Thread by @BeijingPalmer

This New Statesman piece is unfortunately a farrago of nonsense whenever it comes to actual life and working technology in China. Let's go through the claims!

newstatesman.com/chinese-scienc…

"Google is reportedly helping China to build a search engine that will report its users if they ask the wrong questions."

Dragonfly has effectively been cancelled after internal protests, and while the collusion with censorship was alarming, it wasn't going to 'report users.'

"Nobody, in a country of 1.4 billion people, is allowed to mention Winnie the Pooh – to avoid offence to Xi Jinping (who has been compared to the bear in an online meme)."

This takes a sporadic social media ban (one that foreign media *loves* and sometimes conjures out of thin air, like when 'minor Disney movie didn't get one of the 34 foreign release slots' became 'Christopher Robin banned!') and turns it into an absolute forbiddance.

Then we've got a bunch of stuff taken from the SCMP's shitty tech reporting, which repeatedly takes highly experimental or untested tech and transforms it into a daily norm. For instance, the surveillance birds! scmp.com/news/china/soc…

"The devices are monitored by artificial intelligence programmes that can recommend workers be retrained or reassigned if their emotions are not consistent with productivity goals. Such devices have been in widespread use in China for almost five years."

Which comes from this largely nonsensical SCMP story here - scmp.com/news/china/soc…

There's a few tech companies attempting tests of this - but that's not 'widespread use' and at least one of them is American! dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ar…

Repeatedly - and this is a pattern across one type of shitty China tech coverage (as opposed to the shitty coverage that treats it as purely business-orientated) - press releases are mistaken for reality and highly limited experiments or tests for a daily norm.

It's bizarre to me that a) this article was commissioned at all, since the topic has been well covered elsewhere at length over the last few years and b) that it was assigned to somebody who appears to not have any China experience

China's actual surveillance state is boring, expensive, full of holes and mistakes, and mostly uses well-tested technology. There are really interesting things to be written about it - by people (like @larsonchristina and @paulmozur) who actually look at it on the ground.

@larsonchristina @paulmozur The really terrifying parts of the system aren't technological magic. They're the amplification of existing prejudices and biases by algorithmic justification - like the 'predictive' programs that associate prayer with terrorism in Xinjiang.

@larsonchristina @paulmozur But the vast majority of oppression is carried out by simple, human means. At the same time as Xinjiang has covered the region in cameras, it's also enlisted hundreds of thousands of people to monitor and control the population.

@larsonchristina @paulmozur Even oppression, surveillance, and censorship online requires (as is the case with most hyped tech) enormous amounts of labor.

@larsonchristina @paulmozur (Also, an actually good piece about Three-Body would tackle the way that its anti-idealism and paranoia about the world is deeply helpful to the government, especially in the absorption of that worldview among young Chinese)

@larsonchristina @paulmozur (Also, the author appears not to have read any *Western* science fiction. "Engines the size of mountains stop the Earth from spinning, and the planet escapes the solar system while the sun explodes. Western sci-fi begins to look almost parochial next to such massive ideas.")

@larsonchristina @paulmozur like, not only is Western sci-fi full of planetary engineering and living planets, this *very concept* is in a 2005 science fiction novel - Robert Metzger's 'Cusp.' (Similar ideas have been around forever, so this is probably a case of simultaneous invention.)

@larsonchristina @paulmozur It's not even right about Orwell! Orwell didn't think that technological censorship was 'something that would happen in the future' - he was writing based on the very direct experiences of not only Soviet Russia but the wartime BBC