EXCERPT Thousand-Mile Eyes In late 2020, telecom company China Mobile launched a line of integrated high-definition smart video surveillance products called Qianliyan (千里眼), literally ‘thousand-mile eyes’. Marketed to both private consumers and institutional users including the government, the military, public security, transportation and other industries, the Qianliyan line combines networked cameras with a cloud platform offering remote viewing on personal devices, video storage, and data analytics. This product line claims to be able to detect abnormal activity in real time through a combination of image interpretation, face recognition, license plate recognition, and crowd counting—features that are illustrated through scenarios such as thermal screening for epidemic control, biometric identification for security checkpoints, and customer monitoring for automated stores. More comprehensive Qianliyan solutions include ‘Peaceful Village’ (for the surveillance of rural roads, homes, courtyards, farms and fields), ‘Online Baby’ (for remote child monitoring) and ‘Bright Kitchen, Shining Stove’ for inspecting food quality and safety in kitchens and canteens. According to the scenario descriptions, what China Mobile is proposing is a novel conception of security based on the multiplication of watchers with access to an always-on platform: Taking real-time monitoring as its foundation, [Qianliyan] offers functions such as enterprise supervision, video supervision, early warnings and alarms, every- day supervision, GIS mapping, statistical analysis, and more. By combining ‘government supervision, enterprise self-discipline, and public oversight’ it builds a system of common management, common governance and common sharing. In this additive model of optical governance, the more constituencies that are surveilling something, the better—coincidentally, this is also a promising business strategy for a company selling both hardware and software products. On the landing page of China Mobile’s website, the product line is showcased by a promotional video going through several use cases: a parent checking on their kid’s classroom through their mobile phone; restaurant owners monitoring cooks in the kitchen from a meeting room, and policemen identifying a shoplifter from surveillance footage of a store. The product slogans ‘With Qianliyan, you go much further’, ‘embracing enterprises, unveiling the future’, and ‘Making plans for a thousand miles, seeing is believing’ emphasise the key value proposition: extending one’s scopic power over distances (in both time and space) that would not be available to human perception without new AI-powered technologies. …