[WSMDiscuss] China and SA too... and as for your "fibrehood"... ? Re: [social-movements] India Targets Climate Activists With the Help of Big Tech (Naomi Klein)
Patrick Bond
pbond at mail.ngo.za
Sun Feb 28 11:22:02 CET 2021
On 2/28/2021 2:29 AM, Jai Sen wrote:
> https://theintercept.com/2021/02/27/india-climate-activists-twitter-google-facebook/
> <https://theintercept.com/2021/02/27/india-climate-activists-twitter-google-facebook/>
> ... What she does in this article is to connect some big dots that
> there has been much less talk about, as yet : Of the collusion of big
> social media and information corporations with an increasingly
> authoritarian – and, it seems, insecure – state, in their own drive
> for market dominance...
That's very helpful, thanks much, Jai. Naomi Klein remains one of the
most prescient analysts - and most effective popular educators - we've
ever had on the left. Thank goodness for her excellent platforms, reach
and initiative.
By coincidence, I've been working on a chapter for Univ of Johannesburg
sociologist Trevor Ngwane's new book contesting the 4th Industrial
Revolution, addressing some similar dangers in China and South Africa
that we're picking up. This is a superficial scan, and there's much more
coming, when I get into the detailed resistance - shall we say, the 4th
Industrial /counter-/Revolutionary strategies and tactics now being
innovated by SA's social movements - based not on rejection of
technology but its /socialisation. /If I've made mistakes, please alert
me; it was due a couple of days ago and I must finish up quickly...
***
*The 4IR, from sociological critique to social resistance *
By Patrick Bond
*Introduction*
**
The university is a critical site of enquiry into a 4^th Industrial
Revolution that has been accompanied by quite wild, unrigorous and
partisan claims. In some cases, these are associated with
self-interested business elites, stretching from Davos, Switzerland to
the main South African cities where readers of the /Independent /chain
of newspapers witnessed a barrage of 4IR propaganda since 2017, as
explored in more detail below.
MORE INTRO 'GRAFS
The two core areas of 4IR application that have gripped South Africa are
investments in computer technology, and the mix of Surveillance and Big
Data whose abuses range from social media manipulation to e-tolling to
financial inclusion to bulk surveillance. The evidence began to mount by
the late 2010s, as South African social media was infiltrated by “bot
armies” arranged by Bell Pottinger and the Gupta brothers’ in 2016-17
(trying to achieve Cambridge Analytica’s prowess in Britain, the U.S.
and Brazil). During the 2010s, the Gauteng provincial government's
e-tolling and SA Social Security Agency welfare distribution systems
became subjects of citizen rage, because of inappropriately privatised
and commodified processes backed by advanced algorithmic and
sophisticated surveillance techniques. These were deployed by Kapsch
Trafficom - an Austrian electronic toll collection company - and Net1
Cash Paymaster Services (itself backed by its main investor, the World
Bank), but as we see later, these multinational corporations were no
match for South African activists.
Throughout, there were major commitments by the state and capital to
advance 4IR technology. There is no denying that within the South
African economy during the 2010s, a dramatic increase occurred in
computer-related investment (an average of nearly 15 percent annual
growth) as well as software (6 percent annually). These categories far
outpaced other sectors with net positive fixed investment of at least an
average 2 percent annual growth: general research and development,
transport equipment and construction (Bond 2022). Information Technology
dominated all other investments, as the 4th Industrial Revolution began
to take off, as claimed by proponents.
Similar investment patterns were found elsewhere; however, it was not
just a quantitative phenomenon, but a qualitative set of investments
that Davos-based World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab (2017)
declared would be unlike anything humankind has ever experienced:
We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will
fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In
its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike
anything humankind has experienced before. We do not yet know just how
it will unfold, but one thing is clear: the response to it must be
integrated and comprehensive, involving all stakeholders of the global
polity, from the public and private sectors to academia and civil society.
The First Industrial Revolution used water and steam power to mechanize
production. The Second used electric power to create mass production.
The Third used electronics and information technology to automate
production. Now a Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the Third,
the digital revolution that has been occurring since the middle of the
last century. It is characterised by a fusion of technologies that is
blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres.
This easy-to-comprehend – albeit technically sometimes dubious – framing
allowed a few international and South African businesses to continually
amplify the 4IR message and accompanying pro-corporate ideology. Schwab
initially drove this agenda in Africa in May 2016, at a Kigali
WEF-Africa summit. The theme was revealing: “Connecting
/Africa's///Resources through Digital Transformation.” A year later in
Durban, this was matched and even exceeded by Schwab’s main local
parrot: Iqbal Survé, the /Independent /newspaper chain proprietor, along
with several important allies. They drew upon the WEF’s mainstream
credibility, as a long queue of notables from the continent’s government
leaderships, multinational corporate executives and African
entrepreneurs paraded into the Durban International Convention Centre.
