Kodak deletes Xinjiang photo from Instagram, vows to 'respect Chinese gov't' | Hacker News Reader

Kodak deletes Xinjiang photo from Instagram, vows to 'respect Chinese gov't'

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79 pointspcaversaccio25 comments

> Wack described his images as a visual narrative of Xinjiang’s “abrupt descent into an Orwellian dystopia” over the past five years.

I believe the preferred nomenclature of the Party is "Orwellian dystopia with Chinese characteristics"

Welp, no need to ever buy Kodak products again.

Businesses shouldn't care about business they should only care about my own personal view point on politics.

Yeah, Hollywood is doing the same thing as Kodak. I don't have your will power though. I still watch movies, especially Marvel and Disney. But at least I admit it.

What pisses me off is a friend of mine who boycotted a company who supported China but then he still watches American movies. Like do you not realize the whole industry is sucking up to China? Either make a stand for real or don't make a stand at all, don't be a hypocrite.

*Obviously* you're not doing what my friend is doing. You're *Obviously* not a hypocrite. You must not watch any movies or TV shows at all.

I'm fairly critical of the efficacy of boycotts but your anger at your friend seems motivated by a desire to rationalize your own complacency.

We live in a society that is built on a fundamentally unjust framework. It's practically impossible to avoid being tied to exploitative supply chains short of living off the grid and hand making all your own clothes and farming your own produce - and even then you will need to effectively pay tribute to your local municipality or risk falling victim to state violence.

However, incomplete abstinence is better than no abstinence. Every product you refuse to buy is another dollar that these greedy amoral profiteers are deprived from. I think that counts for something, even if it is not a complete solution.

As for media specifically, piracy is still a thing. Just saying ;)

My friend doesn't exist. He's there to illustrate a point. I thought it was obvious; guess not. It wasn't derogatory sarcasm, but sort of like a polite counter example about how irrational the action he is proposing is in the larger context of society.

>However, incomplete abstinence is better than no abstinence. Every product you refuse to buy is another dollar that these greedy amoral profiteers are deprived from. I think that counts for something, even if it is not a complete solution.

What if you work at Kodak and realize that Kodak is in a critical moment in the camera universe. Film is dead, Kodak needs to radically transform itself in order to survive. My job which is also closely tied to my survival depends critically on the business not being Boycotted by anybody, that means Americans and Chinese people.

So basically by doing this boycott, our friend has possibly condemned all the employees to lose their jobs something that's tied closely to their livelihood. Literally harming people on American soil just so he and others can "barely" harm China by keeping a photo online. Is that not evil? Likely not. Just unawareness of nuance of the complexity of the geopolitical world. Nothing is ever that simple.

Notice how I emphasized the plight of an individual rather than the company or even the country? Things need to be brought down to the job level for individuals to understand that the consequences of harming of a company isn't so simple.

In short the consequences of "incomplete" abstinence in a complex world is complex in itself. It's not "better than no abstinence."

>We live in a society that is built on a fundamentally unjust framework. It's practically impossible to avoid being tied to exploitative supply chains short of living off the grid and hand making all your own clothes and farming your own produce - and even then you will need to effectively pay tribute to your local municipality or risk falling victim to state violence.

Not only is the framework unjust, but the complexity of the assigning justice is fraught with further complexity.

Yeah China is lying about Xinjiang. Yeah a lot of what China is doing here is unjust, atrocious and unprecedented. However think about why China did this? A terrorist attack on Chinese soil that is basically the equivalent of 9/11 happened to Chinese people happened and Xinjiang is the response.

Their actions are done in order to permanently stamp out terrorism with minimal resources, minimal violence while maximizing central control and eliminating as many freedoms as possible. I would say that China has succeeded in achieving this goal.

I would also say the violence and slaughter that occurred after 9/11 due to actual ground war started by the US is much worse than China. Including both sides the number of people who died violently should total in the millions. Additionally I would say that whether these actions were successful is debatable. From certain perspectives the situation has only gotten worse.

Starting wars and slaughtering terrorists counterintuitively doesn't eliminate terrorism. Forcing people into education camps and imposing absolute authority and birth control seems to work but has it's obvious atrocious downsides.

So which is better in your opinion? Mass slaughter or mass re-education and birth control? Hard choices, truly I would try to forge a third option but so far not even the United States is capable of doing that.

