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(Does this count as CW? Happy to post it somewhere else if that would be more appropriate.)
I really liked the idea of banning advertising from this blog post (though the post itself is somewhat poorly written and light on the details). HN has a lively discussion of it. I've seen some mentions of this idea here and there but never a really good analysis on it. And I want to change that!
The first step is of course to tighten up the definitions. The most important is to define advertising. I would define it as:
(Maybe the resident lawyers here could have a crack at cleaning this up?)
The underlying theory of harm is that party C is getting inaccurate information designed (often very well designed) to manipulate them into a decision not in their interests. Note that crowding out good information is also very much part of the harm. If C is getting good information from sources not paid for it, it is reasonable that these unpaid sources won't put as much effort into disseminating information as sources paid to spread information (which presumably won't be as truthful due to the conflicting interests from party A).
To clean up potential fuzzy boundaries (I'm sure I've missed a bunch):
So, what is illegal?
Why do I want this?
Possible objections?
Any thoughts?
I like some things about this idea of making advertising illegal. It's good to notice that there's something wrong here. That the amount of effort we put into saturating the mind of the median consumer with the names of brands just seems excessive. Amazon, Walmart, State Farm, Verizon, L’Oréal, DraftKings, etc - if it's been more than 10 minutes since you've seen one of those words, that's an inefficiency and the invisible hand's working to correct it. Why should so many competent people spend their 9/5 in marketing ensuring normal people purchase more makeup or clothing or food or parlays that doesn't particularly improve their lives? I get the concept of advertising as presenting consumers with information they might not have so they can make better purchase, but we've clearly gone beyond that.
On the other hand, the problem here isn't really advertising. It's not like DraftKings or running up credit card debt by shopping would disappear if we banned ads. It'd happen less, but only somewhat less. The problems people identify with advertising, I would argue, are really problems with the things being advertised, and in general with modern culture or whatever. Advertising by itself serves a useful purpose, connecting people selling things to people buying them. If something's broken in there, advertising will be broken too, but banning advertising doesn't really get to the heart of the problem.
Also, I mostly agree with FiveHour's post.
I think I uncomplicatedly support a law of the form "you must allow ad-blockers, not circumvent them, and provide the option to disable ads in native apps where ad-blockers don't work" though, because though uBlock gets everything in a browser they still do waste my time sometimes.
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It would just be impossible especially with more relationships online.
Every conversation on the motte would need to be monitored and bank accounts checked to make sure now one is being paid for promoting a product. It’s not at all weird for online communities to end up having discussions on best car to buy or lawnmower. There would be no way to differentiate between guy being paid and guy just talking about what he likes.
How do porn ads work? Usually I just X out and with thousands of times masturbating I can’t think of how any ad resulted in money changing hands.
Honestly don’t even know how meta ads works. The only thing I’ve ever bought from a meta ad was one of those ads you get when you already bought the thing. Sometimes I buy more. I have no idea if that’s freeloading some ad revenue on what I was going to buy or influenced me.
But if we did manage to get rid of 95% of ads my gut says I would like the world better and things would be cheaper. I currently have zero stock positions in businesses making money off selling ads so now would be a great time for Trump to announce no more ads.
And of course obviously stupid debate for first amendment reasons. I think a lot of current ad limitations are unconstitutional.
The cops don't go around drug testing your food every single time you go to a restaurant. But what if there was fentanyl in your cocktail?!
Enforcement is always a sliding scale and thankfully has good economies of scale. If someone is doing something blatantly illegal, only a few people need to spot one instance of it for the whole thing to come to light (and ex post punishments work quite well). And yes, minor violations will slip by. As long as the major violations get caught, we've still made a lot of progress.
One thing that helps us here is that people at large don't like ads. We're not trying to prevent a transaction that all parties consider beneficial and therefore all parties have an incentive to hide. At least one party here (the final customer marketed to) is getting harmed (and believes that they're getting harmed). And I suspect a lot of corporations don't like paying through the nose for marketing either but just can't do anything about it. I suspect they'd love a legally enforced marketing truce so they could get back to competing on the merits of their products. After all, why does the average nerd get into making something? Because they love the prospect of marketing it? Or actually making it?