Outside, in a march from City Hall to the U.S. Consulate to the
Convention Centre, civil society protesters rejected the WEF and all it
represented (Bond 2017).
And in a similar spirit just over a year later, a new platform for 4IR
promotion was constructed via the Brazil-Russia-India China-South Africa
(BRICS) bloc, which chose the Sandton Convention Centre for the July
2018 Johannesburg Summit hosted by newly-installed President Cyril
Ramaphosa (four months earlier he'd overthrown Jacob Zuma in a palace
coup). At this point, a BRICS Academic Forum and BRICS Think Tank
network gave yet more credibility to the bloc and to its 4IR advocates.
But by far the most overblown input was the BRICS Business Council,
especially two of the most ambitious but ultimately self-destructive 4IR
boosters, Survé and then Transnet CEO Siyabonga Gama, whose work we
consider below among other high-profile South Africans (including the
much more circumspect social exile, Elon Musk).
**
*“Inclusion,” rejection or socialisation of the 4IR?*
**
Schwab works internationally based in one of the world’s richest
countries, but believes the poorest continent is well poised to take
advantage of the 4IR, become more integrated within the world economy
through technological advances, and resume the earlier “Africa Rising”
narrative. Through development of digital skills, the world's outmoded
industries could be digitally disrupted. With technology diffused and
democratised through Public Private Partnerships, the 4IR offers a
potentially powerful lever for positive change throughout Africa, Schwab
insists. Although the 4IR was welcomed by state and corporate elites in
Kigali and Durban in 2016-17, the WEF-Africa summit in Cape Town in
September 2019 suffered its own distinct problems and protests:
simultaneously, three factors - economic recession, a new wave of
xenophobia and terrible gender-based violence incidents - left the host,
Ramaphosa, humiliated (Bond 2021).
The WEF’s 4IR inclusionary-economics pitch was enticing but given the
extreme inequalities on display – more glaringly visible than in other
WEF hosting locales – the African summits were unconvincing. Typical
were pronouncements from South Africa’s Department of Trade and
Industry, whose leader prior to retirement in 2019 was Rob Davies. A
sophisticated intellectual with a PhD in Political Studies from the
University of Sussex, Davies’ Poulantzian version of South African
Marxist historiography generated the seminal critical study of how a
white labour aristocracy emerged a century earlier. After imbibing
rhetoric from the 2016 WEF, Davies (2016) agreed that the continent
needed to 4IR-industrialise:
All of this is happening in the context of major technological changes
like robotics, artificial intelligence, internet of things and all kinds
of digitised processes that are coming in. And they have, as I can see
it, created an enormous potential for use of new devices and new
technologies to solve a number of problems that have bedeviled
development up to now.
However, in what would become a more commonly-articulated statement
along these lines, Davies raised this concern:
The theme of inclusive growth is fundamental. If we don’t have any
inclusivity, we are already seeing in the world now the adoption of
these new technologies, in the context of winner-takes-all markets
innovators of technology win and those who are second and third get
nothing, and that goes with huge increases in inequality around the
globe and within countries.
In contrast, Transnet CEO Siyabonga Gama, prior to being fired by his
board for corruption in late 2018, had in February that year offered no
qualms about the 4IR, which in a /Business Report /op-ed article he termed:
the defining zeitgeist of our nascent century. It promises a fusion of
technologies poised to disrupt almost all industries and transform
systems of production, management and governance. Dizzyingly rapid
advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing and computing
are fundamentally changing the way we both work and live. Disruptive
innovation has become a new buzzword – and with good reason. It is
innovation that creates new markets, displacing established
market-leading firms, products and alliances. We have seen this with
Uber, Airbnb and, of course, social media.
**
But the greatest threat to undo the potential of the 4IR, everyone began
to mention, was South Africa’s enormous “digital divide.” In January
2019, Maria Ramos – then head of Absa Bank and formerly Transnet’s CEO
and the top Treasury Department official – took the stage at the World
Economic Forum, and simultaneously published her remarks in the Sunday
newspaper /City Press/. As Ramos (2019) explained,
While President Ramaphosa, Professor [Tshilidzi] Marwala of the
University of Johannesburg and others have on numerous occasions spoken
on the4IR, we will be left behind if we do not work together to fashion
urgent solutions for our basic education system. This is so that the
majority of our learners are adequately prepared for a digital future.
This is not just about providing tablets to learners but also about
affordable or free internet access, adequately trained teachers and a
curriculum that accommodates a radically different future to what we
currently imagine. It is precisely because these take time to plan,
develop and provide resources for that we have to start our work now –
an endeavour that needs organized business to partner with and provide
support to the government, schools and other actors in the education
space. We have to develop the capacity to normalize coding, robotics,
data analytics and artificial intelligence, among others instead of
leaving this to large companies that have the resources to do this or to
source experts globally. It is key to South Africa’s ability to compete
globally in the near future.
