Hello. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for your patience as we wait for everyone to arrive. This is the sixth event of the virtual symposium, Recursive Colonialism, Artificial Intelligence, and Speculative Computation. This symposium is organized by the Critical Computation Bureau, a collective of researchers,
artists, and writers working at the intersection of technology and culture, computer science, and information theory, aesthetics, and politics. Recursive colonialism, artificial intelligence and speculative computation 2020 aims to provide interventions in the techno politics of racial capitalism and its recursive regeneration. Mixing together critical and creative practices and borrowing models and methods from philosophy of technology, black studies, political theory, computer science, information theory, media aesthetics, cultural and digital media theories. theories. Please check the manifesto on the website and the online journal issue Control Societies at 30, published online in social text. We also thank Duke University, which has sponsored
this symposium, together with UPenn and the University of Napoli de Oriental. For more information on this project, feel free to check out the website www.recursivecolonialisms.com and to follow the event's social postings. My name is William Morgan, and my co-facilitator is Juana Parvin. This session of the symposium is Episode 6, Sino Futurities and Automation. The format of the symposium will be as follows. Our guests will talk for approximately 10 to 15 minutes each. After that, the speakers will address a few questions that you can type into your Q&A box at the bottom of the screen. Please remember to state clearly which speaker your question is addressed to, and our co-facilitator will pick as many questions out as possible, and the chair, me, will address them to the
panelists. I want to remind the panelists not to check the Q&A box, as all questions will be verbally asked by the chair. So please type your question in the Q&A box at any time during the session. The session is being streamed live on our YouTube channel. I will now briefly introduce today's panelists. The abstract of their presentations can all be found available on our website. First is Rebecca Yuliaz, who is an artist and PhD candidate in the Department of Computational Media Arts and Cultures at Duke University. She researches contemporary computational visual culture, the history of cybernetics, and computational aesthetics. She is also part of the audiovisual research collective Governance. Shaoling Ma is an assistant professor of humanities literature at Yale and U.S. College.
Her research interests include literary and critical theory, media studies, and global Chinese literature, film, and art. She has published in academic journals such as science fiction studies, configurations, mediations, and positions. Her first book manuscript, The Stone and the Wireless, Mediating China, 1861 to 1906, is forthcoming in 2021 with Duke University Press as part of the Signed Storage Transmission Series. Anna Greenspan is an assistant professor of global contemporary media at NYU Shanghai. She teaches courses in media theory, philosophy of technology, and digital humanities in the program for interactive media arts. Anna holds a PhD in continental philosophy from Warwick
University, UK. While at Warwick, Anna was a founding member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, the CCRU, and her research interests lie at the intersection of urban Asia and emerging media. Anna's latest book, Shanghai Future, Modernity Remade, was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. She is currently working on a project on China and the wireless wave. Welcome to you all. Welcome to our viewers. Now over to you, Rebecca, Shaolin, and Anna. Thank you so much to William and all the conference organizers for putting this together. I'm going to share a screen with you all.
Last spring, researcher Adam Harvey published an exposé of the Duke MTMC dataset, a mass compilation of surveillance images of students and faculty collected by the Duke University Computer Science Department in the spring of 2014. Harvey linked the dataset, which was used by Duke researchers to train video tracking algorithms to Chinese SAAS companies responsible for selling proprietary software and equipment used by Chinese officials to police the Uyghur population in the Xinyin Uyghur Autonomous Region. This has been read by some as a transgression of human rights where ethical violation denotes the technological stripping of one's dignity,
a dispossession of one's information linked in this case to the ongoing and violent racialization of an overseas population for corporate profit and the maintenance of authoritarian power. I instead want to shift the frame away from human rights and data privacy conversations to what has been called the AI arms race. Marked by heightened tension between the US and China, further accelerated by Trump's racialization of COVID-19 and intensification of Chinese tech bans including Huawei and ByteDance. This issue must not be seen in the Trump administration's language of human rights abuses, but rather the recursive operations of imperialism and epistemic
colonialism. Projects of white anxiety such as the AI arms race, Elon Musk's SpaceX, or Peter Thiel's outcry that Google has treasonous ties to China are all fueled by imaginaries that work to maintain the capacity to produce the future by reproducing hegemony in the present, mainly in the name of technologically outstripping the enemy in the race to the future. We might view this AI arms race as one recursive machine that absorbs the contingent concerns of imperial techno capital in favor of a race to an unmarked finish line because there is no finish line, perpetuating new oblique forms of colonialism on both sides of the race. Following Luciana and Ezekiel's provocation
that apocalypse is both the horizon and condition for the reproduction of universal technoscience as a procedure of the white imaginary, my goal is to de-center the unremarked optimum of whiteness from Sino-futurities in order to open towards what I'm calling the breakdown latent and recursive colonialism. I will look at Beijing-based artist Sun Yan and Peng Yu's installation titled Can't Help Myself to look for forms of breakdown already inscribed within the master-slave or human-object relation that can be realized through automation. I'll come back to this point in three provocations. Provocation one, Sino-futurism. Sino-futurism risks transposing subtle forms of
neo-colonialism through cyber exoticism, which constructs techno-utopian models by ingesting the other within the reproduction and extension of white epistemic models. At the same time, Sino-futurism pushes China to the future and to the past. Artist Lawrence Leck explains that Sino-futurism boxes Chinese culture out of the present through projecting forwards a colonial imaginary, both foreclosing the future while simultaneously providing the onto-epistemological grounds for decision-making in the present. If American technoscientific imaginaries are driven by the general machine of whiteness, which we have seen can be made to produce the forms of futurity it deems optimal, Leck
reclaims Chinese cultural stereotypes, such as computing, copying, and gaming, to ground Sino-futurism as an already existing form of distributed artificial intelligence, a reconfiguration of cliché towards reorienting narratives of both future and past. Lech's reading of Sino-futurism as not just an aesthetic but as a form of already existing intelligence allows us to move away from the end of philosophy marked by the total automation of thought. Instead, we might enfold the Western philosophy of technology within the project of what Yukwe calls Cosmotechnics. This approach opens up the philosophy of technology, our project of unifying
technics and nature, by confirming its participation within a larger milieu of cosmological multiplicity in which it is one of many entwined epistemological orders. Cosmotechnics can help rethink the relation between automation and technoculture through its direct confrontation of Prometheanism, a project that positions the universal human as not yet finished and as animated through the drive to externalize itself technologically towards its own liberation from capitalistic constraints. Instead, I want to turn automation back towards whiteness, the unremarked universal ideal that is both contingent on the colonial past and actively reorganizes the recursive present towards the normative future. I ask if whiteness
can be de-optimized through studying the already broken machine required for its reproduction, and what forms the broken machine might take if it diverges from the ground of the recursive same. Provocation 2. Optimization and whiteness. Optimization and whiteness both automate recursive cycles of innovation and engineering to naturalize epistemic models. These models perpetuate and reproduce racial violence and forms of neocolonialism in the pursuit of the realization of a more perfect techno-social form. Optimization, in mathematics, is a technique of simulating solutions towards a well-defined problem when dealing with given constraints.
techniques of optimization are contingent on the situation at hand, but offer up transposable models that both depend on and perpetuate progress narratives. They are techniques that arrange time and space in accordance with a calculated optimal in order to ground corresponding social imaginaries and material realities as a form of algorithmic control. control. As we know from Foucault, biopolitical operations must break down society in order to impart a hierarchy of being. That is, power operates through an already broken machine in order to optimize away its own malfunctioning parts and to continue business as usual.
