Between Two Blade Runners: Dreampunk's Noir Emotional Ecology

 

The following is an expanded version of a text that was going to be included as part of a zine dedicated to the electronic music subgenre Dreampunk. With that project seemingly having disappeared into the void it's presented here in its extended form. 

It's an irony that screenwriter Hampton Fancher didn't think much of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep when he first read it. Nevertheless, he recognised the story's potential commercial appeal and was attracted to the book's concerns around environmentalism and the implications of mass animal extinction; issues which in the mid-1970s were only just coming to popular consciousness. Another irony was that his original screenplay adaptation of the novel - eventually titled Blade Runner after a short story by William S. Burroughs (glossing the novel by Alan E. Nourse) - envisioned a relatively low budget movie, shot mainly in interiors.

Fancher's genial contribution, however, was in taking the outline of Dick's sci-fi detective story and enveloping it in the universe and sensibility of film noir. That choice, embedded in the film's script through its tortuous gestation and multiple reworkings, would significantly define what I'm calling here Blade Runner's "emotional ecology", which in turn would heavily influence the aesthetic of Dreampunk, as well as setting the template for the 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049.

On the surface it's a straightforward plot; part police procedural, part bounty hunter Western, set in an overpopulated, highly polluted Los Angeles of 2019. The destruction of the environment through resource exploitation and war has resulted in a barely habitable planet which all those with the money to do so have escaped to new lives on the Off-World colonies. Much of the labour needed to sustain this Off-World existence is provided by artificial humanoids called Replicants, manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation; a sort of nightmarish Tesla/Amazon hybrid based out of a city sized pyramid mega-structure on the edge of LA. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is the jaded former police officer drafted in to hunt down a group of state-of-the-art Nexus 6 Replicants led by Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) who have violently broken free of their masters and returned to earth.

Things get more complicated for Deckard after he encounters Rachael (Sean Young) at the Tyrell Corporation; a Replicant that doesn't know she isn't human. Their encounters form the emotional heart of the film, as the traditional noir trope of the femme fatale acts as a stage for an intense meditation on memory and what it means to be human. Just as Rachael cannot reconcile her implanted memories with her status as a Replicant with only a four-year life-span, so Deckard cannot banish his desire for this beautiful but ultimately doomed woman. The long scenes where these tensions play out in Deckard's chaotic apartment, framed by the light flashing in from giant advertising boards and flying 'Spinner' cars outside, are some of most magical in all sci-fi. The lyricism of Ridley Scott's direction and cinematography marries perfectly with the gorgeous blues/electronic score of Vangelis.

None of this would have had half the impact if it weren't for the epoch defining visuals, in particular the very intentional move to make the city environment itself a character in the film. It was Syd Mead, a professional industrial illustrator, who was responsible for much of the city's look. It's yet another irony that the classic elements of a Blade Runner style city; rain, night, smoke, neon signs in Kanji and other East Asian scripts, were born to a considerable degree out of budgetary necessity. Without money to build new sets the street scenes were filmed on the Warner Bros back lot; a basic street front used for decades by the studio, and which without the elements listed above, in the words of Ridley Scott, "looked crap". That rain soaked, neon blurred vista is arguably the film's greatest visual legacy and is replicated in the cover art of countless Dreampunk records from Gates of Siam, Wuso 命, and 2814's Dreampunk classic Birth of a New Day, to name but a few. Unsurprisingly, in a rerun of the protean days of Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), Blade Runner's modest budget quickly ballooned under pressure from Scott's visionary world building and the art department's seemingly limitless imagination.

