PaperTiger
PaperTiger

Weekly letter of selected intelligence on China with Tiger's comments.

Tiger Paper 002: More on the Chinese accelerationism


洞察 | Insight

More on Chinese accelerationism. This topic keeps coming back to my thinking. This Chinese accelerationism should be given more thoughts. In fact, I believe it will become increasingly relevant to political thinking in China and it can be justified as one possible, even optimal, guide for activists for their future political actions.

First of all, the difference between the Chinese accelerationism and the fundamental accelerationism is not that big. Accelerationism, from the left or the right, holds a core belief that we need to accelerate the advancement of technologies, with which the society will transform radically and fundamentally. It is natural to think about artificial intelligence, robotics, and biotech when we think about technology. However, technology includes far more than that. 

Apart from what we are taught in the engineering department, there is a wide range of “social technologies”. For example, prison is a social technology for reducing crime or controlling the ruled. Future and options are technologies that help to allocate financial resources. A union is a technology for dealing with labor-capital relation issues such as protecting workers’ rights.

Usually, social technologies involved in politics are organizational technologies, such as parliamentary system, union, protest and demonstration, and a board of private cooperation. They may also not be organizational such as in the case of debt, money, bitcoin, and anonymous messenger. 

Accelerationists are radical with technologies. They are unsatisfied with the precautionary principle and conservative attitude towards the application of technologies. For them, it does not make sense to hold a years-long international meeting to decide whether the homo sapiens should use fire when this new technology has become available. 

Chinese accelerationists are also unsatisfied with this conservative attitude towards technologies, but just that of a different kind — the conservative (better yet, reactionary) attitudes of Beijing and Chinese nationals towards social technologies.

Whether you agree or not, for accelerationists and many other pro-democratic people, the parliamentary system, federal system, democratic voting system, union, and etc. are more advanced as social technologies than autocracy, one-party system, state propaganda and etc. That is, they believe social technologies in China are left far behind and the Chinese government is trying all it can to prevent its development.

With the background depicted above, let me now point out why Chinese accelerationism, the accelerationism that applies all possible methods, including promoting propaganda, joining in tip-offs, participating in mass surveillance, may be a possible and even optimal guide for our activists' future actions.  

One way of understanding politics is to put it under the “problem-solution” framework. This is not aesthetic, but surely pragmatic. A society a have many problems: unemployment, unjust allocation of education and healthcare resources, intense labor-capital relation, stagnant and deteriorating culture, etc. Politics is about dealing and hopefully solving these issues. Social technologies help us in coming up with solutions. 

For example, a representative democratic mechanism like parliament may help different voices being heard and thus allows better allocation of education and healthcare resource. For another example, when individual laborers do not have the power to negotiate with the cooperation, a union may find a way to empower the powerless. Free speech, along with the social institutions that protect artists and intellectuals, may provide a way to energize a stale culture of a nation. 

Unfortunately, in China, we have a meta-technology called authoritarianism, which precludes all these innovative technologies. Therefore, any attempt in solving some of the urgent social issues results in unbearable powerlessness. You know there is a range of possible solutions to try out, yet the authority proscribes them and tells you to come up with something using the ancient shit. 

We should understand accelerationism as a meta-technology that can eliminate the current authoritarianism. To be a possible and optimal technology that can change the status quo, the tech should suffice a key premise: it would not be alerted and liquidized the moment it is used. And the reason why I believe accelerationism should be given more thoughts is simply that, honestly, we cannot think of any other social technologies that suffice this premise. We need a technology that takes the bionics of cancer: one that grows undetectably until it is too late.

Indeed, Chinese accelerationism is still in its early stage. It is too simple, sometimes naive. Its adverse reaction outscores its benefit for now. So far, it appears that it contributes nothing but makes the authoritarianism worse. But so does most of the technologies. We need to try and error and we need many more innovative “engineers” to build upon each others’ work to come up with something usable and eventually something great. 


推荐阅读 | Good to Read

 我的维吾尔“民族主义”是怎样形成的 Where Does My Uighur Nationalism Come From This article by NYTimes Chinese Edition provides a recount by a Uighur (from a rather intellectual family in Xinjiang province), now lives in the United States, articulately describing his experience of being a member of minority ethnic group in China, and how does this experience shape his nationalistic sentiment towards his own ethnic group. As someone who has lived in Canada as a foreign student for years, I can sympathize with almost everything he says. However, there is a crucial difference between us: I am in a foreign country, he is in his motherland.

HIDE AND SEEK: Tracking NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware to Operations in 45 Countries This old report by the Citizen Lab shows how the Israeli intelligence company NSA assists states with a history of abuses of power in tracking down dissidents, activists, and journalists by applying the spyware Pegasus. Pegasus starts with an SMS clickbait. Then it installs different applications on the phone without the users’ knowledge. These applications can have root access to the Phone, allowing the operator to spy on the users’ surroundings by controlling the camera, send location information and etc. Although the vulnerability used in this specific case to hack iPhones has been solved, it is alarming. I personally have received SMS clickbait similar to those mentioned in the report. 

It is remarkable that although authoritarian governments are the users, private companies are the owner of the technologies for spying and hacking. Indeed, authoritarianism and totalitarianism are good at creating disasters. But capitalism is better at providing the tools for those disastrous causes.  

不要温柔地走进那个白昼 Do Not Go Gently into That Morning( A book review of Biao Xiang’s newest book Make Yourself as the Methodology Yesterday, I was having late-night dinner with a friend and he started to talk about how he is disappointed by the new book of Biao Xiang, a prominent Chinese-British anthropologist. This book is a transcribed interview of Biao, in which, according to my friend, urging issues of China are discussed, but only without acknowledging the elephant in the room — the Chinese political system. This lack of acknowledgment is so patent that many readers question whether Biao is dishonest to the problem at hand, or he is a subprime thinker.

I have not read Biao’s book but I am familiar with the type of intellectual that avoids the elephant. They are not uncommon. One example that comes to mind immediately would be Zhiyuan Xu, a prominent writer in China that repeats himself assiduously and pretends to think about “this age” by avoiding any question offensive to the system. I think of Xu because he is still relevant — he still appears on mass media. The reality is that most intellectuals nowadays do the same.

It is not their fault, to be sympathetic. There are two things intellects do to bring political and social changes: one is to provide criticism, the other is to provide possible solutions. Without criticism, people do not see reasons for changes and society lives in stupidity. Without solutions, people do not see how changes are to be carried out and the society lives in despair. In China, both are not allowed, so intellectuals regress to their scholastic labor. Empirical, impartial, and pragmatic are the usual words they use to lie to themselves about the meanings of their scientific works. 


读书笔记 | Notes

Two Cheers for Anarchism by James Scott - Preface

In the preface of this collection of six essays pertains to Anarchism, Scott talks about why he thinks anarchism is worthwhile considering and how is his understanding of anarchism different from other notions of anarchism. 

Why considering worthwhile: The fact that libertarian capitalism produces many of its own problems and that most Communism efforts are failed (disastrously) justify considerations of other political theories. A good amount of specific examples are given in the book as elaboration. 

However, Scott warns that he does not have a systematic theory for anarchism. And it appears to me that he is not the kind of anarchist that calls for revolutions on the street. His understanding and application of anarchism are rather mild, understanding anarchism as a process, a practice, and a perspective instead of a mature and comprehensive guidebook for an instant institutional overthrown. 

In the preface, Scott points out two dilemmas anarchists face. First, “if relative equality is a necessary condition of mutu­ality and freedom, how can it be guaranteed except through the state?” Second, “massive disruption and defiance can, under some conditions, lead directly to au­thoritarianism or fascism rather than reform or revolution.”

These two dilemmas lead us to two ways Scott’s anarchism is different from the orthodox. First, Scott does not call for the total abolishment of government - at least a minimal government is needed to ensure equality, a difficulty libertarian capitalism fails to deal with, and a necessity for an authentic and fair democracy. Second, Scott focuses on and patently has more admiration towards what he calls the “infra-politics”, actions that lie outside of mainstream politics and that has a non-violent and absenteeism element — actions including “foot-dragging, poaching, pilfering, dissimulation, sabotage, desertion, absen­teeism, squatting, and flight”.

Before Scott moves on to the main body of the book, he cautions us again that this book is not to be regarded as a collection of thoughts that may add up to a coherent and comprehensive whole. It is better to regard them as a process, a practice, and a perspective just like Scott’s anarchism itself. 

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