To return to Sun Yung and Peng Yu's Can't Help Myself, which I'll play a clip of, the piece concretizes the tension of the relation between automation and breakdown that I'm proposing. The artists have designed an artificially intelligent arm based on a KUKA industrial robot used in the production line and car factories. It is seen here contained inside a glass cubicle. The laboring automaton is locked into the task of mopping an ever spreading pool of red liquid, displacing the oozing blood like fluid with no end. Foucault used the term symbolics of blood to describe the discourse of racial purity through bloodline. He argues these symbolics do not disappear in the biopolitical regime, but are rather
technologically iterated to legitimate the policing of a population towards the ordered maximization of collectivity and individual force. Anthropologist Anne-Laura Stoller explains that these locked symbolics of blood generate new unpredictable racialized forms of enslavement when iterated within the machine of contemporary techno-society. Recursion of the symbolics of blood becomes literally, in the case of Can't Help Myself, a technology to automate the ongoing reproduction of the machine arm as slave. If optimization reproduces the split between subject and object, master and slave as part of its operation, while at the same time folding the hierarchy of being into a progress narrative,
the flailing gestures of Yan and Yu's robot mechanizes and automates the scene of its own suffering. The machine is enslaved, enclosed in a delimited field of programmatic actions in which it can produce without end, destined to perform 32 dance moves for an audience, including scratch and itch and ass shake. The artists describe the programmed automation of the machine as a site of panic and pleasure, unknown and also anticipatory of something yet to come. It cannot help itself but to repeat its dance, but it is also optimized for the art gallery, permitting a reading where we see its gestures as contingent and indeterminacy compressed into program feedback loops. And finally, provocation three, breakdown.
I'm proposing what we witness in the moments of machine dance is breakdown, a punctuation within the syntactical programming of the machine in which something in the conceptual scheme of automation breaks open. Breakdown is not failure or glitch because it is part of the program of of the productive machine. It is instead a notion with generative capacity that seeks to avoid prescribing any type of ism, which Frank B. Wilderson reminds us is always tied to a theory of how the body suffers. Different than rupture, breakdown finds the moments within non-monia temporality that are latent but included in the optimal machine, that which produces without ceasing. More so, breakdown precedes the optimal machine as a form of being actualized by
techno-capital. I'll finish by marking the gap between recursive cycles of research and development, innovation and engineering, or abstraction and automation that testifies to the fallibility of universal techno-colonial epistemology. If recursive colonialism arrays the future by reworking the past, both within categorical spatio-temporal constraints, it is worth noting that the indeterminacy of colonial epistemology speaks to its need to constantly update, not to remain the same, but in order to retain hegemony. Recursive colonialism is a mutable and abstract technology of whiteness. Staying with automation, I wonder what methods we might use to find the forms that breakdown takes that are not reducible to the force
exerted upon the body that refuses to be automated away. What might we find in the occluded gestures that do not break out of the program, but rather expose the machine to its own contingency, the truncated edges drawn around the machine in order to conduct business as usual. And finally, I wonder how in pointing to its own breakages, these gestures affirm the machine's place within a milieu that is not defined by its universal wholeness, but rather by its multiple and overlapping cosmotechnical realities. Thank you. Thank you, Rebecca, for such a wonderful start to our panel conversation.
Your publications are rich and generative, and I look forward to exploring them further in our discussion. Now I turn the floor over to Xiao Wing. Thank you. Thank you, William. And thanks to all the organizers and my co-panelists. good to see all of you here. I'm going to share my screen as well. As a diaspora Chinese academic working and living in Singapore, I first proposed this paper at the early peak of the COVID-19 outbreak in the PRC before the pandemic, as they say, went viral and global. It was the beginning of a glorious sabbatical earlier in 2020 and I had planned to
visit Shenzhen as well as Xinjiang to conduct very preliminary research on China's automated authoritarianism. Needless to say, about nearly 12 months later there is no project to speak of. The provision of fieldwork nonetheless fields auto-theoretical speculations. Yes, fields auto-theoretical speculations. In place of thick descriptions from on the ground's observation, I propose today 11 theses on the role that recursivity plays in my study of Xinjiang from afar. First thesis. Philosophical theses are capable of the recursive feedbacks internal to automated
computational processes at vastly different speeds and scales. From the outset, I factor in this difference in speed and scale in my analysis instead of treating it as an extrinsic or irresolvable disparity between non-computational and computational, or qualitative and quantitative studies. When examining the Uyghur genocide, we have to interrogate the methodological tensions produced by two related modes of recursivity. First, global capitalism self-definations and accumulations of territories, borders, resources, and race. And second, the algorithmic recursivity of automated systems running the various surveillance apps, facial recognition technologies, and databases used by the CCP in Xinjiang, as everyone should be familiar by now.
The question to ask then, what is automating the CCP's terror capitalism, to use Darren Bylet's term, what is automating it exactly? Is it the planetary production of area that gives us first a nation state and within it the demarcation of autonomous regions? And within such regions, the physical enclosures of camps, residential units, factories and dormitories that further differentiate between races, subjectivities, languages, cultures, religions. Is it that or is it the recognizably Chinese brand of technology marrying authoritarianism with digital surveillance?
More likely is always the differential relation between global capital, which we do not sensuously perceive, and the tenacious identification of technological innovations with the nation state or political cultural form that we actually can see that is driving such recursive automations. The question then is what is indeed new or even distinctively Chinese about sign of futurity as Rebecca already proposed through Lex's work. Relegated to observe Xinjiang from afar because of travel, ongoing travel restrictions, the question of distance and with it the differentials of scale become less of a research obstacle
And part of my question or method, does Sino-Futurity imply the application of critical computational studies to Xinjiang? Or can the case of Xinjiang inform the premise of critical computational studies? I'm leaning towards the letter. And this is my proposal. Both digital Sino-Futurity and area studies approach nation states, regions, peoples, and things from afar and without direct contact. Both the Xi government's investments in automated remote sensing technologies, and previously non-computational studies of race, story of area, feed into each other only to generate further epistemic as well as material distinctions and connections.
