The Pandemic on Reflection: Grasping the Epoch

 

The following is an introduction written in the summer of 2022 for the collection of writing I produced during the pandemic, published on the Battleground website and also here on this blog. My intention in compiling these pieces wasn’t to attempt to get them published as a book but rather to put something of a full stop on that period and to move on. I had already written an addendum to the collection and so an introduction seemed both appropriate and an opportunity for me to reflect on that time and my reasons for writing. Reading over this again it strikes me as a useful index for how events unfolded and the work I produced in response, so I’m making it available here with links to the relevant articles. I’ve also added a couple of paragraphs bringing my personal situation up to date, since I truly believe if it weren’t for the pandemic I would likely not be living as I am now.

 

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"Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos".

Henry Miller - Tropic of Capricorn

 

The texts included here were written between April 2020 and May 2022. They encompass the period of time when the SARS-CoV2 pandemic was at its height, roughly between the first lockdown in the UK, which began on the 23^rd of March 2020, and the removal of significant restrictions in the late Spring and early summer of 2021. By this chronology the pandemic would have lasted between 14 to 16 months. In practice the long night of pandemic restrictions and the uncertainty they caused lasted through to the end of 2021 and well into the following year. There was also a strange period of existential foreboding which preceded the shutdown, which I find evidence of bubbling to the surface in my choice of subject for a blog entry in February 2020 on Thomas Ligotti’s book ‘The Conspiracy Against the Human Race’. The opening paragraph of that essay, which critiques Ligotti’s quasi-apology for his vision of philosophical pessimism, looks from the distance of two and half years like a premonition:

 

“How to live well in a world that is dying? Increasingly this question preoccupies me. It is a question that is directed in the most radical way at what is most our own, our sense of historicality, of being part of a continuity that exists beyond any one individual, or even perhaps any single community or nation. The significance of the dying world is not immediately ethical but ontological. It disrupts at the base of things, the base on which most, if not all, our commonplace notions about what it is to live are grounded. Finitude, for instance, is hard enough to appropriate to oneself in the context of an otherwise cosy continuity of things. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? It all seems so endless, but in truth the number is perhaps quite small. How then to reconcile such a "personal" relationship to the finite with finitude on the scale of All Things?  Let us then call radical finitude the subjective disposition that identifies one's own finitude with the finitude of the world, and does so by forging a form-of-life appropriate to it. This form-of-life born from out of the wreckage of "last days capitalism" and ecological collapse is the task for anyone who accepts the veracity of the doom of our time and chooses to stay alive amid the gathering ruins”.

 

The question 'how many more times will you watch the full moon rise?' is from Paul Bowles, who I had not read prior to the pandemic. I knew of that quote from a recording of his voice sampled by the US band Neurosis. I've always liked it since I first heard it as a teenager. On the subject of ruins, though, I could never have predicted just how ruinous we were to become over the next twelve months. Giorgio Agamben (a near constant intellectual companion during this period) eloquently captured this feeling of nascent collapsology in what was probably the most philosophical of his pandemic interventions:

 

“‘Everything I do makes no sense if the house burns.’ Yet even as the house is burning, it is necessary to continue as always, to do everything with care and precision, perhaps even more studiously — even if no one should notice. It may be that life disappears from the earth, that no memory remains of what has been done, for better or for worse. But you continue as before, it is too late to change, there is no more time”.

 

And indeed, things do endure. Life - of a sort - goes on, and small pleasures are taken where once there was only tension, dread, and helpless frustration. Nevertheless, this premonition has come to be the guiding light for my own post-pandemic world. It is summed up in a single word: decline. Decline is the interpretive lens through which everything can and must now be viewed. Not because Decline has suddenly come to define our epoch, implying that there was perhaps once a period where Decline was not active in our world, but only because the present is utterly unintelligible without it. It is too late. There is no time.

 

If the texts presented here are a record of anything then it’s the coming to consciousness of this fact, which until now I have only partially grasped and never fully bound myself to. That separation, which would distinguish my fate from the fate of the world is now utterly untenable, and the task now is to develop a form-of-life appropriate to our collective fate; a Being-towards-Decline if you like.

 

For me personally a sense of the pandemic being less of an all-consuming event only came into view when international travel became more predictable and I was finally able, after a period of almost 30 months, to travel abroad. That trip - which was to Copenhagen - and a subsequent trip to Prague in March of 2022, gave me the confidence to draw a line under these writings and to end them with an essay centred around the Francis Bacon exhibition ‘Man and Beast’ held at the Royal Academy of Arts after a long pandemic induced delay. I also wrote the addendum ‘Hurtling Back to Earth’ in the same month.

