The Internet Is Everything: How Internet Censorship Only Affects The Poor

Firstly, let’s not confuse the Internet being Everything with the retardedly regurgitated Internet of Everything, or Internet of Things. An intelligently functioning Internet is nothing of the sort.  

Since its earliest days, the Internet has always been a means of communication between smart people.i Universities used it to communicate with one another, soon businesses began to adopt it, and only decades later did consumers find that it was an even more effective divertissement than television. In the last decade, the Internet has become untethered from desktop computing and now every meat puppet with a pulse has a biometric smartphone in their pocket (or will soon). Frankly, they deserve to have their heads buried in their closed sandboxes.

Speaking of closed sandboxes, there is perhaps no nation state that expends more biodieselii and resourcesiii than The People’s Republic of China. You can’t Google “Falun Gong,” you can’t use Facebook, and, according to the latest New York Times article, The Great Firewall of China is getting beefier by the day and, boohoo, making it hard to use Google and stuff. As the Internet represents an existential threat to the mere notion, much less the continued operation, of the nation state, it should come as no surprise that the toppiest of top-down examples extant would wants to keep a lid on things.

This being said, in their piece for NYT, Keith Bradsher and Paul Mozer disseminate enough braindamaged retardation that I’m compelled to go on the record to set things straight.iv As ever, for your enlightment and entertainment:

As part of a broad campaign to tighten internal security, the Chinese government has draped a darker shroud over Internet communications in recent weeks, a situation that has made it more difficult for Google and its customers to do business.

The boohooing begins: “O noes! China cares more about itself than the big-eyed whiteys who’ve been fucking them in the ass for the past 200+ years! Why o why!” etc. Can you blame them?

In late July, antimonopoly investigators raided Microsoft offices in four Chinese cities to interrogate managers and copy large amounts of data from hard drives.

Replace “antimonopoly” with “anti-terrorist,” “Microsoft” with “Apple,” “Chinese” with “American,” and you have the story behind Apple’s missing warrant canary. That Light Of Truth sure shines brightly when pointed at The Evil Enemy, neh?

“Companies overlooked Internet problems when the economy was booming,” said Shaun Rein, managing director of the China Market Research Group, a Shanghai consulting firm. “But now a lot of companies are asking whether they really need to be in China.”

Unlike the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, desperate as it is to grasp at the tendrils of relevancy, this surely suits China just fine. Never having had the expansionist tendencies of the American, European, or even Mongolian powers, China is quite content to authoritatively maintain its own borders. If you want to play in their sandbox, just as with Apple, you have to play by their rules. If not, then beat it, kid.

The chief technology officer of a start-up in China said it had been especially difficult to use Google Drive this summer, making it a challenge for employees to share files and documents. “We were hooked on collaborative editing,” said the chief technology officer, who insisted on anonymity for fear of reprisal from the Chinese authorities.

This punkass CTO kid should be fired on the spot, just like Andreas was fired from Blockchain.info after MP killed him. There’s zero excuse for being too stupid to find alternatives to Google. There’s SpiderOak, there’s PGP, and there’s other shit out there. Not that the Chinese have never been admired for their creativity and lateral thinking but this is just embarrassing. If you thought only the United States of Egypt had derpage like this, you thought wrong. Shit is globally pervasive. For now.

Jin Hetian, an archaeologist in Beijing, said it was difficult to do research using Baidu, a local search engine that has limitations for searches in English and other non-Chinese languages and that provides fewer specialized functions. “I know some foreign scientists are studying the rings of ancient trees to learn about the climate, for example, but I can’t find their work using Baidu,” Ms. Jin said. “When in China, I’m almost never able to access Google Scholar, so I’m left badly informed of the latest findings.”

Jin is evidently a poorly connected, hollow shell of an archeologist that no one could care less about.v If he can’t form the relationships needed to ensure that “the latest findings” end up directly in his inbox from his colleagues abroad, he’s doomed to irrelevance. A search engine is in no way a replacement for webs of trust and journal publications.

