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Central to my reading of The Wind Done Gone and Suntrust as rhetorical disidentification is the concept of parody. “[P]arody,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes in his Declaration in Suntrust, “is at the heart of African American expression, because it is a creative mechanism for the exercise of political speech, sentiment, and commentary on the part of people who feel themselves oppressed or maligned and wish to protest that condition of oppression or misrepresentation.”273 Integral to parody’s importance in African American expression is the story of the trickster. In The Signifying Monkey, Gates traces the rich history of Esu Elegbara, the Yoruban signifying monkey that mediates between humans and gods, identifying a recurrent trope of signifyin(g) throughout African cultures and African American literature. The rhetorical and performative manifestations of the figure’s prank-playing—including satire, parody, irony, ambiguity, and magic, form the backbone of the preservation of African American identity in the United States as well as a means of resisting dominant culture.274 Appropriative practices such as parody serve to decolonize white linguistic and representational structures, opening space for the use of trickery, lying, and indirect discourse as tools of persuasion and contestation in the face of oppressive conditions.275 Thus, the practice of parody is important not only as a recurrent theme in African American literature—it also operates as a means of preserving fragmented and transplanted African culture in the New World after the rise of slavery.276 Read in this cultural context, parody becomes a means of deconstructing dominant discourses. Speaking in the context of the rhetorical tradition, Hariman notes the parody’s counterhegemonic power. Parody is important for the maintenance of democratic culture, traced through the Greeks. This deconstruction of dominant culture through parodic rewriting occurs through the process of juxtaposition: “[w]hen language is placed beside itself, limits are exposed. What had seemed to be serious is in fact foolish, and likewise the powerful is shown to be vulnerable, the unchangeable contingent, the enchanting dangerous.”277 In the context of copyright law, the lineages of parody as African American and Western cultural practice collide. While copyright law protects parody as a means of producing original and non-infringing creative works, it is also works to “secure the logic of the European art/culture system”278 through strict regulation of parody. Though Hariman is correct that parody diversifies the public domain, it does so within a particular historical context that, as he shows, is derived through liberal democratic practice. In contemporary copyright contexts, parodies have been found to be fair use because they are “transformative” in character when considered under the first factor of copyright law’s four-part fair use test.279 In the seminal case of Campbell v. Acuff Rose Music, the Supreme Court explained that “[f]or the purposes of copyright law, the nub of the definitions, and the heart of any parodist’s claim to quote from existing material, is the use of some elements of a prior author’s composition to create a new one that, at least in part, comments on the author’s works.”280 As Greene notes, however, copyright law has been constructed to actively exclude African American practices of signifyin(g), creating structural barriers to the recognition of culturally specific forms of creativity, particularly with respect to musical and literary works.281 Not only has the definition of creativity as an act of individual genius historically been a barrier to the protection of African American works under copyright, as in the context of jazz, but so too is the understanding of the author as an individual who produces something new.282 Creativity, for the purposes of copyright law, is traditionally understood to exclude precisely the types of signifyin(g) that Gates identifies.

This asymmetrical relation is now triangulated by China. Unlike the United States, however, China is manipulating debt as a newly emergent creditor. It is deploying what has been called “debtbook diplomacy,” or more pointedly “debt-trap diplomacy,” a strategic leveraging of debts made to economically vulnerable nations across Asia and the Pacific for political influence and eco- nomic advantages.65 Yet as I related in the Introduction, critiques of China’s imperial interests that cohere as “China threat discourse” can be deployed as an alibi to retrench the West’s own imperial and neocolonial interests. The notion that the Chinese threat must be contained, and that vulnerable nations must be protected from that threat, is the covering rationale for what could be seen as a new interimperial competitive “Scramble for Africa” that is at once literal and figurative insofar as the terrain certainly includes but is not limited to Africa.

Universal basic income is particularly interesting in thinking about how and why socialist ideals are redefined and appropriated as part of technoliberal reimaginings of the common social good. Hughes and others are aware that the increasing wealth disparity and the disproportionate number of young tech billionaires whose wealth accumulation has been unprecedented are unsustainable and unjust. Yet, in articulating a need for ubi, they also assert that technology is a kind of public good tied to US citizenship. In a 2017 article in Wired magazine, two examples are used to explain why ubi can work. The first is a survey of Alaskans who receive $2,000 per person per year from the state’s oil revenues conducted by the Economic Security Project. In this example, the profit from oil, a public good, is distributed among residents of the state (thus membership in the state determines equal distribution). The second example is that of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina, who split 97 percent of casino profits. The model is slightly different from that of Alaska: “In 2016, every tribal member received roughly $12,000. . . . All children in the community, have been accruing payments since the day they were born. The tribe sets the money aside and invests it, so the children cash out a substantial nest egg when they are 18.”27 At the moment, this payout is around $105,000. The article, rather than dwelling on the politics of land, dispossession, settler colonialism, and the politics of tribal casinos in the US, instead asserts that citizenship, rather than need, should be the basis for distributing ubi:

The idea is not exactly new—Thomas Paine proposed a form of basic income back in 1797—but in this country, aside from Social Secu- rity and Medicare, most government payouts are based on individual need rather than simply citizenship. Lately, however, tech leaders, including Facebook founders Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and Y Combinator president Sam Altman, have begun pushing the concept as a potential solution to the economic anxiety brought on by automation and globalization—anxiety the tech industry has played its own role in creating.28

