Notes On WeChat Governance

To my mind, nothing more accurately encapsulates the "liquid modernity" of Baumant than digital payments systems. Ubiquitous, instantaneous monetary settlement intimately tied to carefully curated digital footprints that are forever etched into cyberspace and tied to your meatspace identity. The sheer convenience of Insert-Pay, the choice available and the almost silent death of physical cash is one of the defining moments of the early 21st century. I suspect, and this is only speculation but many a scholar in not too distant future will be looking at digital payments as the gateway drug from high-minded modernism to the cybernetic postmodernism of new technocratic aspiration.

The pact for digital payments system for the end user is a simple one - untold ease, the programmatic promise of counter-party risk minimisation but attached to the legacy brands of the 20th century for familiarity and comfort. The real genius of digital payments system is to tie the legacy brand and network effect of traditional hyperfinancialist iconography and imagery - the Dollar or the Euro for instance, with the aesthetics of "control". Users think that their generic Insert-Pay app or Paypal equivalent clone is "theirs" after all, they installed it on their phone, registered it under their IRL KYC-AML identity and then deposited their precious fiat into it.

However, what if this network effect, the legacy prestige of the Dollar could be cloned and replicated, packaged in a myriad of ways to cope with the seemingly splintered landscape of cyberspace? What if every social network on the planet created its own tokens built on the carcass and bones of the Dollar, and continued the Great Re-Dollarization Crusade through different means?

This is by no means a phenomenon restricted to American Empire - I suspect Digital Payments are no longer bound to one particular civilizational ethos, but is becoming part of a post-Fukuyaman consensus of postmodern commerce. For instance in Asia, buoyed by the pandemic it witnessed in a few short years:

a revolution in the digital payments industry. Players across the ecosystem, including incumbent banks and financial services organizations, emerging fintech players, and established enterprises in adjacent industries like big tech and telecommunications, are expected to be seeking a number of expansion activities, particularly opportunities to cross-sell other financial services such as insurance, loans and wealth management services

QR codes, the plethora of apps, transparent ledger based cryptocurrencies with KYCd on and off fiat ramps - the postmodern cyber citizen of today is already conditioned to accept the dogma of meatspace identity linked to their cyberspace one, and furthermore also accepts the complete surrender of privacy from governments and corporations in exchange for ease and stability. Digital Payments systems represent the first building block of a much larger elaborate schemata of government monitored digital identity that seeks to rebuild the legacy bureaucratic institutions of the 20th century Administrative State in cyber. This is post-Fukuyaman WeChat Governance.

The Chinese, with WeChat and Alipay have led this breakthrough by showing aging rivals in American Empire that it is indeed possible to have seamless private-public sector partnerships that can orchestrate a complex web of interactions into a smooth "everything app" that bakes surveillance into convenience. Not just payments, but biometric identity in the form of prints and irises as the "authentication" layer, the privilege that must be yielded to participate in such systems. From there, it is a very short journey to tokenizing and etching into blockchains of undying permanency your entire history of transactions, government interactions, consumer habits and social media activity. This of course for those familiar is really just Cybernetic State formation, but using apps like WeChat helps to illustrate this in a more concrete and recognizable fashion.

What is fascinating is that this consensus is emerging both in "democracies" and "authoritarian regimes", that individual sovereignty, privacy are fictions that are best retired in exchange for participation in dynamic public-private sector ecosystems with contagious network effect. These are in effect, Network States that are seeking to create new layers of technocratic surveillance based bureaucracy in cyber - Panoptic-Technocapital. Who reads Rawls, Berlin or Habermas anymore - we are all downloading Google Pay, using Gmail, relying on AWS and paying yearly subscriptions to Microsoft. Our new social contract is the acceptance of the terms and conditions of the many apps of American Empire.

This irresistible force of Panoptic-Technocapital is practically now an uncontested global reality, with very few if any live players departing from it. In a sense, Fukuyama was right that we are approaching the End of History, but he was mistaken in his configuration of it. The End of History is cyber-serfdom, rent-seeking instant gratification in digital spaces, complete capitulation to corporations and governments. This is the new post-Fukuyaman consensus of FinTech. Everyone has fallen into line, pursuing the same paradigmatic and algorithmic monetary base structure for both the state and private sector. Nearly every country in the world today is trialling or seriously researching the implementation of a CBDC or public digital identity.

In that sense, are we philosophically and psychologically really heading towards a multipolar world? I suspect not, I would wager that multipolarity will be operating strictly in the realm of pure power politics in terms of Darwinian competition for influence and prestige. However, the conflicts to come will no longer revolve around grand ideological clashes or competing narratives as perhaps was the case at the height of the Cold War. Mankind has evolved and now agrees that its pretty good to have WeChat Governance, but perhaps the argument will now be which government or state gets to control the data, the spice that flows that makes all of this possible.

Even more important is the fundamental question of what is "backing this", what really is holding these structures together in a physical sense from a security perspective? None of these new digital payment systems are possible without an elaborate industry of KYC-AML biometric checking that is inextricably and intimately tied to Intelligence agencies.

The argument about whether data, whether this spice should be invasively harvested and collected in the first place, is for all intents and purposes dead. The Cypherpunks though they have still managed to create a legacy and a technological culture that has yielded tools to allow for a more discretionary digital existence have failed to generate the network effect to pose a challenge to WeChat Government. Even more so, now that in American Empire, Trump has appointed JD Vance, a man who is from the faction of elites who want to create an American WeChat Government (backed by Thiel, Musk, Balaji - the Paypal and Web3 circles).

Post-Fukuyaman WeChat Government if you look around for it, if you stop, pause and reflect is everywhere, no matter where you go in the world. It is the undisputed consensus global ideology of this decade and perhaps may seal its dominance in the century to come. The alternative - the genuine radical alternative of encryption maximalist, self-sovereign obfuscated identity, truly fungible digital currency (like XMR) is so niche at present that it cannot even be posited as a viable alternative. It has no cultural power, it has no network appeal, it has no urgency and few even are aware that there is a way to live beyond Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

It is delicious irony however, that this project though it started in American Empire, is being perfected by the Chinese Communist Party to such a degree that it has now become the standard of aspiration for the New American Technocrats like Elon Musk.

All of this poses extremely difficult questions to aspirations for Islamicate Sovereignty, and Muslim political theory in general - is WeChat Government inevitable? Must the Ishmaelite reconcile himself to it, accept it but simply quibble over the type of token, the owners of the network and the aesthetics of the whole thing? The alternative of radical individual responsibility seems distant and utopian, perhaps some pragmatic arrangement will have to be made to usher in an Islamicate Cybernetics that forges a new political theory of authority and data. A new understanding of sovereignty and technology.

And God knows best