Has China already won the internet?

Today we’re talking about a panic that’s been simmering for a while but has, in the past couple of years, become a full-blown panic. And that’s the technological Cold War that the US is waging with China. (Okay, and now also the tariff war, but that’s with pretty much everyone.) Are the Chinese really so radically different from us, or — at least when we’re browsing the net — are we the same? Tianyu Fang joins us to compare Chinese and American internet culture, and who suffers from more online brain rot. Our guest Tianyu Fang is a Technology and Democracy Fellow at New America, an editor at Reboot, and formerly co-founded Chaoyang Trap. You can follow him on Twitter @tianyuf, and all of his latest endeavors at https://www.tianyufang.net/. Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for just five bucks a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Sponsors Want to sponsor Panic World? Ad sales & marketing support by Multitude, hit them up here: ⁠http://multitude.productions⁠. Credits - Host: Ryan Broderick - Producer: Grant Irving - Engineer: Rebecca Seidel - Researcher: Adam Bumas - Business Manager: Josh Fjelstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Broderick?

  I want to start with like a really basic, I think, simple question. And we always do this with every episode. Grant wrote the wrong question in because so Grant at the top of our outline said, I should ask you, why will China's internet crush American democracy? And I want to change that to when? When will it crush American democracy, do you think?

• 0:19Speaker 01

  It's already happened.

• 0:20Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, cool.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  It's already happened. It's already in the past. There's no rescue. Yeah, I mean, this idea that just by having a foreign app in your country, your democracy or your political system be crushed, that's exactly what China has done. So congratulations, it already happened.

• 0:36Ryan Broderick?

  This is so exciting. I feel much safer in the hands of the Chinese government, actually, than the American government right now. So I'm glad that they've successfully taken over the country via dancing trends.

• 1:03Ryan Broderick?

  I'm Ryan Broderick. With me as always is our producer Grant Uvering, who you will hear pop in throughout the show. This is Panic World, a podcast about how the internet warps our minds, our culture and our reality. So I don't know if you guys are aware, but along with being in an AI arms race with China, we are also now in a tariff war with China, and they have recently said that they will fight it to the death, which you can interpret however you want. The basis of the China Cold War that we're currently in is the idea that Americans should be panicking over China's, increasing control of the economy, of technology, of culture. And all of that assumes that the Chinese are radically different from us, that they have some sort of grand master plan

• 1:44Ryan Broderick?

  that the government is engaging in, and that, you know, our way of life is better than what theirs is, and we're fighting to defend it. You know, all of this sort of like jingoistic feelings that comes with a Cold War. But to help make sense of this panic that's helping destroy our economy, and really turning the volume up on our AI arms race, and, you know, freaking everybody out about TikTok, is

• 2:10Ryan Broderick?

  I think some pretty serious misunderstandings of what life is actually like on Chinese internet. So that's what we're going to be talking about today. And joining me is Tech and Democracy Fellow at New America, editor at Reboot, and the writer of one of my favorite newsletters, maybe of all time, Chaoyang Trap House, Tien Fu. How are you?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Good, good. So great to be here. I've been a great, a big fan of Garbage Day and so glad to be talking to you guys.

• 2:33Ryan Broderick?

  I don't want to say this like to sound arrogant. The worlds that I live in online are very niche and bizarre. And I get so excited when someone is covering those worlds, or even more niche and more bizarre worlds than mine, better than me. And when I saw your guys' stuff years ago, I was like, fuck, this is so good and I could never do this. It's so great. To kick things off, at the very top level, how would you say the way culturally the Chinese internet works differs from the American internet?

• 3:01Speaker 01

  Well, I think broadly it's very similar, right? I think you do have the obvious stuff going on, right? There's more state directives, there's more censorship. The platforms themselves have less of a, less power in recent years because of government restrictions. You know, more broadly, I think it's, it's, it's very similar, right? There are very similar platform incentives, there are very similar incentives for users. And you have a lot of niche subcultures that are interesting and fun. So yeah, I would say, you know, people tend to portray the Chinese internet as something that's completely different.

• 3:34Ryan Broderick?

  The fact that the Chinese internet and the American internet do have a lot of cultural similarities. And obviously, like, there are differences and we're going to get into them. But one of the pieces Chaoyang Trap House made, like, very early on, I remember, sort of like, I remember like gasping when I saw it, I think, where you guys did a whole thing about the Joe Rogans of China?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's my, uh, my, our friend, Taiwei Chen.

• 3:55Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Three characters on a Chinese internet. One of them was, was this, uh, Tinder coach.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a weird world of Chinese masculinity bros.

• 4:10Ryan Broderick?

  And I feel like it's actually kind of a good place to start with this because so much of the way the American government right now, the sort of the Trump administration is talking, especially the China hawks in the Trump administration, so much of the way the US government is talking about the Chinese internet is, you know, the idea that they can use technology to brainwash Americans. And obviously, we can all agree that we have been brainwashed by the Chinese government, that it's totally fine, and I like it, and it's great. Do you worry personally about sort of the the rise of global Chinese tech platforms? Is that a concern for you?

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Uh, no, just in part because I don't think these platforms are actively censoring speech on other platforms, right? Like, clearly, there are things I can post on TikTok here in the ways that, but I wouldn't be able to post them on like Douyin in China.

• 5:02Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  But I just don't see sufficient evidence to say that this entire censorship apparatus that is focused on domestic political stability in China, right? It's going to be expanded to America in a way that like, oh, I wouldn't be able to talk about like the private lives of Chinese, like Chinese politicians. I just do not think that that is part of what's happening right now. I mean, it could happen, but I'll believe it when I see it.

• 5:32Ryan Broderick?

  You're actually hitting on something really funny, and it's like a really funny contradiction that I don't think got talked enough about during the like the brief TikTok ban stuff, which was like, if China has a very specific domestic policy that it's enforcing censorship to defend, why would it also be like upholding American Christian values in Amer- like, why would it? Bans like the word sex, right, from its algorithm, like the rise of like self censorious algo speak.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:04Ryan Broderick?

  Like, why would it be upholding a Christian right, like censorship program here?

• 6:10Speaker 01

  I mean, if there's anything like censorious, if you will, it's precisely that. I think if TikTok and Doyen at least came from this similar sort of algorithmic system, then I think the intention or one of the byproducts of Chinese censorship is that they want to tone down all these sort of political debates, right?

• 6:31Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  That like Doyen's intention is not to stop particular types of political debate, but they're just very worried about political debates in general, whether they're pro-state or anti-state, right? So I think when people are talking about how like TikTok is, you couldn't talk about sex and that's more sort of sensitive, it's precisely that. And from the platform's perspective, they don't want to get into quote unquote political trouble, whether it is questioning the systems of the Communist Party of China, or it is like Israel Palestine in the US.

• 7:03Ryan Broderick?

  It doesn't want scrutiny from either country. Like, it doesn't want scrutiny in the US or scrutiny at home.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, I don't know if that's what TikTok is actively doing, but I.

• 7:15Ryan Broderick?

  Sure. But, I mean, in terms of like comparing the darker corners of the web, what kind of similarities have you seen? Like, so like, yes, there are Joe Rogan-esque figures. I mean, and I know for a fact that you guys, that China has the 50 Cent Party, which is like, kind of a term that I think is an older term for like nationalist trolls. But like, how, how similar are the weirder corners? Like, what, what do they have there that we would have here?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  There's always this perception that every single person in China is either, either resisting the state or they're being complicit with the government. That is just a total, that, that, that's clearly not true, right? So what you see more often is, is much more complexity and nuance. During COVID, there were people who were trying to protest COVID restrictions.

• 8:02Ryan Broderick?

  I was actually gonna bring this up, yeah.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  There were people who were saying like, "Hao, hao, hao, hao, hao", which means like, "Great, great, great", right? It's just like, all positive comments on, on social media platforms. But if you read it, you would know that they're criticizing this idea that you could only be cheerleaders for the government when it comes to discussing these policies.

• 8:21Ryan Broderick?

  I remember there was like a really magical month. I mean, not magical in the sense of like what COVID was doing to China. But there was a magical sort of moment between like December and January where I had a translator working with me and we had WeChat running. And it was, I've sort of been, and you can tell me if I'm wrong here, but my understanding is that like the Chinese government in terms of like, in times of crisis will sometimes allow like a pressure valve release point of just like, okay, everyone can kind of like complain and bitch. Because like it's better than not letting that happen. And so there was this moment right before COVID really spread beyond China where the average person on public WeChat feeds were just like complaining the way that you would see people complain on Twitter here.

• 9:04Ryan Broderick?

  And I remember just thinking like, I wish Americans knew, not even just for China, but for like the whole world that like the internet is sort of the same everywhere you go. It was like kind of a nice moment of human connection in this weird way. But then it seemed like it disappeared really fast.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 9:21Ryan Broderick?

  With the white sign protests.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know what the intentions of the government were in many ways, allowing these criticisms to come out. But throughout the history of Chinese internet, whether there was or without, was not a severe or intense censorship. There's always been people who are trying to dance around this censorship apparatus.

• 9:40Ryan Broderick?

  Right. Got to be a little more sly, a little more clever with it, I think.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and government does have, they could detain someone or like they could like knock on somebody's door and be like, hey, you've been criticizing Xi Jinping, that shouldn't, you shouldn't do that again. But most of the time, it's just people trying to say things in a different way, right? That they're trying to go around these restrictions.

• 10:04Ryan Broderick?

  So what you said kind of rings true for me. I was in Beijing in December 2019 and I went out for lunch with someone who was kind of working at like a digital media outlet kind of place in China. And you know, the conversation eventually. It wasn't like we were having a totally open and honest conversation about how censorship works in each country, but like we kind of got to a point and she said something that has really stuck with me ever since where she was like, "Look, we have over a billion people here all using the same internet." And like, if you want to hear the argument, the censorship argument from the Chinese perspective, it is, "If we had your internet, we would have riots every day because we

• 10:47Ryan Broderick?

  have so many people who are coming online for the first time right now." And I'm not saying that like I agree with this, and I'm not saying that even she agree with it, but it was like, that is the argument that is made here, is that like, "We need guardrails because if we don't, everyone will start killing each other." Which, then, she was like, "Look at your country." And I was like, "Okay, alright." Like, thank you, I get the, I get the, I get, I get the thought process, which I think is one that is also not communicated to Americans very often, that like, and I've heard this argument also in Europe, I've heard this argument in South America, like, other countries that don't have freedom of speech, they're much more comfortable with the, "Maybe we don't just say everything we think and feel on the internet all the time."

• 11:29Ryan Broderick?

  So I, I, I can understand it, even if I don't maybe necessarily agree with it as an American.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't agree with it either, but I think we have to go back to the premise that is, I think, this kind of free speech that we talk about in America is a very specifically American thing.

• 11:47Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 11:48Speaker 01

  That it is not widely accepted by a lot of Europeans, you know, to the same extent that we do.

• 11:53Ryan Broderick?

  Not at all.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  And certainly not in Asian countries. I, I think it is a good thing in many ways.

• 11:58Ryan Broderick?

  As do I. I, I also don't think Americans think of it as political. Like, I don't think that Americans think about unlimited free speech access, at least in theory, on an American platform in a country that doesn't have free speech, as a political act. Like, allowing Twitter to go live in the Middle East leading to the Arab Spring. Like, they don't, we don't, as Americans, think that we had a role in the politics of that, when obviously free speech is a political decision.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  I mean, but the US did, right? This is part of the foreign policy agenda of the- Obama administration in the Clinton State Department, right? She was out there in early 2010 talking about at the museum in Washington DC, I think, which is now closed.

• 12:43Ryan Broderick?

  It is.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  And she was talking about how, you know, the US must defend the freedom to connect, as she, as Secretary Clinton called it back then. It was, internet freedom was part of US foreign policies.

• 12:55Ryan Broderick?

  Wait, wait, wait, hold on, I forget. What happened with like internet free speech and Hillary Clinton later? Did that go bad? Did she, did she make, she might, she may have bet on the wrong horse on that one? I'm not really sure.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  I, I think, yeah, I think that, that one didn't work out too well. I think, I mean, I think.

• 13:09Ryan Broderick?

  What happened when they got her emails?

• 13:13Ryan Broderick?

  This is, this is a thing that I think Americans do not consider political. They see it as like a, a universal.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 13:21Ryan Broderick?

  True, good, and like, you know, I was raised here, I think that too, but it is political.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And when Secretary Clinton was making that speech, right? When she was talking about how the internet should, should help with democracy and revolutions abroad, countries like China and Russia responded and be like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. This is a dangerous thing that American platforms can now, you know, topple our government, like whether I agree with those governments or not, right? I think that was a valid concern from their perspective. And then the US comes back and be like, these people are paranoid. What are they worried about?

• 13:58Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  You know, it's like, they are worried exactly about what you said you would do to them, right? So, so there's this weird.

• 14:04Ryan Broderick?

  These guys are like getting really hostile with us because we keep publicly talking about using our technology to overthrow other governments. I don't know why, like, they're really hostile now. That's so strange.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  I don't know, I don't know either.

