(Roughly) Daily

… and in some cultures, Nathan Gardels observes, that that phenomenon is picking up pace, as the ruling parties of the world’s two largest nations are fusing high-tech tools with old-fashioned patronage and local wardens…

The more we know or learn through connected networks, the more is known and learned about us.

The same apparatus that enables unprecedented connectivity enables unprecedented surveillance.

Such systems are invasive by design, recording and storing every digital transaction from an online purchase to chatbot queries to uploaded photos in giant databases that are searchable, not least by snooping governments, aggressive marketers and the large language models of Big Tech.

The other side of the coin of connectivity is sousveillance, the capacity of citizens and consumers to monitor authorities, professions and businesses from below to expose abuse, corruption, complacency, incompetence, dissembling or outright lies. (One recent example that springs to mind is the fracas over pro-Palestinian encampments on the U.C.L.A. campus where journalists and students correlated online personal data with facial recognition tools to identify violent counter-demonstrators while law enforcement dawdled.)

Information gathered through connective surveillance is also a means for tracking the pressing concerns, discontent or shifting attitudes of publics that out-of-touch private companies disregard at the risk of their consumer appeal and unresponsive governments or ruling parties ignore at the peril of losing popular legitimacy.

Inundated by junk emails and pop-up ads, most of us are all too familiar with how surveillance capitalism works. But something more is going on in China and India, where the state and ruling parties are wiring a new kind of body politic for the digital age by combining connective capacity with the old stalwarts of allegiance and control — local wardens and the spoils system of patronage…

[Gardels explains the all-too-effective efforts of the Chinese and Indian governments and comes to an alarming (at least to your correspondent) conclusion…]

… To the extent that what we may call “autocratic connectivity” remains an adaptive two-way street where feedback from below is heard and heeded, such a system appears politically sustainable without the liberal freedoms so cherished in the West.

If it works in the two largest nations on the planet, others may see it as their future as well…

Eminently worth reading in full: “‘Autocratic Connectivity’ In China and India,” from @NoemaMag.

* Jaron Lanier

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As we muse on manipulation, we might send persuasive birthday greetings to Carl Hovland; he was born on this date in 1912. A psychologist, he was a pioneer in the study of pioneered in the study of social communication and the modification of attitudes and beliefs. Hovland was the first to record the “sleeper effect,” the observation that individuals exposed repeatedly to what they know is propaganda– e.g., a political smear ad, paid for by an opponent), forget over time that the message is propaganda. (Note that, while the effect has been widely acknowledged and studied, it has been notoriously difficult to reproduce, leading to some doubt over its existence.)

Hovland also developed the social judgment theory of attitude change. He thought that the ability of someone to resist persuasion by a certain group depended on his/her degree of belonging to the group. And he collaborated closely with Irving Janis who would later become famous for his theory of groupthink.

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