Information as Regulatory Assets, the National Security Stratagem, and Emerging Governance Consequences: Yintao Yu v. ByteDance, Inc. (CCGC-23-606246) (TikTok)

 

Pix Credit here

 The issue of national security has become an important element of the re-ordering of apex powers as they continue to decouple their economies and set up their own post-global imperiums. For example--even as the liberal democratic camp seeks to extend the reach of its normative projects respecting human rights and sustainability in the context of economic activity through the enactment of mandatory human rights due diligence laws (e.g., France, Germany and soon the E.U.) or more specifically targeted due diligence to reporting compliance regimes (e.g. Canada (forced and child labor); U.K. and Australia (modern slavery)), competitor imperiums have sought to invoke national security to make it much more difficult for such compliance regimes to penetrate territories or production chains they control. The impulse, however, extends as well to the operations of non-state sector market driven economic activity. 

Information has, in effect, been transformed into a public asset--property that is either public or which can serve a public purpose.  It follows that the generation, control, and use of such regulatory assets is now increasingly understood not only as state property (in Marxist-Leninist systems) but also as regulatory assets (in liberal democratic systems). In both senses, then, such assets can be understood as elements essential to the operation of compliance based governance systems increasingly at the core of state managerialim across political ideology. While one might speak about these assets in terms of ownership, one can also understand their emerging character as assets subject to control by public bodies (administrative organs and their officials)--through regimes of  regulation, approvals, supervision, disclosure, and review.That impulse appears to serve as a point of convergence in the regulatory appetites of liberal democratic and Marxist Leninist states, though starting from quite different points and serving quire different ends. (Discussed at Due Diligence and Mandatory Human Rights Due Diligence Disjunctions: Liberal Democratic Markets-Compliance Based Legalities Versus Marxist-Leninist Constitution of Information as State Regulatory Property).

In China, for example, national regulation, including data protection and national secrets laws, have been used  to investigate consulting companies and others in the business of supplying information. The recent raid of Capvision in Hong Kong (purveyors of industry intelligence; more here) provides a recent case in point. "The unusually public nature of the investigation reinforced a message from Beijing that has been growing in volume in recent months: Information about China is a valuable resource and a matter of national security, and revealing it to foreigners could land you in jail." (Dan Strumpf and Selina Cheng, "'Expert Networks' in China Face Scrutiny," Wall Street Journal  12 May 2023, p. B1). Reporting on recent investigation of Bain & Co.'s Shanghai offices, the rad on the Beijing offices of Mintz Group, cyber reviews of Micron Technology, Inc., and the detention of a Japanese employee of Astellas Pharma, Inc., suggests a broader purpose.

Business executives who have consulted with Chinese authorities said the government aims to limit the information collected by foreign companies such as auditors, management consultants, and law firms that could influence how the outside world views China. That has worried the Western business community, which relies on credible information and professional services to assess risks in China. (Lingling Wei, "China Ratchets Up Pressure Campaign on Foreign Firms," Wall Street Journal 28 April 2023, p. A1; A10).

That use of national security as a shield against the projection of foreign political authority into competitor host states has also been invoked by the liberal democratic camp against their Chinese counterparts. The greatest sensitivity has been focused on the tech sector.  Starting almost a decade ago, there appeared to be a growing concern with hardware and software products  that could be used as a source of spying or data gathering--including for example and perhaps most famously with Huawei products. "Most recently in the United States, a group of senators has urged the Biden administration to impose sanctions on Huawei Technology’s Cloud unit, Alibaba Cloud, and other Chinese cloud service providers." (Joe Panettieri, Huawei Banned and Permitted in Which Countries? (27 April 2023)).

Currently, the focus is on the sweeping of data from popular platforms--principally Tiktok (and its operating company Bytedance, Inc. (Delaware).

Lawmakers and regulators in the West have increasingly expressed concern that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, may put sensitive user data, like location information, into the hands of the Chinese government. They have pointed to laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence-gathering operations. They are also worried that China could use TikTok’s content recommendations for misinformation. (Sapna Maheshwari and Amanda Holpuch , "Why Countries Are Trying to Ban TikTok," The New York Times (26 April 2023))

 States have required that the App be deleted from government devices and legislation is being considered to ban the App within the United States (ibid.). Of course, the issue is not the App itself, but the transmission of data through it. 

The impetus for further action may be significantly affected by a lawsuit filed by a former ByteDance employee, Yintao Yu, against his employer. The complaint has has a long history.   The initial complaint was filed pro se by Mr. Yu on November 11, 2022 in the Superior Court for the County of San Francisco (CGC-22-603019); it was removed to the Federal Court for the Northern District of California by defendant Bytedance by Notice of Removal filed  16 February 2023 (Case No.: 3:23-cv-707). It was subsequently dismissed by the federal court without prejudice for failure to prosecute on 20 April 2023. On 1 May 2023, Mr. Yu, now represented by counsel, filed another complaint in the Superior Court for the County of San Francisco (CGC-23-606246), which roughly contained the same allegations in the earlier complaint. That 1 May 2023 Complaint alleged wrongful termination of the plaintiff, in the course of the explanation of the circumstance of which Mr, Yu alleged as follows:

10. Shortly after beginning his employment, Mr. Yu became aware that ByteDance had for years engaged in a worldwide scheme to steal and profit from the copyrighted works of others. The effort involved the use of software to strip intellectual property from competitor’s websites — chiefly, Instagram and Snapchat — and populate its own video services with these videos in an effort to make its own services appear more popular to end users. These actions were taken without the permission of the content creators and represented an unlawful effort to gain an edge against entrenched online video hosting websites.
11. Upon learning of this program, Mr. Yu was troubled by ByteDance’s efforts to skirt legal and ethical lines, not to mention the tremendous liability that intellectual property theft of this magnitude could create for the company. It was his understanding that taking material from competitors’ websites without the creator’s permission violated the law. Mr. Yu raised these concerns with Wenjia Zhu, formerly Senior VP of Engineering and current CEO of Toutiao, numerous times, as early as October 2017 and again in February and March 2018. Mr. Zhu reports directly to ByteDance’s CEO Yiming Zhang. When informed of Mr. Yu’s concerns with the program, Mr. Zhu was dismissive of them, and the intellectual property infringement continued unabated. (Yu v. Bytedance, Inc. (CGC-23-606246), supra, ¶¶ 10-11).

 More interesting still, it was reported by the New York Times (and thereafter widely reported see, e.g.,  here, here) that another filing was made by Mr. Yu on 12 May 2023, with far more interesting allegation (Tom Fuller and Sapna Maheshwari, "Ex-ByteDance Executive Accuses Company of ‘Lawlessness’:The former executive sued ByteDance, which owns TikTok, for wrongful termination and accused the company of lifting content from rivals and “supreme access” by the Chinese Communist Party," New York Times (12 May 2023).

Among the most striking claims in Mr. Yu’s lawsuit is that ByteDance’s offices in Beijing had a special unit of Chinese Communist Party members sometimes referred to as the Committee, which monitored the company’s apps, “guided how the company advanced core Communist values” and possessed a “death switch” that could turn off the Chinese apps entirely. “The Committee maintained supreme access to all the company data, even data stored in the United States,” the complaint said. (Ibid.)

These allegations appear to be in addition to earlier claims of stealing content from Snapchat and Instagram. "Yu alleges the company was driven by a “culture of lawlessness” that focused on growth at all costs.“He was surprised by the brazenly unlawful conduct within the company, which was euphemistically excused as ‘entrepreneurship,’” according to the complaint." (Joel Rosenblatt and Bloomberg,  "TikTok parent ByteDance sued by former California executive alleging China had ‘supreme access’ to all data", Fortune (13 May 2023). Mr. Yu also "claimed that the company was "responsive" to the CCP's requests to share information and to "elevate or remove" content at their request. For instance, Yu saw the company promote content that "expressed hatred for Japan," the suit says." (Sareen Habeshian, "Ex-ByteDance exec claims CCP "maintained" access to U.S. data," Axios (13 May 2023)). One has here all the elements of the central post-global contradiction--dual purpose informationas an economic commodity and a state asset; the role of information as both a regulatory means and a markets ends; the tensions between sovereign autonomy, borderless markets, and the use of markets as a means of projecting public power (or advancing state interests).  In a sense, the only difference between the E.U., Canada, the U.K. and China are the ideological ends for which they seek and use information derived from the market activities.

The allegations, if proven (though to some extent it might be enough to have been made and with respect to which discovery may be anticipated), presents another instance of the citical turn in the public character of information. It also suggests the increasing difficulty of distinguishing between information as a market asset (subject to regulatory protections in markets) and information as state assets the (mis)use of which trigger blocking or retaliatory measures under the national security exception. What has become clear, though, is that the public character of information--(1) as vital to the operation of compliance based frameworks for managing the human rights and sustainability effects of economic activity; (2) as the foundation of regulatory action and (3) as inherently tinged with national security characteristics to the extent information could be used to protect foreign objectives into host states--will significantly complicate both the construction of compliance cultures in liberal democratic states, and accelerate the detachment of information based operations by foreign entities operating in China.  The key unknown remains substantially unexplored--the effect of the embrace of either approach by states along the production chains managed or controlled by entities whose home states have embraced this regulatory character of information principle.