• 14:14Ryan Broderick?

  You know, I'm coming around to the idea that maybe we aren't so innocent in this Cold War after all. But let's get into the China side of it. Right after a word from our sponsor, which is Donghu Xinlang Industrial Grade Glycine, we're going to be talking about how China's internet was born.

• 14:36Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, let's figure out how things got so tense. I want to run through a rough timeline of how China came online and how their internet looks and feels different from ours. I want to sort of like talk about like the beginning buildings of the modern Chinese internet. So it seems like 1996 was the place to start here. Robin Lee, working for an American tech company, creates a search engine algorithm. It's called Rankdecks, and it becomes like China's biggest internet search provider in the late 90s. Sergey Brin and Larry Page cite Rankdecks in their patent applications for the website that would become Google, which I think is like kind of an adorable moment of like, that's your sliding door moment is like, we had a very similar internet for a while.

• 15:21Ryan Broderick?

  Then in 1999, which I eventually want to maybe even write a book about this idea, the year that the internet kind of was created around the world as we understand it, Tencent starts a messaging service called Open ICQ, which becomes QQ. I don't know how old you are, but did you ever use like?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was my first instant messenger.

• 15:42Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, I have a question. Did you ever use MSN or AIM?

• 15:46Speaker 01

  I used, I didn't use AIM, but I used MSN.

• 15:49Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, close enough. What does QQ do, like do anything cool that MSN Messenger doesn't do, didn't do?

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, this is like 2006, 2007 QQ as opposed to the original early 2001 QQ, but you could have this thing called like QQ Show, which is like a digital character that you can like.

• 16:11Ryan Broderick?

  Like an avatar?

• 16:12Speaker 01

  It's like a digital avatar, avatar, and you could like change clothes. It's like every time you talk to someone, you can see their avatar and they can see mine as pretty, that's part of it. They had their own music streaming thing, they had video games.

• 16:27Ryan Broderick?

  That's awesome.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think in many ways, that was also a super app, even though it was before the app form.

• 16:34Ryan Broderick?

  That's fascinating. In 1999 is also in Alibaba, the sort of Amazon-esque e-commerce platform of China launches.

• 16:42Ryan Broderick?

  2000 is when we get Rankdecks becoming its own search engine, Baidu. This is when web portals in China start to centralize. The 2000s, American search engines aren't blocked in China, but Baidu is more successful because it's more reliable. Which I think is like an interesting thing that like, Google clearly is influenced by Rankdecks, which becomes Baidu, and it still isn't as good. Which I think goes against the other American narrative, which is that like our products are open and thus better. Which is interesting.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Baidu was just better because it was optimized for Chinese language, right?

• 17:19Ryan Broderick?

  Right. What I think is really fascinating about the early 2000s Chinese internet is that they are already experimenting with stuff that we have not even really nailed down now. So like Alibaba launches its own payment service in 2004. Alipay launches, Alipay is 20 years old. We don't even have that now. Like that's actually crazy to think about.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember back then you would also buy things and then pay your courier delivery guy in cash. Not the, not the, not the delivery fee, but the, the, the charge for the actual product.

• 17:56Ryan Broderick?

  So what are you paying with Alipay?

• 17:59Speaker 01

  So I think Alipay has had several different features, right?

• 18:04Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, I see, okay.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Was like clearly like bank transfer, right? Like you, you connected to your bank account. And the, the truth was like a lot of people didn't have bank accounts at this, at this time. I know quite a lot of people, they opened bank accounts so that they could use Alipay and WeChat Pay.

• 18:23Ryan Broderick?

  Cool, okay.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  If you, if you think about it, the majority of the country back then was still very rural. And people weren't using bank accounts to transfer things. Or, or bank transfer was more like wire transfer, like Western Union style.

• 18:35Ryan Broderick?

  Interesting. There's a similar thing happening right now in Latin America. There's a like a Mexican equivalent to 7-Eleven called OXO. And by the way, Panic World believes in OXO supremacy. If OXO ever wants to sponsor the show, they're a great convenience store chain, love them to death. But they've like started becoming like an e-commerce platform. And now like they will, they will basically, if you can open a bank account, you can use OXO Pay. And the same idea is happening. So like it's, it makes sense. I, I think maybe in America, like we got stalled out with our, with our fintech in a way that a lot of other countries didn't. And now we have Bitcoin. So like that, like basically the crypto industry wouldn't have to exist if we hadn't stalled out.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:19Ryan Broderick?

  So in that respect, obviously China is in a better place than we are. But what about the hot topic of censorship? Because like that is real. We, we sort of have to reckon with the fact that like their internet is heavily censored and surveilled. By the end of the 2000s, we're now getting like proper social media over here. You know, we have Twitter now, we have Facebook, we have YouTube, that's all coming in. And in 2009, in China, is like one of the early examples of like anti censorship protests. You actually mentioned this at the top, like having to get around by being a little clever. Are you familiar with the grass mud horse meme?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that was one of the earliest memes.

• 20:02Ryan Broderick?

  Can you talk us through it? How did, how did this work?

• 20:04Speaker 01

  It's just like a, one of the earliest anti censorship memes in China. The pronunciation is the same for like,操你妈, which is like fuck your mother, right?

• 20:14Ryan Broderick?

  Hell yeah.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  And then grass mud horse is like different characters, but it sounds similar. It's操你妈 versus操你妈, right? It's like a slightly different tones. So the earlier censorship, a lot of the censorship restrictions were actually imposed by platforms. And their idea was to foster what they called a harmonious, like internet community, right? It's like, sorry, no, no, no, no cursing on the internet.

• 20:40Ryan Broderick?

  That's the thing.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  And it was less political, right? It was more about, yes, sorry, just no cursing. And people were coming up all sorts of ways to make fun of it, right? 操你妈 was one of them. Grass mud, mud horse was one of them. And like the word for harmonious, right? Harmony is和谐, and they called it, they called it和谐, which is river crab. So there's something like.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I had a great idea yesterday that I wanted to post by God Rivercraft by the ministry.

• 21:09Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, that rules. That's so good.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so you start seeing sort of censorship, but also discussions of censorship in a rather explicit way.

• 21:19Ryan Broderick?

  Like they're avoiding censorship to have a meta-conversation about the censorship.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 21:24Ryan Broderick?

  There is like a joke in English that you like, you learn as a kid that is similar to grass mud horse, which is sofa king.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, same thing. I guess same thing. Yeah.

• 21:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, same, same. I see, you know, it's as different as we are, that we're the same. But I do think it's interesting that one, any country on earth could think that they could build an internet where no one said swears. First of all, I think that's really funny. I think that's just like a really funny waste of everyone's time.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  It kind of sounds nice to me. So I just think like, I'm just imagining, I'm imagining people trying to be as mean as they are, posting at, subtweeting each other.