 

When I look back at these writings it’s clear that I, like so many others, were trying desperately to find mental space in a world turned completely upside down. The two part ‘Plague Power’ (One, Two)  drew on the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben to analyse the pandemic response as an expression of what the former termed (and the latter further developed) as Biopower. These were essentially theoretical analyses of the political implications of the emergency powers used to enforce lockdowns and take a somewhat distanced, if rather polemical, tone. This was not the case for other writing I produced that year. By the end of May it was clear that the pandemic would not be a short-lived event, and my ‘Pandemic Musings’ of that month addressed the changed reality with a much more personal approach.

 

By that point the “enforced nihilism” of the restrictions and the constant fear porn being pumped out by government and compliant media had left London a lonely and alienating place. Although masks had yet to become the ubiquitous medical sacrament they are now, there was still enough anxiety and social distancing around to make venturing into the metropolis a jarring experience. The sun was out, and so was I. During May I cycled constantly, clocking up over 600km around the centre of the city and the Western outskirts. My workplace had never closed and throughout the lockdowns I attended site, working on projects with cancer charities and contributing to the tentative moves my employer made to get in on the various vaccine projects that were then underway. All that was good, and I think without work to distract me and the weather to lure me outside, those first few months of the pandemic would have been far harder, as they undoubtedly were for others.

 

I never succumbed to fear. Nothing about the SARS-CoV2 virus led me to believe that it harboured a serious risk to me. But, as we all know, personal risk was only one side, and a fairly minor one at that, to the psychological warfare practiced upon populations of the most developed economies at this time. Very quickly the emphasis shifted from stay home to “flatten the curve” to a potentially endless task of protecting some nameless vulnerable other by avoiding “unnecessary” social behaviours. The legal contortions and bizarre range of restrictions that were imposed during the late summer and Autumn of 2020 must count as one of the most chaotic periods in British legal history.  The practice of regional lockdowns was imported from China, but unlike in China they were only imposed after rounds of horse-trading with local government officials who were keen to protect their local industries from damaging stay-at-home or compulsory closure orders.

 

What resulted was an epidemiologically absurd mishmash of differing guidance and legal restrictions, where gyms in Blackburn were allowed to stay open, while those in Manchester had to close, and where hairdressers in London could open with social distancing and masks, while those in Leicester had to shut up shop completely. Then there was the arbitrary distinction between essential and non-essential shops which like so many of the restrictions privileged large retailers over small businesses; a fact that no doubt drove many a struggling entrepreneur into the arms of conspiracy theorists. And I won't even touch on the nonsense which led to the debate over whether a scotch egg constituted a 'substantial meal'. None of this was alleviated in early Winter when the no less arbitrary tiers system was brought in and government was accused of keeping London open at the expense of the North of England.

 

This is just a flavour of the chaos which was a near permanent presence during the later months of 2020. In an attempt to make sense of what was happening I had done extensive research into the history of the development of Pandemic Preparedness, tracking its emergence from out of Cold War planning for a nuclear attack, its convergence with theories of the precautionary principle and radicalisation during the years of the War on Terror, and then finally its institutionalisation at the global level under the auspices of the World Health Organisation and their international health regulations. All this helped flesh out what was now commonly being referred to as the Biosecurity Regime. Among the many authors and researchers whose work aided my understanding at this time I’d single out books by Carlo Caduff and Andrew Lakoff, as well as the real time analysis of Simon Elmer of Architects for Social Housing. There has been, understandably, a veritable tsunami of words written about the meaning of the last two years, and I claim no special status for my own contribution to this field. But the voices that have provided real guidance have generally been few and far between.

 

Understanding, however, does not afford oneself the capacity to abstract completely from the reality of the crisis. After the government u-turned on its pledge not to impose new restrictions over the 2020 Christmas period I found myself less inclined to understand and more determined to resist. After this point the tone of my writing became darker and more serious. The theme of Ends and Decline making themselves felt more strongly.

 

Going back to that Ligotti review in February 2020, there is another premonition which became central to my thoughts about life and death under biosecurity. Against the admonishment to “Live your best life!” I contended;

 

“Some of us would be satisfied with a passably happy death, or if not happy, then at least not scrabbling around in our own shit gasping for breath as the experts circle and the Muzak drones on”.

 

How many countless thousands were forced to face such a death owing to the pandemic restrictions which barred them from their loves ones, or from even seeing the unmasked face of another human being in their last moments? I continue to hold that the duties we owe to the dead and dying are what distinguish us from beasts. Fail to live up to them and we are no longer human. It’s with these unfortunates in my thoughts that I wrote in the addendum:

 

“To be released from the demands of the society of production, of unceasing optimisation of the self, of the death march of progress; to escape all this and to be able to turn one's face to the warmth of the sun, that is to live well in a world which is dying”.

