The Existentialist - The Trust Issue

23.11.2020

<The Trust Issue>

T E T T I

H E X I S E N I A L S T

Warren Northover

T he E xistent i a l ist T h e Exi s te nt i a l i s t

The Existentialist acknowledges the traditional custodians of this land, the Gadigal and Bedegal people of the Eora nation, on which our university now stands.

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The Tr ust Issue Th e Trust Issu e

Warren Northover

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DEAR READER, We welcome you to The Existentialist - The Trust Issue, where were explore trust and truth in a world buried beneath fake news. With the current climate of the world, these are things which we believe need to be brought into conversation.

Judith Schulevitz explores how perhaps our blind faith in new technology may be our downfall and Andrew Marantz writes about Facebook becoming an unregulated platform of hate speech. Two pieces which explore both how technology and the people contibute to the trust issues prevalent in society. The other pieces show how society is slowly morphing into a scene out of a sci-f i novel. 2020 has proved this f icitous sounding narrative is close to coming to f ruition, but do not be af raid dear reader, we will all be in this mess together. Gay Alcorn explore the pressing question of whether we can we trust the news media when its all owned by the same person? Some food for thought...

Big thank you to the team for going above and beyond for this publication, I could not have asked for anything more.

Making this publications has been one of the best experiences of the year. So I really thank the team for putting their all into the design Choose your character on the next page - get to know us and I hope you enjoy The Existentialist.

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C HA RAC T ER S E L EC T

Dylan

Lvl. 1

Saafiyah

Lvl. 1

Maya

Lvl. 1

Warren

Lvl. 1

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A E X AL 06

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SHOULD WE TRUST YOU?

By Judith Shulevitz

For a few days this summer, Alexa, the voice assistant who speaks to me through my Amazon Echo Dot, took to ending our interactions with a whisper: Sweet dreams. Every time it happened, I was startled, although I thought I understood why she was doing it, insofar as I understand anything that goes on inside that squat slice of black tube. I had gone onto Amazon.com and activated a third-party “skill”—an app like program that enables Alexa to perform a service or do a trick—called “Baby Lullaby.” It plays an instrumental version of a nursery song (yes, I still listen to lullabies to get to sleep), then signs off softly with the nighttime benediction.

My conjecture is that the last string of code somehow went astray and attached itself to other “skills.” But even though my adult self knew perfectly well that Sweet dreams was a glitch, a part of me wanted to believe that Alexa meant it. Who doesn’t crave a motherly goodnight, even in midafternoon? Proust would have understood.

Maya Ab raham

We’re all falling for Alexa, unless we’re falling for Google Assistant, or Siri, or some other genie in a smart speaker.

When I say “smart,” I mean the speakers possess artif icial intelligence, can conduct basic conversations, and are hooked up to the internet, which allows them to look stuff up and do things for you. And when I say “all,” I know some readers will think, Speak for yourself! Friends my age—we’re the last of the Baby Boomers—tell me they have no desire to talk to a computer or have a computer talk to them. Cynics of every age suspect their virtual assistants of eavesdropping, and not without reason. Smart speakers are yet another way for companies to keep tabs on our searches and purchases.

Their microphones listen even when you’re not interacting with them, because they have to be able to hear their “wake word,” the command that snaps them to attention and puts them at your service.

The speakers’ manufacturers promise that only speech that follows the wake word is archived in the cloud, and Amazon and Google, at least, make deleting those exchanges easy enough. Nonetheless, every so often weird glitches occur, like the time Alexa recorded a family’s private conversation without their having said the wake word and emailed the recording to an acquaintance on their contacts list. Amazon explained that Alexa must have been awakened by a word that sounded like Alexa (Texas? A Lexus? Praxis?), then misconstrued elements of the ensuing conversation as a series of commands. The explanation did not make me feel much better.

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“By 2021, there will be almost as many personal-assistant bots on the planet as people.”

T h e Exi s te nt i a l i s t

Maya Ab raham

“Like an ideal servant in a Victorian manor, Alexa hovers in the background, ready to do her master’s bidding swiftly yet meticulously.”

Privacy concerns have not stopped the march of these devices into our homes, however. Amazon doesn’t disclose exact f igures, but when I asked how many Echo devices have been sold, a spokeswoman said “tens of millions.” By the end of last year, more than 40 million smart speakers had been installed worldwide, according to Canalys, a technologyresearch f irm. Based on current sales, Canalys estimates that this f igure will reach 100 million by the end of this year.