Approaching Death and Decay In his dedication to Minima Moralia, Adorno introduces his "reflections on a damaged life" (the subtitle to Minima Moralia) by considering what it would mean to "truly carry through," in a way Hegel fails to, the dialectic between "bourgeois society and its fundamental category, the individual" (17). For Adorno, Hegel's failure is the failure of liberalistic thinking: "the individual as such Hegel for the most part considers, naively, as an irreducible datum - just what in his theory of knowledge he decomposes" (17). Adorno, writing during World War II and just afterwards, deems philosophy to be perfectly poised to once more return to the matter of individual experience precisely because the individual is in a period of decay. The very nullity of individual experience makes it ripe for social analysis: Compared to the patriarchal meagerness that characterizes his treatment in Hegel, the individual has gained as much in richness, differentiation and vigour as, on the other hand, the socialization of society has enfeebled and undermined him. In the period of his decay, the individuals experience of himself and what he encounters contributes once more to knowledge, which he had merely obscured as long as he continued unshaken to construe himself positively as the dominant category. (17-18) The dialectical relationship between individual differentiation and social enfeeblement engenders, in Adornos particular historical moment, an ability to see the individual in a truly dialectical way, such that "part of the social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual sphere. If theory lingers there," he concludes, "it is not only with a bad conscience" (18). What I want to take from Adornos aphoristic meditations on decay is a methodological approach, namely the necessity of thinking the university today dialectically, which, in part, entails recognizing the immiseration and nullity of the university, its "being-ill 'mal-etrĄ" , to use Derridas term (87). One shorthand version of this nullity is captured in the celebratory sloganeering by universities and their administrations around the idea of excellence. As Bill Readings argues in The University in Ruins , the "empty idea of excellence" has replaced that of a national culture, the propagation of which formed the mission of the "modern" university as envisioned by Kant and Humboldt (160; passim).8 In the move from culture to excellence, any overarching ideological purpose for the university has been lost. As a result, the content of the knowledge taught or produced within the university is less and less important. For Readings, this shift helps to explain the heyday of leftist theory in the 1970s and 80s: such criticism, as long as it was done excellently, in no way impeded the smooth functioning of institutions dedicated to (nothing more than) excellence (13). This might be one way to qualify Leitch's sanguine view of theory as a "changeling" (127). Does not the vision of theory as multi-tasking and mutating, at once engaged and opportunistic, symptomatic and critical, empty it of any determinate content? Is not going viral, after all, fully in keeping with market logic and its emphasis on dissemination at the expense of any kind of value or content? Readings^ own solution is equally problematic, however. Like Leitch, he essentially does away with any content for the idea of the university when he proposes to replace the empty idea of excellence with what he refers to as "the empty idea of Thought" (Readings 160). In both cases, form trumps content, which is, I would suggest, a sign of the times. Neither of these "solutions" constitutes, properly speaking, a dialectical approach to "ends," as either the end of an idea - be it the idea of theory or of the university - or as the end toward which theory or the university aims. As Adorno s approach to individual experience suggests, renewed attention to the individual is not meant to fortify the boundaries between the individual and the social (thereby resurrecting liberalistic thinking), but rather to see in newly critical ways how profoundly social all individual experience is and hence to sublate the very category of the individual - not in the name of the general but rather of the concrete and particular. For example, in his aphorism "Do Not Knock," Adorno writes that one effect of modern technology is that "the ability is lost [. . .] to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed, others have the tendency to snap shut by themselves, imposing on those entering the bad manners of not looking behind them, not shielding the interior of the house which receives them" ( Minima Moralia 40). From seemingly insignificant and innocuous movements, gestures, attitudes (cheerfulness or sociability, for example), and types ("the regular guy," "the popular girl" [58]) to the structure of thinking itself, Adorno attempts, as David Held phrases it, "to create conditions through which the social world could once more become visible" ("Adorno" 5). Writing on the "morality of thinking," Adorno underscores that "knowledge can only widen horizons by abiding so insistently with the particular that its isolation is dispelled. [. . .] Dialectical mediation is not a recourse to the more abstract, but a process of resolution of the concrete in itselP ( Minima Moralia 74). Likewise, in the case of the university today, a dialectical approach needs, at all costs, to undermine and unsettle the idea of the university as an autonomous space protected from the larger social world. On the one hand, the conditions of academic labor increasingly mirror those of flex-labor markets, structured as they are to maximize flexibility on the part of administrators, benefit from the pressures of a reserve army of labor armed, in this case, with PhDs, and reward and capitalize on economic competitiveness and scarcity in the form of market differentials, retention awards, superstar salaries, a shrinking supply of jobs, and the exploitation of adjunct faculty. Rising tuition costs, budget cuts, and the privatization of public education limit access to universities and contribute to the widening gap between an elite class and everyone else. On the other hand, changes in university culture have kept pace with these economic transformations: not only is there an increasing divide between administrative and faculty cultures, but most aspects of university life are now assessed through what Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge refer to as "the needles eye of exchange value " (33; my translation) - whether in the form of "learning outcomes," quantitative assessments of research, or a course's relevance to acquiring a job. Accountability, as Readings pithily notes, is identified, de facto, with accounting (119). And the list of the ways in which capitalist culture and its logic and practices pervade the university goes on, from the subcontracting of cafeteria, grounds, and cleaning services to building projects, institutes, and endowments financed by private corporations, which threaten academic freedom and make public education beholden to corporate interests. In short, the university as enclave no longer exists, if it ever did.9

Although it may now seem like another lifetime, the global Occupy Wall Street movements in 2011 showed that we were in a position to entertain the impossible in a way that had seemed impossible only a short time before the protests began.11 After all, who would have predicted Occupy Wall Street even two years before it happened? The Occupy movement and its offshoot, the Occupy Student Debt campaign, seem, to my mind, a powerful lever, in Derridas sense, with which to orient our thinking about the university and beyond precisely because they highlight the socially shared experience of indebtedness, whether in the realm of global finance or student debt loading. To speak of debt peonage is also, as the Occupy sites demonstrated, to imagine alternative forms of indebtedness and of the public good, in which current structures of debt would be inconceivable. As Richard Diensťs The Bonds of Debt suggests, the valences of indebtedness are multiple and cut many ways: they are forms of indenture, sociality, division, and solidarity, the privilege of the i% and the potential of the 99%. As Dienst writes, "[i]t is only in the experience of the insistence of indebtedness that one can keep faith with the need to be rid of it, and the desire to construct different bonds in common" (136). Likewise, to speak of a new kind of theory, as Horkheimer does, in which the critic s "profession is the struggle of which his own thinking is a part and not something self-sufficient and separable from the struggle" (216) is to imagine a future university in which current structures of thought would be unrecognizable, a future in which the university itself would have no future. Two recent approaches to and critiques of the university are instructive here: Stefano Harney and Fred Motens work on the undercommons, and the attempts underway in Canada, in response to the calls to action by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to Indigenize the university. In The Undercommons , Harney and Moten characterize the university in the United States as synonymous with professionalization and the project of enlightenment: professionalization, as they describe it, drawing on the history of colonization and the enclosure of the commons, is best thought of as "a circling, an encircling of war wagons around the last camp of indigenous women and children" (34). Precluded in this "encircling act" is any ability or desire to question the foundation of the university or to confront "antifoundation out of faith in the unconfrontable foundation" (34). No wonder, they write, that pragmatism and critical realism rule the day: "These loyalties banish dialectics with its inconvenient interest in pushing the material and abstract, the table and its brain, as far as it can, unprofessional behavior at its most obvious" (34). In the face of the university's refusals and limits, the only stance possible, as Harney and Moten put it, is a "criminal one" (26) in which subversive intellectuals work at once within and against the university to undermine its mission, steal its resources, and join with those who have been excluded - the shipped, the Maroons, the poor, the queers - to destroy it.12 Against calls for either the restoration or the reform of the university - the former epitomized by Fish's mantra to "always academicize," the latter by Readings's approach, among others - Harney and Moten want instead to sabotage the university, to leave it behind, and to reclaim in its wake its so-called waste, those who are excluded, whose labor escapes the enlightenment dictates of the university. For, at its broadest, the university's dictates privatize the social individual and, on the ground, they destroy any meaningful form of critical thinking. In this sense, the university has always been "in ruins," or, more accurately, an agent of ruin: professionalization is not only a "matter of administering the world, but of administering away the world (and with it prophecy [their term for a form of organization that is defined by acting in the world])" (36). As their notion of prophetic organization as opposed to institutional administration indicates, Harney and Motens project is not only a negative one: coupled with the necessity of working within and against the university is the need to work with and for an alternative, dissonant form of thinking that would no longer go by the name of theory.13 Along with critique and refusal, then, Harney and Moten shift our attention away from the university toward what they call "study," a form of intellectual activity which is continually taking place outside or beyond the constraints of the university - or, as their use of the term undercommons is meant to highlight, in a space that surrounds or forms the under-side of the university. "Study" is everything from being in a workshop to sitting on a porch to working in a factory together; it is the "incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities," the recognition of which "allows [us] to access a whole, varied, alternative history of thought" ("Studying through the Undercommons"). Against the institutional structures of the university, the undercommons and the practice of study are constituted by the kinds of common bonds to which Dienst refers. Equally, the undercommons and the conceptual terms and tools that animate Harney and Motens vision of struggle and resistance are indebted to the Black radical tradition and specifically, as they note, to Black radical women.14 "To enter this space," Harney and Moten explain, "is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back where the commons gives refuge, where the refuge gives commons" ( Undercommons 28). Crucially, this space not only contains and enacts an "alternative history of thought" but also an alternative form of subjectivity, which is "about not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing; it is about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood" (28). The title of Motens recent trilogy, "consent not to be a single being," succinctly captures the nature of this sense of dispossessed subjectivity. In The Undercommons , Harney and Moten liken this form of subjectivity to the way hobos would "ride the blinds" or hide between cars when they hopped trains in order to remain undetected. For them, "riding the blinds" embodies "a kind of radical, non-locatability," or "the impossibility of being located" (139), a kind of homelessness that is not solely about deprivation, but instead a recognition of the genocidal damage done by the embrace of home: "Homelessness," Moten acknowledges, is undoubtedly "hard." But, he goes on, home is harder. And it's harder on you, and it's harder on every-god-damnbody else too [...]. The horrible difficulties that the settler imposes upon himself are not my first concern, though in the end they are a real thing. It's the general "imposition of severalty," to use Theodore Roosevelt's evil terms, that I'm trying to think about and undermine. He knew that possessive individualism - that self-possessed individual, was as dangerous to Native Americans as a pox-infested blanket. Civilisation, or more precisely civil society, with all its transformative hostility, was mobilized in the service of extinction, of disappearance. The shit is genocidal. Fuck a home in this world, if you think you have one. (140)15 As the many figures of the undercommons attest, no reform or transformation of the university, however far-reaching, could in any way house the maroon or the "cosmic hobo," since their very being and mode of study embodies something that cannot be institutionalized, encircled, or enforced, that refuses the university as a "ministry of information," that imagines knowledge and the world otherwise.

Was this the emancipation of the enslaved, or was it the emancipation of capital? Shareholder whiteness is a cover for law-breaking, an enfranchisement of whiteness over Indigenous and Black modes of relationship. Corporations slithered between legal conceptions of “real” person and “collective aggregate” in ways that allowed them to capture legal and political rights while shirking responsibilities and obligations. The context for these maneuvers was a historical transformation of the concept of personhood and the emergence of the singular individual, harnessing the idea of free labor to the idea of free trade as constituent elements of liberal imperialism.23 By delinking from claims on actual existing assets, which represent the capital of a corporation, and instead organizing around future claims on corporate assets, the share, in the present moment, multiplies the capital in circulation for a given set of tangible assets, such as land, resources, or labor. As these fictitious capitals developed, they were reified and fetishized as things in their own right, and capital itself began to be understood as equally productive as labor. In the United States, this “fetishization of money capital,” the basis of the dominance of market ideologies beginning in the midnineteenth century, grew out of interactions with fetishized whiteness, and the corresponding dominance of nationalist myths of frontier and lost-cause masculinities. Once slave property claims were removed from the balance 160 • c h a p t e r 8 sheet, property claims in future revenues became depersonalized and increasingly immaterial, seeming to take on a personality of their own. The withdrawal of capitalists from the production process, henceforth to be supervised by managers, facilitated the development of shares and other forms of credit, but it also reflected the large-plantation model of management by overseers. The modern corporation bears traces of the antebellum plantation.24 Against an emerging ideal of “shareholder democracy,” corporate power increasingly emphasized managers and directors, technocrats and experts, over a democracy of property owners. Shifting accountability from public governance to the structures of corporate capitalism, shareholder democracy involved a concentration of economic and political power, transforming relationships within and beyond whiteness, splitting the ownership of industrial capital from money capital, multiplying the actual assets of a corporation. A divide between those with rights in the corporation, and those who “are merely ‘owed’,” reflects a divide in whiteness, between the technocratic administrators of racial and colonial capital, and the beneficiaries of imperialist futures. Capturing and controlling corporate assets as common property would fail to resolve the colonial and racial contradictions that shape corporate assets. Railroad unions that actively excluded Black workers from membership and employment, sometimes striking to demand the elimination of Black workers, fulfilled shareholder whiteness.25 In the post-emancipation era, corporate property was defined through legislation and judicial reasoning, rated and regulated by state institutions, the sanctity of individual property claims upheld, in the final instance, by the police and the army. Compulsory Black labor, justified by notions of Black indebtedness to the United States, shaped a transition to a new racial regime. This transition took place in a context of mass white terrorism under state sanction; Ida B. Wells pointed to the legal impunities of racist violence as a constituent feature of the law itself. Expansion of police powers informed the Indian Appropriations Act, passed by Congress in March 1871, in which Congress declared that it would unilaterally suspend the treaty process with tribal nations, thereby evacuating the international diplomatic protocols governing the U. S. “national” interior. While the United States continued to acknowledge the presence of “independent tribes, nations, or powers” it would not recognize these as distinct political actors “within the territory of the United States,” expanding the scope and claims of the federal government.26 S h a r e hol de r W h i t e n e s s • 161 While the United States was suspending diplomatic relations with Indigenous nations, a debate over the legal status of corporations was shaped, in part, by relations of debt. Amidst land grants to railroad corporations, and a growing international market in railroad securities, U. S. courts began to reconceive the corporation as an entity apart from its shareholders, focusing on the terms of contract between the corporation and its shareholders. If the corporation was a person, it was indentured to its shareholders. This was a very different form of debt than the racial and civilizational debt invoked to valuate Indigenous and Black modes of relationship. Corporate debt was, instead, an enabling sort of debt.27

The number of leaks of classified information reported as potential crimes by federal agencies reached record high levels during the first two years of the Trump Administration, according to data released by the Justice Department last week.

Agencies transmitted 120 leak referrals to the Justice Department in 2017, and 88 leak referrals in 2018, for an average of 104 per year. By comparison, the average number of leak referrals during the Obama Administration (2009–2016) was 39 per year.

Both parties might engage in secret reassurance in the face of domestic political opposition. This scenario resembles “mutual assured destruction” (MAD) in which the risk of punishment deters both sides from defecting. From the perspective of the initiator, this scenario is preferable to one in which he alone faces domestic punishment. Nevertheless, according to my proposed mechanism, the adversary should not see the secret channel as credibly revealing the initiator’s cooperative intentions, as the adversary is likely to be self-deterred from exposing. Yet, even in these MAD-like situations, the secret channel may be credible because a third party, such as journalists, mediators, or disgruntled insiders, can reveal the secret negotiations. The risk of such a disclosure, in other words, “must come from somewhere outside the threatener’s control . . . [I]t is an ingredient in the situation” that neither side can “entirely control.”40 Third-party actors may intentionally reveal information about secret talks and concessions because of ideological or political convictions, or they may unintentionally leak information without realizing the potentially adverse consequences. The level of risk may be higher for democratic initiators because they have less control over the media and their countries likely contain more players with access to the secret information.

The analogous situation in deterrence theory seems to be what Schelling calls the “threat that leaves something to chance” that creates what Robert Powell describes as “autonomous risk.” This element of risk exists beyond the control of the parties involved, suggesting that the magnitude of the chance taken affects the credibility of the action. As Powell explains, “[t]he expected cost of taking a step-that-leaves-something-to-chance varies with the level of the autonomous risk that taking the step creates. If, therefore, the risk is sufficiently small, the expected cost of taking the step may be less than the expected cost of submitting.”41 When the risk of undesirable disclosure is high, the credibility of the initiator’s signal for cooperation is stronger. Accordingly, leaders who undertake secret reassurance do so when their intentions to cooperate are sincere. Indeed, the risk of revelation from such exogenous actors is absolutely necessary in these MAD-like situations in order to make the logic of secret reassurance work from the perspective of the adversary. Incurring such risks reveals leader types because an insincere leader will not risk the costs of secret reassurance, given that other actors beyond his control can impose significant political costs on him at any point through revelation.42

Moreover, information on nuclear postures may leak (perhaps intentionally to help strengthen deterrence) or be stolen. Intelligence collectors gather data about other states’ arsenals using a variety of tools, many of which are growing ever-more capable as surveillance technology improves. If this information is rarely if ever shared with the public, civil society and academic researchers combine what governments provide with what they and others observe, including data gathered from leaks, open-source intelligence, and other materials to estimate arsenals and strategies.11 Indeed, the capacity for open source estimations has become even more robust as monitoring and verification technologies have become more and more accessible. The difficulty of keeping at least some information confidential can encourage states to be more transparent themselves, for instance to reduce the bureaucratic costs of classification and to better control the message when information makes it out regardless.12

Computing devices had been used in communications applications in USSR since the 1950s, with missile defence systems (M-40) communicating to remote terminals sending radar data over hundreds of kilometres away, and later the launch in 1972 of a data telecommunication network to serve the needs of the Russian Railways. By the early 1980s, the USSR began to use computer networks to connect with the world outside, testing connections with Australia and the United States. Further commercial networks appeared through the early 1990s. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation and other states inherited a vast network of telephone and data connections. Albeit not state of the art in a global sense, this network served as an initial backbone for the development of the Internet in post-Soviet countries, playing a major role in future network development in former Soviet countries and Eastern Europe.

The Soviet attitude towards communication technologies was described to be driven by telephony policy that was targeted along with other media policies, at the surveillance and maintenance of control through keeping the sector underdeveloped. The resulting concentration of access to media among the ruling elite, the nomenklatura (Vartanova, ), necessarily created an informational divide between the ruling caste and other castes. Still, digitisation and technological development was seen as scientific development rather than as a threat to the political status quo; although it allowed some development in the sector, it still limited connectivity with other countries.

The most extreme version of this techno-authoritarianism exists in Xinjiang, where the Chinese Communist Party is carrying out a brutal campaign of genocide and repression against the ethnic Uighur population. However, many of these tools are used nationwide. COVID-related measures have further enhanced the Chinese Communist Party’s control over citizen movements.

Unlike in the United States and other democratic societies, there are no legal constraints on the Chinese Communist Party’s ability to surveil its citizens. While China has passed a number of laws and regulations pertaining to cybersecurity, data, and artificial intelligence, the law serves a different purpose in China than in democratic states. Unlike the democratic concept of “rule of law,” where the law constrains even the government, China has a system of “rule by law.” The Chinese Communist Party stands above the law, and the law is a vehicle to aid the Party in governing.

4 Beijing calls foreign security concerns over Huawei “lame excuse[s]” and pure “politics.”4 At the same time, China expresses similar concerns domestically over the incorporation of foreign technology into its networks. Security is paramount for Xi, who has repeatedly declared that “without cyber security, there will be no national security.”5 Accordingly, he argues for adoption only of foreign technology that is “controllable” — while leaders at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) stress that foreign technology networks tend not to be “controllable.”6 China must therefore build its own networks that are both “independent and controllable.”7

5 Commercial and academic Chinese sources suggest that the international community’s security concerns over Chinese telecommunications might not be misplaced, and that Beijing might see telecommunications and other commercial networks as means to project offensive power globally. Xi presents IT as a key part of China’s military-civil fusion strategy: In 2018, he said that “military-civil fusion in cybersecurity and informatization is the key field and frontier field for military-civil fusion.”8 Downstream, Qin An, director of the China Institute of Cyberspace Strategy, argued in 2016 that “due to the highly monopolistic nature of information technology systems, it is unlikely that there will be two different systems for military and civilian use … it is particularly necessary [for China] to integrate military and civilian resources through a military-civil fusion system.”9

When digital technologies are installed in an organization, they interact with organizational and managerial characteristics, specifically with the strategy and the legacy of an organization, as well as with the resources, the processes, the values, and the culture of an organization (Dewan et al. ), without forgetting positive attitudes towards change and technology (Dery et al. ). All these organizational antecedents are integrated and interact with environmental antecedents and the characteristics of the country, the industry, and the consumers. These characteristics include the legal conditions and the infrastructure of a country, as well as its regulatory frameworks and interventions (Cortet et al. ), and the dynamics of an industry driven by technology, which includes the changing technological panorama of a country (Alos-Simo et al. ). The above in no way ensures the success of many digital transformations within firms. In a recent study, Witschel et al. () demonstrated that the innovation of the business model is an effective way of continuing to be competitive in the digital era. To do so, these authors defended the role that dynamic capabilities play in the innovation of the business model, as well as contextual factors, leadership and business mentalities. Moreover, Wen et al. () affirmed that manufacturing firms with greater viability are more adaptable to DT and tend to implement differentiated competitive strategies, for which reason they concluded that the effect of incentivizing innovation is greater for firms of higher viability. The antecedents of DT (digital orientation, digital intensity, and digital maturity) were also analyzed to understand their influence on the financial success of firms (Nasisri et al. 2022). These authors maintained that digital orientation and digital intensity in themselves contributed nothing to the financial success of firms; and digital maturity acted as a mediator between digital orientation and the financial success of firms, and between digital intensity and the financial success of firms. DT, therefore, presented important opportunities for firms, but also for entrepreneurs. In the case of digital entrepreneurship, Chatterjee et al. (2022) provided evidence that perceived utility, perceived ease of use, and willingness to introduce strong and significant changes all affected digital entrepreneurship.

In addition, a DT is shaped by the characteristics of the consumer, in particular, the demand of the digital consumer. Consumers place increasing trust in digital technologies throughout their daily lives and personal interactions (Brynjolfsson et al. ) and expect ubiquitous access to virtual resources (Benlian et al. ). Both the appearance of digital technologies and their diffusion have led to greater data availability (on these aspects, see Vial , p.123), which has in turn increased the importance of automated learning and the analysis of data for organizations (Weichert ). These data enable firms to offer services that better respond to the needs of their clients and to complete processes in more efficient ways for their own competitive advantage. Thus, some firms use social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to institute customer care operations and then use the data that are generated from these interactions to appeal to client sentiment in real time. Finally, the digital industrial transformation, known as the fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0 implies a change of paradigm from a hyperconnected and centralized manufacturing ecosystem to a decentralized one (Li et al. ). Under Industry 4.0, intelligent physical objects, decentralized subsystems, and even human components are perfectly integrated within an interoperable, hyperconnected, and decentralized production system (see Hodapp and Hanelt 2022) that is capable of adapting in real time and in an autonomous manner to environmental change (Ardito et al. ; Sanchez et al. ). Khan and Javaid (2022) considered that the IoT was a critical component of Industry 4.0, which improved product manufacturing efficiency, because it was done with fewer errors and costs. Somohano-Rodiríguez et al. (2022), analyzing the role that enabling digital Industry 4.0 (I4.0) technologies played in SME innovations, found that strategic planning advanced I4.0 and that enabling Information and Communication digital technologies promoted innovation more intensely than enabling digital technologies for integration and advanced robotics. Bhatia and Kumar () analyzed the critical success factors of I4.0, highlighting “data governance” as the most critical factor.

Instead, we begin our analysis by looking at the broader global system in which knowledge and information operate: a settler-colonial system that extracts wealth, knowledge, and culture from economically marginalised communities and inequitably redistributes their economic fruits to the wealthiest and most powerful. This approach is in line with that activists and critical scholars have long made of open-access movements: that the central focus on liberty values ignores concerns about equality; that a  as a neutral landscape where every person can reap its riches ignores its real role in exploiting the labour and bodies of people of colour, women, people from the Global South, and the impoverished. We now know that the ‘public domaining’ of Indigenous knowledge about local flora and fauna, traditional medicines, folklore, or traditional cultural expressions has enabled Big Pharma to take Indigenous knowledge, transform it into IP, and become the exclusive owner of that knowledge: a phenomenon known as .

Abolitionist creativity also disagrees with an ideological belief that runs through some prominent segments of the open-access movements, namely that the system once worked well, but that ‘unfortunately, our IP regimes have from their original purposes’. For the colonised, for Indigenous Peoples whose collective knowledge has been ransacked, for communities forced into oppressive trade agreements (e.g. ), for the rising number of  working in global supply chains powered by intangibles, it is hard to see how the IP system ever worked for them – or what decades of reformist attempts inside IP law in the US have accomplished. For abolitionists, the system is not broken and in need of reform, tweaking, and tinkering. It is working as it was designed to work, as a settler-colonial legal and economic structure. And we are running out of time and of magical thinking waiting for public policy to somehow turn favourable in a corporate-dominated .

Imagine a world where no one goes to work, where all economic activities cease, and the global workforce takes an indefinite pause. It’s a scenario that might seem unimaginable, but exploring its potential consequences is very much thought-provoking.

In this comprehensive article, we will delve into the scenario of what would happen if everyone stopped working, both for a single day and for an extended period. We’ll cover the economic repercussions, the breakdown of the economic system, the role of money, workforce dynamics, the loss of , the rise of drug-related issues, the need for fundamental changes in the world system, food shortages, healthcare challenges, transportation problems, the impact on essential utilities like electricity and water supply, and the potential for a self-sufficient society based on agriculture and local production.