You don't. But I'm sure some consumer of porn would. Or just websites who don't want their competition to get an illicit leg up in the market? We only need one (or a few) of them to bring in the authorities.
Thanks. Thought gotta admit I got a small laugh out of the idea of Trump (or really anybody in federal government) pulling off something this contentious and complicated.
The supreme court has been willing to be fairly nuanced for example in the case of porn and political donations. Campaign finance laws are still a thing even though the supreme court has ruled that political donations are covered by the first amendment.
They also don't like it when the entire internet implodes and the parts that are left suddenly all cost money. It's one thing to fantasize about what you'd do if you were absolute dictator, but if you're involving public opinion in this game then it ends with you being tarred and feathered.
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I don't think there's any good way to make this work, but I do sympathize with the idea. Especially on the internet, so many ads just seem malicious. They're not there because anyone would actually see them and think "ooh, good product, I want to buy that!" They're there to trick you into accidentally clicking on them by completely covering the scream, or to screach at you with obnoxious sounds until you get so fed up that you buy a premium subscription to make them go away. If there was a way to buy a "premium internet pass" that would get rid of all internet ads I'd buy it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately I have to do that individiually for every single website, which is its own sort of pain. My personal pet peave is trying to read a news article from some small local news site, which is technically open and not paywalled, it's just crammed full of so many ads that it's basically impossible to read for anyone not subscribed to "the Daily Times of Gary, Indiana" or whatever. I wouldn't mind subscribing to one or two newspapers, maybe even more if I was a professional journalist or something, but it seems unreasonable to expect me to subscribe to every single newspaper on Earth just so I can read one random article.
There... is a place that has managed to remove advertising completely: North Korea. It's kind of bleak and dystopian but... oddly calming? (Other than the state propaganda posters of course) Well, I've never been there so I can't say what it's like, but it's interesting that such a place can even exists, and gives us a glimpse of a different sort of life with a very different aesthetic.
The uBlock Origin browser extension gets you about 95% of the way there.
Yeah... there's that. (world-weary sigh)
I've used ad-blockers for as long as they've been commonly available- maybe 15 years now? I moved around from one to another, in a never-ending "Red Queen's Race" between advertisers and ad-blockers. uBlock Origin really seemed like "the one" and I happily enjoyed it for about 5 years. But then they abruptly removed it from Chrome. And at this point I'm so tied into Chrome (gmail, Android, other extensions) that it would be a huge pain to switch. Sure, I could switch, but I feel like it's only a matter of time before they clamp down again on uBlock Origin in some other way. Because, let's face it, it's basically piracy- it's a way to hack websites to get their content without paying for it by seeing ads. It feels like when people told me "dont' worry that Napster is getting banned, you can just switch to Kazaa...Limewire... Bittorrent... PirateBay... etc...". When I just give in and pay their premium fee, our interests are aligned and the ads go away perfectly.
(also I disagree that it's 95%. My experience was more like 50%, varying wildly depending on the website.)
I just switched to uBlock Origin Lite and it seems to work just as well.
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What? I've literally never seen an ad slip through a blocker.
Then use Brave. It's Chrome, but based (has it's own integrated blocker, supports uBlock, and has a host of other QOL features like vertical tabs).
What's up with all this technological learned helplessness? People used to find and flock to alternatives at light speed.
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Your current best option is a pi-hole, which cuts off ads at the DNS level. It’s not something advertisers can easily distinguish from a genuine failed connection.
interesting, thanks!
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I'm not sure I accept your premise that advertising is a net negative. There are certainly many things I have gladly purchased that I found out about through advertising. My intuitive sense is that ads have had a net positive or at least net neutral impact on my life, not a negative one.
But I will accept the premise that we want to ban ads for the sake of the discussion.
As one of the "resident lawyers" I don't think there's a way to meaningfully define advertising in a way that only captures what you want to capture.
First off, your definition doesn't stop party A from directly advertising to party C. This is the first major loophole, and it's incredibly easy to get around. Big companies just increase the size of their marketing departments and do all ads in house. Little companies can't afford to do this and just get crushed. Bad outcome.
Second, there's the issue of "pays." In the example you give, you seem to interpret this narrowly to mean "give money" but there are many ways to compensate or incentivize people to do things without directly paying them. So this is another relatively easy loophole to exploit.
Third, there's "unsolicited information" which is extremely nebulous and includes many things we don't generally think of as advertising:
Suppose I turn on the TV hoping to watch the local news. The news broadcast is interrupted by a weather report. I didn't want to see the weather report because I get the weather from an app on my phone. Isn't the weather report an example of party A (the station) paying party B (the weatherman) to give unsolicited information (the forecast) to party C (me)?
Suppose I pull up behind a car with bumper stickers on it (e.g. "Baby on Board" or the Christian fish). Isn't this an example of party A (the driver) paying party B (the maker of the bumper sticker) to give unsolicited information (the info on the bumper sticker) to party C (me)?
Suppose I buy clothing with the brand's logo prominently displayed on it. Isn't this an example of party A (me) paying party B (the clothing company) to give unsolicited information (the clothing brand I am wearing) to party C (others around me)?
Suppose I hire an artist to make me a large sign supporting my favorite politician and I place it in my front yard. Isn't this an example of party A (me) paying party B (the artist) to give unsolicited information (my political views) to party C (others around me)?
I already answered most of your objections in my original post. Specifically, I wrote:
So, direct advertisements (e.g. "marketing" copy posted on the company's own website for its own products) isn't covered by my definition at all and would continue to be legal (intentionally so).
And your third objection:
Please think about these examples in light of the theory of harm that I proposed:
None of them (except the branded clothing example possibly) run afoul of it.
Branded clothing is a genuine gray area. If there was similar but non-branded clothing available from the same company that sold for more, I'd definitely consider the branded clothing paid for by the discount. But there often won't be and at least for the initial implementation, I think such cases would slip by. But branded products are easily one of the least egregious forms of marketing around.
Nonstandard forms of payment: is already something the legal profession (and industry at large) has a lot of experience dealing with for e.g. insider trading, bribes, trusted actors getting free expensive meals from sales people, etc... Banks for example have very extensive policies around limits to entertaining clients to "avoid the appearance of impropriety."
And finally:
I'm trying to be charitable here but this is just so far from my experiences that I have a hard time believing it. How often in a typical month do you buy something off of an advertisement? Something that you weren't already thinking of getting (or at least a generally similar product)?
This is a loophole you can drive a truck through. "Party B isn't giving unsolicited information to Party C. Party B is giving it to the broadcast station, who is then broadcasting it to Party C."
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All you've done here is childishly blow the American tech industry's brains out because you think commercials are a drag. China will happily pick up the slack when no one wants to pay thirty bucks a month for Instagram or whatever, leaving you with nothing.
I'm curious if, in this insane scenario, it would become possible for global brands to advertise on streams based in foreign countries, for the purpose of targeting American consumers of those same goods located in America. The NFL becomes PPV in the USA, but it streams free live on TikTok, and Coca Cola and Apple (through their Chinese subsidiaries, of course!) run advertisements during the game.
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Many? I can only think of one thing in my entire adult life, which was a type of pants for being a bum on the couch that I hadn't tried before. And if I had never learned about them I would be like .001% less comfortable the 10 days a year I wear them instead of normal sweat pants.
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There is no way this is feasible to implement in a well-defined way. There are too many incredibly powerful incentives to find loopholes that the only way you'll close them down is by being so strict and draconian that you prohibit regular behavior. You won't be able to tighten the definitions without strangling the life out of them. Just taking what you've defined here, off the top of my head:
-What if party A advertises their own product on their own website without involving "Party B"? If that's not allowed you'll strangle all sorts of regular behavior. But if they are then now you have an incentive for companies to share ownership of streaming websites and create monopolies under one umbrella. Amazon owns Twitch, can they advertise Amazon products on Twitch? Because then everyone selling anything is going to want to use Amazon to list their products so that it can be advertised there. If you try to prohibit that by saying Twitch streamers count as "Party B" because they aren't official Amazon employees then Amazon will hire them as official employees. If you try to prohibit that by saying "Twitch and Amazon marketplace are different websites" then Amazon will merge them and annoyingly integrate them together enough to loophole whatever your law is. If you say "Amazon can't have their employees advertise for them" then nobody can do anything unless they're privately owned and the CEO designs their own website without hiring any employees, which is ridiculous.
The spirit of the law is clear, but you can't enforce the spirit of the law. You can only enforce the letter, and anything where a company is allowed to do their own advertising on their own platforms just encourages consolidation and rewards megacorps at the expense of all the small people. I suspect that if you try to add epicycles to close these loopholes then the megacorps will pay thousands of dollars to clever people who will work harder than the 5 minutes I spent here and find cleverer loopholes. Lobbying, free gifts and perks, wink wink nudge nudge, favors traded between supposed rivals, etc. We can't even keep money out of politics, we're not going to keep money out of advertising. Any attempts to do so are inevitably going to be 10% intended benefit and 90% collateral damage.
Isn't jury of one's peers in essence trying to enforce spirit of the law instead of enforcing the letter?
Juries are capital S Stupid in the 21st century. Place like Singapore abolished them long ago without any problems.
Is it really reasonable for 12 randos with an average IQ of 100 to be deciding on whether a certain pharmaceutical company invention made by a team of Chemistry PhDs is infringing on this patent developed by that other team of Chemistry PhDs? There is a correct answer here, and it is No.
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Sort of. But if you're constantly tangling people up in the courts over technicalities the way this would you've already failed. If people are breaking the letter of the law and only getting by by the good graces of juries then that's just further incentives for corporations to virtue signal and get entangled in the culture war to make people side with them.
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Courts instruct juries on the meaning of the law, then the jury is supposed to apply that meaning to the facts. So, at least in theory, the jury is not supposed to be determining the meaning of the law.
More importantly, jury trials are extremely expensive, and companies want to know what's legal and what's illegal without having to spend ungodly amounts of time and money litigating in Court. Clearly written laws save a lot of money and are easier and cheaper to enforce.
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I don't think this is true. You can embed pragmatic judgements into laws or have them happen in regulatory agencies. We already have laws about undisclosed advertisements in various contexts, which requires defining advertisements. There would absolutely be attempts to work around the laws, but said workarounds would probably be less annoying and less frequent than ads currently are, so that'd still be an improvement. Especially if you don't try to ban all advertising, which is really pretty absurd, but just ban excessive advertising for some sort of specific sense of excessive.
That's specifically what I'm arguing against here. I'm not saying the problem of advertising is completely hopeless and impossible to regulate, my point is that a complete ban is doomed to failure because it will either be too lax on things you intend to block OR too strict on things you don't.
Incentives are like the water pressure in a set of pipes, or a river. If you block off some of the outlets and leave others unblocked then the water will flow down the direction that you left unblocked. If you block of every outlet the pressure will build until it finds an outlet and burst/overflow in some unforseen place. When a lot of people really really really want something, oftentimes even if you don't want them to have that it's often useful and/or necessary to let them have some version of it if only to release the pressure in a more manageable way. You have to do that by being clever, not by being blunt and heavyhanded.
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This seems unnecessarily defeatist. The law is ultimately semi-formalised human judgements, and humans are perfectly capable of making judgements without rigid rubrics. You just need a 'safe zone' of examples that are fine, a 'lawless zone' of examples that are not fine, and a 'here be dragons' zone in between. The reason that megacorps frolic so happily is that lawyers are too lawyer-brained to actually apply the spirit of the law when working out loopholes in the letter of it is so much more fun and rewarding, and because governments don't actually want to apply it. When they do want to apply it, suddenly the corps fall in line.
Except a major strain of liberalism (I keep going back to what Michael Munger said in an interview as an example, where he compared all power and authority to the One Ring) holds that, no, human judgement can't be trusted, not in matters of governance, and that the whole liberal project — Weber's "rationalization" and "bureaucratization" — is about replacing all human judgement, in matters of authority, with procedure. With algorithms, based in "rigid rubrics," with no exceptional cases, such that any human beings remaining in government are quality-agnostic carbon hardware upon which that software runs, like the man in Searle's Chinese room. "I don't make the rules, I just follow them" and all that. A set of algorithms so complete, so perfect in aligning incentives, that, per Kant, they can produce optimal outcomes even from a "society of rational devils." Systems so perfect that no one will need to be good, as T.S. Eliot put it.
(And isn't fully formalized human (moral) judgements the aim of "alignment"?)