Dreampunk derives at least as much of its aesthetic from the visual world of Blade Runner as it does from the actual sound of the films. The myth of the "Blade Runner Sound" is that it's all cavernous pads and filter sweeps played on a Jupiter 8 synthesiser. In reality Vangelis' score was a remarkable amalgam of electronic, acoustic and sampled sound, the cornerstone of which was a sense of lyricism rooted squarely in jazz and blues. One More Kiss (sung by UK pop back-room figure Don Percival) could be a Cole Porter song. All the key themes revolve around simple meandering melodies, repeated against a backdrop of atmospheric electronic sounds, which, like the rain, smoke and neon lights, frame the action in melancholic introspection. Blade Runner Blues, Rachel's Song and Memories of Green all deploy an intense pathos, the sound of an inner world, which is at odds with popular perception of the score as primarily synthetic and futuristic. 

Cover art for records by 2814, D R O I D R O Y, and Gates of Siam

Listen to a Dreampunk record by 2814, D R O I D R O Y, or Remember and you'll immediately be transported into a world of tense atmospheres, half-heard melodies and discordant rhythms, often saturated in the genre's signature style of layered phasing and reverb. These production techniques, which followed the genre as it developed out of Vaporwave, function almost like an auditory shorthand. In Vaporwave they signalled the depressive hedonism of consumer culture, the dissolution of individuality amid a pharmacologically mediated life of endless self-marketing and hyperreal commercial imagery; not to mention a certain amount of ironic distancing too. Dreampunk, like Blade Runner itself, captures something of this contemporary malaise at the crisis point of the Anthropocene. It's notable that Blade Runner's wholesale importing of a pan-Asian culture into its vision of a futuristic Los Angeles is mirrored in Vaporwave's near obsession with Japanese consumer culture of the 1970s and 80s. Dreampunk develops these themes but does so without the irony, substituting it for a heightened sense of urban alienation. It's music which puts a certain 'lack', a certain 'out-of-joint-ness', front and centre, while at the same time striving for beauty and transcendence. On this interpretation it's obvious why Ridley Scott's bleak world holds such appeal as both canvas and inspiration.

It's a cliché that the film's dark introspective mood was the cause of its limited success at the box office on its release in 1982. Famously the studios were not overjoyed at Scott's brooding masterpiece. And what was worse, it didn't even have a happy ending! As is well known they then intervened to cobble together just such an ending for the theatrical release, which involved Deckard and Rachel implausibly driving off into a verdant landscape (actually composed of unused aerial footage of the Montana countryside recorded for The Shining), seemingly unburdened by the film's previous events; least of all Rachel's soon to expire Nexus 6 lifespan. Harrison Ford was press-ganged into recording a series of voiceovers in response to feedback from preview screenings, where the audience reportedly found the film unintelligible. These and the happy ending were subsequently removed for Ridley Scott's Director's and Final cut versions of the film.

Over the subsequent four decades Blade Runner's cult status and its landmark cinematic style would assure that the sequel, when it finally came in 2017, would not deviate significantly from the template. Ryan Gosling's Officer ‘K’ reprises the role of Blade Runner, with the twist that now it's Replicants who hunt down fellow Replicants, and the world of Blade Runner 2049 is even more screwed up than the original's vision of 2019. Hampton Fancher again supplied the screenplay, this time for Denis Villeneuve, fresh from directing another highbrow sci-fi, Arrival (2016). Much of the first film's basic bounty hunt plot structure is retained, as are the themes around identity and the nature of humanity. Officer K comes to believe that he may be the first child born to a Replicant and soon abandons his search and destroy mission against Deckard in favour of a search for his own origins.

Cultural critic Slavoj Žižek has suggested that one interpretation of Blade Runner is as a story about the rise of class consciousness. Deckard comes to suspect that he himself is a Replicant and as such without Rights and disposable. Even his dreams may be known to the police; hence the meaning of the paper unicorn left outside his apartment by the sinister officer Gaff. In the sequel these socio-political themes are more overt and present an obvious commentary on the contemporary rise of big tech monopolies and the power they increasingly weald over all aspects of our lives. One scene has Officer K visit a slum area outside the city where a so-called "orphanage" serves as a front for child slave labour dismantling old electronics. K himself lives in a crowded, rundown apartment block where he is stigmatized by his neighbours who carve the word "skinjob" - a slur directed at Replicants - into his door. Although he's nominally a police officer, he is required to pass a "baseline test" in order to get paid. The test seems designed to measure a Replicant's mental stability and potential to rebel. In a radicalised version of what many precarious and gig-economy workers face today, failure to make baseline can lead to "retirement".

