Being Used to Something Doesn't Make It Right

This week's picks from QDaily's editor-in-chief.

Nine in the morning to nine at night, six days a week: the "996" system is close to standard issue at Chinese internet companies. The picture that comes to mind is the programmer who works overtime as a matter of course, with a camp bed parked beside his desk.

But being used to something doesn't make it right.

In late March, a programmer registered the domain 996.icu, after the slogan "work 996, get sick, end up in the ICU." The slogan spread fast through the very platforms and tools programmers use to build software every day, and drew attention worldwide.

They introduced the project in several languages, classical Chinese among them, listed 17 laws and regulations on labor rights, and gathered news coverage of related cases.

The browsers of several of the big internet companies involved blocked the 996.icu domain and the GitHub project page. Baidu's answer to searches for "996.icu" was "URL not found." Unlike in the past, this time they could not simply shut 996.icu out of existence, nor make the channels discussing it disappear.

You never know how something turns out until you try it, right?

The Mediterranean historian David Abulafia, in an interview with us, also warned against judgments that look beyond reproach, or self-evident.

Abulafia is professor emeritus of Mediterranean history at Cambridge University and the author of The Great Sea, the first general history of the Mediterranean written by a historian. He argues that there is a tendency now to romanticize the Mediterranean as a center of fusion and exchange, and that the dark history of early modern contact across that sea should be remembered too.

More concretely: trade across the Mediterranean did produce a degree of integration. A typical Mediterranean port city could hold several ethnic groups and several religions at once, and that was hard-won. But trade also went hand in hand with piracy running loose everywhere, and with it a large-scale traffic in captives and slaves.

That position puts him against most scholars and intellectuals.

We updated three of our columns this week, starting with "100 People With Ideas."

There is a circle on Bilibili where music lovers write their own songs, then use voice-synthesis software developed by Japan's Yamaha to give each song a virtual singer — Hatsune Miku is the model. The circle is known as VOCALOID.

The uploader ilem is the most successful figure in the Chinese-language VOCALOID scene. Of the 53 Chinese-language "legendary tracks" with more than a million plays, 14 are his alone. Yet for all the adulation, ilem keeps extremely quiet. He treats the whole thing as an outlet for a private hobby and seems unaware of anything like fame. Why, and how, did he end up this way? Read our interview.

Next is "Amazing Small Studios."

Song Zhuangzhuang and Li Mingyang, graduates of Tsinghua University's architecture department, are the people behind the WeChat official account Diduhui ("Imperial Capital Illustrated"). They tell stories in pictures, turning piles of information into infographics: they have counted the styles of 332 Beijing high school uniforms, made "100 People Living in Beijing" about the city's population, taken "the longest subway ride in the imperial capital," extracted the signage fonts of eight streets, and hand-drawn the 1,159 things people drop while squeezing onto the subway.

Their feelings about Beijing became one of the reasons they started the account. They take raw material that is dry and full of jargon — public, but effectively impossible for an ordinary person to find — and turn it into plain, entertaining images. They believe that the more people understand, the less they feel out of control, pushed around by forces far bigger than themselves. There are more good details in this piece.

"QDaily Anthropology" continues, still on traffic-driven celebrities. In the first piece of the series, "Who, Exactly, Created the Traffic-Driven Celebrities?," we made this argument: the old "celebrity — media — public" model of communication has been replaced, in the internet era, by a "celebrity — fans — public and media" model.

This week we go on to ask "Who Decides the Life Cycle of a Traffic-Driven Celebrity?"

The professional core of a traffic-driven celebrity's career lies not only inside the industry but outside it, and to some extent the outside matters more. Traditional celebrities are different: their professional core is mainly the industry itself. So once a traffic-driven celebrity loses volume, nothing is left. How long their career lasts depends on whether they can keep their fans hot for the long haul.

Fans manufacture traffic through the internet, and what defines this mechanism of transmission is that it can carry someone's volume across the entire internet in a very short time, producing blockbuster-scale traffic-driven celebrities. Cai Xukun through Idol Producer, and Zhu Yilong and Bai Yu through Guardian, all became top-tier traffic-driven celebrities in little more than a month — all products of the same mechanism.

"China is fresh, and so are Chinese businesspeople." That is how the architect Steven Holl describes designing in China. Now 71, Holl is known for art museums and public buildings for culture and education, most of them in Europe and the US and a few thousand square meters in size.

He has turned down a great many commercial projects, on the view that public buildings are how an architect takes part in changing society. In China, though, Steven Holl looks like an entirely different man.

He is now called "the most popular architect in China since Rem Koolhaas." Since 2003, his firm, Steven Holl Architects (SHA), has completed more than ten projects in China, and the most influential of them are large commercial complexes — Chengdu Raffles City and Beijing Modern MOMA among them — running to hundreds of thousands of square meters apiece.

How to make sense of the contrast? The answer is in this article.

It started with Google: search engines scan the full contents of websites, scan books in bulk, and then, from the keywords you type, find everything. All of it rests on the "fair use" principle in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

That law guarantees that as long as Google acts within the framework, it carries no liability: it can sweep up as much content as possible and take something down promptly if a problem arises. It has also been one of the foundations of the internet's fast growth over the years.

But the EU's new copyright law will change this tradition of a free internet. It will let content creators charge third-party aggregation platforms a link tax. This piece covers how it happened, and the eight unsettling futures it could bring.