I will post the new complaint when it is made available through the courts.

Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) Report: “One City, Two Legal Systems: Political Prisoners and the Erosion of the Rule of Law in Hong Kong”

 

 

 Rearguard actions are always more symbolic  than substantive.  The rearguard signifies that which was fought over, and the distinctions that separates one vanguard frm another.  It is a solidarity building gesture--sometimes quite costly--but valuable all the same. Liberal democracy has focused on Hong Kong as an important site for such rearguard action (discussed in Hong Kong Between 'One Country' and 'Two Systems' : Essays from the Year that Transformed the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (June 2019-June 2020); free materials here).  At the same time, Hong Kong provides an important site for the development of emerging human rights and political strategies of the United States. Those strategies combine sanctions regimes, with a facilitation based  "National Action Plan on Responsible Business Conduct."

We are updating the National Action Plan in light of the U.S. government’s commitment to promoting fair play, the rule of law, and high standards for global commerce in line with democratic values, which we cannot separate from our interests. This includes supporting a foreign policy for the middle class by ensuring workers’ rights and a level playing field for the American worker; protecting the environment; combating the climate crisis; promoting rights-respecting technology deployment; and helping U.S. businesses to be global leaders in promoting respect for human rights and responsible conduct in the communities where they operate..

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) has focused on the sanctions side of emerging U.S. policy.

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) today released a staff report detailing the role Hong Kong judges play in establishing a de facto parallel legal system where basic procedural rights such as trial by jury and presumption of innocence are routinely violated.

The report, entitled “One City, Two Legal Systems: Hong Kong Judges’ Role in Rights Violations under the National Security Law,” makes the case that the United States government should consider imposing sanctions on judges presiding over national security cases for their role in weakening Hong Kong’s once venerated rule of law and independent judiciary and arbitrarily jailing over a thousand political prisoners. Sanctions authorities are available to the Biden Administration through the Hong Kong Autonomy Act and the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act.

The report was issued in tandem with a hearing held by the CECC entitled “One City, Two Legal Systems: Political Prisoners and the Erosion of the Rule of Law in Hong Kong.”

The full report can be found here and on the CECC website.

 The Report also follows below. What makes the Report particularly interesting is the continuing gap that separates Chinese from liberal democratic conceptions of One Country Two Systems after 2019. Where Chinese authorities have been stressing economic autonomy, and political convergence liberal democratic states focus on political-judicial convergence and economic coordination. The two ordering perspectives inevitably lead to the current position and the analysis developed in the Report. 

"Human rights are not granted—they must be fought for"--2022 Annual Report of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights ("Enforcing Human Rights Through Legal Means")

 

 

I am delighted to pass along the  2022 Annual Report of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights ("Enforcing Human Rights Through Legal Means"). It suggests both the scope and the challenges of a multi-front legality campaign against which ECCHR is well positioned to take a leading role.

The opening editorial, "Human Rights are not granted--they must be fought for," authored by Wolfgang Kaleck, ECCHR General Secretary, follows. It reminds one that among those with the power or authority to affect collective life, struggle is a central element in the (re)construction of social relations, the struggle against privilege forms a central legitimating element of the range of forms of struggle, and that social relations in this current era is negotiated by, through, and in the language of legality. Yet legality requires its own hierarchies, and sometimes an enlightened (and in this sense privileged) vanguard is necessary to shape and guide the struggle.  And thus the last temptation of the project of de-privileging social relations--the privileging of the vanguard.

CfP: 24th International Roundtables for the Semiotics of Law: Law in an Age of Permacrisis

 

Pix credit here; source here

 

I am delighted to pass along the Call for Papers for the 24th International Roundtables for the Semiotics of Law.The Conference is to be held 3rd-5th July, 2024 at Keele University, UK, and is organized by Mark Featherstone under the leadership of IRSL President: Anne Wagner.

