Osborne Ink || News that's fairly liberal, but never unbalanced.

From the New York Times:

BEIJING — In the wake of Sunday’s deadly riots in its western region of Xinjiang, China’s central government took all the usual steps to enshrine its version of events as received wisdom: it crippled Internet service, blocked Twitter’s micro-blogs, purged search engines of unapproved references to the violence, saturated the Chinese media with the state-sanctioned story.

It also took one most unusual step: Hours after troops quelled the protests, in which 156 people were reported killed, the state invited foreign journalists on an official trip to Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital and the site of the unrest, “to know better about the riots.” Indeed, it set up a media center at a downtown hotel — with a hefty discount on rooms — to keep arriving reporters abreast of events. (Link)

As Arianna Huffington put it in her op-ed last week, China “slammed the door in the face of new media — and offered traditional reporters a front row seat.” Now, from the Associated Press we find out that Afghanistan is learning from China’s example:

KABUL — The Afghan government has blocked access to four Web sites with President Hamid Karzai’s name in the address that are critical of the Afghan leader or have links to sites advertising locally taboo subjects such as online dating and mail order brides.

The shutdown order comes ahead of the country’s Aug. 20 presidential election. An Information Ministry spokesman initially said the original complaint about two of the sites came from the Karzai campaign. Karzai’s campaign spokesman agreed, but later called back to deny involvement. (Link)

Kharzai’s actions might seem strange, since most of his rival candidates have no internet access. But that’s not the point of doing this. By blocking the site, he controls the public perception of his regime through state media.

And “state media” really is the operating phrase. Newspapers are easy to shut down; so are TV stations. You can block a website, but you can’t block an internet user so easily. The more access people have to the tools of new media, the less control a government has over what the world sees, hears, and reads about it.

Via email, Juan Cole tells us what happened in Tehran on Friday:

Every time Ansari mentioned the Supreme Leader, the crowd booed. Every time he referred to the opposition as traitors, chants of “liar, liar” started. When he mentioned that everyone should listen to the advice and dictates of the Supreme Leader, chants of “Death to the dictator” were loudly shouted. When he derailed (sic) America and Britain for muddling in Iran’s affairs, the crowd erupted in chants of “Down with Russia” (because Russia immediately recognized the re-election of Ahmadinejad and congratulated him). As he spoke of the recent killings of Muslims in China, the crowd chided him and the system for its hypocrisy.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has kicked the man-on-the-scene reporters out of Iran because, unlike in China, the regime in Iran has been unable to quell dissent in the streets. Reporters will not be allowed to return to Tehran until it goes quiet — and the demonstrators are determined not to be quiet. Indeed, they have proven impossible to shut up.

We know this because more emails, blogs, and videos come out of Iran every day. They wind up on YouTube and get reposted through social media sites. We listen to thousands of voices jam the call to prayer, or chant Allah’u'akbar in the night:

The message those voices want us to hear is this: We have not given up on freedom. China, Afghanistan, and Iran would like us to hear a very different message. They are trying to build Oceania, Orwell’s fictional future surveillance state. Naomi Klein observed China’s Olympics in an op-ed last year:

The goal of all this central planning and spying is not to celebrate the glories of Communism, regardless of what China’s governing party calls itself. It is to create the ultimate consumer cocoon for Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cell phones, McDonald’s happy meals, Tsingtao beer, and UPS delivery — to name just a few of the official Olympic sponsors. But the hottest new market of all is the surveillance itself. Unlike the police states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, China has built a Police State 2.0, an entirely for-profit affair that is the latest frontier for the global Disaster Capitalism Complex. (Emphasis mine)

But even China may not be able to dam the internet much longer. A recent attempt to do that very thing — by requiring all computers to come with an official, pre-installed filtering program called “Green Dam” — was a complete failure:

(T)he software, which analyzes skin tones, will block Garfield kittens, as they are yellow, but it won’t be able to recognise pornographic images of dark-skinned people.

[...]

“The list includes common terms like “essence”. I can’t even imagine what “essence” counts as. Green Dam monitors word processing in addition to internet. So does this mean that from now on the word “essence” can no longer appear in school essays, textbooks and dictionaries?” he says.

The internet is simply too big and dynamic to censor effectively. The technological barriers are just too high. As author William Gibson explained in a 2003 op-ed for the NYT,

Orwell’s projections come from the era of information broadcasting, and are not applicable to our own. Had Orwell been able to equip Big Brother with all the tools of artificial intelligence, he would still have been writing from an older paradigm, and the result could never have described our situation today, nor suggested where we might be heading.

That our own biggish brothers, in the name of national security, draw from ever wider and increasingly transparent fields of data may disturb us, but this is something that corporations, nongovernmental organizations and individuals do as well, with greater and greater frequency. The collection and management of information, at every level, is exponentially empowered by the global nature of the system itself, a system unfettered by national boundaries or, increasingly, government control.

It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret.

In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician and corporate leader: the future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did. (Emphasis mine)

If pressed, Chinese leaders would probably say that clamping down on news is how they keep riots from spreading. But man-on-the-scene reporters would never press their Chinese contacts too far, since those contacts would certainly limit the access on which reporters thrive. What Bob Cesca calls the “barbecue media” is a problem larger than one political campaign.

Even if reporters attempt to speak with Chinese on the street, the picture they get will still be limited by the Eyewitness Fallacy, in which observers confuse their limited field of view for a larger reality. The phenomenon is described thusly by Tony Waters at Ethnography.com:

(T)he individual participant observer’s view is always limited to the contacts they personally make. Meaning that our personal contacts limit the ideas that we can dream up. How can a single observer, then write about a society as vast as China (population 1.2 billion) based only on what they themselves see? Indeed, even tiny Liechtenstein (population 35,000) is too big. This is because even the best participant observer can come in contact with only an extremely limited number of people on their own. (Emphasis mine)

Traditional media has emphasized this limited field of view in an age of information overload, and savvy politicians have long since learned to game that system. Judith Miller’s breathless Iraq reporting for the New York Times helped sell the war, and we’ve since learned that nothing she reported was even remotely true. China is playing the same game now by offering the world a limited view disguised as a scoop.

Contrast this with the virtual torrent of information coming out of Iran. Nico Pitney’s greatest achievement thus far is in aggregating and digesting so much information; at this point, he has probably received updates from a thousand sources — more than any one reporter can talk to in a single trip to China. The picture that emerges is a resilient popular movement.

In China, where text-messaging has become the most popular form of communication, the government has spent five years trying to control its use. Yet protesters continue finding new ways around the filters to organize themselves.

Our globalized world depends on connectivity. When governments pursue modernity, they are inevitably forced to allow ever-greater connectivity. It is a genie not easily returned to its bottle — indeed, it seems to find a thousand new ways to escape its bottle every day. That is a process we ought to celebrate and encourage.