According to a 2018 report by National Public Radio and Edison Research, 8 million Americans own three or more smart speakers, suggesting that they feel the need to always have one within earshot. By 2021, according to another research f irm, Ovum, there will be almost as many voiceactivated assistants on the planet as people. It took about 30 years for mobile phones to outnumber humans. Alexa and her ilk may get there in less than half that time.

One reason is that Amazon and Google are pushing these devices hard, discounting them so heavily during last year’s holiday season that industry observers suspect that the companies lost money on each unit sold. These and other tech corporations have grand ambitions. They want to colonize space. Not interplanetary space. Everyday space: home, off ice, car. In the near future, everything f rom your lighting to your air-conditioning to your ref rigerator, your coffee maker, and even your toilet could be wired to a system controlled by voice.

The company that succeeds in cornering the smartspeaker market will lock appliance manufacturers, app designers, and consumers into its ecosystem of devices and services, just as Microsoft tethered the personal-computer industry to its operating system in the 1990s. Alexa alone already works with more than 20,000 smart-home devices representing more than 3,500 brands. Her voice emanates f rom more than 100 third-party gadgets, including headphones, security systems, and automobiles.

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means of persuasion. Radio broadcasts of Adolf Hitler’s rallies helped create a dictator; Franklin D. Roosevelt’s f ireside chats edged America toward the war that did toppled that dictator.

Yet there is an inherent appeal to the devices, too—one beyond mere consumerism.

It is even those of us who approach new technologies through a healthy amount of caution are f inding reasons to welcome smart speakers into our homes.

Perhaps you think that talking to Alexa is just a new way to do the things you already do on a screen: shopping, catching up on the news, trying to f igure out whether your dog is sick or just depressed. It’s not that simple. It’s not a matter of switching out the body parts used to accomplish those tasks— replacing f ingers and eyes with mouths and ears. We’re talking about a change in status for the technology itself—an upgrade, as it were. When we converse with our personal assistants, we bring them closer to our own level.

Maya Ab raham

After my daughter-in-law posted on Instagram an adorable video of her 2-yearold son trying to get Alexa to play “You’re Welcome,” f rom the Moana soundtrack, I wrote to ask why she and my stepson had bought an Echo, given that they’re fairly strict about what they let their son play with.

“Before we got Alexa, the only way to play music was on our computers, and when [he] sees a computer screen, he thinks it’s time to watch TV,” my daughter-in-law emailed back.

“It’s great to have a way to listen to music or the radio that doesn’t involve opening up a computer screen.” She’s not the f irst parent to have had that thought. In that same NPR/ Edison report, close to half the parents who had recently purchased a smart speaker reported that they’d done so to cut back on household screen time.

The ramif ications of this shift are likely to be wide and profound. Human history is a by-product of human inventions. New tools— wheels, plows, PCs—usher in new economic and social orders. They create and destroy civilizations. Voice technologies such as telephones, recording devices, and the radio have had a particularly momentous impact on the course of political history—speech and rhetoric being, of course, the classical

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HAS NEWSCORP FINALLY GONE TOO FAR?

Dylan Kelly

By Gay Alcorn

There is nothing new about attacks on News Corp’s influence on policy and politics in Australia. There is nothing new about claims that Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers are not just right wing, but distort and manufacture news, campaigning for favoured political parties without the obligation of fairness.

There is nothing new about concern over the impact the company, which controls 70% of the country’s newspaper circulation, might have on democratic debate.

“The only time Murdoch tries to get into bed with federal Labor leaders is when his editors conclude that, despite News Corp’s efforts, the conservatives will not win anyway.”

But this old story has a new twist as Australia prepares for an election, a hint that something is changing. The opposition Labor party, which once believed it had no choice but to court senior News Corp executives, now openly criticises it, perhaps believing its power is waning as the media f ragments, or that its bias might even help them at next Saturday’s poll. Even more surprisingly, several respected News Corp insiders are speaking against their organisation’s bias, particularly at Murdoch’s flagship Australian newspaper.

After the dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government in 1975, the Australian’s journalists went on strike during the subsequent election campaign over what they saw as the newspaper’s biased coverage.

A letter f rom journalists to management took issue with the “deliberate and careless slanting of headlines, seemingly blatant imbalance in news presentation, political censorship and, more occasionally, distortion of copy f rom senior specialist journalists, the political management of news and features, the stifling of dissident and even palatably impartial opinion in the papers’ columns…”

“This sounds like the f irst time since 1975 that the journalists at the Australian have actually stood up and said something,” says associate professor David McKnight f rom the University of New South Wales, who has written extensively on Murdoch.

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At the 2013 election, the Daily Telegraph in particular campaigned ferociously against Labor. It’s f ront-page headline the day after the election was called read “Kick this mob out”. Labor’s divisions and changes of leadership between Rudd and Gillard would almost certainly have cost the party election anyhow, but Rudd’s adviser Bruce Hawker has written about how News Corp “blew our campaign off course”. Radio and TV stations picked up the stories, distracting Rudd f rom his agenda. That has not happened at this election. No media organisation followed up the Daily Telegraph’s hatchet job, except to condemn it. What has happened is that a trickle of News Corp insiders has spoken out against the organisation they used to work for, or still work for.

After leaving school, his mother gave up her dream to study law to train as a teacher because it came with a scholarship, which would help her working-class family. The omission of her later law career on this occasion, according to the Telegraph journalist, meant Shorten “comes off as the slippery salesman yet again”. For decades, Australian party leaders, including Labor leaders Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, travelled to New York to visit Rupert Murdoch before an election. But Shorten has declined, saying it was nothing personal, but 13

Dylan Kelly

that “I will deal with their local management, just as I deal with the local management of the ABC.” Rudd, who the Australian supported in 2007 but turned sharply against at the 2013 election, now calls for a royal commission into News Corp, which he calls a “cancer on Australian democracy”. He said recently that Shorten’s decision was smart.

The tipping point this time was on Wednesday, when Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, the most aggressively anti-Labor masthead in the group, published a f ront-page story with the headline “Mother of Invention”, which criticised opposition leader Bill Shorten for “neglecting to mention” on the ABC’s Q&A program that his now deceased mother Ann, had an “illustrious” career as a barrister in mid-life. The suggestion was that he had manipulated his mother’s career for political gain. Shorten has in fact discussed his mother’s law career many times, but his point on Q&A was to explain his motivation in politics.

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There’s not a lot to read in the political news that isn’t biased in such a way that you think,

“

Dylan Kelly

” Tony Koch, a 30-year veteran of News Corp until retiring in 2012, won five prestigious Walkley awards and the Sir Keith Murdoch News Ltd award. In a Guardian column, he wrote that once good newspapers had lost their way with the “biased anti-Labor rubbish that, shamefully, the papers now produce on a daily basis”.

“One has only to look at the story selection and headlines on the f ront pages of the papers each day to see that an anti-Labor angle has been taken, however contorted had been the literary gymnastics required to f inally arrive at that particular bit of stupidity … it grieves me to hear that the Australian has become little more than a laughing stock.”

Koch’s intervention was extraordinary.

But then the newspaper’s current social affairs reporter, Rick Morton, gave an interview to journalism students at the University of Technology in Sydney, saying journalists at the Australian were uncomfortable with the paper’s cheerleading for the Coalition.

The “craziness has been dialled up” in the past six months, Morton said, with copy changed without reporters’ knowledge, and headlines spun to reflect a particular view.

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The media academic and journalist Meg Simons, who became a target of News Corp after criticising some of its practices, told the Guardian that the principal influence of News Corp was to stifle f ree debate. “The main concern is that such behaviour by a media outlet discourages people f rom participating in public life – including voices that would enrich the dialogue. As a journalist I dish it out so have to be prepared to take it in return, within limits. But not everyone should have to tolerate such vendettas merely for speaking out. “

“These are decisions that are made by the people who are running the newspaper and they don’t always make the right calls, just like politicians, they make mistakes and I think some very obvious mistakes have been made and I think that’s a great shame.” Such dissent has not been heard f rom News Corp employees for years. The company always says editors make their own decisions, and do not take orders from Rupert Murdoch. It may be that his heir apparent, Lachlan, has more influence now. Chris Mitchell, a former long-time editor of the Australian, recalled in his 2016 memoir that “Lachlan’s conservatism is more vigorous than that of any Australian politician”, with views often to the right of his father’s.

Such behaviour amplif ies certain voices in our society at the cost of others. This is possible because of our highly concentrated media ownership. If we had more diversity of media ownership, there would be less reason to worry when one set of outlets goes rogue or off on some campaign of its own invention.

