Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the Commentator pieces for this week. These are riffs on articles - from around the world and across the political spectrum - that I find to be interesting, important, and/or provocative. I’m still thinking through some things on my publishing rhythm, but I’m liking the idea of starting the week more with politics and then drifting towards aesthetics by week’s end.
Best,
Sam
CHINA’S PROTESTS AND CRACKDOWN
The top stories this week are exactly the same as in my last ‘Commentator’ posting - China’s protests, Iran’s protests, the consequences of the grinding war in Ukraine, and, additionally, concerns about AI.
Coverage on China’s protests and the CCP’s crackdown has been alarmingly sparse on the major news sites - today, for instance, there’s nothing about it on the home screens of The New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, Associated Press, The Guardian. That’s not at all to say that nothing is happening. Chinese citizens have been engaged in breathtakingly courageous displays of public protest. Those protests have resulted in dramatic, sweeping changes. As The South China Morning Post notes, “In the past week the country has largely abandoned PCR test requirements for public places and offices,” and several cities, particularly Guangzhou, have lifted lockdowns. However, the concessions - the “teensiest, weensiest of concessions,” as expatriate Simon Leplâtre, living in Shanghai, writes - are accompanied by a wave of crackdowns that, by all indications, is widespread and punitive. Newsweek reports that some suspected of protest have been interrogated or arrested in their homes. Police have seized cell phones and - as in this video - have effected random searches of cell phones for VPN software. The government has issued a new raft of repressive rules including potential prosecution for ‘likes’ of social media posts. The most famous and visible of China’s protestors - the ‘Bridge Man,’ the ‘Shanghai Flower Boy’ - have not been heard from since they were whisked away in police cars.
The sense is that, while the protests amazed the world, the Chinese authorities have things well in hand - and that, after effective crackdowns and a few symbolic concessions, the attention of the world will allow itself to be diverted elsewhere. A certain cynicism prevails - for instance, in this comment on The Free Press ‘s article on the protests, as written by ‘Raziel,’ a self-described Beijing resident: “People here are not protesting for democracy, but for easing of lockdowns. That several people are shouting ‘We want democracy means absolutly nothing. You can find people yelling ‘We want emperor back’. Majority people are pissed, because they follow world cup and see that nobody is wearing mask.”
But the energy is obviously there - and this moment proves to be very valuable in elucidating the values of a whole new generation in China: ‘the Bridge Man’ generation, to pair itself with ‘the Tank Man’ generation.
Leplâtre, who found himself part of a protest march in Shanghai writes: ‘“‘Yao ziyou!’ they chanted, which means: We want freedom! They held their phones up to record the moment. I realized my heart was pounding. I’ve lived in China for nine years—and I had never witnessed this kind of protest.”
Aaron Sarin, writing from England but apparently with a wide network in China, quotes a Chinese student in London as saying, “I thought to myself that there are many Chinese who also want freedom and democracy. But where are you? Where can I find you? If we meet on the street, how can we recognize each other?” Sarin claims that “every single mainlander I’ve spoken to in the past year has been opposed to Zero COVID and—more significantly—to Xi Jinping himself” - an opposition that was expressed as weary defeatism but now, suddenly, has energy, crowd symbols, and, to some extent, an ability to organize.
Fang Fang, writing from under surveillance in Wuhan - her Wuhan Diary, published in Europe, made her persona non grata in China - eloquently writes of the despairing atmosphere of ‘Zero-Covid’: “The virus is no longer sowing death all around Wuhan, as it did in the early days, yet preventive measures are still central to our lives. They have changed how we live, our habits and our state of mind. Today you need to wear a mask and carry a mobile phone showing a green QR code. You have to queue for PCR tests, sometimes two or three days in a row. If you don’t, your green QR code turns grey, and you’re banned from public places. Buses, the metro, schools, shopping centres, banks, post offices — all the places that are part of daily life — are off limits without a green QR code; without one you can’t even use the motorway. Life has never made us feel so lost.”
As for the crowd symbols, I admit to not understanding the significance of the blank sheets of paper when I first saw them posted online, but, at the Shanghai protest, a woman in the crowd helpfully explains to Leplâtre, “Our country does not let us write anything here, but even if we don’t write anything, people know what we would like to say.”
And I find this to be extraordinarily beautiful: after all, what could be a more stirring expression of freedom than the blank page? - the ability to write one’s life in a way that one chooses.
In terms of what we can do from the West, the answer is: probably not very much. This is a matter for the ‘Bridge Man generation’ learning how to “recognize one another” - and making up their own minds as to the sacrifices they are willing to make to contend with a repressive regime. From the perspective of the West, I would just hope that we manage to be a tad less stupid about China than we have been up to this point. To a shameful extent, the American liberal media has responded to this once-in-a-generation, recklessly brave outpouring of democratic energy in China by being …. concerned about a spike in Covid cases. In The Atlantic, Katherine J. Wu writes, “The rollbacks [in Covid measures] … are swiftly tilting the nation toward a future that’s felt inevitable for nearly three years: a flood of infections—accompanied, perhaps, by an uncharted morass of disease and death.” The link in The Atlantic article leads, by the way, not to any epidemiological information clarifying the ‘uncharted morass of disease and death’ but to a New York Times piece praising China’s government for “its uncompromising approach which seemed to work at first” but lamenting that, with the advent of new Covid variants, the conscientious Chinese bureaucrats unfortunately had “no exit ramp.”
So what to say about journalism of this kind? The New York Times appears at least to be encouraging the Chinese to pull back from harsh Covid restrictions and attempting to speak the bureaucrats’ language. The Atlantic, meanwhile, is just writing the CCP’s talking points for them. The next step, presumably, is that the CCP will step back from mass testing and lockdowns, and then when the the expected spike in Covid infections hits, the argument is in place that Zero-Covid was the right policy all along and the new round of freedoms are rolled back.
The issue is that Western journalists are still thinking in public health terms and don’t quite realize that the Zero-Covid policy isn’t really about public health; it’s about power. A more persuasive analysis of what’s going on is an essay by George Yean in The National Interest - contending that China’s governing policy is fundamentally ‘realist’ and driven by power politics. “Over nearly two decades, China’s overarching strategy was [paraphrasing Deng Xiaoping] ‘hide your strength, bide your time, never take the lead,’” Yean writes. “Liberals may argue that it was economic (inter)dependence that prevented high-profile actions by China. This, however, ignores the fact that CCP leaders have repeatedly stressed the importance of a ‘period of strategic opportunity’ and that ‘China will be invincible if it seizes this opportunity to grow.’”
In other words, economic growth was never the highest priority - and economic growth was never particularly going to lead to a loosening of civil society. The great lie of my era has been that the Cold War ended in 1989 - and ended with the ascendance of both free markets and free societies. But, clearly, leadership in both Russia and China have a very different perspective on this. Great Power politics very much continues abroad, and, domestically, leaders in the authoritarian tradition (Xi Jinping and Putin, in his 2022 incarnation, being the most egregious) are fully capable of deciding that they prefer to keep things simple and to rule with as tight control over their populations as possible.
The liberal West is simply not thinking in these terms. We are still assuming a concert of nations, driven by capitalism and with certain Western values and institutions predominant. It’s time - given Russia and China’s dramatic defection from that system - to recognize that the bankers’ utopia has passed, that national security at times takes precedence over economics, that we’re engaged in Great Power politics whether we like it or not, and that the CCP is a pernicious force that wishes ill both to the West and really, fundamentally, to its own people.
A SNAPSHOT OF JINA MAHSA AMINI
As for the world’s other great popular democratic movement - in Iran (!) - protestors are in a similarly beleaguered position. The story spreading widely this week that the regime had pledged to disband the morality police has turned out - as far as anybody can tell - to be a rumor, based on a confusing statement given by the Attorney General. Meanwhile, the regime has moved forward with the first execution of a protestor - of 23-year-old Mohsen Shekari, accused of “blocking the street” - and the reformist Etemad newspaper published a list of 24 protestors facing charges of “waging war against car,” a crime that carries the death sentence.
It remains very difficult to find real stories about Iran - particularly what seems to be a near-state of insurrection in the Kurdish regions - so this piece from Der Spiegel on Jina Mahsa Amini will have to stand in. Der Spiegel worked hard to meet with a branch of Jina’s family that had moved to Norway and then spoke by phone to her father and grandfather in Iran. In her family’s reminiscence, she comes across as being very shy, very quiet - just about the last person one would expect to be the face of a national resistance movement. But that’s, of course, exactly why her death reverberated so profoundly across Iran - it was immediately apparent that she was a good-hearted, apolitical person, that the morality police had no possible justification for what happened to her.
As reported by Der Spiegel, the faultlines in Jina’s life had to do with navigating the stringent rules for behavior as laid out by the regime and daily life as actually practiced in Iran. At the boutique where she worked in Saqqez she sold revealing t-shirts that, as Der Spiegel writes, “her customers would never able to openly [wear] in public.” But, meanwhile, she, according to her grandfather, always made a point of covering her hair before entering a room - and her father was adamant that she “always wore appropriate clothing and that there was never any reason to find fault with anything.”