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But if you make any mistake in your 'safe zone' that's still effectively a loophole. How do you let Coca Cola link you to their shop with a bunch of products and merchandise on their own website (which I expect you intend since it's "opt in") but not allow Amazon to link you to their shop and products during a Twitch stream on their own website? (which I expect you don't intend, because even though you've opted into a Twitch stream you didn't intend to opt into the Amazon store)
Keeping in mind that you can't just take the state of the world as it exists right now this very instant, you have to draw the categories in a way that fundamentally cannot be worked around? If the law says "you can only advertise your own products on your own website" then the Lawyers don't need to do anything, they've already won because you forgot the websites are owned by the same company (and they could just as easily have made them the same website). There's no infraction of the law for the government to enforce because they're not breaking the law, it's just badly written.
How do you make it stronger without accidentally crushing normal people just trying to honestly sell things?
That's how. Like, Amazon and Twitch are separate brands and people use them for separate things, and everybody with eyes can see that. It's not a grand political dilemma like the Minneapolis car incident.
The 'safe zone' is 'you make cola and you advertise your own cola'. The bad zone is 'you run an advertising agency'. 'you make cola but you advertise life insurance from your life insurance subsidiary' is well within 'here be dragons' and you're risking serious issues. It's like when you threaten massive fines for disinformation and everyone bans anything that could even possibly look like something government might consider disinfo. You don't actually have to tolerate autistic winkling out of loopholes.
Could you give some examples? My model of the world is broadly 'if people want what you are trying to sell, they will go looking for it'. If people buy something and they like it, they tell their friends or they write reviews (I am okay with free samples to review sites etc.). But the idea that 'no, you don't know you want this yet' is IMO a lie that advertisers and salesmen tell themselves and deserves very short thrift.
https://www.twitch.amazon.com
Whose brand does such a website fall under? Does it change if we switch the word order?
The convention is that it's www.subnet.host.com. So you might have
maps.google.comorauth.google.comorsearch.alphabet.com. If Amazon is acting as a large supercorp providing many services, and Twitch is a provider of streaming, then people ontwitch.amazon.comoramazon.twitch.comare on that site for streaming. If they were there to be sold things they would be onshopping.amazon.comor the reverse.(In today's internet you pay for the xxx.com domain name, but you can subdivide that domain into as many yyy.xxx.com subnets as you want. Doing it the other way round would be incredibly expensive.)
If Twitch and Amazon are both big messy things full of subsidiaries and you are advertising everything everywhere then you are in the realm of 'play stupid games, win stupid prizes' and you should fix your org chart.
The host/domain ordering has always struck me as backwards from pretty much everything else, like file system paths. In fact, URLs are frequently
https://specific.to.general/general/to/specific?veryspecific. I wish I knew why they thought that made sense.I imagine because the practice of selling domains as domain.com came in long before people used subdomains.
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So basically, blame DNS.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20120617152945/http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200903/msg00098.html
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If I slap a popup on my streaming site that directs you to buy shit, guess what, now it's a site for selling shit to you. Seriously what kind of garbage is this? You're going to penalize people over what a court thinks people think the purpose of their website is supposed to be? Give up, you guys just keep digging deeper.
Or you could respect your customers and provide them services they like in exchange for money? Once upon a time, Americans were into that.
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This is BAD. This is a bad outcome! This is exactly what I'm afraid of. Nobody was allowed to question the Covid vaccine or masking or any sort of government approved narrative on social media because it might possibly be construed as disinformation. The chilling effect caused by ambiguous rules that might or might not be arbitrarily enforced on a whim is bad. The ability for the government to selectively target anyone they dislike for rules that normal people occasionally violate because they're not quite sure where the boundary gives the government an extra cudgel to manipulate people with.
And again, once the boundaries become a little better known this is solved by a little Goodharting to integrate things to be within the boundaries. Ie, Facebook Marketplace is a logical offshoot of Facebook. Stopping them from having, or forcing it to be separate from Facebook would be bad because the networking ability on it is useful for customers. But allowing them to have it would probably also allow them to start selling their own stuff on it. Maybe Amazon makes "Amazon Marketplace", or "Twitchmazon" where Twitch streamers have their own merchandise branded to them just enough that it counts as "their own product" and skirts within your guidelines. Is Pokimane not allowed to have her own cookie company that sells Pokimane cookies? What if Pokimane just happens to be hanging out with some friends (which happen to be filmed because they're all Twitch Streamers) and mentions her own Cookie company? If she is allowed, then you're once again allowing large people to advertise while blocking the little people who don't have a whole team to create advertising and entire companies internally. If that's not allowed then you're restricting the ability for people with cookie companies to even talk about their own product out loud.
95% of the time this is true, but 5% it's not, and that 5% might be disproportionately impactful. Take Uber. Lots of people like Uber. As soon as people found out about Uber they were usually like "that sounds like a good idea". People didn't know they wanted it, because it didn't exist and nothing like it existed, but they did know that they wanted something like that because nobody was happy with Taxi prices or availability.
Uber could not have worked without advertising. The networking effects between drivers and customers do not scale linearly. If you have 1% as many drivers and 1% as many users it's awful because users spend forever waiting to get picked up and drivers spend forever not working and not being paid. It needed to be quickly noticed and adopted or it would have died instantly. A world without advertising is a world where Uber (and all similar rideshare and foodshare apps) that scale nonlinearly would have never been brought to market because they obviously wouldn't have worked. Word of mouth only works on things that people already know about, and if you literally can't advertise anywhere then you can't kickstart that process in the first place.
Or take Ozempic/GLP-1. People didn't know they wanted Ozempic, but people have wanted a weight loss pill that actually works for decades. Advertisements actually did help people here because it's a thing they wanted and looked for and tried and gave up because it didn't exist, and then one day it did exist. The knowledge that the thing they've always wanted but didn't exist suddenly now does exist (in a form they can legally and practically access) is useful knowledge.
Again, I think you're right 95% of the time. And I'm generally in favor of fixing advertising... somehow. But the exceptions exist, and I think a blanket ban is doomed to failure in a way that disproportionately harms smaller and newer people, pushing us even further into the hands of monopolistic megacorps that already exist and everyone already knows about. We need more small businesses and competitors, not fewer.
No, you're making a static world assumption. In a world without marketing, consumer directed information venues would pop up. You would have e.g. magazines (/blogs/whatever) that users paid for that would ferret out interesting new products that their viewers might be interested in. And they would have drastically better incentives.
For example, take Ozempic. I found out about it thanks to ACX. Was he paid by Ozempic companies to put up that post? I don't think so. In a world without ads, there would be medical journals that specifically focused on upcoming treatments with honest evaluations because that's what their revenue source would demand! In fact, even with ads, we already have medical journals that they already have to put in a bunch of effort to make sure they aren't biased by their funding sources.
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This is a rather extreme and unlikely example because combining services like this dramatically degrades the quality of the service. If the only way for me to get coke is to wade through a pile of unrelated garbage because the company's interface makes it impossible for me to express my intent (because that would trigger the anti-marketing laws), I'm going somewhere else.
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This is a terrible, infantile idea.
This is so blatantly untrue that it's hard to take the rest of the essay seriously. Advertising appears with the newspaper. The first paid newspaper advertisement in American history was in 1704 in Boston, it is literally older than the United States of America. Zero research was done going into this, just a whiny infant complaining about advertising that could be easily avoided.
There's not going to BE any general experience of the web you stupid slut.
The entire general experience of the web is built around advertising. An entirely paid model of web usage is not something we've ever really seen. Note that I don't include a model that is built primarily around free-riding on government/university research dollars, like the early internet. Nor a model that is built around the millennial lifestyle subsidy like current Substack or ChatGPT, where the free infrastructure is funded by VC money with the expectation of later exploitation. All that's left after you remove those are hobbies or charity, like TheMotte or Wikipedia, which probably can't exist without the infrastructure built by the advertising-funded products anyway.
