jasmine sun

@jasmine.bsky.social

3047 Followers 243 Following

anthropologist of disruption / writing jasmi.news / san francisco

Hi! Thank you for the thoughtful note, and for coming on Thursday! I'll preface by saying that this happy hour series is pretty casual / not a real organization or anything, so Clara and I haven't put a ton of thought into the right policies/norms. So I'll just reason out loud a bit. But my initial stream-of-consciousness reaction is something like this: I have no personal attachment/relationship to Samo or Palladium, and he was invited by someone else I invited. But when you say Samo Burja / Palladium are "fascist," what do you mean? I haven't read much of their stuff, but looking at the Palladium website now, it doesn't seem overtlyfascist. But maybe I'm not looking at the right thing? One of my goals with these is to bridge various Bay Area intellectual scenes that might not otherwise meet or talk, including people with pretty different politics. Like personally, I strongly disagree with groups like the tech right and effective altruists, but they're both influential parts of the intellectual scene here, so therefore I'm still curious to understand them better. That means I have a high bar for "barring attendees based on political beliefs" if there isn't interpersonal harm/bad behavior. While the median attendee is probably a liberal, most people have some beliefs that someone else in the room considers noxious. Also, I personally don't want to be in the business of defining fascism or adjudicating political boundaries to host a happy hour—I think kicking one person would lead to others weaponizing that to try to kick others out, etc. At the same time, I want you and your friends to feel comfortable & excited to come to these, and it'd suck if you stopped, or broadly if we got a reputation from the left of being right-wing/fascist/etc. (I really feel like it's mostly normie libs, and it feels kind of unfair to be labeled as "fascist-adjacent" for having like 2 maybe-fascists attending among like 50-100 other people.) I do think we should have a zero-tolerance…
Those who are staying in the US, meanwhile, say they feel exhausted. "I've been in the US for almost a decade," a Chinese-born data scientist and UC Berkeley graduate told me. "Many of us left to escape that political environment, and are the most liberal-leaning Chinese you can find. We spend so much time going through the American education and immigration system — and now the US says it doesn't welcome us either. It feels like we have this talent that no one wants."
Divyansh Kaushik, a tech and national security expert at Beacon Global Strategies, told me that America needs policies that are a "scalpel, not a sledgehammer." He recognizes the risk of espionage, citing China's 2017 National Intelligence Law, which legally obligates all Chinese citizens to "support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work." But Kaushik considers blanket bans on foreign nationals just as counterproductive. He instead pointed to policies that restrict students from specific Chinese-military-affiliated universities from obtaining visas. "There will be false positives and false negatives," but the US can mitigate the risk without overreaching, he told me. Other experts believe that nationality-based anti-espionage efforts are more security theater than reality. Yangyang Cheng, a physicist and China researcher at Yale Law School, told me that AI risks "are not exclusive to Chinese firms or unique products of the Chinese authoritarian system." She cited examples of American professors who helped build biometric technologies for ethnic oppression in Xinjiang, arguing that we should be focused on preventing harm wherever it originates. She thinks the TikTok ban makes the same mistakes. "The focus on the Chinese government's subpoena power overlooks the many ways American companies cooperate with the state," she wrote for Wired.
Concerns over Chinese spying have been on the rise since the early 2010s, when the US escalated its efforts to address Chinese cyberattacks. In 2018, the Department of Justice under Donald Trump undertook a controversial "China Initiative," which aimed to prevent industrial espionage in the research community by investigating hundreds of academics suspected of having ties to China. It found only a few cases of actual spying. The plurality of investigations, Bloomberg and MIT Technology Review reported in 2021, involved undisclosed funding and affiliations to Chinese institutions, while "just three claim that secrets were handed over to Chinese agents," Bloomberg wrote. Instead of catching spies, many cases just indicted professors for bureaucratic oversights — those found guilty claimed they didn't disclose their funding because they didn't think they had to. The China Initiative's slipshod approach upended many people's lives. Gang Chen, a nanotechnologist, and Anming Hu, a physicist, were both US-based tenured professors who were arrested by the FBI, only for authorities to later realize they had made a mistake. During the yearlong investigations, Chen was barred from his university's campus, and Hu was suspended without pay and his work authorization revoked. (Though both were later reinstated to their positions, Chen said he would no longer take federal research funding). The suicide of the neuroscientist Jane Ying Wu last year came after a China Initiative investigation shut down her lab.
As a tech worker, she has turned down AI-related job opportunities to avoid scrutiny for herself and her family from both the US and Chinese governments. She also tries to downplay her Chinese accent and cultural identity. "A lot of Chinese nationals don't agree with the Chinese government" on issues like Uyghur repression in Xinjiang, she said. "But in social situations, you have to vocalize it passionately just to lower the guard people have toward you." Sarah affirmed this sentiment. She hoped to contribute to global AI safety work by bridging the information gap between Chinese- and English-language researchers and policymakers, but the hawkish environment has made collaboration difficult. "Whenever you say anything neutral about China, people will think, 'That's pro-China, and this person is bought by the CCP,'" she said.
Meanwhile, the US faces a critical talent shortage in AI. A 2021 report by the National Security Commission on AI found that the number of US-born STEM and AI doctorates is not nearly keeping pace with the industry's growth. While 42% of top-tier AI researchers worked in the US in 2022, only 18% of them received their undergraduate degree here, Macro Polo's AI Talent Tracker found. China is currently the largest source of these top-tier researchers — and more are choosing to stay in China. "For the first time in our lifetime, the United States risks losing the competition for talent on the scientific frontiers," the NSCAI report says. "Immigration reform is a national security imperative."
Screenshot of article titled "Silicon Valley's new Red Scare"
Vibes we would like to see: The NIST standard for lighting a cigarette. Three felonies a day. Getting a text and making yourself wait before responding. The move-fast-break-things to extremely-specific-content-moderation-policy pipeline. The internationally approved frequencies for amateur ham radio operators to contact the International Space Station. Not selling a painting, but selling the rules for how to make a painting. Surviving on the 2b2t anarchist Minecraft server.
Easy moral-political spectrums can’t answer these questions; tech media ought to outgrow its beloved hero/villain stories. I’m practicing radical openness instead: looking strange ideas directly in the eye, taking them to coffee, inviting them to dance. Living with my Notes app always open, listening well and asking good questions. Indulging the senses. Cultivating epistemic openness: independence, nonalignment, the ability to tear down and reconstruct inherited beliefs.⁴ My all-time favorite aphorism: Strong opinions, weakly held. Writing not as a job but a way of life.
Neo-cities: When do people start new cities vs. reforming existing ones? Is Singapore an urbanist paradise or technofascist dystopia? What can the US learn from Special Economic Zones? Can you do urban renewal right? What’s the difference between Esmeralda and California Forever? Why do most charter cities fail? How might they succeed? 21st century privacy: Why do teens have so many randos on Find My Friends? Do CCTVs work? Who ought we most fear surveillance from: corporations, the government, or each other? Should I tell Claude my secrets? Should I use a period tracking app? How much will people trade privacy for safety and convenience? What is being lost, and how might we recover it? The politics of progress: Where did IFP come from? Where do the left and right factions disagree? Is Trump e/acc? What’s up with DOGE? What differs from prior eras of tech-government partnership? How much is driven by China fear (and envy)? Will tech-driven abundance trickle down to normal people? What compromises will be made? Can San Francisco be saved? AI adaptation: Who is adopting AI the fastest? Outside Silicon Valley? Outside the US? Where are the bottlenecks? How do I “feel the AGI”? Can “safety” outcompete arms race incentives? (Must someone die first?) Seriously—what do we do about jobs? Will I know when I’ve been automated? How much power will we delegate? What will we hold tight?
I can’t remember the dress she wore or what she had bought; I can’t remember what we did for the rest of that afternoon; I can’t re-create the exact timbre of her voice or the precise shapes of her features, the lines at the corners of her mouth or the name of her perfume. I only remember the way sunlight through the kitchen window glinted from her forearm, an arc as lovely as her smile. A lit forearm, laughter, food of the gods. Thus are our memories compressed, integrated into sparkling jewels to be embedded in the limited space of our minds. A scene is turned into a mnemonic, a conversation reduced to a single phrase, a day distilled to a fleeting feeling of joy. Time’s arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.
several sheep looking back at the camera, on a small road surrounded by grass with the ocean in the background
norman rockwell unpopular opinion mem3