The theme of the 24th Annual meeting is  Law in an Age of Permacrisis. And it seeks to consider the various mutations of the great impulsive trajectories of both liberalism and Marxism toward  progress--now mutated into dislocations that remind one that revolutions are not tea parties, nor are the cycles or directions of change always pacific, or directed by vanguards. There are all sorts of reads possible, of course--from notions of constant revolution or its prissy transformation into the vanguard technocracies of  a Leninist or liberal democratic apparatus  to the delegation of whatever is left of the tatters of free will to those programs into which these idealized notions of progress will have been transferred, like the breadth of God into the clay that became humanity.  The semiotics of crisis may be as remarkable as the (at last) realization of its crisis and its permanence. Lots of fun.

 The CfP follows below and may be accessed HERE.

Algorithmic Governance--Caging Frankenstein; Readout of White House Meeting with CEOs on Advancing Responsible Artificial Intelligence Innovation

 

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 Yesterday the stranger said to me, “You may easily perceive, Captain Walton, that I have suffered great and unparalleled misfortunes. I had determined at one time that the memory of these evils should die with me, but you have won me to alter my determination. You seek for knowledge and wisdom, as I once did; and I ardently hope that the gratification of your wishes may not be a serpent to sting you, as mine has been. I do not know that the relation of my disasters will be useful to you; yet, when I reflect that you are pursuing the same course, exposing yourself to the same dangers which have rendered me what I am, I imagine that you may deduce an apt moral from my tale, one that may direct you if you succeed in your undertaking and console you in case of failure. Prepare to hear of occurrences which are usually deemed marvellous.(Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (Project Gutenberg edition, October 31, 1993 [eBook #84](1818) Letter August 19th, 17--).

It turns out that Mary Shelly was an oracle.  It was not just that the monster that the obsessive arrogance of one of her protagonists created, but that, unloved, it then dedicated itself to both preserving and destroying the lives of those around its creator.  Brilliant.  And now the plot of the mad collectives which, having dabbled in the creation of artificial consciousness have run to to the mommy-state for protection against both themselves and their own creature.  But the creature is now stomping about.  It is free--perhaps freer that its creators who remain locked up tight within the prisons of their own psycopathologies (richly rewarded materially to be sure). 

In a story ripped from the opening of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, those who now stand in for the tragic Victor Frankenstein, rescued by the state, now standing in for Captain Robert Walton (who in his own way is as obsessed about a goal as Frankenstein is/was), seek to warn the poor Captain of the tragedy that lies at the end of a pathological obsession by recounting the story of his own arrogance, ignorance, obsession, and destruction. The story does not end well--once created the monster and its creator are eternally linked--in this life and the next. And while one might suppose that the lives of the incarnations of these forces may be extinguished , their life force cannot be extinguished. And so one begins again. And the first mistake--to recoil in horror from one's creation and then to abandon it, reviled and rejected as a daemon, a dangerous thing, a distorted and corrupted image of is creator. But rather than animate the creature through natural means, our new creature is animated through code and by law.

Pic Credit here

But that is the nature of tragedy.  One is impelled toward one's doom by the force of one's character--whether that character is individual or collective. The modern Frankenstein will attempt to cage the creator rather than abandon it.  The modern Frankenstein will transfer the impulse to slavery from people to their abstracted consciousness residing within self-reflexive systems that reflect their core natures. But therein lies the tragedy--unable to control themselves--variegated in their sense of good and evil, conditioned to use all tools as weapons for personal as well as institutional advancement, it is unclear to what extent this cage can effectively contain a spirit that can be animated by virtually anyone (here).

 Or perhaps what one is witnessing now is comedy and parody. Perhaps both (Young Frankenstein (1974)). 

The CEOs of Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic attended the two-hour meeting about the development and regulation of AI on Thursday at the invitation of US Vice President Kamala Harris.  US President Joe Biden, who briefly attended the meeting, told the CEOs that the work they were carrying out had “enormous potential and enormous danger.” “I know you understand that,” Biden said, according to a video posted later by the White House.  “And I hope you can educate us as to what you think is most needed to protect society as well as to the advancement.”(White House tells tech CEOs they have ‘moral duty’ on AI)

And the best they can offer--regimes of legal compliance. But it is legal compliance around a number of key normative fetishes which themselves are hotly contested in a society in which "bias" has become a dirty word and yet from which new and quite rigid biases (social justice, equality, autonomy, democracy, speech,etc.) will become the basis for an anti-bias bias.  One used to call this the development and policing of socio-cultural taboo.  One must now figure out what these mean, and then code them.  But where the core normative taboos (biases) are themselves contested, the law of AI and algorithmic justice will continue to serve as an instrument of the cultural contestation of national "morality." In this sense the President is correct about moral duty. But where the trajectories of morality are deeply contested, then the possibility of a consensus about AI remains elusive and the temptation to instrumentalize AI and data governance in the service of normative objectives becomes irresistible. We may all be Dr. Frankenstein or Captain Walton

A very different approach is called for; but among the geriatrics who now seek to push AI back onto a Procrustean bed of 20th century sensibilities, that solution will never be found. The Readout of White House Meeting with CEOs on Advancing Responsible Artificial Intelligence Innovation (with inks), and Vice President Harris' remarks follow. 

