The Reality Bubble

by Ziya Tong

  Not only has China got a supercharged surveillance system, it is tied to a person’s credit history as well. If, in the West, people obsess over social media “likes,” in China people have an added obsession: their social credit scores. The system, proposed by China’s State Council in 2014 to establish “a nationwide tracking system to rate the reputations of individuals, businesses, and even government officials,” has been called the “gamifying [of] good behavior.” As Mara Hvistendahl writes in Wired magazine, “The aim is for every Chinese citizen to be trailed by a file compiling data from public and private sources by 2020, and for those files to be searchable by fingerprints and other biometric characteristics.”

  Points are awarded for such meritorious behaviour as making early bill payments, stopping at crosswalks, conserving energy, giving to charity, and being friends with the right people. Having high-scoring friends in your social network is like a positive feedback loop, adding points to your own social credit score. And having a good score has benefits: a high-scorer can book a hotel room without paying a deposit, use free umbrellas, skip airport security lines, secure better interest rates at banks, receive energy bill discounts, gain access to apartment rentals, and even be rewarded with a boost to their profile on online dating sites. And increasingly, as facial recognition and technologies like “smile to pay” become integrated, a person’s face will become tied to their social credit score as well as to their wallet.

  These are the pluses. Points can be knocked off for bad behaviour, however. That can range from one’s shopping habits to undesirable online speech. Points can also be docked for jaywalking, spreading fake news or anti-government propaganda, late payment of bills, loitering, illegal parking, playing too many video games, illegal home renovations, cheating on exams, or even just having a lower digital class of friends. And the penalties aren’t frivolous. Low-scorers may have difficulty getting their children into good schools or getting mortgages or government jobs.

  As Hvistendahl writes, with a low social credit score, you become, “effectively, a second-class citizen.” She documents a low-scorer who “was banned from most forms of travel; he could only book the lowest classes of seat on the slowest trains. He could not buy certain consumer goods or stay at luxury hotels, and he was ineligible for large bank loans.”

  Low scores have put millions of Chinese citizens on travel blacklists. Already, four million have been blocked from high-speed train travel, and eleven million more have been blocked from buying airline tickets. And once people are on the blacklist, they often don’t know how to get off. Even Zhang Yong, the deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission, which regulates the social credit system, has stated that people “quite often” remain on the blacklist after their fines or debts have been repaid.

  China’s social credit system is still in its early phases. But the data pipe has been designed as a joint state-corporate system; for the most part, the government uses its high-tech infrastructure—such as facial recognition cameras to surveil and track citizens in public—while the bulk of the data compiled on citizens comes from private companies like Tencent and the Alibaba Group’s Ant Financial that collect and track consumer behaviour, political allegiances, social networks, and payments (or nonpayments) on their apps.*11

  The irony is that historically in China the most powerful form of social control has been the desire to save face, or to keep up one’s public image, because that reflects not only on the individual but on the respect given to and the dignity of the whole family. Today, that face is digitized data. And increasingly we are letting computers gauge our reputations based on our social media history. In the real world, our friends and families may in time forgive and forget, but there is no saving face with a computer, because a database will never forgive or forget.

  With artificial intelligence, we hand over the reins to machines. As James Vincent writes in The Verge magazine, “We usually think of surveillance cameras as digital eyes, watching over us or watching out for us, depending on your view. But really, they’re more like portholes: useful only when someone is looking through them….Artificial intelligence is giving surveillance cameras digital brains to match their eyes, letting them analyze live video with no humans necessary.”

  Our bodies are just another topography to a computer, just another map. Modern facial recognition systems chart our faces like landforms. Our “landmarks” are defined and measured, from the ridges of our noses, to the depth and width of our eye sockets, to the forms of our ears. In this domain, it is not people but computers that recognize us. Systems, like those used on Apple’s Face ID, project thirty thousand infrared dots onto a person’s face, creating a unique topography that is instantly read and recognized by the phone’s sensors. Computer technologies like DeepFace, used by surveillance systems, can create 3-D models of our heads from 2-D images such as photographs, so that we can be tracked even if we are moving our heads or a camera is pointed at us from a different angle. Additionally, surface texture analysis can be used to improve ID methods. Algorithms analyze a patch of skin for particular characteristics, like lines and pores, and create a unique “skin print,” which can improve facial recognition accuracy by 20 to 25 percent. Even thermal cameras are being tested so that a person’s profile and the shape of their skull are recognizable regardless of whether they are wearing a hat, scarf, glasses, makeup, or anything else to disguise themselves.

  Often, when the topic of surveillance comes up, you’ll hear people say, “So what? I’m not doing anything wrong. What do I have to fear?” To be clear, you don’t have to do anything wrong; you can just be in the wrong category. Whether it’s being Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, gay or trans, poor, sick, or disabled, or a jaywalker. And facial recognition systems can not only spot a person’s age, race, and gender but also their sexuality. This “gaydar” has an accuracy rate of 91 percent, which could lead to serious abuses in countries where being gay can result in imprisonment or even the death penalty.