What’s particularly heartbreaking in Jina’s death is the sense that she and her family had done everything they could to carefully compromise with the status quo in Iran. The aunt who moved to Norway in the 1990s was beset by grief that she hadn’t convinced her sister - Jina’s mother - to emigrate at that time. When the Norwegian branch visited Iran, it was Jina who would instruct her aunt in how to properly cover herself. And, in the boutique, Jina had sold a wide variety of headscarves - the item that is now being widely burned in the protests following her death.
But, even more, what’s heartbreaking is that Jina, in everybody’s reminiscence, comes across as a deeply shy, uniquely gentle person. When she was a baby, her grandfather gave her the nickname ‘Shen’ - meaning ‘Gentle Wind’ - which stayed with her. The grandfather recalled visiting her as an adult, asking, “Shne, how are you doing,” and barely being able to hear her reply “since she spoke so softly.”
Fear - and the need to always appear modest and devout - had clearly been a guiding constraint of Jina’s life. Der Spiegel notes that “the extreme caution” of her family members “is palpable in conversation,” and her father’s fixation in their interview is to insist that Jina “never went anywhere by herself,” that she really was in all ways modest. Evidently, for so many Iranians, the hope had been that fear and compromise would keep them safe. The revelation of Jina’s death was that courage was now the only way forward.
DEFENSE BOONDOGGLES AND BONANZAS
In another underreported story of the week, Congress is about to pass a record-shattering $857 billion defense spending bill - $45 billion more than the Biden administration had asked for.
In The Intercept, Jeremy Scahill has a useful primer on the war caucus - and on what the era of escalating tension with Russia and China means for the military establishment. (What it means is, of course, a blank check with no end in sight.)
I have conflicted feelings on this. I’m very hawkish on the war in Ukraine and do believe that there needs to be a state of readiness for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. I had been genuinely concerned in the run-up to the midterms that a Republican majority would have resulted in a slashing of Ukraine’s support. Apparently there was no reason to panic! Kevin McCarthy has made it clear that - whatever concerns he may have expressed about Americans in his home district prior to the election - he is not wavering in his “fundamental support for arming and aiming Kyiv.” And, as Scahill notes, the apparently intractable differences between Congressional Republicans and Democrats does not extend to questioning Defense Department spending.
The ridiculous ease with which bill drafters have reached that outsize figure - and the ease with which the bill is likely to sail through Congress - should raise more questions than it has or almost certainly will. As Scahill writes, the invasion of Ukraine and ‘ratched-up rhetoric’ with China has resulted in a “bonanza for the defense industry.” And Scahill - along with anybody on the dovish left - find themselves in the uncomfortable territory of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rand Paul, the only members of Congress who seem to be at all serious about calling for ‘audits’ or checking to see what becomes of all that money.
And a recent audit carried out by the Department of Defense reveals that there is ample cause for concern. For the fifth consecutive year, the Pentagon failed to pass its audit criteria. “We failed to get an A. I would not say that we flunked,” the Pentagon’s comptroller Mike McCord charmingly said - while adding that the failure is a “teachable moment.” (Meanwhile, The Hill encouragingly writes that, while the Pentagon failed, it “made progress.”) Less charming, though, is the extent to which the Pentagon actually failed - managing to account for only 39% of its $3.5 trillion in its assets, as McCord mumblingly revealed.
I find it difficult even to wrap my mind around that number. It’s really an extraordinary indication of how little the elected government cares about the responsibilities it’s supposed to have. Around half of the discretionary budget every year goes to military spending - and around 60% of that money, as per the Pentagon’s audit, is unaccounted for. I really don’t know what to make of that scale of waste - whether all that unaccounted-for money is going to cost overruns, to off-the-book operations, to simple graft.
And, of course, the state of alarm brought about by the war in Ukraine, in addition to saber-rattling with China, is the perfect excuse for the defense industry to continue to spend money with essentially no oversight. As Responsible Statecraft wryly notes, an effort spearheaded by Bernie Sanders to tie federal spending to the successful passage of an audit has “fizzled out, leaving the Pentagon’s accountants as the last line of defense.” Which means, in other words, that there is no line of defense at all. The surprise in reading around from military establishment types is the matter of factness in stating that the new reality - war in Ukraine, Cold War with Russia and China - is likely to be a permanent state of affairs. Brookings’ Daniel S. Hamilton writes, “As the war drags on, weary pundits and politicians are fond of asking, ‘When will this end?’ We will do better by asking ourselves, ‘How will this continue?’” - and recommends a move from “on-the-fly assistance to more structured and sustainable long-term support.” Doug Bush, the Army’s chief weapons buyer, told Politico, “I think we’re closer to a wartime mode, which has been something I’ve been working on to build.”
