Jacob Silverman at The Baffler writes—Silicon Valley’s Chinese Dream: Tech elites, weary of democracy, look to the East:
AT A RECENT CONFERENCE ON INNOVATION, one of the assembled venture capitalists wondered aloud, while discussing China, whether “democracy and capitalism are compatible.” This man clearly preferred the latter and seemed to consider China as practicing a particularly aggressive, and thereby enviable, form of it. He also worried that China, blessed with these advantages, would one day surpass the United States in artificial intelligence development. I listened in as several other VCs expressed a similarly fawning regard for the Chinese tech scene, with its absence of regulation, pliant consumer base, huge data sets, and massive cashflows.
Later, after my own talk, during which I spoke critically about conditions in Chinese tech factories, a prominent computer scientist approached to tell me how wrong I was. The workers of Foxconn, a Taiwanese manufacturer with massive facilities in mainland China, are there willingly, he insisted, and life in the rural provinces where many of these workers come from is miserable. When I asked about the factories’ infamous suicide nets, he said that most workers enjoyed their working conditions and that it was useless to argue for anything better. We jousted passive aggressively like that for a few minutes, my pious morality against his evasive apologetics. But more important than the specifics of these arguments is the worldview they reflect. An increasing number of tech elites seem untroubled by China’s ghastly human rights record, its dire working conditions, or even how the country’s vast security apparatus uses sophisticated surveillance technologies to oppress and imprison hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, a Muslim minority concentrated in the far west Xinjiang region.
China’s rise as a tech powerhouse has dovetailed with Silicon Valley’s growing, and often vividly expressed, distrust toward democracy itself. Always steeped in libertarian pique—not long ago, technologists expressed hope for floating ad-hoc nation-states or, as Larry Page put it, referencing Burning Man, “some safe places where we can try out some new things”— Silicon Valley now toys with Californian secessionism and Singapore-style authoritarian technocracy. That new horizon, that place of raucous experimentation with a frontier-like possibility at striking it rich, they believe, is in China.
Long the industrial producer of Silicon Valley’s gadgets, China has developed its own thriving startup scene, towered over by juggernauts like Alibaba, Xiaomi, Huawei, and Tencent, which are formidable rivals to Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, et al. From biotech to facial recognition systems, Chinese tech companies and their state backers are working intently on bleeding-edge technologies that can in turn be sold to governments in Central Asia and Africa, where China has funded numerous infrastructure projects while snapping up interests in mines, farmland, ports, and a Djiboutian military outpost. (Among other ventures, China’s ZTE—a telecoms giant likely known to Americans, if at all, for its cut-rate smartphones—recently helped Venezuela institute a version of its social-credit system, a scheme whose main purpose seems to be social control.)
With a pledge to invest tens of billions of dollars into artificial intelligence research, it seems assured, as industry figureheads like Eric Schmidt have predicted, that China will soon surpass the United States in this ultra-hyped technology. Chinese capital has also become an important funder of American startups, while Foxconn is building a factory in Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin—thanks to billions in subsidies from outgoing governor Scott Walker and a small assist from Donald Trump. No word yet if it will feature suicide nets. But the company has earned numerous other easements, including a lifting of smog pollution limits that may soon bring Mt. Pleasant’s air in line with Shenzhen’s. [...]
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On this date at Daily Kos in 2004—US of A Headed for Economic Armageddon:
If you’re like me, you take economic prognostications with a salt shaker (and a back-up) close at hand. Whether it’s ultra-optimist Harry Dent explaining in The Roaring 2000s how to get rich as the Dow climbs to 35,000-41,000 by 2008, or uber-bear Robert Prechter explaining in Conquering the Crash how to get rich while everybody else is in the soup line, I’m skeptical that – for all their expertise - either these guys or a bunch of others just like them really knows what’s going on any more than my NASDAQ-happy ex-broker did on March 10, 2000.
In some cases, of course, blind ideology of left or right directs many economists – amateur and pro - to their conclusions. Supply-siders and paleo-Marxists both suffer from the same disease: our theory says this is the way things should be, so, despite contrary evidence, this is the way things will be.
Less ideologically encumbered players do what they can with the tools they’ve got. But modeling the interwoven global economy is akin to modeling the details of climate change. We know what causes a rise in average temperatures or a burst of inflation, but predicting exactly when, how much and all the consequences is, let us say, less than a precise science.
With all these caveats in mind - and fresh off reading about the growing U.S. debt, plus recent news (recounted in some Diaries) about China's attitudes toward the U.S. economy - I was not heartened by this: Economic 'Armageddon' predicted
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