Moreover, on the web or not, you are asking for every ad you are ever shown, other than billboards I guess. Libraries exist! Physical media can be borrowed from them, and you would have more media than you would ever be able to consume in fifteen lifetimes, and never see a single ad beyond a flier for the knitting circle. Yet nobody who complains about advertising does that. If ads on youtube offended people, they could pay for youtube premium, but they mostly don't. If ads on twitter offended people, they could pay for whatever it is Elon is calling it now. They mostly don't. Why not? The ad-supported Kindle is $20 cheaper than the ad free one, the ad-supported model outsells the ad-free version. And, of course, physical media exists, you could purchase movies on DVD and books at bookstores and you would have more than enough content for the rest of your life, but people don't do that. Because people are more than willing to accept the cost of advertising to get free-to-them, or even just reduced price, content. There is no circumstance in which you are forced to watch ads, in every case you are choosing to consume content that would not be available without advertising to support it, or you are choosing to consume it through a medium that is supported by ads. The revealed preference is that people don't care about ads.
The only real exception that occurs to me is sports, which are impossible to watch without seeing ads. American sports like the NFL and MLB are shown with ads in the broadcast, while racecars and MMA fighters and soccer teams give no option to skip ads as they are on the competitors themselves! But, of course, without those ads we wouldn't have those competitions at those levels. Without advertising, I wouldn't be able to get the game on the radio or OTA TV, I'd have to go PPV, which I would not do. Without sponsor dollars, MMA fighters wouldn't be able to train to the level that they have pushed the sport. The ecosystem would be impossible. The same, of course, applies to things like local radio news: no traffic on the twos without Chevy dealers BLOWING OUT THEIR INVENTORY. Well, I guess we'd still have NPR, that bastion of politically neutral fact-finding...
Which is the real point, advertising in media is a good thing because it supports neutral media motivated purely by capitalism. When we mourn the decline of the politically-neutral American local newspaper, we are too stupid to realize what we are mourning is mostly the decline of newspaper advertising. Time was, you needed the newspaper to find out basic facts about the world. Movie times, church schedules, the weather. Every responsible American needed access to a newspaper, which drove mass subscriptions, which made advertising in the newspaper profitable, which funded investigative journalism and reporting. And because the goal was to sell ads, newspapers wanted the broadest reach possible, Republicans buy sneakers too. Once the advertising model breaks down, you get the modern newspaper industry. Local papers lack any but the most rudimentary reporting, while national papers like the New York Times cater to subscriber biases and lose even the pretense of neutrality. Substack, again, suffers from this: while an occasional gem might appear in the muck, almost every substack author becomes captured by his audience, forced to cater to their whims. So many interesting bloggers or writers become increasingly less interesting as they cater to their audiences' whims. In a world without advertising, we are at the mercy of subscribers and their biases.
I think the stronger argument against ads is more that the median ad that makes someone purchase something is causing them to make a purchase that they probably shouldn't in a more ideal world, and people both do that and accept their time being wasted with extremely repetitive advertising because they're bad at making tradeoffs. So that people 'accept the cost' isn't a strong counterargument. And idk if the internet or sports would be doomed or particularly harmed without this much advertising, the economy is an equilibrium, people really like sports and the internet and would find other ways to pay for it. I'm not sure your last paragraph is an argument for advertising specifically more than it is an argument for a class of intellectuals with independent funding and has strong influence over the information diet of the average American. But as I said in my other comment I don't think the problem here is really the ads, it's the things being advertised.
Once you start with this logic, you end up somewhere between the khmer rouge and the Uncle Ted. Which, fine, make a much bigger argument for that if you want to, but it's way outside the bounds of OP or the essay he's citing back to. I don't think a mass consumer production economy is possible without branding and advertising. But then when you say:
There's a big difference between "Advertising should be more strictly regulated and limited" and "Advertising should be illegal." I don't even think you can really get from one to the other in terms of consequences.
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You're right, banning advertising would destroy the web as we know it. Was there also a downside?
... you might want to reread that sentence and see if you can spot any logical inconsistencies.
The media motivated by capitalism unsurprisingly has a very strong pro-captial bias. Which has been intensifying in the past few years with billionaires buying up the remaining reputable media outlets like The Washington Post and CBS (those being more recent examples, this is not a new trend).
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OP's war on ad-supporter platforms presumably also hits GMail and all the free email hosting alternatives. Honestly, it does worry me that those have piecemeal become load-bearing parts of the economy: I need it to reset the account password for my bank.
On the other hand, I'm not anxious to retvrn to the days of email addresses tying you to your ISP: "DSL now more expensive than the alternatives, but it's the email address I use for everything like my bank accounts." I'm not sure who else I'd want to host email (honestly: USPS? Not the greatest alternative), and I can't see masses of normies paying for Proton Mail or such.