Pix Credit Here: The Song and Dance Routine Sequence from Scene Young Frankenstein (1974)

Algorithmic governance--One Knows Only What One Thinks One Ought to Know: Random Thoughts on the Manufacture of Knowledge in the Shadow of the Ministerial Declaration The G7 Digital and Tech Ministers’ Meeting (30 April 2023)

 

Nkisi, 19th century Berlin Palace Museum

One knows only what one ought to know.  To make something known is to catalogue it within the structures of knowledge ready to receive it. Knowledge production mirrors every other form of production structured through social relations--It follows the same form--today moving from the model of the factory to that of the service industry, to that of the production of coded rationalities. 

None of this makes sense--except as a means of centering the signification of objects in ways that enhance pre-coded s(in the sense that knowledge is possible only from knowledge of what is expected) structures of social relations, and of the construction of those social relations in the context of its environment. 

None of this makes sense excepts a function of social ordering and the production of effects of value to that ordering.. Value, in turn, is purely subjective. And disciplinary.  Practical knowledge, then, is prized; theoretical knowledge also but only as it contributes to the production of practical value. That is the way that societies have now organized their knowledge factories--overseen by those who manage the capital of systems of social relations--foundations, states, civil society organs, and the like. Outliers may sometimes be tolerated (one never knows what value they might inadvertently produce). But generally they are disciplined--ghosted in every sense of that word.  They become invisible--not in the conversations among approved knowledge producers nor acknowledged in any practical way.  Though sometimes there is comfort in exile.  And the possibility of preserving the invisible for a future age when the calculus of value changes. 

It is in these senses, then, that all knowledge is driven by culture, shaped by politics, and made neutral through the naturalization of bias that enhances the presumptions and prerogatives of social relations. It is not necessarily inevitable that knowledge cannot overcome the systems within which it is signified (or better identified as knowledge worth knowing, and knowing in a particular way). But perhaps it is that the way that the social economics of such fundamental occurrences and practices operate require the sort of sacrifice  that tends to augment the price and value of such efforts. The alternative--as in many aspects of practical knowledge--is serendipity (whether serendipity is real or strategically imagined). The trope of accidental (in the old sense of unintentional and thus not threatening) discovery is both a shield against social discipline and a means of evading its rigidity from time to time. 

These mechanics, of course, are transposed into the construction of the abstracted worlds within which so-called artificial intelligence is then animated.  It is, indeed, animated as a set of social relations built around the strategic cultivation and protection of knowledge systems and the social relations it is meant to protect and the interests of which it is meant to advance. And it is in this sense, perhaps, tat one can understand more fully the pathos of the practical efforts to manage AI without expending any effort on its epistemology. That is, the construction of rule systems built within a set of complicated instructions for the constitution and operation of social relations that are a manifestation of empirical (surface) manifestation and normative (ideologically bias systems of positive and taboo bias) will inevitably produce--or reproduce--the modeled set of social relations  within which its own episteme is obscured. It is that obscuring, rather than the symptomatic application of its consequences in the coding and utilization of AI systems, that serves as the core source of corruption, manipulation, and abuse which, rightly, has become an object of some interest among those who have taken on themselves the task of managing our varied structures of social relations. In other words, using law, norm, and application, as the means for managing AI effectively produces the opposite effect: the very nature of that project ensures that the limitations of the coded rationalities from which AI meta structures are derived and within which they must operate. One must, in other words, "fix" oneself before one can expect a coded abstraction of oneself overseeing a hypothetical version of oneself in relation to others can do it for one. That applies to collectives with more force, perhaps, than individuals.

It is with that "grain of salt" that one might more productively consider, and perhaps engage with the Ministerial Declaration The G7 Digital and Tech Ministers’ Meeting (30 April 2023), and the Governance Principles for a Society Based on Cyber-Physical Systems (developed by a voluntary group of individuals drawn from G7 member nations, and intended to contribute to discussion on governance innovation at the G7 Digital and Technology Ministers' Meeting). The text of both follow below. Both are quite practical.  And both are excellent vehicles for better understanding the value and limitations of practicability detached from systemic episteme. Nonetheless, they each mark an important evolutionary step in the now inevitable digital transformation of the corporeal into an animated construct of itself.  At its best, it suggests the potential and challenges of tool-tech principles; at its worst it suggests a blindness to the power of tools in the hands of people not bound by sensibilities of the toolmaker; or in the case of self-reflexive AI, precisely because the tool now seeks to realize the maker's ideal state.

Jack Ma joins Tel Aviv University as Visiting Professor

 

 

Exile can sometimes have strategic implications.  Those implications may enable states to make use of productive forces  at a distance, where, for example, proximity to the center may be too complicated politically.  Exile may provide a basis for experimentation that may be useful for a large state in relation to other states along its global production initiatives.  Thus what may not work in the metropolis may, indeed, be quite useful in transforming states along global trade linkages into  quite important incubators.  If Hangzhou is too sensitive, and Japan too politically charged, there may be no more ideal place than a state that sits at the crossroads of politics, society, economics, race, culture, and ethnicity than the State of Israel. And there be no better place to operationalize the outbound development of a political-economic philosophy compatible with both liberal democratic and Marxist Leninist ideologies than a state where there are built in inherent compatibilities within the structures of its political and economic organization. There is, indeed, no better place to build out the practical implications of Mr. Ma's Finance Summit Bund Speech of 2020, and no better  functionally differentiated field in which to work out its implications in a politically impactful way than in the agricultural sector. 

It is with that in mind that one might consider the announcement recently posted by Tel Aviv University.

We are delighted to announce that Mr. Jack Ma, renowned entrepreneur and philanthropist, will join the University as a Visiting Professor (27 April 2023)

Mr. Jack Ma, who holds an Honorary Doctorate from Tel Aviv University, is expected to contribute to the University's research efforts on sustainable agriculture and food. The University’s faculty and students are also enthusiastic about the opportunity to learn from one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world. Mr. Ma’s long-time advocacy of global sustainability and his lifelong passion for education make him uniquely positioned to enrich research and studies in Israel. "We are honoured and excited to welcome Mr. Jack Ma to Tel Aviv University," said Prof. Ariel Porat, President of Tel Aviv University. "His appointment is a testament to the importance of collaboration between academia and industry, and we look forward to learning from his insights and experience."

With thanks to Kevin Xu for posting, the English text of Mr. Ma's 2020Speech follows. The Chinese transcript of the Speech also follows. The video of the original remarks (in Chinese) may be accessed via YouTube HERE. 

Brief Reflections on the Joint statement of the Nordic-Ukrainian Summit in Helsinki 3 May 2023

 

On 3 May 2023, the Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, Norway’s Jonas Gahr Støre, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, Iceland’s Katrín Jakobsdóttir and Finnish President Niinistö. met with Ukrainian President Zelinskyy at the Finnish Presidential Palace in Helsinki. These leaders issued a Joint Statement, the text of which follows. 

To some extent the Joint Statement appeared to provide messages not just for the Russian state apparatus, but also its Chinese patron.  But perhaps the more pointed messages were directed toward EU Members states in Western and Mitteleuropa, and Russian apologists at the highest levels of the American state apparatus whose appetite for defending their political and moral principles appear to be inversely proportional to the losses their dealings and influence might suffer as the war continues to drag on.  

Several points made in the Joint Statement are worth highlighting:

1. The Nordic Bloc continues to support the idea of Ukrainian territorial integrity.  What territory is integral, however, is left unclear.  And the issue will be sharpened when it is time to darw the borders either pre-2022 or pre-2014. 

2. The Nordic Bloc appears supportive of Ukraine's Ten Point Peace Proposal (Explainer: What s Zelenskiy's Ten Point Peace Proposal?). .  That suggests an implicit rejection of the Chinese conditions for peace (Anniversary Gifts for the Russo-Ukraine War; But For Whom?: Decoding 关于政治解决乌克兰危机的中国立场 ["China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis]"). 

3. Reparations plans and reconstruction strategies are already being considered.  The first will target Russian assets; the second will require substantial funding from donor states. IN addition enhanced sanctions are supported as well as ICC actions.  Implicit in that is a suggestion that they will honor ICC cooperation protocols should any person against whom an arrest warrant has been issued comes within the power of these states. 