Industrialist Niander Wallace (Jared Leto), who has taken over the remnants of the Tyrell Corporation is a cold-blooded killer who openly claims that "every advance in human civilization has been off the back of a disposable workforce". Oppressive corporate culture, including the Wallace Corporation using drones to massacre slum dwellers, is one of the film's major themes, which, along with the politics of artificial life are issues more prescient now than ever.

No-where is the question over the impact of technology on our private lives more keenly explored than in officer K's relationship with his holographic companion Joi (Ana de Armas). Joi is an AI program created by the Wallace Corporation as a kind of perfect fantasy girlfriend. At every turn she gives K unfailing support, telling him how special he is and pushing him to pursue his quest to discover his true identity. In the film's most uncanny scene she even hires a sex worker whose body she uses as a substrate, giving K the illusion of actual intimacy with the virtual body of Joi. Gosling does a fine job of looking both aroused and mildly horrified as the features of Joi phase in and out of sync with those of the Replicant sex worker Mariette (Mackenzie Davis).

This hint towards the present-day dominance of the virtual over the physical in what should be our most personal moments is powerfully made. After Joi is destroyed by Luv (Sylvia Hoeks), Wallace's psychotic PA/bodyguard, Officer K encounters a giant interactive pink neon advertisement for the AI on the street, carrying the slogan "Everything you want to hear". In a sort of coming to class consciousness, K shakes off his grief and sets out to rescue Deckard from the hands of the Wallace Corporation and aid the burgeoning Replicant resistance movement.

Despite Villeneuve's admirable commitment to the original film's slow pace there are still considerable differences in tone between the two. Like so many big budget films of recent years it suffers from a degree of what I'll call "epicification”, where the lead character's story becomes intertwined with larger and more power forces on a societal or even universal scale. The inclusion of the Replicant rebellion twist seems more of an afterthought, and much of the police procedural angle which guided the structure of Scott's film is absent. What we get, predictably, is more money thrown around and more explosions. The scale is grander but at the cost of diminishing the intimacy and much of the humanity in the film.

Although the grand cityscape vistas are here in spades, this time round the inhabitants appear totally alienated in their vast towers. The Wallace corporation's building looms over the city almost entirely shrouded in darkness, while the scenes in the junkyard slum make clear that there is no space for nostalgia over Kowloon walled city, or other such edgeland alternative communities. The divide here is hard and unequivocal; you are either inside or outside of society. Dreampunk, on the contrary, sits in the ambiguous spaces opened up by the original film's noir turn, eschewing both violence and 'The Epic'. In Scott's vision of 2019 neither people nor places are quite what they seem. The grand building where JF Sebastian lives is a derelict filled with biomechanical products of his genial imagination. Sebastian himself is a young man made old by a degenerative condition. And the Replicant Leon Kowalski is described in the police briefing as simple and violent, yet he cherishes a set of photographs of his fellow Replicant friends.

As beautiful as Roger Deakins' cinematography for Blade Runner 2049 undoubtedly is, there's nothing that quite matches the in-camera drama of Zhora smashing through shop windows in a desperate attempt to evade Deckard's bullets in the original. The score and sound effects (notably foregrounding the gunshots) perfectly signals the fatalism which is one of the film's key themes.Much of the scene's power is gained by the simple choice to run the sequence in slow motion.

