Half way along the road we have to go ...(MidJourney)

 

Since April I've been using an image generating artificial intelligence program called MidJourney. Previously my experience of the cutting edge of AI had been putting a few basic requests into ChatGPT, none of which I found particularly inspiring. I'd discovered MidJourney via a Twitter post from Mary Harrington who was commenting on the "nefarious" atmosphere of some of the purportedly more photorealistic images produced by the AI. The images in question were of groups of attractive young women, seemingly hanging out at a party. The composition was naturalistic, like a candid shot taken with a old Polaroid. Only when I looked closer did the figures begin to lose their air of authenticity. The limbs were not quite in the right orientation, hands were slightly too small or large, and most obviously at least half had missing or extra fingers. There was also something about the expressions on the faces of these digitally created nubiles that was, well, a little off, like the expressions on waxworks but far more fleshy and uncanny.

Harrington was right, there was something nefarious about these pictures, like the photographer had captured a scene never meant to be exposed to public view. Anyway, it was enough to peak my interest and have me sign up for a few minutes CPU time on the MidJourney server, which is accessed via the Discord app (I have no prior experience using Discord, which is apparently mainly used by gamers). I soon came to realise that quirks of anatomy are a common feature, particularly of the earlier versions of MidJourney - which as of this month is up to version 6.

Like all of these image generating AIs it responds to prompts fed in by the user, which can be either text, images or a combination of the two. There are also a variety of commands that can be used to tailor the images and to select basic parameters such as aspect ratio. Once a command is submitted the MidJourney bot - which you are in communication with on Discord, usually responds within 30 seconds or so, presenting you with a grid of four images the differences between which will depend on how you have configured the prompt. For example increasing the '--Chaos' level will add greater stylistic variation, while the '--Stylize' parameter sets the level at which the bot will improvise around your prompt. There are also levers for 'Weird' which I've yet to find a use for, and 'Image weight', which allows you to tweak the degree to which either the image or the text part of a prompt determine the output. There are a lot of other little features but these are ones I tend to use as standard.

So what's the point of this thing? What are people doing with it? Well, generalising somewhat, I'd say there were four main areas or genres of use based on the public gallery on the MidJourney site and images which have garnered popularity on social media:

1 - Fake news or comedy images of celebrities, politicians and other public figures. This is where you got those images of Donald Trump seemingly being dragged by police to jail. Now, this stuff has only really taken off on MidJourney since they've released versions that can actually reproduce a good likeness of the person being punked. Version four was passable but required a lot of coaxing by adding real photos of the individual to the prompt, but things really took off with version 5 and especially 5.2 which can produce excellent likenesses of major political figures without the need to feed it a picture of the person. Version 6 (I've only used this for a few days) appears to be just as good, but with better overall complexity and compositional coherence. It's the potential for misuse - or really any use - of this feature that gets a lot of people worried about the possibility of AI undermining democracy or rendering all news images untrustworthy - as if this wasn't already well on the way.

2 - A picture of your dream girl, often suspiciously young looking, and either anime style Asian or Teutonic blonde babe in appearance . Yes really, I'm not glossing this; it's clear this is what's going on, and why should we be surprised that in the world of OnlyFans and chatbot girlfriends that people immediately gravitate towards using AI in this way, as if the developers at MidJourney had a mainline into the deepest desires of the average extremely online male. But what really bothers me about the trend is how formulaic all the images are. It's all waify (or should that be Waifu?) skinny pixie girls or vivacious models of ambiguous age framed in soft light, staring out vacantly at the sex starved prompter on the other side of the screen. None of these kinds of images are pornographic (more on that side of things later), if anything they're just boring in their cute Eurasian / Aryan predictability. I have no doubt that this is going to be a major growth area in AI development as it so neatly tracks the general state of social and sexual atomisation in the developed world. One could imagine going to your doctor with depression born of loneliness only to be prescribed a fully customisable AI companion. It's cheaper than therapy!

3 - Mainstream entertainment spin off type imagery / fan art.  This needs little explanation, and it's perhaps understandable that at a stage in which the people most likely to be using this technology are geeks and the extremely online that a significant proportion of the content will be Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, Pokémon adjacent type images. So what? it's boring but it's entertainment, and that is what most people will be satisfied with.

 

4 - Decoration. I'm revealing my Baconian prejudices here, but for me perhaps the most uninspired use of the this vastly powerful technology is in the production of purely decorative images, whether they be for marketing purposes, website design, or just stuff people can use at home. It's dull. End of. But it's also possibly the most "everyday" application image generating AI will be used for. This is where we fear for the graphic designers who face an 'adapt or perish' situation when this stuff goes mainstream. In fact it's already going mainstream with Adobe Firefly which will combine generative AI with Adobe's already wildly successful Photoshop and Illustrator products. So, I don't have a problem with using AI for basic graphic design, but it is for me - as the workaday application - thoroughly pedestrian and only likely to track the mediocrity of contemporary culture. 