And this is just an example of the Big Earth Data platform that the digital Belt and Road is actively trying to promote. And of course you can go to the website. So how and what we know about the Xinjiang crisis, its epistemological possibilities are part of the politics of area. So a major component of the Xinjiang Database Project headed by the ASPI in Australia identify and map over 380 sites in the detention network across Xinjiang. Using satellite imagery analysis, this is one of the most comprehensive database in the world, according to the website. And what the Institute have done is they have reconstructed 3D models of an example of each tier of detention facilities from lowest to the highest, showing the key structural features.
features. And of course, temporality plays a big role because it also shows time sensitive development of these sites from previously empty desert landscape to a very well built up site. So the database also claims to gather empirical research and of course emphasizes its collaboration with global experts quote who conduct data-driven policy relevant research right so thanks to such exposés and projects we now have clear evidence of what is happening the volume of information along with the accelerating visibility of Xinjiang in the
anglophone internet are astonishing where do we draw the lines of digital enclosures when distance the view from above, made possible by the remote sensing capabilities of automated systems, become a research criteria. Take a look at both academic and non-academic essays on major U.S. news channels and databases like the one I just showed you, and you will notice the prevalence of geodetic mapping visualizations evidencing the growing number of weaker re-education camps and their proximity to major factory sites. This is not at all an indictment or a simple observation that everything is, you know, co-opted into each other, but instead I want to suggest
that we really consider satellite imageries and new forms of cartographies as part of this evolving social relations of internet technologies. Exposes of the Xinjiang crisis overwhelmingly focus on surveillance and enclosures, two mechanisms which really we can trace back to the 18th century Qing state's colonization of weaker territories and other Turkic peoples and and their systematic dispossessions of land and resources. Surveillance and enclosure served the accumulation of racial capital and Xinjiang border eight other countries, Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, which are strategic to the PRC's Belt Road Initiative. initiative. And what is intriguing is that with this ongoing human rights crisis, sign of futurity relies not simply on native informants, but now diasporic informants. And a prominent example is Canadian Chinese lawyer and activist, Sean Zhang, who since 2018 has archived on his own a mediated aggregate of digital enclosures whose area perspective mark weaker absence. So this is an example of such open source satellite imagery that he uses
and that again a lot of which are time sensitive and shows the development of these sites. So as earlier stated the strategic location of Xinjiang is so essential for the BRI But on top of this geopolitical connectivity, I also perceive how the evolving crisis affords an unprecedented epistemological connectivity. It brings together media computational studies, political science, policy studies, sociology, geography, history. I often find I no longer know what I work on once I have to try to condense all these different scholarships together.
So how can studies of Xinjiang from afar, including mine, that frequently take the form of policy recommendations and human rights advocacy more than recursively generate the scopic regime of exposures and exclusions also help theorize the logics of of obfuscation and inclusion central to racial capitalism. Widespread indictments of ongoing detention camps review not only the exercise of coercive power, but also the mobilization of desire. And this is the interesting recursive aspect that I want to plug in today. The more the so-called anglophone internet politicizes and condemns, the more the Chinese so-called Chinese social media trends out similarly opposite microblogs,
images, videos, music, live streams, exalting the happy lives of Uyghur minorities, celebrity influences, inane shows of Indian accents, cultural habits, of course, all denying what is going on, right? So this is just, you know, an example of that. What lies and it's I want to suggest sorry just to go back. It is because and not despite such censored and self censored denials a politicized expressions and nationalistic jingoism that there is no outside to Xinjiang's digital enclosures.
So we have to not exclude such expressions on Chinese social media and in fact, find some way to talk about it. What lies behind the Chinese firewall connects with its outside precisely because the technical machine is not the mirror of the normative apparatus of knowledge reproduction, to quote, from Perry C. and Dixong Roman. Chinese technoculture sustains its own racialized capitalist growth by perpetuating its difference from liberal Western technocultures. What is less perceptible is how an unabashedly consumerist and therefore incessantly desiring labor force on Chinese social media feeds the planetary extractation of material resources and racialized labor.
And I'm particularly caught up in this phenomenon of GIS instructional video on Kuaishou, which far from evidencing the genocide in Xinjiang, as we saw from other kind of more activist use of the technology, boosts purely of the technical position. So, oh, am I out of time? If I can just... You have a couple of minutes. Okay, great. Thank you. So you can find...
So a video like that is definitely not limited or focusing on Xinjiang. It has every different province and region in the PRC, but also globally. So what do we do with these kind of promotional GIS videos, as well as the kind of more activist use of surveillance is really an open question I'm struggling with. So, last but not least, this is my final thesis. To view Xinjiang from afar shakes the ground on which so-called ground-truthing stands, and vice versa. Critics and defenders of the PRC state's digital accent recursively perpetuate each other while producing different techno-cultures.
cultures. We have actively resisted or tried to resist algorithmic oppression in different ways. The point though is to change the relation of what we think of the relation between activism or resistance and quietism or co-optation. Thank you. Thank you so much, Shaolin, for a wonderful talk. I can't wait to discuss these themes with all of you. Now I will turn the floor over to Anna. Okay, thank you so much for all the organizers and all their immense amount of work. I'll also share my screen here.
Okay. Prior to the modern period, almost nothing was known about electricity. Its ancient and visible vibrations were only ever vaguely perceived. Deep within the body of the earth is an iron ocean whose ripple effects bathe the planet in vast electromagnetic fields. If modernity has a trajectory, it is to envelop us ever deeper into the alien atmosphere generated by this innermost geological layer. Electricity has become a mighty kingdom, said Henrik Hertz over a century ago. We perceive it in a thousand places where we had no proof of its existence before. The domain of electricity extends over the whole of nature. With the pervasiveness of wireless media, imperceptible electromagnetic frequencies have become the abstract transcendental infrastructure of 21st century life.
Technocapitalism arrives in waves. Economist Nikolai Kondratiev proposed that the periodic fluctuations which generate evolutionary growth follows a recognizable pattern marked by cycles of 50 years. The rhythmic generation of cell phones unfolds in much tighter loops. The first generation of mobile technology, which could only make calls, was launched in Tokyo in 1979. Since then, a new generation of cellular networks has been introduced every decade. This intensification of wireless media has been concurrent with China's remarkable rise. 1979 was also the year the country introduced its policies of Gaiga Kaifeng, reform and opening. Today, China is at the heart of a confluence between the fifth generation of mobile technology
and the fifth long wave of techno-capitalist time. In the 19th century, when the planet first electrified, China resisted the new media, treating it as a foreign invasion. How is it then that with wireless media, China has grown so attuned to the medium of the age? The battle for control over 5G brings a new twist to an old puzzle that has haunted Chinese modernity from the start. To what extent are the old internal cultural traditions compatible with a techno-scientific future that is allied with the outside. While life in fantasy-ecla China was embedded in a myriad of layerings, exchanges, and complexities, it was largely framed by dualistic modulations, past and future, tradition and modernity,
east and west. To make sense of these, the late Qing literati mobilized one of the most profound pairings in Chinese thought, Tiyong, or essence function. The twin concepts first appeared in classical Confucian and neo-Daoist texts. They were later transformed and deepened by the Buddhists, and then further elaborated by neo-Confucianists of the Song Ming period. Crucially, in all these traditions, Tiyong is conceived of non-dualistically, as a symbiotic pair. In the famous 19th century formulation, however, Ti and Yong were split. Scholar officials aimed to separate the use of technology, Yong, which was associated with revolutionary transformation, from a protected
Chinese essence, Ti, that remained constant and unwavering. The two sides were poised in a fragile equilibrium that ultimately proved untenable. Rather than attain an ideal balance, China veered from intense suspicion of modern technology, as when the country's first telegraph wires were sabotaged by the boxers, to a revolutionary anti-traditionalism, as in the belief held by the intelligentsia of the May 4th movement, that China must change everything from its script to its calendars to adapt itself to the machines of the modern age. The consolidation of the state arose out of the eventual inevitable ruin of the tiyong duality. The globalization of electric
communication was a powerful force for spatial and even more importantly temporal integration. In China this global unification was met by an assertion of technological sovereignty that was foundational to the establishment of the modern nation and has only grown more tenacious with time. Today, this integrated, concentrated, interiorized China contributes to a dark Sino-futurist fantasy. Dystopian narratives swirl around China's engagement with contemporary technology, which appears to be fundamentally governed by the dictates of a highly centralized authoritarian control. This techno-authoritarianism is countered by the opposite pole, the promise of techno liberation, which is based on the de-centering
tendency of digital technology and regularly associated with a democratic West. Cyberculture in China has thus been shaped by the rhythmic oscillation of these two opposing forces, an outward expansion and an inward contraction. Concentrating on only one of these poles, however, can only ever offer a limited perspective. It fails to apprehend the whole of the wave. The underlying undulating rhythm is revealed through a cosmo-ontology developed by an alternative Chinese intellectual lineage which sought to connect indigenous religio-philosophical ideas with a techno-capitalist modernity that had arrived on its shore. A key figure is Xiong Xili.
remembered as one of the fathers of 20th century New Confucianism. Unlike other Chinese scholars of the time, Xiong insisted that the cyclical rediscovery of the past, the retrospective creation of the way, lay not in the sequestering of Ti from Yang, but rather from Ti Yong's fundamental inseparability. Synthesizing a critique of the Buddhist Yogatsara school with a Confucian monism based on the continuously transforming substance found in the Chinese classic the I Ching, Sheng reconceived the relation between essence and function, conceptualizing the two as intermingled like the ocean and the wave. Subconsciously influenced by the electric atmosphere that was emerging all around him,
he likened the ceaseless rhythm of generation and extinction, wondrous and unfathomable, to an uninterrupted flash upon flash of lightning, a myriad of transformations that is continuous and without end. China's role in the coming wireless wave proceeds not only from the consolidating power of the terrestrial state, but also from experimental practice which surfaced out of the watery edges of the peripheral zone. Especially potent is the distributed Shenzhen culture of Shenzhen, the mega metropolis on the Pearl River Delta, the place where most of the world's cell phones are made and out of which a planetary wireless media was born. Chinese
cyber culture is thus structured by an ongoing wavering tension that recalls the Schmittian distinction between a land race and a watery people. The territorialized, interiorized, unifying core coexists with dispersive counter currents, inherently aquatic, which elude unification and offer alternative and more diffuse intimacies with the vibrations that permeate the electric body of the earth. These borderline practices operate with a mode of time and creativity born from the alterity of simulation. Piracy, copying, trickery, imitation have an alliance with illusion, coincidence, repetition, and doubling, all of which, as scholar Mark Fisher
has theorized, belong to the realm of the weird and the eerie and its fascination with the outside. Electromagnetic technologies cross into a sphere outside of all anthropomorphic design. Earth's metallic interior is unencumbered by the integrity and identity of the organisms that live on the planet's surface. Instead, its intrinsic mutability is characterized by the raw potentiality of metal's machinic phylum. Rather than represent human communication, cell phones and Wi-Fi signals function on a machinic level that is exterior to the domain of human understanding. In the West, increasingly, the response has fed into an escalating paranoia,
A sense that our nation, our cities, our bodies, our lives should be sheltered from the saturating waves of 5G. Yet there is an occult history that celebrates our absorption into invisible electromagnetic frequencies. This vibratory modernism made its way to China and was taken up by the intellectual circles of the 19th century. Particularly important was Tan Sitong, whose book Ren Shui connected the new sciences of electricity, ether and the brain with metaphysical insights from Buddhist and Confucian texts, bridging the new science of electromagnetic vibrations with a Chinese neo-traditionalist thought. Saturated in the radiosphere, the 21st century city, the most artificial of environments,
is interpenetrated with a force that is both cosmic and earthy, highly technological and wholly natural. The imperceptible world of the wireless wave functions doubly, as media theorist Mark Hansen has written, both as a mode of human communication, but also as a cosmological revelation. speculation about the emerging alien sentience is offered by the philosopher Mo Zongsan, who is one of Xiong Xili's students and is now widely considered one of the most important figures in modern Chinese thought. Mo furthered the new Confucian project by using the conceptual language of Chinese Buddhism as a means of translating the critical writings of Immanuel
Kant. His interpretation insisted that intellectual intuition was attainable through a practical knowledge of the noumenal world. Mo referred to this awakening as a vibrational event. Perhaps these experiment embodied practices are what wireless media is for. Beyond our phenomenal awareness, our bodies now fused with machines mutate towards an apprehension of what Hertz called the mysterious waves that are there but that we cannot see with the naked eye. Thank you. Thank you so much, Anna. And thank you to all of our wonderful panelists and as well as the organizational team.