  In the Chinese province of Xinjiang, which is home to China’s Muslim Uighur population, over 18.8 million people were required to participate in the Physicals for All program in 2017. The biodata collected from residents included DNA samples, blood samples, fingerprints, and iris scans. All of the data is crunched together, along with surveillance materials, to rank people as “safe,” “normal,” or “unsafe.” Opting out was not an option, and the desire to do so was regarded as a “thought problem” or “political disloyalty.” Like the Golden Record system in Colorado schools, the involuntary participants are not given their results.

  Today, in the main city of Ürümqi, one of the world’s most advanced surveillance systems is in place. In an effort to root out violent separatists, as The Wall Street Journal notes, “Security checkpoints with identification scanners guard the train station and roads in and out of town. Facial scanners track comings and goings at hotels, shopping malls and banks. Police use hand-held devices to search smartphones for encrypted chat apps, politically charged videos and other suspect content. To fill up with gas, drivers must first swipe their ID cards and stare into a camera.” For those who are blacklisted, an “X” shows up when their photo ID is scanned, and when that happens they are trapped. They can’t travel anywhere.

  The technology companies fetishizing and normalizing biometric technologies lure us into giving them our data with “cool features” like quick payments, VIP priorities, and silly avatar apps. But biometric data is not just surrendered voluntarily. In many countries it is being increasingly used without people’s consent. In India, even newborn babies have their fingerprints scanned,*12 and in the United Kingdom four out of ten schools use biometric fingerprinting, creating a database of over 1.28 million pupils’ fingerprints (31 percent of which were taken without the consultation of parents). It is also widespread in the United States, where hundreds of schools have begun using biometric fingerprinting for students to pay for their cafeteria meals.*13 When parents in the U
nited States protested because of privacy concerns, some were told that unless they submitted their child to the procedure, “their children wouldn’t be allowed to eat school lunches at all.”

  We are beginning to see the dark side of biometrics. When used to control access to basic life requirements, it has the power to penalize us in the most fundamental ways. You can be denied not only free movement but even the ability to eat. In India, the government has implemented the mandatory Aadhaar system, scanning the eyes, faces, and fingerprints of its 1.3 billion citizens. As Vindu Goel writes in The Independent, as part of the program, “The poor must scan their fingerprints at the ration shop to get their government allocations of rice. Retirees must do the same to get their pensions.” Likewise, in Venezuela, over twenty-thousand fingerprint scanners were installed in supermarkets as part of the country’s food rationing plan so that hoarding could be prevented and access to food, medicines, toilet paper, sanitary napkins, detergent, and other necessities could be either granted or limited.

  Is It a Crime to See?

  JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU ONCE SAID that “man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” The chains are not imaginary—they are very real—but to the naked eye they are invisible. And in this invisibility lies power. Our whole planet is surrounded by eyes. We are tracked by cameras from thirty-five thousand kilometres up in the sky and scanned and monitored right down to the very lines and pores in our skin. But here’s the thing: we don’t even notice we’re being monitored. It’s a huge blind spot. It’s like we live in a high-tech panopticon, the circular prison building devised by philosopher Jeremy Bentham, where all the inmates could be observed in their cells without them ever knowing when someone was watching. The watchmen could see, but were not seen by those who were being watched.

  Michel Foucault was aware of this when he stated that “disciplinary power is exercised through its invisibility…[and] at the same time it imposes on its subjects a compulsory visibility. It is this fact of being constantly seen…that assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them.” Likewise, writing in Guernica magazine, John Berger stated that “the best way to understand the world is not as a metaphorical prison but a literal one.” And that, without hyperbole, our current state of affairs is “nothing less. Across the planet we are living in a prison.”

  Throughout this book there has been one recurrent theme: in the twenty-first century, you’ll find cameras everywhere except where our food comes from, where our energy comes from, and where our waste goes. These are the three blind spots of our human life-support system. And the system works to protect itself, which is why you’ll find that it deliberately blinds us.

  Ryan Shapiro, executive director of the transparency organization Property of the People, has been obtaining Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents for more than a decade. In one FOIA release, he found that one year after 9/11, despite all of the domestic terrorism priorities, the FBI was tracking vegans—specifically, at a Halloween party.

  The document reads,

  SYNOPSIS: Vegan Halloween Party

  DETAILS: Philadelphia obtained an Internet posting of the Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) USA website. The posting advises of a Vegan Halloween Costume Party:…“On Saturday, October 19, starting at about 7:30 PM SHAC Philly will be having a Vegan Halloween costume party as a fundraiser at the Old Pine Community Centre (4th and Lombard). We will have a DJ, vegan food and a photo lab to take pictures of attendees and their dates in whatever holiday splendour they should choose to wear.”

  And why were FBI spies tracking an event that likely featured nothing more dangerous than quinoa and veggie patties? Because animal rights activists are seen as a direct threat to the food system. As we saw in Chapter Four, the conditions often aren’t pretty. As Paul McCartney famously said, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.” But it isn’t just walls that keep the reality hidden. It can be illegal to look in. Food companies who want to be shielded from public scrutiny have put forward ag-gag laws (short for agriculture gag) designed to prohibit undercover investigations on factory farms. First proposed in 2011, these laws would make it a crime to “produce a record which reproduces an image or sound”*14 inside an animal facility or even “possess or distribute” such a recording.”

  Distressing animal abuse videos and unsanitary farming conditions have led to meat recalls, which is bad for big business. But for doing the dirty work of exposing inhumane and sometimes horrific practices, poor food safety, and abuse of workers’ rights, animal rights activists who go undercover to take videos and photographs and document abuses are considered “eco-terrorists” committing a felony, and if caught they can be fined or imprisoned.

  The news often portrays animal rights campaigners as violent bomb-setters, so Will Potter, author of Green Is the New Red, decided to go to the source and research their history. Potter contacted the Foundation for Biomedical Research (FBR), a non-profit based in Washington, DC, that supports animal testing in medical and scientific research and is currently the only group in the world that keeps tabs on the crimes of eco-terrorists. If any group has the incentive to expose the crimes of animal rights activists, it’s the FBR. But what Potter discovered was surprising: “The list of top eco-terrorism crimes from one of the top adversaries of these movements does not include a single injury or death.” And while “thousands of violent criminal acts” have been documented in recent decades, he continues, a report investigating the subject “lists ninety-five crimes from 1984 to 2002, including multiple ‘pie-ings.’ A pie-ing is exactly what the name implies. Think Larry, Moe and Curly imbued with the revolutionary spirit of Situationist International.”

  It is illegal to look too deeply at where our food comes from, and the same is true of our energy and waste systems. Businesses and governments can spy on us, but we are forbidden from spying on them, and in some cases even forbidden from openly recording a public protest.

  In October 2016, documentary filmmakers Deia Schlosberg and Lindsey Grayzel were arrested for turning on their cameras to film pipeline protests. Schlosberg faced three felony conspiracy charges and up to forty years in prison for recording events at TransCanada’s Keystone Pipeline site in Pembina County, North Dakota, while Grayzel was subject to a strip search and jailed for filming a pipeline protest in Skagit County, Washington. After massive uproar and celebrity protests, the charges were dropped. Interviewed at the Portland EcoFilm Festival, Schlosberg told the audience, “Lindsey and I had never experienced anything like that: being arrested for doing our jobs, charged with felonies for doing our jobs.” And as festival director Dawn Smallman put it, “If they could arrest Lindsey and Deia, they can arrest pretty much every filmmaker we show here at the EcoFilm Festival. This is a huge chilling thing if you work in media, if you work in film and if you’re taking on big issues like climate change and the big corporations.”

  Compared to Vietnamese activist Hoang Duc Binh, the American filmmakers had it easy. On February 6, 2018, Binh was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for the crime of documenting fishermen who were protesting waste pollution. After a massive chemical spill by a multi-billion-dollar steel plant conglomerate devastated fishing communities and caused mass fish deaths along two hundred kilometres of coastline, the locals, whose livelihoods were dependent on the fish stocks, held a demonstration.

  Binh’s crime was live streaming the fishermen’s protests on Facebook. According to the People’s Court in Nghệ An Province, he was convicted of “abusing democratic freedoms to infringe on the interests of the state, organisation and people, and opposing officers on duty.” During the live stream, Binh had told viewers that the fishermen were being beaten by authorities. The court ruled his statements were slander, while Binh denied wrongdoing. In essence, Binh’s real crime was refusing to participate in official blindness.

  In recent years, the silencing of environmental activists—those who document wrongdoings with respect to our food and ene
rgy production and disposal of our waste—has seen a steady increase. In 2017 alone, 197 environmental activists were murdered for exposing systemic abuses. According to the non-profit Global Witness, which documents crimes against activists, in 2016 up to four people were killed every week of the year.

  Surveillance, then, is the means by which our modern life-support system is maintained. It ensures that we work efficiently and productively, that we are good consumers and shoppers, that we don’t rock the boat or stray from the status quo. We are tracked on a grid that no longer requires that we “believe” in the hegemony of time and space. The new system is a physical manifestation that seeks to control and limit our behaviour through a physical apparatus.

  It would be a mistake, however, to think there is any evil mastermind behind it all. There is no Big Brother. We are all watching over each other to ensure that we keep in line. We tell ourselves it keeps us safe, that surveillance protects the good people in society by tracking down the bad who engage in criminal behaviour. But ordinary people are being monitored and penalized too, for the most minor of “infractions.” And modern surveillance is also used to track down and silence activists, the people attempting to turn the cameras back on the system to show us where it is going wrong.

  That, perhaps, is what is most frightening. Our system of producing food and energy and disposing of waste is operating on a scale that is beyond alarming. We are prisoners to a system that if left unchecked will, it is no exaggeration to say, destroy most of life on Earth. And yet surveillance encourages us, indeed forces us, to keep on with business as usual, to turn a blind eye and look away.