Venture into a bustling artery of any capitalist society and you're likely to find yourself enveloped by its palpable manifestations: shimmering advertisements seducing you with the promise of the latest commodities, financial institutions promising safe havens for your wealth, and corporations locked in fierce  for your patronage.

It's an undeniable reality that capitalism sculpts our tangible world. However, what about the intangible realms of our thoughts and emotions? A fresh wave of research is gradually uncovering the subtle yet profound ways in which capitalism shapes our cognitive processes, emotional responses, and behavioral patterns.

In which I explain what I meant by my comment to  from Doug Johnson. I commented, "If the word is not the thing, how do you evaluate the sentence 'Dragons are green?'" It's probably foundational for semiotics that the word is a sign or symbol, and in some way stands for or represents something else. This separation allows us to meaningfully use words like 'red' without particularly worrying about the reality of whatever they represent. But the question of whether essence implies existence shaped much of 20th century philosophy. What do you say about the meaning of words that represent or refer to things that don't exist? If the meaning of the word 'dragon' does not depend on representation of or reference to dragons - since there are no dragons - then where does it get its meaning? You might say that 'dragon' is just a fictional example, that we don't need to worry about its meaning, it's just metaphorical. But what about a sentence like (to use Bertrand Russell's famous example) "Brakeless trains are dangerous." It's not fiction, it is, moreover, true, and known to be true, and yet (by virtue of that very fact!) there are no brakeless trains. So, while it's simple and appealing to say, "The symbol is NOT the thing symbolized; the word is NOT the thing; the map is NOT the territory it stands for," there are important senses in which it's not true. In some important senses, the thing is the thing symbolized. When we talk about 'tiger' we are in fact talking about the concept 'tiger', which is just what is contained in the word 'tiger', and not about things in the world at all. When we talk about 'the tiger' we are (Russell would say) making two claims: that there is a thing that exists, and that it is an instance of this concept we call 'tiger'. All the referring happens in the word 'the', not the word 'tiger'. You might think, this is all meaningless babble. Who cares? But it has a direct and immediate impact on how we think about learning. On the simple picture, you just show people some tigers (or trains, or dragons) and they learn about them. Or (since that's very inconvenient) you simply give them a series of propositions about tigers, trains and dragons ("dragons are green", "tigers are orange", etc.) and that teaches you about the world. Except - it doesn't. It teaches you about language. Most of what we learn about in school is language, not reality. Math - science - these are all disciplines of language. In a very real sense, a traditional (text-based, languages lased) education is an education based on fiction. Very useful fiction, to be sure, since most other people are willing participants in that fiction, and it helps us do useful things. But it renders us unusually vulnerable to propaganda and media, since we can convince people of some reality merely through the use of words - actual evidence or experience is not required. We buy into beliefs like 'the world is described by numbers', 'if it can't be measured it can't be managed' and other variations on the old positivist principle of meaningfulness. Most of the work in late 20th century philosophy goes to show that meaning and truth are embedded in the representational system - that, in other words, the word is the thing the word describes, the map is the terrain (if you don't believe me, try walking across an international border). van Fraassen on how explanations in science are descriptive mostly of our expectations. Derrida on how the meaning of the word is based largely on the range of alternative possible words that could be used. Quine on how translations are based on guesses (or what he called 'analytic hypotheses'). None of this implies that there is no reality, that there is no physical world, that there is no experience. Of course there is a great deal of all three. It's just that the supposedly privileged connection between word and reality - the one represented by 'The symbol is NOT the thing symbolized' - is an illusion. And that these representational and referential systems are elaborate fictions. This is not new knowledge. It is very old knowledge. And as the Taoists used to say, knowing that these distinctions we find in language represent our interpretations of the world, represent our projections onto the world, is very powerful. Very enlightening. Because it frees us from the absolutes we believed ruled us with an iron grip. What people thought were right and wrong, for example (which is why we can make sense of how something that was once 'right' - slavery, say - is now 'wrong'). What people thought were plants or animals. Sentient or senseless. Planets or non-planets. This is not an endorsement of relativism. It is merely the assertion that what is represented in language is fiction. If we rely solely on language - solely on what were told - then anything can be true. Look what happens to viewers of Fox News! What it tells us is that we cannot rely on words, on language, on mathematics, on representational systems. We have to, in our own lives, appeal to our own experiences, our own connection with the world itself. The Taoists would say we have to connect to 'The Way' - the ineffable reality behind human descriptions. But it's not an appeal to the mystical. It's an appeal to the world that lies beyond our descriptions of the world. In an important sense, then, I want to say that semiotics is wrong. Not in the sense that it is descriptively false - for no doubt there is a truth (or, as experience shows, many, many truths) in semiotic accounts of meaning and representation. But rather, that semiotics as epistemology, or even ontology, are false. That there is no actual relation of reference or representation, only (within the referential or representative system) a fiction of one. In a sense, we're at the same position today that Descartes was at in 1616 when he said, "I entirely abandoned the study of letters." At that time, knowledge, philosophy and science were in the hands of the Scholastics, who understood the world through finer and finer distinctions and relations between the categories. Descartes descided - and proved, through his sceptical argument - that theirs was a world of fiction, that we would not understand the nature of reality by dividing things over and over again into increasingly arbitrary categories. Descartes (and his contemporaries, for this was a broad social movement) derived an analytical method of dividing the world into parts, and using mathematics, not qualities, to represent this fundamental nature. Now we understand that mathematics is yet another kind of language. We understand that merely measuring the world is to produce a kind of fiction. Though, to be sure, there are many Scholastics in today's world who are like the doctors of medieval times, shuffling their figures in finer and finer dimensions to articulate very precisely one fiction after another. And now a lot of people are pointing to networks or connections (etc) as the new underlying description of reality. But we ought to know by now that networks, too, are a form of fiction, that they are our imposition of this or that order on our perceptions, experiences and reality. When we teach, while it is our job to ensure that our students are well versed in the fictions of the day, for they'll need them in order to socialize and make a living, it is our obligation to ensure that our students are not entrapped by these fictions, that they have it within themselves to touch their own reality, their own physicality, their own experience experience.

