I work in tech, and have worked in the past for a smartphone company. Nothing to disagree with here on the concept of sharp power and what China seems to want, but a few tech-related parts jumped out and didn't seem right to me in this essay:
> [Russia's] lack of economic heft and its lower technology level mean that it doesn’t have nearly the reach that China does.
Russia is one of the very few countries in the world that has been able to develop and keep domestic equivalents to Google, Gmail/Hotmail and Facebook. It also has produced some very advanced software companies that have successfully sold into western business for years (e.g. Kaspersky, JetBrains). China's success is at best similar or if you wanted to you could argue it's worse, because TikTok is free (people don't really choose to pay money for it in the way they buy Russian products) and the rest are manufacturing companies that benefited immensely from cheap factory labor, something that doesn't really apply to software companies.
In other words: don't underestimate the Russians. Given a choice between being given a team of 10 Russian computer engineers or 10 Chinese, I'm gonna pick the Russians every time.
> First, internet users migrated from the Web (where attempts at tracking can be detected and blocked) to apps, which watch and record pretty much everything you do in the app
The privacy differences between mobile apps and websites are trivial and hardly matter, despite what you may read in parts of the media. You can argue that in some cases websites have worse privacy than apps and that would be perfectly credible.
> internet use switched from PCs to smartphones, which are far easier to track in physical space, and far easier to link to a user
Again the differences are small. Phones only share precise location if you agree to it, and if you don't then historically it's actually easier to figure out the location of a PC than a phone, because the PC is far more likely to be using an IP address that maps directly to your geolocation whereas mobile IPs are invariably useless due to heavy use of CGNAT.
> A sufficiently powerful government can use your phone, and the apps on your phone, to track where you are and what you’re doing at all times.
They can track where you are if they can either hack or compel the phone company to tell them, but phones have always worked that way even before smartphones and the internet. Tracking what you are doing is much harder. They can see which websites or services you interact with but not necessarily what you are doing on them. For that they'd have to either hack the phone, or hack the entities you're interacting with, or compel them to hand over the data.
False equivalence between Chinese engineers/programmers (where there is a glut of low quality engineers in the domestic market, as there is in India) and Russian programmers using a much smaller subset (expat Russians working for leading companies, which is the cream of the crop). There are plenty of good Chinese (and Indian) expat developers and engineers working at top American companies (including some founders). The overseas Chinese are much greater in number than the Russians and much more vulnerable to being turned (or planted) by the well-organized Chinese surveillance and espionage network, IMO.
I'm judging it based on companies that are or were mostly based in Russia, not those who emigrated to the US (although they are usually excellent too). For example Kaspersky, Yandex, JB, probably more I forgot about.
Thanks. I guess we should compare Yandex to Alibaba, Weibo, TikTok etc then for apples to apples. Turns out Chinese domestic tech leaders also have good programmers and engineers and excellent products. China does graduate a lot of lower grade dross (as does India), which is probably your point, but top talent at top companies is top talent.
Pre-2022 US web platforms weren't banned in Russia outright as they mostly are in China: Yandex's persistence was more due to robust Russian antitrust enforcement, as well as a design more suited to a highly inflected language like Russian:
It's formally Czech (headquartered there) and nowadays they got all their staff out of Russia since the war started. But I've been a customer for years and have interacted with their staff many times, almost all of them were Russians.
Obviously, liberalism and authoritarianism don't mix. So respond symmetrically: whenever the CCP tries to increase control over "its" people in free societies, decrease the CCP's control over its people at home. There are many ways to do this (send some star link terminals over there, assist dissidents with encrypted software, etc.) but the most effective is to encourage emigration.
The CCP is absolutely livid about the UK's BNO visa program for Hong Kongers as is witnessed by its propaganda outlets' constant raging and whining about it. Every time one of those secret police stations is discovered grant another 10.000 Chinese visa. Voting with one's feet still works and China cannot afford the brain drain.
"Obviously, liberalism and authoritarianism don't mix."
That's great to hear. Now I can do business with companies in Iran and Russia freely. I'm also sure the hundreds of thousands of people who died in the War on Terror are glad that liberalism killed them.
Even better, UK should just grant visas to all 1.4 billion Chinese. No need to play this slow tit for tat game. With this one move, UK won't just drain China's brain, but also its arms, legs, arse etc.
I know you are going for a reductio ad absurdum here, but yes, the West (not just the UK) allowing basically anyone from China to immigrate would be much to its benefit (not that everyone would come).
In fact, while the UK's response to the Chinese crack down in Hong Kong was good, even better would have been a united response by the West: give Hong Kongers the same deal they got as a crown colony (including 1994 reforms) and let them rebuild the city elsewhere. Maybe in Guam or New Caledonia.
They may not match at the abstract level (aka: publicly stated activities and intentions), but they do in fact mix at the object level (to the degree that they do, which is unknowable, thus it is hallucinated, according to Western cultural standards in the year 2024).
I am in the middle of reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff and have just got to the part where she describes the rise of Totalitarianism in the early parts of the 20th century, leading to Hitler and Stalin. This whole issue is deeply disturbing and, I'm afraid to say, US tech. companies are playing their part in the totalitarianism of Surveillance Capitalism with the ultimate goal of behavioural control of us, the lumpenproletariat, to ensure certainty of the commercial ends of the tech. companies' commercial customers. God, how depressing.
Another threat to our way of life. I’m saddened. I just got over Saddam Hussein, Assad, Islamism, secular Arab nationalism, white supremacy, woke totalitarianism, Muhammad ghaddaffi and now Putin, Putin Putin. Now China.
While I agree China is an issue, the largest threats to Western liberalism are domestic. The Left (which is firmly in control of the Democratic Party) has essentially abandoned the value-neutral state model of Lockean / Millian liberalism in favor of privileges and rewards assigned by a racial and sexual grievance hierarchy. the cult of Trump is putting the Right on the same road, largely but not entirely in response to the Left. Patrick Deneen (and Edmund Burke long before him) predicted this.
2/3rds of American college students today say speech should be legally limited for "climate change deniers", "haters", racially insensitive people"... essentially anyone who disagrees with them. (https://thompsoncenter.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/509/2021/01/Thompson-Center-First-Amendment-Survey.pdf ) That illiberalism didn't come from China. It came from America's higher "education" establishment, the very institutions that are supposed to be creating the next generation of our ruling class. In horror movie terms: you're worried about locking the doors when the call is coming from inside the house.
Clearly you've forgotten Comintern and Stalin's succesful suborning of Western journalists and Leftists. There's been a campaign to strip Walter Duranty of the Pulitzer Prize he won for denying the Holodomor for 30 years. Great men like George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells were hoodwinked into praising Stalin. The Communist Parties in many Western countries were also effectively run from Moscow for a number of years. The West countered with operations like Voice of America and, more subtly, The Paris Review.
“Hitler would have certainly liked to do this — he certainly tried to get ethnic Germans on his side when he took over neighboring countries — but he lacked the technology and the global economic reach to bend German Americans to his will, so he didn’t even try.”
He may not have needed to do much, given the reach of Father Coghlin and the widespread antisemitism of powerful people such as Henry Ford. But there were successful attempts to suborn members of Congress, and extensive pro-Nazi organizations in the U.S. So it’s a bit naive to say he didn’t even try.
"Of course because the Worldcon organizers do not employ a large team of censors that combs over every work of fiction with a sensitive eye to what might offend the CCP, it’s pretty much certain that the CCP called the Worldcon people up and gave them a list of authors they didn’t like”
This seems inaccurate given the evidence from the leaked emails. The linked Guardian article and the report here https://file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censorship-and-exclusion/ say pretty much the opposite, that it was driven by Worldcon, at least at the level of selecting individual works and authors:
After discussing technical details of the work in the June 5th email, McCarty wrote “In addition to the regular technical review, as we are happening in China and the *laws* we operate under are different…we need to highlight anything of a sensitive political nature in the work. It’s not necessary to read everything, but if the work focuses on China, taiwan, tibet, or other topics that may be an issue *in* China…that needs to be highlighted so that we can determine if it is safe to put it on the ballot (or) if the law will require us to make an administrative decision about it.”
On June 5, Kat Jones asked McCarty for a “list or a resource you can point us to that elaborates on ‘other topics that may be an issue *in* China’?”
McCarty responded on June 5 at 7:18 pm saying “At the moment, the best guidance I have is ‘mentions of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, negatives of China’. I will try to get better guidance when I have a chance to dig into this deeper with the Chinese folks on the committee.”
What would be the point of asking your staff to research the books and author backgrounds if you were just going off a list given by the CCP? It seems that precisely because Worldcon didn't employ a large team of experienced censors, the actual censoring was pretty poor, with one author disqualified for having visited Tibet despite never having been there.
He also writes "At the recent APEC summit in San Francisco, China sent agents to attack Chinese Americans who protested against Xi Jinping’s policies." That sounded like a big deal, and I wanted to read more, but the article he linked just doesn't say anything of the sort.
Even if we can avoid China's influence, we're still sleepwalking into home-grown totalitarian thanks to the ongoing collapse of privacy and the increasingly cheap and economically attractive ability to make everything legible via audio, video, and natural language processing.
Without change, we're not far from a future where no minor infraction (jaywalking, drug use in your backyard) will go unnoticed by automated processes. We're then in a no-win situation where either we fall into tyranny of individuals empowered by these systems, or, if the law is instead enforced equally in all cases - a tyranny of the law itself expanded far beyond the domain it was ever intended - as I outline here:
Thankfully, some states like Taiwan have seen this danger, and are already working to implement systems designed to preserve individual privacy in the age of AI and big-data and even go so far as to attempt to prevent the future reverse engineering of their datasets:
Most laws, particularly those involving "lifestyle" issues, were written with the tacit understanding that they were to be enforced to the extent needed to preserve public order. Absolute enforcement will mean everyone goes to prison.
Sure do, but we're sleepwalking into a situation where normative (but technically and usefully illegal) infractions need to be updated yesterday in light of the LLM-assisted collapse of privacy (thanks to data on everything plus ability to cheaply make that data legible) order to avoid either undermining the rule of law and giving undue discretionary power to various functionaries, or upholding the rule of law at the expense of liberty.
I'm not a doomer about the problem, but it does need to be urgently addressed, and I think many of the answers have yet to be discovered.
I don't think it's that difficult. People rail against conservative Boomers and totalitarianism all the time (though, that sounds wrong - it's authoritarian and not NK style totalitarianism as there's still a lot of non-political personal freedom here). Meanwhile, there's slow but steady income growth and some hand waving about inclusive growth but everyone knows it's all about being close to the people in power and, hopefully, not getting burned when they invariably look to make an example out of someone.
Liberal countries just need to keep doing what they're doing, accept immigrants and maintain their comparative advantages while re-developing a new trading bloc and disciplining their companies so they don't repeat the errors of the past. Meanwhile, they need to sew up better trading relationships with the developing world. Above all, there needs to be a path to eventual prosperity for one's progeny in the Western world. That's where you guys have dropped the ball.
The flip side of China (or, rather, the CCP) wanting control over the racial group is that it kinda wants nothing to do with the rest of the races out there. They'll happy kowtow to the elites of every country, of course. Sharp power can, over the long haul, be countered by soft power and hard economic power.
This is an excellent article, but I think a far bigger threat than Chinese totalitarianism is the rise of the same methods within wealthy Western nations. Over the last few years, Western nations seem determined to copy the methods of Chinese Communists rather than preserve our freedoms. I hope that you write a follow-up article on that topic.
Historically, the more directly confrontational liberal states become, the more they can appear similar to their adversaries. By the end of WWII, Russia, Germany, the UK and US were all command economies.
Plus the Twitter files documenting direct federal government censorship on social media and more commonly pressuring social media companies to do it themselves "voluntarily."
"Then two things happened. First, internet users migrated from the Web (where attempts at tracking can be detected and blocked) to apps, which watch and record pretty much everything you do in the app. Second, internet use switched from PCs to smartphones, which are far easier to track in physical space, and far easier to link to a user."
Not sure what you mean by your first point: isn't a Web browser itself a kind of "app"?
Web browsers are dramatically more sandboxed than apps. Though the mobile OSes have improved markedly in recent years in various ways with how they handle permissions. Remember when you couldn't even install many apps unless you gave them tons of unnecessary permissions?
The sandboxing difference isn't that dramatic. For privacy, consider the fact that it's possible and common for mobile apps to not need an internet connection at all. Often when they do it's only for ads, and you can easily pay to get rid of them.
Web apps on the other hand always need to be loaded from a remote server, so they find out at least when you start the webapp, and often they will send almost every user interaction to the server because they can't do much locally. The service provider just gets way more data due to the limitations of the platform and the workarounds needed. They will also do things like load fonts and scripts from random third parties, so your device is contacting a bigger collection of third parties. And exactly because the browser has to offload so much more to servers companies are often forced into a high-touch subscription model that's not strictly necessary meaning they then need your payment details, at which point all talk of privacy is moot.
This is a much appreciated post with some points I hadn't considered before.
It still seems to me though that users have more fine-grained control over a browser than a smartphone app, although most users likely never use the privacy features.
A lot of phone apps won't install or run without being given certain permissions, while browser apps tend to degrade more gracefully when the browser doesn't give them access to things. This is perhaps more of a platform norm than a technological difference.
I think they're pretty similar these days. Mobile apps prompt for permissions 'just in time' as well, like webapps do. I checked a bunch of apps on my phone and the permission lists are all reasonable and the same as what a webapp equivalent would use (e.g. microphone, notifications).
Mobile apps can store data locally, work without contacting a home server, do ML inferencing locally etc. Not many apps exploit those abilities, but it's there and some do. Android can also remove unused permissions from apps if they weren't used for a while, I think Chrome doesn't do this (might be wrong).
It took me some time to understand why the CCP targets Chinese abroad. For recent immigrants, it's about recruiting them to return to China with Western skills. For permanent residents, it's about being able to apply leverage on their families back in China. For second generation, it's about maintaining a monopoly on Chinese-language media.
So many China hawks look at this as "and this is why you can't trust Chinese immigrants". But it should be "CCP realizes that free Chinese people preferring the West is it's greatest ideological and geopolitical weakness".
There are many things to say about this post, but one thing that makes me very sad and hits close to home is the idea of Chinese spies in American academia.
I am a scientist. Over my career, I have interacted with tons of Chinese foreign nationals as my fellow grad students, postdocs, and technicians. (There are Chinese-American faculty too, of course, but they are more likely to be American citizens of Chinese ancestry.) They are super smart and hardworking and it's hard to imagine American STEM departments without them. If the Chinese government pressures/entices Chinese scientists in America to spy, what is the solution? Surely it can't be to assume that any Chinese national at an American university is a potential spy? That would be hideously racist.
So, for example, now any Chinese who spent time at a military college won't get a visa. I doubt it will go much beyond small, targeted things like this though (pernicious perhaps but small in impact). American science would collapse without the 350,000+ Chinese students here.
It's because the author of this profound drivel is an incredible paranoiac who is talking about a topic he has NO understanding of and is creating monsters hiding under your bed.
I worked in IT for years and I ditched my smartphone 3 years ago after watching Citizen Four on NetFlix. It altered both my view of Edward Snowden and of smartphones. Big Brother in your pocket is not a metaphor. Here's the weird thing; I'm much happier since ditching permanent Internet access. My flip phone is cheap ($30/yr), effectively unhackable, and doesn't tempt me to look at it constantly. Is it inconvenient not to have Internet access on my phone sometimes? Sure. But it's certainly not hard, and how much is your convenience worth in privacy?
As Snowden detailed, the NSA records and keeps all voice calls and text messages and is able to track any phone (flip or smart) by the cellular network, so you aren’t completely protecting your privacy. A smart phone is not less private in itself, although apps and hacks are a bigger attack surface. A smartphone with a VPN and a secure messaging app like Signal and no use of other apps is probably more private than a flip phone, use of which may attract attention of the spies since it indicates “something to hide”.
In truth, despite Snowden's comments, I'm less worried about the NSA than I am corporate data privacy. If the NSA decides they're interested in me (or anyone else) there's really nothing I can do to stop them short of living 100% off grid. But I can stop corporate behemoths from data mining everything about my life.
Yeah, but if you have a VPN on full time and assume it isn’t compromised, and the phone isn’t hacked, it’s hard for even a large organization like NSA/PRC/GRU to get the contents of the Signal messages or even know you are using it. I recall there was a known issue when using a Chinese input method keyboard on Signal possibly leaking entered text, so now the built in text prediction on Signal is subpar (can’t use the phone OS keyboard’s prediction since that may leak entered text). A payphone with a voice scrambler or carrier pigeons maybe more private but harder to use.
India seems to want a (much smaller) piece of that action, but devoted toward their strange sexual puritanism. In India it is de facto illegal to display even a romantic kiss, and they seem intent on enforcing that standard upon the world by using their value as a market as a bludgeon.
For what it's worth, I didn't find The Poppy War very good. It is too much a direct copy of history while also simultaneously not making sense. It has scenes that felt like they were copy & pasted from the Wikipedia entry on the rape of Nanking. Meanwhile the main character is supposed to be Mao but nothing about her actions or philosophy make sense given that.
If you didn't know anything about Chinese history I think the book might be better. A kind of "stealth history for people who hate reading about history".
I work in tech, and have worked in the past for a smartphone company. Nothing to disagree with here on the concept of sharp power and what China seems to want, but a few tech-related parts jumped out and didn't seem right to me in this essay:
> [Russia's] lack of economic heft and its lower technology level mean that it doesn’t have nearly the reach that China does.
Russia is one of the very few countries in the world that has been able to develop and keep domestic equivalents to Google, Gmail/Hotmail and Facebook. It also has produced some very advanced software companies that have successfully sold into western business for years (e.g. Kaspersky, JetBrains). China's success is at best similar or if you wanted to you could argue it's worse, because TikTok is free (people don't really choose to pay money for it in the way they buy Russian products) and the rest are manufacturing companies that benefited immensely from cheap factory labor, something that doesn't really apply to software companies.
In other words: don't underestimate the Russians. Given a choice between being given a team of 10 Russian computer engineers or 10 Chinese, I'm gonna pick the Russians every time.
> First, internet users migrated from the Web (where attempts at tracking can be detected and blocked) to apps, which watch and record pretty much everything you do in the app
The privacy differences between mobile apps and websites are trivial and hardly matter, despite what you may read in parts of the media. You can argue that in some cases websites have worse privacy than apps and that would be perfectly credible.
> internet use switched from PCs to smartphones, which are far easier to track in physical space, and far easier to link to a user
Again the differences are small. Phones only share precise location if you agree to it, and if you don't then historically it's actually easier to figure out the location of a PC than a phone, because the PC is far more likely to be using an IP address that maps directly to your geolocation whereas mobile IPs are invariably useless due to heavy use of CGNAT.
> A sufficiently powerful government can use your phone, and the apps on your phone, to track where you are and what you’re doing at all times.
They can track where you are if they can either hack or compel the phone company to tell them, but phones have always worked that way even before smartphones and the internet. Tracking what you are doing is much harder. They can see which websites or services you interact with but not necessarily what you are doing on them. For that they'd have to either hack the phone, or hack the entities you're interacting with, or compel them to hand over the data.
False equivalence between Chinese engineers/programmers (where there is a glut of low quality engineers in the domestic market, as there is in India) and Russian programmers using a much smaller subset (expat Russians working for leading companies, which is the cream of the crop). There are plenty of good Chinese (and Indian) expat developers and engineers working at top American companies (including some founders). The overseas Chinese are much greater in number than the Russians and much more vulnerable to being turned (or planted) by the well-organized Chinese surveillance and espionage network, IMO.
I'm judging it based on companies that are or were mostly based in Russia, not those who emigrated to the US (although they are usually excellent too). For example Kaspersky, Yandex, JB, probably more I forgot about.
Thanks. I guess we should compare Yandex to Alibaba, Weibo, TikTok etc then for apples to apples. Turns out Chinese domestic tech leaders also have good programmers and engineers and excellent products. China does graduate a lot of lower grade dross (as does India), which is probably your point, but top talent at top companies is top talent.
Pre-2022 US web platforms weren't banned in Russia outright as they mostly are in China: Yandex's persistence was more due to robust Russian antitrust enforcement, as well as a design more suited to a highly inflected language like Russian:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-russian-antitrust-enforcers-defeated
Sure, but I don't think I said China is worse at tech than Russia, just that they aren't clearly better.
If these maniacs break out systems, don’t you think we should have some back ups ready to go? Help us build them:
https://open.substack.com/pub/joshketry/p/we-need-alternative-systems-in-case?r=7oa9d&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Wow, there are othes who can see outside the Overton Window?? I'm in!
I think you have a strong overall point, but I believe JetBrains is Czech, not Russian, though it was founded initially by Russian developers.
It's formally Czech (headquartered there) and nowadays they got all their staff out of Russia since the war started. But I've been a customer for years and have interacted with their staff many times, almost all of them were Russians.
Obviously, liberalism and authoritarianism don't mix. So respond symmetrically: whenever the CCP tries to increase control over "its" people in free societies, decrease the CCP's control over its people at home. There are many ways to do this (send some star link terminals over there, assist dissidents with encrypted software, etc.) but the most effective is to encourage emigration.
The CCP is absolutely livid about the UK's BNO visa program for Hong Kongers as is witnessed by its propaganda outlets' constant raging and whining about it. Every time one of those secret police stations is discovered grant another 10.000 Chinese visa. Voting with one's feet still works and China cannot afford the brain drain.
"Obviously, liberalism and authoritarianism don't mix."
That's great to hear. Now I can do business with companies in Iran and Russia freely. I'm also sure the hundreds of thousands of people who died in the War on Terror are glad that liberalism killed them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance#:~:text=The%20paradox%20of%20tolerance%20states,practice%20of%20tolerance%20with%20them.
The Paradox of Tolerance is one of the best examples of the question begging fallacy every written.
Sir: please follow the script.
Even better, UK should just grant visas to all 1.4 billion Chinese. No need to play this slow tit for tat game. With this one move, UK won't just drain China's brain, but also its arms, legs, arse etc.
I know you are going for a reductio ad absurdum here, but yes, the West (not just the UK) allowing basically anyone from China to immigrate would be much to its benefit (not that everyone would come).
In fact, while the UK's response to the Chinese crack down in Hong Kong was good, even better would have been a united response by the West: give Hong Kongers the same deal they got as a crown colony (including 1994 reforms) and let them rebuild the city elsewhere. Maybe in Guam or New Caledonia.
They may not match at the abstract level (aka: publicly stated activities and intentions), but they do in fact mix at the object level (to the degree that they do, which is unknowable, thus it is hallucinated, according to Western cultural standards in the year 2024).