It’s obvious that the skeptics - Scahill, Responsible Statecraft - have no bright ideas about how to bring any of this in line. As Scahill observes, the ‘war caucus’ has had to improvise a bit for the last 30 years, playing up the menace of Islamic terrorism. With the imminence of a ‘new Cold War,’ it’s almost too easy. “Declaring war against the threats posed by nation states like Russia and China is a far better vehicle to sell large-scale defense spending than Osama bin Laden or the Islamic State group, in part because it justifies massive expenditures on the most expensive weapons systems,” writes Scahill.
But Scahill is astute in noticing the return of an old trick - the claim of a “shortage” of defensive weapons in the U.S., as the U.S. gives out equipment to Ukraine. Scahill writes, “This rhetoric is largely a parlor game. There is no actual shortage of defensive weapons in the U.S. The ‘stockpile’ is based on U.S. war-gaming theory and preparation for various imagined future wars and simultaneous campaigns.”
This is a reprise of the “missile gap” which consumed the United States in the late 1950s - and so took in JFK that he ran for president on the issue and, after winning, had to essentially be taken aside and told that the ‘missile gap’ was a figment of Pentagon rhetoric - and it’s useful for us to at least not fall for the same tricks too many times.
At the moment that’s pretty much all I can offer on this. I have no problem with the money that’s going to Ukraine. I do think that the United States has to be ready to defend Taiwan. But $857 billion is a lot of money. An audit accounting for 39% of total DoD assets is outrageous. At the very least we should be upset about this.
OF KILLER ROBOTS AND CREEPY GRIEF TECH
I was having a conversation this week about AI. My interlocutor was very surprised that I was such a pessimist about it - which made me surprised in turn that everyone else isn’t pessimistic; or, better to say, isn’t truly terrified of what’s coming.
The point I made is that human beings are predators. We’ve been at the top of the chain for as long as we can remember - and have done so largely through intelligence. With computing, automation, ‘artificial intelligence,’ we effectively instate another predator at the top of the chain above us. It’s hard to say what in that configuration will exactly go wrong, but you don’t have to think too long about it to realize that it’s obviously a horrible idea.
And, as if on cue, a news story pops up that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors signed off on a police request that police be allowed to use killer robots in extreme standoff scenarios. A week later, though, after a massive public backlash, the Board of Supervisors reversed itself. Supervisor Gordon Mar issued a thoughtful tweet: “Despite my own deep concerns with the policy, I voted for it after additional guardrails were added. I regret it. I’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with our vote. I do not think making state violence more remote, distanced, & less human is a step forward.”
That seems like a pretty reasonable position, and reasonable line in the sand to draw. The surprise to me, really, is that anybody would think differently. But here, for instance, is Rich Lowry writing in Politico:
There is indeed a large and entertaining body of movies about creepy and dangerous robots, from Metropolis to Ex Machina, from The Terminator to I, Robot, but the key word in science fiction is ‘fiction.’
The risk is that we’ll take outlandish dystopian scenarios seriously and allow a poorly informed Luddism, combined with the special pleading of potentially threatened incumbent industries, to crimp technological advance.
Robots have had terrible PR going on a century now with little or no justification…..On the basis of the historical record, it is robots who should fear humans, since we are guilty of every imaginable crime, sometimes on an unspeakable scale, while robots have minded their own business.
Lowry is an idiot and it’s not even worth digging too much into his arguments. The point is that there’s a whole cottage industry cropping up of enablers of the next turn-of-the-wheel in artificial intelligence and automation. Consumers are being sold on AI through an array of gadgets - everybody’s getting AI to do their homework for them or to write a poem or to mash up images of their face. As Jonathan V. Last writes of the phenomenon, “The new A.I. is magic. This probably doesn’t end well.” And, at a more elevated level, arguments are deployed that AI and automation function somehow like an inalienable right. In a moving article about a ‘grief tech’ service called HereAfter, MIT Technology Review reporter Charlotte Jee describes how she had conversations with startlingly well-honed facsimiles of her parents and concluded that whatever misgivings she had about the ‘creep’ factor of the technology couldn’t contend with the deeper longer to connect with the dead. “I’m only human, and those worries end up being washed away by the even scarier prospect of losing the people I love—dead and gone without a trace,” Jee writes. “If technology might help me hang onto them, is it so wrong to try?” Which is not so different, in a sense, from Lowry’s concern for the maligned robots - the idea being that the burden of argumentation is on the skeptics, that AI is here and is unquestionably doing good for someone somewhere, and it’s only the mean old Luddites who want to take all the fun away.
