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arcticdementor · 4 years

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The intensifying geopolitical competition between China and the United States has sounded the death knell for liberal hopes of a transparent and unified internet. These aspirations have warped and disintegrated beneath the shadow of the “Splinternet”—a fragmentation of the global internet into autonomous American, Chinese, Russian, and other spheres. Though the West has grown resigned to the prospect of a hegemonic and heavily censored Chinese internet within China’s own national territory, the internet’s global “marketplace of ideas” remains the object of maudlin lamentation as a casualty of the spiraling U.S.-China cold war.

The erection of this Iron Curtain in cyberspace, we are told, has diminished opportunities for transnational collaboration in a variety of productive spheres, ranging from cultural exchange to scientific research, excluding both the American and Chinese sides from the win-win dynamics of a free and open internet. Left unquestioned in this is the premise that the uncensored Western internet has served as a neutral platform for the unmitigated intercourse of ideas and networks.

Influential American geopolitical strategists such as Joseph Nye have frequently observed that the U.S. dominance of the internet constitutes a key pillar of American cultural hegemony abroad. This appears validated by Western Europe, which, above all, has fallen ever more under the sway of American political discourse. Even in countries culturally positioned outside the West such as India, prolonged exposure to the Western internet is increasingly eroding traditional cultural norms. Although this has not yet extended to influencing Indian politics, international familiarity with the distinctly American brand of liberal politics underscores the Internet’s instrumental role in exporting its publicity—putting in question the internet’s intrinsic neutrality.

The active role of the American-dominated internet in radiating this particular form of liberal politics across the world bears profound implications for the global future of governance. It raises fundamental questions as to whether a country should find it desirable to remain open to the Western internet today.

The trade-off involved is best illustrated in a comparative examination of Singapore and China. Both countries are highly technocratic states with formidable capacities for mobilization and, from the perspective of many Westerners, enviably functional governance structures. Singapore’s cyberspace is practically constituted and engulfed by the American internet, while China has retained and consolidated “cybersovereignty” over a distinctive internet culture.

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This combination of openness to the West and retention of illiberal technocratic management is widely seen as a major advantage of Singapore’s governing model. The former allows Singapore to access the West’s scientific and cultural know-how, while the latter ensures policy can be implemented efficiently without partisan obstruction and in a long-term manner. Indeed, in light of America’s catastrophic governmental response to the coronavirus, Singapore is increasingly cited approvingly as an example of a competent state that still tolerates Western institutional norms—thus proof the West need not emulate China in designing a credible alternative governance model.

However, this presupposes a monolithic and static Singapore model, meticulously selecting the best aspects of the West to emulate. It ignores a recent transformational shift which has only accelerated due to deep exposure to the Western internet: the ascent of “identity politics” in Singapore. If sufficiently proliferated, it would pose a new, yet undiscussed challenge to the sustainability of Singapore’s governance model.

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However, this state-imposed vision of racial and religious harmony is largely freedom from racial and religious discrimination, rather than freedom to actively forge a collective identity that transcends race and religion while still accommodating cultural differences. This is manifest in the Singaporean state’s reliance on top-down mechanisms to enforce this policy—notably, in the primary use of legal sanctions against racially sensitive activity, and in the deliberate allocation of public housing to ensure multiethnic compositions in housing estates.

One consequence of this “freedom from” top-down approach is the persistence of racial stereotypes across Singapore’s racial groups. For example, Singapore’s Malay community may be stereotyped by the Chinese as “lazy,” while the Malays may reciprocate with labels of “intimidating” and “bossy.” These sentiments are only compounded by Singapore’s high level of income inequality and status anxiety.

This setup has fomented a growing constituency of primarily younger Singaporeans who believe the discourse of American liberal politics finds a direct parallel in Singapore’s domestic situation. Unashamed borrowing of the terminology is evident. For example, the term “Chinese privilege,” derived from the Anglo-American concept of “white privilege” and used to describe the advantages enjoyed by the politically and economically dominant Chinese community, has proven ubiquitous enough to become the central theme of articles in the student newspaper of the Raffles Institution, one of Singapore’s leading schools.

