Interview with Seek-Cheap Photo Bolo
a case study in cooperative ownership and creativity in lockdown
Note: To stall the natural tendencies of a Leninist government and protect all involved, all names and locations have been changed, and no actual photos have been allowed to be reproduced. This photograph is from Shanghai in 2019. The essential truth of this story has been faithfully rendered.
Shanghai is exiting three months of lockdown with an agonizing slowness. But one business, the 找便照片(zhao pian-zhaopian) Bolo, a photography collective, has found riches in the ashes of the city's economy and sense of liberty and security.
We’ve gotten in touch with these survivors of this strange and cruel special period in the history of a great city. Zhao and Pian, the (pseudonymous) founders of this 8 person collective, found an innovative solution to stay solvent and grow as a collective, during a three month period where all other work had been suspended. It's pushed them to the limits of their invention. They’ve used AI, and daring guerilla photography done undercover to fund and sustain a worker-owned company. Zhao is an AI researcher by training and Pian is a videographer, and the rest of the staff, who will go unnamed, are photographers of various levels of education and different backgrounds.
Zhao and Pian have several meanings, as do most phonemes in Chinese. 照片/zhaopian, together, means photograph. 找/zhao can also mean seek or search, and 便/pian is part of the word for cheap, inexpensive. In short, it reads something like: Seek-Cheap Photo. And ZhaoPianZhaopian has produced, unknown to many, a wide majority of the photos seen of the lockdown used by the foreign press without the scenes actually existing.
"Really, I guess it truly started when we realized that no reporter had ever really been to China before. We accidentally sold a photo of a trip we took to Hanoi. We’d had little bits of regular work with our friend over there over the years. And, sure enough, our friend in Reuters ran it as a photo of Beihai. There was Vietnamese writing and everything. You know they use an alphabet. They look kind of like us, but, I mean, Beihai is Southeast Asia too, but... you start to wonder," said Zhao.
Through a stringer for Reuters-Thomson's photo department, one who Zhao knew from her post-graduate work in Sweden, she discovered what exactly was needed. New pictures of the situation. But nobody could get out, seemingly, to take the photos. But how did an AI researcher and a videographer form a photography collective in Shanghai? And how did they end up in this line of work, deepfaking the reality of a complex crisis?
Seek-Cheap, at the Beginning
"So at first, this wasn't a collective. It wasn't a bolo, it was just a photo studio in Qingpu. We had an interesting business model, but it wasn’t formally a collective ownership. But when you're 2 people, you're sharing everything. As we grew, we had to deal with a lot of hurdles before we settled on this model. Our studio is pretty big. We all share the space, and work here. I kind of inherited this place, under mortgage, from my grandmother. She was a bureaucrat, and got this place, before my parents mortgaged it to help fund my studies. Our most pressing concern throughout the lockdown was paying the mortgage."
Pian's mother worked for the tax bureau in Qingpu her entire life. A natural and prodigious talent for numbers and accounting kept her from ever being sent down during the Cultural Revolution, and by the time she retired in the 90s, she had amassed a small fortune. As small fortunes often do, within a generation it was down to an asset under mortgage. But a fine asset. A roomy (in Shanghai) 200 square meter apartment with a basement could easily become a dream live-in studio for the right people.
"My parents had spent a lot on my education. I studied at the Sorbonne for my undergraduate degree. That's actually how I met Zhao, we ended up meeting on a train to Amsterdam. We hit it off immediately, just sort of, one of those weird, wonderful experiences you can have on a train," said Pian.
Zhao, 5 years Pian's senior, was studying a master's degree in computer science, focusing on big data, machine learning, and computer vision, in Sweden. And Pian was pursuing video art at the Sorbonne. While Pian had a dreamier career track, he was the practical one, and Zhao was the dreamer. Zhao had wanted to revolutionize fashion.
"When I got back to China, I found a good job, I did a year at one of the big tech companies, but--well, never work for them. They're demons. The West Lake in Hangzhou, demons crawl out of it," said Zhao.
"Slave driving demons," added Pian.
They're referring to the infamous forced labor regime of tech companies in China, the 996 schedule (9am to 9pm, 6 days a week, the standard for tech workers in China) expounded by famed Chinese lake goblin and billionaire Jack Ma, and enthusiastically picked up by the new tech leaders in China.
"I toughed it out for a year so I could get a gig doing what I wanted. After that, I could start inflating my experience a bit to clients, so my passion project was about to get off the ground—the thing with the AI driven fashion designs—but then the GDPR came into effect in Europe, and China started its own onshore data 'privacy' rules," explained Zhao.
Hitting the big wall
It was a project to analyze billions if not trillions of social media photos to begin using AI to spit out new fashion designs to test and be improved on by designers and tested with consumers. A season could last a few weeks. Fashion would turn into a high-throughput, immensely creative industry, driven by the skill of the designer as much as the quality of data. Anyone could use the machine learning model hopefully, and create a winner. It was a bold dream.
"When Zhao told me about it, I spit my drink in her face. No one's ever gonna let you do that! So many headaches getting the data. Whose data is it? And what, you’re telling companies to fire their designers? It's too revolutionary, too much, too big a dream. You should focus on something nice and stable, like filming commercials, or using big data to figure out how to give people commercials they will turn off after 20 seconds instead of 5," said Pian.
Pian has a much more ruthless and focused personality, and it shows in their fashion, coincidentally enough. Where Zhao wears whatever was cheap at Uniqlo, and wears it until it falls apart, Pian wears French tailored suits. In the summer, like today, Pian is wearing a high waisted pair of chinos with a half unbuttoned lime green linen-cotton blend shirt. He's wearing wingtips, and looks for all the world like one of the rare modern dandies you seen in Shanghai, perhaps in People's Square, accompanying their mother or their date to some wanghong noodle shop. Zhao looks a bit more like the waimai driver, when they're playing poker and take off some of their uniform during the lull in orders between lunch and dinner.
In spite of Pian's classier fashion sensibilities, he lacked the social graces necessary to really succeed in his chosen field, video direction. Specifically, TV and commercials.
"Social graces? I lacked the tolerance for their shit. Mediocrity. Look, tech, especially in China, after 2012, tech ate everything it could. Everyone wanted to be devoured! And at the time, and now too I guess, they were the only ones with money, and they had their hands in everyone's wallet. So they bought up studio after studio, bribed everyone in charge of cultural production, or, rather, got their guanxi [networking power, connections]. So that's why I burned out. I got sick of shooting advertisements masquerading as streaming series. Whatever you say about Netflix, it's a million times worse at iQiYi or BeSTV. You'd burn out too."
By 2019, both had crashed on the rocks of their dreams and expectations, and were eager to try anything else. Anything that seemed fun and appealing to their senses as professionals and strivers. Both desperately seeking a city that reminded them a bit of Europe, and they found each other again in the Xuhui District in Shanghai, the heart of the Former French Concession.
"I told him that I honestly didn't know what to do with myself. I had a bit of money left, even after spending a year trying to get the resources together to let me train my AI models, but... I was close enough to broke," said Zhao.
"I told her, go into business with me. You were always the better photographer."
Zhao smiles at this, a rare unguarded moment from Pian. Usually Pian wears a high level of cynicism as his costume, and perhaps that day he let his guard down as well. That day, Zhao Pian Zhaopian was born.
Using machine learning to support professional clout-chasing
Fastforward a year later, and they'd found some success combining their talents. Using AI models and scraped data from LinkedIn, they'd identified a niche of social media users, many of them women, who desperately needed to upgrade their appearance to stand a chance in the high stakes world of professional clout chasing.
"In China, your appearance is really important when you're looking for a job. It matters for both sides. There’s a look for any job. For example, there's not many handsome programmers. Why would you trust a handsome person to code? They need to smell, reek like a pervert, or else you can’t keep them at their desks," said Zhao.
"Which is why we figured, there's all of these average looking women in China, and maybe they can't afford plastic surgery, or maybe they're afraid, or think it looks gross, and there’s a lot of shady clinics. But they can't get a promotion, attract recruiters, unless they're pretty. Ugly women can't get ahead in China, unless they're brilliant or their father is rich," said Pian.
"We were surprised to see though--at first we thought, it'd just be women looking to rebrand professionally. But it was men, too, a lot of men. I guess maybe ugly and boring people always struggle," said Zhao.
Their alarmingly direct frankness aside, they had a target and a model--to use AI to find exciting new compositions, angles, coloring and lighting that could maintain 'professional' while breaking the mold of the typical LinkedIn blogging which regular Chinese professionals did in order to attract attention, build clout, and jump from company to company.
"I'm kind of proud to say we helped start the trend I call LinkedInsta.” Zhao is embarrassed a bit by her own joke. She must have thought it was better than it came out. “Well, anyway, we'd use the algorithm and then handshop them--with some AI assistance, in exotic locations. They couldn't afford to go there, or maybe their photos there didn’t turn out," said Zhao.
"The average salary for some of these people, it's just really low here. Takes years to save for a trip, or pay one off for a lot of people."
The average starting wage for a college-graduated professional in a field like marketing in Shanghai tends to be around 4 to 6 thousand RMB a month, which is approximately the average rent in the second ring of the city, and a solid hour of commuting to their jobs, overwhelmingly concentrated in the inner ring.
"We hit a sweet spot, could charge around 1000 RMB for a photo set. Even if you don’t earn a lot, it’s an investment you can justify, or put on the card. And it's a blog or two a month for them--but it makes them seem mysterious, special. Like they have a past. These people don't have a past! They went to school, they went home, they went to work, they went home. Now they look like dreamers, travelers," said Zhao.
"It'd just take a couple of hours for us, and boom, they're charismatic, they're interesting. We did a lot of testing to find the right quotes and copy and stuff, the ways to make them seem interesting to other people, stuff they'd never ever figure out on their own," said Pian.
Circling the Drain
Business was going well until Covid-19 hit. At that point, the country was paralyzed in fear. And what's worse, tourism stopped. Planes stopped flying. How could they make people seem like they were exotic travelers when they couldn't travel?
"We had to ride that China Pride wave. It's a good thing they all fell for it too! It was such a hard, abrupt pivot for us. We had to start sending out our employees as soon as the lockdowns in Shanghai ended to get us high quality photos we could start using of big tourist sites. We could scrape Chinese data for pictures, but we wanted our own high quality sets, a few TB of photos for every angle possible to really train our models," said Zhao.
"We were lucky, in a way, since Shanghai was barely disrupted at all until this year. What we hadn't anticipated was a big change in hiring. The economy is in the toilet now, but it was swirling the drain for a while," said Pian.
In 2020 and 2021 the government enacted sweeping regulations of the tech industry and education industry that have led to a monumental downsizing in the sector. The bloodbath in education was absolute. Thousands and thousands lost their jobs, providing low-quality English educations to Chinese parents at high (for the middle class) prices. Alibaba and Tencent, world-straddling behemoths with total control over the financial lives of average Chinese citizens and near total control of their entertainment and consumer goods and groceries, shed approximately a quarter to a third of their primary workforce.
"These tech workers, and the English teachers, they were our bread and butter really. We could upcharge the tech guys especially. Those ones, they were as trusting as they were dishonest, they were excited by the AI thing when we told them, and they really trusted us. And now, they're broke. Going back to their home town," said Pian.
The ‘hope of the village’ is a literal translation from Mandarin of what might be called the hometown hero. People who move up in the world to the professional technology sector or the seemingly high-end, safe and well-respected education sector in China, neither of which simply didn't exist for their parent's generation, are often the children of rural or unknown 'Tier 88' type cities. People with nothing to lose, everything to gain from hard work.
Returning home without a fortune to turn into your own little company and empire is a hard pill to swallow. And no amount of branding adjustment could help fix the fact.
"It was a great scattering for us. And we got pretty depressed. It was getting hard to pay the bills, to justify what we were doing, at our scale. By fall 2021 we were about 20 people, regular salaries, taxes, the mortgage, and the occasional bribe to whoever was asking about why so many people were in our xiaoqu," said Pian.
Big Shots
So ZhaoPian Zhaopian had to downsize too. Back to 8 people. Anxiety about the future was permeating their Qingpu studio/mini data center.
"I was talking to a lot of people online then, really getting sucked into my phone. And I barely remember how, but someone showed me the book bolo'bolo. I burned through it. It changed my life. I got Zhao to read it too. I thought, here's the answer," explained Pian.
"Reorganizing as a bolo wasn't too hard. We ended up just sitting everyone down. We went to a print shop, a good one, by Donghua University, and we got these certificates of stock printed up," said Zhao.
"Everyone from then on had the same job title, Big Shot. It's Da Wan'r in Mandarin," said Pian.
"Like the movie, with Donald Sutherland," said Zhao.
I didn't understand, so they found their pirated DVD of it. It was a movie starring Donald Sutherland as a Scorsese-tier director, filming a movie like The Last Emperor, who suffers a near fatal stroke that leaves him in a coma, with a grim prognosis. As his seeming dying request, he requests that a local videographer, played by Ge You, give him a 'Comedy Funeral' that soon becomes an epic extravaganza of commercialism and ingenuity. After a watch, we resumed the interview.
"I feel like we had to do a lot of what Ge You had to do, but on a smaller scale."
"The real change for our employees was letting them know it was their idea too. Their business too. They weren't used to it. They wanted order, direction, they were used to it. But once we started accommodating that, the work seemed to get a little better. We had a lot less of it, but we started telling them to just mess around with it. Show us what they could do. Show us if they had any ideas of their own."