But this is of course thinking exactly backwards. If, as Lowry disingenuously writes, “robots are just a tool, like any other,” then we have a perfect right to decide that we don’t want to play with them, want to put them back in the box. That’s what a century’s worth of science fiction - which is obviously not ‘fiction’ if its predictions so reliably come to pass - has been advising us, and it’s what our intuition is frenetically warning us to do. It’s in, for instance, the Black Mirror episode that deals so presciently with grief tech - in which a widow realizes that the technologically cutting-edge bot of her dead husband is “wrong, all wrong” and ends up being confined to the attic. And Jee, in the MIT Technology Review article, has an intuitive flash of that. “It’s possible to put too much weight on the technology,” she writes. “A grieving person needs to remember that these bots can only ever capture a small sliver of someone. They are not sentient, and they will not replace healthy, functional human relationships.” The government, to my amazement, appears to be ahead of the curve on this. At a 2021 Trade and Technology Council summit - featuring the U.S. Secretary of State and European Commission Vice President - the Council “declared their opposition to artificial intelligence (AI) that does not respect human rights” and particularly took aim at China’s data-driven ‘social credit’ system (which is, by the way, the materialization of yet another Black Mirror episode).
The trick about technological advances, which everybody seems to forget, is that governments - or powerful entities - can actually put a stop to them. That’s what the Biden administration and the TTC were hinting at. But the reigning ethos is all about mimetics and the inalienable progression of new technologies. The MIT Technology Review article is an interesting case of a person clearly feeling deeply uncomfortable about HereAfter but talking herself into it - and convincing herself that it’s unethical to get in the way of a technology that could potentially help people with their grief. The Rich Lowry piece is an extreme case of insisting that a breakthrough technology - in this instance, the ‘killer robots’ - is all in the natural order of things and opposing it an almost ethical affront to the robot.
I do know that the tech is moving so fast that the TTC - or anybody else - is unlikely to stand in the way. (And the government is of course very interested in AI weaponry and unlikely to forestall AI development in the midst of an international arms race.) But it’s really important not to mistake scientific advances for scientific determinism - there are technological shifts that happen and we find ourselves adapting to them but that is different from believing that they are somehow advantageous developments. (The nuclear era has meant nuclear power plants, x-rays, etc, but there is no technological benefit that will mitigate the absolute horror of the development of nuclear weapons - that will make anybody not wish that that particular toy had been left in the box.)
In the case of killer robots, we sense intuitively that something is very wrong about it - and facile counter-arguments like Lowry’s aren’t particularly convincing. It’s worth thinking a little bit about why the grief tech bothers us at the same intuitive level. And the Catherine Jee article helps to provide some of the answer. Jee quotes a grief tech evangelist named Marius Ursache complaining about the slowness of the market - particularly consumers’ squeamishness in dealing with death - and saying, “People assume that AI is the key to breaking this. But really, it’s human behavior.”
Yes. Exactly. There is something in human nature that balks at trying to cross the threshold of death - the corporate slogan of the grief tech company Only Virtual ‘Never Have To Say Goodbye’ is deeply chilling. Religious rituals for millennia have emphasized the finality of death - the open casket, the dirt thrown over the coffin, the name and dates on the tombstone - all of it as a way of reminding the mourners that the dead really are gone, that the grieving process is, precisely, a matter of saying goodbye. The slow sales for Ursache’s company aren’t - as he interprets it - a type of avoidance. They are a very healthy human instinct to stay within our natural, emotional cycles. To attempt to break that is to move into a completely different kind of existence with no natural rhythms, no real sense of identity, no clear ethics. It’s a sign of health - not Ludditism - that we would resist that.
You wrote, "We’ve been at the top of the chain for as long as we can remember - and have done so largely through intelligence. With computing, automation, ‘artificial intelligence,’ we effectively instate another predator at the top of the chain above us."
Yes, absolutely. ChatGPT is still just a toy (it couldn't consistently figure out how many letters were in a word, for example), but an impressive one. What gives me pause is that people were able to get around its content safeguards within hours. The controls are nowhere near ready for a more advanced AI. They need to be massively strengthened - and controls rarely keep pace with innovation.
My view is that it's probably impossible to prevent someone, somewhere, from eventually developing artificial intelligence that surpasses us. But it's still worthwhile to try to prevent bad outcomes. Somehow, we haven't had a nuclear apocalypse, which tells me it's possible to get a handle on controls. But AI is (much) trickier to track and control. We are going to see a very interesting, scary, critical next thirty years driven by climate change and AI evolution.