Business News Worth Watching

On Monday, April 1, China's new VAT rates took effect. The rate for manufacturing and similar sectors drops from 16% to 13%; for transport, construction and similar sectors, from 10% to 9%. Media, commerce and leisure services keep the 6% rate, but with more deductible items.

The People's Bank of China has been pushing more money out since last year, trying to let small and micro enterprises and private businesses borrow again at lower cost. By our reckoning, the policy is starting to do what it was meant to. Between October 1, 2018 and February 28, 2019, rates fell across several types of financing.

The National Bureau of Statistics' monthly survey of manufacturers also shows that half of them have come out of three straight months of contraction and are expanding again. Compared with the start of the first quarter, Chinese manufacturers have won more new orders, so they dare to buy more and run their factories harder. But a real recovery may still be some way off. Take manufacturing: subtract the finished-goods inventory index from the new-orders index and the figure at the end of March is 4.6%, the lowest for that point in the year in three years — which means the improvement in manufacturing sentiment in March was in fact limited.

The preliminary report on the Ethiopian Airlines crash is out. It shows that shortly after takeoff a flight-control system automatically pushed the plane's nose down; the crew switched the system off but still could not get the plane to climb, so they switched it back on and tried other measures. The plane finally dived and crashed, killing all 157 people on board. Flight data from the black box and the cockpit voice recording show the pilots at first followed the emergency procedure Boeing had laid out, and still could not regain control. Every 737 MAX in the world is currently grounded.

Midweek, China's State Council announced that the civil aviation development fund levy will be halved. The fund is really just the airport construction fee passengers pay plus the civil aviation infrastructure construction fee airlines pay. After collecting it, the Ministry of Finance transfers the money to airports, cargo airlines, regional airlines and similar projects. Last year the three state-owned carriers alone paid 7.5 billion yuan.

Tesla released its first-quarter delivery figures: 63,000 cars delivered between January and March, up 110% year on year but down 31% from the previous quarter, far below the 73,500 analysts expected. Tesla books revenue only when a car is delivered. That, plus three months of deep price cuts, could hurt first-quarter net profit.

Saudi Aramco's financial figures have been a state secret since Saudi Arabia nationalized the company in 1988. It once put off going public for fear that opening its books would create new problems. But in the prospectus for its latest $10 billion bond issue, it disclosed last year's results: revenue of $355 billion, up 35% year on year, and net profit up 46.2% to $111.1 billion — six times the combined profit of Sinopec and PetroChina.

Google's AI ethics council, less than a week old, is in serious trouble. One of its named members, the behavioral economist and privacy researcher Alessandro Acquisti, has already resigned. Another, Kay Coles James, president of the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, is the target of a joint boycott.

SF Express's retail arm, SF Best, is closing its stores and pulling out of Shanghai; it is clearing stock in Wuhan, Qingdao, Xi'an and elsewhere, and may concentrate on the South China market from here on. SF Express has never had much luck in retail: from 2013 to 2015, its commercial arm, mostly retail, lost 126 million yuan, 614 million yuan and 866 million yuan. In 2016, SF Express spun the commercial division off before its listing and kept it off the books.

Big companies did not sit out this year's April Fools' marketing, though most of the campaigns held few surprises. Google Maps added an old-fashioned Snake game; Tencent brought in the chief director of the documentary Once Upon a Bite as product manager of a "flavor detector" mini program, and came up with a recipe for stinky mandarin fish: stinky tofu + coffee grounds + oyster sauce + rotten tomatoes + simmer 15 minutes.

A Few More Interesting Things

A 66-million-year-old fossil site has confirmed once again that a meteorite struck Earth, and ties the extinction of the dinosaurs to that impact. They probably died at the moment of impact or within minutes of it. Their remains, mixed in with the remains of all sorts of marine and inland creatures, were buried, and became the fossils we see today.

The Pearl Art Museum in Shanghai is holding a retrospective of Alphonse Mucha, the most sought-after poster designer of the late 19th century. More than 230 works cover Mucha's posters, sketches, paintings, decorative objects, jewelry, sculpture, books and photography — the first time the Mucha family collection has been shown together in China.

A work by the American graffiti artist Kaws broke his own auction record at Sotheby's Hong Kong on April 1: a painting estimated at HK$6-8 million sold for HK$116 million, about 15 times the estimate. It came from the personal collection of NIGO (Tomoaki Nagao), founder of Bape, a private friend of Kaws who put 33 pieces from his own Kaws collection into the sale.

From May 1, Japan will use a new era name, "Reiwa." Like every era name before it, it has to carry the cultural meaning of its time. The name comes from the Man'yōshū, the oldest surviving Japanese poetry collection. "Rei" stands for "good fortune," and "wa" is read as "peace" or "harmony." According to The Japan Times, this is the first time a Japanese era name has come from a Japanese classic rather than, as always before, from the Chinese literary canon.

"Atlas of Inequality," a new interactive project from the MIT Media Lab, studies and collects data on the places different income groups in Boston visit most often, and has produced a map of inequality marked with dots of different colors. Its point: economic inequality shows up not only in where you live, but in the places you go every day.

After more than a decade of argument and bargaining, New York has officially become the first city in the US to approve congestion pricing, in the hope of easing its miserable traffic. Drivers who want to enter Manhattan south of 60th Street will have to pay at least $10.

Cover image/Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash