Jeffrey Wasserstrom
speaker
385 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
One is Christina Larson, a very bright journalist, a friend of mine who's now working on other things, but was working on China. And she wrote about this in MIT Technology Review. She said, you need to think about China as having the best as well as the worst internet experience in the world.
And, you know, you think about it with, you think of the worst as easy, you know, the Great Firewall, you try to search for what happened. You search for the tank man, you won't get it. You search for information about Dalai Lama and you get all these lies about him.
Search for things about Xinjiang and it makes it seem like it's a place where people are happy rather than massive extra legal detention camps and where your life can be ruined by crime. by things you have no control over. But she said like on other ways, when it comes to like consumer playing to your pleasures and things, it was really advanced.
A lot of things that then come out of the place are tried out there and in massive numbers. And I remember after I, around the time that I had read that, I was in Shanghai and somebody was explaining it to me. They were talking about like going out to eat. Like I said, oh, we've got such and such. And I said, oh, that's like Yelp.
I said, well, yeah, but Yelp just tells you the overall rating for a restaurant over time. We've got one that can tell you which part of the restaurant you want to sit in because there's a waiter that's in a really bad mood and people have posted enough information to do this. Or, you know, what the best dish there is in the last week. Forget about these sort of slow things.
And you had a lot of things, you know, that were like, okay, you've... smart city and controlled you can learn things about ease of movement and singapore had some of these things tested too you had way before you move you go into an underground um parking lot now in the u.s and you find out whether there are any empty spaces on um on a floor.
That was something that was years before in Singapore. And you used money less often there because you had a kind of transponder that would automatically pay for your parking and things. And it was something that can be very seductive. So the other line besides best of worst internet I always like is William Gibson, who wrote
one of the other important dystopian novels of the present, Neuromancer, he wrote a rare, for him, nonfiction piece about Singapore where he referred to it as Disneyland with the death penalty. And, you know, there are times when... I shouldn't laugh. But it is. It's a powerful... Yeah. He's not welcomed in Singapore, let's just say. But he talked about how when he wanted to try to...
He went to Japan a lot in the 1980s at a time when Japan was a place where you sort of got a sense of what the future might hold. So the dark side of this, the surveillance state at its worst, which we see in Xinjiang and places. And there, again, it may seem like I'm just obsessed with science fiction. And there, it really is minority report. It's this kind of like...
you do certain kinds of behaviors. And we're seeing this other places too. We're seeing versions of it in the US as well, where it's like, oh, we can tell from a pattern that you're the kind of person who might do X. And so in Xinjiang, when they were starting to round people up, there's this great book by a Uyghur poet. He talks about how
People were just starting to disappear off the streets, and they were being accused of being radicalized and being potential terrorists. And the cues could be something like somebody giving up smoking or not drinking alcohol, because that was seen as something that sometimes went along with becoming more violent. Um, more devoted to Islam and more devoted to something, a particular version of it.
So he talked about how a group of the poets, when they would get a writers, would they get together? They would, whether or not any of them drank, they would make sure there was a bottle of alcohol on their table because it was simply a way of, of trying to stay ahead of this system of looking for these kind of clues. So you really have this dark side.
Xinjiang is this example, and Tibet also with incredible tight control. And there's more of that kind of push on personal life in other parts of China as well. But I think the question of whether we give up too much and who can abuse what we do give up is something that is being asked in the United States now about big tech companies as well.
It's asked about governments, but it's also asked about big tech and what you have as a trade-off. But I hadn't thought about it until this conversation, which... I can tell is why people find it stimulating to have these extended conversations because you have set lines, but then the conversation goes and you think in a different way.
So what I used to always say about China after 1989 was the Chinese Communist Party wanted to stay in power. And they realized that the Soviet Union, Soviet bloc was falling apart.
They knew that one reason why people, and this is like the simple way of, one way I think you have to understand why communism fell in Eastern Europe was partly about ideals and thirst for freedom and that, but also people knew that people, East Germans knew that West Germans were having more fun and getting better stuff.
And when some East Berliners got over the wall, one of the first places they went to was this department store to see if the images of better food and more choices were available there. And it was true. And I think this is a human, as human as the desire for more freedom.
So one of the things that the Chinese Communist Party, they never articulated this way, but how can we try to get to a stage where we don't have things like Tiananmen again? Well, what if we tried to make a deal with people? We'll give them more choices. in their daily life. We'll give them better stuff. We'll give them more choices at the store.
We'll give them more choices about what to read, too, because, you know, we'll give them more choices in consumer goods and intellectuals. The consumer goods they want are to watch the movies and read the books that other people like them around the world are reading. So we'll give them more choices.
We won't open the floodgates completely, but we'll give them more choices, but not give them more choices at the ballot box or in politics. And this was the new kind of new social compact. Allow us to keep ruling and we'll make sure that you're living better than the last generation in terms of choices and in terms of material goods.
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