I am in the middle of reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff and have just got to the part where she describes the rise of Totalitarianism in the early parts of the 20th century, leading to Hitler and Stalin. This whole issue is deeply disturbing and, I'm afraid to say, US tech. companies are playing their part in the totalitarianism of Surveillance Capitalism with the ultimate goal of behavioural control of us, the lumpenproletariat, to ensure certainty of the commercial ends of the tech. companies' commercial customers. God, how depressing.
Another threat to our way of life. I’m saddened. I just got over Saddam Hussein, Assad, Islamism, secular Arab nationalism, white supremacy, woke totalitarianism, Muhammad ghaddaffi and now Putin, Putin Putin. Now China.
Will it ever end.
We didn’t start the fire…
While I agree China is an issue, the largest threats to Western liberalism are domestic. The Left (which is firmly in control of the Democratic Party) has essentially abandoned the value-neutral state model of Lockean / Millian liberalism in favor of privileges and rewards assigned by a racial and sexual grievance hierarchy. the cult of Trump is putting the Right on the same road, largely but not entirely in response to the Left. Patrick Deneen (and Edmund Burke long before him) predicted this.
2/3rds of American college students today say speech should be legally limited for "climate change deniers", "haters", racially insensitive people"... essentially anyone who disagrees with them. (https://thompsoncenter.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/509/2021/01/Thompson-Center-First-Amendment-Survey.pdf ) That illiberalism didn't come from China. It came from America's higher "education" establishment, the very institutions that are supposed to be creating the next generation of our ruling class. In horror movie terms: you're worried about locking the doors when the call is coming from inside the house.
Well said. The biggest threat to genuine liberalism the world over is probably from the so-called liberals in America!
Clearly you've forgotten Comintern and Stalin's succesful suborning of Western journalists and Leftists. There's been a campaign to strip Walter Duranty of the Pulitzer Prize he won for denying the Holodomor for 30 years. Great men like George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells were hoodwinked into praising Stalin. The Communist Parties in many Western countries were also effectively run from Moscow for a number of years. The West countered with operations like Voice of America and, more subtly, The Paris Review.
Information operations are very old, but what new technology enables is a massive leap in their reach and capability.
They also countered(?) with this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
“Hitler would have certainly liked to do this — he certainly tried to get ethnic Germans on his side when he took over neighboring countries — but he lacked the technology and the global economic reach to bend German Americans to his will, so he didn’t even try.”
He may not have needed to do much, given the reach of Father Coghlin and the widespread antisemitism of powerful people such as Henry Ford. But there were successful attempts to suborn members of Congress, and extensive pro-Nazi organizations in the U.S. So it’s a bit naive to say he didn’t even try.
You wrote:
"Of course because the Worldcon organizers do not employ a large team of censors that combs over every work of fiction with a sensitive eye to what might offend the CCP, it’s pretty much certain that the CCP called the Worldcon people up and gave them a list of authors they didn’t like”
This seems inaccurate given the evidence from the leaked emails. The linked Guardian article and the report here https://file770.com/the-2023-hugo-awards-a-report-on-censorship-and-exclusion/ say pretty much the opposite, that it was driven by Worldcon, at least at the level of selecting individual works and authors:
After discussing technical details of the work in the June 5th email, McCarty wrote “In addition to the regular technical review, as we are happening in China and the *laws* we operate under are different…we need to highlight anything of a sensitive political nature in the work. It’s not necessary to read everything, but if the work focuses on China, taiwan, tibet, or other topics that may be an issue *in* China…that needs to be highlighted so that we can determine if it is safe to put it on the ballot (or) if the law will require us to make an administrative decision about it.”
On June 5, Kat Jones asked McCarty for a “list or a resource you can point us to that elaborates on ‘other topics that may be an issue *in* China’?”
McCarty responded on June 5 at 7:18 pm saying “At the moment, the best guidance I have is ‘mentions of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, negatives of China’. I will try to get better guidance when I have a chance to dig into this deeper with the Chinese folks on the committee.”
What would be the point of asking your staff to research the books and author backgrounds if you were just going off a list given by the CCP? It seems that precisely because Worldcon didn't employ a large team of experienced censors, the actual censoring was pretty poor, with one author disqualified for having visited Tibet despite never having been there.
He also writes "At the recent APEC summit in San Francisco, China sent agents to attack Chinese Americans who protested against Xi Jinping’s policies." That sounded like a big deal, and I wanted to read more, but the article he linked just doesn't say anything of the sort.
Even if we can avoid China's influence, we're still sleepwalking into home-grown totalitarian thanks to the ongoing collapse of privacy and the increasingly cheap and economically attractive ability to make everything legible via audio, video, and natural language processing.
Without change, we're not far from a future where no minor infraction (jaywalking, drug use in your backyard) will go unnoticed by automated processes. We're then in a no-win situation where either we fall into tyranny of individuals empowered by these systems, or, if the law is instead enforced equally in all cases - a tyranny of the law itself expanded far beyond the domain it was ever intended - as I outline here:
https://alethios.substack.com/p/at-the-dawn-of-the-smart-city-age
Thankfully, some states like Taiwan have seen this danger, and are already working to implement systems designed to preserve individual privacy in the age of AI and big-data and even go so far as to attempt to prevent the future reverse engineering of their datasets:
https://alethios.substack.com/p/why-we-need-taiwan
What’s wrong with infractions being punished? Don’t we have a political process that enables us to legalize activities that shouldn’t be punished?
Most laws, particularly those involving "lifestyle" issues, were written with the tacit understanding that they were to be enforced to the extent needed to preserve public order. Absolute enforcement will mean everyone goes to prison.
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229
We've been rewriting many of them, and I don't see any reason why we wouldn't do so faster if there is better enforcement.
I would hope you're right - you have a lot more faith in our current legislature than I do!
Hopefully the legislators would treat the issue with more urgency when they started being auto-prosecuted themselves.
Sure do, but we're sleepwalking into a situation where normative (but technically and usefully illegal) infractions need to be updated yesterday in light of the LLM-assisted collapse of privacy (thanks to data on everything plus ability to cheaply make that data legible) order to avoid either undermining the rule of law and giving undue discretionary power to various functionaries, or upholding the rule of law at the expense of liberty.
I'm not a doomer about the problem, but it does need to be urgently addressed, and I think many of the answers have yet to be discovered.
I don't think it's that difficult. People rail against conservative Boomers and totalitarianism all the time (though, that sounds wrong - it's authoritarian and not NK style totalitarianism as there's still a lot of non-political personal freedom here). Meanwhile, there's slow but steady income growth and some hand waving about inclusive growth but everyone knows it's all about being close to the people in power and, hopefully, not getting burned when they invariably look to make an example out of someone.
Liberal countries just need to keep doing what they're doing, accept immigrants and maintain their comparative advantages while re-developing a new trading bloc and disciplining their companies so they don't repeat the errors of the past. Meanwhile, they need to sew up better trading relationships with the developing world. Above all, there needs to be a path to eventual prosperity for one's progeny in the Western world. That's where you guys have dropped the ball.
The flip side of China (or, rather, the CCP) wanting control over the racial group is that it kinda wants nothing to do with the rest of the races out there. They'll happy kowtow to the elites of every country, of course. Sharp power can, over the long haul, be countered by soft power and hard economic power.
The firewall hasn't come here in HK just yet.
This is an excellent article, but I think a far bigger threat than Chinese totalitarianism is the rise of the same methods within wealthy Western nations. Over the last few years, Western nations seem determined to copy the methods of Chinese Communists rather than preserve our freedoms. I hope that you write a follow-up article on that topic.
Can you provide examples?
Historically, the more directly confrontational liberal states become, the more they can appear similar to their adversaries. By the end of WWII, Russia, Germany, the UK and US were all command economies.
Here are a few more (just grabbing randomly from recent articles):
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/germany-announces-wide-ranging-plans?utm_medium=reader2
https://public.substack.com/p/politicians-urge-censorship-of-the
https://public.substack.com/p/totalitarian-bid-to-censor-entire
Plus the Twitter files documenting direct federal government censorship on social media and more commonly pressuring social media companies to do it themselves "voluntarily."
Yes, just look at the various articles written by Public. And this is just a select list.
https://public.substack.com/
"Then two things happened. First, internet users migrated from the Web (where attempts at tracking can be detected and blocked) to apps, which watch and record pretty much everything you do in the app. Second, internet use switched from PCs to smartphones, which are far easier to track in physical space, and far easier to link to a user."
Not sure what you mean by your first point: isn't a Web browser itself a kind of "app"?
Web browsers are dramatically more sandboxed than apps. Though the mobile OSes have improved markedly in recent years in various ways with how they handle permissions. Remember when you couldn't even install many apps unless you gave them tons of unnecessary permissions?
The sandboxing difference isn't that dramatic. For privacy, consider the fact that it's possible and common for mobile apps to not need an internet connection at all. Often when they do it's only for ads, and you can easily pay to get rid of them.
Web apps on the other hand always need to be loaded from a remote server, so they find out at least when you start the webapp, and often they will send almost every user interaction to the server because they can't do much locally. The service provider just gets way more data due to the limitations of the platform and the workarounds needed. They will also do things like load fonts and scripts from random third parties, so your device is contacting a bigger collection of third parties. And exactly because the browser has to offload so much more to servers companies are often forced into a high-touch subscription model that's not strictly necessary meaning they then need your payment details, at which point all talk of privacy is moot.
This is a much appreciated post with some points I hadn't considered before.
It still seems to me though that users have more fine-grained control over a browser than a smartphone app, although most users likely never use the privacy features.
A lot of phone apps won't install or run without being given certain permissions, while browser apps tend to degrade more gracefully when the browser doesn't give them access to things. This is perhaps more of a platform norm than a technological difference.
I think they're pretty similar these days. Mobile apps prompt for permissions 'just in time' as well, like webapps do. I checked a bunch of apps on my phone and the permission lists are all reasonable and the same as what a webapp equivalent would use (e.g. microphone, notifications).
Mobile apps can store data locally, work without contacting a home server, do ML inferencing locally etc. Not many apps exploit those abilities, but it's there and some do. Android can also remove unused permissions from apps if they weren't used for a while, I think Chrome doesn't do this (might be wrong).
But there's not much in it, either way.
It took me some time to understand why the CCP targets Chinese abroad. For recent immigrants, it's about recruiting them to return to China with Western skills. For permanent residents, it's about being able to apply leverage on their families back in China. For second generation, it's about maintaining a monopoly on Chinese-language media.
So many China hawks look at this as "and this is why you can't trust Chinese immigrants". But it should be "CCP realizes that free Chinese people preferring the West is it's greatest ideological and geopolitical weakness".
There are many things to say about this post, but one thing that makes me very sad and hits close to home is the idea of Chinese spies in American academia.
I am a scientist. Over my career, I have interacted with tons of Chinese foreign nationals as my fellow grad students, postdocs, and technicians. (There are Chinese-American faculty too, of course, but they are more likely to be American citizens of Chinese ancestry.) They are super smart and hardworking and it's hard to imagine American STEM departments without them. If the Chinese government pressures/entices Chinese scientists in America to spy, what is the solution? Surely it can't be to assume that any Chinese national at an American university is a potential spy? That would be hideously racist.
So, for example, now any Chinese who spent time at a military college won't get a visa. I doubt it will go much beyond small, targeted things like this though (pernicious perhaps but small in impact). American science would collapse without the 350,000+ Chinese students here.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/14/china-united-states-university-students-border/
It's because the author of this profound drivel is an incredible paranoiac who is talking about a topic he has NO understanding of and is creating monsters hiding under your bed.
I worked in IT for years and I ditched my smartphone 3 years ago after watching Citizen Four on NetFlix. It altered both my view of Edward Snowden and of smartphones. Big Brother in your pocket is not a metaphor. Here's the weird thing; I'm much happier since ditching permanent Internet access. My flip phone is cheap ($30/yr), effectively unhackable, and doesn't tempt me to look at it constantly. Is it inconvenient not to have Internet access on my phone sometimes? Sure. But it's certainly not hard, and how much is your convenience worth in privacy?
As Snowden detailed, the NSA records and keeps all voice calls and text messages and is able to track any phone (flip or smart) by the cellular network, so you aren’t completely protecting your privacy. A smart phone is not less private in itself, although apps and hacks are a bigger attack surface. A smartphone with a VPN and a secure messaging app like Signal and no use of other apps is probably more private than a flip phone, use of which may attract attention of the spies since it indicates “something to hide”.
In truth, despite Snowden's comments, I'm less worried about the NSA than I am corporate data privacy. If the NSA decides they're interested in me (or anyone else) there's really nothing I can do to stop them short of living 100% off grid. But I can stop corporate behemoths from data mining everything about my life.
A smartphone with a VPN and Signal installed also attracts attention.
Yeah, but if you have a VPN on full time and assume it isn’t compromised, and the phone isn’t hacked, it’s hard for even a large organization like NSA/PRC/GRU to get the contents of the Signal messages or even know you are using it. I recall there was a known issue when using a Chinese input method keyboard on Signal possibly leaking entered text, so now the built in text prediction on Signal is subpar (can’t use the phone OS keyboard’s prediction since that may leak entered text). A payphone with a voice scrambler or carrier pigeons maybe more private but harder to use.
India seems to want a (much smaller) piece of that action, but devoted toward their strange sexual puritanism. In India it is de facto illegal to display even a romantic kiss, and they seem intent on enforcing that standard upon the world by using their value as a market as a bludgeon.
To what extent is India's weird prudishness a product of the British Raj?
For what it's worth, I didn't find The Poppy War very good. It is too much a direct copy of history while also simultaneously not making sense. It has scenes that felt like they were copy & pasted from the Wikipedia entry on the rape of Nanking. Meanwhile the main character is supposed to be Mao but nothing about her actions or philosophy make sense given that.
If you didn't know anything about Chinese history I think the book might be better. A kind of "stealth history for people who hate reading about history".