinese and American interest in social control overlap.  As shown by the new hysteria about illegal immigrants and terrorism, and massive government investment in surveillance, the U.S. shares the Chinese anxiety that the scale of life exceeds traditional constraints.  U.S. immigration officials are combing records looking for even minor infractions that could justify expulsion.

 At  the same time both countries nurture ambitions that look for a payoff from new tools of control.  Some of the tools are crude propaganda such as the ballyhooed Mexican wall, but others are exploring the depths of electronic data technology and human nature. Why the hysteria? For the moment the scale of life has reached a tipping point. Big numbers challenge the brain, whether they’re population, trade, or environmental figures. And competition makes high-strung humans nervous, since the deep metaphor is combat.  You see the hysteria in the hoarding of power and money at the top, a gun under every pillow, and shameful attacks on the working poor and labor law.

The Chinese have a thousand-point surveillance system. The US has the smarmy slogan “a thousand points of light.” Both cultures are trying to devise narratives that control rambunctious reality without leaving unsightly scars. It’s an old project. Let’s see how it works out this time.

In his Notes from Underground, Dostoyevsky vowed that some humans are defiantly perverse and therefore will be defiantly free. Skeptics anticipate that some Chinese will find ways around the ratings system and its likely corruptions. We are social animals, but also competitive and devious creatures.  The same mentality that enables traders to intuit what others value may also be able to imagine what fools them.  As we see around us today, we can deplore deception even as the crowd is applauding a hoodwinking magic show.

Resources used in this essay:

1. Tamsin Shaw, “Invisible Manipulators of Your Mind,” New York Review of Books  (April 20, 2017), 64.

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The Woman Who Met God

Back when the Soviet Union had just come unglued, in 1993, I was doing some workshops for the Peace Corps in Kazakhstan.  In Taldy-Korgan, just across the Tien Shan mountains from the Uighurs in China, I met with a group of local grammar school teachers. They were hard-workers: Instructors, mothers to their own families as well as to their students,

I asked them to write about a problem they faced.  Finally the fortyish, motherly blonde Tatiana obliged by volunteering that she had met “the Christ” in a dream.  Her problem, she said wryly, was that when she told her husband, he thought she was crazy. 

Her dream messiah was a handsome Russian-looking young man who assured her he was the real thing.  Tatiana had grown up in Tatarstan in a nominally Islamic family.  Like many others in the group whose families the paranoid Stalin had  exiled to Kazakhstan, she was now  anxious, because the post-Soviet Kazakh government was pressuring non-ethnic Kazakhs to emigrate and appropriating their jobs.

I pointed out that a messiah rescues people.  What, I asked, might Tatiana need to be rescued from? In no time we were discussing a  new law that threatened non-Kazakh- speakers with the loss of job and deportation.  (Since only 40% of Kazakhs spoke the language, the law was eventually ignored.) We talked about emigration and the threats it posed, especially at a time when Yugoslavia was breaking up in  murderous ethnic cleansing.

In this context Tatiana’s Russian-looking messiah seemed to be trying out her “Russian” identity, grounding her in a deeper frame than the politically unstable local scene.  To put it another way, if the cultural crash uprooted her, Tatiana was facing social death as threatening as real death. She was envisioning a new Russian Christian identity that would welcome and console her.                                                                          

The Kazakh women began reassuring or even mothering one another. But when the idea of exile–social death–surfaced, a few of the Kazakh women testily denied that there was any threat at all.  They may have felt guilty that a national policy which benefitted their own group would injure their colleagues and neighbors.  Yet they were also threatened by economic insecurity in the new post-Soviet environment, so they no doubt had their own anxiety to contend with. 

What struck me was the Kazakh teachers’ desire to resolve their ambivalence about hurting the openly anxious non-Kazakh women.  Their self-esteem was pumped up, and yet that made them feel guilty.  In turn, they dispelled guilt by defensively—aggressively—attacking their non-Kazakh colleagues. After all,  sending colleagues into exile was symbolically killing them.

Some of the non-Kazakh teachers saw us off to the airport. One said the workshop had been the only time in decades working together that they had ever really talked to one another.  Although I’d  had the group shake hands and re-introduce themselves to one another, nothing was resolved. Yet some of them at least were grateful that the many years of polite professional silence have been broken.  The teachers’  professional culture had  ordered the workplace for many years, but it wasn’t enough.

In the parting hugs one of the women thanked me again, and her eyes shimmered with tears.

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Us Outlaws

An elderly neighbor of mine once struck up a conversation about his frail health—George’s doctor had warned him that  his heart was bad.  Suddenly he began to tell me about being a teenage lifeguard at a local pool during Prohibition.  Every Friday afternoon a big car from Canada would pull up, and the driver would give him $5 to watch his car for him. $5 was a fabulous tip. Needless to say, this became a regular appointment.

 A few years later George  and his new wife were in Montréal.  The city was jammed for a holiday,  and they couldn’t find a hotel room. They were desperately quizzing a hotel clerk when someone in the crowd hailed him.  It was the bootlegger whose car George had been minding by  the pool a few years before.

They renewed auld acquaintance, and the bootlegger instructed the hotel clerk to give George and his wife a prize suite.

The anecdote seemed to be about life’s surprising coincidences.   But a few years later I was talking to a  retired carpenter.   He began to  describe being a doorman in New York City as a young man. In one of the apartments lived a gangster who was often visited in the evenings by members of his gang.  They would send the doorman out on errands and would tip laviishly. 

A month or so after our conversation the carpenter died.   This let me know that he had told me about being an unofficial gangster because he was aware,  as George had been,  that his time was running out. The memories were haunting.

Both memories were especially meaningful as the storytellers summed up their lives.   They had been unofficial outlaws, breaking out of the constraints of  conventional culture. They had received privileged rewards for breaking the law, but the memories were important because the association with outlaws seemed important.  You could say that both flirted with the idea of being a bigshot, or of being like an obliging son to a powerful and generous parent. After all, to a child, adults can do whatever they want. Everything has purpose. The child in us imagines grown-ups have perfect freedom.