As Publius showed in Xi Jinping Drives China Down, Xi, top boss of The Center of Everything (“China” above, in Chinese) faces an existential challenge: The Rate of Cloud Inflation.
Let’s have a look at Cloud Inflation to see how deadly it is for The Center.
The Cloud is simply this: universal access by every person and thing to unlimited computing power at marginal cost.
The Cloud inflates at the rate of the power of devices, growing exponentially, times the number of devices growing exponentially, times the number of apps growing exponentially. That’s fast!
We have never seen anything so powerful in human history. Marginal cost computing on this scale is having a staggering impact. It is a sudden, sharp and very quick move down the Information Cost-Velocity Curve where information velocity is always increasing and costs always falling.
The last time this happened in a really big way was Gutenberg’s printing press of 1440. Every organization of every type in all Europe was ripped to shreds in a bloody, two and a half century-long Reformation and its aftermath.
The Center saw plenty of blood in the Great Leap Forward—two Holocausts a year for four years—and no one there wants to go back to that.
Xi’s problem is that the ICVC is the central force in social evolution. It has dominated our existence since we learned to mumble. For hundreds of thousands of years, it moved hardly at all. But, when we combined information with grasses to create agriculture, things started to move. And move at an ever-faster pace.
Two things happen when the ICVC moves:
Information is substituted for other factor inputs—land, labor and capital—at faster rates.
In a Marxian shift, the ICVC transfers market power from producers to consumers.
Combined, these two displace all organization structures, whatever they are. The faster the ICVC moves, the faster these changes occur. In a centuries-long process, the governing structure of France’s Fifth Republic looks nothing like that of Louis XIV, the Sun King. But today, the ever-faster ICVC is far more transformative. In a decades-long process, the 1980s structure of minicomputer makers looked nothing like those of mainframe makers in the 1960s. Apple looks nothing like the PC makers of only a few years ago.
Xi’s big problem now is that if The Center doesn’t get ahead of the ICVC, it is dead. But if it does get ahead, in an ironically Marx-like effect, power will move fast away from the Party, the center of The Center, and the Party will be dead.
His short-term solution, consistent with the Great Mussolini Shift that followed the Party’s failure to capitalize on Tianamen in 1989, is the Great Firewall. As Mussolini would have granted, the people are allowed access to Cloud services so long as the Party controls all Cloud content and traffic and no foreign services, like Google or Facebook, are permitted. Like the Iron Curtain of the past, The Great Firewall encircles all the people of The Center, keeping them in and keeping all foreign influences out.
How does this work? Here we use different apps for different things. In The Center, by contrast, you stay “in-app.” All your texts, emails, banking, takeout orders, car hires, everything, are done on one app—think of Facebook for everything—where Party servers can monitor your every move and censor your every communication. The Party has your access codes and can monitor every device that you use. Layered onto this is advanced facial recognition technology so that you can be tracked even when you carry no electronic device.
The idea was to give The Center’s people some flexibility on the ICVC but not enough to destroy the Party’s control.
But, things began to get wonky. Party-controlled companies want access to foreign markets so that they can grow. But doing this means having a free and open Internet in The Center and out. Which in turn means taking down the Great Firewall. Center companies cannot afford to support one standard at home and another abroad. They need uniformity.
Japan had tried a two-standard system in the post War period, most forcefully in telecommunications. The result was Japanese companies making computerized network gear to one standard at home and another abroad. Their costs shot way higher than those of the competition and all their once-great names in the sector vanished. It was so bad that Japan’s entire IT sector never recovered.
This is not what Xi wants for The Center.
Already, Center companies are having problems with the Great Firewall. The Party insists that Center-financed films made here, for example, portray our state authorities “correctly.” In another instance, Americans trying to edit a simple voice over here for movie shot there could not get past Party-controlled servers to use an industry-standard voice-to-video synchronization program. The costs of shipping the cast back to The Center for a few minutes of overdubbing were absurd.
At the same time, Xi wants The Center to live up to its name and dominate information technology globally. But, this means taking the Great Firewall down, something that is unthinkable.
So, what will The Center do?
It has a well-organized, classic Communist plan to seize control of artificial intelligence technology. The Center plans to infuse this technology into everything from your car to your microwave. If successful, even so much as a light bulb, if it is made in The Center or has Center-made AI parts, can be monitored by Party servers. We don't have five-year plans and so have nothing to counter The Center's.
Instead of taking down the Great Firewall, XI will use AI dominance to inflate it to global scale. Think, www.everything.theCenter. A Cloud-inflating Nine Dash Line in Cyberspace. Xi’s goal is to ensure that every person in every home and office in the world adheres to Xi Jinping Thought. Amazingly, Google is now on side.
Take what the Russian FSB did to the 2016 U.S. elections and multiply it by the Rate of Cloud Inflation.
That’s what Xi wants for you.
Enjoy.
September 19, 2018
Jack Ma, the retiring head of the Center's Alibaba empire has warned Xi to rethink his approach if the Center is to succeed. Ma will find himself in a re-education camp if he's not careful.