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This straightforward importation of Western liberal politics into Singapore should be taken seriously as a political trend with disruptive potential for its governance. Whatever one thinks of the positions involved here, the rising challenge is not compatible with Singapore’s governance model.

Some have seen in the Singaporean governance model a simultaneously inclusive and technocratic state apparatus. The technocratic elite derives expertise on “appropriate” policy by leveraging powerful state organs to consult social stakeholders and gauge public sentiment. This forms the “inclusivity” aspect. In tandem with consultation, the technocratic class evaluates public sentiment in relation to their worldview and analysis of the conjuncture. These factors jointly influence eventual policy decisions that are imposed top-down. This forms the “technocratic” aspect. This purportedly ensures astute decisiveness in policy-making while still leaving room for public opinion. More importantly, the ability of the state to set the parameters of discourse in civil society develops a consciousness among individuals and consulted stakeholders of where their interests and roles stand in the broader national interest. This expedites trust and co-operation with the state in policy implementation.

However, the importation of Western liberal politics has introduced two novelties to Singaporean discourse that undermine this approach that renders American cultural influence problematic for the sustainability of Singaporean governance.

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A 2019 article by Zhang Xu and Liu Yangyue—a political scientist at China’s National University of Defense Technology who has specialized in comparing the dynamics of internet control across different countries—instructively outlines the central problems that the policy of cybersovereignty is intended to resolve. Among these they enumerate the intrinsic disorder of the internet and its facilitation of political irresponsibility—items that may appear as so many generic authoritarian complaints in response to a space of free and unfettered discourse. Yet they highlight two other characteristics that are harder to dismiss: first, the unequal distribution of power built into the global infrastructure and governance of the internet; second, the tendency of cyberspace towards cultural homogeneity.

In respect of the broader goals of China’s internet policy, this last observation may be the most relevant point. “Cyberspace,” Zhang and Liu argue, citing Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of the culture industry, is a favorable “environment for the expansion of cultural imperialism.” The dominant characteristic of online social media, they note, is the use of American social media platforms by non-American users. The ostensible neutrality and freedom of cyberspace has become merely the vector of an all-encompassing American cultural hegemony. To some degree, the Singaporean case might justify this view.

In effect, China’s response to this problem has been the guided and intensive cultivation of a domestic online culture industry unbeholden to Western concerns. Though competitive domestic alternatives to the Western social media giants have emerged in many countries—Naver in South Korea and VK in Russia—from its fortified position behind the Great Firewall, China has attained a degree of influence and variety in its homegrown social media that is unique outside the West. The comprehensive and carefully regulated ecosystem of networks such as Weibo and Weixin, together with forums such as Zhihu, represents a total discursive space that has proven relatively impervious to the currents emanating from the internal convulsions of American culture—unlike the Singaporean internet. Moreover, as the growth of TikTok in Western markets attests, Chinese platforms may now cast shadows that extend far beyond China itself.

As with the selective imposition of tariffs on physical goods, this aspect of cybersovereignty as an industrial policy of the public sphere, a project that combines the cultivation of flagship social media platforms with intentional cultural engineering, would not be possible at such scale without the selective exclusion of dominant foreign alternatives. This exclusion is by no means hermetic. Mainland Chinese users of Western social media, though Westerners typically dislike their opinions, are not simply “bots” sponsored by the CCP: the use of VPNs to access Western websites like Twitter is endemic and shows little sign of disappearance despite its formal illegality and periodic, often localized crackdowns by the Chinese government. It is not difficult to find mainland Chinese users on Western social media. What is far less frequent, however, is for the cultural worldview of such users to be shaped fundamentally by their access to these foreign platforms. In that respect, the policy of hindering access without complete exclusion has done its work.

