The Surprising Similarity Between the US and Chinese Internets
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Why did early internet optimism about liberalization fail in both the US and China?
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Bloomberg Audio Studios.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
Tracy, remember how like in the late nineties, like the internet was starting to become a thing and people thought it would bring like liberalism and democracy.
Utopia.
I totally bought into that. Like I I you know, people look back at that and they're like, oh, they were naive. Like I don't blame them. Like I think I bought into that too.
I mean there was something very wholesome about the sort of mid nineties internet culture where you could go to everyone's like little individual blog and people were mostly talking about their hobbies and things like that. Or at least that was my experience of it. Probably colored by the fact that I was in middle school at the time. But it seemed very innocent.
It was very cool. It was very decentralized, right? So now we associate the internet with a handful of tech oligarchs that control various kingdoms, maybe you could even say within the internet, whether it's the meta kingdom or the Amazon kingdom or whatever. But it was very decentralized, everyone with their own little sites, cobbled together and so forth. And I totally bought that idea. It was just like, oh, we're all gonna talk to each other, we're gonna work things out. And there's no way that authoritarian governments could ever control this and it will finally realize the true promise of democracy and all that stuff. I'm totally blind. I'm totally bought into it.
Fast forward to twenty twenty six. How would you describe the internet now?
I mean, the word that always comes to my mind, and there are many words, is just this sort of like Sheer like sort of tribalism and conflictualism on every level, right? Nationalism, racism, bigotry, anti-semitism, sexism, et cetera. This is it's just like riven with that. It's riven with conflict and so forth. It's heavily centralized. All of this sort of utopian promise. I'm like, uh didn't really pan out that way.
I would say cesspool.
Cesspool, that's a good one too.
You have to try really, really hard nowadays to find like good and useful corners of the internet. Yeah, possibly. And I'm not saying that they're not out there, but it is interesting how far we've deviated from that initial utopian pre premise of the internet.
What is “The Wall Dancers” and why is it called that?
The other thing that's happening, we're recording this on, let's see, January twenty-seventh. What's interesting is that we're starting to have even more discussion about the power of the platform. So over the weekend there have been some allegations that TikTok, for instance, is censoring Minneapolis video or video of the Minneapolis shooting. And that's just after the new ownership took control of the platform, right? So they spun off the US business and now it has all these new owners and people are starting to talk about, well, maybe they're censoring, or even if they're not directly censoring some stuff, maybe the algorithm is influencing what people see.
Totally. And then there's one other dimension before we get into the conversation that I think is very important here, which is that The internet is splintering geographically, right? So we've known for a long time, of course, people talk about the firewall in China and the Chinese internet, but it's not just China, right? We see the UK establishing its own rules, and we see Australia establishing its own rules. We saw the thing a couple years ago with Brazil temporarily banning Twitter, et cetera. And so there's all these sort of intermingling of digital platforms and national science.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why did early internet optimism about liberalization fail in both the US and China?
0:00–2:50
2
What is “The Wall Dancers” and why is it called that?
2:50–9:42
3
How does Chinese censorship actually work – from vague rules to on‑the‑ground enforcement?
9:42–16:24
4
What role did nationalism and “little pinks” play in shaping the Chinese internet?
16:24–23:01
5
How did the temporary TikTok ban in the US trigger a flood of American users onto China’s Xiao Hong Shu?
23:01–30:25
6
In what ways are algorithms and AI being used to control online speech in China versus the US?
30:25–36:16
7
What are the biggest social cleavages emerging from the internet in both societies?
36:16–43:09
8
What is the overarching thesis: why do the US and Chinese internets end up looking so similar despite different political systems?
43:09–54:11
Speakers
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