If Ramos had been serious about drawing poor students into the
globally-competitive economy, that would have been evident during the
2020 lockdown which closed schools and universities. Her bank and other
elites would have helped ensure free “lifeline” access to data – given
South Africa’s oligopolistic ICT structure, which results in
communication and data costs at the high end of the world’s tech
industries – since use of the internet commons is such an obvious
entryway to the 4IR. But there was no such move to make data free, aside
from university students and the leftist Right2Know Coalition. Their
calls certainly weren’t given support by the country’s business elites –
themselves ranked in 2020 as the second most culpable of economic crime
and corruption (PwC 2020) – in the world’s most unequal society.
Ramos’ speech noted regretfully that the year before, 2017, South Africa
had fallen from 62 to 67 out of 140 in theWEF /Global Competitiveness
Report. /That document assesses ICT systems and skills, among scores of
other criteria. While these sorts of international rankings are
pernicious for many reasons, what goes into them is indeed suggestive of
national priorities. South Africa’s strongest comparative advantage for
4IR competitiveness is mobile cellular telephone subscriptions per
person, in which South Africa ranked 10th in the world in the 2019 WEF
(2019) survey. The only other area where South Africa ranks within the
top 40 countries is the extent to which businesses train their staff.
Most other such rankings are unimpressive: 126^th in the population’s
digital skills; 119^th in the quality of vocational training; 109^th in
pupil to teacher ratio in primary education; and 104^th in fixed
broadband internet subscriptions per person. These are areas where South
Africa desperately needs to improve, if indeed competitiveness is the
objective.
A clear example of the pernicious effects of competitive rankings is to
be found in South African schools which prepare students for their life
in the world and their role in the economy. In a typical year, 2007,
about a million students entered primary schools, but by the time they
reached 12th grade in 2018, the full-time students were reduced to just
51 percent of those who had started. When 78 percent of those passed
matric, this was regarded as an important accomplishment. However,
considering the original one million children, the final pass rate was
only 40 percent. And most of those who dropped out, did so in the 10th
and 11th grades. This technique is sometimes described as “culling”
those students who might not make it through the 12^th grade, so that
each school’s pass rate would increase, to stand it in better stead in
competitiveness rankings even in public secondary schools. The Education
Department has denied this charge of culling, and argues that reasons
students drop out of schools include substance abuse, teenage pregnancy,
death, attending alternative educational institutions, employment,
criminality and frustration with continued grade repetition (Business
Tech 2017, Macupe 2020).
Regardless of intent, and notwithstanding weaker students dropping out,
in 2015 the WEF (2015) rated South Africa’s science and mathematics
education as the worst of 140 countries, and overall educational quality
was 138^th . Education researcher Nicholas Spaull (2018) remarked, “with
the exception of a wealthy minority, most South African pupils cannot
read, write and compute at grade-appropriate levels, with large
proportions being functionally illiterate and innumerate.”The Treasury
official who at that time was responsible for funding the schools,
Deputy Director General Andrew Donaldson (2014), had to concede this
harsh reality: “In areas such as education, health care and urban
transport, service provision tends to evolve in differentiated ways […]
the result is a fragmented, unequal structure in which the allocation of
resources and the quality of services diverge.” Combined with
semi-privatised systems, such public spending, he admitted, “entrenches
inequality between rich and poor.”
The racial component of class differentiation is always evident; when it
came to tertiary education, access by the majority Black African
population actually worsened in the years immediately after apartheid.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (2010: 248)
observed how, “In 2008, only 1.4 percent of working-age Africans held a
[university] degree, compared to almost 20 percent of working-age
Whites. This proportion for Africans has hardly increased since 1993,
while the proportion for Whites has grown by 5.4 percent.”
In short, the 4IR’s reforming role, towards a more inclusive local and
global economy, would appear to have little or no relevance to all but
the wealthy minority. For promoters of the 4IR, it must have appeared
that the only viable strategy, in this context, would be simply to ramp
up the hype. The main force responsible by the late 2010s was a
newspaper chain owned by a charismatic, ambitious 4IR entrepreneur,
Iqbal Survé, but his failure reveals a great deal about the limits of
pushing rhetoric far beyond the scope of reality.
**
*The revealing case of Iqbal Survé’s Sagarmatha and BRICS Business Council*
**
The chairperson of the five-member BRICS South African Business Council
was, in 2017-18, Survé, also serving as board chair and main owner of
the /Independent Group /newspapers. Using that base plus online shopping
firm Loot and the controversial Ayo IT service firm which
(illegitimately) received R4.3 billion in civil servants’ retirement
investments, Survé attempted, in April 2018, to launch a new firm on the
Johannesburg Stock Exchange: Sagarmatha. Its IT wing, Sagarmatha
Technologies, was briefly run in 2017-18 by a Canadian described by
/Business Report /as a “visionary leader” and “investor guru,” Paul
Lamontagne. He declared it the first “Silicon Africa” company:
"Sagarmatha’s business model is agile, scalable, integrated and able to
drive the marginal cost trend of the integrated businesses towards
zero, using our platform. Through international partnerships we are
confident that Sagarmatha’s global audience reach will exceed more than
one billion people and companies by 2020."
The name Sagarmatha is Nepalese (combining ‘sky’ and ‘head’), and refers
to Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world. The firm’s
ambitions were indeed lofty. Journalists looked deeper into Sagarmatha,
including one of Survé’s competitors, /Business Insider/, whose reporter
Phillip de Wet discovered “three weird things” on Sagarmatha’s agenda:
1.It wants to sell its customers’ genetic information. Sagarmatha told
investors it plans to expand into a long list of fields. One of those is
personal genetics, analysing the DNA of its customers to give them
personalised information on fitness and nutrition. Then it wants to sell
that information… That is on top of its plans to “develop consumer
intelligence that can be sold on.” It wants to combine voice recognition
with neuro-linguistic programming... One potential acquisition is “a
leader in voice biometrics”, which allows people to be identified
through only their voice. The company also has an artificial
intelligence solution that “combines best-in-class speech,
neuro-linguistic programming and voice biometric technologies into a
unified multi-engine platform”…
2.One of its subsidiaries owns “a video sharing site and app similar in
many respects to YouTube”, Sagarmatha told its investors – Video360. The
day of its parent company’s listing, Video360 had not had a new video
uploaded in 24 days. Sagarmatha also plans to emulate Amazon, although
it never mentioned the e-commerce giant by name. It plans to launch an
offering called Sagarmatha Peak, the company said, that would give
customers free or expedited delivery on online shopping, member-only
discounts, access to streaming TV shows and movies (“including original
content”), and subscriptions to its newspapers and magazines. That is a
near perfect description of Amazon Prime.
3.It also has plans for augmented reality, virtual reality, and wants to
develop “cryptocurrencies and other products and services such as
insurance and lending arrangements.”
But to list successfully on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) first
required a private placement; Survé sought R7.5 billion from private
supporters to bring the firm at least half the way to becoming Africa’s
first “unicorn,” i.e., a startup firm with an Initial Public Offering
value of US$1 billion. To Survé’s chagrin, the Public Investment
Corporation (PIC) confirmed it would not buy Sagarmatha shares, in spite
of having put R4.3 billion of its investment fund into Ayo Technologies
– nearly a third of the firm’s nominal value but 15 times its apparent
real value (Thamm 2020) – as a result of Survé’s personal friendship
with PIC chief executive Dan Matjila.
The Johannesburg Stock Exchange then refused to allow Sagarmatha’s
listing, claiming that financial statements filed at the Companies and
Intellectual Property Commission were not in order. Sagarmatha claimed
it had ticked all the required boxes and that it was fully compliant. It
wasn’t, Survé later admitted. Indeed when in 2020, the
presidentially-commissioned investigative report on the PIC was
released, it was very scathing about Survé’s malfeasance and outright
manipulation of the PIC and likewise about what was termed Matjila’s
“gross negligence” (Thamm 2020).
Another facet of a mythical 4IR – its role in “inclusive growth” –
entailed much more extensive promotional hype in 2018, through the BRICS
bloc which that year was chaired by Ramaphosa. In April 2018, just as
Sagarmatha was collapsing, Survé was enjoying high-profile leadership of
the BRICS Business Councils network, comprised of local corporate
leaders but also twenty others from Brazil, Russia, India and China. In
July 2018, the BRICS Heads of State Summit was held in Sandton, and the
key figure from government organising the event behind the scenes was
Survé’s ally Anil Sooklal, a deputy director general of the Department
of International Cooperation and Development. Sooklal crafted the BRICS
summit theme: “inclusive growth and shared prosperity agenda in the
4IR,” and assisted in arranging Xi Jinping’s keynote address to Survé’s
business group just before the summit.
In the same month, a costly BRICS Academic Forum event in Sandton was
also driven by all manner of claims about the BRICS’ role in promoting
economic collaboration, social justice and environmental conservation,
notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary, at a time university
research was being drastically defunded (Bond 2019). The final
humiliation for Survé was when in October 2018, just after Siyabonga
Gama was fired as Transnet CEO for corruption, it was announced that
Davies had fired all five members. It wasn’t Gama alone; three of the
others had also suffered similar controversies: Survé, Aspen
Pharmaceutical’s Stavros Nicolaou and Mediterranean Shipping Company’s
Sello Rasethaba. In acquiring prolific wealth, they had attracted
serious charges of tender fraud (Survé, Gama, and Rasethaba) (Sole,
2013; Legal Brief, 2010); price fixing (Nicolaou on cancer medicines in
the European Union for which Aspen paid a hefty fine) (Khan, 2017);
Gupta-denialism (Gama) (Menon, 2017); spying on anti-corruption
whistle-blowers (Gama) (Mashego, 2018); and even sexual harassment in
the course of BRICS-related travel duties (Rasethaba) (Malope, 2018).
