Factual Dispatch

I'm hoping this can act as a counterweight to the awful din of digital tabloids, for-profit message amplification, and information overload. This dispatch assumes you're vaguely aware of the news, so it will provide perspectives, articles, visualizations, and other content that you wouldn't come across anywhere else.

Over the weekend, a previously unheard of outlet named Palladium posted, in my opinion, the most important piece of journalism of the year (by a writer whose name was changed to protect his identity). An immersive, loving look at Xinjiang, the province under hyper-surveillance by the Chinese government. The big thing here is that we're actually looking at two inter-connected ideas. First, the social credit system, Great Firewall & digital panopticon that has been built inside of Xinjiang, is also slated to be rolled out across China in the coming years. The pervasive monitoring of China's citizens has led to some interesting forms of activism in recent years, but its reach should not be underestimated. When a surveillance system can pick out faces at rock concerts and have them arrested as they leave, don't sleep on Chinese tech. That's the stuff that resulted in the death of essentially all of the CIA's agents & sources in-country. (Editor's Note: A deeper dive into the digital panopticon both in China and in the West will be the focus of a Dispatch in the future.)

The second is the Chinese Communist Party's active efforts to "Sinicise Islam" in places that are (in some cases) closer to Baghdad than Beijing. Oppression by the government has gotten so bad that Uyghurs in Xinjiang are fleeing to Afganistan. Ostensibly deployed in response to a wave of riots and insurrectionary behavior in 2009, the lengths to which the Communist Party seems willing to go to de-Islamify these areas can be hard to conceptualize of in the West. Over the last several years, construction of "Arab Style" mosques has been banned, with some being destroyed and replaced with Chinese-style mosques, using a style that was popular between 1368-1644 (which adds an extra layer of Karma, as many of these Mosques were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution less than 75 years ago). 

To be a member of the Chinese Communist Party, you must also forgo ever making the Hajj or even going to mosque daily.  Traditional Muslim grooming & dress, the call to prayer, and many other hallmarks of Muslim communities have all but vanished. With 10 million Hui Muslims in Ningxia, 10 million Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, and 2 million Hui Muslims in Gansu, stamping out Islam is no trivial task, but the CCP seems to be up for it, as 1 million Uyghurs have already been interned, for various (and I do mean various) reasons in what the government has referred to as "vocational education" camps. Party members live in home with Muslim families for weeks, interviewing & documenting the habits & behaviors of Uyghurs. Families are being separated, with children being sent to state-run orphanages, while their parents are sent to internment camps.  The camps, documented using satellite imagery & testimonials, seem as dystopian as anything could be. China seems to be trying to stamp out the cultural footprint of Islam in its western hinterlands, without murdering its populace. Given that the administrator of the Uyghur repression is the same person that previously worked on "stabilizing" Tibet, it's important to see this as an evolving program that the CCP will continue to iterate until it gets it "right."

Most, especially in the West, don't really care what happens to ethnic Muslim minority populations spread across the globe. Some say fears about the Social Credit System are overblown. Even the Belt & Road Initiative, Xi Jinping's pet project, is pushing countries back into the arms of the IMF & the West faster than even the most optimistic neoliberals expected. But to discount what China is doing is both safe and idiotic. The entirety of the Muslim world has not said a damn thing, and even Chinese celebrities & elites dare not to stand up to the CCP, because they will get you. They spy, a lot and they're good at it. No seriously, quite a bit. And they will disappear you, even if you're famous or powerful. If you live out of reach, they'll disappear your family. They even disappeared the scientist responsible for those gene edited babies (great read on the problems with that research here, by the way).  But they aren't invincible, their youth are plenty disaffected, they have massive demographic problems, and may not be as readily able to capture Taiwan as they let on. So it's important not to hallucinate wildly about what they could be, and understand what the country is now, and how it actually works.My biggest concern isn't that this will be inflicted on the rest of China, but that xenophobic, authoritarian or fascist-adjacent governments across the world will attempt to emulate the "success" that has been showcased in the Palladium article. That there is essentially no violent crime in Xinjiang, while wildly expensive, will not be lost on the West for long. There are plenty of countries with ethnic minorities that occasionally get a little rowdy, that this type of surveillance and authoritarian policing stamps out entirely. "Stop & Frisk" within the Digital Panopticon makes for a very scary world for some people.

Eye-Watering Data Visualization of the Week: 

 Vaguely Dystopian News of the Week: Two power plants in Nebraska caused lake-effect snow, resulting in several inches of accumulation. Of course, the article documents two times this insanity has happened before.Annoying-but-Correct Take of the Week: A "Toyery" or Toy Library should exist in every community. And yes, they existed almost 100 years ago, we should pay for them, and one still exists in LA."Huh, Interesting" Read of the Week: The Human Origin story changed again last week, for everyone keeping track. This update puts us in Northern Africa approximately one million years earlier than previously thought.Dunk of the Week: The incomparable John Cleese himself: