The End of the American Internet
ben-evans.com
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- biggest unified market. This is HUGE. Not like the EU "unified" where you can't even speak the same language, but really unified. This means an early idea has big enough of a market to worth pursuing, among other things.
- a culture that values technology, innovation, tolerance for risk
- world class academic institutions, by far the most of any other country
China may challenge the US in terms of being a big unified market, for sure. Given the geopolitical situation however most likely China's innovation will stay focused on China, and the rest of the world will continue to be led by the US for the reasons above.
If China was ever to become democratized and continue its growth trajectory it could truly challenge the US gobally but that may not happen for years or decades.
Overall I think we should welcome more innovation, even if the US has to share some of the leadership it had until now. But articles that portray some short of US demise or structural decline are more journalistic clickbait than anything else.
When the combined US+EU market is less than half the amount of people of your own economy, stumbling upon itself with regulations and inner struggles and disagreements, and you are the single most important builder of things in their world.. I'm not sure democracy is a prerequisite to be able to achieve domination eventually.
Sure, average quality of life still isn't on par with the EU or the US.. but then again, they've taken 600 million people out of extreme poverty in the last few decades, they're the single biggest current builder of nuclear power plants, they're developing their own space agency at a rapid pace, and are perfectly fine increasingly making major US businesses bend to their will (in tech, in sports, in the industry, and in bending America's cultural influence in the world through things like Hollywood), and they seriously lock down the innovation and profit so that it circulates internally first and foremost.
I'm not saying all these things for the fun of it: I'm from the EU and I live in Canada, so I'm both very much wanting the world to go towards the models that the EU and Canada are trying to achieve (as far as democracies strive to improve themselves, ever-so-slowly sometimes), but I'm also pretty keenly aware of how small those players actually can be when compared to a behemoth with a very long history, a critical mass, and willing to make any necessary concessions to dominate.
You don't really need 750 million people when you have 1.6 billion in the first place.
Yes. Who said they hadn't?
For the biggest part of history, until Europe got forward after kickstarting the industrial revolution (along with the help of colonization and the exploiting of the New World), China was the #1 economy worldwide, and quite more advanced in many ways than the rest of the world.
E.g. in the Song dynasty (900-1200 A.D): "These [policies] made China a global leader, leading some historians to call this an "early modern" economy many centuries before Western Europe made its breakthrough".
1500 A.D.: In 1500, China was the largest economy in the world, followed closely by India, both with estimated GDP's of approximately $100 billion. France was a distant third at approximately 18 billion, followed closely by Italy and Germany. What is now the United Kingdom ranked 10th, at barely one quarter the output of France (Figure 1).
Heck, China was prosperous all the way back to 20-100 B.C ("Technological innovations, such as the wheelbarrow, paper and a seismograph, were invented during this period")
"China's economy led its European counterpart by leaps and bounds at the start of the Renaissance. China was so far ahead, in fact, that economic historian Eric L. Jones once argued that the Chinese empire "came within a hair's breadth of industrializing in the fourteenth century.""
https://i.insider.com/586e8834ee14b6507e8b5b45?width=1000&fo...
https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-chinese-economy-1...
China had an iron industry earlier than that - 12th century, IIRC. It was all starting - more iron resulting in iron tools all over the place, process improvements, and so on. But then some bureaucrats (mandarins, which I think is the same thing) noticed that some of the "wrong" people were getting rich in all this, and the government forcibly shut it all down in the name of preserving social order.
That's one of the strengths of America - more than anywhere else in the world, if you have the right idea, it doesn't matter if you're the "wrong" person.
Chinese civilization peaked in tang (in terms of international influence) and later song (in terms of tech and culture).
Then it's a steady declination till the end of Qing.
Ancient China was quite liberal and diverse even in modern standards. But the history took a reverse turn to more totalitarian direction. (China never practiced authoritarian regime, even today, people just cannot admit or bother to learn the nuances of modern China political system, I am so very much disappointed there is no modern day Tocqueville on China, what a pity!)
Xi's approach is fairly conventional in terms of Chinese tradition. But it has swapped the Confucius core with a blended scientific core through learning from Communism. This is a dangerous direction, as there is quite a risk of how to continue this tradition across generations, history has shown that declination and degradation is inevitable within 2-300 years time period. It will be interesting to see how Xi handles his succession. It might be quite disastrous. But it also has a lot of institutional safety backup.
Who knows! To me, this is the single most political affair in the next 10-20 years.
Xi is not a dictator, his life experience does not lend the ambition, nor his power can dominate the check and balance in China. Whoever labels xi a dictator is fooling his audience for some unspeakable purpose.
[1] https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%9B%90%E9%93%81%E8%AE%BA
> check and balance in China
Do tell.
Last I checked, China was a one-party state and doesn't have the same judiciary-executive freedom that typically defines 'checks and balances'
Check and balanced exit, as one example, in the ways of how policies are executed between different branches and sectors.
Like if Xi wants to do some thing, the functioning branch has a great deal of influence, as the government officials are not refreshed between different government terms. Like many of Xi's policy can be effectively nullified, if the policy really were not effectively mobilizing the functioning units.
One might fancy that Xi can install his own men that is so effective that the above check is rendered ineffective. That's possible, but it seems even in the imperial era, a sane emperor was not able to do that [1]. Nor I see any evidence that Xi had acquired any such superhuman power.
These are unfortunately not as visible as western systems.
But again, I can only state qualitatively, in the sense that the check and balance is so much more effective than what a lot of people imagine. I am not an expert that can give you a systematic description of the details. I once again lament the missing of a modern day Tocqueville...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1587,_a_Year_of_No_Significa...
Well, he does need to be voted Secretary by the Central Committee. The change that was made recently was to remove term limits - but in theory he can still be voted out. Weak sauce I know compared to judicial oversight but hey, you asked.
I agree with the GP that labeling Xi a "dictator" is hyperbole. I wouldn't even say he's as entrenched as Putin.
So anyone who claims Xi is a dictator has evil motives? No room for honest disagreement? The facts are not only clear and unambiguous, but also so widely spread that everyone knows? Nonsense. "I'm right, and anyone who disagrees is not only wrong but evil" is a very cheap rhetorical trick. You sound like...
Well, you sound like the American left. And the American right. And the Republican Party. And the Democratic Party. What you don't sound like, though, is a reasonable person having a reasonable discussion, who has evidence on his side.
Transitioning to less "dangerous" fossil fuels happened once the economies were already pretty robust and machines were doing the work of hundreds of men at once, because countries got richer and as their quality of life improved they increasingly walked away from dangerous stuff (the deaths per TWh of coal and brown coal are horrifying[0] and unions and education of the population surely had their role to play in driving change in the way those countries dealt with fossil fuels). Europe then increasingly moved away from coal (not quite done with it though: Germany is still so anti-nuclear that they are the second biggest users behind Russia and iirc the first next importer of coal-based energy - from Russia), but that's the kind of luxury one can afford when the economy is already in decent shape. That's also in part why, while currently China is the single largest producer of coal in the world (to sustain its growth year-on-year), they're also pretty aware that they've got to switch pretty fast to something better (i.e. nuclear) because the honeymoon won't last forever (and I have no doubt that a few generations there will pay a high price in the future for that - cue social unrest down the road).
So at the very least, the idea that we can "throw people at the problem" isn't entirely devoid of sense when you consider how many people in Europe dedicated their lives to this brand-new energy-dense coal for a couple generations, and in doing so definitely sacrificed their health and lives in exchange for rapid social progress (that they might or might not have benefited from..).
I've come to the conclusion that a well functioning authoritarian government (like China's) has many short term advantages:
- very efficient in redirecting resources as needed
- the top concerns of the state (e.g. beat COVID, create a domestic semiconductor industry out of thin air) are addressed very efficently
- no politics or stupid "check and balances" to stall momentum (e.g compare to how many of Trump's orders, even for Tiktok, were at least temporarily halted by federal judges)
HOWEVER- to have a well functioning authoritarian government you need a strongman at the top (Xi, Putin etc). This is my own anecdotal estimate, but I'd say there is at least a 25% change you get someone that wants to hold on to power and willing to sacrifice their people's well being in order to do that (e.g. see China's Great Leap forward and resulting famine [1])
So you get 1, 2 3 leadership successions that work out and prosperity keeps growing... but how far will your luck take you? Even if 3/4 leaders are 'good' chances of having 5 leaders all good are 23%, and to have 10 successful successions your chances are .75^10=5%.
In the long run, the authoritarian regime will collapse under its own weight. In the short term it's kicking ass. Your call which one you want to pick.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
And it's precisely because no system of checks and balances exist that ensures once you roll badly on a succession, that whoever ends up gaining control is able to so quickly destroy whatever has previously been built up.
The only way to truly ensure long term growth and stability, is to build up a robust system, independent of any individual, that has checks and balances set in place.
It has lots of disadvantages:
- You can loose everything you have very fast, including your live and the live of your children, and of course your money or your home. There are kidnappings in China.
-Your food is not safe. The air you breath is not safe and if you try to do something, let alone measure it, you will get into problems. They can kill you and make you disappear.
- Nothing is true. Have they beaten COVID? You believe so because they tell you so. But the party controls media so you can believe as well in Santa.