*Dangers from hacking and surveillance abuse *
The dubious character of the 4IR promoters was not the only dilemma, for
by the middle of 2018, many other reasons emerged to create new doubts
in the technology. Even /Business Report /technology correspondent
Wesley Diphoko – also Sagarmatha’s Chief Information Officer – began
covering widespread computer theft of data from Liberty Life insurance
(one of many victims) in broader terms that highlighted the 4IR’s dangers:
The hacking of Liberty is just a sign of things to come. The reason for
this is simple and it relates to the fact that there’s a move towards
connecting everything. The Internet of Things, which is one of the key
features of the Fourth Industrial Age, will enable everyday objects such
automobiles (cars, buses and trains), homewares (fridge, washing
machine, stove), clothing (jackets, spectacles, watches) to be
connected. Institutions such as schools, police stations and hospitals
will all be connected. The more connected we will be, the more
vulnerable we will be. The nature of crime will change and the Liberty
Hack should be seen as just an example of what will happen to other
institutions. (Diphoko 2018)
For Diphoko (2018), “crimes that will be possible in the future the more
connected we are and the more we rely on digitally enabled tools”
include “car cyber hijacking, 3D guns and country hacking.” The Chrysler
Jeep was so easily hacked that the firm recalled 1.4 million vehicles.
The 4IR field of 3D printing makes gun manufacture feasible, at home.
And in the case of one sophisticated country, Sweden, “sensitive and
personal data of millions of people along with the nation’s military
secrets, have been exposed, putting every individual’s as well as
national security at risk,” warned Diphoko (2018). He then sounded
another alarm: “I am currently reading this book, /The Age of
Surveillance Capitalism/ by Professor Shoshana Zuboff, as I believe it
is one of the best books written in our time, and you will be hard
pressed to find a more critical reading or the 4IR especially this
surveillance capitalism of the Big Data companies than that by Shoshana
Zuboff”(Diphoko 2018).
In addition to hacking, extreme surveillance presents another
vulnerability for society thanks to Big Data’s voracious appetite and
technological prowess, states’ desire for extreme levels of control, and
corporation’s perpetual search for profit maximisation. The most
dangerous such manifestation is Beijing’s “Social Credit” system, in
which South Africans are playing an important passive role. The Chinese
state and two leading corporations – Tencent and Alibaba –together rate
people the way Western credit rating agencies and lenders have done for
ages, but in China with a profound innovation. The factor in having a
strong credit rating there is not just repayment consistency, but
personal and social behaviour. Social Credit relies upon facial
recognition software, installed to analyse data flows from millions of
cameras. The result is the state’s penalisation – not through a
courtroom but with a rapid change to a personal rating – of antisocial
acts ranging from serious crimes like assault, to petty offenses such as
jaywalking or not taking your dog for a walk on a leash.
A graffiti covered wall Description automatically generatedBy mid-2019,
as the system was just beginning to operate, punishments included the
denial of 27 million airplane tickets and 6 million high-speed rail
trips for even minor violations. Those committing offenses are to remain
on blacklists from two to five years. On the other hand, those
considered trustworthy do have perks. /Wired/ magazine assessed the
process in 2020: “The system as it exists today is more a patchwork of
regional pilots and experimental projects, with few indications about
what could be implemented at a national scale.” But that has not stopped
some from positing the scenario that was described in /Black Mirror/ TV
series, in a show called Nosedive in which the narcissism and vanity
associated with such ratings reaches extreme levels.
An uptick in “China bashing” was one obvious consequence, as illustrated
by then U.S. Vice President Mike Pence: “By 2020, China’s rulers aim to
implement an Orwellian system premised on controlling virtually every
facet of human life. In the words of that program’s official blueprint,
it will ‘allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while
making it hard for the discredited to take a single step’” (Matsakis
2019). That is indeed rhetoric from the official Chinese document,
though rhetoric is not always matched by reality. But the official
narrative suggests that if trustworthy Chinese help the poor, praise the
government on social media, engage in charity work, or donate blood or
money, they receive benefits, such as fast-tracking a work promotion,
priority status for children’s school admissions, and easier access to
bank loans and tax breaks.
The untrustworthy, in contrast, spread rumours on the internet, offer
insincere apologies for their crimes, cheat in online games or do not
visit their aging parents regularly, for example. The threat to the
Chinese people will probably be when facial recognition captures those
citizens – even when wearing Covid-19 face masks – who protest against
the government or companies. Millions of protesters take to the Chinese
streets to demonstrate frustrations each year, not to mention millions
more in Hong Kong. Sometimes the grievances are a source of local
pollution or corruption, or in the latter case, existential threats to
their (semi-democratic) freedoms and way of life posed by the Chinese
Communist Party. Penalties for acts deemed “anti-social” include
exclusion from booking flights or train tickets, ineligibility for
certain jobs, restricted access to public services, and public shaming.
For example, by mid-2019, on 290,000 occasions, individuals were blocked
from taking senior management jobs. (More trivially, 1400 dog owners
were fined or lost points or even had their dogs confiscated, if they
engage in behaviour like not cleaning up after their dog walking, and
pet off leash.)
This system works in large part because China’s equivalent of Facebook
and Twitter is WeChat, run by Tencent. The firm’s value skyrocketed
during the 2010s, making it Asia’s largest firm. But by historical
accident, investors in the Johannesburg Stock Exchange typically have a
high proportion of their portfolio in the form of Tencent shares, given
that by 2021 it accounted for more than 30 percent of JSE market
capitalisation. This accident was thanks to an exceptionally lucky bet
by the former leader – Koos Bekker – of what had been for most of its
history apartheid’s main media propaganda firm, Naspers. In 2001, as
Nasper’s CEO, Bekker found $35 million in hard currency that he could
invest abroad. After meeting Tencent founder Pony Ma, he invested in
Tencent, a deal that grew to be worth $200 billion twenty years later.
Tencent’s 2001 purchase price was just a fraction of a Hong Kong dollar.
In 2004 the firm listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange at 80 cents.
Within 15 years it had risen by a factor of 700 to nearly $600 per
share. But one problem encountered in the meantime was illustrative: in
2018, the share price crashed by one fifth, once Pony Ma was told by the
Chinese government to stop importing Japanese video games because of the
detrimental impact they were having on Chinese children. Investors
feared that any such sign of disapproval by Beijing would threaten their
interests. To be sure, they returned in droves and the price continued
to soar after 2019, but the confrontation between capital’s profit drive
and the state’s desire to retain cultural power was revealing. In
mid-2019, Bekker decided – alongside his CEO successor at Naspers, Bob
van Dijk – to move Tencent ownership to Amsterdam, using a new company
specifically designed to hold the shares, Prosus. From then onward, the
profits from Tencent (converted to Euros) would increasingly flow to the
Next exchange in the Netherlands, not to South Africa, in a move that
will over time degrade South Africa’s already negative balance on
profits, dividends and interest. This problem began in earnest in
1999-2000 – when the largest JSE firms relisted in London – and has
typically driven the current account balance deep into negative
territory (often below -5%), requiring more infusions of expensive
foreign debt to cover the outflows.
Another dangerous reflection of the socio-political character of facial
recognition software central to the Social Credit system – as well as
ongoing crime-related surveillance – is the differential capacity of a
camera to recognise faces according to their skin colour. as Amy Hawkins
(2018) explained in the U.S. journal /Foreign Policy/, “Many parts of
Africa are essentially reliant on Chinese for their telecoms and digital
services,” so this is potentially a major flaw in the surveillance
system. In Johannesburg, the Chinese firm Hikvision has the world’s
leading surveillance camera network. In Zimbabwe, there is widespread
experimentation by the Chinese firm CloudWalk to solve this problem, but
according to Natasha Msonza, co-founder of the Digital Society of
Zimbabwe: “It feels like [CloudWalk] is looking for guinea pigs. I don’t
believe that the Zimbabwe government gave this proposition much thought
before volunteering its citizens to be subjected to racial facial
recognition experiments.”
Not all of this 4IR surveillance is adverse to the public interest, for
some criminal activity is deterred (or often just displaced) and the
Covid-19 crisis is one instance in which such systems could be important
to protect public health. For example, in Barcelona, one firm (Herta)
identified – using artificial intelligence and surveillance capacities
in ever more sophisticated cameras – whether groups of people were
standing too close together during Spain’s highly contagious Covid-19
outbreak. However, in other societies such as New Zealand, a
track-and-tracing system was effectively implemented in a manner that
isn’t considered such a treat to civil liberties and privacy.//
No matter how sophisticated the cameras, there also arises the
possibility of an arms race between states and activists. Hong Kong is
the state of the most advanced struggles over surveillance. As
journalist Masha Borak (2018) explained,
Hong Kong’s protesters have learned to hide their identities. They cover
their faces with masks, goggles and hard hats during press conferences.
They spray paint surveillance cameras and point pocket lasers at police
cameras. But it’s not just their faces that can give them away.
Protesters have also learned to hide their smartphone data using various
security-related apps now climbing the download charts. With the
anti-government movement increasingly resulting in clashes in the
streets and with arrests piling up, the city’s most popular apps are
changing. Aside from the usual contenders like YouTube and Snapchat, the
iOS App Store’s top download charts this week included an app that gives
a fake GPS location, password-locked document storage app iSafe, and a
panic button for smartphones called Parachute which automatically
records video, audio and location data during an emergency. It also
sends out texts, calls, emails and recorded content to emergency contacts.
