First, a link to the story that set these thoughts in motion.
Technology serves a purpose to mankind that is far greater than mankind’s cumulative understanding of technology. Technology gives us tools to reach across cultural barriers, through taboos, half-whispered stories, through lives and lives lost, and through lives yet to be lived. It provides us with new ways in which to discover ourselves in the world in which we live and, ultimately, to learn from others. Our understanding of the world we live in and the varied cultures which make up that world is limited to the way in which we were brought up, from our individual level of learning about what our common ground is and with whom we can or cannot relate, much like the way we each understand technology. Computers and the internet are, in their own way, a culture unto themselves on which we all rely and in which each of us reading this participates.
Many of us cannot remember what the time was like when this machine called the computer was not in our lives in one way or another. Be it video games. ATM machines, cellular phones, even word processors and the electronic gas pump. We’ve never been removed from the freedom that access to these devices present to us. If we have been, when we return to those devices and the powers they provide we forget what it was like once again not to have them. Technology is taken for granted until it is not in our grasp, and then only for a short time.
The internet represents a sort of technocracy to its minions, representing the freedom of ideas and the ease with which one can maneuver to find answers that once took days to research. It is a teacher, it is a student, it is interactive, and it both represents the idea of true freedom and is a freedom in and of itself.
Yesterday, several companies, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google were challenged to reveal their lists of words or phrases banned from their search engines in China by Amnesty International. While I’m quick to applaud AI for their resourceful and considerate campaign which, ultimately, is to open dialogue for seeking a representation of the net freedom experienced by the Chinese people before these restrictions came to be, I have to stand back and recognize the cultural dilemma that the Communist-operated government must be experiencing in dealing with these new found freedoms and their potentially damaging affects on their rule of law.
But my concern is this: why should we continue to attempt to Westernize their culture if they are satisfied with their culture as it exists? If they are satisfied to participate in censorship, who are we to protest that? As it applies to our own culture, it can be a valid example of the direction that censorship can take, one from which we as a free society should learn and apply to working to save our own shrinking freedoms.
Ultimately, the government in China forms their own rule of law, frequently to the dissatisfaction of Western cultures which differ dramatically from their own. As a company or as a traveler, we are merely visitors in their country. They have opened up opportunity for trade with their people, many of whom have lived in China all their life. They do not know a different way not because, as it has been suggested, they are being kept in the dark. It is merely part and parcel of their daily function to live in a way of simplicity that no Western can comprehend fully.
The thought that some of those people may not be ready to experience the freedom offered by the internet seems to me as real as the thought your own parents had the first time you went out on a date. It is as real as your first kiss, learning to ride a bicycle, and in some cases just that simple. The way towards the peaceful continuation of not only financial trade with China but our relationships with that which we admire and respect about China and its long history should be directly reflected in a Western acceptance of the joys of our differences of culture while taking note of those things which upset and disturb us about their ways and deciding what power we, as Westerns, truly have in changing them. The message we wish to send is not heard there so much as it is heard by those elsewhere who share our joys or disillusionments.
I believe that If we were to focus on the purpose of recognizing our feelings about this issue as one of educating people in our own country regarding the technocratic realities rather than continuing to believe, incorrectly, that we can affect a change, we may succeed in strengthening our own resolves rather than dismantling the resolves of the Chinese government. The change we may desire to affect will more likely occur through example than through blind outrage.
The thought, however, goes further with the Chinese government’s interpretation. Protestors equate the methods of Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo as censorshp. While they might be correct, it is not our information to choose to manipulate or present.
They rightly equate the internet with what is damaging to their historical beliefs and their modern culture, too much influence over decisions or lifestyles from the West which are totally counter to their own culture could inevitably cause unrest in a country that seems to have a majority position on the traditions of their culture and how they are carried out through government rule. I like to think of that sense as similar to having a frank conversation with your child about sex or arguing with your child about what clothes they wear, whom they hang out with. Acting as parents with a rule of law in place, the government feels compelled to work with these companies rather than to deny them access entirely.
There is, for every freedom, a cost which is much deeper and broader than a denial of the things we in the technocracy recognize as normal and salient. There is also a peace which those of us who know so much about technology and the internet’s power can no longer experience. As a culture, the technology-driven world has crossed a line from which no return is possible.
And so, this border of innocence to some of the information the internet provides that protesters are eschewing their sense of necessary availability to the Chinese people over really reflects the extent to which Western culture, in some way, wants to pave the way for that innocence to be lost. Are these people necessarily going to be a happier and more fulfilled people because of the information that they are being denied? Will it serve any purpose other than to shackle their desires to those of Western civilization and the adamant push to spread freedom and democracy at any cost? I think this is wholly unfair to the great and industrious people of China, whose ideas and lifestyle we attempt to emulate in Western society while shunning the precepts from which that respectable industriousness was borne.
Revolutionary thoughts and ideas do not disappear merely because they have been outlawed. In fact, those ideas and thoughts have a place in which to gestate when rule of law denies their right to exist. The revolution, as Gil-Scott Heron said, will not be televised.
In the same way that we have the right to be concerned about the boy our daughter is dating or the time she spends away from us not knowing where she is, so should we allow the Chinese government the right to make application of their fears with those whom they do not completely understand. We are strangers in their country, after all.
The real issues that this need to fight these internet providers represents is a desire by the West to give a freedom of information to the Chinese people that we in the west already enjoy. It’s an attempt to spread democracy through the search tools of the internet which to us are as popular and common as our reflection in the mirror, to give people a sense of even momentary freedom from the right to gain knowledge that is taken for granted in our Western technocracy. It is not about the companies bowing under pressure so much; it seems to me about a general feeling of concern in the West over the Chinese people’s relationship with their own government and with each other. The way in which they can access the internet being stifled is representative of Western fears and misguided notions of Chinese culture, the laws which the Chinese may fear would be irrevocably lost or altered by Western intervention through information.
I have to say that our understanding of their government and culture, though fueled by fact, is based in a fear — either that we will not have the opportunity to learn from them how the internet functions in China or that they will not ever experience the freedoms we know from our own access to what the internet offers.
If Amnesty International wants to be effective in sending a message to those companies, they should clearly be willing to temper their rage at those companies willingness to work with the Chinese government to allow a portal to western thinking that is censored to meet the Chinese government’s standards. Their standards, after all, are not our own and not ours to control. To express outrage and disgust is to focus on the problem rather than to focus on a solution for that problem. I believe firmly that these companies were unswayed by their feelings because they recognize that any level of technocracy existing in a country so tightly guarded as China can only lead to the Chinese people making decisions for themselves and their families as to what is right within the boundaries of their own cultural norms.
We should not use this as a chance to pass judgement on the cultural norms of China, but as an assertion of the example Western culture sets in their own responsible use of the internet for its many freedoms of information at our fingertips.
Leave the big companies alone, I say. It is to everyone’s benefit to have any presence at all in China and other countries where the internet is tightly controlled. It is far better to learn about these cultures and develop a respect for the parts of the culture that we like than to focus so vehemently on the negative aspects, many of which may never change in any of our lifetimes.
Real knowledge is rarely found when sought out. True knowledge of self or otherwise has always come to me when I’m not expecting it. I’ll never find that true knowledge in a Google search or on a blog or on a website. I had a teacher who used to say, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” I think what she meant is that people who are blissfully ignorant are often the happiest among us. Who are we to determine whether or not our desire to seek out knowledge will make someone else happy?