I am strongly in favour of f reedom of speech, which is so important that we should put up with a great deal before we limit it. But the principle of f reedom of speech should not be used to stifle the speech of others. At times, News Corp’s behaviour has tended to do that.”

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“We know what the empire is, we know what the papers do, but something has changed in the last six months. I don’t know what it is. Death rattles or loss of relevance?

And journos pretty much spend all day talking about it.” Asked about Morton’s remarks on ABC radio, one of the Australian’s most respected political commentators, Niki Savva, said that “there are grounds for concern about the way that some of the coverage has been handled, there’s no doubt about that”.

Co ntrib uto r nam e

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<By Andrew Marantz>

When Facebook was founded, in 2004, the company had few codif ied rules about what was allowed on the platform and what was not. Charlotte Willner joined three years later, as one of the company’s f irst employees to moderate content on the site. At the time, she said, the written guidelines were about a page long; around the off ice, they were often summarized as, “If something makes you feel bad in your When Facebook was founded, in 2004, the company had few codif ied rules about what was allowed on the platform and what was not. Charlotte Willner joined three years later, as one of the company’s f irst employees to moderate content on the site. At the time, she said, the written guidelines were about a page long; around the off ice, they were often summarized as, “If something makes you feel bad in your gut, take it down.” Her husband, Dave, was hired the following year, becoming one of twelve full-time content moderators. He later became the company’s head of content policy.

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Saaf iyah Hussain

WHY FACE BOOK CAN’T FIX IT SELF

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platform. Yet none of this seemed to cause lasting damage to the company’s reputation, or to its valuation. Facebook’s representatives repeatedly claimed that they took the spread of harmful content seriously, indicating that they could manage the problem if they were only given more time. Rashad Robinson, the president of the racial-justice group Color of Change, told me, “I don’t want to sound naïve, but until recently I was willing to believe that they were committed to making real progress.

But then the hate speech and the toxicity keeps multiplying, and at a certain point you go, Oh, maybe, despite what they say, getting rid of this stuff just isn’t a priority for them.”

Saaf iyah Hussain

The guidelines, he told me, “were just a bunch of examples, with no one articulating the reasoning behind them. ‘We delete nudity.’

‘People aren’t allowed to say nice things about Hitler.’ It was a list, not a f ramework.” So he wrote a f ramework. He called the document the Abuse Standards. A few years later, it was given a more innocuous-sounding title: the Implementation Standards.

These days, the total of Implementation Standards comprise of an ever-changing wiki, roughly twelve thousand words long, with twenty-four headings—“Hate Speech,” “Bullying,” “Harassment,” and so on—each of which contains dozens of subcategories, technicalality def initions, and many links to supplementary materials. These are located on an internal software system that only content moderators and select employees can access.

The document available to Facebook’s users, the Community Standards, is a condensed, sanitized version of the guidelines. The one rule about graphic content, for example, begins, “We remove content that glorif ies violence.” The internal version, by contrast, enumerates one of several dozen types of graphic images—“charred or burning human beings”; “the detachment of non-generating body parts”; or “toddlers smoking”—that content moderators are instructed to mark as “disturbing,” but not to remove.

There are reportedly more than f ive hundred full-time employees working in Facebook’s P.R. department. These days, their primary job is to insist that Facebook is a fun place to share baby photos and sell old couches, not a vector for hate speech, misinformation, and violent extremist propaganda. In July, Nick Clegg, a former Deputy Prime Minister of the U.K. who is now a top flack at Facebook, published a piece on AdAge.com and on the company’s off icial blog titled “Facebook Does Not Benef it f rom Hate,” in which he wrote, “There is no incentive for us to do anything but remove it.” The previous week, Guy Rosen, whose job title is vice-president for integrity, had written, “We don’t allow hate speech on Facebook. While we recognize we have more to do . . . we are moving in the right direction.”

Facebook’s stated mission is to “bring the world closer together.” It considers itself a neutral platform, not a publisher, and so has resisted censoring its users’ speech, even when that speech is ugly or unpopular. In its early years, Facebook weathered periodic waves of bad press, usually occasioned by incidents of bullying and/or violence on the

It would be more accurate to say that the company is moving in several contradictory directions at once. In theory, no one is allowed to post hate speech on Facebook.

Yet many are world leaders—Rodrigo Duterte, of the Philippines; Narendra Modi, of India.

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“...But then the hate speech and the toxicity keeps multiplying, and at a certain point you go, Oh, maybe, despite what they say, getting rid of this stuff just isn’t a priority for them.”

LIE DETECTOR 1984

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WHEN CHINA SEES ALL

By Ross Anderson

Northwest of beijing’s Forbidden City, outside the Third Ring Road, the Chinese Academy of Sciences has spent seven decades building a campus of national laboratories. Near its center is the Institute of Automation, a sleek silvery-blue building surrounded by camera-studded poles. The institute is a basic research facility. Its computer scientists inquire into artif icial intelligence’s fundamental mysteries.

Their more practical innovations— iris recognition, cloud-based speech synthesis—are spun off to Chinese tech giants, AI start-ups, and, in some cases, the People’s Liberation Army.

I visited the institute on a rainy morning in the summer of 2019. China’s best and brightest were still shuffling in post-commute, dressed casually in basketball shorts or yoga pants, AirPods nestled in their ears. In my pocket, I had a burner phone; in my backpack, a computer wiped f ree of data—standard precautions for Western journalists in China. To visit China on sensitive business is to risk being barraged with cyberattacks and malware.

In 2019, Belgian off icials on a trade mission noticed that their mobile data were being intercepted by pop-up antennae outside their Beijing hotel.

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China’s government has a history of using major historical events to introduce and embed surveillance measures. In the run-up to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Chinese security services achieved a new level of control over the country’s internet.

During China’s coronavirus outbreak, Xi’s government leaned hard on private companies in possession of sensitive personal data. Any emergency data-sharing arrangements made behind closed doors during the pandemic could become permanent.

The lobby’s most prominent poster depicted Xi Jinping in a crisp black suit.

China’s current president and the general secretary of its Communist Party has taken a keen interest in the institute. Its work is part of a grand AI strategy that Xi has laid out in a series of speeches akin to those John F. Kennedy used to train America’s techno-scientif ic sights on the moon. Xi has said that he wants China, by year ’s end, to be competitive with the world’s AI leaders, a benchmark the country has arguably already reached. And he wants China to achieve AI supremacy by 2030. Xi’s pronouncements on AI have a sinister edge.

Artif icial intelligence has applications in nearly every human domain, f rom the instant translation of spoken language to early viral-outbreak detection. But Xi also wants to use AI’s awesome analytical powers to push China to the cutting edge of surveillance.

China already has hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras in place.

Xi’s government hopes to soon achieve full video coverage of key public areas. Much of the footage collected by China’s cameras is parsed by algorithms for security threats of one kind or another. In the near future, every person who enters a public space could be identif ied, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text communication, and their body’s one-of-a-kind protein-construction schema. In time, algorithms will be able to string together data points f rom a broad range of sources—travel records, f riends and associates, reading habits, purchases— to predict political resistance before it happens. China’s government could soon achieve an unprecedented political stranglehold on more than 1 billion people.

“Xi wants to use artificial intelligence to build a digital system of social control, patrolled by precog algorithms that identify dissenters in real time.”

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After clearing the institute’s security, I was told to wait in a lobby monitored by cameras. On its walls were posters of China’s most consequential postwar leaders. Mao Zedong loomed large in his characteristic four-pocket suit. He looked serene, as though satisf ied with having f reed China f rom the Western yoke. Next to him was a fuzzy black-and-white shot of Deng Xiaoping visiting the institute in his later years, after his economic reforms had set China on a course to reclaim its traditional global role as a great power.

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actual and would-be autocracies. Over the next few years, those technologies will be ref ined and integrated into allencompassing surveillance systems that dictators can play.

Warre n N o r th ove r

Early in the coronavirus outbreak, China’s citizens were subjected to a form of risk scoring. An algorithm assigned people a color code—green, yellow, or red—that determined their ability to take transit or enter buildings in China’s megacities. In a sophisticated digital system of social control, codes like these could be used to score a person’s perceived political pliancy as well.

The emergence of an AI-powered authoritarian bloc led by China could warp the geopolitics of this century. It could prevent billions of people, across large swaths of the globe, f rom ever securing any measure of political f reedom. And whatever the pretensions of American policy makers, only China’s citizens can stop it. I’d come to Beijing to look for some sign that they might.

A crude version of such a system is already in operation in China’s northwestern territory of Xinjiang, where more than one million Muslim Uighurs have been imprisoned, the largest internment of an ethnic-religious minority since the fall of the Third Reich. Once Xi perfects this system in Xinjiang, no technological limitations will prevent him f rom extending AI surveillance across China. He could also export it beyond the country’s borders, entrenching the power of a whole generation of autocrats. China has recently embarked on a number of ambitious inf rastructure projects abroad—megacity construction, high-speed rail networks, not to mention the country’s much-vaunted Belt and Road Initiative.

This techno-political moment has been long in the making. China has spent all but a few centuries of its 5,000-year history at the vanguard of information technology.

Along with Sumer and Mesoamerica, it was one of three places where writing was independently invented, allowing information to be stored outside the human brain. In the second century a.d., the Chinese invented paper. This cheap, bindable information-storage technology allowed data—Silk Road trade records, military communiqués, correspondence among elites—to crisscross the empire on horses bred for speed by steppe nomads beyond the Great Wall. Data began to circulate even faster a few centuries later, when Tang-dynasty artisans perfected woodblock printing, a mass-information technology that helped administer a huge and growing state. As rulers of some of the world’s largest complex social organizations, ancient Chinese emperors well understood the relationship between information flows and power, and the value of surveillance. During the 11th century, a Song-dynasty emperor realized that China’s elegant walled cities had become too numerous to be monitored f rom Beijing, so he deputized locals to police them. A few decades before the digital era’s dawn, Chiang Kai-shek made use of this self-policing tradition, asking citizens to watch for dissidents in their midst, so that communist rebellions could be

But these won’t reshape history like China’s digital inf rastructure, which could shift the balance of power between the individual and the state worldwide.

American policy makers f rom across the political spectrum are concerned about this scenario. Michael Kratsios, the former Peter Thiel acolyte whom Donald Trump picked to be the U.S. government’s chief technology off icer, told me that technological leadership f rom democratic nations has “ never been more imperative” and that “ if we want to make sure that Western values are baked into the technologies of the future, we need to make sure we’re leading in those technologies.” Despite China’s considerable strides, industry analysts expect America to retain its current AI lead for another decade at least. But this is cold comfort: China is already developing powerful new surveillance tools, and exporting them to dozens of the world’s

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“An authoritarian state with enough processing power could feed every blip of a citizen’s neural activity into a government database.”

Xi has appropriated the phrase sharp eyes, with all its historical resonances, as his chosen name for the AI-powered surveillance cameras that will soon span China. With AI, Xi can build history’s most oppressive authoritarian apparatus, without the manpower Mao needed to keep information about dissent flowing to a single, centralized node. In China’s most prominent AI start-ups—SenseTime, CloudWalk, Megvii, Hikvision, iFlytek, Meiya Pico—Xi has found willing commercial partners. And in Xinjiang’s Muslim minority, he has found his test population. The Chinese Communist Party has long been suspicious of religion, and not just as a result of Marxist influence.

Uighurs who were spared the camps now make up the most intensely surveilled population on Earth. Not all of the surveillance is digital. The Chinese government has moved thousands of Han Chinese “big brothers and sisters” into homes in Xinjiang’s ancient Silk Road cities, to monitor Uighurs’ forced assimilation to mainstream Chinese culture. They eat meals with the family, and some “big brothers” sleep in the same bed as the wives of detained Uighur men.

Meanwhile, AI-powered sensors lurk everywhere, including in Uighurs’ purses and pants pockets. According to the anthropologist Darren Byler, some Uighurs buried their mobile phones containing Islamic materials, or even f roze their data cards into dumplings for safekeeping, when Xi’s campaign of cultural erasure reached full tilt.

Only a century and a half ago— yesterday, in the memory of a 5,000-yearold civilization—Hong Xiuquan, a quasiChristian mystic converted by Western missionaries, launched the Taiping Rebellion, an apocalyptic 14-year campaign that may have killed more people than the First World War. Today, in China’s single-party political system, religion is an

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alternative source of ultimate authority, which means it must be co-opted or destroyed. By 2009, China’s Uighurs had become weary after decades of discrimination and land conf iscation. They launched mass protests and a smattering of suicide attacks against Chinese police. In 2014, Xi cracked down, directing Xinjiang’s provincial government to destroy mosques and reduce Uighur neighborhoods to rubble. More than 1 million Uighurs were disappeared into concentration camps.

Many were tortured and made to perform slave labor.

stamped out in their infancy. When Mao took over, he arranged cities into grids, making each square its own work unit, where local spies kept “sharp eyes” out for counterrevolutionary behavior, no matter how trivial. During the initial coronavirus outbreak, Chinese social-media apps promoted hotlines where people could report those suspected of hiding symptoms.