So what have I used this technology for? What has held my attention over the last nine months and encouraged me to pump about £200 into a monthly subscription and extra CPU time? After the initial novelty wore off, and I realised I couldn't just upload a picture of myself and expect it to produce a perfect likeness in whatever Kabuki drag scenario I chose, I began to explore what you could call its inner aesthetic tendencies. My attitude was straightforward; I wasn't interested in a digitally enhanced version of reality. What interested me was pushing the AI into making images of a world that could not, and perhaps should not exist.

This is where I think the developers of MidJourney show their conservatism and adherence to the basic coordinates of traditional Western thought about aesthetics, since they constantly talk - in their Discord announcements - about 'prompt following' and 'coherence'. What this amounts to is fixing the horizons of the AI to the field of representation. The images the AI is meant to produce should visually represent as closely as possible the verbal and visual data fed into it in the prompt. If you ask for a black cat on a white mat, then that's what it should give you each time, except this is in aesthetic terms a very formal and empty description, which in and of itself could never be said to constitute the salient datum for a unique work of art. Either the same cat on the same mat would be produced each time, which would satisfy very few people, or an infinite number of radically different cats and mats would result, which would show MidJourney to be an engine of arbitrariness and rob the prompt engineer of their status as an "AI artist".  

Now, the developers know this, which is why they've put so much effort into MidJourney's ability to understand natural language prompts and in training the AI to interpolate those prompts with its dataset (or supercluster as they call it) in an increasingly coherent and complex way. The results, as you can see with the comparisons between V4 and V6 are startling. 

Left V4 Right V6 - Prompt: Videodrome, surrealism, cybernetics + the same 4 prompt images

Even so, I wonder what the ultimate end goal is for MidJourney's programmers when it comes to the question of representation? Do they want an tool that if given an essay on the aesthetics of Van Goghs Sunflowers could perfectly reproduce the Dutch masters painting (an idea which makes certain assumptions about art criticism), or do they want an AI that is itself an artist? If it is the former then they would seem doomed to produce endless iterations that track the user's prompts to ever greater degree of representational accuracy, which - since everyone will have a different idea of what that cat on the matt should look like - will never become the reliable tool of representation they might hope for, and will likely never satisfy those users - like myself - that hope AI can offer something uniquely nonhuman to the artistic process.

I don't know if that's what their engineers  want, perhaps some, the more commercially minded of their staff, do. After all, MidJourney is usually promoted as a tool for artists, not as an artist in its own right. If this is their intention then what they'll sacrifice, and indeed some versions have already bordered on this, is the wildness and surprising interpretations MidJourney gives to the prompts, and in particular how it interpolates radically incoherent combinations of text and image.

This has been my entry point to MidJourney, the USP without which I doubt I would have stuck around. You could call it dialectical, though that's probably a bit high flung. The attraction is the interplay between intention and randomness, and the feeling that there's something truly uncanny (a ghost in the machine if you like) behind the coding, that is working with you when you use it. This is also what makes it potentially addictive. You craft your prompt, maybe it takes only a minute, maybe it takes ten minutes, or twenty, before you fire it off into the heart of the rough beast. Then there is the delay while the magic happens; compare it to the gap between a dice throw and winning or losing. There is the slow incremental appearance of the grid, and finally the finished result which you scrutinise for hitherto unknown aesthetic qualities - also count the fingers, if there are meant to be fingers, and especially if there are not. It is genuinely addictive and I think even more so when you're trying to produce weird and unconventional images, since half of the fun is trying to sneak something past the moderators in the hope that'll push the result into more interesting territory.

And yes there is moderation, lots of it. Generally speaking you can't pump explicit images into it, or words that are likely to generate explicit images. That is not to say that it doesn't generate explicit images anyway, it really does, and with very little help; I do wonder whether the moderation is aimed more at controlling the inner tendencies of the AI than of the users! I just can't imagine the supercluster training set and coding is able to be thoroughly purged of the raw material that goes into making up a pornographic image. If it knows what Botticelli's Venus looks like then it knows how to generate nude female figures. To exclude all images of nudity would cut it off from a large swath of the cannon of Western art. This is another reason why I find no use for the --weird command. Just adding extra dissonance to the prompt, in either text or image form is enough to throw the result out to odd places and seemingly activate its inner tendencies and interpretive habits.

For example browsing other users pictures I found that the term (Nether Regions) in brackets, which is a kind of soft English slang for genitals (from the idiom of hidden Hellish things), would push any image with organic content into looking, well, not like actual nether regions, but just more gnarly, as if the biological components were suffering from some awful disease. An odd discovery, and only one of many similar counter-intuitive examples of non representational prompting. It doesn't give you what it says on the tin but it does something interesting and fairly consistently.

It's perhaps saying too much that there is a poetic quality to MidJourney, but it is striking the way in which it interpolates the different parts of a prompt, and can turn grammatically or semantically jarring words into coherent compositions. There is then an internal logic perhaps beyond the human ability to make sense from disparate linguistic and visual data. This is perhaps it's greatest strength as an artistic tool and it'll be interesting to see whether the developers are curious enough or sufficiently philosophically minded not to smother MidJourney's wildness in a race for ever greater representational accuracy.

Fluidity and the Uneasiness of Culture

 

It is increasingly common to hear of identities described as "fluid". Fluid identities are shifting identities, unmoored from any fixed location. In their fluidity they break down the normative weight of solid, fixed identities.

 

Fluidity implies movement, a sort of identity jet-setting which - despite the proliferation of fluid identities - I think we should recognise as being less and less characteristic of the digital age, and especially the post pandemic age. If potential for movement is no longer the prime characteristic of the non-solid, should we then pivot within the idiom to liquidity and liquidizing as the signatures of digitally disaffected and dysphoric humanity?

 

Liquidity does not emphasise the mobile, as with fluidity, but the labile, the property of being easily changed, and a description that necessitates a process of liquidation, so as to nullify the residual and resisting solidity of the thing.

 

Labile persons are not fixed in their identities. Nor however are they fluid in so far as they neatly move from one shape to another by force of their own will, like the mythical god Proteus, the etymology of which implies an originary or primordial character and was commonly associated with the sea.

 

The status of modern labile persons is foremost to be subject to processes of liquification, disruption, and change, such that holding a stable form is impossible.

 

Autonomy is the principle victim of subjective liquification, as the capacity to adopt a form-of-life proper to a stable and ongoing persona is constantly disrupted by what Bernard Stiegler has termed generalised proletarianization.  This process - dramatically accelerated by the enforced nihilism of the pandemic - is enabled by evermore invasive technologies.

 

The elimination of boundaries does not deliver all things to free association.

 

Information is paradigmatic of "liquid modernity"; it is ephemeral, always superseding itself. We talk of information flows and hubs where it is stored like oil or gas. Some tech entrepreneurs have even compared the big data economy to the oil and gas industry. But information also liquidizes. In its shear quantity it overwhelms what is solid in an endless competition for attention.

 

As it exists in a competitive environment (a capitalist environment), information constantly radicalises itself so as to be best positioned to capture the cognitive capacity of human beings, who are its relays. A relay is not a repository. Human beings are no longer required to hold information, only to generate, transmit, and amplify it. Since the information economy is by nature transitory and ephemeral it carries with it its own sense of time, which is always in the process of accelerating.

 

"Everything that stabilizes human life is time-consuming. Faithfulness, bonding and commitment are time-consuming practices. The decay of stabilizing temporal architectures, including rituals, makes life unstable. The stabilization of life would require a different temporal politics".

Byung-Chul Han - Non-Things

 

Fluid subjects are mixed into the ocean of digital culture, but they do not swim in it. Swimming is a discipline that implies direction and will, set against (or maybe consciously with) the prevailing currents. The fluid subject is not like the dandy or flaneur of industrial modernity, who picks choice pieces from out the incessant flow of experience. Even such a subjectivist aestheticism as this requires a basic foundation (an essential stillness) on which to function. Digitally disaffected populations have no solid ground on which to stand, nor can they find their way in the ocean of data.  

 

In the digital order, the grundstimmung of post-human subjects is dysphoria.

 

The role of memory in guarding against dysphoria is paramount. But even here, in the own-most depths of our bower there is disruption. Our memories too are made labile by an overabundance of stimuli and information. We don't hang around long enough to remember, and besides we have all the technology to remember for us.

 

What becomes of our past without memory?

 

Those memories which stick to us owing to their intensity, or the value we place on them as formative for our persona, take on the musky nostalgia of an old movie which we replay for ourselves as a reminder that we do have a history, that things did once happen. Otherwise memory is lost amongst the endless competing stimuli, like an ace of hearts placed at random into a deck of cards.

 

In the competition for available brain power (another way of rendering the attention economy) only the most affective data flows have a chance of being retained as memory. The algorithms understand this. Their funnelling of human attention towards ever more extreme content ends predictably in a world of trauma.

 

In the economy of extreme affect only the traumatised fully exist

 

Are we not all like Rachael in Blade Runner, unable to trust our memories, unable to orientate ourselves within the intensity of lived experience? The amorous encounter becomes a depressive acting out of liquified subjects, unsure even of the grounds of their own enjoyment. Is she into me or is she like Joi, Officer K’s holographic girlfriend in Blade Runner 2049, just telling you everything you want to hear?

 

You have memories to look back on 😊

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?