The violence of the scene also points to an uncomfortable element of the Blade Runner universe; while no-one is quite what they seem, the burden of this ambiguity falls hardest upon women. Even fully fleshed out characters like Rachel are doomed from the outset, lacking the ontological stability afforded to most of the males. This tendency is heightened in the 2017 film as not a single female character is able to avoid some level of depreciation, whether in the form of being a mute substrate (as Mariette does for K); being violently killed if you're human or Replicant; or being deleted as happens to Joi. It's unclear whether we should read all this as a dead-eyed comment on the treatment of women in the real world, or if Blade Runner just blindly repeats much of Hollywood's historical debasement of female characters. In any case it might be worth noting the undeniable "broishness" of the Dreampunk scene (still sadly not unusual for electronic music) and some of the carryover of images of women from Vaporwave cover art, which frequently depict Asian woman as submissive, exotic and ephemeral; imagery that mirrors the lack of authentic Being in characters like Joi and Rachel. This is the danger of identifying too strongly with the aesthetics of melancholy, where the work of mourning the lost object (always already lost of course) turns into a mortifying gaze, giving life to the fantasy at the expense of a more radical relationship to the real. 

Labels releasing Dreampunk records have consistently drawn on the imagery of Blade Runner and Cyberpunk more generally. From left to right, promotional art from the Dream Catalogue, Pure Life and Vill4in labels.

 Death scenes are pivotal in both films, and are where they lodge their key messages. At the finale of the 1982 film, Roy Batty, having seen his ambitions of a longer life thwarted, and feeling death approach, spares Deckard's life. What follows is Rutger Hauer's immortal (and partly ad-libbed) speech upon the rooftop: "All those moments will be lost, like tears in rain. Time to die". While in the sequel Officer K comes to understand that he's not the first child born to a Replicant, and after saving Deckard resigns himself to his injuries and his fate. In a sequence that can only be viewed as homage to the death scene of the first film, K lies back, feeling the snow fall upon his bare skin; something real, unlike the programmed reactions of Joi as she "experienced" the rain upon the rooftop of their apartment earlier in the film. It would not be saying too much I think to claim that one of Blade Runner's deepest philosophical truths is that an authentic experience of a free human life is intimately tied to the apprehension of death. For a Replicant, then, in accordance with Montaigne's famous statement, learning to die is learning how not to be a slave.

These themes of pathos, loss, radical self-questioning and fatalism in the face of an indifferent universe, are the bedrock of Blade Runner's noir emotional ecology. They are also the themes which come through most strongly in the drifting melancholy of Dreampunk music, and for which the dark, rain soaked city of neon lights forms the perfect backdrop. 

Some recommended Dreampunk records:

2814 - Birth of a New Day (Dream Catalogue, 2015)

wuso 命 - Lonely Streets (Crystaltone, 2016)

Yoshimi - Tokyo Restricted Area (Dream Catalogue, 2016)

Rashida Prime ‎– Damaged Interface (Bludhoney Records, 2016)

Sangam - Void 003 (Vill4in, 2019)

Cryosauna - Fractured City (Hanging Garden, 2019)

輕描淡寫 X Kuroi Ame ‎– 眼泪含泪  (Pure Life, 2020)

The Wushimi Complex - The Anon Database (Dream Catalogue, 2020)

Gates Of Siam - Eve (Waters End, 2020)

D R O I D R O Y -水族館の夜 (No Problema Tapes, 2020)

 

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?

Autumn/Winter articles at the Battleground

 

So, eventually I was able to pull myself out of the lockdown induced torpor to start writing on the pandemic again. I'm trying to approach things from a more oblique standpoint now. I'm done with the microphysics of pandemic power and (un)preparedness. I know all that stuff, and there's only so many roots into nuclear disaster planning and apocalyptic thought you can follow without ending up thoroughly drained of libidinal energy yourself. In the end I have gone so far West I ended up East. Below are links to a part exploration of China's social credit system and tech landscape with an eye on the developing geopolitical trends in what's been termed algorithmic governance. 

 

 

Ideological Upheaval -Pandemic Rebels and Fascist Longings (September 2021)

Pandemic, Politics, Anxieties - China’s Social Credit Model, Part I (December 2021)

East Meets West (Slight Return) - China’s Social Credit Model, Part II (December 2021)