-The State in China is one of the least efficient things you can think of, and extremely corrupt. The only thing they are good at is propaganda.
-Lots of politics in China. Have you seen all the people at the CCP? Lots of factions there fighting for power. Those guys are killing each other or pointing fingers at other factions and sending them to jail with each new scandal.
IMO, "check and balances" is not stupid. It is one of the best inventions the West have created.
Coming back has made me realize how valuable is what we have in the West. And how spoiled people are taking for granted what took thousands of years to develop.
Also, authoritarian leader willing to sacrifice well being of subjects is not the exception, it is the norm. You can't be authoritarian leader without such willingness.
Also, checks and balances are not stupid. The difference is that stalling of Trump orders happened in the open for well defined reasons.
Why not have both?
China should in no way have to be “Western” to be trusted internationally. But they could embrace the opportunity to be even more open and generous of a society than they have been in the recent past. They’re certainly strong enough for it.
A few things I would personally love to see:
– More transparent and consistent application of laws
– Celebrate and protect all Chinese of all diversities, not just the majority who hold the most power
– Avoid taking nationalism to an extreme
The second and third especially are serious mistakes other nations (e.g. Britain, Japan, America) have made in recent history. It would be a gift to see China avoid the same.
Instead, they recently tightened the Party control over businesses, less Deng Xiaoping style, more Soviet style.
I feel that for at least the last century, you need to think of the US population for the purposes of talent pool sizing as more or less the entire world because of its focus on liberty and opportunity. Consider how many accomplished scientists and inventors came from other countries (including China) for this reason. The US has enjoyed a very privileged position of being able to skim the cream of the crop in this way.
The bar gets higher every day, and it's a hassle a lot of people are not willing to go through
So you don't know how long it takes to get an H1B and you want to talk about "reasonable standards"? That's funny
Getting a work visa to pretty much anywhere in the EU or Canada (or maybe even Australia) is quicker than an H1B.
I don’t think it works that way. We’re not talking about building pyramids, or a great wall. It’s not a simple labor issue or China and India would already be winning.
A corrupt authoritarian country can’t innovate at the speed of a free and democratic one.
Progress is heavily non-linear, particularly so in the last few hundred years, and very unevenly distributed due to various factors (geography, wars, resources, population sizes, etc). The way European and even North American powers developed even 70 years back is not a direct match to how countries develop now.
But you're right that it's not just a labour issue: it's also an energy issue, for power (which enabled hundred-fold ROIs compared to human work, even slave work) and materials construction (which already occurs in the countries you mentioned). And on that note, the planned construction of nuclear power plants in China is enormous[0] (including new technologies like EPR which work well already there while they're lagging behind in my home country of France) and by the end of that their total nuclear throughput will be higher than France[1]. And renewables are also rising at a fantastic pace there too.
Now there's the current (and soon to be dated) GDP/added-value definition of "winning" from the west. Well, even there it's a steady improvement for China (more so than for India, that's for sure): over two-thirds of foreign executives were already saying Chinese companies were as innovative or more than their companies by 2014[2] and the time to market on their internal market is very different from the rest of the world due in part to entirely different approaches to strict internal processes, which leads to a very different approach to what's "new". As noted in the same article and in my previous comment, while the quality of things isn't quite on par with what the US or the EU are accustomed to, it's good enough for a market that is more than twice the population of the two aforementioned. And by sticking to that metric, one can easily say that what WeChat does in China is the wet dream of basically most of the biggest US tech companies.
I do have many doubts about what will happen to the country and its population as the middle class grows and starts asking questions and wanting a better quality of life and, you know, perhaps want no more autocratic regimes and less corruption. Perhaps that's more a hope of mine rather than a pragmatic prediction though.
I'm not sure what definitions of "winning" and "innovate" you are using, and I am curious to hear about the places where the country completely fails to innovate or "win" (this is not a sarcastic comment, I'm genuinely curious), because it's getting the world handed to it on a platter these last few years.
I don't wish for the EU to emulate in any way some of the terrible things occurring in China, and I hope that the ideals of the Schengen space and practical EU protections (that I very much cherish) will be one of those things that spread to the world eventually, but I'm not seeing a fantastic amount of "winning" happening in our democratic countries lately, from one side of the Atlantic (Brexit, rise of extremes, EU issues in Poland or Hungary, lack of collective weight on major decisions, etc) or on the other side.
edit: links, sorry about that.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268154/number-of-planned...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country
[2] https://outline.com/szPNha (MIT Sloan Management Review)
Russia put a man in space in 1961, and Mir was 25 years later (following several Salyut stations)
19 years doesn’t seem that great
I think the Coronavirus disaster has shown that China can be more efficient than all democratic countries where it counts. A serious blow to the prestige of democracy vs autocracy.
