© REUTERS/Umit Bektas

1. At its core, systemic competition with China consists of rival visions of human nature. The European ideal of the autonomous individual, responsible for its own actions, has come under severe threat by digitally-driven behavioral conditioning. However, from a Chinese point of view, the Enlightenment view of human nature is a transient historical phenomenon, a luxury that only a few wealthy societies can afford.

In our epoch of interactive digital media, gamification and artificial intelligence, the autonomous individual—capable of thinking, deciding and acting for itself—has been increasingly called into question. That individualistic figure had underpinned the Enlightenment’s optimistic vision of human nature. But today, vast quantities of data amassed by digital platforms and the gaming and advertising industries have proven the extent to which human desires and preferences can in fact be exploited and manipulated, as well as analyzed for their supra-individual properties. It is also increasingly clear how easily most “netizens” can be influenced by the targeted manipulation of information and human emotions. Networks of influencers and followers—in other words, digital thought leaders and acolytes—are by now a powerful vehicle to steer collective mimetic behavior.

To use a rather pointed metaphor: the ecosystems of interactive apps are a playground for modern herd behavior among humans. This herd behavior can be observed in the imitation of prefabricated lifestyles, fashions and looks, but it also extends to individual positions taken on divisive, in-or-out questions, and to forms of collective online denunciation, aggression, and hatred. What confronts us in social media, the gaming industry, and digital advertising are not images of self-aware, mature individuals. We are witnesses to a pandemic of herd behavior.

In a vast number of experimental studies, neuroscience and behavioral economics have demonstrated that herd and mimetic behavior remains a determining element of human nature, notwithstanding the great efforts made by state and society toward individual education, freedom of decision, and self-responsibility. The reestablishment of authoritarian and totalitarian modes of social order has its basis in collective needs for security and order and in herd behavior that is prompted by sheer terror or mass fear. In this way, the digital proliferation of herd behavior benefits the social engineering of the Chinese Communist Party, which it is now deploying with ever greater confidence and championing elsewhere in the world.

2. The CCP’s design for social order is based on a vision of human nature compatible with both Leninist principles and the digital age. Human beings are understood as herd creatures requiring guidance and steering. Under the guidance of a wise, strong Great Herdsman, the herd can be formed into a placid, productive, and technologically innovative society, but only as long as it is protected by vigilant herding dogs and has its agility maintained by loyal junior herdsmen.

China’s communist revolutionaries and the founders of the People’s Republic always rejected Western individualism as a bourgeois smokescreen; they thought close control of the “masses” by a political avantgarde to be essential. However, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping never had access to the digital technologies of power that Xi Jinping relies on today. China’s model for digital civilization consists of an agile hierarchical order, deploying targeted, seamless digital control technologies in order to steer a conflict-prone mass society down well-defined political paths. As it currently stands, this Chinese model offers a worryingly productive combination of political and commercial conditioning with economic and technological agility. This sort of social order appears particularly compatible with the possibilities inherent to our emerging digital civilization. It can potentially serve as an example for other governments and societies also in search of political stability and economic prosperity.

3. Platform corporations like Alibaba or Tencent and innovation champions like Huawei function as authorized “junior herdsmen.” Under close observation by central political authorities, they must pass on unlimited quantities of data to state bodies for evaluation and control.

The metaphor of herd behavior also applies to other specificities of the Chinese context. The system of herd control, which China quite deliberately brought into being, is led by wise herdsmen: the party leader and the central governing ranks of the CCP. For controlling the herd, the central authorities rely on a division of labor between “junior herdsmen” and “herding dogs.” This is necessary since herd society requires carefully-supported pioneers and role models, who for their part remain agile and innovative. Individual pioneering acts of innovation, in particular in the economy, technology, and science, are publicized in so far as they are socially and politically useful within officially-established parameters. In this context, popular online idols created by the system serve to popularize overarching regime goals, including unquestioned nationalism and unconstrained enthusiasm for technology.

From the perspective central authorities, China’s pioneers should on no account be independent, freewheeling thinkers. Instead, they should desire to emerge from the herd, ascending to high-ranking positions in the official order, while never calling political hierarchies into question. Status and rank within the herd are acceptable values; individual power or even political freedom are not. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba and a model member of the Communist Party, exemplifies this behavioral pattern: a loyal idol for the digital age.

All of this takes place under the watchful eyes of powerful herding dogs (cyber-administrations at every governmental level, digitally-upgraded state security bodies, state-run cloud operating companies, etc.). When in doubt, the authorities will bite quickly and hard to enforce subordination and discipline. The overall guardians are under instruction to allow considerable freedom of action to junior herdsmen who function as pioneers. The search for new grazing grounds (markets) and new nutritional sources (raw materials, products, business models) is of paramount importance to the highest-ranking herders to make the herd system prosper and expand.

4. The Chinese state, well-equipped with digital technologies, is becoming an agile conditioning apparatus impacting both society and the economy.

The Communist Party has powerful instruments at its disposal: AI-based facial, voice and gait recognition and analytic cameras in public spaces, as well as the ubiquitous smartphone, providing a constant supply of data on individual mobility, communications, and transactions. In part, this can be seen as a matter of surveillance and of early recognition of actual or presumed aberrant behavior. This entails an ongoing analysis of the unending data streams produced by all human interactions. On this basis, individual and collective behavior is regulated. Incentives and sanctions are used to shift overall behavior in the desired direction. All individuals and all legal entities, including official bodies, generate permanently updated data sets, which can in turn be used to evaluate and regulate their conduct. Political, social, and economic trustworthiness is no longer generated through human interaction or formal laws and contracts. Rather it emerges from the data streams and evaluations of trustworthiness apps—in other words through state-organized “social scoring.”

“Big Brother” or “Sauron’s Eye” are inadequate metaphors for this system of control. China’s rulers are aiming to have people internalize the system to such a degree that they no longer even perceive how much the Party controls them. Thereafter, inner resistance will no longer exist. External regulation and control at a distance are meant to become a self-evident and accepted part of life. So if the planners in Beijing have their way, a self-operating surveillance system may come into being, eventually meaning almost no need for police. Breaches of the rules will be socially proscribed, with no active participation on the part of state authorities. Each and every person in society must conform and practice self-discipline, otherwise they lose their trustworthiness ranking and are automatically forced out of society. Used in China’s unconstrained way, digital technology allows for constantly intensifying and granular behavioral control not imposed by a superior authority, but rather anchored and executed within the social fabric.

5. AI is a perfect instrument in the hands of a communist party.

Artificial Intelligence offers the possibility of centralized analysis of huge quantities of data, allowing the recognition of patterns and deviations, and systems of centralized regulation, all without active human participation. The particular strength of AI consists of producing optimized regulatory results for the largest possible population—in other words, it can overcome the chaotic, self-seeking individual pursuit of happiness. These ambitions have been among the central goals of communist revolutionaries since the early 20th century. This is why the IT investor Peter Thiel has accurately characterized AI as “communist.”

But after an initial phase of testing and optimization, AI will also be able to function without the deficient human organization of a communist party. For this reason, China can arrange to have its model of social order installed in other countries and societies without having first to develop a local party-state machine. In its enhanced, 21st-century form, AI will reconstitute the communist agenda of a collectivized, conflict-free society, a vision that was an utter failure during the 20th century. Moreover, it will do so much more effectively than any authoritarian party-state, past or present. Thanks to AI, the original vision of early 20th-century communist revolutionaries will at last come within reach: centralized planning, control, and programming of economy and society, aimed at overcoming all social defects and conflicts, both contemporary and historical.

6. The Chinese panopticon currently emerging arose as the realization of a Leninist dream: at any time, anyone can be observed by the central authorities. This will make possible the formation of a “New Human Being.”
Jeremy Bentham first described the idea of the “panopticon,” a method for enabling the perfect surveillance of large numbers of people by a single overseer. In the industrial age, as a result of cumbersome, large organizations, mass deviance from the norm, and many observational blind spots, this vision could never be consistently realized. However, the fusion of new digital technologies with the more traditional control instruments of Communist Party rule is preparing the way for a substantially more effective Digital Leninism that is currently taking shape in China. In the Chinese system of surveillance and conditioning, the individual cannot know with certainty whether he is actually under observation. But he knows that he is visible at all times, always observable: he thus will have to adapt his behavior in a kind of preemptive obedience.

Behind the ambitions of the Chinese social credit system, we can discern the idea of the “New Human Being”: the dream of a civilization in which human behavior is changed to such an extent that it becomes a lasting collective form, entirely compatible with the broader aims of those in charge. The new trustworthiness system—unlike traditional power instruments like mass mobilization and state terror —is being sold to the Chinese people as technological progress, purported to make the individual’s life easier, safer, and more transparent. In fact, the new developments have been hailed by many, who wish to use, for example, a scoring app to find out whether the person they are meeting or the delivery company they are contracting is worthy of trust. In this assessment, however, one’s own judgment plays no further role. The grounds for evaluation now consist of ostensibly objective data profiles.

7. If we do not oppose the penetration of digital manipulation of preferences and behaviors more effectively than hitherto, time will bring the essence of Chinese developments to our own society: a politically and commercially fabricated and regulated herd organization.

With the pandemic of herd behavior in the digital age, the Chinese government’s vision of human nature has concrete potential to gain ground in many other societies. Systemic competition between China and the West—which first played out mainly in economic and technological realms—is now escalating in politics and ideology. That particular conflict focuses on fundamentally differing conceptions of human nature.
If, in the medium term, China turns out to be the superior economic and technological system, with China’s economy possibly double the size of the United States by 2050, it will have undoubted global consequences for 21st-century governance. Chinese views of society and economy as a herd order in need of surveillance and regulation may prove victorious around the world. And China will reveal itself to be the political and economic system that can make use of the whole range of possibilities within digital civilization the most effectively.

For these reasons, systemic competition with China turns on questions that are even more fundamental than political institutions, technological competition, and security threats. It is a question of the roles and rights of human beings in a future society. China is offering an alternative form of social order, aiming at omnipresent digital conditioning and granular behavioral control. This stands in radical contradiction to the vision of human nature dominant in liberal democracies and market economies.
However, the Chinese conception of ordering human beings, society, markets, and government is gaining attractiveness in many developing countries and emerging markets. China can promise comprehensive technological solutions for politically unstable, economically less productive and conflict-ridden societies, in particular in order to reorganize the wildly proliferating metropolitan areas, now often housing more than 15 million people. The tried and tested systemic solutions that China offers for managing megacities can address infrastructure, living conditions, mobility, energy, environment, and security. Chinese surveillance techniques for public spaces and for online communication have already been deployed in at least 18 separate countries.

Europeans criminally underestimate the strength of demand in many countries for Chinese “smart city” models, including infrastructure and security technology. We cannot rule out in advance that the Chinese-designed systems of authority may allow for peace, wellbeing, and even environmental sustainability in an increasingly densely populated and conflict-prone planet. But if current Chinese conceptions and practices of social engineering come to proliferate globally, the ideas of human freedom and self-determination will head for their digital demise.

8. What can freedom-loving societies do to counter the global advance of Chinese-style digital social engineering?

If we Europeans want to defend what we have struggled to achieve over centuries—individual freedom and choice—the digital transformation will prove an obstacle in many areas of life. European data protection regulations are an expression of this conflict. China’s social scoring system and surveillance state offer a counter-model. Even in China, it is not at all certain that social and political conformity can be implemented without resistance, as suggested by Chinese planners. The large-scale technical systems on which Digital Leninism is based are highly vulnerable. And the social reactions to omnipresent surveillance systems and behavior control will likely become manifest only when systems extend over all areas of life and offer no escape, not even within the most mundane scenes of daily life.
But it would be irresponsible to rely on a stumble, even a collapse, of the Chinese system. In the past, the CCP has repeatedly startled us with its capacity for learning and adaptation. For this reason, we cannot pin our hopes on a Chinese collapse. Rather, what we need to work hard at is a purposive and consistent separation between European and Chinese models of digital control in spite of possible economic costs and political conflicts in relations with China. The discussion on the role of Huawei, the Chinese telecoms equipment supplier, in the development of European 5G networks is only the beginning. Subsequently, we must address the worldwide communications, transactions, and data analysis that are enabled in particular by Tencent’s app “WeChat” and Alibaba’s e-commerce empire. Alibaba and Tencent are dominant ecosystems, not only within China itself, but also for the million-strong Chinese diaspora who all send enormous quantities of data to state-controlled server systems in China.