• 22:06Ryan Broderick?

  I think you'd be meaner.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  I think it'd be cute to watch people have to articulate themselves by not just being like, you fucking bitch, but having to be like, you ignorant.

• 22:19Ryan Broderick?

  You can't even do it. You're not, you're not even, you're not on the level of grass mud horse. You gotta like really think about it.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  But, but surprisingly, right? I think interestingly, some of the most polite discussion boards in China back in that period, now that I was on them, were like porn discussion boards. Cause they're already blocked by the Chinese internet.

• 22:36Ryan Broderick?

  In China?

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, like pornography was always sort of censor, right? There's no, there's no question about that. But the, the mods are extremely good at circumventing censorship by just like changing server, changing their domain names.

• 22:50Ryan Broderick?

  So this actually ties to something we touched on in a previous episode of the show where we were talking about the Silk Road, the Tor-based dark web drug site. And the guest, we were talking about how polite and nice they all were on there. Because like in the darker parts of the web, you kind of live or die by your reputation in a way. So that actually clocks with me that like, I mean, early 4chan had this as well, where like, obviously, it was always kind of a renegade insane place. But there were parts of 4chan that were like allowing forms of speech that were unacceptable elsewhere because like you're stuck with each other in a way. That's fascinating that that was happening in China, too.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  On these porn discussion boards, you have very strict rules, right? Because you might lose your account. And that was considered like a very difficult thing to get during this period. And there was no censorship. And like, all the counter-margination was done by the mods.

• 23:48Ryan Broderick?

  Do you feel like in the 2000s, like, does it feel fair to say that like these early anti-censorship protests were the moment when like a unique Chinese internet culture started to form?

• 24:03Speaker 01

  I mean, unique to China or like, or that it was different from the, it was unique to the rest of the world?

• 24:08Ryan Broderick?

  To put this another way, like, do you feel like there's a way to talk about Chinese internet culture without talking about censorship? Like, because it's like, from the outside perspective, it feels like they're very much molded by one another in a way. Sort of in the same way that like, American internet culture, I think, is you cannot really talk about it without talking about free speech. Because it is, you know, I mean, we have people posting swastikas on every day now. Like, we're full Nazi bar now. But like, to me, it feels like at this moment in time, as America was defining its internet culture as one that could allow Occupy Wall Street, and it could allow anonymous, and it could allow WikiLeaks. China's was becoming different in the opposite direction, even if it was producing similar outcomes. Does that make sense?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it was unique in the sense that, yeah, in that sense that China is different because there's censorship and people were walking, you know, finding all sorts of ways around censorship. But also, as you mentioned, right, the US is doing exactly the same exercise, though towards a very different direction. And the European Union was also grappling with its own thing. So I think it was, it just led to very different outcomes. I think there is a, it'd be a mistake to take the US case as the default and say the Chinese deviated from that norm.

• 25:23Ryan Broderick?

  No, and I am not saying that, yeah.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Whereas, like, it just like some sort of, oh, governments became more involved. Like, in the 2000s, in the US, you couldn't convince a lot of these people who work in government that the internet mattered, right? Or like, what people said on internet mattered.

• 25:39Ryan Broderick?

  In case people forgot, censorship in America was so bad that the Dixie Chicks, like essentially ceased to exist in public after they were aggressively anti George W. Bush for reasons they were historically right about, and their lives are still a mess. We are talking like peak American post 911 censorship. To even say that America like is the default, like there's, there's no argument there in my mind.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Online piracy was very much popular in China when

• 26:05Ryan Broderick?

  Hell yeah, brother.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  And, and, and yeah, well.

• 26:08Ryan Broderick?

  I had a terabyte of stolen music in, by 2009. I should be in jail. Let's keep moving along our timeline to the next big site we can compare to an American tech platform. Are you familiar with Akfun?

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes.

• 26:22Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so Akfun is an anime fan site, gets really popular around 2009. It goes offline. A user and former employee makes a new website and it's called MikuFans.cn. Are you familiar with this version?

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a Billy Billy, uh, the original Billy Billy, right?

• 26:43Ryan Broderick?

  So that's where we're headed. Yeah. So what I think is really funny about this is, do you know Hatsune Miku? Are you familiar with Hatsune Miku?

• 26:49Speaker 01

  No, I'm not super plugged in.

• 26:50Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so Hatsune Miku is a Japanese Vocaloid, which is what, it basically, it's like an anime girl hologram and she's open source. And MikuFans.cn, uh, seems to have been like a place for people to talk about Hatsune Miku.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Oh, Hatsune Miku, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The vocal, yeah, okay, all right, all right.

• 27:09Ryan Broderick?

  It all comes back to the love of anime girls. Um, and then that becomes Billy Billy and Billy Billy, uh, I would say is probably the closest China has to like a YouTube. Is, would you say that's accurate?

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was completely run by Webs.

• 27:23Ryan Broderick?

  Incredible.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  For a long time.

• 27:24Ryan Broderick?

  I, I was actually hunting around on Billy Billy the other day for a story and the, the shitposting level that's happening on Billy Billy is unlike anything we have in America. It's so good. It's like, people are just like taking shitposting to an art form over there. I'm very jealous of it, actually.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Compare it. How's it?

• 27:42Ryan Broderick?

  Um.

• 27:44Ryan Broderick?

  Well, okay, have you seen those CGI home remodeling videos, TNU?

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, I'm very familiar with that, that world.

• 27:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Hours on them.

• 27:54Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, they're amazing. And so I was trying to figure out where they came from and I found like a group of artists, like CGI artists on Billy Billy that are taking requests to make the most ridiculous insane home remodeling video. And they're all giving them really funny titles like incredible, perfect house for a thousand children. And in the comments, they're writing things like, I want to kill myself for doing this. Or like, I'm, I'm so sad I wasted my one life making this. So like, they're just shitposting on a much more intense level, which I really appreciate.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's also, there's also the demo, right? So the, the, the things that the floating comments in the midst of the videos that we don't, we don't have here in the US.

• 28:32Ryan Broderick?

  Nico Nico Doga is, is another one that does this. And essentially, like, if you comment on a video on Billy Billy or Nico Nico, you're gonna see the comment come across the screen. I watched a video of a Japanese guy unknowingly light his apartment on fire by flicking a cigarette behind him. And he like, doesn't see the comments that are streaming across him being like, your house is burning down, your house is burning down. And it's really funny. He, he didn't get hurt, but it was pretty funny. But so, uh, back to our timeline, back to our story here. This is, I think, once again, you can tell me if I'm wrong. I feel like we spotted like the first real big moment of government internet shutdown in China, which is when the government clamps down after the riots in, uh, Yurumqi.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, Muumchi.

• 29:15Ryan Broderick?

  Yurumqi. Uh, so after the riots in Yurumqi, which by the way, uh, we're, we're not going to be focusing heavily on the sort of like surveillance and crackdown on Uighurs in China in this episode. It's a massive topic and trying to fit that in with everything else just seemed totally impossible. But the the earliest days of the Chinese crackdown on Uighur Muslims after the riots in Yurumqi do play a really important part in the story that we're telling today about the evolution of Chinese internet. So a lot of microblogging sites shut down, they don't reopen for a long time, and a lot of those users move over to a site that's much more happy to play ball with the Chinese government.

• 30:00Ryan Broderick?

  A website that I think is arguably probably one of, if not the most important websites in Chinese history, a little place called Weibo, which is kind of like, I mean, if this, does it sound right? It's kind of like if MySpace evolved into something as important and powerful as Twitter.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that would be a good way to put it.

• 30:16Ryan Broderick?

  Do you use Weibo? Have you ever used Weibo?

• 30:18Speaker 01

  I got I got banned from them like there three times, I think.

• 30:21Ryan Broderick?

  Please tell me everything. How did you get banned from Weibo?

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Oh, well, one time I was using my actual account to test what will get censored.

• 30:30Ryan Broderick?

  Sure, that's one way to do it.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  And it turned out to be a terrible idea. And I think I just like, there were several times I were just like being stupid. I was like, huh, let me see if I can get banned by doing this, and I got banned several times. But, um, yes, you're totally right. That was the first major, uh, like crackdown on sort of like internet platforms. This was also a period of time when, uh, I would mention that, um, there before micro blogs, blogs, before like Weibo, there were plenty of bloggers, uh, in China, uh, and they would do this thing called the Annual Conference of Chinese Bloggers. And that also got shut down in 2010, right? So there was, uh, that crackdown was both online and it was also offline, right?

• 31:11Speaker 01

  That people were were told like, do not organize this conference, do not gather for this event. And also like in in Xinjiang, because of the riots, uh, I think internet was actually completely shut off to the region for several months, if not a year.

• 31:26Ryan Broderick?

  I would give nothing more to go back in time and attend the National Conference of Chinese Bloggers.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  And like I also mentioned that these previous versions, iterations of of microblog platforms, right? Like Fanful, for example, uh, like they were very, they were very important sort of landmarks in Chinese internet history, uh, precisely because they provided this model for Weibo, which is like a small project in this larger conglomerate that was, uh, Sina.

• 31:52Ryan Broderick?

  Sina, yeah.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  The the larger company.

• 31:55Ryan Broderick?

  I think the most important piece here before we kind of move forward is that Sina...

• 32:02Ryan Broderick?

  Sina? Sina?

• 32:03Speaker 01

  I don't know, I don't know. They never, I've never pronounced it in English, you know?

• 32:07Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, Sina figured out a similar strategy to Twitter in the early 2010s, which is if you want to grow a social network really fast, you bring on every celebrity. And I think up until maybe, maybe the late 2010s, Weibo's like big thing was like it could offer the Twitter experience, the Instagram experience, you had these verified profiles. I've used it a little bit, it's cool, the emojis are really good. The Doge emoji is like really flirty. I got, I made an account there and I got a lot of flirty Doge emojis, which I thought was nice. And it was, it's an interesting thing. I think Americans would really benefit from, from seeing how it works

• 32:50Ryan Broderick?

  because it is kind of this alternate timeline of, of the way our social platforms may have worked. You know, what if our internet was more focused on e-commerce from the jump? What if our internet was more focused on video faster? You know, what if, what if we were more mobile earlier? All of the things that we sort of do now on our internet, a lot of it was very, very, very baked into Chinese internet from the jump. And so it does kind of represent this alternate way of thinking about how information technology functions, which I think is just really neat. But throughout the early 2010s, it's a lot of restructuring. Chinese internet is sort of like, it's, it's expanding as international companies are leaving. Google leaves in 2010.

• 33:35Ryan Broderick?

  As it's expanding, the government has like, I think more of a firmer thumbprint on it. Billy Billy launches a payment system, even before YouTube does. And this is when I think you get the first real American misunderstanding of Chinese technology, which is the social credit score hysteria. Can you explain what we got wrong here just to sort of help us understand like why we're still freaking out about the Chinese social credit score?

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So in 2014, there was a state document that was about implementing a social credit system. There are two parts to it, right? Like, one is this idea of a personal credit score. Then the other part is sort of a credit score for companies and business people, right? So one of the part of the problem that we're trying to solve at this time was that a lot of people were, say, taken out on loan from one province and then they don't pay the loan back. And then they go start the same business in a different province. And there's no consistent record of that this person has been, has been. I mean, it's very similar to FICO, it's very, or not at the high granularity level, right? But if you read the documents of the planning documents during that period of time,

• 34:44Speaker 01

  they were referencing FICO, they were referencing these like credit systems that we have in the US and Europe. And they're saying, look, we should do something similar because people are defaulting on their debt. And they go to other places to scam other people. So that was a, it was primarily targeting business transactions. But I think in the 2016, 2017, there was this small part of this larger plan that was about establishing some sort of personal credit system. And they had 30, 40 pilot cities in China. And one of them was the city in Shandong province called Rongchang. It's a very small Chinese city by Chinese center, but a large city, I'm sure by any other standard.

• 35:27Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  They basically came up with their own list of things that you would do to get scores and others to get your scores deducted. It never really became a real thing. It was only in pilot. And people sort of decided that was kind of a bad idea because, you know.

• 35:44Ryan Broderick?

  I could see that being bad, yeah.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. And it was not really specifically political. It wasn't about you posting things on the internet. It was like, oh, you can gain points if you, I'm, you know, I'm just, I don't remember the exact details of this, but you can gain points if you won an award from the city.

• 36:03Ryan Broderick?

  This is the era where China starts to really expand into what is now, I think, the predominant. Like internet platform there, which is social shopping. So like the easiest way for an American rapper head around is like, what if everything was Groupon? And then what if Groupon was also your FICO score? And then what if like Groupon and your FICO score? Like gave you more Groupons for how you like lived in your city?

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:29Ryan Broderick?

