Why Internet freedom matters, in the West, in China

For those of you out there who, like me, have been living and breathing the Internet for the past decade, we know what it represents. It’s not just another media technology – it is the one that blows all the rest out of the water, and for many, has almost become a fundamental human right. If you think the Internet is already pervasive, it has nothing on what we’re going to see in the next 5,000 days. And as the excellent documentary “RIP: A Remix Manifesto” the future direction of the digital realm is being laid out now. And we’re in real danger of losing the vibrancy, diversity and freedom that makes the Internet so incredible.

While RIP focuses on the insidious nature of corporate greed, I can assure you there’s another bad monster you have to be wary of: government control. If you want to envision a nightmare scenario of what could happen to your Internet, just look to China for inspiration.

In Danwei’s fascinating video with China’s blogging big guns, writers that face serious potential consequences by blogging about what they do, almost all had the same answer when asked about the biggest changes to the Internet in China: this year the Party seriously tightened their control. Much of it was a response to the July 5 riots in Urumqi, plus stepping up national security for the 60th anniversary celebrations. Down went YouTube, down went Facebook and Twitter, down went everything hosted on WordPress (although that has recently been restored) and every day a few more blogs and sites were added to the banned list.

In the video, blogger Zhai Minglei says, “the control is so heavy that I would call this year Year One of Internet Control,” which doesn’t bode well for his predictions of the coming years. On the other hand, when asked in what way the internet had changed this year, blogger and grass roots philanthropist Tiger Temple had a somewhat more positive spin:

I have an answer which may sound self-contradictory. The online freedom is deteriorating due to the tightened controls. It is moving backwards. However we feel that we have more freedom to express our freedom. Why this paradox? Obviously the government has been increasing its efforts in terms of technology and control of public opinion, the environment is getting worse.

But why now we can see online discussions that we could not previously see? Some small blogs with supposedly “extreme” opinions are still around. Is it all because of regulatory negligence? No, I think it because we are now slow-boiling the frog. We used to be boiled by them, now it is the other way around. We are helping them get used to the freedom of speech. To make the Internet police feel how dumb their rules are. And we will prevail step by step.

Despite the fact that China has some of the most restrictive censorship laws of the world, somewhat paradoxically (or perhaps as a consequence of) the fact is that the Internet is just as prevalent here as it is back home – if not more so!

The thing with the Chinese is that, my impression so far is, they’ve never had the kind of diverse, independent, truth-to-power media industry that a country of their size warrants. Newspapers, television networks and books have always had a tight Government controlled leash around them. So it makes sense that the Internet – a place in which broadcasting is decentralised and therefore very difficult to monitor – has become a primary source of news and information for many Chinese.

Not to mention a safer (although not completely safe) way to organise, and voice dissent than IRL (in real life).

They, particularly the young, and particularly the urban, educated, are, for the most part, Internet savvy and active participants in the online world. More and more are using proxies to “scale the Wall“, and netizens are making a serious impact on events, such as in the Deng Yujiao incident.

From Australia, it’s hard to get a sense of the depth and vibrancy of China’s online sphere. Primarily it is a language barrier that creates the “insularity of the Chinese Internet” as blogger Chinayouren put it, and one that continues to frustrate me today. Nonetheless, “bridge blogs”, particularly those like chinaSMACK which even translate comments made by Chinese readers on Chinese stories, allow me to peek into that world.

When it comes to power, there are two critical components: information and organisation. The latter is self-explanatory, but the former equally vital. I’ve come to realise how much I take the Western media, with all its flaws, for granted. It is so hard to get an accurate picture of what’s going on in this country, and without which you have no idea what needs to change. You have no idea what has been taken away from you, from your neighbour, or from a community.

(It must be mentioned one gigantic flaw being that despite its more accurate reportage, the trade-off was advertising and the promotion of consumerism, so Western media is essentially complicit in consumer culture playing an unhealthy role in maintaining corporate control of our society.)

So until now, the people of China had trouble getting the first, and in the face of the most organised authoritarian government in the world, had even more trouble with the second. Then along came the Internet and in a single stroke were given the potential to access both. No wonder it has the Party nervous, and why “18 of the 24 journalists imprisoned in China work online“.

The Internet is here to stay, and the very future of democracy may live and die in its pipes. But your average person doesn’t know this. As an Internet obsessed person I forget most people are like my friend who today exclaimed “really?” when I informed him that even publications like the NYTimes have blogs these days. And to whom issues like net neutrality, or liberalizing copyright laws in the digital age seem trivial compared to climate change and the global financial crises etc.

But these things are important, and it’s critical that we netizens fight to preserve all the wonderful, revolutionary qualities of the Internet that we love so much: before corporate culture or scary governments distort, choke, sanitize, and eventually spiritually kill this amazing place.

Lastly, I’m going to leave you with a video poking fun of Tony Abbot, for your own local taste of netizen action: