I highly recommend the story Kremlin, Inc. in last week's New Yorker. It's a very good piece, and it awakens me to the corrosive by degrees nature of our own compliance in corporate evildoing. If this age truly is the age where the most technically useful aspects of all the previous ages are gathered up and re-used, then the practice of dealing with ones' enemies by simply having them killed, which here and there throughout history has enjoyed some popularity, would certainly be central to the combo platter of options considered available to today's leaders. And while we may be correct in saying: we can't fight them, the fact that we likewise refuse to protest in small ways seems the most disingenuous of all.
I'm thinking specifically of Google, both the richest company and the first to ever adopt as its mission statement "Don't be evil." I'm thinking of hanging out with Sergei Brin, which I actually did a couple of weeks ago at a party, and what we talked about. And I'm thinking of Professor Ding Zilin, whose son was shot dead protesting freedom on the night of June 3rd, 1989, and who since has been collecting names of those who were killed around that night. At the end of June 2006, she was able to confirm 186 deaths. But when she logged onto the Internet and went to Google.cn, which began operating in China in January of 2006, and typed in Tienanmen Square, zero results showed up. She typed in her son's name. There was no such person. In exchange for what could be billions of dollars of revenue, Google agreed to censor all of its Chinese searches to exclude, how did the Nazis put it, "any unpleasantness."
How many people died at Tienanmen? According to Wikipedia: "Estimates of civilian deaths vary: 23 (Communist Party of China), 400–800 (Central Intelligence Agency), 2600 (Chinese Red Cross). Injuries are generally held to have numbered from 7,000 to 10,000." Wow. That’s a lot of human sacrifices for freedom, in a country without, shall we say, a history of strong protest movements. These people were killed or injured for doing nothing but peaceably assembling, one of the cornerstone reasons for why there is an America. And while it was American freedom that gave birth to the Internet, ironically none of these people will ever turn up on a Google search in China. Look it up. It never happened. Imagine being someone who knew them, loved them, someone like their mother, like Professor Ding.
The BBC wrote: "Google's launch of a new, self-censored search engine in China is a 'black day' for freedom of expression, a leading international media watchdog says. Reporters Without Borders joined others in asking how Google could stand up for US users' freedoms while controlling what Chinese users can search for." The article continues: "The BBC news site, for example, is inaccessible, while a search on Google.cn for the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement directs users to a string of condemnatory articles." Please keep in mind: this isn't the fascist Chinese government building these algorithms; it's Google! Big Brother says these people are disappeared, and Google complies. They fix it so these trouble makers never existed. I know it sounds shocking, but this is the deal Google made.
Microsoft and Yahoo!, by the way, do the same thing. Big surprise, but they aren't run by two Jews who founded a company with an ethical imperative. The lame argument they make is: "They would do it anyway, so why not make money on it?" What would happen though if the big search engines refused to play China's game? Government's wage war but if the soldiers won't pull the trigger there isn't much of a war. Is it really better to assimilate and hope for the best? What possible motive would China have for changing? But unless we as Web users agree not to support them, which is almost impossible, why would they ever feel the need to change?
I'm only 230 years old, a young adult in Nation Years, but I remember being a grown teenager and coming out of the shadow of the Cold War, with Rod Serling and Hannah Arendt and Mad Magazine and Edward R. Murrow and Elie Weisel laying bare the cultural shame surrounding what it means to be silent. It was as if a generation of WWII survivors were dedicated to teaching the next generation never to stand by as they come for your neighbors, for they will soon be coming for you. I witnessed a tremendous amount of science fiction and social fiction and social analysis, created in the aftermath of WWII. What Americans learned about human nature after WWII was unprecedented, and there was an unprecedented effort then made to ensure that a society would be able to identify it when the powers that be start to wear these freedoms down. Through melodrama and satire, a new and clear picture was painted of what constitutes an unacceptable un-human response. And yet that is the picture I see today.
It's tough to watch it all go to hell. I have a particular soft spot for that generation that received giant cultural inoculations of this freedom virus. I am still moved by all the TV shows that have the lone man stand up and shock the community and say, "But I saw what happened..." or who refuses to pretend that all is well. And yet I see virtually none of my fellow 'liberals' and 'activists' paying attention to this pernicious threat. Indeed, I did all my research for this article on Google. And so when should you begin to doubt its complete objectivity?
For more on the subject, here is Human Rights Watch's take:
http://hrw.org/englishwr2k7/docs/2007/01/11/china14867.htm
And here's the original New Yorker story: http://royaldutchshellplc.com/2007/05/31/the-new-yorker-kremlin-inc-why-are-vladimir-putin%E2%80%99s-opponents-dying/
5 comments:
"we make the reality"
That's the new reality, that various people really think they can make the reality, and they have results to show for it.
In the end, the ants will win. The engineers will win if for us, because we are all going to have our own transmitter. But that's 100 years from now. We may or may not make it.
But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe people don't want truth.
On http://hrw.org/englishwr2k7/docs/2007/01/11/china14867.htm Human Writes
Watch writes:
Restrictions on Freedom of Expression
The Great Firewall of China restricts not only access to the internet,
with its 123 million users in China, but also to newspapers, magazines,
books, television and radio broadcasts, and film. During 2006, the Chinese
government and Communist party officials moved aggressively to plug the wall
s holes and to punish transgressors. Premier Wen Jiabao justified the
renewed crackdown, stating that internet censorship is necessary to
safeguard national, social and collective interests.
Journalists, bloggers, webmasters, writers, and editors, who send news out
of China or who merely debate politically sensitive ideas among themselves,
face punishments ranging from sudden unemployment to long prison terms.
Censors use sophisticated filters, blocking, and internet police to limit
incoming information.
During the first half of 2006, Chinese officials shut down more than 700
online forums and ordered eight search engines to filter subversive and
sensitive content based on 10,000 key words. In July, a website called
Century China and its eight online forums, popular among Chinese
intellectuals, was shut down for illegally providing news. In September, two
chief editors of Wang Yi (NetEase), a top internet portal, were fired for
allowing an unauthorized opinion poll. Blogs from prominent commentators and
activists continued to be regularly shut down.
By their own admission, global corporations such as Google, Microsoft,
Yahoo!, and Skype continue to assist in the Chinese government s system of
arbitrary and opaque political censorship in an effort to ingratiate their
companies with Chinese regulators. Yahoo! released the identity of private
users to Chinese authorities, contributing to four critics lengthy prison
sentences. Microsoft and Google censor searches for what they think the
government considers sensitive terms.
I hate to play the other side here, but I can argue that what google did was ok. Of course I'm a hardened compromiser, but this may even be my real point of view.
The solution they contrived is unique and ingenious, and it allows them to operate inside CHina without being entangled in the corruption of the actual workings of the censorship process. As you probably know, they stick a machine inside china and have it repeatedly query the outside world, thus learning what the chinese are blocking at that moment. They can't ask China cause China won't tell anybody what the list is. Censorship is more effective, like training rats, when punishment and reward are unpredictable. It forces the creature to internalize the stimulus mechanism.
If I understand it correctly, google.com is still available in China, though the govt cripples its speed and blocks access to cache files, and of course blocks access to all the webpages that it blocks for any request crossing its borders, and blocks certain search terms, as it does for everybody. A google.cn search is different from any other search in CHina because it actually tells the user that his search is being blocked whenever google happens to know that it is being blocked. God knows why China lets them do that, but they do.
They are not ratting out people like yahoo, or purging files, like microsoft, and I assume they will refuse to do so.
DId you read that Times piece I just sent you? I think that chinese history is so different from ours, so communal, so steeped in profound self-censorship, that it takes a completely different frame of mind to comprhend what freedom means there. I think the ants will win, especially in CHina, beacuse they really are the ant people, and that what google is doing is going to help get there.
so tell me why I'm wrong.
Because we have to beat the ant people. They can't create fun things. You know the song Venus in Furs? They can't write it. They can't make good art. They don't have crazy women who like to fuck. Because diversity leads to goodness. Because letting things rip leads to betterness. Yes, Capitalism is a degenerate form of social interaction, and I don't endorse it one bit. But Socialism breeds its own forms of fetishism. They like to cut the fins off sharks and throw them back, just cuz they believe the power of the fin will give them hard ons. They kill Tigers for their balls, Rhinos for their tusks. Americans care about the little kitties and puppies. We're suckers for endangered species. Their national pasttime is creating enganged species. They are ruthless, with very little sentimentality, and the only form of romanticism they enjoy is as nationalism. It's a martial culture. I still believe in the power of being free, to follow where our thoughts take us, to let the mind go whereever it wants to go. In your way, we have to always be afraid that it might be the "wrong" place. How can we evolve to being an enlighted species without the ability to ramble?
Because these people are terrified, just terrified. They're seriously worried about slipping up and going to jail. Because The main function of Jingjing and Chacha is to intimidate. Because once you start trying to figure out how to self-censor, your whole orientation shifts and evolution stops. Because they are destroying the planet arguably way faster than everybody else put together, and . Because everything you hold dear and sacred would be not allowed in their world. Their world would kill you Chris. For all the reasons I mention above, but mainly cuz they torture people...a lot. Because having to guess where you will run afoul of the law is Kafka-esque.
Did you read the quote from the Google guy about how we can't intervene in internal policies in China? When it comes to something like this, I guess this is where I have always differed from you. This liberal Clinton thing of expediency and compromise and relativism I believe leads to human suffering and deaths. This is the tiny nugget of truth that Bush has run with and perverted and almost utterly emptied of meaning. But it is based on good old American values that is embodied by Dennis Hopper in True Romance. Chris Walken will kill him if he stands up for himself. He knows this. So what does he do. He fucking goes out like a champ. That's my America. Fuck those guys. Real people died for something real, and to be deeply involved in the process of lying about it, which ultimately is what censorship is (it's the Google brand, which means something, and that which is being traded upon, part of which btw I've made a contribution to), is to play a small role in support of the Chinese government's murder. We only have one life, and I can't imagine enabling these goons.
So help me see why one does anything other than just say fuck you, the way Wikipedia does. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both say this whole thing is fucked! So, in this area, I am a straight up 100% 1950's Republican. Or 1970's Radical. Either way, it's the idea that right is right. They're just too fucking evil. There's very little good about the Chinese government. I surely don't agree that Google is involved in CHina without being entangled in the corruption of the actual workings of the censorship process
I'm not clear what happens to a Chinese citizen who types in Tiananmen into Google.com in China. I think they will come for them. It might take awhile, but I bet it's not advised. You write: Censorship is more effective, like training rats, when punishment and reward are unpredictable.
a couple of things--FIrst, I wanted to take the opposing point, which I think is valid, but I also think your argument is valid and hasn't been said enough or strong enough. IN fact the dominant view seems to be the "realist" fatalism (it's not cynicism, but it is fatalism) that I spew. ANd you should still make your rant. Even though it's not timely in the regular sense, it still is timely in the sense of an overlay that says--hey you, you people, wake up to the fact that you have the exact same loyalty to Google that your parents did to Ford or Chevy, and Google is already fucking you just like Ford and CHevy ultimately did, but they managed to get there about 50 years quicker in their corporate history. Don't forget, you guys, that Ford was the original "don't be evil" company, and they meant it (paying workers well, etc.), and lived it for just exactly as long as it didn't get in the way of profits, just like google.
FUck all companies and brands! Fuck tribes! FUck nations and religions! Fuck all these warring factions and the power and money they fight for.
Google told us they were the standard-bearer of the new denatured, deracinated, global meta-tribe of no tribes and all tribes too big and too small to fight, subsisting only in the living information flows that have no center and no periphery. Alright, maybe they didn't tell us that. Maybe we foisted that role on them, since we are Americans and therefore need a rich corporation to carry the standard of our dream.
However, the age has not arrived of no loyalties but true loyalties, and no tribes but true tribes, and Google is not its flag. When that age arrives, there will be no flags, by definition. Google is just the flag of really good engineering, which may be the flag that we will have to make do with for now.
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