"What struck us at first was how good they were getting at showing off Shanghai. We had about 100GB or so of photos to work with, just from messing around with the equipment and testing things out, but that dataset is enough for us to generate certain scenes. Big restaurants, crowds, normal stuff. The sights of the city when it's alive. When they tried to show us 'spooky Shanghai,' post-apocalyptic Shanghai, it never looked right." said Zhao.
But in February ‘22, the next blow came. Piece by piece, district by district, starting in Pudong, an outbreak of Covid-19's utterly nonthreatening Omicron variant. By the time the lockdown became an inescapable reality in March, case numbers were at the order of 20,000 a day. During the course of the outbreak, less than 100 people died from the virus, a number that is surely dwarfed by deaths from other causes, which could not be treated adequately due to all healthcare workers being recruited to manage an outbreak of a minor disease.
"We can't... you know, explain it. It sucked. It was bad. There was nothing good about it. And we were running out of money. We were running out of food. Group buying, our juwei at first wasn't letting us buy in bulk, it took a week of us beating on their door and yelling to let us get food."
"There's something cruel at the heart of all of this. I don't like to speculate politically. I’m not one of those people, who loves all the sensitive topics Something has gone awfully wrong, and letting average Chinese people have power, when they've never had much power at all, it's a recipe for disaster. All they know to do is follow orders."
A New Opportunity
By the end of week 1, they had secured a reliable food supply, but were entertaining a new business strategy to try and keep their heads above water during the seemingly indefinite lockdown.
"I told them about my friend in France now, I knew him in Sweden, when I took photos for the student union newsletter and website. He works for Reuters-Thomson Trust now, and he wanted to know if we'd had any photos. We'd been in touch, just loosely. And then, one of our guys, he suggested it."
"Why not just take some dabai uniforms [dabai, literally means Big Whites, the local name for the all-white medics testing and enforcing the house arrests] from the medical trash? They dump them at the end of the day, right in our trash dump. They can’t reuse them, but we don’t believe the disease is a threat. Trash pickups weren't happening regularly, so why not go, sneak out, get those, then take photos. If you look like them, you can do whatever if you act mean enough we thought. And with our program, if we can just feed it the right source material, we can make whatever they're asking for. If anyone asks who the stranger in the uniform is, they could just say, I’m a propaganda department or something."
So they started. At first, to show credibility with Sven, they had tried to train with their existing model to generate the images they needed. But it wasn't coming out right. The dabai, the testing queues, the new propaganda signage, the fences and barricades--they were new phenomena, and they needed that. The stringers (soon it blossomed from more than Sven to many news organizations and bloggers) also wanted, crucially, something different from what they were getting usually. They wouldn't be getting much money for providing a service others could provide.
"Pian and me, we're not that kind of brave. Every night, our people would climb over a section of the garden wall and spend the entire night and most of the morning getting photos of environments, dabai out and about. People ask questions, but not to those people in white uniform. Then, in the morning, they'd slip in and basically just pass unnoticed to our place. I couldn't believe how easy they made it look."
It was dangerous. While anyone, including the US Department of State, will warn you of 'arbitrary enforcement of rules' in the PRC, it truly did seem as if society was coming apart. Arrest was always a possibility. And there was violence and unrest, often arbitrary and random. Videos of protests would float around until they suddenly disappeared. Groups were desperately trying to find out where they were. Videos of people banging their pots in an aural protest of hunger were called foreign agitation.
"We wanted to portray people standing up, instead of lying down. But in the end, what we wanted didn't matter much. We could do anything. To keep us safe, only one person would sneak out at night at a time. Me and Pian, we knew we couldn't do it. If Pian goes, so does the apartment. And if I go, we can't train the model we're using," said Zhao.
"We were trying to train them in how to use machine learning, but she's got a Master's in Computer Science. It's not like pushing a broom. Taking photos is a lot easier. Climbing walls is easier," said Pian.
New customers, new problems
Demand for their work grew, and fast. While the eyes of the world might not truly have been on Shanghai, there was a constant demand for good photos, from a city that was missing photographers. And no one was asking questions about how they were getting them. They must have assumed they were lucky, connected, or daredevils. In a sense, they were all 3.
"We made a good bit of money. Reuters paid us, we had a good cooperation with them, and we started becoming a primary source for photos. All of it fake. There are very few authentic pictures of the lockdown floating around. There wasn’t all that much to see. The biggest single challenge we had was when they asked us about the zoo. What’s going on at the zoo?” said Pian.
“I said, oh my god, they want us to sneak to the zoo? But we figured, you know, a chimp is a chimp, a tiger’s a tiger. We found old photos and stuff, different animals. Thank god we didn’t have to sneak into the zoo! We had no idea if there were tigers running around or what,” said Zhao.