*South African surveillance*
There is not yet the threat of Chinese-scale mass surveillance in South
Africa, though disturbing indicators are evident. Cellphone-jamming
technology and bulk-data surveillance capacities were purchased by the
South Africa’s State Security Agency and used during the 2010s. But in
2021 – at a time of widespread discrediting of the agency for its
pro-Zuma slush fund – these practices were declared unconstitutional.
The AmaBhungane investigative journalism agency discovered that one of
its journalists, Sam Sole, was targeted for snooping reminiscent of the
way the National Security Agency engages in mass spying through
cellphones, laptops and other devices. Sole’s 2021 victory was a
substantial step forward for civil liberties against 4IR capabilities
(Sole 2021).
Nevertheless, in the most unequal city in the world, Johannesburg,
surveillance cameras were ubiquitous, first by the late 1990s in the two
central business districts; then on the main highways during
construction of an early-2010s toll-road system (widely rejected by
users); and then through a suburban anti-crime surveillance strategy
launched by the AI-based firm, Vumacam, in the late 2010s. On the one
hand, these latter cameras are celebrated by anyone concerned with
gender-based violence; on the other, the coverage was, by 2021, limited
to upscale suburbs. The installation cost for the 15 000 cameras was
vast: R500 million. But there was ultimately no correlation of camera
locations to the areas of greatest desperation, i.e., those suffering
high unemployment and poverty. A company official conceded, “Vumacam was
not planning on rolling out cameras in Dobsonville (within Soweto)
because it was difficult for the company to operate in areas that did
not have active private security companies” (Sibembe 2019).
/Vumacam Johannesburg coverage in comparison to unemployment and income/
A close up of a map Description automatically generated
The state’s augmentation in some wealthy areas by an “artificially
intelligent smart camera network” run by a private 4IR company in
conjunction with private security firms is ultimately useless to those
involved in combatting crime against poor and working-class people
(especially women) in mainly Black neighbourhoods where there are no
cameras. But there are other ways the “smart cameras” reinforce
prevailing racial power relations, according to Yale Law School
Information Society Project researcher Michael Kwet:
Fibrehoods posted a real-life iSentry “shift report,” which lists 14
incidents flagging 28 “suspicious” people in the Johannesburg suburbs.
All 28 people flagged for “unusual behavior” are black, even though the
majority of the suburb’s population are white. CCTV systems are now
equipped with sophisticated video analytics that can track a wide range
of behaviors, objects, and patterns, in addition to individual faces.
Armed with powerful new tech, communities of color can be watched,
flagged, policed, and intimidated into submission.
The story of Vumacam goes back more than a decade, with the buildup of a
surveillance empire that has capitalised on advances in artificial
intelligence, the deployment of high-speed internet to the suburbs, and
the monopolistic dynamics of the CCTV industry. The public was led to
believe this was merely an extension of fiber optic internet to
households craving high-speed connectivity. What they weren’t told is
the fiber project was first created for high-tech surveillance. What
constitutes “abnormal behavior detection” appears to be racially biased
in a region where security officers disproportionately target people of
color.
State regulation of such abuse is simply non-existent, adds University
of Johannesburg media scholar Jane Duncan, since “technology is running
far ahead of the policy.” Moreover, Vumacam did not “conduct a privacy
impact assessment, which should be standard for privacy-invading
systems.” After all, Duncan argued, CCTV was ineffective as a crime
fighting tool, because of its displacement of crime to “poorer areas.
That is why public policy is needed before systems like these are rolled
out, as this allows the public an opportunity to define the city-wide
rules for public space surveillance.” Asked by reporter Yanga Sibembe
(2019) whether personal information about the people its cameras
surveyed was kept definitively secure, Vumacam could not answer
affirmatively.
*South Africa’s 4IR personalities*
Before addressing the contestation of 4IR, consider the role of outsized
personalities – and the various processes that legitimised and
delegitimised their operations. Extreme 4IR promotionalism by the likes
of Iqbal Survé and Anil Sooklal appears ephemeral and flitty; both
rarely quoted the term publicly after 2018, in the wake of their
energetic but failed Sagarmatha and BRICS sagas. By 2020, Paul
Lamontagne was ridiculed in the Toronto /Globe and Mail, /after he had
returned to Canada to run a tech-oriented state-financed venture capital
fund, for having ridiculously overvalued Sagarmatha (as its chief
financial official) and for predicting it would be “the Africa Facebook,
the Africa Bloomberg” (York and McClearn 2020).
South Africa’s main 4IR tycoon, Koos Bekker, never engaged in such hype,
but profiteering by Naspers appears nearly entirely parasitical, given
that the local businesses – primarily Media24 and Take-A-Lot retail
delivery – are considered in both the JSE and Amsterdam’s Next stock
exchange to impose a massive net drain on Naspers and Prosus valuation,
sometimes as much as 40 percent. The values of the Tencent holdings in
these holding companies remained far higher than the value of their
total assets. In other words, the 4IR’s erratic implications for the
highest-profile South African private sector investors can be summarised
as highly lucrative for offshore holdings, but verging on a joke when it
comes to in-country investments.
