Universal science posits the end of philosophical thought vis-a-vis the eclipse of human experience, an anxiety connected to the advance of artificial intelligence today. The automation of intelligent algorithms has proliferated an infinitude of overlapping black box societies, each constructing its own contingent and bounded world, while at the same reproducing an unremarked universalism that sets normative claims on the types of worlds that can be realized – a gesture that allows it to cover over its innate contingency. The goal of this talk is to center universal technoscience as a procedure of the white imaginary, while also indicating its inherent incomputability by looking to the latent spaces intrinsic to the operations of recursive colonialism. I do so by centering whiteness as the unremarked optimum within technoscientific epistemology in 3 provocations. First, I trouble Sinofuturism vis-a-vis Lawrence Lek and Yuk Hui’s propositions of a non-universal and properly non-Western philosophy of technology. Next, I turn to Beijing artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s industrial robot inspired artwork Can’t Help Myself (2016) to connect optimization, racialization, and whiteness. Finally, I look to automation to wonder what conceptual tools are needed to find the forms of breakdown already latent within the recursive machine of colonial epistemology.

As a diasporic Chinese academic working and living in Singapore, I write this at the height of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, which has thwarted my original plan to visit Shenzhen’s artificial intelligence industries and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR) as part of my preliminary research on the People’s Republic of China’s supposedly exceptional brand of marrying “automation” with “authoritarianism.” The privation of fieldwork, nonetheless, fuels auto-theoretical speculations. Whereas I have previously been considering Shenzhen, which supplies many of the face recognition technologies deployed in Xinjiang’s Uyghur Muslim camps, as the Chinese model-zone of global surveillance capitalism, I now doubt if it is really the spectacular development of digital surveillance technologies that is “automating” the Party-state’s coercive governance. Instead, in line with the symposium’s logic of recursive colonialism, I ask if it is the classic colonizing operation of enclosure—of which Shenzhen and XUAR are two historical cases—that is also automating the systematic usage of machine-learning policing mechanisms. If so, talk about the PRC’s automated authoritarianism ought to hinge less on the computerized minimization of human assistance in authoritarian processes, but more on how area itself, understood as more than territory, zone or even geo-political orders but the enclosure of national language, national culture, and national subjectivities, drives such automated procedures. Area, in moving the accumulation of men to that of capital, indeed names an automated process of dispossessing colonized and enclosed populations from information, while persistently capitalizing on them. My paper examines the valences of recursivity between automation, authoritarianism, and area in PRC today, where the latter names both the nation-state and the entity constituted by the Western academic sub-field of Chinese studies. Certainly, with as-yet unknowable deaths and infection rates escalating in the Hubei area, international travel bans and domestic quarantine enforcements are emergency measures that differ drastically from, and yet strangely exacerbate the logic of enclosure embodied by the PRC’s massive Muslim “reeducation” camps and their larger repressive surveillance networks. Declarations of body temperatures, of where one has been and with whom one has been in contact are keyed into local governmental and healthcare databases, which translate not just biometrics but also mundane daily lives into behavioral data. Already in 2016, the Public Security Bureau began to collect biometric data from XUAR residents through a 1.49 billion RMB program of “universal health checks” which is subsequently fed into Xinjiang’s “Integrated Joint Operations Platform” (IJOP) meant to collate multiple data sources into predictive policing models. I reflect on this comparative possibility: two situationally very different forms of enclosure foreground the simple fact that there is no exclusion or absolute exterior to XUAR, and in this present worldwide health crisis, to “mainland China” as such. Overseas Chinese have led much of the exposés on both XUAR and state censorship on the Coronavirus epidemic through social media and Google Earth; and yet, they are, according to what I call “area automata,” no less enclosed by virtue of their exclusion from the Great Firewall.

In 1876 when Heinrich Hertz first discovered electromagnetic frequencies, he could see no practical purpose for his experiments. ‘It’s of no use whatsoever,’ he is reported to have said, ‘this is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right – we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there’. Today, the ‘mysterious waves’ that surround us but that ‘we cannot see’ are used by an increasing number of ‘smart objects’ embedded in all aspects of life. Starting with radio’s capacity to occupy the airwaves and broadcast telegraphic signals across the sea, through the mobile phone, which was adopted throughout the planet faster than any device in history, to the emergence of wearables and the ‘Internet of Things,’ with its promise of billions of interconnected objects, our electromagnetic atmosphere has intensified; growing ever more ubiquitous, immersive, autonomous and smart. Electromagnetic vibrations do not conform to the scale and rhythms of conscious experience. Instead, these imperceptible, non human frequencies construct the abstract, transcendental infrastructure of daily life. If modernity has a trajectory, it is to envelop us ever deeper into the alien environment of wireless waves. Since the 1980s—the retro-chronic date for the 1st generation of cellular systems—the intensification of wireless media has been concurrent with China’s remarkable rise. Today, at the dawn of the second decade of the 21st century, with 5th generation networks set to arrive, global powers are locked in a geopolitical struggle over the future of cyberspace. Dystopian narratives surround China’s engagement with contemporary technology, which seems to be fundamentally governed by the dictates of a highly centralized, authoritarian control. My work offers an alternative approach. Rather than emphasize the consolidating power of the terrestrial state, it understands China’s role in the coming wireless wave as having emerged from the experimental practices of simulation, which surfaced out of the dispersed watery edges of the peripheral zone. Especially potent is the 'shanzhai' culture of Shenzhen, the mega-metropolis on the Pearl River Delta where most of the world’s cell phones are made. In order to articulate this more marginal vision of China’s relation to the global technosphere, my work synthesizes both historical and recent conceptualizations of vibratory media with aspects of China’s own intellectual past. It turns to the period in the late 19th and early 20th century, when Chinese literati sought to reinvent a tradition that could connect with the techno-capitalist modernity that had arrived on its shores. At this moment, a critical line of thought appears, which is based on the cosmo-ontology of the wave. In reanimating these abstract ideas, my work uncovers a Sinofuturist philosophy attuned to our intensifying immersion in an electric atmosphere that is constituted by imperceptible, mysterious, underlying waves.