/03

Of course technology perpetuates racism. It was designed that way. | MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/03/1002589/technology-perpetuates-racism-by-design-simulmatics-charlton-mcilw

https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Surveillance-protests.jpg?resize=1200,600

We often call on technology to help solve problems. But when society defines, frames, and represents people of color as “the problem,” those solutions often do more harm than good. We’ve designed facial recognition technologies that target criminal suspects on the basis of skin color. We’ve trained automated risk profiling systems that disproportionately identify Latinx people as illegal immigrants. We’ve devised credit scoring algorithms that disproportionately identify black people as risks and prevent them from buying homes, getting loans, or finding jobs.

So the question we have to confront is whether we will continue to design and deploy tools that serve the interests of racism and white supremacy,

Of course, it’s not a new question at all.

As part of a DARPA project aimed at turning the tide of the Vietnam War, Pool’s company had been hard at work preparing a massive propaganda and psychological campaign against the Vietcong. President Johnson was eager to deploy Simulmatics’s behavioral influence technology to quell the nation’s domestic threat, not just its foreign enemies. Under the guise of what they called a “media study,” Simulmatics built a team for what amounted to a large-scale surveillance campaign in the “riot-affected areas” that captured the nation’s attention that summer of 1967.

Three-member teams went into areas where riots had taken place that summer. They identified and interviewed strategically important black people. They followed up to identify and interview other black residents, in every venue from barbershops to churches. They asked residents what they thought about the news media’s coverage of the “riots.” But they collected data on so much more, too: how people moved in and around the city during the unrest, who they talked to before and during, and how they prepared for the aftermath. They collected data on toll booth usage, gas station sales, and bus routes. They gained entry to these communities under the pretense of trying to understand how news media supposedly inflamed “riots.” But Johnson and the nation’s political leaders were trying to solve a problem. They aimed to use the information that Simulmatics collected to trace information flow during protests to identify influencers and decapitate the protests’ leadership.

They didn’t accomplish this directly. They did not murder people, put people in jail, or secretly “disappear” them.

But by the end of the 1960s, this kind of information had helped create what came to be known as “criminal justice information systems.” They proliferated through the decades, laying the foundation for racial profiling, predictive policing, and racially targeted surveillance. They left behind a legacy that includes millions of black and brown women and men incarcerated.

#Racisme #Intelligence_artificielle #capitalisme_surveillance #surveillance

First the trade war, then the pandemic. Now Chinese manufacturers are turning inward. | MIT Technology Review
▻https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/06/03/1002573/pandemic-us-china-trade-war-impact-on-manufacturers

https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/MIT_ChineseDomesticGrowth.jpg?resize=1200,600

Then, before his business had fully recovered, covid-19 ripped through the world. Exports tanked, saddling Zhu with a stream of order cancellations worth an estimated $4 to $5 million. Domestic sales also suffered as physical stores shuttered under pandemic control restrictions. “The impact could’ve been huge,” he says. “My factory is really big; I have so many workers to support.”

But Zhu fortunately had another sales channel. In 2018, Pinduoduo, an e-commerce giant targeted at consumers in China’s smaller cities, launched an initiative to connect manufacturers with the domestic market. Under a so-called “consumer-to-manufacturer,” or C2M, model, the platform began using its massive pools of data and AI algorithms to help Chinese manufacturers predict consumer preferences and develop brands specifically for a domestic audience.

Pinduoduo told manufacturers not only how to customize their products—down to the wash of a jean or the length of a sock. It also advised them on how to redesign their packaging, how to set their prices, and how to market their goods online. In this way, manufacturers could improve the efficiency of their production, which in turn made the products cheaper for consumers. And platforms could monetize new users with advertising. This helped both the platform and manufacturers alike tap into a rapidly growing middle-class consumer base. Whereas upper-class consumers care more about international brands, this newer wave of consumers care more about quality products at lower prices.

When the pandemic hit, Pinduoduo quickly expanded its initiative. It added new incentives for affected manufacturers to join its platform, welcoming them to adopt its live-streaming service (link in Chinese) and holding promotional sales events.

As China’s access to international markets has grown more unreliable—with a possible trade fight renewal looming on the horizon—the country has increasingly sought to ramp up domestic consumption in an effort to stave off a greater economic recession.

“The problem is China is losing [overseas] demand,” says Derek Scissors, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, where he researches trade policy and US-China relations. “You want to replace it with Chinese demand.”

As well as Pinduoduo, other Chinese e-commerce giants, including Alibaba-owned Taobao and JD, are now offering C2M services. Since the start of this year, all three have set new goals for expanding their C2M initiatives. Pinduoduo, which helped launch 106 manufacturer-owned brands in 2019, aims to establish 1,000 more. It also signed a strategic partnership in April with the government of Dongguan, where Zhu’s factory is based, one of China’s largest manufacturing hubs.

As the partnerships have produced promising results, manufacturers have also doubled down on their domestic brand strategies. Chen Zhuoyue, the owner of a toy manufacturing company based in Chenghai, Guangdong, joined JD’s C2M program in 2018. After JD helped him customize his products and develop a new pricing strategy, the platform quickly grew to account for 50% of his domestic sales. When the pandemic hit and his exports sharply declined from 30% to less than 5% of his revenue, he took it as a sign to open up two new JD stores and launch more domestic brands.

It’s not that Chen will stop working with foreign brands. “As a businessman, I’m always thinking about how to expand into more markets,” he says. If exports were to return back to normal and his long-term foreign collaborators came knocking on his door, he would gladly continue fulfilling their orders. At the same time, now that he’s launched his own brand, he sees it as an important source of growth and stability. “My plan is to expand our domestic presence,” he says. “This year I want to increase our investment in this area.”

It’s not clear whether domestic markets alone will be able to compensate for China’s variable access to international markets over the long run. On one hand, the country’s middle class has rapidly increased their spending power and is expected to grow to a market size of 1,008 billion RMB ($141 million) by 2022, according to iResearch. On the other, even before the pandemic, the manufacturing industry was already struggling with too much supply, says Scissors, and it relied on the US and other overseas markets to “dump their manufacturing excess,” he says. As a result, he’s unconvinced that a new model like C2M would resolve such deeply-entrenched macroeconomic issues. If anything, he sees C2M instead as a savvy push from e-commerce giants to grow their own profits.

#Chine #Commerce_électronique #C2M #Consumer-to-manufacturer #Marché_interieur #Mondialisation