Just Published: v. 28 n. 68 (2026): Revista de Ciências da Administração Along With its Guidelines for the use of AI in RCA publications (Directrices de la RCA para el uso de IA; Diretrizes editoriais para Uso de IA )

 

I am delighted to pass along the announcement of the publication of Vol 28(68) of the  Revista de Ciências da Administração. The articles and links follow below. 

One of the most important elements of this volume is  Rosalia Lavarda, Leandro Dorneles dos Santos Editorial (in English and Spanish) describing ethical use of AI in the creation of scholarly work. The center piece of that Editorial is the establishment of Guidelines for the use of AI:

Guidelines for the use of AI in RCA publications: a) AI cannot be listed as an author;b) The use of AI must be explicitly disclosed;c) Substantive applications must be described in the methods section;d) Tool, version, and purpose must be specified;e) Human validation must be explicitly stated;f) Reviewers and editors may not use AI for article evaluation tasks or tasks that utilize article content; AI may only be used for auxiliary tasks, such as improving the writing of the review or email messages;g) The use of AI in the editorial process must be transparent and, when applicable, communicated to the Editor-in-Chief through the “Declaration of AI Use by Reviewers” (mandatory document from 2026);h) The insertion of hidden prompts or instructions in manuscripts or reviews is prohibited;i) The submission of AI-generated content as if it were authored by humans is prohibited, with authors being fully responsible for the final content, including any plagiarism or inaccuracies generated by AI;j) The insertion of third-party research projects into AI tools for the preparation of scientific reviews is prohibited;k) To be fully responsible for the final content of the research, including any plagiarism or inaccuracies generated by AI.These guidelines operationalize transparency as a structuring mechanism of scientific integrity, enabling the traceability of methodological decisions and strengthening trust among authors, reviewers, and readers. By standardizing reporting practices, RCA contributes to the consolidation of shared ethical parameters and to the cumulative quality of knowledge production in the field of Management. 

Directrices de la RCA para el uso de IA: a) La IA no puede figurar como autora;b) El uso de IA debe declararse explícitamente;c) Las aplicaciones sustantivas deben describirse en la sección de métodos;d) Deben indicarse herramienta, versión y finalidad;e) La validación humana debe explicitarse;f) Revisores y editores pueden utilizar IA únicamente para tareas auxiliares;g) El uso de IA en el proceso editorial debe ser transparente;h) Se prohíbe la inserción de prompts o instrucciones ocultas en manuscritos o evaluaciones.Estas directrices operacionalizan la transparencia como un mecanismo estructurante de la integridad científica, al permitir la trazabilidad de las decisiones metodológicas y fortalecer la confianza entre autores, evalua-dores y lectores. La estandarización de estas prácticas contribuye a la con-solidación de parámetros éticos compartidos y a la calidad acumulativa del conocimiento en el campo de la Administración.

Diretrizes editoriais para Uso de IA a) A inteligência artificial não pode ser listada como autora, uma vez que a autoria implica responsabilidade e prestação de contas;b) O uso de IA deve ser explicitamente declarado em todos os manuscritos, e documentado por meio da “Declaração de uso de IA por autores” (do-cumento obrigatório a partir de 2026);c) Aplicações substantivas devem ser descritas na seção de métodos, asse-gurando a rastreabilidade;d) Ferramenta, versão e finalidade devem ser informadas de forma clara;e) Os procedimentos de validação humana devem ser explicitados;f) Revisores e editores não podem utilizar IA para tarefas de avaliação do artigo ou que utilizem o conteúdo do artigo; A IA poderá ser utilizada apenas para tarefas auxiliares, como por exemplo, melhorar a escrita do parecer ou mensagens de e-mail;g) O uso de IA no processo editorial deve ser transparente e, quando aplicável, comunicado ao Editor-Chefe por meio da “Declaração de uso de IA por revisores” (documento obrigatório a partir de 2026);h) É vedada a inserção de prompts ou instruções ocultas em manuscritos ou pareceres;i) É vedada a submissão de conteúdo gerado por IA como se fosse de auto-ria humana, sendo os autores integralmente responsáveis pelo conteúdo final, inclusive por eventuais plágios ou imprecisões geradas pela IA;j) É vedada a inserção de projetos de pesquisa de terceiros em ferramentas de IA para elaboração de pareceres científicos;k) Responsabilizar-se integralmente pelo conteúdo final da pesquisa, inclu-sive por eventuais plágios ou imprecisões geradas pela IA.Essas diretrizes operacionalizam a transparência como um mecanismo estruturante da integridade científica, ao possibilitar a rastreabilidade das decisões metodológicas e fortalecer a confiança entre autores, avaliadores e leitores.

The Volume's table of contents with links to the articles, including the AI Guidelines, follows below..

From the Open Society Foundation Ideas Letter: Quinn Slobodian, "Digital Bandung" (14 May 2026)

 

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 Quinn Slobodian, professor of international history at Boston University, has written a quite interesting essay, "Digital Bandung" which appeared on the website of the Open Society Foundation Ideas Letter (14 May 2026). It is reposted below.

Quinn Slobodian argues that contemporary critiques of AI, Big Tech, and digital capitalism increasingly rely on the language of “empire” and “colonialism,” but that these metaphors are often more emotionally powerful than analytically precise. He traces the rise of terms like “digital empire” and “data colonialism” in recent scholarship and journalism, noting that they replaced earlier critiques centered on psychology and manipulation—such as “surveillance capitalism” and behaviorist models of social control. The newer imperial framework, he argues, usefully foregrounds questions of power, territory, infrastructure, and sovereignty, especially given the global dominance of a handful of US technology firms.

Still, one might want to underestimate the power of emotion and its metaphors. They make possible the shift in perspective that no amount of precision in analysis might overcome. Semiotics suggests that, at least with respect to mass politics and the politics of collective meaning making it is precisely the values, premises, expectations and framing of the language used to approach a subject that may well be dispositive in shaping as well the precision of analysis that derives its power from the language of the collective.  The language, the cognitive cages of "empire", of "colonialism", ironically enough may not displace but rather situates more precisely the earlier language (one with which leading intellectual forces in developed states are more comfortable) of "surveillance capitalism" which is itself meant as a signifier of a whole ideology of meaning and with its a necessary set of "marching orders" that are meant ot take a society"forward" toward whatever goals the language itself embeds. . .in and as itself.  

Slobodian's examination, though, takes him down a different path.  He suggests that much of the “digital empire” literature oversimplifies both historical empires and present-day digital capitalism. Empires historically were not systems of total centralized domination but depended on delegation, local intermediaries, and complex exchanges. Likewise, Big Tech companies do not operate outside states; rather, they are deeply intertwined with governments and regulatory systems. Calling these arrangements “empires,” he suggests, often adds rhetorical force without increasing explanatory clarity. This, though not wrong, may be perhaps too literal (situating the notion of empire as a sort of museum piece  embedding in time, place and space. But it is also too narrow. Still as the necessary foundation for the argument he advances it serves a useful purpose. 

A major theme of the essay is that contemporary critics frequently cast users as passive victims analogous to colonized peoples. Slobodian argues this analogy is strained. Unlike subjects of classical colonialism, digital users often derive real pleasure, convenience, and economic benefit from digital systems. He emphasizes that many people in wealthy countries are financially entangled with Big Tech through pensions, mutual funds, and stock ownership. That point does fit comfortably within the orthodox narratives of historical empire and colonialism--especially (since the term appears to be reduced to this one and singular instance of colonialism in the current historical era) to European colonialism of the 19th century.  For Slobodian this appears to make users not simply “digital natives” being exploited, but something closer to “digital creoles”: populations simultaneously shaped by, benefiting from, and subordinated to digital capitalism. Others might suggest a different perspectives when one de-links the language and sensibilities of colonialism and empire from its singular focus on Europeans in the 19th century. 

To deepen the analysis, Slobodian introduces three underused concepts from imperial history:

• Compradors: local intermediaries who collaborated with imperial systems and facilitated exchange. He argues digital capitalism similarly depends on users, contractors, local elites, and states that actively participate in platform economies.

• Creoles: populations who occupy ambiguous positions between colonizer and colonized. Digital users in advanced economies often fit this role because their financial welfare is linked to the success of tech firms.

• Counter-colonization: strategies of resistance that resemble national sovereignty movements more than popular revolt. He points to efforts such as data localization, digital sovereignty policies, and coordinated state regulation as examples.

Quite interesting is Slobodianis suggestion that the tendency among some theorists to "see" (that is to understand and by understanding imbuing a word/concept with a particular ideology of values and presumptions)  colonialism as an unending structure that survives all formal independence. While acknowledging enduring inequalities, he warns that this framework can make every solution appear futile or co-opted. Instead, he suggests shifting from purely political metaphors toward economic and class analysis.

That brings one back to the great third rail of contemporary political theory--class. Drawing on Vili Lehdonvirta’s work, Slobodian proposes that digital capitalism may be producing new forms of class formation rather than straightforward imperial domination. Gig workers, software engineers, and tech employees increasingly organize collectively, developing forms of political consciousness and labor resistance. Ideas such as platform cooperatives, data trusts, and worker organizing may therefore offer more practical avenues for contesting digital power than the language of empire alone.

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Slobodian suggests that society may not be moving (back) toward the lived realities of feudal imperialism now under the overlordship of the masters of techno-empires (territory is a 20th century thing) or of techno-feudalism, but under modern capitalism in a new digital form. I only note that the West's infatuation with that protean term "capitalism" continues to fascinate--another detritus of 1968--see my discussion in The Vulgarization of the French Post-Modern, "Truth", Irony, and "First Principles": A Reflection on a Short Essay (an Apologia) Posted to X by Brivael Le Pogam).  Thus the suggestion, in the essay of avoiding grand gestures of denunciation of “digital empires,” but focus on knowledge and action (to understand the complicated ways people are simultaneously exploited by, invested in, dependent on, and capable of resisting the structures of digital capitalism).

 Professor Slobodian's essay follows in full below. 

Reflections on the Victory Speech of Mayor Elect Mamdani; The Politics of Virtual Archetypes, of Avatars and Icons, Becomes Better Defined

 

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I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life. But let tonight be the final time I utter his name, as we turn the page on a politics that abandons the many and answers only to the few. New York, tonight you have delivered. A mandate for change. ​​A mandate for a new kind of politics. A mandate for a city we can afford. And a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that. (Transcript of Zohran Mamdani’s Victory Speech)

 

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The man, Zohran Mamdani was elected to the mayorship of New York City on 3 November 2025.  He delivered a speech to celebrate his victory. The lines above perhaps represent the most revealing element of a speech that was meant, as all political speeches are meant to do, to reveal the avatar and icon that are now no longer contained within the human person, but which have now become the form of humanity only barely contained within the body of a person (Avatars, Icons, and Adversaries--Full Text of Vice President's Harris's Remarks at the Democratic National Convention). In the process, the transformation of the human into an idea defined within the confines of the virtual space of the avatar  that serves as a conduit to the virtual as icon, also invites an equally compelling transformation of the physicality of the spaces over which that avatar-icon (in human form) has a measure of authority into a virtual reality of itself, a representation of the idea of itself that is encased in physical form but that is itself the avatar of a signification that melds together all of its parts into a singular object--one form, one will, one purpose,one idea ("And while we cast our ballots alone, we chose hope together.") (Transcript of Zohran Mamdani’s Victory Speech).  Yet there is ego in avatar, and there is a structure to the dialectic routing for which ikons serve as doorway. Mayor elect Mamdani, like Kamala Harris last year, and following a pattern now deeply embedded in culture, constructs his avatar from out of privileged shards of personal history, which are then fused into an identity that assumes a form useful as icon as a function of the inherent ideas embedded in and thorough the representations of avatar. 