 

Over the extended lockdown covering the first months of 2021 I produced more focussed and overtly political takes on the crisis. I particularly railed against the imposition of vaccine passports either for international travel or access to facilities at home. I also covered some of the artistic responses to the pandemic from the film makers John Smith and the collage artist Cold War Steve. My most polemical piece was written for my blog and contrasted the reduction of pandemic deaths to mute statistics with the outpouring of grief and solidarity in the aftermath of the murder of Sarah Everard. The police response to the vigil held for Sarah on Clapham Common further reinforced my increasingly militant opposition to State imposed pandemic restrictions. I watched the police break up this gathering of grieving women with incandescent rage.

 

As Summer turned to Autumn and things in London began to look vaguely like they used to, my attention turned to the broader implications of the pandemic and in particular the penetration and radicalisation of digital control technologies into daily life. Digital health surveillance technologies in their manifold forms had throughout the pandemic frequently been compared by their opponents to China’s so-called Social Credit System. The three pieces of writing I produced at the end of 2021 cover the reality of that system and the anxieties around a possible post-political society controlled by Algorithmic Governance. My research also took me towards theorists most attuned to the post-political management of populations and the continuing effects of digital technologies on forms of subjectivity. The writing of Ignas Kalpokas, in particular his Algorithmic Governance: Politics and Law in the Post-Human Era, were highly instructive, as have been my continued reading of the work of Bernard Stiegler and Byung-Chul Han.

 

On a personal level the pandemic was a watershed for me. Tracing the origins of formative thought in one’s life is always a little futile and there is a tendency to narrativize what is often random unconnected events and decisions, but I do think that the December evening of 2020, when Boris Johnson announced another nationwide lockdown, set in motion the ideas, or at least the subjective break that has led me both to leave London and find myself planning a life with my soon-to-be wife in near total opposition to what I had previously taken to be essential. Even live music, the absence of which in the two blog articles titled ‘The Sounds ofSilence’ I lamented, has faded as a motivation for remaining in the Capital. By the end of 2022 I was in no doubt that everything had changed, even if it was in ways that were scarcely perceptible and difficult to describe. Nevertheless, I no longer felt at home. I don’t know the future, but I am pretty certain it is not in the cities.

 

The world is changed, but there is nothing new under the sun and we will make ugly ruins; which according to a certain - notably illiberal - strain of thought, means we have failed to build a worthwhile civilization. The pandemic is not over, nor will it ever be, since like the truly epochal events of the previous century - the great depression, the world wars, the war on terror - it's not that history moves on, but rather that the event is integrated into our sense of being historical, and thus we carry the wreckage with us into the next crisis. This is another way of conceiving Decline; a gradual, inescapable build-up of weight upon the back of the present, until time itself collapses. Grasping the Epoch is grasping the time of the Now, when no other future is thinkable.

 

"But you continue as before, it is too late to change, there is no more time”.

 

China's Dream, the World's Destiny?: Sundry Notes on Social Credit, Algorithmic Governance and Tech Dystopia

 

The following is a series of notes, quotes and reflections left over from my two recent articles for the Battleground on China's social credit model and their tech landscape more generally.

 

 

Ꙛ. In the West technologies which would enable the expansion of algorithmic governance are predominantly held by the tech monopolies, Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon, as well as smaller developers working at the intersections of big data and surveillance infrastructure, in addition to more traditional commercial incentivising, marketing and analysis tools. So far there is little in the way of a centralised state led approach to joining up the different strands of what would be a totalising system utilising large amount of citizen data. This is not surprising given the transnational nature of these corporations and their well established antipathy towards state regulation or co-option.  This is not, however, to deny the links between state surveillance and the private technology firms which are sequestered to enable it.  These technologies are – despite the scope of data collecting undertaken by the likes of GCHQ and the US NSA being an open secret - still largely viewed by the ruling class and the professional middle classes as economic tools with differing degrees of deleterious collateral effects.

 

The situation in China, however, is marked by a mixed tech economy that currently supports a high degree of market competition, uneven deployment within civilian life, as well as an increasing degree of centralised governance encompassing legal regulation and military contracting. The political will towards centralisation of digital technologies for the purpose of what the CCP call 'Data Driven Governance' is certainly present, however the current state of play reveals a diverse picture which is as much about regulatory containment and limit setting as it is on the wholesale construction of a nationwide digital panopticon. This latter remains a fantasy born of Western anxieties over loss of competitiveness and geopolitical maneuvering.

The overarching name given to this fantasy is The Chinese Social Credit System (shehui xinyong tixi).