  That seems

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there was also a corporate version of the same thing, right? Is that people were trying to grapple with, okay, now we have all this data. Right? Or we're collecting all these data from people. What do we do with it? And for for a government is like, oh, we want to make sure that people don't go from province to province to borrow money from banks. And I mean, I don't know if they're doing that too well. But for companies like Alibaba, for companies like Meituan, they're trying to figure out how do you monetize on this data? And to make sure that like people buy from Alibaba or like Ant Financial, the financing arm. Or like people, you lend money from the same company. You would sell your stuff from the same company. You would bank with the same company, et cetera.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  So I think they were trying to figure out what all that data could be monetized for.

• 37:17Ryan Broderick?

  I think one thing that you've touched on several times that I do, I want to try to make explicit because I think it is something that is missing from a lot of the conversations about Chinese internet. And it's something that like, when I've spoken to sort of either experts or people working in Chinese internet companies, the transition from rural to urban and the sort of still massive split between urban and rural is not in the rear view. Like it is something that was like being addressed as China was coming online. These tech platforms were not being created for the same kind of like middle class, post-World War II society that America had in the 2000s.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  In in late 2000s, early 2010s, China, you have what we called the Taobao villages, right?

• 38:03Ryan Broderick?

  A Taobao village, probably the American equivalent, just just for, you know, comparison sake, would probably be like those towns that exist just for like Amazon fulfillment centers. You know, we have them, we just like, don't think about them that way. And

• 38:20Ryan Broderick?

  Ours are also, you know, run by a massive dystopian capitalistic corporation like that would be the difference, but they're not that they're not that different. There are places in the Midwest where like there are just people whose only lives are sending stuff out on Amazon. So it's, you know, once again, pretty similar.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Originally, it was more like eBay. So it was more, it was vendor to to customer.

• 38:43Ryan Broderick?

  Okay.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  They charged like a like a processing fee, but now it's become much more complicated, right? It's like Ali Pay, Ali Pay and Taba are the same company.

• 38:51Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. So you're basically saying like there were these villages in China that were making the majority of their income from just like selling goods on essentially Chinese eBay.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, most of their customers are not other Chinese like villagers, right? They're they're these people who live in cities. So you do have this rural urban divide was actually critical to the e-commerce infrastructure that was up and coming during this period.

• 39:16Ryan Broderick?

  It's not exactly the same, but I read this incredible story years ago about this kid in, I want to say, India. It was in the Global South and I'm pretty sure it was India. He was the Google guy in his village. So he had a phone that he had Google on and he was charging everyone a small fee to Google questions for them. And like, that was like his job. And I, I think like Americans just can't even wrap their head around the idea that like, you can be in a rural part of the Global South and have very, very fast internet on a very, very cheap phone. And your concerns about the internet are just never going to be the same as someone living in like fucking Cincinnati. Like they're just never gonna line up.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 39:57Ryan Broderick?

  And when we are confused in America, we love to escalate the situation into, well, a international security incident. And that's what we're going to be talking about after the break. But first, a word from our sponsors. That guy who sells neon signs on TikTok from that Chinese factory. Those look pretty good. And he's very good at accents. But I don't enjoy like his weird right wing turn, but I assume it's because he's micro targeting Americans.

• 40:25Ryan Broderick?

  In the mid 2000s is, I think, where you start to get the creation of the Chinese internet that I think most Americans are now, you know, warning their children about right before they go to bed at night, saying that President Xi is going to come into their house and brainwash them through TikTok. So, Douyin launches in 2016. It gets 100 million users in a year, which is unreal. Then ByteDance launches, the owner of Douyin launches TikTok in 2007 outside of China. It merges with Musically, the like cute boy lip sync app in 2018, and that creates the TikTok we know and love. And that is also around the same time that Chinese censors become, I think, a lot more aggressive about the kind of cute

• 41:10Ryan Broderick?

  wordplay protests. This is when they start banning Winnie the Pooh.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  Well, the Winnie the Pooh meme was never really banned in the sense that like if you refer it, if you make a reference to Winnie the Pooh, like to talk about Xi Jinping, then it is gonna be a problem. But the character itself was never banned. Like, you see it everywhere.

• 41:28Ryan Broderick?

  The actual character isn't, okay. But this is when we also start to see WeChat banning non-state approved political videos. And the West starts to fear and really notice how involved the Chinese government is in controlling what's online when in 2019 the Hong Kong protests break out. I was actually there and I, you know, I was talking to protesters and they were all trying very hard not to use Chinese tech products, including ones made by ByteDance. But also, like, the specter of growing, increasingly powerful Chinese tech haunted them. Whether it was surveillance, whether it was like stuff installed on their phones, what internet they connected to. It was, it was a really fascinating moment where like these young people were trying to create their own internet culture from

• 42:13Ryan Broderick?

  scratch with their own tools as this like massive behemoth was clearly coming.

• 42:21Ryan Broderick?

  Can you speak to like how you view that flashpoint? Because to me, looking back, it feels like the sort of switch, I think, in terms of how Chinese tech.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think the, well, for one, the the Hong Kong sort of tech ecosystem has always been slightly different.

• 42:35Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  Where the language was different, people weren't, you know, Google wasn't that there. Most of most of the American platforms weren't been been there. So it was easier for people to use, say, a non-Chinese stack of technologies, right? Like, you can use your iPhones, you can use your Telegrams. That was OK. But at the same time, right, you do have people who cross borders from Hong Kong to China, and their phones will get checked to see if they install Telegram on it. You would have stories of people being being recognized for who they were using facial recognition technologies. I think it's it's important to note that 2016, 20, 2019, that particular period was when Chinese, the Chinese government had much stronger facial recognition capabilities.

• 43:17Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  And like, the reason that censorship became more more effective from the Chinese government's perspective was because of artificial intelligence, that we're using large language models, albeit earlier iterations of that, to detect what kind of content should be censored. So I think these two things play go hand in hand. And the Hong Kong case was interesting because I think it really reshaped the American view of.

• 43:45Ryan Broderick?

  I think so, too.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Technologies. And I think more so the Americans' perception than the Chinese reality, because China has had been like that for quite a few years.

• 43:54Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  You know, when I first moved to the Bay Area in 2021, I would go around and ask people, you know, 2018, 2019, San Francisco was like, you would invest in Chinese companies, and you would want to invest in Chinese startups. You're curious about what's going on in China. In 2021, it's like, no, we're not touching it. So I started asking people what really changed, right? And they would all say it's the Hong Kong protests, because they thought China was becoming authoritarian using their technologies, which I still don't understand why that was a valid argument, because China has always been authoritarian. Like, why was it that you felt OK that the Chinese government was using technology for, quote unquote, authoritarianism in China?

• 44:38Speaker 01

  But when that's on Hong Kong, that becomes a moral issue for you? Like, I never understood that, so.

