China: The Surveillance State in Practice
The most misleading way to understand surveillance in China is to imagine a single machine.
Privacy Was Never Free
Human civilization has always kept records. Long before computers, databases, intelligence agencies or artificial intelligence, societies learned that memory could be removed from the mind and placed somewhere more durable. Clay tablets recorded grain, debts and taxation. Religious institutions preserved births, marriages and deaths. Kingdoms maintained land registers because property determined wealth, obligation and political power. Empires counted populations because soldiers, laborers and taxable bodies had to be found before they could be commanded.
The Performance
The box was black, eight feet tall, four feet wide, and mounted on six wheels, only three of which respected the concept of forward motion.
AI Didn’t Create Surveillance. It Completed It.
Privacy is dead.
The Problem Is Not Memory. It Is Routing.
A system does not operationally know something merely because the information exists somewhere in its history. It must retrieve the information at the right moment, interpret why it matters, compare it with competing evidence, and allow it to alter what happens next.
The Spirit
A sleepless records clerk’s awkward videos become a worldwide movement, leaving him to confront the good, harm, and meanings created by people who no longer need him.
Useful to Whom, Specifically, and for How Long?
A clarifying note on the most carefully unanswered question of our era. The question of whether artificial intelligence will be useful sounds, on first hearing, like the kind of thing a reasonable adult might consider over coffee, arrive at a thoughtful position on, and then move on with his day.
The Agentic AI Bot that Never Sleeps.
The argument for agentic AI is that it removes the human bottleneck. Ok then.
Dreams and Reality.
In Calcutta, in the eighties, the dead were collected from the streets in the early morning by trucks that paced the neighborhoods at hours most of the city was not yet awake. The collecting was an industry.
Pen and paper. Typewriter and computer.
Pen and paper forces commitment at the sentence level. You write the sentence and it exists.