 

 “If her risk factor fluctuated upward—whether due to some suspicious pattern in her movements, her social associations, her insufficient attention to a propaganda-consumption app, or some correlation known only to the AI—a purely automated system could limit her movement. It could prevent her from purchasing plane or train tickets. It could disallow passage through checkpoints. It could remotely commandeer “smart locks” in public or private spaces, to confine her until security forces arrived”. - The Panopticon is Already Here - The Atlantic September 2020

֎. Generalising somewhat, we might describe two differing central domains of politics out of which the movement towards algorithmic governance is occurring in China and the West. On both sides the present tendency involves an inmixing of three generic elements within that central domain, Order, Control and Economic Growth; each of which impart their own rationality upon the whole.

 

In the West the weight falls decisively on the side of growth which - with the passing of the consumerist model of capitalism - we should no longer identify with traditional measures such as GDP, but more with the profitability of the main tech and data monopolies, as well as the nexus of finance and eCommerce that they support. The ordering potential of algorithmic technologies and machine learning is - according to the historical movement of rationalisation - a desirable and ideologically neutral extension of the organisational and utilitarian principles of secular Western societies. We should understand this at its most basic metaphysical level as the dispelling of darkness, the bringing into light of all that is otherwise concealed and previously impervious to calculation within the complexity of human affairs. In this regard we should closely associate calculability with profitability derived from the opportunities afforded by digitalisation for primitive accumulation. This would obviously not be the kind of primitive accumulation associated with colonialist exploitation, but, following the insight of Hardt and Negri is the turning inwards onto Western populations of forces expropriating the communicative resources of human beings, just as the former European imperial powers exploited their colonial subjects.

"In today’s largely data-centric environment, truth-claims can be specifically manufactured in a way that maximizes the pleasure experienced by target audiences by affirming their desires, hopes, and fears, or suggesting aspirational visions derived from preexisting opinion. As striving for pleasure is a natural feature of human life, and individuals are capable of learning to maximize their satisfaction by repeating and emulating previously successful behaviors (e.g. siding with opinion-congruent fake news), it is only logical that positive affective impact replaces truthfulness as the main criterion for news selection". Ignas Kalpokas - Affective Encounters of the Algorithmic Kind: Post-Truth and Posthuman Pleasure

 

ϡ. The social control potential of digitalisation is largely disavowed in Western politics, something to be mitigated and regulated by democratic oversight and market mechanisms. That Liberal Democracy is utterly incapable of controlling the forces it has engendered is the tragic element in this story. Tragic in that it seals its own fate, but also the fate of all those theories of political-economy (Neoliberalism chiefly) which place the autonomy of the market at their core. The canonical distinction between Market and State -  a nominal gap within which the history of modernity has been written - is drawing to a close. The ultimate harmonising power of algorithmic governance is to do away with this great historical antagonism. A gestalt switch is occurring as the pandemic opens up greater demands for curtailing uncertainty (economic, epidemiological, political) and managing risk in all areas of society.

 “In this digital era, new data and technology are shaping the credit reporting sector. Big data and machine learning, for example, allow for faster, more sophisticated, and more cost-effective data mining and processing while lowering the risks associated with human interventions. These technologies hold tremendous potential for credit information sharing”. - Leveraging big data and machine learning in credit reporting - World Bank Blogs August 2021  

Ꙛ. The demand for social media companies to ‘tackle online hate’ is the clearest example of a disavowal of the true nature of these technologies as they are deployed within the unbounded rationale of the attention market (competition for available brain power). The presumption that Statute may be able to contain the furies of utterly disaffected and spiritually impoverished populations is as tragic as it is laughable. Following Bernard Stiegler let us call 'online hate' the basic form of activity which negative desublimation takes in societies increasingly dominated by an attention economy of extreme affect; a combination of instant gratification, infantilised attention seeking, and monetised cruelty. The YouTube Influencer is the poster-subjectivity emanating from such an economy.

 

“Social integrity is the foundation of the construction of a social credit system. Only by treating each other with sincerity and trust will we form harmonious and friendly interpersonal relationships, promote the progress of socialist civilization, and achieve social harmony and long-term stability". - Guidelines of Social Credit SystemConstruction (2014-2020) 

 

֎. From the perspective of the desire to ‘tackle online hate’ Western politicians and the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party are in complete agreement; here the harmonising potential of an extended social credit system reveals its cross-ideological appeal. Nonetheless without the authoritarian core and will to reign in the "all powerful subjects" that Silicone Valley's finest represent, all these committee hearings with whistleblowers and soft regulatory bluster amount to nothing. They fail to register the basic point, which is that the corruption, amplification and monitization of our worst instincts IS the productive core of the social media industry. Meanwhile, China can afford to make both the influencers and their richest tech entrepreneurs disappear.

