Ai Weiwei on the “Catastrophic Status Quo” of Censorship

And Ai would know. The 68-year-old multidisciplinary artist — best known for his political photography, sculptures, documentaries and public installations — now lives in exile from his home country of China after being imprisoned for questioning and criticizing his government. Throughout his decades-long career, he’s had exhibitions canceled in Australia over statements about offshore refugee detention policies and in London, New York City and beyond after posting support for Gaza, and he was cut from a film in Germany to appease Chinese investors.

In On Censorship, Ai explores how censorship pervades our lives, the societal forces that drive self-censorship, the elimination of privacy via ubiquitous surveillance, and the rising threat of artificial intelligence. At less than 90 pages, the book is packed with a steady stream of aphorism on the vital importance of unrepressed expression and is punctuated with photographs related to the many attempts to silence him.

Ai spoke with In These Times about what people tend to misunderstand about censorship, the ideological and financial ​“organisms” that rely on it, and the role of art in fighting back.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Censorship has unambiguously played a role in the life of you and your father. His poetry was banned in 1957, under the Cultural Revolution. How has censorship affected your life? 

My father and I — though, in fact, our experience represents not just ourselves, but generations of people living in a turbulent political environment — have lived under constantly shifting standards and intensities of censorship. This does not manifest only in thought, but also in daily behavior. It affects people’s actions through systems of reward and punishment, shaping conduct in tangible ways. Under such conditions, it is impossible not to be aware of censorship. The feeling is deeply constricting: it compresses one’s space of existence and restricts the possibilities of thinking, judging, distinguishing and expressing.

You quote your father’s writing: ​“Only when artistic creation is granted such freedom and independence can art play a role in advancing social reform.” What role does art play in social reform?

Art does not only serve social reform; it is central to an individual’s pursuit of freedom and independence. Art is almost the only remaining possibility for spiritual activity and thinking beyond survival and competition. It is the basic characteristic of life. The struggle for freedom and independence is the first condition of human existence.

You write that trust and honesty are crucial components of society, but that loss of privacy is making them irrelevant. Why is privacy important in a political context? 

When you know you are constantly observed, a deep discomfort emerges that resists the most essential human feeling — ease. In China, freedom is inseparable from being at ease within oneself. Freedom must be individual; the individual must be at ease within oneself. When privacy disappears and one is not at ease anymore, freedom disappears with it.

In highly developed technological societies, what people truly lose is freedom. The essence of consciousness is a return to freedom and the state of being at ease. Only then can individuals understand their existence and their relationship to the universe. When privacy is denied, we are reduced to carbon-based entities without consciousness, stripped of motivation to live. This is why privacy, in both political and everyday life, is untouchable. It is the final attribute of human rights. From individual privacy emerges individualized thinking, which is more important than anything else.

Everyone seems aware that surveillance is a dangerous tool, yet we have allowed it to become pervasive, even inviting it into our homes. Why did we embrace the creation of, as you refer to it in your book, the ​“Argos Panoptes”?

Surveillance functions as the managerial mechanism of censorship: those who control surveillance possess more information than those who are surveilled, allowing them to define behavior ethically, morally and even legally, and to react accordingly. The fundamental injustice lies in who is surveilled and who controls surveillance.

Surveillance is like a poker game in which one player can see everyone else’s cards. Information is power — it is also productive power. The one who sees the cards gains an invincible advantage that cannot be overcome. Surveillance fulfils the desire shared by all players to peek, a kind of cheating. Governments invoke national security, organizations cite self-protection, yet surveillance inevitably expands into every aspect of individual behavior.

Surveillance is dangerous; it is also profitable. The acquisition of inappropriate information becomes a way of existing and expanding one’s living space. That space includes security and stability — by controlling part of it, one acquires a semblance of omniscience. In seeking power, people often fail to recognize what they lose in the act of gaining it.

Censorship manifests in many contexts, whether in China, the United States or elsewhere. What do you think is the inherent underlying motivation?

Any organism that holds power or ideology — whether a country, a regime, a military force, an organization, a school or, more broadly, public opinion — inevitably produces censorship as a means of maintaining control. Any organization requires a dominant narrative, a logic that sustains its own existence. That narrative, by its nature, excludes others. It purges opposing, challenging or even parallel voices as a basic mechanism of self-preservation.

Americans tend to view censorship as an abstract concept because they are censored without being aware of it, or they do not realize that they already live within a system of censorship. From early education to schooling, from popular thought to public opinion and entertainment, all parts of culture diminish the seriousness of censorship as an issue.

You write that public reactions can be manipulated through the presentation of a curated reality. How does a person recognize that manipulation?

Financial interests manipulate public reactions by exploiting human desires for convenience, luxury and competitive advantage. Individuals who gain more than the collective — through status, wealth or education — may come to believe that censorship benefits them. As long as social and financial hierarchies exist, reactions to censorship will differ.

Manipulation functions through systems of reward and punishment. If you cooperate with power, censorship benefits you; if you are censored, you are punished. Convenience and incentives make people willing collaborators in financial manipulation. This process is very obvious.

Recognizing the manipulation, however, is complicated. If you possess information that others cannot access because of your status, and if that information disadvantages others, then you are benefiting from censorship. There must always be beneficiaries, otherwise censorship would not exist. Conversely, if your language, thinking or behavior is restricted, you can observe how capital uses censorship to shape daily life. For most individuals simply trying to survive, this is unavoidable.

How do capital and financial interest contribute to censorship?

In the age of artificial intelligence, every sentence, behavior, motivation, exchange and method of survival becomes capital itself. Information becomes the greatest source of profit. Censorship — whether exercised by governments, organizations or capital — generates enormous advantage. Control over information and access to others’ data has become the most efficient accelerator of profit.

In this sense, censorship has become a basic condition of capital’s existence.

What is your biggest concern about AI in regard to censorship?

AI is the most efficient tool of censorship yet developed. When a regime can analyze an individual’s needs and behavioral patterns through AI, it places every person under a microscope. Privacy disappears. Humanity becomes instrumentalized. Individuals are reduced to objects. This erodes human distinctiveness. When people’s motivations and drives are diminished by AI, whether people exist or not becomes an open question.

What can be done to curtail the censoring tendencies of Western media?

What we call Western media largely operates through financial partnerships and major profit groups that represent the interests of capital. To resist these censoring tendencies is extremely difficult, because censorship is embedded in their very structure. In fact, the public’s thinking has been shaped from early education through family, social environments and peer networks, all operating within censored frameworks. Resistance can only begin with individual consciousness, behavior and expressive capacity. Although social media and the internet appear open, individual voices are easily drowned out and are disproportionately small compared with large media institutions.

You write, ​“Censorship effectively eliminates public and societal participation.” Once people have reached that point, how do we rebuild that participation?

Censorship is like a fixed road that forcibly formats behavior. Under such conditions, rebuilding participation is extremely difficult. When thinking, feeling and challenging power are themselves censored, participation becomes nearly impossible.

Rebuilding would require reconstructing education, lifestyles and desire itself. Desire for comfort is linked to laziness, convenience and selfish accumulation. The catastrophic status quo we face today arises from basic human nature. Acting against that nature is profoundly difficult.