Best of the Spectator – Détails, épisodes et analyse

Freddy Gray speaks to writer and author Karen Hao, whose new book Empire of AI looks at a new, ominous age of empire with OpenAI. On the podcast they discuss the impacts of artificial intelligence on society and democracy and how Open AI founder Sam Altman has become a controversial figure. 

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Sam Leith's guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Robert Macfarlane. In his new book Is A River Alive? he travels from the cloud forests of Ecuador to the pollution-choked rivers of Chennai and the threatened waterways of eastern Canada. He tells Sam what he learned along the journey – and why we need to reconceptualise our relationship with the natural world.

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Daria Lavelle was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and raised in New York. Her work explores themes of identity and belonging and her short stories have appeared in The Deadlands, Dread Machine, and elsewhere. Daria is the author of the critically acclaimed new novel Aftertaste which explores food, grief and the uncanny. 

On the podcast she tells Liv about her 'inexplicable' love of olives as a child in Ukraine, trying to make it as a writer in New York and how to write about food without it feeling contrived.

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The Spectator’s Katy Balls, Michael Gove and Kate Andrews were joined by special guests Robert Jenrick and Jonathan Ashworth for a live podcast, recorded at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster.

The main topic of discussion was, of course, Donald Trump, whose inauguration has ushered in a new world disorder. His ‘shock and awe’ foreign policy has sent Europe scrambling as it tries to work out who will be responsible for ensuring its security in the future. We have seen a move away from the idealism that has defined foreign policy in the last decade and towards ‘realism’, with countries committing to boots on the ground and greater defence spending. Are Labour right to increase their defence pledge? Is Kemi Badenoch being energetic enough in holding the government to account – not just on its foreign policy, but on its record in government so far? And – closer to home – how worried are the Tories about the rise of Reform?

This discussion was originally recorded on Wednesday 26 February.

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In this week’s episode:Why is there a lack of faith in western leaders? Spectator deputy editor Freddy Gray, Callum Williams from the Economist & Harvard professor Barbara Kellerman discuss why the world feel so leaderless. (00:44)
Also this week:How do you escape the church of scientology? Spectator Columnist Mary Wakefield talks with former scientologist Claire Headley about her life inside the organisation and how hard it was to leave. (15:07)
And finally:
Should we all give boxing a go?
Anil Bhoyrul & James Amos organiser of Boodles Boxing Ball on the strange world of White Collar Boxing. (27:40)
Hosted by Lara Prendergast & William MooreProduced by Sam Holmes
Subscribe to The Spectator today and get a £20 Amazon gift voucher: www.spectator.co.uk/voucher

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In this week's Book Club podcast I'm joined by the New York Times's Andrea Elliott, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in New York City. She tells me how she came to spend seven years reporting on a single, homeless family in Brooklyn, how she negotiated her duty to observe rather than participate – and what their telenovela-like experiences tell us about American history.

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Winston speaks with writer, musician and host of Conversations with Coleman, Coleman Hughes. They discuss blasphemy in the music industry, counter-culture, race, reparations, colourblindness and much more...

Presented by Winston Marshall 
Produced by Sam Holmes

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China's social credit system is notorious. This Black Mirror-esque network supposedly gives citizens a score, based on an opaque algorithm that feeds on data from each person's digital and physical lives. With one billion Chinese accessing the Internet and the growing prevalence of facial recognition, it means that their every move can be monitored – from whether they cross the road dangerously, to whether they play too many video games and buy too much junk food. Those with low scores have lower socio-economic status, and may not be able to board planes and trains, or send their children to school. It's all part of a Chinese Communist Party directive to further control and mould its citizens.

Except it's not. Speak to any Chinese person and you'll quickly realise that their lives are not dictated by some score, with their every move monitored and live-feeding to some kind of governmental evaluation of their social worth. In fact, the western narrative of the social credit system has deviated so far from the situation on the ground that Chinese Internet users went viral mocking western reporting on Weibo: '-278 points: Immediate execution'.

Telling Cindy Yu this story on this episode of Chinese Whispers is Vincent Brussee, a researcher at the Mercator Institute for China Studies (Merics), who has recently released a detailed paper looking at what the social credit system really entails on the ground (Merics was part of the group of European organisations and individuals sanctioned by Beijing last year).

The reality of social credit is unfortunately much less exciting and sexy than you might fear. For one, the technology simply isn't there.  ' When the social credit system was envisioned, or when it was designed in the early 2000s, government files in China were still held in dusty drawers… In 2019 when I worked in China I still had to use a fax machine. That was the first time in my life that I ever saw a fax machine', Vincent says. The system is not linked with someone's digital data, but fundamentally only their interactions with the government (for example, permits and licences). Data that e-commerce and social media companies collect on their users, which must be extensive, are not connected with the government's own data (probably because of the CCP's growing suspicion of Chinese tech firms).

But more fundamentally, the social credit system is not just one system. 'It's more of an umbrella term', Jeremy Daum says. He is the senior research fellow at Yale Law School's Paul Tsai China Center, who also runs the blog China Law Translate (which does what it says on the tin). Jeremy has spent years myth-busting the social credit system. He says that for some institutions, social credit is a financial record ('credit' as in 'credit card'); for others, it is a way of black-marking unscrupulous companies that in the past fell short of, say, food safety standards (a particularly sensitive topic in China, given the milk powder scandal). In fact, social credit often functionally works as a way of determining how trustworthy a company is, like a government-run Yelp or Trustpilot system (the Merics report found that most targets of are companies rather than individuals).

So how did reporters get the social credit story so wrong? In reality, though the social credit system itself is fairly boring, the way this narrative exploded and took hold is a cautionary tale for the West in our understanding of China. 'The western coverage of social credit has hardly been coverage of social credit at all. It is coverage of us, seen through a mirror of China', says Jeremy, arguing that it tapped into our deep fear of unbridled technology and surveillance. On the episode Cindy also speaks to Louise Matsakis, a freelance journalist covering tech and China, who was one of the first to point out the disparity in the social credit narrative and the reality on the ground. Together, they unpack what lessons there are for studying, understanding and reporting on China from this whole saga. 

For further reading, here are the sources we mention in the episode:

- The Chinese Whispers episode with Jeremy Daum on the fightback against facial recognition:  https://www.spectator.co.uk/po...

- The Merics report:  https://merics.org/en/report/c...

- China Law Translate's Social Credit section:  https://www.chinalawtranslate....

- Louise Matsakis in WIRED, ' How the West Got China's Social Credit System Wrong':  https://www.wired.com/story/ch...

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John Connolly, The Spectator’s news editor, speaks to historian Anthony Seldon about whether Boris Johnson might resign:

‘Why on earth would he want to carry on and have more of this humiliation? Why wouldn’t want to take the dignified path of saying: “I’m going to fall on my sword.”'

On the rest of the show, Spectator contributor Owen Matthews and our Wild Life columnist Aidan Hartley discuss how far Putin is to blame for global food shortages, the Refugee Council’s Enver Solomon says the Home Office is in crisis, and sports journalist Neil Clark explains why, despite the danger, the Isle of Man TT should be celebrated, not banned.

Watch the full episode at: www.spectator.co.uk/tv

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On this week's episode: 

Katy Balls reads her article on the cadets gunning for the Tory leadership. (00:52)

John Connolly reads his investigation into the new warehouse ghettos where Britain is sending migrants. (06:36) 

Gus Carter reads his piece on why he's not getting invited to any dinner parties. (12:05)

Presented by Angus Colwell.

Produced by Angus Colwell and Sam Holmes.

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