One lesson from Apple v. Samsung (and other recent events)

An interesting lesson from the entire Apple v. Samsung affaire was that there are certain things that cyberpunk got right. And there are other things that the literary-cultural movement got wrong. But it got much more right than it got wrong.

The movement in computer technology drifts not, as technoutopians (including many cyberlibertarians) would have it, toward greater openness, greater flow of information and ever-increasing substantive degrees of personal freedom, as government structures founder ineffectually in a rusty, industrial-age obsolescence. Instead, the apostles of personal computing and networking have ushered in the same Coke-and-Pepsi choices that have characterised the rest of late-capitalist modernity. The vast majority of computer users have the choice of Windows versus Mac OS, PC versus Apple. And that choice constrains to a significant degree what you can and cannot do, unless you have a degree of willpower and technological savvy which allows you to do end-runs around proprietary structures and programmes which govern not only your machine, but the potentially infinite number of other terminals and users to which you are connected. Rather than being empowering, this level of technology only erects another dimension of illusory choice.

Aesthetically, as well, Apple in particular set the trend toward a superlative form of modernist design: sleek, monolithic, monochrome capsules which exude ‘trendiness’ and ‘convenience’, which less-enlightened megacorporations are seeking to emulate. Note that, for the Apple product, the end user is of secondary importance, even an afterthought – Apple Corporation tells you what is and isn’t ‘cool’, what is and isn’t ‘hip’, what is and isn’t allowed. What do you mean, you want to use Adobe Flash? What, you want to add more memory to your white-and-chrome monolith than the extra 512 MB that the Corporation very generously deigns to permit you to purchase built-in? That would totally throw off the design, man! Begone, vile square (pun intended)! Megacorporations may not have taken up the brutalist glass-and-steel-ziggurat visual style in the exact way envisioned by, for example, Blade Runner and The Matrix, but Apple’s vision is every bit as hypermodernist, consolidated, monolithic and dictatorial, even if the sleek, smooth curves put a slightly friendlier face on the aesthetic.

But the real audacity of Apple was to tell its consumers through a clever and insidious advertising campaign that by conforming to its consolidated, top-down, end-user-optional vision of computing, they are being ‘rebellious’ and ‘countercultural’ (just like Einstein, Dr King and Gandhi!), and generally ‘thinking outside the [PC] box’. Put this way, of course, the technoutopian vision looks downright naïve.

To their everlasting credit, the likes of William Gibson, Philip K Dick and Edward Neumeier did envision a future where this level of interconnectivity and corporate dominance served to keep people quiescent and constrain people’s choices in a sort of dystopia, rather than liberating them. They fell prey to the same error as the technoutopians they critiqued, however, in that they thought that government would be made obsolete as networking increased and computing became more ubiquitous and sophisticated. (OCP doesn’t run the cops, per se, but they do have free run of the courts and the legislature, as the concerted efforts to pass SOPA and PIPA, as well as DMCA-prompted crackdowns on file-sharing websites, have borne witness!) Coming from the other angle, of course, we have Evgeny Morozov pointing out how networking and social technologies are tools which determined and savvy authoritarian governments can potentially use to their advantage. There are certain elements of Facebook, indeed (particularly the ways in which it compromises user privacy), which could very readily adapt themselves to a corporatist form of authoritarianism.

There are a number of other things we have seen cyberpunk get right in the meantime, one of which is the rise of activist forms of cyberanarchism, represented by the likes of Julian Assange and Anonymous. They aren’t exactly hard-boiled, hard-drinking cybernetic ninjas… that I am aware of. But even so, they do seem to be motivated by a sense of rather understandable dissatisfaction with and alienation from the (increasingly consolidated, increasingly opaque, increasingly unaccountable) direction technologies and their applications have taken.

Pointless video post - ‘Dust to Dust’ by Sinbreed

What is it about Germany? Seriously. They always seem to churn out these unspeakably talented bands, including relatively new ones like Sinbreed (see also their Encyclopædia Metallum entry, here - sporting members of both Blind Guardian and Seventh Avenue? I’m in). They are not an explicitly Christian band, though their lyrics do tend towards Abrahamic meditations on fate, free will, sin and redemption, with a few darker Orwellian and Lewisian themes thrown in for good measure; not quite Threshold, but still a bit more weighty and philosophical in terms of subject matter than most power metal bands of this style. More to the point, though, these guys are holding high the raw, thrashy Teutonic power-metal torch of bands like Accept, Paragon, Grave Digger and Rage, pumping out chunky, thundering riffs with total conviction whilst still remaining open to a bit of keyboard experimentation more along the lines of Lost Horizon or Sabaton. Some melodic ear-candy here for those of my readers who got tired of me posting thrash videos in my PVPs; enjoy it!