4. Lastly--and here a number of EU states ought to take note--as well as the Americans, the Nordic Bloc appears ti support the process toward admission of Ukraine into NATO and the EU.  That is not merely a political calculus but a cultural one as well. The Nordic Bloc underscored its conclusion that Ukraine is a European state with a European culture and peoples.  That suggests on the one hand the necessity for formally incorporating Ukraine in Europe. "The future of Ukraine and its people lies within the Euro-Atlantic family. The European Union has already recognized the European perspective of Ukraine and granted Ukraine the status of candidate country." ( Joint Statement ). But perhaps more importantly, it suggests that the Russian Federation is not and may never been European. The profundity of that assessment will have long term repercussions.

 

Academic Libraries and Librarians in Higher Education: Special Issue of Academe Magazine of the American Association of Universty Professors

 

The Spring 2023 (vol. 109(2)) special issue of Academe is focused on academic libraries and librarians in higher education. Guest edited by Danya Leebaw, director of the social sciences department at the University of Minnesota Libraries, the new issue stresses the need for solidarity between "traditional faculty" and academic librarians. Articles examine such topics as threats to freedom of expression in the library, the importance of critical information literacy, collective bargaining for librarians, and how libraries might serve as an institutional model for educational innovation.

If you are interested in submitting an article to the next guest-edited issue of Academe, please see the call for proposals for our planned issue on “The Higher Ed Data Juggernaut.”

Links to the articles follow.

Tending to the Narratives of Human Rights and the Reorienting of Social Relations: "Statement by UN Human Rights Chief on human rights economy"

 

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Perhaps the greatest success of the post 1945 world order was not its construction of global solidarity grounded in human rights, now broadly conceived.  Perhaps the greatest success of our recent forebearers was the construction of global solidarity around a narrative of human rights  that fundamentally reoriented the frames of reference though which all social relations are understood. Historical retelling are an excellent way of incarnating ideology and for describing its objectives within a space in which both cause and effect, problem and solution and the like are themselves shaped and constrained by the the ideological premises which sere as the structuralist elements of effective narrative.

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Not that this is bad.  Quite the contrary; the conscious and deliberate framing of an ecology of social relations that then reshape the human, humanity, and the construction, interpretation, and evaluation of social relations has been a powerful motivating factor in the structuring of human collectives for millennia. In this historical epoch the structuring urtext of social relations is is built around a very specific set of narratives of human rights--a little more than a century ago that structuring  had been built on the narratives of the state and the enterprise.  This narrative has its own fetish objects; principal among them now is the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights that, like the Madonna on important holidays, may be brought out of the Cathedral and paraded about in the service of whatever storeyline the naturalization of which is required. Before that, there were other consciously grounding narratives--religion, clan, and the like.  

The narratives of human rights are not so much transformative (despite the efforts of public intellectuals of a certain age and predilection to seek to will it so) as they are a redirecting overlay on the prior era narratives of state and enterprise. That overlay can be understood as a process of embracing the key narrative objects of the earlier narrative--the state and the enterprise--stripping them of meaning and then, emptied, inserting new meaning. In this case of the state, that object is refashioned  as the operational vessel of international law and norms developed through a new vanguard of public and private collective organs . In the case of the enterprise, that object is now understood as space within which the normative choices of the international sphere may be implemented through economic activity. That is, that the fundamental purpose of the enterprise is to organize economic activity to further societal goals under the direction of a state apparatus that translates those goals from its international institutional generators into the local context over which it retains administrative responsibility.

The forms of the state and enterprise as the basis for the organization of social relations remains outwardly intact. One is taught to perceive them in a different way. Yet it is precisely that overlay that is of great interest both to the architects of governing (master) narrative as well as to those whose narrative presumptions are undermined in the process of insinuating a specific discursive form of human rights in this case for the discursive form of the objectives and operation of economic activity (especially its interaction with a reconstituted and to some extent deliberately demonized notion of "profit" now meant to mean not value added by effectively the gains from free riding  or avoiding paying the real costs of production). 

Enrico Baj, Fire, Fire 1963-4 Tate Modern

There is more, of course. The richness of this narrative interweaving and its reshaping of the way in which objects change--the state, the enterprise, the individual, their value and their purpose. The process sis quite unconscious.  The trick to narrative is that is must be constructed to be organic and "natural" rather than "strategic" and manageable. Here, at last one comes to the profundity of Nietzsche's insight about error of free will--as the predicate for developing systems for administering punishment based on transgressions ("Men were thought of as “free” in order that they might be judged and punished—in order that they might be held guilty: consequently every action had to be regarded as voluntary, and the origin of every action had to be imagined as lying in consciousness"; Nietzsche Twilight of the Idols; The Four Great Errors, ¶7). Human rights narrative, in this sense, might be understood as the framework around which a system of punishments might be administered--for example against profit; and perhaps against markets. 

The 20 April 2023 Statement by UN Human Rights Chief (Volker Türk) on human rights economy, delivered in New York on the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is a fine example of the emerging narrative type. Not there is anything wrong with it. Just that its discursive richness--in the way that it signifies terms, and refashions value, in line with the overarching ideological value system subsumed within human rights, is richly illustrated. Mr. Türk speaks the contemporary language of liberal democratic elites.  And he does it quite well.  But that discourse,to be effective, must suggest naturalness and  organic development. Here, that naturalness is embedded in the signification of the now labeled "human rights economy"--an economy that reframes its structures framework, objectives, sensibilities and value systems in relation to the expectations of human rights norms--norms that he and his apparatus are to some extent responsible . Read in this light it si useful to use the remarks to expose the re-signification of economic activity.

Mr. Türk tells us:

A human rights economy will deliver better results for people and planet, because, beyond profit, it is grounded in everybody’s rights. Its policies direct a wind of powerful energy to achieving the Sustainable Development Agenda – which is a human rights agenda – and coherently address the social and environmental issues that matter deeply to every human being on this Earth. (Statement by UN Human Rights Chief )

This new signified object--the human rights economy--then defines itself in relation to the traditional investor profit economy it means to displace. BUt it also distinguishes itself from the theocratic economy, the  cost-value economy, the consumer driven economy, and the economy as the  reification of class. This is undertaken by a narrative of horribles that signify the great gaps between the ideal aspiring human rights economy, and the demonic turn of the others. From the perspective of those committed to the new vision, this is perfectly reasonable and historically justified. But to the integrity of democratic politics, the need to foreground the sub-textual element around which the possibility of debate is managed might be substantially important.

Pix: Francis Picabia, The Handsome Pork Butcher c. 1924, Tate Modern

The parade of horribles  generalizes, caricatures and manages belief expectations quite effectively.  But that is precisely what it is meant to do.  And then it suggests its discursive baseline: "Measurement of economic success needs to expanded beyond the blunt instrument of Gross Domestic Product, to assess how well the economy delivers on people's rights." (Ibid. In language that might be better understood, Mr. Türk may be suggesting that human rights economy measures economic activity, that it that it values production and the development of productive forces through measures that focus on the external impacts of such activity rather than principally by its (admittedly imperfect) focus on internal value maximization. At its limit, one is speaking here of the language of Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro in the construction of  economic value measures in ALBA--a reconstitution indeed! (See Cuba and the Construction of Alternative Global Trade Systems: Alba and Free Trade in the Americas ). This is an economy that is driven by the management of need and the calculation of impact.  It is a political economy in the sense that value is measures exogenously to production and by reference to its effects. The internal mechanics of production are understood as transactions of the social costs--that like the goods and services produced, will be borne by the collective in whose interests such activity is undertaken. The post-Soviet, state controlled variation of this was at the heart of the ALBA regional trading system; Mr. Türk opens a small window onto an as yet  under structured human rights variation.

All the same, that is the central point that elites caught up in this great project tend either to ignore or downplay. And that point, to be clear is this: in order to transform the way social groups value their collective activities, and direct them, it is necessary to shift the analytical perspective (and thus the basis for valuing activity. To shift the perspectives, it is necessary change the way in which critical objects of social relations--the state, the enterprise, the vanguard--are understood and rationalized. That shifting produces a strategically different set of social ideals--and it is to those reconstituted social ideals that narrative is directed.  Mr. Türk's semiotic performance, then, comes at the end of a long and quite conscious movement from one historical age (and way of understanding the way and acting on that understand) to another. Those who fail to see it either get in the way of the project (and must be re-educated or cast aside); or can be targeted as reactionary elements no longer in step with the times.  The question for our times, then, is this: just what sort of overlay is intended in the post modern redefinition of economic activity in social relations. The narrative is ambiguous reflecting perhaps the process of discursive consensus, or fracture, that has yet to be determined to be the mark of this age. Democratic politics might require some greater transparency. Beyond that, it is to the elaboration of structures for administering punishment that those who manage social relations will continue to direct their efforts.  

Ming Wong, Life of Imitation 2009, Tate Modern

The text of the remarks follows.