We have some time for discussion now. Before we get into questions from the audience, I think I'd like to take a moment to, well, perhaps give everyone just a second to pause and reflect because there's quite a bit in what we just heard. But I think first I might like to invite our panelists to enter into discussion with one another if they'd like to do so at this time. And perhaps as chair I might remark upon a couple of themes that could become subject for discussion, a couple of interrelations that I noticed. Something that stuck out immediately was there seems to be a profound connection between Rebecca's understanding of breakdown and the provocations about deoptimization.
In Xiaoling's talk, the notion of the mobilization of desire, the specific Chinese mobilization of desire as a response to novel cartographies and the reshaping of social relations. And then in Anna's talk, the relation of the outside, this imperceptible geological substratum, the domain of electricity, as well as the techniques that you reference in Mark's work. So the kind of connection that I was seeing here is that it's this shock to thought that Sino-futurity represents. And it's the relationship of the conference itself, the recursiveness that's not entirely absorbed, but pretends the possibility of breakdown.
So I won't go on any longer just to give some space for thought and to open potential avenues for dialogue, but I'll turn it over to the three of you all now. I could ask something of Shaolin. I don't know if this is sort of too mundane a question, but you know you mentioned this issue about studying Xinjiang from afar and obviously there's this like dual problem of COVID and my understanding is even without COVID it's pretty hard to get to Xinjiang. And I just kind of wonder as this project moves forward, whether you
imagine yourself getting there and what you would actually like, how would you conduct research if you were there or what it is that you think you might be able to find out or investigate if if this distance wasn't, or maybe, you know, one day we can assume that that will end. Yeah, thank you. That's a great question, not mundane at all. I think this speaks of so much of my own kind of anxieties of like starting a new project, right? Because frankly, it's true. I mean, what happens if I can get there, if indeed, you know, one can get there these days? I'm not a
trained, I'm not at all anthropologist, right? I've not conducted ethnography. I've been reading up on it, you know, in preparation for the day that I might be able to conduct interviews. But as, you you know, scholars much more invested as well as knowledgeable of the field have demonstrated it takes years and years of field work and linguistic capabilities, which I don't have. So I think in a way, I think this have absolved me of my own guilt, right, of not being able to do real ethnographic work. But my initial plan was really just to go
and make a first trip just to see, just because it's been years since I've been to the mainland, for one. And hopefully the Shenzhen part was easier to flesh out, right, and that is still possible, which is to actually visit some of the companies and factories. and from my preliminary emails is actually not that difficult. And of course, Xinjiang is absolutely tricky. But yeah, I was hoping to just go to the coastal regions first and literally see what happens. So yeah, I'm totally ignorant of this, what to do if I'm there. So yeah, thank you. We have some questions from the audience now. The first one is from anonymous to Rebecca.
How can the breakdown become a fallibility that might allow the machine to speak? Thank you for your question. I guess that maybe I could maybe try to like articulate sort of the distinctions that I'm making in like talking about this conceptualization of breakdown and how that relates to automation. So I think there's an important differentiation between what I'm calling breakdown and this idea of like a glitch or like an error or like a failure or something like that. So on the one hand, you could think of
glitch as akin to sort of like this master's tools thesis that Luciana and others have discussed throughout this conference, where we could position glitch or error as sort of like an escape from the operations as a machine, or as like an expose or sort of mode of resistance. But that, and as people have articulated that there are limitations to this approach, in that for one, we see that the error or glitch becomes a means just for the further expansion or intensification of something like a machine learning algorithm, or even an intensification of the dynamics of capital internally and externally. And so on the other hand, I was trying to think about this idea
of breakdown as actually like a prerequisite for the automation, as sort of a prerequisite for optimization, if we could think of optimization as sort of like the calculated arrangement of parts or the weighing of parts of a machine or machine learning algorithm or neural net, that could be adjusted or even replaced in order to guarantee that the machine keeps functioning. So it means for the machine to like accrue resilience. So the call for me in sort of making this distinction is at the same time to understand the changing science of what it means to optimize a machine in the face of like constant crisis. And maybe like deoptimization
is the wrong word that I'm using, but to me, it speaks to the need to actually bring sort of universalism and whiteness in as the object of optimization, what things are optimized for, in order to ask how things are done and how they might be done differently or otherwise. So to bring this back to your question of how a machine speaks, maybe that's a question of how things, the conditions from which things might be done otherwise. Thank you, Rebecca. The next question is for Anna from Enrico Monachelli. Anna, does the modeling of temporal expansions and contractions as a waveform limit the possibility
of a genuinely alien future unbound from the past? It feels like the emergence of a genuinely alien future was crucial for your previous work. The questioner has in mind, for example, your work on the alienness of Y2K and would like to know if this new conceptual turn limits, alters, or corrects in any way your own philosophy of time? Sorry. I mean, I think that it is, for me, a development of my thoughts about the philosophy of time. And so maybe I'll say that for me, the whole idea of Sino-futurism
is fundamentally a time concept, right? It's an issue about time, about how time works. So it's not a theory that says China occupies the future or in some straightforward way. It's rather that the whole idea of the future has to be re-conceptualized by China's engagement with these contemporary technologies. And so in writing Shanghai Future, I was really thinking about this idea of the time spiral
as an idea of something that sort of engagement of the past, that an engagement of the future that that, you know, made use of the past. And that's something that we see in Shanghai all the time, right? That it's looking back in order to look forward. But as I have gone sort of deeper into Chinese philosophy, I would say that this idea of the wave is the one that is now, is my current obsession, I guess. And I think it does, I think it's a good question, right?
Like to what extent it has to do with an outside. But it does, you know, in the writings of Xiong Xili and Mo Zong San, And they're all about the, through this kind of spiraling, swirling idea of the Tiyong, they want to break apart through bringing together, I guess, this idea of essence function or the phenomenal and the eternal. And so in that way, they get to an outside. Like Mo Zong San definitely was very adamant about the idea that intellectual intuition was possible.