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This reframing might then be useful in understanding the text of the victory speech that Mayor elect Mamdani projected out to the idea, the significance, of the masses in dialectics with which engagement is inevitable. And in this case, that engagement was undertaken in the shadow of another avatar-icon, the current sitting President of the United States ("After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power." (Transcript of Zohran Mamdani’s Victory Speech).). What is signified now, what produces the cognitive cages within with a virtual dialectics may  be undertaken, has escaped the human and encased  itself within the idea of itself--an idea that is itself the incarnation of the premises and understanding of the reality of things that in virtual spaces acquire not just value but produces judgment in the virtual with consequences over the bodies and spaces that house these avatars.  One no longer speaks about Mayor elect Mamdani the man, or President Trump, the man, or New Yok, the city, or its inhabitants, as humans. One speaks now only to the ideas and reality ordering spaces that is housed (for the moment) in the body of Mayor elect Mamdani, and President Trump, and the idea of the City of New York as well as that organism that represents the collectivity of the humanity of New York as a singularity, the body of which resides now within the avatar of the mayor elect. 

 

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Once framed in this way, and beyond the usual bromides that are required textual performances within the expectations built into victory speeches of this sort at this stage of the historical development of the U.S., engagement with Mayor Elect Mamdani's  speech given in celebration of his electoral victory becomes a richer experience. One is interested, for this purpose, not in the specific manifestation of the politics of the Mayor elect (though that will be the language and meaning-verse through which his dialectics with opposing political avatars will be undertaken), but in the underlying transformation of the forms and fundamental structures through which politics is rationalized. That transformation suggests a melding, in a modern version of its medieval forms, of the physical bodies of representatives with the idea of the thing they represent. They are not in that sense and in this Republic, leaders, but rather representatives--something that our avatars sometimes forget in the process of their transformation from human to something greater in the virtual spaces of ideas and signification. In the process, one encounters a move toward a politics that is no longer human. The idea of the human--as a singularity and more importantly as a collective object, now drives politics in ways that technology has made possible. It is from that cognitive foundation that one can, without  more, humanize Mario Cuomo (the opening quote) and at the same time reduce that humanity to something that no longer has significance in the virtual space that matters. In the holographic representation of the physical, the physical itself becomes a secondary object--one driven by its virtual self--both digitized and digitalized, operating within the parameters not of human expectations but of the coding inherent in the triumph of cognitive systems that then shape not just the virtual presentations of these political objects, but also, and only indirectly related,  the physical spaces in which they are to be manifested.  

 

It in in these spaces that the idea of Mayer Elect Mamdani will confront the idea of President Trump within the virtual landscapes of New York City, and perhaps beyond. The full text of Mayor Mamdani's speech (courtesy of the New York Times) follows below. It is from that text that one acquires a better sense not just of the well understood ideology that serves to frame the reality within which the incoming administration will function (defined as a variant of American "democratic socialism" the nuances of which are worth extracting), but also the way that this ideology is framed by the construction of identity avatar into which humans now pour themselves and in the process become something different, something virtual--a signification of their "selves" only partly represented by their bodies that are both expressions of that ideology and its consequence, and that shape both--in virtual space. 

 

 

Curating History and its Lessons at the Smithsonian: Reflections on the Administration's Document "President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian"

 

 

There appears to be some sort of global convergence--at least within the smallish club of apex or near apex states (within the geo-political peeking order as commonly constituted among those interested or affected by such things)--around the idea that the political institutions of state might or ought to have a hand, not just in the overall management of official history, but also in its micro expressions in and through state and private organs. The United States has never been shy about the constitution of official history, especially in its aspirational elements and as manifested in official monument building and in the construction of those objects that manifest or convey a preferred way of approaching that accumulation of selected facts marshaled together in stories the arc of which pushes the nation on its temporal journey toward the union of facts and the national ideal. 

It is in that sense that political disorder is sometimes manifested in the popular relationship with national monuments.  In the United States the actions around monuments or other remembrances of the Confederate States of America in a peculiar way have provided a recent focal point. But the same is true in virtually any state that has invested time and effort (and which state has not) in the cultivation of its self-actualization particularly through the use of historical objects in crafting narratives with appropriate morals or which reinforce current national assumptions about itself, its character, and its trajectories forward. 

The Trump Administration has forcefully indicated a substantial discomfort with the project of U.S, official history for a long time. Its members advocate a distinct way of amalgamating facts and objects with a connection to the past, which to its mind might be usefully pointed in a certain way toward the future (discussed The Trump Administration and the (Re)booting of the Republic's History: Lindsey Halligan, Vince Haley, and Russell Vought, "Letter to the Smithsonian: Internal Review of Smithsonian Exhibitions and Materials"). The actions and activities are not unique to this Administration, though its point of view and the cluster of foundational premises may differ in substantial respect from that of the Biden and predecessor Administrations that shared a quite different approach.  It is to the "cleansing" of the accretions of the older approach and the substitution of the cognitive landscapes of the present administration that officials have devoted some time. 

The focus, for the moment has been on museums and related institutions--that is on those institutions that collect, arrange, and present history and the imaginaries of the Republic to the masses. The Trump Administration, for the moment, has left intellectuals and influencers (however formed and recognized in contemporary times) to their own devices--except to the extent that their approaches encroach on the public project of national self-actualization. And it is in those spaces where the Administration (not unlike its predecessors) has put in a substantial amount of effort. A crown jewel of that apparatus for official history and mass education has been the museum complexes in the Capital--and principally the Smithsonian. 

On 21 August the Trump Administration appeared both to intensify and deepen its efforts at curating  the narratives of history from out of and through the ordering of the bricolage that are the collection of "facts" and "objects" from that past that can be used to constitute the present and better define the idealized future toward which the Republic ought to aspire.  The New York Times reported (Zachary Small, "White House Lists Smithsonian Exhibits It Finds Objectionable: The Trump administration highlighted material dealing with topics like sexuality, slavery and immigration", New York Times 21 August 2025): 

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The White House published a list of Smithsonian exhibits, programming and artwork it considered objectionable on Thursday, one week after announcing that eight of the institution’s museums must submit their current wall text and future exhibition plans for a comprehensive review. The list borrows heavily from a recent article in The Federalist that objected to portrayals at several museums. It argued that the Museum of American History promoted homosexuality by hanging a pride flag; overemphasized Benjamin Franklin’s relationship to slavery in its programming; and promoted open borders by depicting migrants watching fireworks “through an opening in the U.S.-Mexico border wall.” Other grievances were previously enumerated in an executive order that President Trump authorized in March, which criticized the National Museum of African American History and Culture for a 2020 worksheet that describes aspects of “whiteness” as “hard work,” “individualism" and “the nuclear family.” The worksheet was part of an online educational portal called Talking About Race; once it drew criticism, Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian, had it removed.

The listing of objectionable works, at least the preliminary listing, was set out in President Trump Is Right About the Smithsonian , posted to the White House website. The text of that descriptive document follows in full below, along with the article that the New York Times suggested was the source of a bit of borrowing: Smithsonian’s American History Museum Is Wall-To-Wall Anti-American Propaganda.

One might despise or laud the effort of the Trump Administration; certainly there was quite a bit of both around the efforts of the Biden Administration to insinuate its own reading of historically unavoidable "truth" or "principle" from the objects it assembled in furtherance of its own narrative history. One can hardly object to either on grounds of the project of historical weaving itself--though historians would be correct to get huffy about "crossing the line"--the fact objects themselves. With respect to the  rest--elites have been picking and choosing (valuing, foregrounding or marginalizing) the objects and actions that serve as the basis for whatever interpretive project suits for quite some time--even in the U.S. To fight over history, in this sense, or interpretation and deepening of grounding premises for its interpretation and ordering, is not to engage in battle over the "facticity" of the past, but rather as to the politics, morals, and premises that serve as the basis for analysis, interpretation and objective in bringing this past forward to the present, and the use of that present  as an instrument to guide action toward a desired future.  

In that sense, the Trump Administration's efforts are as open to debate as was the project of the Biden Administration, and so on. In liberal democracy that is perhaps healthy though it is disruptive--but at least for the moment its disruptions are stabilizing in comparison to the explosions in other systems when the official history is overturned. In that effort, one may derive form comfort (or intensify one's horror) from the way in which the current "debate" reinforces an inclination to understand history as another political front, and not just a political front, but the trenches of the continuous  war over the control of the cognitive framework within which social collectivity (and its solidarity) may be forged. And it ought to remind one that in turbulent times everything may prove useful. Whether there will be resolution or victory in the great revolutionary battle between, what for convenience one might refer to the Biden and the Trump Administration camps (though they are merely a convenient way of manifesting far more profound differences and ambitions for transformation), remains to be seen. But the ambitions of those seeking to lead the masses toward some sort of "new or renewed consciousness" are clear enough; whether the Republic will continue to cultivate a taste for this theater of cognitive oppositions, and whether the masses have been well enough prepared to be led into one or another of these transformative cages, remains to be seen.  

 

"Hot Damn, It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!"--The Transactional Merchant Phenomenology of the Trump Administration and the Cognitive Cage of Ideological Presumption: CEA Chairman Steve Miran Hudson Institute Event Remarks (7 April 2025).

 

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In the great excitement about the tariffs agit-prop--a marvelous piece of action theater catalyzing action and reaction--it was only inevitable that people still require the reassurance of cages of ideology to give them a certain comfort in the rationality of the inductive, iterative, transactions based merchant action philosophy of the Trump Administration.  And, of course, academics and other trained in the sciences of rationalizing the human, all too human, have stepped up to fill the void. One of these rationalization is worth a careful reading, if only because, in the Chinese style, it was published to the White House website as a signal of approval by the leadership core of the American political apparatus:    CEA Chairman Steve Miran Hudson Institute Event Remarks (7 April 2025).

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The remarks as especially valuable not because the President has embraced them, or believes the comprehensive premises that order the world that Mr. Miran, the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers of United States, rationalizes in those remarks, but because many in the Administration, and many more outside of the Administration--desperately hungry for good "old timey" deductive principles-based rationality structures from out of which policy proceeds--very much like the Holy Spirit in the Christian Nicene Creed: "who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets" (Nicene Creed). That is what people crave--and rightly so given the way that deductive rationality created systems have been so deepened normalized within the constructs of human cognition that any abrupt transition to an equally old cognitive system, one increasingly embedded in the forms of virtual realities and tech interfaces with humanity, makes people nervous. People need the crutch.  They may not necessarily need the deductive framework.  But they crave its verities and its forms of accessing collective cognitive understandings of "the way things ought to work." And how better than a higher level priest of the magisterium around the president to provide this "old timey" and soothing rationalization. Not that it is wrong, but that it is deductive that is interesting in the face of the President's inductive impulses and mode of operation.

