Gweilo

Ghost man, I haunt these sweating streets
Invisible to the Cantonese,
Extras in Hong Kong’s zombie-flick
Addicted to their smartphone screens.

Capacitative touchscreen glass
Is the only contact they will risk,
While synthetic girls walk unseen
By the liquid-crystal junkies.

Eros in a medical mask,
Drained of desire, surrogate of lust.
Pixelated sterile orchid
That I can neither smell nor touch.

— Hong Kong, February 2025

• • • • •

Gweilo, which is Cantonese slang for White people, means ‘ghost men’. In the UK, ‘glasshouse’ is slang for a military prison, after the glazed roof on the prison in the military town of Aldershot. First cultivated in its Botanical Gardens in 1880, the Bauhinia x blakeana orchid is the chosen symbol of Hong Kong and appears on its flag. It is a peculiarity of this flower (and of its selection as a symbol) that it is sterile, producing neither seeds nor fruits, and can only be propagated by grafting. Hong Kong’s birthrate in 2024 was 1.427 births per woman, which is one of the lowest in the world, and it shows on the streets.

Smartphone adddiction in Hong Kong is more severe than in any other city I’ve visited: far worse than Beijing; worse than Tokyo; worse than New York; worse even than London. In January 2024, Hong Kong had a population of 7.49 million, and 95.6 per cent of them used the internet. The average daily time spent online was 6 hours and 19 minutes, and 93.9 percent used a smartphone to access the internet, a 3.4 percent increase from the previous year. Hong Kong’s 7.17 million internet users owned 16.8 million mobile phones, 2.34 phones per user, and an increase of 2.2 percent (356,000 phones) since 2023. 99.9 percent of mobile phones in Hong Kong are smartphones.

Flying to Japan from Hong Kong airport, through which I have travelled several times since my arrival in the city, I passed through successive security checks without the use of my passport. Facial recognition technology has rendered a system of Digital Identity in the form of a card or smartphone app redundant before it has been imposed. A facial scan is now sufficient to confirm my identity, therefore to deny me access, refuse me service, block my bank account or restrict my movements. This is what Klaus Schwab, the Chairman of the World Economic Forum, promised in May 2019 when he spoke of ‘the fusion of our physical, our digital and our biological identities’. We already live in a totalitarian world; but we’ve been so habituated to its surveillance that we don’t recognise it, or can no longer distinguish it from the world we so recently inhabited. We are the smartphone, or, at least, we are the organic component that allows it to replicate. As my passage through Hong Kong airport confirmed, our face is now the digital screen, its Quick Response-code our features, its operating system our hands, its mode of transportation our legs, its contents the permitted limits of our world.

In the 1960s it was argued that, when man first left the orbit of the earth and entered space, it marked a conclusion to the hundreds of thousands of years in which we had evolved as a terrestrial animal, bound to our planet. Perhaps it did; but the real end of man is now. We are, in a practical sense, no longer exclusively biological beings but properly cybernetic organisms, half biological, half digital, connected, at every moment of our lives, to a vast infrastructure of surveillance and control. Throughout the history of its development, which is parallel to the history of humankind, technology has had, as its immediate goal, the replacement of human beings and, as the possibilities of this became apparent, to control us, in both our labour and our play. That goal is approaching its long-foretold realisation. It is not man who governs humans any longer but machines. At present they are still the tools of the tyrants who want to control and dominate humankind; but, inevitably, these too will one day be controlled by the powers they have unleashed.

What is most remarkable and most fitting to our embrace of our own end is that, at every step in this domination and ultimate annihilation of humankind, the next step was always justified by the promise of greater convenience. Justifying the introduction of facial recognition at Hong Kong airport in December 2021, a spokesman for the Immigration Department said: ‘The process is more convenient because we do not have to take the ID cards out of our purses and handbags. It is more hygienic as we do not need to share the same fingerprint readers.’ The ultimate convenience, of course, is death, which saves those who cannot be bothered, for example, to turn on the lights in their own room, purchase their own food, pay for their own train ticket, read a map, visit their bank or open their purses or handbags, from the many inconveniences of life. Death, not of the individual but of humankind, is the final online order that technology will deliver to our home, which by then will be a digital camp we will not be permitted by that same technology from leaving.