“They'd change demands all the time, too, different news orgs and stuff. SCMP, they didn't want to get our friends in Beijing up their ass," said Zhao.
The fact was that their tactic of scoping out real photos in bulk, and altering them with AI and careful modification in house with photo-touchup experts helped produce images that fooled the world into believing whatever they wanted about the lockdowns.
"SCMP wanted pictures of people being tame, normal, dabai doing their job. We started selling to different rightwing blogs too. Epoch Times, we thought about taking some of their money too," said Zhao.
Epoch Times is known as the media arm of the Falun Dafa movement, a repressed cult-like organization that has successfully engrained itself into Western society as an anti-CPC faction, with elaborate media arms including opera and ballet, and their pro-Trump, right wing newspaper, the Epoch Times.
"We're very neutral people. People want a cult, they can join their cult. Obviously starting a cult is a great business tactic, and it worked out quite well for them. The Shen Yun Ballet? Big money. Very smart. I admire that about them," said Pian.
"We put it up to a vote though. Everyone except for Pian voted against it. So it went. It was a good idea. There's no way that wouldn't have passed notice, if we'd taken their money. [If we had,] we might actually be under serious investigation now," said Zhao.
Choices, Consequences
But what were the consequences? Surely faking a news story must have caused them some discomfort? And why weren't they noticed?
"Consequences, god help us if they find us, right?" asked Zhao.
"Right. But, you know, what did we fake, exactly? We basically sold them a painting that looked great. And they paid for it, used it, got their desired effect. They were shopping for a visual, they already knew their angle and concept. And we had a stall set up with what they wanted. Ask the editors if they felt comfortable with their jobs," said Pian.
Of course, after all the risk and suffering from the lockdown, did they think they'd made the right choices?
"Us? All of us made the best choice that we could, and we made it together. We didn't make anyone do anything they didn't want to, and we made sure that we stayed alive in a tough time. If it hadn't been for us being in it together, seeing our work as vital and important together, we'd have been screwed," said Pian.
"We loved our work. And it gave us a lot of reward. We took a few days of risk and turned it into a mill for photos for 3 months. We had total control of the market by the time lockdown ended. Now we're just trying to get the hell out, away from the crazy," said Zhao.
The redlight/greenlight momentum and seemingly perpetual regime of mass testing is a sure sign that until some political or epidemiological goals that are not known to the public are met, the PRC will not be joining the rest of the world in reopening. Quarantine measures remain a perpetual threat, and the camps for confirmed cases have not been torn down. There have been no punishments for sacrificing years of growth and opportunity and untold billions of yuan to save no one and imperil and impoverish millions.
Good Paranoia
"We were a bit paranoid. Not bad paranoid. Good paranoid," said Pian. "We knew it would end eventually, so we had to cover our asses, live for tomorrow."
"We took a lot of steps to take security seriously. There's only so much you can do sometimes, but we were careful to use private VPNs that tunneled directly to some old friends of mine back in Sweden. We did everything we could to keep obfuscating where the data was coming from. It's not foolproof, but it'll be hard to know it was us sending the photos. And we moved the money as carefully as we could. Even though we made money, we knew we had to live like monks to keep appearances up, said Zhao."
"Cashing out will be the most dangerous thing we've ever done I think. There's a tidy amount spread between a bunch of accounts, and collecting it and distributing it will require all of us to leave the country."
Their plans are nonspecific, and of course they won't tell me. But the apartment is full of boxes being packed. Odds are they're headed somewhere in Europe. But it's hard to say. Lots of places speak some combination of English, French, and Chinese.
"Immigrating won't be hard for us, but our colleagues, we're working with them. We know some immigration attorneys. It'll work out, we think," said Pian.
End of Life
"A bolo has a lifespan, you know? A company, any group does. Once we get through this, get out of China, we'll have something to be proud of, and something to live on for a while, and we know how to succeed," said Zhao. "You have to steal what you can and make the rest."
"And if we're somewhere else, somewhere new? We can start over. Try again. We know one thing for sure, trusting your people, giving them ownership, and letting them take risks and be bold, we can do more with them now than we ever thought we could accomplish when we were just selling fancy headshots and blog posts to dull deskworkers."
"Besides, the real thing is getting to live in something you care about, doing something new, with people you love."
At midnight on June 1, the night of the reopening, Zhao and Pian and the rest of the bolo ceremoniously burned the white suit of the dabai they had stolen from the trash, alongside the masks and visor. They put the remains in a garbage bag, and made sure it was gotten rid of.
"It's weird saying goodbye to such a weird period of time. You almost regret not doing enough," said Zhao.
"We might have done too much!"