The fight, however, must not only be fought against manipulative uses of data coming from abroad. On the domestic front, we need to take on the predominantly US-based platform enterprises and targeted data services that have come to dominate the markets. Europe can only achieve its much invoked “digital sovereignty” if it prevents unacceptable practices of data collection and behavior manipulation by suppliers inside and outside Europe. Perhaps most importantly, as a precondition to even think about “digital sovereignty,” Europe needs to nourish the emergence of digital business models for its large domestic market that offers competitive services without destroying free societies.

The decisive question is whether European people, societies, and political institutions can find the strength to at least defend and preserve the core areas of freedom of decision in the manipulative world of digital platforms. Many concrete practical measures are on offer and are ready for implementation. Parts of European society and official regulators are pushing back hard against behavioral conditioning and herd behavior. Because why would any rational person want to be reduced to the human equivalent of sheep, lemmings, or even insects?

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© REUTERS/David Gray

“The AI Arms Race,” “Information Iron Curtain”, or even a new “Tech Cold War”: there’s apparently no shortage of hyperbolic headlines harking back to pre-1989 times, when it comes to describing the now fierce competition between the United States and China over influence in global affairs that is progressively waged also over technologies. The current fight in Western countries about allowing the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei a role in the build-up of their 5G networks is just one example of this.

At the first glance, one could perhaps argue that the re-emergence of two superpowers clashing over global dominance is reminiscent of the old Cold War days when the US battled it out with the Soviet Union. However, appearances are often deceptive, especially in light of the mounting importance of technologies for global competition, and analogies that are leftovers of a bygone era are misleading.

“Brave” New World

The probably most obvious fundamental difference from Cold War times—as trivial it might sound—is the absence of an unequivocal political block confrontation. The “Western world” is not engaged in an official system and military contest with China, in contrast to the much more ideologically charged conflict between NATO members and the Warsaw Pact countries prior to 1989. With the present structure of international politics, the US, for instance, cannot take for granted that its organizational or like-minded “allies” will automatically join it in banning Huawei from their own 5G networks.

This is closely connected to the ever-growing economic interdependence on a global scale. China’s state-capitalistic system is much more integrated into the world economy than the rather old Soviet closed-off system and—as can be seen in the current trade conflict—is also deeply intertwined with the US economy. Moreover, this increasing economic entanglement has been propelled by digitalization itself, as technological systems are often shaped by individual modular components with different countries of origin. And within these global supply chains, the US and China are―to some extent― dependent on each other.

In several areas, including tech-related ones, it seems that Washington is forced into competition with Beijing over who offers the better (and perhaps cheaper) products and services, including to some longstanding US allies. Given this political and economic setting, these allies often don’t feel obliged to choose one side. This is due to the lack of two closed blocks. This is for example shown in the way some NATO members have simultaneously “signed up” for China´s Belt and Road Initiative or the 17+1 format. Hence, calling the ongoing dispute between China and the US a “Cold War”—even without considering the increasing impact of digitalization—would already barely reflect the current realities.

“General-Purpose” Technologies

Often overlooked, but no less important, are the new technologies themselves, which also mean the Cold War analogies do not work. Since the inception of the internet age, the sheer quantity and nature of emerging technologies have led to a rapid and structural transformation. During the Cold War, the number of technologies with relevance for the US-Soviet power battle was comparatively limited. Nowadays, the list of relevant innovations with important implications for various sectors seems to be getting longer by the day. Hence, data-driven technologies, for instance, have a much bigger impact on a country´s GDP today than say, nuclear production, did before.

Many of those technologies don’t just have a dual-use nature, but rather a “general-purpose” one. For instance, the application of artificial intelligence systems is often compared with the invention and use of electricity by pointing to the range of application possibilities. Furthermore, AI innovations can now be developed and shared without the huge industrial effort that, for instance, building intercontinental ballistic missiles meant. Today’s innovations have few parallels with the Cold War ones, which were characterized by huge logistics requirements and complex and lengthy manufacturing phases. However, this also means that countries like the US can no longer control them the way they did in the early days.

The Innovation Edge

This is boosted by the fact that—in contrast to the Soviet Union—China is heavily investing in all of these technologies and genuinely challenging the US innovation edge, especially by pushing forward with the “military-civilian fusion” to fully leverage the general-purpose applicability.
Also, the sources of major technological advances have shifted from the public sector (or the “military-industrial complex”) to commercial companies, most notably illustrated by the tech giants both in the US and in China. This growing reliance on the private sector requires much more sophisticated long-term strategies: while the US has to find ways to ensure that the access to those innovations stemming from US-based “multinational companies” will not be impeded, China will attempt to use its state-capitalistic companies without stifling innovation; in both cases, permanent readjustments are needed.

And last but not least, nowadays there is the contradictory development of digitalization connecting people across borders via information and communication technologies and leading to a democratization of interaction, but at the same time also handing nation states the tools that allow them to put into practice totalitarian visions to an unprecedented degree. China´s application and export of surveillance technologies or internet censorship are cases in point. Hence, technologies and its usage have much more impact on the ideological battlefield internationally.

New Parameters

These are just some of the profound differences from the Cold War period. At the same time, it is telling that within both the US and China, some are pushing for technological decoupling and thus showing a longing for the old Cold War structures. However, such a process would be messy and expensive, if doable at all.

The analogy of a “Tech Cold War” suggests parameters that are far too static and structured to describe the current situation. Conversely, Washington and Beijing find themselves in a perpetual mode of competition and negotiation vis-à-vis third countries, and even with actors in their own countries. If they want to avoid harming themselves, they will need a much more nuanced strategy and a better understanding of the impact of technologies in various areas including economic and military competitiveness and the international order.

It is of utmost importance that those dynamics are understood as precisely as possible—not only for the two main competitors, but also for countries and regions like Europe, who run the risk of becoming of pawns caught between the two fronts.

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© REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke

Somewhat incongruously, a meeting of the European Union’s agriculture ministers on 15 April will probably see the finalization of the first major update to the bloc’s copyright laws since the turn of the millennium. The EU’s new Copyright Directive has been the subject of major battles through the legislative process; the war’s end will be agreed between discussions of farmers’ funding and climate change.

If, as expected, the European Council rubber-stamps the Directive, online content-sharing services operating in the EU will need to prepare for major changes to the way they operate. This is due to Article 17 of the Directive, which was until recently known as Article 13—the focus of many a digital rights campaigner’s ire.

Ensuring “Unavailability”

The 2000 E-Commerce Directive has long given content-sharing services safe harbor from liability over copyright infringements that take on their platforms, as long as they remove copyright-violating content that is flagged up to them. However, the new Copyright Directive declares that they are performing an act of communication to the public when they provide access to copyrighted works, so they need to get rightsholders’ authorization or face being liable for violations.

This means the platforms need to conclude licensing agreements with rightsholders. If they don’t have such agreements, they will be obligated to make their “best efforts to ensure the unavailability of specific works and other subject matter for which the rightsholders have provided the service providers with the relevant and necessary information.” (This applies to larger, established platforms, as startups will initially face less stringent rules.)

What would these best efforts to ensure unavailability entail? Although the Directive claims that it “shall not lead to any general monitoring obligation,” the outcome will in many cases involve automated filters that scan everything people upload in an attempt to compare the uploads with known copyrighted works.

It was once the case that the draft law explicitly referred to “the use of effective content recognition technologies” as a way to keep copyright-violating uploads off platforms, but that led to the European Parliament’s rejection of the draft in July 2018. The language morphed into the vague “best efforts to ensure unavailability” terminology and Parliament’s rapporteur on the file, Axel Voss, insisted that filters were no longer foreseen.