Not all democratic countries. I live in Thailand, which is at least technically a democracy, and the virus has been completely extinguished here. The crackdown was harsh - a month of curfew! - but it worked, and the public was largely on board. Life is back to normal here, with the addition of masks, for which there is 100% compliance - I just don't understand how the US acts against its own interests in that regard. The virus has been crushed. And it's the same in Singapore, after a couple of hiccups. Hell, Thailand is re-opening to tourism!
China isn't 100% autocracy, anyway. There's a very very large gap between China and, say, North Korea, or even Soviet Russia. You can definitely make the case though that the "pure democracy free for all" model like the USA, with its totally unrestricted (and possibly harmful in the age of social media) free speech, has certainly lost if not prestige, then at least the status of the model of governance other countries should aspire to. I would say the USA's handling of COVID19 has been a big wake-up call to pretty much every other democracy of what can happen when "freedom" goes too far.
And for what it's worth, I'd call America's money-driven system pretty far from the world's best democracy as well.
Singapore can be as bad as Russia - it's just that if they were as bad, nobody would bother to stay along in that tiny island. Thailand is like Russia to Thai folks - recent protests are just evidence of that.
America isn't perfect, but at least you get to have an opposition. Last time the opposition found a reasonable and charismatic leader, we know what the king did in Thailand (it was his sister in the opposition).
The world got plenty of notice and the countries listening acted successfully.
Even the US enacted travel bans which - if they had followed up and kept working towards suppression of the virus - would have been a great start. Instead the US sacrificed it's gains to political games and now is seeing what happens.
The whistleblowers in China shouldn't have been suppressed. But there was plenty of notice early enough to act.
China! Where peoples live are worth nothing...
They prevented people traveling from Wuhan to the rest of China but did not prevent people from traveling from Wuhan to the rest of the world.
During this time, they, and the WHO were saying that there was no evidence of human-to-human contagion.
You do the math.
China shutdown Wuhan on 23 January[2] (notice this was after human-to-human transmission was confirmed). Wuhan airport was closed[2], and Chinese did stop all travel out of Wuhan[3]. There are many reports of people escaping the lockdown that night, but it doesn't seem this was some Chinese policy - more that events were moving fast.
It's your country's responsibility who enters its borders. The Trump administration moved fairly quickly and closed borders to Wuhan by Feb 2, which was earlier than South Korea (but later than many countries).
I don't think many would fault that part of the US response, but it isn't exactly clear what people think China was hiding in this period - remember this was the time when people were seeing pictures of the lockdown in Wuhan. Countries can make their own judgement about the severity.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/20/coronavirus-sp...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_lockdown_in_...
[3] https://www.health.gov.au/news/chief-medical-officers-update...
“It's your country's responsibility who enters its borders”
This is technically true according to a black and white definition of ‘responsibility’.
But the decision you make will be based a lot on information you get from other parties and how trustworthy they are.
The extent to which the Chinese system causes the severity to be downplayed matters a lot.
They were welding doors shut to keep people inside. It's difficult to argue they downplayed it.
There is (fair) criticism of the regional authorities in Wuhan downplaying it in early January. But the central government didn't seem do anything to try to hide things.
BTW, if you didn't already know these dates and thought the Chinese gov was hiding things, you might want to re-examine the source of your information.
I’m not saying that your sources are worth nothing, but there is reason to doubt that they tell the whole story.
Claiming the central government didn’t seem to do anything to try to hide things, and blaming it on the regular government seems rather blithe.
It is well reported m that a doctor who identified the virus early on was forced to lie and claim he was mistaken.
In an environment where forcing lies is a normal part of government operation, we just can’t know how many other doctors were prevented from speaking out.
We also know that the CCP was spreading the story that the virus was planted by the US military.
Are you really so certain that your timeline is accurate?
What does this mean? I read the WHO reports at the time, and they are still the same. They are "incorrect" in the sense they didn't know things at the start, but they are a correct historical record.
> It is well reported that a doctor who identified the virus early on was forced to lie and claim he was mistaken.
Indeed. And look what happened to the officials who forced him to do that.
> Are you really so certain that your timeline is accurate?
Yes, absolutely - which is why I'm so surprised at the "blame China" narrative.
I'd be quite interested to understand why you think it could be wrong? It was less than a year ago, and the information is all publicly accessible.
I was following Covid from early and ordered masks in late January. The WHO started publishing daily updates at[2] from Jan 21 and prior to that on[3]. People knew and were making preparations for a SARS type epidemic - I'd suggest you read some to see how much people knew and how seriously they were taking it.
Their update on Jan 21 reports:
Additional investigations are needed to determine how the patients were infected, the extent of human-to-human transmission, the clinical spectrum of disease, and the geographic range of infection. [4] (note the human-to-human transmission bit)
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/chinese-inquir...
[2] https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
[3] https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...
[4] https://www.who.int/csr/don/21-january-2020-novel-coronaviru...
Don't buy into the western anti-china propaganda.
Here's an official timeline: https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/29-06-2020-covidtimelin...
I clearly remember back when this whole thing started and how pretty much all of the western countries bashed on china endlessly for no actually sane reason. It's what made me start digging into it. This whole mess, we live in now, wouldn't be a thing if china-bashing wasn't the norm in western countries and if they, the respective governments, instead had acted in the interest of their respective people. Which they didn't.
Indian on the other hand, given enough time, could come to challenge the US’s economic domination.
"China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015"
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China
I felt like 250 million people difference in accuracy was worth pointing out, but of course this also covers "600 million in the last decades".
Sixty units of currency are a lot of money when rent costs you ten and bread costs you one.
In Bulgaria, most things are half the price. Food and rent are damn cheap for someone who earns money in euros.
They earn half as many units of currency compared to people where I live. That's an amount of currency with which I could never live where I live now, but there it would last.
Han might be half-something too but it's definitely not something anybody ever spoke in Europe, South-America, or Africa. Europeans will likely never speak Chinese in numbers comparable to modern-day English.
Look at Russian. Even when the USSR was the most fashionable country on Earth, when Western intelligentsia (eh) was massively convinced that Russians were showing us the future, people were not queuing up to learn Russian. Often Russian intellectuals had to speak another language to communicate with the "outside" (when they were allowed to). It was simply too different in its alphabet, too complicated. The same happened with Japanese, despite Japan being a massive economic and cultural power for more than 40 years. Japanese is occasionally fashionable but it will never be a lingua franca.
English might not be the easiest language in the world or the most regular, but it's definitely easier than any Asian language featuring complex glyphs. Its pronounciation rules are relatively easy. Its lineage is markedly European, which keeps it close to French and Spanish and makes it easier to piggyback on their own spread. Even if it were to lose its importance tomorrow, should the US self-nuke or something, chances are that its replacement would still be based on the Latin alphabet. That's what is used in South America, Australia, Europe, and large parts of Africa, regardless of whether they speak English, Spanish, French... So that's what will likely continue to be entrenched, one way or the other. Chinese will grow in importance for sure, particularly in Asia, but it will never be "the" global language.
There's a joke that the most common language in the world is bad English. I have a theory that the diversity of English speakers makes it more forgiving of pronunciation, word order, and tonal mistakes than languages with fewer speakers.
Chinese/Japanese is a completely different thing.
The world didn't know 3 words of French when that became dominant "linga franca", and din't know English when that replaced it, either.
People learn X's language because there's an advantage of knowing it and doing business with X, they don't do business with X because they speak their language.
The future language will probably just be some bastardization of English and Chinese, with some Spanish thrown in...
Back on point, that will take time, and it will follow china becoming dominant rather than leading to it. Also, Europeans learning French is a fairly easy lift compared to Americans learning Chinese.
Threre's already Singlish in Singapore, something like that would have no chance to be a future language. Esperanto has more potential and that's a half dead language.
The "rest of the world" is increasingly Europe, if that. The rest of Asia, Africa, Australia, and perhaps Latin America, wont have as many issues being led by China.
US + Europe, along with other US aligned nations (Japan, Australia, NZ etc) account for >50% of the world GDP[1].
> The rest of Asia ... wont have as many issues being led by China.
Any more details to back this assertion? Just a brief glance at the current geopolitical events reveal the following Asian countries having issues with China: Japan, India, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam. Some other are heavily aligned with the US (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, ...). A lot of these have significant populations and/or economies in Asia.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
Chinese netizens have a sarcastic name for people with the tendency to comment on grandiose topics with some form of unfounded authority, who unfortunately dont have a long professional career as an academic researcher or as a long time practitioner of that area.
That name is called keyboard politicians, or 键盘政治家/键政
First as an immigrant, you are farm from the dynamism and inner working of the society. An EU immigrant is surely more informed than a Chinese one, but I would put both as largely blank paper compared to a native person.
For China... I left China 2008, and today I consider myself no fundamental difference when dealing with Chinese affairs than an American. Any one who had not lived in China for the past 4 decades, simply have no way to understand the unprecedented changes and the fundamentally different social dynamism in China.
In short, these statements might be true. But more likely to be wrong. And in the end, they not too far from from a gibberish produced by GPT-3 trained from randomly sampled web articles.
Good luck with the belief...
Certainly someone who immigrated to the US as an adult cannot know more about the US than someone who grew up here.
> What sort of claim is this?
A fairly straightforward one.
I don't think the guy's comment was that controversial or baffling.
They certainly can, might even get a Ph.d in Cultural anthropology albeit without necessarily grasping small local intricacies, but the same could be said about someone from a different state.
Though US here is a bad example, it's just too culturally heterogeneous compared to China.
Many other cultures have the same, perhaps to a lesser extent, but balanced in that regard (say) by more rights for workers or protection from corporate abuse or a higher quality of life.
world class academic institutions, by far the most of any other country
Depends how you look at it - for example, per capita the UK has more Top 10 universities than the USA.
articles that portray some short of US demise or structural decline are more journalistic clickbait than anything else
It's important to take a balanced view on these things; a US decline is probably simplistic as you indicate - but a rose-tinted view of it is just as unhelpful.
You note in your post that has very strong academic institutions. This is certainly true at the postsecondary and advanced degree level. However, the backbone of American innovation through academia is foreign students who come to study, then develop businesses and stay. This pipeline is under increasing pressure due to anti-immigrant reactionary politics and it is unclear if the foreign student to entrepreneur pipeline will survive both tightening official obstacles (e.g. restrictions on visas) and increasingly mainstreamed public hostility to immigration. It is unclear whether domestic students will be able to take up the slack in the event foreign students are excluded.
Tied into this is increasingly steep American descent into dysfunctional politics, where the dominant political culture is now driven by hatred for the people and regions that actually make the US economy work. It is unclear if economically productive areas of the US will remain economically productive now it has become a stated objective of the dominant political culture to persecute productive areas and deprive them of the resources they need to maintain their human and physical infrastructure.
While a second civil war along defined battle lines is unlikely, the historical record provides no reasons to be sanguine about the prospects of polities that reach this level of internal division. Political collapse into anti-intellectual despotism, potentially spurred on by outside help ('Russia, if you're listening....') is far from impossible.
Finally, the US has a massive problem with inappropriate investment. The US pours a huge amount of public and private money into investments that are either socioeconomically useless, or only redistribute money into the pockets of the very wealthy, instead of enlarging the economy for everyone. Maintaining economic primacy requires creating and deploying innovations quickly enough that competitors cannot catch up. The past few decades of US investment, however, have been much more greatly oriented towards profit taking, oligarchic rent extraction, and graft rather than developing and deploying innovations on a large scale.
It does no good to have invented the Internet when it's barely available in many parts of America and the Internet's primary business-to-consumer purpose is to help various economic parasites suck even more money out of consumer's pockets. The modern US falls down both on mass deployment and on maintaining enough of a market balance to ensure that the benefits of innovation aren't seized by rentiers. These are major vulnerabilities.
The US is in good shape now--in no small part because both China and the EU have their own problems--but the red flags are rising and US standing will fall if nothing is done.
Sounds as if you've found a bubble and mistake it good being the general population.
Therere similar bubbles (even whole cities maybe I could say) with many startup people and innovative culture outside the US too, eg here where I live
> biggest unified market
Good point, thanks for writing
Even the TikTok case is telling. Many european countries do not wish to have bad relations with china, or don't see them as a threat, yet they 'll follow suit in banning it.
I think it's the other way around. There is too much americano-centrism in the internet now, and that s a problem because it's being filled with increasingly more numerous and more rigid american rules (gone is piracy, subscriptions for everything, app stores, gatekeepers everywhere). This is a culture that is not fun, and consumers will take note. TikTok is probably just the beginning of people searching for new toys outside america's walled garden.
I'm also really curious when exactly you think popular (in terms of users) operating systems for computers didn't come from the US. Symbian and BlackBerry OS are the only two coming to mind and neither were general purpose OSes.
As for American-centric Internet...wow. Piracy is still a thing. Subscriptions are a revenue model in no way unique or specific to the US. Web browsers still exist so I don't see how "app stores" did anything to make the Internet American-centric. Those same web browsers can access websites with no gatekeeping unless you live in an authoritarian state that does gatekeeping for you. Describing the Internet as an American walled garden is, to be charitable, absolutely ridiculous and borderline stupid.
The internet's overton window is almost 100% defined by the US. The cultural norms, free speech norms, cryptocurrency norms, comedy norms, nudity norms, all are filtered by US companies, and the US acts as a relay for just about anything that goes on in the internet. Only russia and china have enclaves with internet cultures that deviate from internet orthodoxy.
The norms you're seemingly complaining about are pretty common in Western-style liberal democracies. It's not like US companies are exporting many norms that aren't common to most first world countries. Cryptocurrencies abound so I don't see why you're complaining about filters.
As for nudity norms...when the fuck has the Internet not been rife with nudity. If you can't find nudity on the Internet I'm wondering if your WiFi is working correctly.
Really it seems you're trying to project onto the US/US companies the sort of filtering and censorship Russia and China (to name two countries) engage in with gusto. They have "enclaves" because they actively block foreign sites and services from their citizens.
The Trump administration's efforts against TikTok and WeChat face legal challenges in the US and have a good chance of being struck down as unconstitutional. Despite fantasies by the current administration to the contrary the US is not an authoritarian dictatorship. They can't just unilaterally block a foreign website without some due process.
This is the next level, superseding many/most other means of power.
Are you as concerned about this "insanely detailed" information being collected by US companies? If not, what differentiates your concern when the information goes to foreign companies?
The potential international/cyber warfare aspect seems to have been ignored so far.
"Using our arsenal of forward deployed apps, how would population of country X feel if we took back that piece of land that is ours, and how could we make them see things our way?"
Are you sure you're not talking about google.com here? Way more people across way more ages use that than tiktok and it also does tracking for the purpose of personalization.
Your reasoning would result in banning Google products (from the Play Store controlling most mobile computers across the planet to Gmail and YouTube) from all countries except the USA, and to a lesser extent banning Facebook products, Apple products, etc. Tiktok barely makes it onto the radar compared to those.
Just ban them already. Hobbling these corporations would help Americans too, for whom legislative reform seems like a pipe dream. Anything that harms these corporations abroad will negatively impact their ability to lobby American politicians. That might not be much, but it'll be better than the status quo.
"Hobbling these corporations would help" - same as above, zero empathy for people who are trying to pay your salary. Fair enough - it sucks to work hard and watch your employer get rich off of your work.
That has nothing to do with imposing regulation on everyone. What does being filthy rich have to do with running a small business, working really hard to make ends meet, and then having to pay $10k to comply with GDPR? What a wonderful idea - let's stick it to Facebook by requiring millions of small businesses around the world to comply with something that most small businesses cannot accomplish on their own. And no, 99.99999% of those businesses are not selling anyone's data, but instead they are simply selling and shipping physical goods using... you guessed it - their customers' personally identifiable information [0], which is so horrible and should be strictly regulated so we can sue those businesses and force them into bankruptcy lest they spend time and money working on this "filthy rich people" trap.
[0] https://www.pitneybowes.com/us/shipping-and-mailing/case-stu... "You may collect much of that data digitally, but the minute you print it on a piece of paper and mail it to a customer, you have to make sure you have the customer’s permission to communicate about that information with them, and that you’re adequately protecting their data in the process."
Every time I see details of the survellience industry in the US, I get more and more greatful for GDPR.
One reason could be because that better fits our ethics. We might not have to lower ourselves to their level to have a competitive economy.
I'm not saying we have to be passive but "playing hardball" is usually a way to suggest the most extreme measure possible and I'm not sure this inequality is that bad. I'm much more worried about things like child labor and other issues China still has.
What "ethics"? This is Europe, of the conquest of the Americas, the colonization of the world, WWI and WWII, and so on up to 2020, we're talking about, not Mother Teresa. The same countries who still keep colonies, run things in post-colonial neo-colonies, and fought wars until the 1960s to keep their grabs...
Anyway, pretty off topic, but the argument bad things = everything is tainted doesn't hold for me, especially since people born after the 1960s now includes 50 year-olds and below
Only until you look closely. NZ has very high levels of inequality (children living below the poverty line, and Maori and Polynesian people are incarcerated more, receive less medical care, and have poorer health and shorter lives than the colonisers and recent immigrants.
More qualitatively they are also systematically discriminated against both by government institutions and by employers.
Me, I'm a child of Dutch immigrants in the 1950s, so I just see this among friends, it doesn't affect me personally.
It's sad if NZ is the gold standard.
No, but China has those too in some degree -- and improving in some of those aspects.
But the original argument was that we European somehow have more ethics than others...
People have raised the same issue regarding Trump banning TikTok and the legal basis seems to some national security law from the 80s?
I believe governments should not be able to ban TikTok.
Plus the whole "colonization" thing, which included Europeans invading and running 2/3rds of the world (including putting the pressure on Japan and China).
Meanwhile, europe and china have great trade relationships in just about everything, china invests in europe (especially in european countries that cant find investment elsewhere) and europeans invest in china.
I have increasingly the impression that China is a security threat to the US, but its not seen as such in europe.
For some things, maybe. But I had the good fortune of experiencing Chinese Google before it was banned, which was orders of magnitude better than its Chinese competitor (Baidu).
I mean, it would be ironic if they would give this reasoning, considering the fact that the US currently has its own version of concentration camps which we, as western countries upholding ideals of freedom, should want to change.