Humanity seems to have been thrown into a ‘perfect storm’ of several huge challenges such as global warming, accelerating extinction of species, the corona pandemic and uncontrollable migration streams caused by fossil fuel emissions, overexploitation of natural resources, extreme weather, viruses, and ethnic and religious conflicts. On top of this, there are even signs that liberal democracy is in crisis, far from the days when it was proclaimed irreversibly hegemonic [1]. The challenges mentioned are, by many scientists, some world leaders and a broader audience, considered existential threats in need of urgent action, that is ‘securitization’ [2]. As the causes, effects and adequate reactions upon these threats are contested, there are no given solutions how to ‘de-securitize’ them, neither one by one, no less together. In other words, it is ultimately a question of how government and governance configurations globally, at various levels and settings, choose to decide on the road forward. Although world leaders in the Global North have been desperately fertilizing their economies with heaps of money to recover the still largely fossil-dependent ‘Great Acceleration’, there are in this ‘critical juncture’ also windows of opportunity to enter new paths. How do urban public institutions and actors in market and civil society respond to these crises? Do they only try to reinvent old ideas and practices, or do they search for healthier, more sustainable, democratic and just ways of handling major threats and risks?

In this era of the internet generation, the use of information and communication technology (ICT) has greatly increased. This growth has resulted in the emergence of a knowledge-based society that provides various facilities (for the public) to perform certain activities and processes in a much more transparent, efficient, and smooth manner. The advancement of ICT and the unification of the electronic media and resources in the services sector helped to promote a knowledge-based society on a large scale. Therefore, today, electronic media are being used in almost every field in the world, and concepts like e-governance, e-government, e-education, e-payments, e-transfer, etc. have emerged in global society. Governments benefited from these electronic media as well, allowing them to carry out their activities and processes in a more efficient and transparent manner. So, concepts like e-government and e-governance have emerged and are being utilized to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of government processes and functions. Because the terms "government" and "governance" are both related and work to provide facilities to the common public, these terms are often used interchangeably.

E-governance and e-government are often used interchangeably, and many people consider them to be the same concept, but in reality, these two terms are quite different from each other. The concept of e-government is related to the functioning and processes of the government by implementing ICT. The use of electronic media provides great benefits, like governments adopting electronic media to perform their duties to improve their performance. It ensures transparency and efficiency in various operations. It provides easy access to information for the common public and increases communication between the people and governments. Further, it also ensures the increased participation of the citizens in various government operations. Therefore, the quality of public service is also ensured.

Our project examined the role of smartphones mainly in relation to their consequences for older people and for health. We frequently came across instances where the demographic we focused upon, often people in their 50s to 70s, had elderly parents, in their 90s, who were now frail and needed considerable care. These circumstances provided clear demonstrations of the capacity of smartphones to develop care. In several fieldsites when someone is gravely ill, it seems that today, often the first response of family and friends is to create a WhatsApp group to organise their care. Another part of our project examined the use of smartphones in expressing care over distance for people living far from their parent or the patient. Projects examined the use of visual elements to express affection and consideration such as short health videos through WeChat in China or using stickers through LINE in Japan (Wang and Haapio-Kirk 2021), as a complement to the etiquettes and formality of face-to-face encounters. Another example came from research in a low- income settlement in Kampala, Uganda, that examined the use of mobile money in assisting older people who had remained in the villages and were now faced with health problems (Hawkins forthcoming). We summarised these findings as creating a condition of ‘Care Transcending Distance’ (Miller et al. 2021: 241–244). For example, the researcher in Brazil sometimes sim- ply didn’t know whether a grandmother was referring to the grandchild that lived in Sao Paulo or the one living in New York (Duque 2022). The way the grandmother talked about communicating with them by WhatsApp was just the same.¶ Precisely how people used WhatsApp groups to monitor and care for older people would vary. In Yaoundé, Cameroon Awondo reported how retired people are closely monitored by their children, a practice which may either involve having them live with the children, who can thereby keep a better eye on them (avoir un oeil sur eux), or instead, involve following them in very active family WhatsApp groups where one or two children often play a sentinel role. In all these examples, the obligations of kinship are given manifest form by a smartphone app. Such cases make it relatively easy for governments to claim that the development of contact tracing apps on smartphones is itself an expression of care. For example, Japan had already developed a system of phone messages to alert people to impending emergencies such as tsunamis and earthquakes (Haapio-Kirk forthcoming). All of this suggests that quite apart from contact tracing apps, there were many ways in which the smartphone had been adopted and adapted as an instrument of care