You know, so, and my reading of this, and it's not in any way conventional reading, is that this is underlying this is a kind of vibrational or wave-like mode of time. if i can just follow up briefly about that um in previous work i think you've written about like control as a time binding process thinking about the burroughs formulation i wonder just to follow up on the questioner's provocation how you see this vibrational model either intersecting with the like burroughs control thesis or refuting it or what the kind
relationship you see there is so the kind of wave that um the the sort of way the wave works it as read by me philosophized by these thinkers is through this process of contraction and expansion and they actually uh shun shi li talks about this uh through um through the yijing through how the I Ching works. So there is a kind of what he says, a kind of contraction. And that contraction is actually what produces materialization. And so I would, you know, and I think the way I'm thinking about it is that that sort of mechanism of control, and I would even go so
far, though, you know, it might be that you break this apart, that the state apparatus is through this process of contraction, but that within this process of contraction is this counterforce of expansion. And that duality, you know, he says, is that's continuous, right? There's never, it's not actually wrong. It's wrong to say there's a moment of contraction and then there's a moment of expansion. That is the wave. Yeah, that's super helpful. And I think relates to what Rebecca had said about the difference between glitch and breakdown. I think it helps establish that. I have a question now for Xiaoling
that I think will touch on similar thematics as you were mentioning with the state form from Anonymous, how do you see the geopolitics of internal borders of this automata area? Do you see it as a model that is going to state a new form of area sovereignty? Thank you. Thanks for that question. I think internal borders and camps and enclosures are not new, right? But I do think that with Xi's really unprecedented kind of global vision of the BRI and what all the promises and failures
that it continues to deliver on a daily basis, I do think that this idea of internal borders borders is in such rapid multiplication of external connections. So this idea, again, picking up on what Anna and Rebecca have all brilliantly theorized, this idea of not just a non-duality of expansion and contraction, but also the kind of multiple lines that are being drawn between internal enclosures and external connectivity.
And then added on top of that, which is not just about geopolitics, but really a kind of epistemology, right? Because if you look at any kind of visual mapping of the BRI and you see all these lines that have been drawn across the maps, you cannot but also think about the kind of connectivity between ways of knowing because, you know, talk of China right now really brings together these different fields. as we do with any kind of interdisciplinary work, I think. But I'm trying to think through the kind of geopolitical connectivity with internal breakdown, to use Rebecca's term, of communication or information,
as well as a crazy explosion of connecting ways of knowing. So, and this to be further complicated by, you know, who is inside or outside of the great firewall, right, is, I think, really tricky. Do you think I can ask Anna a question? Please. Yeah. Anna, thanks for your talk. And it's so great to connect with you again after so many years. Yeah, I really love your thinking through the wave as a philosophical tradition, technological innovation, but also as a conceptual heuristic more generally for your own work, right?
So when you mentioned about contraction and expansion in these thinkers and how they produce materialization, I can't help but also think about the kind of in the political economy aspect of the growth of, you know, GDP and nation's economy and all that. So are you also at some point of this larger project thinking about economic growth as part of this kind of dialectics and tension? Yeah, so the sort of wave theory of capitalism is kind of part of the part of the project.
And it's a little bit like wave theory is a slightly controversial topic among, I think only heterodox economics takes it seriously. But on the other hand, when in my experience, when you talk to economists about it, a lot of the presumptions because wave theory is about technological innovation. Right. So a lot of the you know, they don't necessarily dismiss it. It's just not part of the sort of field. but um so it how the wave is measured is is um complicated and and and it's measured by lots of
different things like whether it's measured by gdp or whether it's measured by certain price gauges or whether it's measured by whatever right um but certainly um these kind of wave theories which assume that capitalism works in waves, you know, is part of the idea. And I guess the mapping of this is that it also has a geopolitics to it. And so the waves which Kondratiev and Shumpeter saw as these 50-year cycles move through the planet. And so the idea is that we are in the fifth long wave and China is uh you know sort of the the site of this
long wave and according and it's a little it's very hard to map and you know it's not exactly it's not an exact science but I think that there is compelling case to say that 2020 is a peak of the wave and that we're entering the downturn of the wave and sort of intriguingly a lot of the theory presumes that technological innovation happens on the downturn of the wave. And so this is something that is being said now, right, as we come out of the pandemic that we're entering it's like the end of the great stagnation and that we're entering this moment of new technological whatever. So yes. Sorry.
So to follow up on this, we have two questions about very large scale geopolitical matters. And so perhaps I will combine them into a single two part question. And we'll start with the one that is addressed to you, Rebecca, but then the second one's addressed to all the panelists. So the first component of the question is, Rebecca, can you elaborate on the relationship between breakdown and apocalypse? Are there moments of breakdown in the AI arms race? And then, so the secondary component of this question is a questioner that's thinking about in Orientalism when Saeed speaks
to the collaboration between the British and French colonial technologies in Egypt, and asks about how the interaction between North American, after the interaction between North American Chinese control technologies, following up with, are we in the middle of a new iteration of the Cold War? Or is this view a simplification of the contemporary articulations of techno capitalism? So I hope the combination is not too much, but the AI arms race and the, you know, are we in the new Cold War slash interaction between North America and Chinese control technologies. But of course, the scale of this question is massive. So please feel free to address it how you would like. Thank you, William.
That was definitely a lot to parse. But I can try to speak to sort of the way that I am thinking about what is being referred to as the AI arms race in relation to this conceptualization of the apocalypse or sort of the horizon that never comes. And maybe I could talk about this sort of like in the context of kind of military research and development cycles. So I'm thinking about like artificial intelligence and the types of economic and political plans around the development of AI in the now and in the coming years.
we see actually like very similar narratives within the US and China that equate sort of the development of artificial intelligence with technological progress, with economic progress, with political progress for the nation. And thus AI becomes a way towards empire and imperial power. And within the context of this cycle of research and development, it perpetuates forever because research sort of defines the projects that are to be developed, which then defines the questions which are to be researched, right? So I'm thinking about this as sort of like the deferral of something which is not clearly demarcated.
It's not come. And I think that it's interesting, it's especially clear in sort of looking at military strategies in the US and China around the future development of artificial intelligence, that the US privileges a discourse on ethics and human rights, where firstly, they pride themselves as not having like a quote unquote, human controller, like out of the loop, right? but also condone China for doing so. And even more so, this becomes a way to normalize like the US's imperial agenda while also subordinating the other agenda is wrong or uncivil. And of course, that's not to say that like all of the research and development
in the context of military science isn't unethical in some sort of way. We're talking about war technologies. but just to say that one is naturalized or made to feel ethically sound by scorning the other. So yeah, that was, I don't even know if I offered an answer to that question, but yes, I hope that there's moments of breakdown within that recursive system. And thank you for that question. Anna and Shaolin, would you like to remark on this question, either in terms of the AI arms race component or the new iteration of the Cold War slash Chinese and American collaboration or
relationship between new control technologies? I could say something briefly, I guess, which is, I mean, I think Rebecca's, you know, obviously absolutely right that, well, certainly in China, maybe even in China more than America, that the project of AI and the project of national resurgence or national growth or the triumph of the nation are completely, you know, are becoming totally fused. in certain rhetorical strategies. And at the same time, I think that there is, you know, I'm just
kind of continuously struck, I have been for some time, but I think it's just heating up to such a level that is kind of shocking, the way in which in the West, Sinophobia and Technophobia have become the same thing. And so there's this kind of like the yellow peril of the Chinese robotic nation that, you know, and that was elaborated by Lex's film, you know, that just seems to be like you just open any newspaper any day and you can see evidence of that. So yeah, sadly, I think that we maybe are in some form of Cold War.
Yeah, it's not looking great, is it? Yeah, I mean, at the same time, I think all three of us are trying to think beyond this framing of the Cold War because I mean, for many reasons, but one of which is, if popular journalism is already doing the work, obviously we need to do something else that's different. Right? Although that's in itself, you know, depressing on a daily basis for me. So, and this idea of, you know, again, why and how do we start associating techno cultures with a national cultural form? And that's one of the questions that I've been thinking through
because I think it has deeply geopolitical but also a kind of phenomenological question as it were, it's easy to identify a technology with a national identity or cultural identity when we know materially the kind of circulation of innovation circulation of innovation and duplication, as well as the components of different production of the different component parts mean that there is never a kind of Chinese technology or American technology to speak of. And yet we persist because it's perceptible. But what we can't really see
is, you know, as Jameson very traditionally puts it by now, we can't see global capital, right? We just can't, with our naked eye, perceive it as such. We know it, right? So, and then as both Anna and my work show, it's really about tracing it back to the late Qing in some aspect to truly understand the kind of the roots of it all right with this persistent identification of technology with the west and of tradition and philosophy and a certain kind of art making with the non-west so
a lot of it is being packed into those few years of the turn of the 20th century as well. But also just one more thing to add is that I'm super, I'm persuaded that a lot of these AI innovations and the huge amounts of money that Xi's government is pouring into the digital Belt and Road is a kind of spatial fix, right? And of course, this is to, you know, jump on already existing work done by Marxist geography, which is that it's all the innovation, a lot of it is to just, you know, to a place to pour capital in. So it's the kind of calculated factor of waste and redundancy, as well as technologies that will simply not always serve
a purpose, right, has to be considered as part of the, you know, a way to fix capital that needs to go somewhere, basically, investments that need to go somewhere. The status of fixed there is very interesting. And maybe we can come back to that. I have a question from Luciana to you, Anna, that I think picks up on something that Shailene was just saying about when the media is already doing some of this work of like the, you know, these kind of noticings that we partake in as well, like what is the role for philosophy and thought? So Luciana asks, do you see that on the long wave of techno capitalism, the conception of essence function
offers a mode of challenging the Kantian model of knowledge? Yeah, so like I said, that certainly is Mo Zong San's, well, I would say that that seems to me to be Mo Zong San's project, right, is to what he saw really as a corrective to the Kantian project through this particular reading of
Chinese intellectual history and this relationship of phenomenon, noumena, and that, as I kind of briefly said in this piece, sort of runs through Buddhist thinking and brings in certain sort of Neo-Confucian thinking. And so certainly that is the project of Mo Jong San as I see it. And yeah, I guess I think that to try to relate it in this kind of maybe, I'm not sure this will work, glitchy way to what you were just saying. There is, as also I mentioned, a kind of occult history of experimental practices with
electromagnetics, for example, that is very different from these concerns about or the way, the framing of these geopolitical concerns, right? They're much more about thinking about what it is, like this specific question, what can a body do? And relating it to these cosmic forces that we are immersed in and that the process of modernity has increasingly immersed us in. And so, you know, I think there is a mode of engagement that, like Shaolin says, comes out of this really
fertile moment at the turn of the century in China, where intellectuals of all sorts were trying to engage with this new technology and there was like lots of different ways of thinking about it and different questions and different uh approaches and so there's a you know there is a a mode of experimentation and a uh in my view really exciting mode of thinking of this again And through these, there was a very strong reemergence of Yogatsara Buddhism in particular, but other forms of Buddhism as well. So debates within Buddhism and debates, and then this kind of emergence of new Confucianism.
So I think there is this really sort of very interesting philosophical lineage that emerges them that maybe offers some ways of thinking about our engagement with the technosphere that is outside these modulations of Cold War modulations, let's say. Yeah, this is the questions are nicely related and I hope the participants don't mind me picking and choosing in a way that kind of continues a thread here.
But to go back to Xiaoling, this anonymous questioner asks, it's very interesting to hear about how critical computation can contribute to area studies and vice versa. Can you tell us more about the implications of this in relation to digital enclosure? Thank you for that. Yeah, you know, it's the history of area studies as it arose in the Cold War context in North America has been, you know, very thoroughly excavated. So I think part of the intriguing point of connection is how area studies had been traditionally and historically a kind of practice of viewing areas from afar,
which does not mean that one does not go there because obviously area specialists do. but there's a kind of scopic intervention at some level in the history of area studies, which does not at all just limit, it's limited to China, but also the study of other parts of Asia and other parts of Europe and Latin America as well. So I am, yeah, I'm invested in that kind of lineage of the approach from the study of areas and peoples from a distance, which inevitably does a kind of enclosing, right? you're kind of categorically and as well as epistemologically defining a group of people
according to their territory as calling to their languages spoken and so on and so forth so it is a kind of an enclosure to speak of in a traditional sense or rather a kind of knowledge formation sense And of course, now we have computational algorithmics that does this kind of enclosing in a different way. Is it going to have a different new lens through which? Yeah, I think if, you know, if the study of China, if literary studies, historical studies have such a rich tradition of viewing China from afar, I think right now the turn is especially intriguing because now we are also really invested in how China sees, right?
So not just seeing China, but also how China does the seeing itself. And this is, again, back to the kind of AI technologies, but also the launch of these satellites and in Jiuquan and the actual sites. how China sees the earth with Baidu Maps and how China continues to see the world differently from Google Maps, right? Which is of course not the official mapping tool one uses in the PRC and so on and so forth. I think that posits an interesting turn. So yeah, and what that does to area studies, I think it totally is changing the configurations for sure. Yeah.
Just to go back to when you mentioned the spatial fix, do you think that there, so in addition to these like technologies of seeing that you talk about, there's also a kind of like value implicit in the seeing what the space might be good for. And so would you go so far as to say that this spatial fix is like a cartographic like kind of I mean the way you described it before almost sounded like an expenditure is that is that maybe how you would describe it yeah definitely it's definitely a kind of um expense and one which is you know not perfectly calculated always right it is not always profit generating um a lot of these technological innovations so the idea of waste
that doesn't just have a human cost, again, to kind of disturb the human rights framework that we all are in some ways in this panel, but also an actual economic waste on the part of the PRC government. Again, of course, I will need more kind of data and evidence for that, but I think that's an interesting speculation. And in terms of cartographic, I think that it's interesting how exposés of the Xinjiang genocide and, again, these kind of critiques, which are correct, of the ongoing encampments in Xinjiang reproduce the kind of discourse that the Chinese government has to say about the desert land, right?
Because a lot of these kind of satellite imageries start from premise that, look, in 2015 or so, this was an empty barren land. And look, now there are camps, right, which is exactly the kind of same kind of discourse that the government takes to say that, look, you know, this is ultimately unfarmable and unlivable. and yet now we have made it so arable and rich and sustainable. Sustainability is a big, big thing. So, you know, when actually, no, on the contrary, for decades of centuries, Turkey minorities have farmed and lived on these so-called non-arable land.
Rebecca, sorry. If the, this question sort of picks up on this question about waste and maybe touches on your remarks about recursive colonialism in terms of the master slave relationship and the human and object relationship. It's from an anonymous questioner and asks if the breakdown of the system becomes the condition for automation to learn, what might it then mean for the machine to break down? Yeah, that's a really great question. Thank you. I guess maybe for me, it's helpful to think about breakdown as not detached from automation
or thinking about the two together is sort of the way that I'm conceptualizing this. And I'm interested in thinking automation as both the way that the operations of recursive colonialism create a subject and a corresponding imaginary, but also then produce the conditions for the subject to maybe be other than what it is. And I guess like thinking about something like an automated machine or like an algorithm, I'm thinking about how its limitations are also its enabling constraints. So, you know, if total automation is kind of the dream of Silicon Valley programmers
who, you know, their formulas to sort of add artificial intelligence to whatever already existing platform or object there is, we can see that sort of this idea of what we've been calling or what we've been referring to as the universal subject or the universal man this week actually needs to produce the other as an automaton or the other as slave in order to reaffirm like a self as universal man, right? So I'm interested in this question of like what it means to use, to actually use automation or use the automaton to push back against this idea of the universal by saying that there are only ever like partial or incomplete ways of
being or partial operations. And these actually come before your claims to universalism. So what does it mean to sort of automate as a way to expose kind of the breakdown that's already latent within any given kind of system or epistemology. I hope that I answered that question. Thank you. Yeah, I think from my perspective, you did. And I think it's a very challenging question because it would, I mean, normally we'd want to hold these things apart, but the collapse of them seems to be necessary in order to avoid this media spectacularization that we've all been noticing and criticizing. There's something, some work that is there that's so crucial.
I think we have time for just two more questions. The first one is for Shaolin, and I think the question is whether you could expand a bit on the mobilization of desire. Yeah, thank you. So I'm trying to find exactly something different to say about the extreme kind of propaganda or nationalistic jingoism on the Chinese social media.
and obviously a direct observation is that they are not opposite to critiques of the PRC, but in fact has some kind of intertwined relation. And with desire, I mean, I think it's immediately linked to kind of capitalist desire for commodities and consumerism, right? So a lot of the, if you search for Xinjiang or, you know, where to keywords on either TikTok or Kuaishou, which is the platform I really, really enjoy, it's kind of really, Kuaishou is more popular among kind of rural users or less educated users, so-called.
You will find, of course, you know, Xinjiang food, you know, jokes about Xinjiang accent, so on, so on, by the minorities themselves. And so all this is for a way to gain popularity, right, to have followers as we, you know, as it is in social media. But also the kind of desire for, and this is thanks to Rebecca's presentation, a desire for whiteness, right? So as we know, I mean, with Xinjiang celebrities, as one of the images I showed in my slide, the constant obsession with how they look absolutely white or a better, you know, the perfect mix, right? The Eurasian look.
And again, you know, so many good works done by critical scholars of race on, you know, Eurasian as a kind of beauty aesthetic. But yeah, this, you know, one of the most popular results one gets from searching for Xinjiang on these websites is the face, right, the Xinjiang face. And of course, this is entirely has striking resonance because of facial recognition technologies. But on the part of Chinese social media users, the face is the desirable face, the most desirable face, if you like. which, you know, all kinds of filters and facial kind of
uploading smartphone apps try to kind of reconfigure, right, the Chinese face to a Eurasian one. So yeah, this desire for whiteness is actually something that I think I will pursue. Thank you. We have time for one final question. The question is addressed to Anna, but I'll invite all of the panelists to join in if they'd like for a final remark and some closing thoughts. I think the question lends itself to that. It's from Mitch McEwen, who asks, what about downtime in the electrical? Thinking of Malcolm McClough's downtime on the microgrid,
the question is, is there a Neo-Confucian idea of electricity that's not always on? And I would add to that, is the turning off electricity something that's desirable or something we should strive for? uh so i think that's a really interesting question and i um don't know about research into like microgrids in china but i really invite anyone who does know about research into that to let me know because i think it's a a fascinating question and i would guess that there is a lot of experimentation of that sort, like sort of de-centered experiments with
electricity, but, you know, has a very different valence here than it would in, in, say, California or something like that, right? So I, I would be very interested in that. I think that, I'm not sure I'm going to get right to this, like, should we turn the electricity off thing, but maybe I can just say that, you know, in my own thinking, part of what I'm thinking about, and I think this is also maps on to the other panelists, is this sort of question of like, what do we mean by China, right? Like, if we're talking about China, what do we mean by China?
And, you know, it seems to me maybe too often that we flatten the idea of the state with the idea of China. And so, of course, there's many theorists of the diaspora, the diasporic sort of thinkers that talk about how peripheral thought and peripheral experiments and peripheral practices maybe force us or ask us to conceptualize. what or first of all ask this question what do we mean by China and then try to think through this question through these peripheral practices and these peripheral engagements and stuff like
that so I think that thinking about that in terms of like the national electricity grid and these some sort of micro practices would be really interesting and also because it of course really relates to issues of pollution and climate and all those other critical issues that we're facing. Rebecca, shall we? Any, would you like to respond or shall we, shall we leave it there? okay um well thank you all for such a wonderful panel um the presentations were outstanding it
was an absolutely great discussion um so on behalf of all of our participants uh i will clap um thank you all and yeah be sure to keep up with the conference on the website to everyone who is here and we will see you tomorrow for episode seven, Mediterranean Archives and Post-Colonial Technocultures. Thank you again. Thank you to the Critical Computation Bureau and all the technical support staff who have helped us as well. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you all so much. Thank you. I really enjoyed this. Take care. Stay in touch.