• 44:44Ryan Broderick?

  My thought is that I think a lot of Westerners saw Hong Kong as this separate place. And it was like, oh, if China can do that there, they can do it in Taiwan. And then if they can do it in Taiwan, then they can do it in London and they can do it in New York. And they like, it was, I think, a moment of,

• 45:02Ryan Broderick?

  to be very frank, as someone who's been very critical of American tech companies, I think Americans saw for the first time what many countries have experienced via Facebook and Twitter and our own technology and freaked the fuck out.

• 45:19Ryan Broderick?

  That's what I think happened.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think that's, that's definitely true in, in the story. Yeah, I, I do think there was a lot of misassessments of what the Chinese central government could do at this, at that point. Uh, you know, in 2019, but that's a totally different story, a totally different conversation.

• 45:36Ryan Broderick?

  But there was one other thing I think that we sort of have to hit when we, when we're tiling the story of Chinese internet. And that's COVID. So we, we hit this at the top. But I think not only was Hong Kong the moment where Americans started to actually kind of like get a sense of like the Chinese government as a, maybe like an imperialist, is an imperialistic or a sort of like aggressive government entity. And got a sense of like what their techno, like technology kind of looked and felt like. But I also feel like COVID was a moment where the Chinese censorship

• 46:11Ryan Broderick?

  was a lot more like you, like we were covering it more here. And we had just sort of come, and we haven't really talked about like the surveillance with like the Uighurs and sort of like how all of, but you had sort of touched on this, like this half decade of like increasingly powerful Chinese surveillance. And I feel like with Hong Kong, the Uighurs and then COVID, it just hits this point where we're at now, where we've been at for five years, where the West is afraid of China, but they're not sure what they're afraid of. And it's like, we're just lashing out, like not understanding what any of these platforms do, how they connect to the government, how people use them. It just seems very confused now.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  You know, in the in the first Trump administration, you see this attack of Chinese surveillance technologies. People were making these moralistic statements of Chinese tech. I think a lot of it is completely valid, the human rights violations. I think those are completely valid, but we're doing exactly the same thing here in the United States.

• 47:03Ryan Broderick?

  We sure are.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  Here, we have companies like Clearview AI at the time, selling more or less the same technologies, sometimes better technologies to to DHS, to local police bureaus. You know, the scale of these technologies were used differently or the way that they're used are were different compared to the Chinese counterparts. But they were there, right? And

• 47:24Ryan Broderick?

  We are right now using privately made facial recognition software to pick up random Hispanic men and send them to a gulag in El Salvador for prison sentences that have come in nine thousand year increments. Like, yeah, we are, we are completely in the deep end and I lost any sort of perceived moral superiority here.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  This is the point when when I think in retrospect, right? A lot of people were mad about China's technological development and its sort of techno authoritarian state because they they couldn't do it themselves or they wanted to be like China and they weren't.

• 48:01Ryan Broderick?

  Jealousy, yes.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  I think it's jealousy and it's in both cases, the goals are are terrible. And, you know, I think these are misguided things to do, but they were jealous of it, right? And the way that I hate to get on this current affair, the abundance, you know, type of ideology that's coming out on the

• 48:21Ryan Broderick?

  You're talking about the Ezra Klein book, the abundance. I have not spent the, I've not wasted the time to figure out what the abundance agenda is and you can't make me learn what it is.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not gonna tell you what it is, right? But but I I I will say that there is a obsession with state oriented, state driven technological progress that involves like export controls, that involves regulations. I mean, that ideology has been around for a long time, right? Even the Biden administration was trying to push for this, like, we're going to ban Chinese EVs. So we develop our domestic industry. We're going to justify every single piece of our legislation, regulation, based on this narrative technological competition with China. They they want to become like China. Like, I just, I just think. That's what they want, right, is to become, to do the things that China was able to accomplish

• 49:13Speaker 01

  in the last 20 years, you know, with all the good things and the bad things.

• 49:19Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, to hit this point again, because I do think it is like the most important and least covered aspect of this. China was able to make tech products that are in many ways functionally better. Like, it beat Google to Google and still worked better in an open market when Google was still accessible there. And it did it while transitioning sociologically, basically, where America was in like, let's say, the 20s or 30s, as like America, like the 1920s or 30s, like as America is going from rural to industrialized society, China did that move while also beating Google to making Google. Like, and you're right,

• 50:04Ryan Broderick?

  there are humanitarian concerns, there are surveillance concerns, and those are real. They are, they are real. But every, I think, I think the thing that has brought us to this moment right now where everyone is afraid of Chinese tech is a jealousy that, like, China was able to pull that off and we can't even really make a good electric car. Like, not, like, we can't even really do that. In China, you can buy a vape that's also an Android phone. Like, come on.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  Why do you think China has been so much better at making everything than us? Is it free speech?

• 50:41Ryan Broderick?

  Is it the lack of free speech? Is it, that is a real question. Like, what is, what is your gut tell you there? Like, why is China, why has China been so successful?

• 50:51Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's an economic scale, right?

• 50:53Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  It has this incredibly sophisticated manufacturing base that was built up in the last, like, 30, 40 years. That, by the way, like, we often see this narrative that, like, oh, like, China took away American manufacturing. The American manufacturing gave it away to Asia, like, in the 1970s and 80s, when the corporate bosses Owner to unions and they're saying we're seeing our our manufacturing to to Asia. Uh, that was a choice. That was a choice. They could have given it to unionized workers and they chose not to. Anyways, uh, but but China does have a manufacturing base that's much stronger. No matter what you how hard a niche your manufacturer, you know, the the thing that you're manufacturing, it always has a market.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Right? Whether that be domestic or or international.

• 51:42Ryan Broderick?

  A vape that's also an Android phone. Yeah, exactly.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  It's also an Android phone. And also, just like the the way that uh hardware manufacturing, hardware designers uh here in the US. Like to test a prototype, you have to send your prototype to China and then they they ship it back to you and then you're like, oh, this is not okay. You have to do this iterative process and that takes a very, very long time. When uh when when your factory is overseas, you know, I think there's a lot of criticism that. Like China was copying stuff in the in the for for like twenty thirty years. Uh, I think that in many ways that was a learning process, right? You learn how to do things and you do it really well.

• 52:20Ryan Broderick?

  America can no longer talk about copying anything with any sort of high ground. The the argument that.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  It's over. It's over. Like, I I don't think there's any moral high ground.

• 52:30Ryan Broderick?

  No, we don't have it. Also, like, it the the Chinese, the China is copying stuff argument. You saw it most recently with the release of DeepSeek this year, uh, the the Chinese uh ChatGPT competitor. And like, did they copy ChatGPT? Maybe. What did ChatGPT do? Copy the entire internet. Like, it's it's a it's a stupid argument.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  It's a little percy.