  

ϡ. From the side of ORDER, the socially divisive consequences of an economy of extreme affect are negative upon the whole, leading to “culture war” and general disunity. Conversely from the side of GROWTH, the rigidity of the ordering principle – an extension of the bureaucratic principle – leaves insufficient free play within the system to enable production of new profitable modes of sociality, including the capture of libidinal economy. It is the task of the third element, CONTROL, to find a mode of binding the other two elements. As yet it is only China which has taken this as an explicit task, with the social credit system and their most recent plan for Rule of Law with Chinese characteristics touted as its vanguard policy. One should also consider the significance in China of the Rule of Virtue and the tendency to use centralising and legitimising functions of the ruling party as limiting factors on the depth to which algorithmic governance could reach. There are no such limitations West of Ankara. 

“Historian Yuval Harari argues “free market capitalism and state-controlled communism aren’t competing ideologies, ethical creeds, or political institutions. At bottom, they are competing data-processing systems. Capitalism uses distributed processing, whereas communism relies on centralized processing.”218 While this characterization may be reductive, it does neatly encapsulate the divergent approaches to algorithmic regulation taken by China and the United States. Employing AI and big data to inform regulatory decision making is not unique to China or the CSCS. In the report ‘Government by Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence in Federal Administrative Agencies’ released in February 2020 by a team at Stanford University, researchers found that 45 percent of U.S. federal agencies have experimented with AI in capacities quite similar to CSCS data-based initiatives such as Internet Plus”. – Trivium China Project report onthe Social Credit System

 

Ꙛ. In the Anglophone world, the disruptive force of digital technologies in combination with rising inequality and political dissatisfaction, has resulted in societies which seem increasingly ungovernable by Liberal Democratic means. The advent of the security state in the wake of the attacks of 9/11 was the clearest expression yet of the permanent state of emergency which has not ceased to restructure the public sphere around the management of risk and uncertainty. Now the pandemic has accelerated these tendencies and forced crumbling Western democracies onto foothills already trodden by Beijing.  

  

“In the biosecurity context, as in any other, intelligence is a ‘service industry’ whose sole aim ought to be to interpret the threat and risk environment for a decision-maker in order that they can either disrupt threats or put in place mitigation strategies. Put another way, national security intelligence and law enforcement agencies play a role both in reducing uncertainty around the biosecurity environment, and the impact of threats and risks associated with it. The degree to which intelligence can interpret emerging bio-threats will depend on the issue, and the extent to which intelligence agencies are able to provide ‘value added’ information in a timely manner for decision-makers”. Patrick F. Walsh - Intelligence,Biosecurity and Bioterrorism (2018)

 

֎.  Data plays a fundamental ideological role in the field of risk management. A quantitative assumption is made regarding the relationship of data to the evaluation of risk. Despite overtures being made to the ‘quality’ of intelligence, in practice one never ceases to demand more data, and the bureaucratic systems within which risk analysis takes place ensure that the will to collect ever more quantities of data will coincide with the blind expansion of the bureaucratic/rationalisation process itself. In other words, bureaucracy and big data share deep seated metaphysical characteristics. This should be of no surprise as the literal meaning of bureaucracy – rule by the files – is immediately applicable to a society algorithmically governed via the mass collection of citizen information. But, with decision making having escaped human cognitive limitations into artificial intelligence, will there be a place in the future for the bureaucrat?

 

“System 206 is the codename for the Shanghai High People’s Court intelligent assistive case-handling system for criminal cases, which aims to improve quality and reduce ‘false, unjust, or wrong’ charges and sentences. The system has two main components. The first is a cross-referencing system that uses speech recognition and natural language processing to compare different types of evidence and alert the judge to any contradictions in the fact patterns. The second is a sentencing reference tool based on machine learning algorithms that use the defendant’s basic information (criminal record, age, ‘social harm’ incurred, etc) to search a large database of past court records for similar cases and make sentencing recommendations”. - From Traffic Management to Smart Courts: China’s approach to smartcities - NESTA May 2020

 

ϡ. The signature characteristic of the Panopticon is taken to be the architectural device by which a person located at the centre of the building is able, without being seen themselves, to observe the totality of the inmates. But in addition to this scopic feature there is also the basic fact of confinement without which the device could not function. It follows that in order to apply the panoptic paradigm to modern surveillance society we should also recognise the character of late modernity as a kind of ever-expanding prison. Here, Foucault’s observations on visibility and discipline converge with Giorgio Agamben’s bleak assessment that the concentration camp is the paradigm of modern government. The pandemic has rendered this convergence more explicit than ever, as executive orders enforcing the confinement of whole populations have been combined with the broadest and most invasive of digital surveillance technologies. How is it that under such conditions of expanding and diversifying boundaries can the concept of fluid or liquid modernity still hold true, still be the driver for ever more disruptive indeterminacy?

 

Ꙛ. The disruptive consequences of platform capitalism, and digital technologies more generally, on the national and international scale have been – claims the late French philosopher Bernard Stiegler – a massive degree of desocialisation, where digital technical systems have overtaken social systems. The results being balkanisation, anger, disaffection and political and social disintegration. The situation in the Western world is, according to his description, a state of fact that awaits its state of law. This perceptive point is perhaps key to understanding what China is doing with its recent drive towards containing development of digital culture within a legal framework, and the fate they are hoping to avoid.

"The broad range of policy goals projected on the system explains why what is generally translated as “social credit” is not a clearly and legally defined concept. Documents and discussions of the system contain a set of terms that range from financial creditworthiness (征信) to broader trustworthiness, law-abiding behaviour, or even moral values such as honesty and integrity (诚信/守信). [ ... ] The vagueness of “social credit” has enabled China’s local authorities to use the catchphrase to enforce (often unrelated) policy priorities through highly localised initiatives”. - Merics China Monitor - Report on Social Credit system 2021 

 

֎. There is seemingly an ambiguity at the cultural level between common actuarial procedures for assessing levels of risk, say for the purpose of granting loans, and decision making regarding the political or moral trustworthiness of individuals. The same can be said for other key terms involved in China's tech/market/social control nexus, especially Fǔbài (腐败), which isn't just corruption in the legal or political context but has a special emphasis on the sense of something rotten in the character of the person or institution; a definition that would deserve to be revived in the West if corruption were not already the waters in which we swim. Then there is Fǎzhì (法治), which the CCP like to translate as Rule of Law both for their documents and increasingly at the UN, but in fact is better rendered as rule BY law, law as an instrument with value insofar as it achieves an effect, but without any inherent virtue, and certainly without the great historical baggage of Law in the West emanating (literally) from the confluence of Christian theology and NeoPlatonic metaphysics. 

“Accelerate the advancement of social credit legislation and improve the punishment mechanism for dishonesty. Standardize the list of targets for punishment for dishonesty. Clearly formulate the basis, scope of application, punishment standards and relief mechanisms in accordance with laws and regulations, and protect the legitimate rights and interests of citizens and enterprises while strengthening punishment for dishonesty”. - Plan for the Construction of Rule of Law in China (2020-2025) 

 

ϡ. The fragmentary nature of the social credit system and the strategic ambiguity which exists around the system’s key concepts allows traditional personal authority in the form of local and party state officials to pursue their own agenda, and, as such, undermine any general claim as to the system's strengthening of the rule of law in either the conventional sense, or the extended and highly centralised version pursued by the CCP. Additional harmonisation and standardisation is severely needed if the social credit idea is not to end up as a patchwork of local loyalty schemes with varying degrees of efficiency and participation.

 

“It is important to note that the SoCS remains an extension of the existing legal and

administrative system under party-state control. The official limitation to “enforcement of

laws” does not prevent overreach and human rights violations:

First, the SoCS enforces all laws and regulations. This includes repressive ones such as censorship regulations, or those that lead to discriminatory treatment of companies. It also enforces the growing list of regulations aimed at tackling anti-social conduct, standardising and restricting civic behaviour in line with “socialist core values”, as proclaimed by the leadership. There is therefore an acute risk of “credit” being randomly applied with disproportionate punishments, undermining the party state’s claim that the SoCS would establish fairness and transparency”.

  - Merics China Monitor - Report on Social Credit system 2021 

 

Ꙛ. In other parts of the world the aims of the SoCS could fall under the more bureaucratic categories of industry standardisation and regulatory alignment. However, the broader moral and social connotations of trustworthiness and integrity within the Chinese system of socialist core values, and the official nature of the SoCS means that the boundary separating economic activity and personal lifestyle is extremely porous, allowing the CCP to promulgate social credit as a general concept supporting their version of the Rule of Law in concert with the Rule of Virtue, and overall social cohesion.

 

“It is also a necessary condition for promoting the establishment of an objective, fair, reasonable and balanced international credit rating system, To adapt to the new situation of globalization and control the urgent requirements of the new pattern of globalization”. - Guidelinesof Social Credit System Construction (2014-2020) 

“Chinese economists have proposed that a multi-dimensional approach under which lenders consider regulatory compliance metrics in addition to financial metrics could form the basis of a new Chinese-led financial credit rating model. Thus, in the realm of global finance, it is possible that over the long-term, the Chinese Social Credit System could present a challenge to U.S.-led sovereign debt and corporate bond rating models developed by S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch Ratings”.- China’s Corporate Social Credit System - Trivium China Project report Novermber 2020

 

֎. The dream of a totally harmonised society has at its apex the great historical sovereign of world history, now reduced to the status of a Fisher King. Wounded, impotent, unable to control the forces swirling all around him, he retreats to the lake where he fishes day after day, awaiting the one who can heal him by asking the right question. Who do we imagine is more likely to end up on such an interminable fishing trip, Biden or Xi Jinping?

Three Articles at The Battleground

I've tried to avoid writing anything technical about the pandemic since Spring. I have this heavy feeling of having seen to much and knowing to much. The first of these three articles below covers the issue of vaccine or health passports - whichn will come, in some form or another - but the other two cover stories in the arts, which is a nice break from the drudgery of studying what is being done to us. 

 

 

 

The Covid Excuse (Feb 2021) 

 

 

  

 

 

Cutting up Boris Johnson (March 2021) 

 

 

Cold War Steve (June 2021)

Excess Deaths, Grievable Death

Detail from Bruegel's The Triumph of Death

Excess deaths is a key figure which has been used over the past year as part of the government strategy to manage the Pandemic. The term "excess" implies something about the character of these deaths; that they should not have taken place; that they were avoidable. This is the tone in which the UK media has consistently used the term, encouraging shock and dismay, and emphasising the continual - indeed likely permanent - need to comply with biosecurity restrictions to avoid more unnecessary, excess deaths. In reality excess deaths is a purely statistical abstraction, devoid of explanatory content. The figure is the total number of recorded deaths above the previous five year average.

Accordingly the current estimates for excess deaths in the UK in 2020 (the figures for last year are still provisional according to the ONS) is in the region of 75 to 85 thousand. This will include all those registered as Covid deaths (which as we know has a very low bar) and also those that died prematurely as a result of the pandemic response. The government has not shown any interest in distinguishing between these two groups and so we are encouraged to think of every excess death as caused by Covid. However, Matthew Reed, of the end-of-life care charity Marie Curie noted in January that during the pandemic there had been a "silent crisis" of deaths at home, unrelated to the disease.

In isolation the figure of 75 to 85 thousand sounds appalling, and indeed the propagandistic use of such statistics is grounded on using them in the abstract. The greatest abstraction here is the hidden assumption in the notion of "excess deaths" of an acceptable rate of mortality. This is an illusion since the "excess" here is derived from a rolling five year average and does not contain any normative notion of mortality.  Quite what that mythical figure might be is never discussed. However the ONS data does at least afford us a historical comparison.

The UK Office for National Statistics makes most of its data sets publically available on easy to use Excel spreadsheets, which affords anyone the opportunity to dig into the numbers and find out the recent history of excess deaths and how that figure relates to other key death statistics such as Crude and Age-standardised mortality rate. The first thing that jumps out is that since the 1960s there had been a steady decline in excess deaths in the UK. Indeed since 1980 the figure was rarely above zero. That all changed after the Tories came to power in 2010 and began a decade of austerity which has gutted the public services - most notably those of health and social care - on which the nation's health depends. As a result the total number of excess deaths from 2010 to 2019 according to the ONS is 121,798. In the previous decade it was zero. Given that this number far exceeds even the worst estimates for 2020 could we not argue that the election of a conservative government is at least as great a threat to public heath as SARS-CoV-2? To bring the winter of 2020/21 into similar context the ONS report from 2018 highlights that in the 2017 to 2018 winter period, there were an estimated 50,100 excess winter deaths in England and Wales alone. That figure was the highest recorded since the winter of 1975 to 1976. Where was the declaration of a public health emergency then? Indeed why was it not headline news in 2015 when excess deaths were the highest since the early 60s?

These excess deaths - which apparently were not worthy of massive state intervention or blanket media coverage - were not the result of a virus which until recently we had no treatment, but were the direct result of political decisions. In contrast, in January this year the media - which has never tired of making the analogy with a state of war - loudly exclaimed the highest number of excess deaths since World War 2. Now, remember, excess deaths is the total number of recorded deaths above the previous five year average. With this in mind it's hardly surprising that the transition from a state of relative peace to one of mass slaughter in the five years from 1935 to 1940 would yield such a figure. In fact the crude mortality rate for 1940 was 1457.9 (per 100,000 population), compared to 1016.2 for 2020. This latter figure is lower than the corresponding mortality rate for 2003. And what terrible events were happening in the UK in 2003 to account for such an awful mortality rate? Really, I'd like to know. If we take the more informative Age-standardised mortality rate - which we should given how much more lethal Covid-19 is to the elderly - we find the 2020 rate of 1043.5 is comparable with the figure recorded in 2009 (1033.8). In fairness the media haven't shied away from stating this counterintuitive fact, perhaps hoping for hazy memories of a Gordon Brown governed UK in the grip of the financial crisis; the countless dead going unburied.