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And there it is.  The President believes what he does; everyone else, it seems, does what they believe. And so Mr. Miran has come forward with the cooing noises of a bridging discourse. That is something that is both necessary as a propaganda and mass management effort, but also as a means of beginning to develop the post factor historical-ideological construction of inductive iteration that produces something that is both different and new in terms of objectives, methods, and processes, as well as values and expectations. Not that Mr. Miran is wrong or right, but that his necessary translation of the President's inductive and iterative cognitive style required a translation into the more old fashioned and comforting language of deductive principles based policy rationalization that the world has gotten used to in the last century or so. That ought to be the most interesting aspect of a deductive analysis seeking to translate into its own terms  the President's inductive impulses and mode of operation.  

For those inclined to debate the merits of this deductive rationalization, there is much here.  Especially for social scientists and their scientific approach to the substance and perhaps the principles around which  they believe it is possible to manage projections of policy.  And yet is precisely the conundrum. science styles itself fueled by facts and factual relations, but factual relations, the cognitive cages the bars of which are the presumptions built from the underlying fundamental construction of the reality within which "facts" may be "found" and "analyzed" and "judged" and yet facticity is a function of the principles from out of which it is possible to identity and signify objects as facts, and facts as related to each other in ways that conform to the principles from which it is possible to identity facts.  Closed loop thinking builds civilizations, but can also undo them. And both are a function of the way in which social collectives choose (or are taught) to view the world.  In this sense failures of education, of naturalizing the cognitive cages within humans and their collectives produces the disjunctions that can tear things down. And that may well be the rift between this grand effort at deductive thinking from which things inevitably follow. Those well educated in Enlightenment sensibilities come  "naturally" to this. But digitization and digitalization calls up the iterative, action oriented forms of cognition  that serve as the other end of the conceptual horse. The President, though, appears to come at this from he other end of the horse. For those interested in the constitution of Mr. Miran's conceptual universe (no judgment on my part other than that is is constructed and by that constructed becomes real in its application), see Miran, Stephen. "A User's Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System" (PDF). Hudson Bay Capital. Retrieved 16 March 2025.

 

Pix Credit (The Governor Dances, CHarles Durning, Oh Brother Where Art Thou? (2000))

The difference between the President and Mr. Miran is archetypal: the difference between the official and the merchant. There is a very large gulf between them, and the failure to bridge that gap will prove more dangerous to this Administration than anything that the official/bureaucrats  in the nation's strongest rivals might be tempted to hurl at the Republic.  The Remarks follow below.

TikTok, Inc v. Garland, 604 U.S. ___ (2025) Text of Per Curiam and the Separate Opinions of Justices Sotomayor and Gorsuch

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 The Supreme Court has issued its per Curiam decision in TikTok, Inc v. Garland, 604 U.S. ___ (2025).  

The Supreme Court unanimously upheld a federal law requiring TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell or shut down the social-media app by Jan. 19, siding with Congress’s national-security concerns over the platform and its users’ claim that the ban violates the First Amendment. The ruling on Friday means the platform could go dark—at least temporarily—on Sunday, depriving millions of teenagers and other TikTok users of their daily fix of short-form videos that keep them glued to their phones.  President-elect Donald Trump and his allies are trying to find a political path forward to assuage security concerns and rescue the app. Biden administration officials have signaled they don’t intend to enforce the ban on his final day in office and that enforcement would fall to the Trump White House, but that hasn’t been enough to give TikTok comfort. (Supreme Court Upholds TikTok Shutdown)

The per curiam's holding is actually the least interesting part of the opinion. And its politics beyond the authority of the courts. It is likely that some sort of extension, including if applicable, the one provided by the statute will be invoked by the incoming Administration. The object is laudable--to preserve the platform but detach it from its current owners. The most direct route is likely unpalatable and effectively impossible--to nationalize the company, and then either sell it at leisure or figure out a way of  selling its shares on some sort of market. The likely route has already been charted by well meaning if (at best naive elites (no one else is going anywhere near the discussions) that will come up with some sad techno-bureaucratic and institutional mechanism heavy "solution" that provides the necessary appearance of a plausible resolution. All of this is speculation and I am sure that quite brought people working selflessly int he coming weeks will be able to cobble together some sort of fair  arrangement that will  reduce the sense risk of what triggered the enactment of the stature in the first place. Whether it actually reduces risk is another matter entirely, and whether one ought to be risk avers in the context of national security (on the model vigorous adopted by other states) is not to be considered in polite society.  

Pix credit here (Oh Brother Where Art Thou (Movie 2000)

 In a way it doesn't matter.  Certainly a group of TikTok consumers and producers have happily migrated to other platforms that are far more open about the practices of data mining, etc. Perhaps, as a political matter, the American public that matters does not have qualms about anyone helping themselves to their data, that of their contacts, and their own on line behaviors, In a sense that is the future, one in which it will become largely implausible to avoid scrutiny by those with an interest (psychological, political, social, transformative, punitive, etc.) in such behaviors. It will be much more useful for those on a mission to harvest for the purpose of ensuring a more efficient way of managing people, views, beliefs, cognition, etc. But that is a future story. For the moment, the ball has been tossed back in the direction of the political collective.

Nonetheless, the per curiam opinion is rich and worth careful study for the future (jurisprudential) battlefields it describes, the divisions within the judiciary (reflecting in part the divisions already crystalizing among the elites within which the justices are already deeply embedded) preparing for ongoing conflict, the underlying principles and fundamental understandings of "the ideal" against (and through) which all sides are weaponizing (developing) in the usual manner the overgrown garden of their own self-reflections in the form of opinions as malleable within interpretative fields as putty, slime, and goo toys for toddlers.  And, in a sense, one can begin to re-imagine jurisprudence in developed states as different variations of semiotic goo that serves as an important element of providing the objects of signification with which the social collective can build, maintain, order, and protect its ideal vision of itself--and occasionally use it to protect itself.  This is no criticism but an observation of the realities into which this society and its power orders have moved themselves in the service of the ideals and goals each succeeding generation, through its vanguard leafing forces, it "brain trusts and influence leaders, have heloed guide the masses to embrace enough  to make it work.

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 And yet this is merely describing the ordinary--so ordinary, in fact that one must necessarily become oblivious to its character--its tic-- in order to both affirm solidarity and productively engage in the reality of the practices of the collective. The ceremonials, and the now increasingly baroque analytics of constitutional decision making--and much more relevant, the way in which the Speech rights of individuals now tends to increasing serve as the ordering  premise through which constitutional law is rationalized, and its components ordered and valued and understood, now becomes clearer in the quite stark context of threats to the security of the nation which, in the last analysis has, through the jurisprudence of the court, become a matter of judicial business. Not that it ought not, but its current state might well beg for some discussion at something other than the technical level.  It is hardly  useful to have those deeply invested in the system to talk about the system itself, without inevitably engaging in the performance of the system. Basic collective semiotics.  

For all that, the per curiam, on its own terms, and within the self-reflexive parameters of the system that produced it, is a remarkably clear and straightforward analysis. It is careful; and also careful not to be dismissive. Certainly none of the arguments put forward were either frivolous or put forward in bad faith.  Some would have produced some interesting jurisprudential innovation.  But that is the bread and butter of this sort of practice at this level.  More revealing, and worth reading more closely, are the opinions attached by the justices who just couldn't hep themselves, two with a strong impulse to signal the future and their positions within it. 

Justice Sotomayor's brief bit quite effective concurrence (in part and in the judgment). Justice Sotomayor principal point was managed in four lines of text: "I join all but Part II.A of the Court’s per curiam opinion. I see no reason to assume without deciding that the Act implicates the First Amendment because our precedent leaves no doubt that it does." The rest is explanatory looking forward to future battles. At its limit (and of course no Justice would ever suggest such limits to well intentioned principled positions) the ordering presupposition could be applied to virtually every action and undertaking among individuals in a social collective. The role of the courts, then, would be to order constitutional rights and limits on the basis of a presumption that there is no state act that does not, in some way, directly or indirectly burden speech (broadly construed). Just as the international community increasingly sees the world as a function of human rights (and more broadly sustainability), it is possible to reconstruct the American constitutional order to understand it as a function of speech (constitutionally defined). 

Justice Gorsuch, as is his habit, occupies more textual space. Where Justice Sotomayor is looking at the big picture from which all sorts of actions might be deduced, Justice Gorsuch looks at the applications from which through a process of induction, a bigger picture might emerged which is jurisprudence might serve. His "five points" provide a template for fleshing that out. Buried in the opinion, like the per curiam, is the notion that national security justifications are merely another element of administrative law, and imposed an obligation on the administrator to justify the action by reference and at a level of persuasiveness that is left to the courts. As a limiting proposition is makes sense, but it is certainly an area of jurisprudence that, given the changes in historical context, may require some rethinking.  

Postscript with great thanks to the powerful insights of Alok Tiwari: indeed, while the jurisprudence of this speaks volume to the convolutions and byzantine system of elite managed behaviors (is is a very small club fiercely protective of entry requirements and disciplined by internal solidarity regimes) within the language and sensibilities of law that has become the constitutionalized spaces of American life; one is really engaging here in business. It is the business of the management and exploitaiton of state assets or state assets in and as markets that is at the center. With that as an organizing point, a good starting point is this: wwcd— what would China do under similar circumstances; the US answer is different but the national security imperative is not. So; an acceptable buyer must be found and the program must be firewalled (that may be impossible because US data policy tends to be the inverse of the Chinese) but roadblocks, tripwires and surveillance may be politically sufficient; Mr Trump on the other hand may make a sale more appealing by monetizing the data leakage to China— selling the data to China sanitized to suit its worries. If one can’t stop something one can monetize it and manage its markets; the great lesson of Prohibition! And all of this can be taxed as it goes abroad. Business…….

 

Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) Issues its 2024 Report

 

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China was created by the U.S. Congress in 2000 "with the legislative mandate to monitor human rights and the development of the rule of law in China, and to submit an annual report to the President and the Congress. The Commission consists of nine Senators, nine Members of the House of Representatives, and five senior Administration officials appointed by the President." (CECC About). The CECC FAQs provide useful information about the CECC. See CECC Frequently Asked Questions. They have developed positions on a number of issues.

CECC tends to serve as an excellent barometer of the thinking of political and academic elites in the United States about issues touching on China and the official American line developed in connection with those issues. As such it is an important source of information about the way official and academic sectors think about China. As one can imagine many of the positions of the CECC are critical of current Chinese policies and institutions (for some analysis see CECC). 

CECC publishes annual reports. It has just published in Annual Report for 2024.  The Press Release provides an excellent summary:

U.S. Representative Christopher Smith (R-NJ) and Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Chair and Cochair of the bipartisan and bicameral Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), issued today the Commission’s 2024 Annual Report on human rights conditions and rule of law developments in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), as mandated by Title III of Public Law 106-286.     

 

The full report and an executive summary are available for download on the CECC’s website.   

 

“In the 2024 annual report released today, the CECC once again stands with the Chinese people against the Chinese Communist Party,” said CECC Chair Smith. “Our Commission and its dedicated staff have compiled a compendium of the worst of the CCP’s human rights abuses, which can stand as a prosecutor’s brief for a future tribunal holding Xi Jinping and his accomplices accountable. Tellingly, we also take to task those Western corporations that are complicit in such abuses, including those who utilize supply chains contaminated by forced labor. Never again will they be able to say, ‘We did not know.’”

 

“The Chinese government’s assault on human dignity not only affects people in China but also increasingly those around the world, including the United States,” said CECC Co-chair Merkley. “The Congressional-Executive Commission on China has reported on these human rights abuses across borders and inspired legislation such as my Transnational Repression Policy Act. Once again, the Commission has issued a quality product that documents the poor state of human rights and the rule of law in China. When the Chinese government refuses to recognize the aspirations for freedom and dignity of its own people, we are duty-bound to speak out on their behalf.  I hope Congress and the incoming Trump Administration will act on the CECC’s recommendations for action.”

 

The 2024 Annual Report provides a detailed account of the People’s Republic of China‘s (PRC) systematic abuses of human rights—most brutally implemented in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Tibet, and Hong Kong—and documents the widespread use of arbitrary detention and torture targeting ethnic minorities, human rights lawyers, and advocates for free speech, religious freedom, and an independent civil society. The report also includes a chapter on the PRC’s efforts to intimidate U.S. citizens and others critical of the PRC’s human rights record around the world. The protection of U.S. citizens from transnational repression remains a key issue of concern for the Commission, and the report details the tools used by the PRC in this effort, including cyberattacks, smear campaigns, and threats against individuals and the detention of their family members.  

 

The report reflects the view of CECC Commissioners that the PRC’s complicity in atrocity crimes and forced labor, and its efforts to use technology to coerce and control the Chinese people and undermine democratic freedoms globally, pose a distinct challenge to the United States' interest in maintaining universally recognized human rights norms and supply chains free of forced or prison labor.       

Other issues highlighted in the 2024 Annual Report’s 20 chapters include—

 

• The continuing atrocities being committed in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
• The growing risk faced by global businesses of complicity in human rights abuses, particularly in the use of forced labor and the creation of mass biometric surveillance systems in China. 
• The suppression of labor rights activists, particularly in light of the increased number of strikes and labor protests occurring in the past year.
• Ongoing efforts to dismantle Hong Kong's democratic freedoms, applying national security laws to imprison over one thousand political prisoners.
• Efforts to destroy the language and culture of ethnic minority groups, including Tibetans, Southern Mongolians, and Uyghurs.
• Expanded efforts to control civil society organizations and advocacy deemed politically threatening, including harsh crackdowns on religious believers and communities.
• The resumption of forced repatriations of North Koreans from China.

The report also includes recommendations for congressional and executive branch action, highlighting the Commission’s many bipartisan legislative priorities. The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act—which was conceived, drafted, and secured by the bipartisan leadership of the Commission — is an example of the Chairs commitment to enact important legislation that advances U.S. human rights diplomacy and secures vulnerable supply chains from forced labor.  The UFLPA is the strongest action taken anywhere in the world to address the importation of goods made by forced labor, and robust implementation remained a priority of Commission reporting, hearings, advocacy, and legislative initiatives, including championing additional funding for the work of the Forced Labor Enforcement Task Force (FLETF) and seeking an end to U.S. Government procurement of seafood processed by the forced labor of Uyghurs and North Koreans.

 

In the 118^th Congress, the Chairs and Commissioners championed a number of legislative initiatives, including—

 

• Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office Certification Act (S. 490 / H.R. 1103)
• Transnational Repression Policy Act (S. 831 / H.R. 3654)
• Uyghur Genocide Accountability and Sanctions Act (H.R. 8124 / S. 1770) 
• Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act (H.R. 1154 / S. 761)
• Promoting a Resolution to the Tibet-China Dispute Act (S. 138/ H.R. 533)
• COBALT Supply Chain Act (H.R. 6909)
• Southern Mongolian Human Rights Policy Act (S. 5305)

The Commission also maintains a searchable Political Prisoner Database (PPD) that provides detailed information on thousands of political prisoner cases, including individuals in Hong Kong. The PPD contains 2,764 “active detentions” records of political and religious prisoners currently known or believed to be detained or imprisoned, or under coercive controls. The Commission highlighted political prisoner cases during the past year and advocated for prisoner releases, including of American citizens unjustly detained in China, via public statements and social media. A list of 12 representative cases highlighted in this year’s report can be found in the 2024 Annual Report. 

 

The Chairs commend the capable and professional work of the CECC’s research staff in producing the 2024 Annual Report.

While it is not clear whether or how the incoming Trump Administration will receive this, or the uses to which its findings will be put, it is clear that the language and narratives of human rights will play a role in ways that resonate most effectively outside of China, even if the ultimate aim is centered on development of the US and its allies. 

A summary of the "Key Findings" from the Executive Summary follows below. They provide the categorical focus framework within which the U.S. constructs China. Key areas of analysis include: (1) freedom of expression; (2) civil society; (3) freedom of religion; (4) criminal justice; (5) access to justice; (5) governance; (6) ethnic minority rights; (7) status of women; (8) population control; (9) human trafficking; (10) worker rights; (11) public health; (12) environment; (13) business and human rights; (14) North Korean refugees in China; (15) technology enhanced authoritarianism; (16) Tibet; (17) Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region; (18) Hong Kong and Macao; and (19) human rights violations in the U.S. and globally. The last one is likely to play an increasingly important role in shaping China-U.S. relations and may well be felt in all aspects of comprehensive trade and other bilateral relations.

 

In the Val-Halle of Perception: BRICs 2024 «Strengthening Multilateralism for Just Global Development and Security» Documents and the Text of the Kazan Declaration

 

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 But whosoever endeavours to establish wholesome laws in a state, attends to the virtues and the vices of each individual who composes it; from whence it is evident, that the first care of him who would found a city, truly deserving that name, and not nominally so, must be to have his citizens virtuous; for otherwise it is merely an alliance for self-defence; differing from those of the same cast which are made between different people only in place: for law is an agreement and a pledge, as the sophist Lycophron says, between the citizens of their intending to do justice to each other, though not sufficient to make all the citizens just and good: and that this is faact is evident, for could any one bring different places together, as, for instance, enclose Megara and Corinth in a wall, yet they would not be one city, not even if the inhabitants intermarried with each other, though this inter-community contributes much to make a place one city. (Aristotle, Politics, Book III, chp. IX))

 

One of the most important industries that have emerged in this century is that of story telling.  Having effectively mis-read the gist of post-modernist efforts to reframe the analytics of perception, and its consequences for the management of self- and collective consciousness, virtually every person (in the form of influencers in social media for example) and every social collective (from local parents' groups to large congresses of states cobbled together by a patchwork of shared interests. . .or enemies) has invested in the business of narrative. For those with the means (large enterprises, large civil society organizations, states, and international groupings of every kind) the temptations of playing with the so-called master narratives--the lebenswelt or imaginaries of collectives (and the masses these are meant to manage into the appropriate behaviors within their political-economic-oral-cultural orders). What had once been thought of as an object (the customs and traditions of a social collective) the signification of which must be presumed, often tended to and preserved (eg the warning in Aristotle's Politics) has now become an object that ca be distilled, its essence appreciated, and its forms and contents managed, changed and directed to suit the capabilities of those with the ambition to undertake this task.

One does not speak here about the crudities of small time management of taste represented by advertising, and to some extent also of short term propaganda efforts. These are certainly important and touch on broader matters of control (consumption, production, social relations at the margins and the like). One speaks here to the baselines of perception, of a consciousness of things, from out of which it is easier (perhaps) to engage in the practical business of propaganda, of combat, and the instrumentalization of orthodoxy not just to control mass relations, but also to change the nature of perception in a deliberate and increasingly (they hope) well calibrated way. To those ends, of course, the mechanisms of big data tech and its related approaches will be useful, but that is a subject for another day.

The production of perception sensitive documents from out of the 2024 BRICs congress provides a brilliant example of the forms, trajectories, and ambitions for such efforts.  They continue to refine the practice of suffocating alternative perception through a layering of text that buries alternative text in an elegant and relentless way. It is not that the masses actually read these textual productions.  They weigh their heft; they consider their breadth, and the images that illustrate and make more digestible the forms and directions that are their intended effects. They serve as well as the (usually unread) basis form out of which the more crude but effective mechanisms of propaganda and instruction for the masses may be undertaken--text lite. Leadership performative, sound bites, and selected and well curated reductions and quotations serve those ends well.  One learns much from the experience of government in the 1930s-1970s. 

And, indeed, from one way of considering this production one might apply the lens of new quality production in the further development of the fundamental productive forces of the state within the community of states.  In some sense, the Kazan Declaration, asthe product of a series of such declaraitons over the life of BRICs, suggests a striving toward a better, or new and high quality production of narrative as the core productive purpose of the relaitons among states (considered from a certain point of view here).  That is, that utility of the the proper forms of production of perception narrative as the highest form of new quality production for the development of multilateral collectives. In this sense one might consider states as the productive forces of narrative (and certaonly their orthodoxies), or at least that states have sought a dominant role in their ambition to serve that finction (undermined, of course by other perception generating/controlling/managing productive forces). All of these contribute to the modernization of the perception universe within which it is possible to manage and utilize the masses and their own perception dependent production.

BRICs states are not the only ones engaged in this business. Nor is their approach--grounded in the sensibilities of what might be described as "left" sensibilities originating in the 19th century--the only means of effecting these ends. There are orthodoxies and pathways toward the instrumentalization of perception that are as variegated as the ambitions to control those perceptions to certain ends. . Still, there are excellent examples of the form here.

To those ends, as well as for the purpose of better understanding the agendas and the constitution of a certain orthodoxy of perception ans its modalities (in text), the apex official product of the event, its Kazan Declaration: STRENGTHENING MULTILATERALISM FOR JUST GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT AND SECURITY, Kazan, Russian Federation (23 October 2024) is reproduced below. Along with that the subsidiary texts meant to fulfill or fill in, at least at the level of discourse (because in the end discourse may well be its own ends) the perception  space created through the Kazan Declaraiton. At a higher level of abstraction, of course, this Kazan Declaration must be understood as merely one brick in the construction of this specific edifice of perception--this Val-halle--into which the divinities of this system will enter and reside.

 

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And the urtext of perception requires conexttually based storytelling in its own right.  That, to some extent, is served by the new quality production of leader speeches that draw on, and that in turn construct, the fundamental perception texts.  But that dialectic reveals rupture as well as commitment to a vision; rupture within, a united front against opposing perception universes no longer congenial to the re-constitution of human relations under their leadership that is sought. See, e.g., President Lula's speech during the open plenary session of the BRICS Summit; Full Text: Address by Chinese President Xi Jinping at 'BRICS Plus' leaders' dialogue; PM's Modi Full Speech At 16th BRICS Summit In Russia; Address by President Cyril Ramaphosa during the BRICS Summit.

Their texts also follow below.