Alan Jacobs

John Lanchester:

First, the Weibo accounts of prominent critics were ‘harmonised’ – in other words, deleted overnight. Then a conference was called for ‘Big Vs’, people with well-followed verified accounts, analogous to Twitter’s blue tick. At the conference, the newly formed Cyberspace Administration of China reminded the assembled big shots about their ‘social responsibility’ to the ‘interests of the state’ and ‘core socialist values’. Two weeks later, on 23 August 2013, the prominent investor and Weibo activist Charles Xue was arrested. He turned up shortly afterwards in a Chinese Central Television interview from his prison cell, weeping and apologising for his irresponsibility and vanity.

Such TV interviews have become a staple feature of the CCP’s internet crackdown, helped by a new law, passed in September 2013, which threatens three years in prison to anyone who shares a rumour that ‘upsets social order’ and is shared five hundred times or clicked on five thousand times. For people with Weibo followings well into the millions, the law effectively banned the posting of anything even potentially controversial. ‘Ever since, Weibo has been dead as a politically relevant medium,’ Griffiths writes. ‘Once, debate had raged there: sometimes wild, often polemical, clever if you were lucky – but always lively. Today, it’s as silent as the grave.’ Weibo continues to grow, mind you; it’s just that it’s now the usual entertainment news and celebrity bollocks.

And:

Put all this together. Imagine a place in which there’s a police post every hundred metres, and tens of thousands of cameras linked to a state-run facial recognition system; where people are forced to have police-owned GPS systems in their cars, and you can buy petrol only after having your face scanned; where all mobile phones have a state app on them to monitor their activity and prevent access to ‘damaging information’; where religious activity is monitored; where the state knows whether you have family and friends abroad, and where the government offers free health clinics as a way of getting your fingerprint and iris scan and samples of your DNA. Strittmatter points out that you don’t need to imagine this place, because it exists: that’s life in Xinjiang for the minority population of Muslim Uighurs. Increasingly, policing in Xinjiang has an algorithmic basis. A superb piece of reporting by Christian Shepherd in the Financial Times recently told the story of Yalqun Rozi, who has ended up in a re-education camp for publishing Uighur textbooks in an attempt to preserve the language. One of his crimes was using too high a percentage of Uighur words. The system allows a maximum of 30 per cent from minority language sources; Rozi had used 60 per cent Uighur, and ‘China’ had appeared only four times in 200,000 words. Uighurs get into trouble for attending mosque too often or too fervently, or for naming their children Mohammed, or for fasting during Ramadan. There are about 12 million Uighurs in Xinjiang: 1.5 million of them have either spent time in a re-education camp or are in one right now.

To which Adam Silver, commissioner of the NBA:

Actual quote: “We are dealing with a complex set of issues. And I will just add that the fact that we have apologized to fans in China is not inconsistent with supporting someone’s right to have a point of view.” A point of view — your opinion, man — the opinion that the people of Hong Kong have the right to demand democracy and that the Chinese communist government is determined at all costs to deny it to them — which Silver is quite explicitly disavowing by apologizing to the fans in China. The NBA loves it when their people are politically vocal, until being politically vocal costs the NBA money. Then they claim, as the owner of the Houston Rockets has, not to be political.

It’s interesting how little coverage of this issue there is on ESPN, and no editorializing — in text, anyway: maybe the on-air personalities are being more assertive. But my guess is that ESPN and the NBA are joined at the hip here, and are trying to figure out which way to jump. My second guess is that they’ll back the totalitarian Chinese regime.

And my third guess is this: The time will come when no major American media will tell the truth about what the Chinese government does, and my over/under on the moment when perfect silence has been achieved is five years.

UPDATE: Here’s what the NBA posted on Weibo: “We feel greatly disappointed at Houston Rockets’ GM Daryl Morey’s inappropriate speech, which is regrettable.” Remember that “inappropriate speech,” in full, was: “Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.”

UPDATE 2: Since I posted this earlier today I have been browsing through the Twitter feeds of the major NBA reporters. Crickets. Not an opinion in sight, and these people have opinions about everything. There are two factors at work here, I think. The first is simple greed: NBA exhibition games are coming up in China, ESPN is sending crews there, there’s money to be had both in the near and in the far term. But the other factor is something I wrote about a lot in How to Think: Scott Alexander’s extremely useful categories of the Ingroup, the Outgroup, and the Fargroup. To people who run the NBA, how North Carolina portions out its public restrooms is A Matter of Vital Importance, because those Jesusland weirdos are the Outgroup. But the Chinese government persecuting and killing Uighurs? Whatever, man. Who am I to judge?

UPDATE 3: Brian Phillips:

There’s nothing edifying about any of this, except to the extent that it’s a useful reminder of where we are. We’re in a world where global capital feels perfectly comfortable teaming up with communist autocrats against democracy activists, as long as it keeps the cash registers dinging. Generally speaking, the hypocrisy of sports owners feels more depressing than the hypocrisy of other tycoon varietals, because sports owners represent a product that you’d like to believe has a meaning surpassing commerce. This is especially true about the NBA, because the NBA is so proud of its social conscience, or at least it was before its social conscience started threatening to cost it money.

For the most part, though, you’ll never be surprised if you assume that the devotion of sports owners to their own self-interest, and of sports leagues to their owners’ self-interest, is absolute. The NBA wants you to see it as politically progressive to the precise extent that your seeing it as progressive helps the bottom line and no further. Tilman Fertitta, the Rockets’ owner, occasionally goes on CNBC to praise Donald Trump, from whom he bought an Atlantic City casino in 2011, and to say things like “Obamacare does not work.” He has no problem then turning around and declaring that the Rockets are a “non-political organization” to make nice with China, because what he means by “non-political organization” is that he thinks hundred-dollar bills are nice, and also fuck you.

Of all the peculiar traits of the church, perhaps the most peculiar is its double character as end-in-itself and instrument. In one sense it is koinonia, the community of fellowship of the faithful with one another and with their Risen Lord; it is, then, what we were made for; it is. In another sense church is an instrument for the making of disciples and for the transmission of the faith from generation to generation. No shame need fall upon us for reflecting on that instrumental character as long as we do not forget the other face, the koinonia.

A word nearly synonymous with “instrument” is “technology,” and I would hope that my readers shudder at the thought of designating the church as a technology. But that shudder, though natural and commendable in our circumstances, is to some degree the product of those circumstances, of a world in which the term “technology” is associated with a handful of systems that are dangerous if not wholly destructive: biotechnology, information technology, weapons technology. In a broader sense, though, and a sense more appropriate here, technologies are, as Marshall McLuhan often said, extensions of the human body and human faculties. The development of the hospital in the fourth-century Byzantine world — most famously in Caesarea under Basil the Great, whose hospital took in not only the ill but also the poor and homeless and the elderly — was in this sense a technology: a complex instrument meant to extend the gracious labor of compassion, to increase the power of the koinonia’s love.¹ If in what follows I refer to the church as a technology, it is in this sense, not in the (understandably) debased sense in which we use the term in this age of social media and drone warfare.

My thesis here is simply this: If we come to understand the kind of technology, the kind of instrument, that the church is, we will better know how to heal its wounds — for indeed the Body of Christ is wounded, and the instruments meant to extend its reach are largely non-functional. We Christians are now not physicians but rather sufferers in need of care; we are not building hospitals but are collectively in need of hospital care. And if we are to find good treatment, we must begin with a sound diagnosis.

•

The church of Jesus Christ is, or should be,

• a seasoned technology;
• a convivial technology;
• a technology in need of repair;
• a technology that, after repair, requires maintenance.

Each of these concepts needs to be explained in its original context before we can make ecclesial use of it.

Seasoned. The Japanese game designer Gunpei Yokoi (1941-1997), the designer of the original Nintendo Game Boy, advocated what he called Kareta Gijutsu no Suihei Shikō: “Lateral Thinking with Seasoned Technology.” Perhaps the best illustration of this technology, though it appeared after Yokoi’s death, was the Nintendo Wii: at a time when other video game manufacturers were racing one another to employ more powerful processors and graphics cards, Nintendo in designing the Wii used older, less powerful, more seasoned technologies — but employed “lateral thinking” to use them in ways no one had ever thought of before. Despite many confident predictions that Nintendo had fallen lamentably behind in the CPU-speed race and was courting disaster, the Wii became an enormous hit and remains even today the most loved of game consoles. Perhaps not incidentally, much of its success was due to its popularity with audiences that the other console makers utterly ignored: the very young and the elderly.

Convivial. Ivan Illich, from Tools for Conviviality:

I choose the term ‘conviviality’ to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society’s members.

Following from this definition is another:

As an alternative to technocratic disaster, I propose the vision of a convivial society. A convivial society would be the result of social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favour of another member’s equal freedom.

And in the closing sentence of his book he makes this great affirmation: “Imperialist mercenaries can poison or maim but never conquer a people who have chosen to set boundaries to their tools for the sake of conviviality.”

Repair. In a seminal essay called “Rethinking Repair,” Steven Jackson notes that “the world is always breaking; it’s in its nature to break.” And so what is always required of us is “broken-world thinking.” But a necessary element of that thinking is “a deep wonder and appreciation for the ongoing activities by which stability (such as it is) is maintained, the subtle arts of repair by which rich and robust lives are sustained against the weight of centrifugal odds, and how sociotechnical forms and infrastructures, large and small, get not only broken but restored, one not-so-metaphoric brick at a time.” Brokenness and repair, in a never-ending cycle. Which leaves Jackson with a powerful question: “How might we begin to … reimagine or better recognize the forms of innovation, difference, and creativity embedded in repair?”²

Maintenance. In an equally seminal essay that follows and extends Jackson’s work, “Maintenance and Care,” Shannon Mattern demonstrates that “In many academic disciplines and professional practices — architecture, urban studies, labor history, development economics, and the information sciences, just to name a few — maintenance has taken on new resonance as a theoretical framework, an ethos, a methodology, and a political cause.” She cites a group of historians of technology who, in ironic response to Walter Isaacson’s book The Innovators, call themselves “The Maintainers”: they are “interested in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the myriad forms of labor and expertise that sustain our human-built world.” Mattern further points out, in a particularly useful and provocative formulation, that “To study maintenance is itself an act of maintenance. To fill in the gaps in this literature, to draw connections among different disciplines, is an act of repair or, simply, of taking care — connecting threads, mending holes, amplifying quiet voices.”

A proper understanding and application of these concepts — lateral thinking with seasoned technology, tools that promote conviviality, the role of repair in a broken world, the acknowledgment of the necessity and creativity of the work of maintenance — will help us to renew the church and, in the spirit of Tikkun olam, repair the world.

More on this in future posts.

Well, first of all, it’s important to remember that a lot of criticism of your work really doesn’t have anything to do with your work or you. Your words may provide for some a launch pad to say something they want to say anyhow — these are the people who come to lectures and during the Q&A say “This is really more of a comment than a question” — and for others it’s an opportunity to strut and fret their hour upon the social-media stage, or to preen and flex in the mirror that your text provides them. It’s not about you, it’s about them, and in any case they’ll be on to something else that displeases them in an hour or two. So who cares?

But if someone takes the trouble to pay attention to what you’ve written, to grasp your argument and to show where they think it goes wrong, or to bring in evidence that you’ve neglected (or didn’t know about) — the price of that kind of thing is above rubies. But it’s very very rare.