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The contradictions of China’s own development, above all between reform-and-opening and the self-insistent continuation of the Leninist state, have themselves produced discursive divergences that cannot simply resolve themselves through reasoned argument. Some of the broad and ultimately irreconcilable viewpoints generated by these different moments of development were summarized by the Beijing theorist Jiang Shigong in 2018: the desire for China’s transformation into a liberal democratic state on Western lines, the appeal to Confucian antiquity as a basis for the reconstruction of the CCP, and so on.

In the context of an intensifying competition between fundamentally divergent worldviews, Jiang’s argument suggests, the political development of the public sphere must be subject to an ultimate Schmittian decision that clarifies the goals and limits of acceptable discourse. As the West’s own experience has shown, in cyberspace such points of tension have the potential for limitless amplification. Yet the intrinsic network openness of the internet will not simply disappear. The only option—so it appears to China—is a recognition that this process of discursive collapse will happen, and that it must be kept in check by a continual process of public intervention aiming to maintain its contradictions within the limits, and perhaps for the benefit, of a certain common good.

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These are merely concrete benefits that China derives from cybersovereignty and not moral justifications for China’s policy. Given heightening American strategic competition with China, however, there must be some coherent Western response to the challenge of China’s model of cultural regulation. An important starting step would be the recognition that the status quo of an internet regulated solely by private interests can be a liability for effective governance. In the context of an internet riven in the West by private social media amplifying a spiral of internal conflict, the old nostrums about the intrinsic potentiality of cyberspace to construct a free and rational world are increasingly hollow.

The decisive questions in this struggle for the future of cyberspace are: can an open internet function not simply as a vector for the power plays of American political interests, but as a space of genuine cultural productivity—that is, as something that it is possible to order towards the good? More fundamentally: is there anything now to be gained from openness to the West?

A Western answer to these questions can begin only by admitting the reality of cyberspace as a strategic terrain requiring public oversight—and laying the groundwork for an industrial policy that can effectively govern its own public sphere.

#vincent garton #brandon cheong #palladium magazine #singapore #end the american empire #cybersovereignty #read the whole thing

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bebebisous33 · 2 years

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Under The Green Light: "Sweet Potato?" 🥔

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duancocobay · 5 years

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The Fermi Paradox — Where Are All The Aliens? (1/2)

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The universe is unbelievably big – trillions of stars and even more planets. Soo… there just has to be life out there, right? But where is it? Why don’t we see any aliens? Where are they? And more importantly, what does this tell us about our own fate in this gigantic and scary universe?

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The Fermi Paradox — Where Are All The Aliens?

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kimduancocobay · 5 years

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The Fermi Paradox — Where Are All The Aliens? (1/2)

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Support us on Patreon so we can make more videos (and get cool stuff in return):

Steady: Merchandise: Newsletter: Facebook: Twitter: Instagram: Discord:

The Voice of Kurzgesagt: Steve Taylor:

You can get the music for the video here:

Also, for more in depth information take a look at the WAIT BUT WHY article about Fermi Paradox:

THANKS A LOT TO OUR LOVELY PATRONS FOR SUPPORTING US:

The Fermi Paradox — Where Are All The Aliens?

Help us caption & translate this video!

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fullspectrum-cbd-oil · 5 years

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Bette Midler Gets Torched for ‘Racist’ Post Claiming POTUS Paid Black Americans to Be at His Rally

Actress Bette Midler got destroyed by users on Twitter after posting a tweet targeting the president, a comment that users from both sides of the aisle deemed “racist.”

In a tweet published on Wednesday, Midler — who has appeared in films such as “Hocus Pocus” and “The First Wives Club” — suggested that President Donald Trump had paid Black American men to appear as a “blackground” at one of his 2020 re-election rallies.

“Look, there are African American men in this shot!” wrote Midler. “How much did he pay them to be ‘blackground’?”

Look, there are African American men in this shot! How much did he pay them to be “blackground”? pic.twitter.com/pTkoHTIpQl

— Bette Midler (@BetteMidler) July 24, 2019

Understandably, some users on Twitter were not exactly thrilled by Midler’s tweet, with many of them taking aim at Midler herself for what they dubbed a “racist” tweet.

“That’s a very racist thing to say,” wrote one user.

That’s a very racist thing to say.

— Mark Dice (@MarkDice) July 24, 2019

Yes.. These are black people and there are many many more of us that will stand behind and with our president for the payment of being free to have a voice and our own opinion. We aren’t Driving Ms. Daisy … OR Ms. Midler. Racist!

— June Long (@MrsJuneLong) July 24, 2019

Julio Rosas, a reporter for the Washington Examiner, offered a poll as to how “racist” the tweet was, with the choices presented being “very racist” or “extremely racist.”

How racist is this tweet?

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) July 24, 2019

Another pointed out that “18% of black women voted Republican in Florida, keeping the state red.”

18% of black women voted Republican in Florida, keeping the state red.

The black community gets that democrats choose illegal aliens over Americans.

— #ThePersistence (@ScottPresler) July 24, 2019

Former New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-N.Y.) — who filed a lawsuit against self-described democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) — called the post “next level racism” and “disgusting.”

This is some next level racism right here. As if all blacks can be at a Trump rally is “blackground”?!

Disgusting! And you’re a “progressive”?! More like a retrogressive racist!

— Dov Hikind (@HikindDov) July 24, 2019

Check out some of the other reactions:

Lady, get help.

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) July 24, 2019

Wow…

Just when I think you can’t go any lower.

Don’t worry, though. I saved it. pic.twitter.com/HjN01R8mDF

— Vincent Charles (@YesThatVCharles) July 24, 2019

Hi Bette…it’s me again, here to answer your silly question. He paid them the same amount that he paid these supporters. New jobs, larger retirement accounts, lower unemployment. You know, those things. pic.twitter.com/1KfeW42dS8

— Vintageport (@vintageport014) July 24, 2019

Bette doesn’t think black ppl can think for themselves.

— matt’s idea shop (@MattsIdeaShop) July 24, 2019

Like the embarrassing drunk aunt at thanksgiving.

— Cassandra Fairbanks (@CassandraRules) July 24, 2019

You racist POS

So you are saying Black folks are stupid and desperate.

We cannot have a diversity of thought like white people?

We better get our black a** back in line like you racist white Democrats believe we should be?

I’ve been to WH 3x & 2 rallies VIP, never got a dime

— Brandon Tatum (@TheOfficerTatum) July 24, 2019

Also, you’re a racist.

— #ThePersistence (@ScottPresler) July 24, 2019

#blackground ??? Imagine if a conservative said this.

— Carry (@boatgirl3) July 24, 2019

Bette Midler, how dare you make a blanket statement that black people can’t think for themselves & that they must be paid off if they don’t agree with you. Your statement is so condescending & racist. “From the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.”

— Glen Woodfin (@GlenWoodfin) July 25, 2019

pic.twitter.com/qM1i7YEsGV

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) July 24, 2019

Thanks for reminding everyone that disgusting racism is still alive and well in America…. especially in Hollywood.

— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) July 24, 2019

Nice ratio, bigoted Bette. pic.twitter.com/1Ukux5aYmC

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) July 24, 2019

We love TRUMP and they are PICS EVERYWHERE ♥️🇺🇸♥️ On TWITTER! pic.twitter.com/E1m1QR0vCH

— DJ Camacho (@d7cam) July 24, 2019

wow this is a disgusting comment on so many levels? “blackground?” Really? You are really sick, Bette.

— derek schwartz (@derek_mafs) July 24, 2019

Progressives don’t own black people, Bette.

They can actually believe whatever they want.

It’s pretty cool. pic.twitter.com/NNXKusleGG

— Lauren Chen (@TheLaurenChen) July 25, 2019

Midler has not addressed the backlash from her tweet or deleted it as of publication.

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