This conclusion is confirmed when considering the best-known South
African in the 4IR field, Elon Musk, who in 2021 became the world’s
richest person after a $150 billion personal wealth bonanza during
2020’s New York Stock Exchange splurge. His main firm, Tesla, is
massively overvalued in part because of media hype – and his
privately-held SpaceX will have the same benefits once publicly
launched, when Musk soars even further away from second-ranked Jeff
Bezos in the rich-list ratings. Musk was raised in Johannesburg and
Pretoria, but left the country with a strong desire to break away from
apartheid’s strict racist and patriarchal power relations, after being
hospitalised for two weeks due to the brutality of hazing at Randburg
High School. He transferred to Pretoria Boys, whose reputation was
slightly less ghastly. At that time, the late 1980s, army service for
young white South African men was considered not just repressive but
profoundly unethical. So Musk came into his own after emigrating to
Canada and studying at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School
(where Donald Trump had studied two generations earlier). His career
began innovating in computer security and he soon moved into electric
vehicles, household solar batteries and space travel.
Most relevant to our concerns, in 2018 Musk had sponsored a documentary
critical of the 4IR – “Do you trust this computer” – expressing fear
that by putting robotics and artificial intelligence together in a
factory and by mistake leaving open the door, humanity would be
threatened by excessively rapid machine-learning. The clear danger to
AI-enabled robots is the programmer, hence they may well decide it is in
their interests one day, to eliminate human life altogether,
/Terminator/-style. As Musk once put it, “artificial intelligence is a
fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization. The danger of
AI is much greater than the danger of nuclear warheads.” By 2021, little
had been done in the sphere of AI regulation to dampen the likelihood of
such a scenario.
Another famous innovator in 4IR from South Africa is Mark Shuttleworth,
who as a young engineer invented software that PayPal uses for security,
followed by the copyright-free Ubuntu operating system. Although he is a
generous philanthropist, the asterisk by Shuttleworth’s record is his
attempt to take large amounts of money out of South Africa to a tax
haven where he holds residential rights, which was deemed illegal by the
Reserve Bank in a famous exchange control case. This reminds society of
the tendency of South Africa’s ultra-rich to engage in shrink-the-state
practices, offshoring of wealth and outright Illicit Financial Flows to
Western safe havens, which the Treasury’s Financial Intelligence Centre
estimated to be in the range of a financial market drain of 3-7 percent
of GDP annually.
In another 4IR instance of optimising ICT, Nkosana Makate illustrates
the small innovator’s disadvantages when fighting massive firms like
Vodacom. Makate worked for the cellular phone corporation and invented
the idea of “Please call me.” For that he was rewarded with R59 million,
but his lawyers claim he was cheated, and demanded R60 billion for the
massive value added that he provided.
In a final case, the main innovator of “financial inclusion” using Big
Data, Serge Bellamant, ended his career in shame in 2019 because his
algorithms were deemed profoundly anti-social. Originally from Belgium,
Belamant grew up in South Africa and was a banking-sector computer
programmer for decades until he invented next-generation
credit-assessment software for low-income borrowers. The repayments came
through debit stop-orders on monthly welfare grants, and the zero-risk
system allowed Belamant to found the firm Net1, as (tokenistic) cash
transfers grew in popularity among neoliberal social policy-makers
during the 2010s (Bond 2014). Under the rubric of financial inclusion
investment, Net1's main backer (with 22 percent ownership) during the
late 2010s was the World Bank International Finance Corporation. While
Net1’s South Africa subsidiary Cash Paymaster Services (CPS) made
Belamant extremely rich by providing predatory FinTech to very poor
people, as discussed below, the activist group Black Sash not only
protested and eventually took away its lucrative contract, pushing CPS
into bankruptcy in 2020 as punishment.
But, more generally, in this spirit, a new 4th Industrial
/Counter-/Revolution emerged from progressive activist circuits aiming
not to reject useful technology, but to /socialise/ the 4IR. The most
spectacular was when in 2001, Intellectual Property - so crucial for 4IR
tech-monopoly profiteering - was decommodified by the Treatment Action
Campaign and its allies, as applied to vitally-deeded anti-retroviral
medicines for people living with HIV, a strategy which will perhaps be
applicable again to Covid-19 vaccines and treatment. But another
half-dozen struggles for socio-economic and environmental justice during
the subsequent two decades illustrate the Polanyian double movement (and
the triple movement identified by Nancy Fraser) at a time so many
features of 4IR penetration of all aspects of life need to be pushed back.
NEXT: MORE ON THE 4th INDUSTRIAL COUNTER-REVO...
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