None of what I've written here is "disputing" the facts. The numbers are what they are; the political significance, however, cannot be determined from these figures alone. What we can say is that in response to a mortality rate comparable to a decade ago we have abandoned all political and social life and voluntarily subjected ourselves to restrictions that surpass even the most invasive forms of totalitarianism.

In practice we've got used to being managed according to these statistical abstractions, viewing ourselves and our futures as tied to a mass of transmission rates, risk curves, and mortality figures. In doing so we evacuate our lives of all political and ethical significance and instead end up identifying with a purely abstract biological existence, one to which we are expected to sacrifice everything that makes life worth living. It is on account of this logic that Giorgio Agamben has described the cultic practices associated with the religion of science, which he argues has superseded the previous religions of Christianity and capitalism in the West.

Critics would say that such statistics allow us to see the pandemic's real impact. I disagree. What they do is to efface the lives of the countless thousands that make up those deaths, all of whom are lumped into bare facts that we consume daily without any depth of understanding. Rather than encouraging us to identify with the individuals who make up those numbers, we end up treating them as faceless "generic" persons.

This has not been the case with one particular death this month. On a night in early March Sarah Everard was abducted from the Clapham Common area. Her body was recovered from woods in Kent a week later. A serving police officer has been charged with her kidnap and murder. If any death deserves to be treated as excess and avoidable in the fully ethical sense then it is this one. The murder has led to an outpouring of grief and of anger at the levels of gender based violence women are continuing to suffer at the hands of men. If anything, the apparently random nature of the attack has contributed to greater identification with the victim. As one caller to LBC radio said "she could have been any one of us".

On Saturday women and their supporters across the country defied police restrictions to hold vigils for Sarah, coming together in a show of solidarity and to demand an end to the epidemic of gender based violence. The vigil on Clapham Common was attended by several hundred people, diligently obeying social distancing regulations, wearing masks amid the flowers and tributes. The contrast with the way we have been encouraged to react to Covid deaths could not be more stark. Here, instead of abandoning our ethical and political responsibilities, the death of a single person was the catalyst for a spontaneous, politically engaged, and very public show of solidarity. The people who defied Covid regulations (which have effectively banned all forms of protest) did so because they recognised that there was something more important at stake, an ethical/political response to a single death that implicates everyone. 

It was an intensely moving scene, even when predictably the Neanderthals of the Metropolitan Police moved in to break up the vigil. The images of young women being dragged away in handcuffs from a peaceful event organised for the sake of a murdered woman have focussed attention on how pandemic restrictions are normalising the erosion of many rights; and also how that erosion disproportionately affects women, just as the lockdowns have contributed to a spike in domestic violence and domestic servitude. It couldn't be more timely as the government have submitted a bill which if approved would lock-in many of the restrictions on protest which were brought in to manage the pandemic. One can only hope that this Spring will finally bring the belated push back against the biosecurity state.

Three Articles at The Battleground 2020

The Battleground very kindly published three articles by me last year. Two originals and one edit of my long piece from May on life under lockdown. 

The Truth About Coronavirus: Science and Governing the Emergency

This is the most recent one, where I attempt to put the often repeated claim that government interventions are being "led by the science" into some kind of historical and context. I also touch on the sort of epistemology that is increasingly deployed as a way for political power to govern emergency situations. This piece is in some respects a brief outline of a longer analysis I'm working on coving the knowledge based techniques associated with the rise of what Giorgio Agamben is calling the political rationality of Biosecurity.

Pandemic Interiors: Pinkcourtesyphone and Coronavirus Politics

This one was also published in December. I've reviewed several Pinkcourtesyphone records for Musique Machine in the past and had planned an interview with the project's creator Richard Chartier. Midway through the year Chartier dropped another garish pink slab of dark ambient and it dawned on me that many of the themes of the project spoke to our era of lockdowns, paranoia and pharmacologically modulated states.

Life Under Lockdown: London Calling (COVID-19 Remix)

 This is the edit of the longer piece I wrote in May here.

All three, like everything I've written since March last year, are a response to the Coronavirus pandemic. This will likely continue for some time longer, but hopefully in the not too distant future I will feel inspired to write about something more positive.