Data

There is a scene in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian in which "the judge" -- a psychopathic killer as well as a savant in every known field, and surely one of literature's most unsettling characters -- is glimpsed scribbling in a notebook. He is obsessively documenting specimens of various sorts that he has observed, catalogued, and killed. Some are birds, which he has shot and stuffed. Some are leaves, which he has pressed between the pages of a book. All are dead, by the time the judge is through with them. They have ceased their independent existence and been filed away to his satisfaction as data.

One of the other characters asks the judge why he does this. His answer is simple. "Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge," he says, "exists without my consent."

It is a sentence that might serve as the motto of every totalitarian and genocidal regime in history. When a state becomes dominated by a single faction or cult of personality, it replicates on a macro scale the obsessions of a single egomaniacal and psychopathic individual. The murderous regimes of the past century have thus been like the mind of "the judge" writ large. They have a passion for information that reflects in truth a desire to control -- a need to suppress the plurality and mystery of human experience by channeling it into definite and categorizable forms.

The Khmer Rouge, for one, made a practice of taking a photo of every prisoner who passed through its notorious S21 prison. The regime thus left behind thousands of images of the staring faces of the people they intended to torture, to force into signing false confessions, and ultimately to execute. It is hard to fathom why they would do this. A clue perhaps can be found in the passage from McCarthy's novel. Cambodia's genocidal authorities treated human beings the way the judge treats the leaves pressed between the pages of his book, or the birds mounted in his knapsack. It catalogued and filed away their images, before taking their lives.

Modern technologies have only made it more possible for regimes to live out this fantasy of total control over data, and thus of total control over human beings. When we read today about contemporary governments using facial recognition software to monitor people in their territories, I am reminded of the haunting photographs the Khmer Rouge left of its victims. In many ways, Pol Pot's regime was simply attempting to achieve with twentieth century technology what modern artificial intelligence has now rendered possible for megalomaniacal rulers.

What Cambodia's "brother number one" would not have given, after all, to be able to feed every picture of the people his regime killed into a machine learning algorithm -- perhaps one increasingly able over time to identify people who belong to ethnic minorities, come from foreign countries, display intellectual tendencies, or represent other groups the Khmer Rouge systematically targeted.

This is what the contemporary rulers of the People's Republic of China have apparently been able to achieve. They have mined enough surveillance data of people in the country's western provinces that they can reportedly now use artificial intelligence to identify members of the Uighur minority by their image alone. This information allows the regime to conduct its racist program of mass surveillance and repression against Uighur Muslims -- a campaign that has already led to the detention of more than a million people in concentration camps, and which may be spiraling toward genocide.

So too, Burmese officials have apparently made a push for several decades to photograph Rohingya families in several northern states of the country. According to a recent report by the Burma Human Rights Network (BHRN), no other ethnic groups were subjected to the same procedure, in the places where these strange censuses were taken. The pictures that resulted from the push, many of which are included in BHRN's report (with the faces blurred to protect privacy), take on an eery poignancy in light of the events that followed -- the deliberate mass expulsion of the Rohingya in 2017, amounting to genocide.

Once again, the drive for total information -- the cataloguing of reality -- eventually became a drive to eliminate the people who had been catalogued.

By the same token, as authorities become increasingly unaccountable and seek to extend their power, their desire for total knowledge increases as well. This is a dynamic that proceeds in democratic societies no less than in contemporary authoritarian ones. As the title character of Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost rhetorically asks his protogé, fellow CIA man Harry Hubbard: "Where is the end to all we can be legitimately interested in?" He is making the case that the U.S. intelligence services must become "the mind of America," soaking up all possible information, from every field of study.

It is no coincidence that Harlot is speaking here on behalf of an agency that has -- time and again throughout its history -- violated legal and ethical limits, including those set by human rights. Much in the manner of despots elsewhere, the CIA has in the last century operated a torture program, plotted assassinations and coups against foreign leaders, and carried out a targeted killing program in countries with which our government is not officially at war.

Much like the fictional Harlot, real-life U.S. law enforcement agencies are going data-mad, increasingly coming to rely on facial recognition technologies to conduct their operations. ICE is reportedly mining vast troves of data from state drivers' licenses in order to find undocumented immigrants. The FBI uses facial recognition software to identify criminal suspects, despite documented racial and gender disparities in these programs' accuracy. In this way, the agency is exposing people on a mass scale to the risk of profiling-by-AI.

And this week, U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced that it was planning to step up the use of similar facial recognition technologies at ports of entry, helping the agency to "vet[...] international travelers." This "vetting" of who has the right to enter and leave the country will take place under the command of a president who has called for -- and implemented -- a "ban" on Muslim travelers, let us not forget. This is also a president who runs an executive branch that is now holding an excess of 50,000 people a day in administrative immigration detention facilities -- none of whom has ever been tried and convicted of a crime.

Even if we cannot draw a direct moral equivalence, the parallels are not hard to discern between what is happening in our country, and China's present-day concentration camps in Xinjiang, or Burma's apartheid system for internally-displaced Rohingya -- or, for that matter, the facilities that India's right-wing government is now reportedly planning to construct in the Muslim-majority state of Assam. In all three cases in Asia, the policies governments are implementing against their own people have been justified with the same rhetorical tropes that Trump routinely employs -- associating ethnic minorities with "terrorism," comparing "illegal immigrants" to disease or vermin, and casting doubt on the citizenship of people simply because they do not belong to the dominant ethnic group.

I wonder sometimes if the Khmer Rouge were still in power, what they would do in this time, the dawning age of AI. No doubt they would scan those thousands of photos of the political prisoners in their jails -- those faces of the people they killed, and record them digitally. Perhaps they would feed them into a machine learning algorithm and tell it to look for people who bear the same visual traits. This technology would then go hunting through surveillance images for other "traitors," "spies," and "foreign agents" on the theory that like resembles like.

It would find people who looked scared. It would find people who looked defiant. It would find images of human bravery and sorrow and despair and anger. It would be confronted with the unknowable multiplicity and variety of human beings as they actually are -- manifold and never fully comprehensible or predictable.

In healthy societies and people, this complexity of human beings is one of the joys as well as inevitable challenges of life. It is something ultimately to celebrate or at the very least to accept.

When we come to be governed by people who cannot tolerate the existence of things outside themselves, however -- who insist on people being categorized and ordered within their own minds, as the price for having the right to exist at all -- then we are in grave trouble. We are already well advanced on the road to some of the worst crimes of which human beings are capable -- apartheid, genocide, and ethnic cleansing.