羽翼已成 (Wings fully grown)

Sir Nick Young, OBE, at the China Development Brief has a very broad-ranging, constructive and thoughtful critique of non-governmental organisations and foreign aid in China. For one thing (though such a characterisation hardly does it justice), it studiously avoids both the tired old Hudge and Gudge (or, should I say, ‘He and Ge 何與葛’?) critiques of aid which are sadly still all too common in development parlance, and places a deliberate focus on the ‘homegrown’ aspect of civil society which a right-thinking distributist ought to admire as well as on the correct relationship between civil society and government which ought to be the concern not just of distributists but also of, for example, Tocquevillean liberals. (And the fact that he favourably cites the work of Cambridge University institutional economist Dr Chang Ha-Joon in his section on the Washington Consensus and modernisation theory very much further endears him to me.)

The policy brief is very much worth reading in full, but to sum up, Sir Young is much concerned with setting out a proper history of development aid in China, and from there using the history to set out his major criticisms. These have to do (roughly) with a.) the degree to which adoption of foreign-imported institutions (and, to a lesser extent, technologies) is possible and desirable; b.) the historical differences in policy approach between countries which have toed the Washington Consensus line and those (like Japan, Taiwan and South Korea) which were more flexible, and the degree of success in each model; c.) the role of NGOs in challenging, carrying out and being shaped by official, neoliberal aid policy on the donor front; and d.) the nature of the relationship between ‘governance’, ‘government’ and ‘civil society’ on the recipient front (including whether or not the role of ‘civil society’ is always to oppose ‘government’ power and interference). The gist of his argument carries several shades of nuance, but Sir Young does take note that (firstly) as a result of several economic sea-changes, the amount of foreign aid which goes to China from OECD nations is likely to decline, and with it the foreign-funded sections of the ‘civil society’ are likely to dwindle. In their place, though, NGOs which have managed to find and cultivate a sustainable local funding base may find their wings fully grown (羽翼已成, to quote the Chinese aphorism), and are likely to take up the slack. There is reason to hope, furthermore, that these NGOs will, once freed from a Western paradigm in which ‘civil society’ serves a ‘regime change’ function of agitation against government, be able to scout their own way forward - neither dependent on government nor actively seeking to undermine it. And government will respond by lightening up their suspicions of civil society as an instrument of foreign-imposed political instability (a topic on which the Chinese have good historical reasons to be concerned).

This last thought seems to be the punchline of the brief, and there is much in it that strikes me as both intuitive and true. But I would like to see it further fleshed-out, perhaps in further briefs. China Development Brief is certainly something to check back on!

Winds shifting over the borderlands (and other news)

Another Ukrainian election is looming, and the current president and leader of the centrist, federalist Party of Regions, Mr Viktor Yanukovich, is turning his sights toward the east, notably seeking for his country observer status within the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), a loose economic federation which includes Russia, China and several Central Asian nations. This should not really come as any surprise; despite the complicated love-hate relationship between the heirs to the Principality of Kiev and to the Principality of Rostov-Suzdal and Grand Duchy of Muscovy, and the often-infuriatingly retrenched language politics (see also here for the opposing view) endemic to Eastern Europe, the Ukraine and Russia see eye-to-eye more often than not. It is practically a form of sibling rivalry: though a few Ukrainians might gripe about the ‘Muscovites’ and their ways, opinion polls show a (perhaps grudging?) mutual respect between the two old principalities and their people; and many Ukrainians still prefer the old, familiar rival on their doorstep to the even more foreign EU and NATO powers.

There have also been a couple of very worthwhile China articles this past week: one by Maj Gen Chen Zhou on how the ABM programme (not quite my area of expertise) is actually a detriment to global (and to American) security; and by Mr James Traub on Foreign Policy (by his own emphasis, not an old China hand) on how the US needs to get serious about infrastructure planning, and on how China is an instructive example in this case. Though China’s infrastructure planning itself has problems, the lesson should be well-taken that the United States should return to its emphasis on making, building and producing things, notably things of lasting value (meaning, not missiles, but rather steel and silicon consumer manufactures, real food, schools and libraries, bridges and trains), and it should be building them here. We should regain, or begin building from scratch, an appreciation for ritual and tradition. We should place more faith in soft power than in the instruments of political and economic sabotage, coercion and war. We should cease denigrating all forms of public service and begin appreciating the value of job security. We should recognise that, though each individual human being is fallible enough, human beings in general are resources for the Earth as well as consumers.

The American Conservative, in fine form today

There are times when I wonder if I should be worried that I am linking to so many stories on The American Conservative, but I can’t really help myself when the writing is this good and the arguments this right-headed (no pun intended). Daniel Larison is busy doing his noble work, to wit: the American equivalent of calmly and logically deflating wumao netizen conspiracy theorists, the conspiracy theorist du jour being Dr William Martel of Tufts University. Dr Larison’s arguments, of course, are fairly commonsensical for those of us who have studied both Russia and China - world powers which have their own economic and national security interests which do not always overlap. (Indeed, for all of our complaints about Chinese and Russian industrial espionage against the United States, they do not seem too averse to doing it to each other, particularly where military tech is concerned.) North Korea, Cuba and Iran are ludicrous additions to this supposed ‘axis’, as the only reason these nations do so much business with Russia and China is because, on account of sanctions, there is literally nowhere else to go. This is not an indictment of our economic policies toward them (well, maybe in Cuba’s and Iran’s cases it could be), but merely a statement of fact. The Chinese attitude toward North Korea nowadays is a notably ambivalent one, as many keen China-watchers have pointed out already. Likewise, these nations are not the sole bastions of ideological authoritarianism in the world: notable for their absence from Martel’s list are nations like Turkmenistan, Georgia, Albania (or its outpost of fundamentalist thugs in Kosovo), Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia and practically all of the Gulf states. These nations are all amply authoritarian, yet are for all practical purposes aligned with the geopolitical agendas of many countries in what Dr Martel considers ‘the West’ (though this concept is also deconstructed adeptly by Dr Larison).

On a purely empirical basis, then, the ‘Authoritarian Axis’ model fails. Dr Larison does an excellent job of demonstrating this much. Going a bit further, though, one can readily see the appeal that the ‘Authoritarian Axis’ model would have for anyone seeking to create a normative space for a neoconservative policy agenda. Though Martel distances his model explicitly from the Bush-era ‘Axis of Evil’, it is noteworthy that he is actually broadening this category and turning it into an ideological one rather than one based on supposed threats to national security. Because it is now (rightly) rather passé to declare that the United States is under the immanent threat of attack (whether of the ‘smoking gun’ or the ‘ticking time-bomb’ varieties) from any of these countries, the neocons will be forced to adopt the language of existential threat, precisely as Dr Martel is doing here.

Another excellent article by author and former Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren on TAC concerns the way in which traditionalist conservatives ought to be questioning creeds such as vulgar Calvinism and Social Darwinism, and how they ought not to fear revolt from below but rather revolt from above, from an elite which are (to quote the Chinese pun) 和尚打傘--無發無天 ‘monks bearing umbrellas--without hair [law] and without Heaven’. This is an age where the working classes, having been denied it by a global order where capital is free to float about wherever its owners choose, desire stability most of all (for themselves, for their families and for their communities), and where the people who desire economic stability least are the ones in positions of power. As Mr Lofgren very aptly puts it:

If a morally acceptable American conservatism is ever to extricate itself from a pseudo-scientific inverted Marxist economic theory, it must grasp that order, tradition, and stability are not coterminous with an uncritical worship of the Almighty Dollar, nor with obeisance to the demands of the wealthy.

Great stuff. There is a lot of material on The American Conservative which can appeal to us lefties these days. Perhaps we should always have been taking this sort of thing seriously.

Rableh and the rebellion

Over the past two weeks, the town of Rableh in Syria, home to over 12,000 people, most of them Christians, was being held under siege by FSA insurgents. They would not allow in either food or medical supplies, so those inside were subsisting on bread and water, and could not treat their wounded and dying. Anyone daring to leave the town would be shot at by insurgent snipers, as would anyone attempting to bring food or water into the town. Only earlier today were the Syrian regulars able to chase the insurgents from Rableh, and allow for the infrastructure of the town to be repaired.

Progressive Catholic and evangelical voices had been calling for some international attention to the situation in Rableh. However, I could find no secular sources outside Russia Today, The Voice of Russia and the Canadian National Post which would even touch the subject. It is not one which fits in with the preordained Western media narrative of the hip, peaceful demonstrators being mown down senselessly by the bloodthirsty, iron-fisted Assad regime. But this incident, and the lack of coverage, is indicative that a good deal more is going on in Syria than we are being allowed to see. If we truly want to aid the causes of peace and human rights in Syria today, we need to look far more carefully before we leap toward actions we may have good cause to regret.

Pointless video post - ‘Native Blood’ by Testament

There are multiple reasons why Testament continue to completely kick arse. Most of them are amply demonstrated on this year’s album Dark Roots of Earth, including this track, ‘Native Blood’. Testament are at their best when their music edges toward the political, I find - one of the reasons I enjoyed Low so much, in point of fact - and it is good to see they haven’t lost their touch, and the not-so-subtle note of native defiance that one can find on, say, ‘Allegiance’. This song in particular shows the more melodic direction they have been heading in arguably since The Ritual, but they haven’t lost the ability to throw down a few mean riffs in the meanwhile. Great stuff here - enjoy, folks!