Looking for "concentration camp USA" on DDG, just to make sure we're talking about the same thing, it comes up with some site about customs and border patrol stations where refugees are imprisoned in for-profit facilities. Is that what you are referring to?
"Concentration camps" is the exact and precise term for what the USA has.
"Extermination camps" are the ones we probably don't have.
On the flip side. The CCP has been committing a genocide by UN standards and has previously admitted to organ harvesting.
Concentration camp in America = break the law by entering the country illegally and need to be processed before you're deported.
Those things do not sound at all similar.
Seems pretty similar in the US for black people, being 12% of the population yet 33% of the prison population while white people are 63% of the population and only 30% of the prison population. [1] Are all 12 million Uyghurs in camps? Or is it also a disproportionate amount like in the US? Estimates say about 3 million are in camps, so about 25%. So, statistically anyway, the US seems a bit worse so far.
> Concentration camp in America = break the law by entering the country illegally and need to be processed before you're deported.
A concentration camp is a concentration camp regardless of the justification.
[1]. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/05/06/share-of-bl...
The US has a treaty obligation to protect (most) European countries militarily, particularly from Russia but to a lesser extent from China and other countries in Asia. This is a partnership of course, and America's European friends contribute, but the bulk is still borne by the US for obvious reasons (gigantic military budget, global deployment, desire to preserve peace between France, Germany and the rest of the continent).
All of that is to say, for better or worse, the US feels that it can apply pressure. Brussels may not like it, but Washington knows Europe will choose America to Putin's Russia or Communist China most of the time.
I don't know why I find this so funny, but I just imagine a completely terrified American family going "honey, you won't believe this, I opened the about page of the app, and it's from 'somewhere else'!"
Yeah no shit there's 97% of the world that's not American and they can actually make things. Americans are talking about TikTok as if they've just encountered their first batch of exotic spices travelling along the Silk Road.
China having visibility on personal lives of most us Citizens is a bigger concern.
Personally I am more afraid of my own government than I am of china, See my government has the power to put me in a cage, or even kill me if I defy them. They have a the power to unilaterally declare an "emergency" to put me under house arrest, they have the power to close my business at will....
If china attempted to any of these things to me here in the US that would be an act of war, but when my own government does it that is perfectly acceptable and even endorsed by the courts of this land
So why pray tell do believe China is the threat?
I also think given half a chance China will remove US as a super power, or any power of any kind.
I think China is a threat, and they will cease upon our weakness, but I do not believe China can do this on their own
For the US to fall, it will be down to our own hubris and internal division, not an external force or a china run Social media service hosting 30 second banal mindless videos
Sadly it seems the melting pot is gone, and been replaced with the Salad Bowl... and the Tomato's want to declare war on the Onions.....
Funny to imagine sure, however definitely exaggerated ahah.
> Second, you can no longer assume that the important companies and products themselves are American. Both of these are captured in Tiktok.
Is Tiktok an "important" service? I may very well be out of touch, but a social media app used primarily by teenagers to share trendy videos doesn't seem all that important to me. It's important in the sense that it's shaping regulation, but I don't believe that's what the author is referring to when using the word.
I wonder how much Vine influenced TikTok/Musical.ly, and if Vine's timing was bad, or if Twitter just really dropped the ball.
It’s also worth noting that TikTok is based on AI recommendation, like Facebook and YouTube.
It’s in many ways a special case (as they also are) of a particularly pathological kind of Internet that is only really represented by a few companies.
China is a little different there.
The most poignant artifact from the article relates to the fact that TikTok is a 'first' for America, in that they've had to deal with something for the first time, which is a major foreign entity with different world views on their turf. It's should be added that China/CCP is a dystopian surveillance nightmare with a politicized justice system and effective CCP control of all major companies at least as far as messaging, surveillance and censorship is concerned.
But it's worth considering and it's interesting the press has not bee up on in for some time - we're in a 'brave new world' in software and services and it needs to be talked about.
Created thanks to the Galactic Senate's efforts several thousand years BBY, the HoloNet quickly expanded throughout the galaxy, ending up with at least one emitter/receiver device located on virtually every planet of the Galactic Republic. The Holonet was operational by at least 3954 BBY.
During the Clone Wars, the Confederacy created the CIS Shadowfeed, a network of hyperwave transceivers similar to the Republic's HoloNet News channel. During this time, both sides used the HoloNet to broadcast propaganda.
I wonder whether the absence of FTL communication in the universe could be the ultimate physical guarantee of decentralization of political power (which is not possible on Earth) and the protection against universe-wide, total imperial powers.
It is probably a more complicated story than just "latency of the signal".