“Internet security is being raised to a much higher degree,” said Xiao Qiang, a specialist in Chinese Internet censorship at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information. “It overrides the other priorities, including commerce or scientific research.”

Xiao, on the other hand, knows what he’s talking about. Kudos to him. Control of all forms has always been the overriding objective of Chinese Emperors, Xi Jinping is no different.

Frustrated users have often resorted to “virtual private network,” or V.P.N., services to evade China’s Internet filters. But those services, too, have come under concerted attack from the authorities, who have interrupted service to them with increasing frequency. Many ordinary citizens cannot afford or obtain access to V.P.N.s to begin with.

To the extent that “most ordinary citizens can’t afford VPNs” I guess they can’t afford the Internet. Period. To the extent that most people on the planet can’t afford cars, houses, or vacations to Riga, they… can’t afford those things. What, pray tell, is wrong with that? Anything else, anything more “fair,” is some optimal stock bullshit and there’s no legitimate room for such spurious drivel at any place nor at any time. Yes, a VPN is fucking necessary. No, it’s not free. So maybe you eat ramen noodles and only ramen noodles for the next few years? So what of it? There is no world without choice. There is no world without risk and reward.

Those of us who can afford a voice will have a voice. Just as in the aristocracies of yore. Just as is in the +v #bitcoin-assets. While the intellectually and financially poor can be effectively censored, the Bitcoin Lordship cannot. The poor are disproportionately affected by censorship measures, widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots. And this is but one of the many ironic consequences of democratic central planning.

Google also hosts publicly available libraries of coding scripts and fonts on its servers, but China now blocks these libraries. The chief technology officer at the start-up said his company had resorted to creating its own libraries and hosting them on its own servers, wasting costly computing power and space. “We have our own closed server in the office and host things there,” he said. “That’s not going to the cloud; it’s like going back to the early 2000s.”

So Jin no like own computer. “No efficient” he say. Lest we forget that “cloud computing” is a euphemism for “someone else’s hard drive” and therefore antithetical to all that is digital security, there’s no excuse for not controlling your own shit. If you’re managing the hardware and software of your company, your primary objective is to ensure their safety and continued operation. That means control. Hey, if absolute dominion is good enough for the Chinese government, why not for Mr. CTO? 

Ultimately, the Internet is too important to be left in the hands of retards who moan and bitch when shit isn’t free, private, and perfect. They fail to see the equivalence of their derpage with that of gulag prisoners who want fewer lashings. Lashings are exactly what they’ll get until they put in the effort required. No amount of grade inflation will save people from the real world. 

The silver lining being that this much nonsense can’t last forever, as MP notes: 

I look forward to the day random derps all over the US can’t afford Internet derpage anymore because Bitcoin competition has made electricity too expensive.

That day is coming for the US. That day is coming for China. That day is coming for you.

Now don’t just sit there, do something about it!

___ ___ ___

  1. Today, this means Bitcoin, IRC, and PGP. That’s it. That’s the definitive threshold with which conversations can be entertained.
  2. In Rudolph Diesel’s native tongue: Fleisch und Blut.
  3. Inorganics such as energy.
  4. I mean, what good is a blog if it can’t call out the slothenly scum of the earth?
  5. Of course, these are the types of people that newsrags almost exclusively interview. Important people are too hard to get a hold of and don’t have “relatable problems” to the readership.

9 thoughts on “The Internet Is Everything: How Internet Censorship Only Affects The Poor

  1. Fun student exercise: compare Chinese treatment of ‘phree speech’ (read: Western propaganda) with the West’s treatment of… warez.

    • Pete D. says:

      Each beast has its burdens, burdens that can only increase convexly with increasingly concerted efforts to contain them. Sorta why small is so beautiful. Sorta why big is so unwieldily and so predictably fucked.

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