• 52:51Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, but also as as this episode has kind of gone through, like. It it it actually doesn't really bear that out. Like, China had e-commerce faster. It had fintech faster. It had social media in different and more interesting ways. Like, it it is a totally different evolutionary branch. And if you like really dig into how people have been using the internet in China for the last twenty five years, like. It doesn't, it doesn't hold scrutiny. Like I, I, I find this stuff super fascinating and I try to read as much as I can about it. And like, I don't see it. I don't see the Chinese internet as a cheap knockoff of American internet. If anything, it's like weirder and stranger with like, kind of cooler features sometimes and kind of dumb in different ways too. Like, I mean,

• 53:37Ryan Broderick?

  trying to use WeChat as a foreigner in China, like to order a car, like kill me, like honestly kill me. Like that was so goddamn hard. Like, there is dumb things about Chinese internet too. It's just, it's just different, I think.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really interesting because, because you mentioned the car story, right? Like I, I was in South Korea for a first, uh, for a first time a few weeks ago. Um, and it was actually, I, I got the experience of what a non-Chinese person will get in China.

• 54:03Ryan Broderick?

  Yep.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Uh, where I got, I landed, I realized none of my apps work because Google Maps, you can't use it in South Korea.

• 54:10Ryan Broderick?

  I should explain this because Korea has a very siloed internet as well because of concerns of the North Korean government spying on them. So you can't use Google products. You have to use Korean-made products and certain geolocation stuff just doesn't work there. So, yeah.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not explicitly banned. It just can't use it, right?

• 54:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it just doesn't work. Yeah, it's blocked.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it just doesn't work. Like it will go, tell you to go to the wrong like bus station.

• 54:30Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. I had to read all these apps. I have to like do verification and a lot of things don't work in English. And I was like, oh, this is what it feels like to be a non-Chinese person in China. Uh, and like a lot of it is just like, oh, I think this sucks. But it, I think the, the logic is deeply embedded in the way that these platforms are designed.

• 54:47Ryan Broderick?

  Well, I, I think ultimately the really important takeaway for people from this episode is one, um, Americans should understand more stuff about how other people's internet works and functions. And I think the second one is, America has no moral high ground at all and maybe never will again. And God bless the Chinese century upon us. Um, because Jesus, like, I mean, yeah, every argument we could have ever made about the Chinese surveillance state, we have to like reckon with at home first. Tim, thank you for coming on. This was great. This was a great conversation.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 55:20Ryan Broderick?

  If people want to follow you on the internet, where can they do that?

• 55:23Speaker 01

  I'm still on Twitter, uh, once in a while. Uh, my Twitter handle is T I U F, T I A Y U F. And I mostly just write things on my website. Like I just write things here and there now. So my website is T I U F A I N dot net.

• 55:36Ryan Broderick?

  That's the best. Writing things on websites is the true way to defeat global censorship and surveillance.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  I just want to go back to blogging, the blogging service 2000s.

• 55:46Ryan Broderick?

  When we bring back the International Committee of Chinese bloggers, we can expand it and we can do like an internet, we can do an international consortium of bloggers. I think that'd be really fun.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that would be great.

• 55:57Ryan Broderick?

  So normally I would let Grant out of his little producer cage to ask our guests a couple of questions. And then we normally put those on our Patreon version, but this week we thought we'd just include them here. But if you do like the sort of feeling of like, wow, the episode's over. Oh, wait, it's not over. That's fantastic. You should definitely subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/panicworld. Okay, producer Grant, I'm letting you out of your cage. Also, I have five minutes and then I gotta leave. So you gotta make this fast.

• 56:21Speaker 02

  Damn you, Ryan. Compare the surveillance at this stage of America to Chinese surveillance?

• 56:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. For one, I think the Chinese, American, and American surveillance states are just different. For one, I think the surveillance in the US is mostly coming from corporations. And those are not vacuous, right? They have real implications on your lives. Being constantly surveilled by corporations with no limits. Whereas in China, you do have a lot of regulations in recent years about what data, what kind of data that companies can collect. And like, what are the terms that they can loan you money? But you are under this surveillance of a very powerful state, right? So I think it's a pick your poison type of game. And I don't think either is good.

• 57:14Speaker 02

  Do you have an Elon Musk running your apps? Because if not...

• 57:17Speaker 01

  I mean, but Elon Musk is running a factory, the Gigafactory in Shanghai right now. So who knows? Who knows what will happen?

• 57:23Ryan Broderick?

  See, that's the real, that's the real thing, is that both models are so bad that they both allow Elon Musk to resist them. So there's really, like, they both gotta just start over.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Whether Elon Musk has a presence in your country.

• 57:40Ryan Broderick?

  Both systems have allowed the virus of Elon Musk to exist within them. So we have to smash both, unfortunately. Yeah.

• 57:48Speaker 01

  I totally agree. It's pretty bad. Yeah.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  Who is more internet brain rot?

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Oh, China, China, China. Uh, yeah, yeah, definitely. It's, it's so, yeah, every time I go there is, I don't know. I feel like all the, all the internet brain rots in the US, it's all in the same cultural context, more or less. There hasn't been a brain rot that is completely incomprehensible to me. I feel like on the Chinese internet, I keep seeing brain rots that are completely, I just, I have no idea how to make sense of this. There is no way I can make sense of this. I would just completely give up right now. Yeah.

• 58:23Ryan Broderick?

  That's awesome. That's the dream, honestly.

• 58:25Speaker 02

  Maybe the cure is to get sicker.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  Get worse.

• 58:27Speaker 02

  Maybe that's the only answer.

• 58:29Ryan Broderick?

  To see, to see a meme so bizarre and specific and niche that it's impossible to comprehend? That's the dream, man. That's awesome. All right. I gotta run.

• 58:39Speaker 01

  Good for you, man.

• 58:40Ryan Broderick?

  Fantastic. Panic World is a Garbage Day production. Subscribe to the newsletter at garbage day dot email. Panic World is written and produced by Grant Irving. It's hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. It's engineered by Rebecca Seidel. Our deranged logo was created by Gabby Cash. Please give us $5 at patreon.com/panicworld. Please give us products to sell by contacting multitude at multitude dot production slash ads. For any other way you would like to give us money or work with us or promote us or become financially entangled with us, you can reach out to our fixer, our wonderful bag man, Josh Fielstad, and you can reach him at [email protected].

• 59:22Ryan Broderick?

  And one piece of advice from me to you, chill out, touch grass while you still can.