However, the effect remained the same, as EU Commissioner Günther Oettinger, who proposed the legislation in 2016, has repeatedly admitted since the European Parliament finally green-lit the text on March 26. Indeed, the day after the vote, French culture minister Franck Riester also gave a speech announcing an immediate push for content recognition technologies in that country’s transposition of the Directive.

Fierce Opposition

Because of the effective filtering requirement, Article 13 of the draft was bitterly contested by the tech industry, digital rights campaigners, and the United Nations’ free speech rapporteur, David Kaye. “Article 13 of the proposed Directive appears destined to drive internet platforms toward monitoring and restriction of user-generated content even at the point of upload.  Such sweeping pressure for pre-publication filtering is neither a necessary nor proportionate response to copyright infringement online,” Kaye warned just ahead of the European Parliament vote. He pointed out that most platforms would not qualify for the exemptions that are designed to protect young startups, and the “legal pressure to install and maintain expensive content filtering infrastructure” would, in the long run, “imperil the future of information diversity and media pluralism in Europe, since only the biggest players will be able to afford these technologies.”

Internet grandees such as Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, “father of the Internet” Vint Cerf, and Wikipedia chief Jimmy Wales wrote a letter to EP President Antonia Tajani arguing that the legislation “takes an unprecedented step toward the transformation of the Internet from an open platform for sharing and innovation, into a tool for the automated surveillance and control of its users.”

But in the end, the European Parliament cleared the text by 348 votes to 274. This was largely thanks to more than two-thirds of the European People’s Party (EPP)—the biggest voting group—backing the text, with support from the majority of MEPs in the liberal ALDE group. The Socialist and Democrats (S&D) were split on the Directive, and the left-wing Greens/EFA and GUE/NGL groups were heavily against it.

In terms of country breakdown, by far the heaviest support for the Directive came from France—a mere two French MEPs voted against it. Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Latvia, Portugal, and Slovakia were also keen supporters. The heaviest opposition came from German, Estonian, Czech, Dutch, Polish, Luxembourg, Slovakian and Swedish MEPs. British lawmakers were quite evenly split on the issue.

Pressing the Wrong Button

Crucially, the European Parliament passed the Directive after accidentally voting not to consider alterations to the text, which would have potentially allowed the removal of both Article 17 and the also-controversial Article 15 (previously known as Article 11). Article 15 extends across the EU a new right for press publishers called ancillary copyright, basically the right to demand licensing fees when services such a Google News reproduce parts of their articles. It has previously failed to function as planned in Germany and Spain. Parliament rejected the possibility of changes by five votes—it turned out 10 MEPs had meant to allow changes but pressed the wrong button. No matter; while the final record of a a European Parliament vote can be changed for posterity, the result will not change.

Might the vote have some effect on MEPs’ chances for re-election in May? Given the fact that Article 13/17 sparked significant street protests and Wikipedia blackouts in countries such as Germany and Czechia, and over five million signed a petition against it, there may be fallout. Digital rights campaigners have already set up set up online services to help people see how their MEP voted.

And so the Directive goes to that mid-April agriculture council meeting. But is there any chance of it falling at the last minute? This would require a blocking minority of countries representing at least 35% of the EU, and it seems unlikely that such a coalition can be achieved. There could be opposition from some countries where the local EPP parties came out against Article 13/17, such as Sweden and Czechia, but unless Germany follows suit, a blocking minority is out of the question. German justice minister Katarina Barley has decried the use of upload filters. However, according to Germany’s Frankfurter Allgmeine Zeitung newspaper, Berlin and Paris did a deal whereby the former would support the Copyright Directive if the latter would support the construction of the German-backed Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia. And don’t forget that the version of the text approved by the European Parliament, with no alterations, was what came out of Council in the first place.

Assuming that Council gives its final approval to the text, EU member states will then have two years to transpose the Directive into national law. So expect the lobbying battles to continue at a national level, as tech firms and activists try to convince legislators to avoid a heavy-handed interpretation of those “best efforts.”

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