>As for media specifically, piracy is still a thing. Just saying ;)

;) so turning to theft is a justified response to an industry that wants to stay apolitical for the sake of business? Maybe think about the complexity of the consequences here. You are harming an entire supply chain that contains directors, VFX artists, VFX programmers, writers, comedians, etc, etc...

Personally, I pirate everything from music to software to movies. Literally everything. But of course because all of Hollywood basically stays apolitical about this China issue, it effectively justifies all my actions. Kodak and practically every single company on the face of the earth is doing the same thing. The more of the world I pirate the more justice I'm doing for the world. Of course things are just THAT simple.

No in all seriousness I do pirate on occasion. But I don't justify it. I'm not a saint. I do shitty things sometimes because I'm cheap. That's the way it is.

It's sad that people would lose their jobs but I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. This whole argument is toxic - we can't punish a company for doing unethical things because of all the people who rely on them? I reject this argument because providing jobs is not a real defense of anything and it also implies that the corporation's security means job security when many companies will do mass layoffs irrespective of how well they do (Activision being a rather infamous example) to help make revenue figures look better leading up to a review. Kodak are also most likely going to go under regardless unless if they make a real innovative change - and sucking up the CCP is not going to be it considering that market is saturated at this point.

The fact that evil empire number 2's actions could arguably less terrible than evil empire number 1 is not a defense. How about both the US and China are responsible for reprehensible things which deserve condemnation? It's gross enough to see US companies bootlicking their own government but it's even more nuasuating seeing them do so to another. It's also objectively even more reprehensible because it is not something that is even necessary for survival compared to not antagonising your own home state.

I also completely reject the stance that piracy is theft. Nobody is losing out on anything unless if you believe in the modern delusion that is IP. The fact that occasionally I'm pirating from US and CCP shills is a bonus, not the justification for it. I do not need any justification to pirate. I'm fine with paying for things as well but I'm not under some delusion that the money I'm sending is going to somehow be distributed fairly among the people who actually were responsible for making the production possible. I will and have spent hundreds or thousands when I have the option to send directly to creators, I couldn't give two shits if some parasitic executive would have been able to afford an extra diamond encrusted bidet if only for that last couple of dollars I could have provided him for the privilege of watching a show he didn't make. I only make exceptions for shows that are known to be struggling financially. That's the one case where individual purchases actually have a real impact on the survival of a show or the jobs of the people who do the real work.

> we can't punish a company for doing unethical things because of all the people who rely on them?

We live in a globalized world where not only every corporation but every individual has economic ties with China. That means if you want to target China, you need to boycott practically every company in the united states thereby grinding the entire economy to a halt.

This has obvious impractical standpoints.

>The fact that evil empire number 2's actions could arguably less terrible than evil empire number 1 is not a defense.

Defense for what? Nothing is being defended here. The only thing that I am stating is that not only is China an "evil" empire. But so is the US so is practically every country. In fact the better way to put it is, practically every country and every person isn't a saint. Most countries are guilty of something.

However due to the rivalry between the West and China, the media over emphasizes China's retaliatory actions towards terrorism. Yes it's wrong. But I can guarantee you, the violent slaughter conducted by the US on the middle east is on a scale far greater than anything China has done; And you didn't boycott any company for this. All companies basically stayed neutral in terms of their political commitment to the war. This is normal, but did you boycott The entire US? No. Your stated behavior and Americas behavior is anything but consistent.

Why so much hate for China? It's obvious. Economic Rivalry. China is well on it's way to possibly being technologically and economically superior to the US. That is the driver behind most of the media bias and your own as well. Anyone taking the crown away from the US has to have a bad side.

>I also completely reject the stance that piracy is theft.

Good. Nothing wrong with this opinion. However piracy does harm software developers, this is irrelevant to the existence of IP. https://www.macgasm.net/news/iphone-news/ios-game-battle-dun...

The money from software doesn't just go to pay a CEO's salary. It pays everyones salary and indeed the above link is an example of a company that went bankrupt because people didn't pay to play the game. The software developers lost their jobs. Consequences occur regardless of your outlook on piracy.

>This whole argument is toxic - we can't punish a company for doing unethical things because of all the people who rely on them?

No this is only toxic to people who see the world in terms of black and white. I'm not saying don't punish a company. I am saying the ethical complexity of the situation is too sophisticated to be solved by just "punishment" alone. Yet we have people like you trying to bend the entire world into a simple game of hammering a nail into a wall. The world isn't a nail, it's a complex diorama made up of millions of pieces and you can't just treat it like a dumb nail.

The point of my post is not to say who's right or who's wrong or whether you should punish a company. The point of my post is to illustrate the complexity of the world so that people stop posting stupid ass statements like "Oh I'm gonna boycott Kodak" Like dude get out of the mob mentality, things are NEVER that simple.

Not only is the morality of "boycotting" Kodak ambiguous and irrational, but the practical consequence of boycotting Kodak only damages our own country.

Sorry but I'm not American so this whole whataboutism game doesn't really work on me. I actually think America are in fact the worse of the two when it comes to international activities and by a wide margin. I also do in fact boycott American companies based on their profiteering and support for both the Iraq War and the illegal Israeli settlements. I pretty much avoid all products from the UAE and Saudi Arabia as well for similar reasons. This is a fake dichotomy. I can condemn both China and America because I don't see them as that fundamentally different.

Both are capitalistic societies - one with neoliberal leanings and the other with a totalitarian state controlled capitalism. Both are intensely hierarchical and class based societies and neither are democratic to a meaningful capacity.

Organisations that derive their stability from a base of exploitation do not deserve to exist and I frankly care more about the plight of the workers in the global south than people being laid off in America or China (which is already beginning to outsource work to African states the same way the US had started to outsource work to China). That's not to say that their plight does not matter but keep in mind that much of the material wealth and stability that the US (and to a lesser extent, China) and even it's working class citizens enjoy was built off the back of the South.

I am in agreement that boycotts on their own are largely symbolic gestures but broader economic sanctions do have a history of working, South Africa being the most recent example.

You mean Kodak actually still makes something that you can buy?

So, can we see the photo? Now I want to see it.

The spineless groveling at the feet of the CCP candidly reveals how a significant portion of our corporate executives are gutless wimps.

Okay, nice censorship, now someone please post the deleted photo to f* em', thanks.

Kodak matters? I figured they'd gone the way of RCA and Westinghouse

Last I heard of them was when they offered to help manufacture vaccines last year, but I haven’t really seen them around in the consumer space for ages. Perhaps they do industrial manufacturing?

They filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012. Good article on the missteps they made during the start of the digital photography age is here:

https://hbr.org/2016/07/kodaks-downfall-wasnt-about-technolo...

Patents I guess

Surprised Kodak hasn’t gone out of business yet. Spineless.

Didn't exactly expect a dead company to have a spine.

Absolutely sickening groveling. American companies need to uphold American values. Global capitalism lets them cater to the worst actors.

This is hardly the fault of global capitalism, given that China is a communist country, that western culture is also quite clear that corporations may not fight back against abuses of government power. We expect companies to kneel before our own governments, we cannot therefore be upset when they kneel for all governments.

Corporations kneel to short term profit. Thus they will kneel to anything if it means increasing short term profit.

Any company that gets political, does so as a means of increasing or defending short term profits.

It's how capitalism works. Corporations are just brainless cogs with the one task of increasing short term profits.

Kodak is sort of in a tough situation here.

So long as our government refuses to materially oppose the CCP regime in any way, this will continue to be the correct move for corporations. Generate some bad press in the West, maybe be targeted with a half hearted slacktivist hashtag "boycott" that will be forgotten in a week, and in return for kissing the ring maintain access to a market of over a billion other consumers. It's a no-brainer.

I think you're getting downvoted because people don't want what you're saying to be true, not because anyone thinks it's actually false. Unfortunately, the U.S. has lost sight of the fact that you get what you incentivize. I am upset at Kodak for this, but it was a rational decision given the incentive structure.

The US government doesn't incentivize companies in this way.

Mostly the US government creates incentives related to:

  - Economic policy
  - Environmental policy 
  - Public Health

Economic sanctions aren't done to incentivize companies. They are done to impose political will and they are usually done on countries that have little business influence.

Generally, International Politics are never are a part of "incentives." For international politics you and I are the incentive.

If you refuse to buy a product because the company doesn't align with your viewpoint of international politics, then you have created an incentive.

The US government refuses to materially oppose the CCP regime in any way BECAUSE of corporations. Corporations have more influence on daily life and government policy than anything else out there. Part of the "correct move" by corporations is to influence this policy to allow corporations to profit off of China.

Also logistically given globalization if China was actually boycotted it would do a lot of collateral damage in addition to intended damages.

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