Author: ShinJoung Yeo

Baidu China Geopolitics United States

Baidu: Geopolitical Dynamics of the Internet in China

By ShinJoung Yeo

This post is based on a talk on the panel titled Venturing China’s Globalized Internet at the 2023 International Communication Association. (ICA) preconference. The panel was organized by the contributors of recently published books on the political economy of China’s internet giants: Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent in the Global Media Giants book series. I revised my original talk to provide a little more context drawing from my 2022 book Baidu: Geopolitical Dynamics of the Internet in China. Baidu was primarily a search engine company, but it has diversified its business into artificial intelligence (AI) and AI-driven industrial sectors including self-driving or autonomous cars (AVs), Electric Vehicles (EVs), cloud computing, smart devices etc.

Today, it is extremely challenging to engage in a reasonable debate about the tech sector related to China – a major geopolitical flesh point between the US and China. In the Western mainstream media, the discussions are persistently framed under the themes of national security, spying, censorship, human rights, and authoritarianism vs liberal democracy, but these narrow and self-interested analytical frameworks obfuscate the underlying pollical economy of the Chinese internet industry which is deeply integrated into the US-led global capitalist order.  

In turn, the often-used term “decoupling” needs to be handled carefully. “Decoupling” actually is embedded with a longer process of coupling. The Chinese search giant Baidu, which represents the internet industry in China, sheds light on this decades-long enmeshment – and its implications for current capitalist dynamics. Thus, I’ll talk about Baidu in the context of coupling, geopolitical competition, and “decoupling.”

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Internet Industry Russia Ukraine War

Declaration of Withdrawal

By ShinJoung Yeo

For the past few weeks, the mainstream media have been plastered with news about ChatGPT – a chatbot developed by the Silicon Valley company OpenAI which recently received a $10 billion investment from Microsoft. Will Microsoft revolutionize its Bing search with ChatGPT? How did Google lose $100 million with its mishap on its new AI chatbot? Will ChatGPT change education? Will ChatGPT affect the future of work? We’re sure that an AI chatbot is worthy of the corporate media’s close probing, but amidst plenty of media coverage on technology, there is a deprivation of critical analysis on the tech industry’s involvement in the current war between Ukraine and Russia resulting in the killing of thousands of people on both sides NOW – not in some version of the future. We insist this requires a series of probing questions and elaboration.

A few months after the war broke out, the US and its allies imposed economic sanctions against Russia.[1] Company after company loudly publicized that they were withdrawing their businesses from Russia; though after a year of the war, hundreds of the US and European companies, including Pfizer, BP, and Renault, are still doing business in Russia according to a recent NY Times report.[2]

By March 2022, the major tech companies were also joining this drive. Apple stopped selling new products and paused its Apple payment services; Amazon suspended shipments of its retail products and new clients for its cloud services in Russia and Belarus. Google’s Russian subsidiary filed for bankruptcy in Russia and suspended ads in Russia on Google’s internet properties including YouTube. Microsoft announced that the company was also suspending new sales in Russia.

Despite their public declarations, it is not clear to what extent the US tech industry has actually pulled their businesses from Russia; however, one still wonders what has driven this unusually prompt rhetoric of withdrawal? According to the tech companies, they were responding to an unlawful invasion and a humanitarian disaster. This line of reasoning is inconsistent with the tech companies’ previous behavior, as they are doing or have done plenty of business in countries with repressive regimes around the globe and have ignored other humanitarian disasters.[3]

The tech companies’ exit from Russia came as a result of governmental edicts. The question then is, what has moved these companies to comply with the US state’s current geopolitical ambitions? What is the basis of the interlock? The complete answers to these questions are multi-faceted because we need to consider the tech giants’ long relationship with the Democratic party; their interests in domestic and governmental markets; their involvements in US foreign policy; and their leaders’ class interests – all of which are intricately intertwined.  Further explication of these questions will occupy multiple posts. However, for this piece, we’re calling attention to one of the apparent reasons for the tech companies’ swift withdrawal announcements from Russia.

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Post Office Telecommunications Telegraph US telecommunications

IO is Back

By ShinJoung Yeo

IO has been on a long hiatus, but we’re coming back this year. The world is in dire circumstances, facing poverty, war, diseases, and climate catastrophes. However, critical political economic analyses on global information and communications that affect those issues are difficult to find in corporate media. By renewing IO, we hope to draw attention to the underlying structural forces that shape the information and communication systems as well as local and international struggles to transform the world so that vital information systems and resources are redesigned and reallocated for social needs. Please look out for new posts from IO. 

As a kick-off, we want to announce Dan Schiller’s newly released book, Crossed Wires, published by Oxford University Press. It’s a timely book to help us to understand how, for what purpose, by whom, and under what conditions US telecommunications networks were built and rebuilt over the decades. And here is a short description of the book: 

Telecommunications networks are vast, intricate, hugely costly systems for exchanging messages and information-within cities and across continents. From the Post Office and the telegraph to today’s internet, these networks have sown domestic division while also acting as sources of international power.

In Crossed Wires, Dan Schiller, who has conducted archival research on US telecommunications for more than forty years, recovers the extraordinary social history of the major network systems of the United States. Drawing on arrays of archival documents and secondary sources, Schiller reveals that this history has been shaped by sharp social and political conflict and is embedded in the larger history of an expansionary US capitalism. Schiller argues that networks have enabled US imperialism through a a recurrent “American system” of cross-border communications. Three other key findings wind through the book. First, business users of networks–more than carriers, and certainly more than residential users–have repeatedly determined how telecommunications systems have developed. Second, despite their current importance for virtually every sphere of social life, networks have been consecrated above all to aiding the circulation of commodities. Finally, although the preferences of executives and officials have broadly determined outcomes, these elites have repeatedly had to contend against the ideas and organizations of workers, social movement activists, and other reformers.

This authoritative and comprehensive revisionist history of US telecommunications argues that not technology but a dominative–and contested–political economy drove the evolution of this critical industry.

Dan Schiller, Crossed Wires: The Conflicted History of US Telecommunications, From The Post Office To The Internet (Oxford University Press, 2023)

Arts Commodification Labor Tech Cities

Artists in Tech Cities

By ShinJoung Yeo

This report was co-authored with Professor Toby Miller earlier this year in collaboration with the East London-based arts organisation SPACE. This research project looked at the convergence between artist communities and tech sectors and the un/intended impacts on artists and local communities under the promotion of ‘creative’ industries in the region where we live and work: Silicon Roundabout/Shoreditch and Here East in East London.

“…UK’s Technology City is a place where policy makers seek to coalesce the arts and technology sectors under one umbrella and translate human creativity into economic value. It elucidates the inherent contradiction between the politics of creativity subscribed to by urban policy makers and the technology sector, as opposed to artistic freedom. The creativity pursued by many artists frequently exercises and strives for an artistic autonomy that transcends market interests; however, the politics of ‘creativity’ in the Technology City further absorbs art into market relations. Aesthetic expression must justify itself in terms of productivity and economic outcomes. Depoliticizing ‘creativity’ masks the inherent incompatibility of absorbing artistic expression into market relations, justifying urban dispossession…”

group sex

 
Full report is available Here.