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SpaceX presses legal fight + Confucian loss of "face" in China's surveillance regime

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SpaceX presses on with legal fight against U.S. Air Force over rocket contracts
https://spacenews.com/spacex-presses-on-...contracts/

INTRO: SpaceX has asked the U.S. District Court of the Central District of California to hold a hearing on March 2 to consider the company’s eight-months-long protest against the U.S. Air Force. A request for a hearing and for the court to rule on the case was filed Jan. 8 by SpaceX as the company presses forward with a protest originally filed in May with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

SpaceX is challenging the Air Force’s decision in October 2018 to award rocket development contracts to Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman and United Launch Alliance. The U.S. government and the three companies that received Air Force contracts filed motions on Jan. 17 opposing SpaceX’s request. SpaceX contends that the Air Force made an unfair decision in awarding $2.3 billion in so-called Launch Service Agreements to the three launch providers and excluding SpaceX.

The U.S. Court of Federal Claims in August dismissed the protest on grounds that the court lacked jurisdiction and agreed to transfer the case to the California District court. The Court of Federal Claims ruled that LSAs are cooperative agreements that cannot be legally challenged like standard procurement contract awards. SpaceX filed the complaint with the California court on Sept. 13 and filed a supplemental complaint on Dec. 23.

The outcome of the case could have significant implications as the three LSA winners and SpaceX are all competing for two contracts to provide launch services to the Air Force for five years starting in 2022. The Air Force plans to select two providers in 2020 for the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 Launch Service Procurement... (MORE)



How Confucius loses face in China’s new surveillance regime
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-confucius-lose...nce-regime

INTRO (Philip Ivanhoe): While conceived of and functioning differently in diverse contexts, ‘face’ describes a phenomenon that exists in every human society. Its most basic sense concerns the public presentation and perception of the self. Someone who has face possesses something of positive social value that arises from social approval of a person’s status, action or state of being; someone who loses face has suffered a loss in social value concerning her status, behaviour or state of being. In addition to public perception, ‘face’ has an internal psychological aspect as well: it captures one’s self-image and evaluation of oneself in regard to shared ethical standards and social hierarchies, expectations and norms.

Face is particularly important in East Asian societies such as China, and found in two related forms. The first and more popular conception, mianzi (面子), primarily concerns wealth, social status, position, power and prestige; the second, lian (臉), concerns moral character and behaviour. A person can have mianzi – eg, status, position, etc – but lack a corresponding level of lian – eg, be regarded as morally bad. A complete lack of lian erodes and eventually undermines one’s mianzi, while someone with great lian will have considerable mianzi.

In contemporary Chinese society the question of face has taken a new and disturbing form that profoundly affects these more traditional, Confucian-inspired conceptions. China’s rapidly expanding network of surveillance cameras increasingly relies upon AI-aided facial-recognition technology to achieve much of its primary mission: to keep track of, record, control and modify the behaviour of its citizens. Within this system, ‘face’ really has nothing to do with traditional conceptions of moral or social status – at least, their ideal forms; it is not about how one views oneself or how the members of one’s community regard one. Instead, it is to be an object under the gaze of a systematic government surveillance system established by the Communist Party of China (CPC) and guided by increasingly sophisticated AI. My primary interest is what this does to the traditional notions of mianzi, lian and related ideas about virtue, but I will also note an unanticipated implication that the new mass surveillance carries for the CPC, an implication that betokens a more general concern with the ethics of AI.

My central claim is that the new surveillance culture largely eliminates not only concern with but the possibility of traditional, Confucian-inspired conceptions of face and related conceptions of virtue. By focusing on the physical face for identification, and assessing citizens purely in terms of their perceived benefit or harm to the state – measured in terms of the Social Credit System (社会信用体系) – the new surveillance culture fundamentally alters the senses and functions of these traditional concepts, eliminating both the internal, moral dimension of face as well as its external, socially constituted dimension. In a very real sense, it constitutes an ultimate and complete loss of face... (MORE)
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