If it wasn't for all the anti-spam measures, I'd host my own email servers in a heartbeat (I already host my own website, code repos, etc...). And I do think services like email should be part of a personal cloud offering. It wouldn't cost more than a dollar or two a month (per user) to run once it achieves scale. It would also have much better privacy behavior because the user would actually be the customer.
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Dude... Chill... This is just a random internet forum. No need to get worked up about it.
First off, chill out. There's no need for personal attacks. And quantity very much matters here. Some random ad in a medium that nobody pays attention to is very different from our current environment where we are positively bathed in this stuff every moment of every day.
I agree that people not paying for ad-free products is a good argument. My first counter-argument is that e.g. paying for youtube premium would only get rid of a small fraction of ads that I experience every day. The marginal gain isn't worthwhile. People do regularly pay for ad blockers (or at least put in effort into getting them). And friction is a thing. There are lots of services that I could theoretically benefit from but don't pay for because it isn't worth the hassle of managing. Youtube is a tiny part of my day. The hassle of managing a youtube premium subscription isn't worthwhile (and they've done nothing to reduce the hassle because they don't have an incentive to).
My second is something I brought up in my original post:
I genuinely think this soft marketing war drastically inflates the "value" of ads. After all, does Amazon (or their marketing clients) really expect people to buy twenty dollars worth of stuff off the ads on a Kindle? I'm an order of magnitude away from that for my entire life for all ads I've ever seen anywhere! No, I suspect it is companies trying not to get drowned out.
There's also a large economy of scale problem here. Consumer Reports exists. They are small because they're expensive and they're expensive because they're small. Yes, removing ads would be a sea change in how our information systems have to operate and people are going to have to get used to paying explicitly for a lot more stuff. It's going to require new business models and interfaces. Substack is a great example. I woul;d have never paid for individual bloggers before them. It was just too much of a hassle even if I enjoyed the content. But Substack (and Patreon as well) have drastically reduced friction and as a result, I just checked and I'm paying for ~ten blogs (with subscriptions to a few more). And if after all that, customers still don't want to pay... I contend that's a good thing. It's the market aligning with people's actual expressed preferences.
Regarding neutral media: capitalism is customers paying for neutral media. And I don't know about you but most of my neutral media comes from Substack (which you also don't like for some reason...) where I do in fact pay directly to hear from sources that I care about. And Substack the company is technically not profitable yet but the popular writers on there are extremely profitable which makes me think that Substack the company could be easily profitable if they wanted to be. After all, how much does it really cost to host a bunch of simple mostly-text-and-images websites in 2026?
Dude...Chill...This just a random internet forum. No need to get worked up about it. We argue, we hang out. Stick around, somebody will accuse you of much worse.
But I don't think we disagree that much really. When you say:
Then I can't philosophically argue with it. If you think the internet as it exists today is bad and should be burned to the ground and salted, great, I can jive with that. The vast majority of content would not exist or be accessible without ad supported models, if that is your goal than this is a good policy to reach it. If you are willing to bite the bullet and say Twitter Delenda Est, and youtube and facebook and instagram and every other social media service with it, then we can get to a logical position. But that is what you are arguing for here, and it's much bigger than advertising, there's not going to be social media or open content platforms that are subscription based. I'm actually curious to see someone try to make one, but I'm not sure I would subscribe if they did anyway. Even this place I wouldn't want to subscribe, a one time payment maybe, but the hassle isn't worth it.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Youtube exists you can choose: a) not to consume youtube, b) to pay for youtube, c) pay for premium. The same choices exist for every content outlet. If ads offended you and you wanted to minimize consumption of ads, it would make sense to avoid advertising based content and stick to a few outlets that you can make ad free. Premium would give you an ad-free outlet, and if ads were as distasteful to the average consumer as believed, then one would consume only ad-free outlets. There's clearly a free market for ad-based and ad-free content operating right now, and most people consistently choose ad-based content over ad-free content.
This gets into a much bigger discussion, but I strongly suspect this isn't true, even if you think it is. You've almost definitely had >$20 of marginal spend for all the ads you've ever seen in your life, across every category of good. TLP's favorite scene from The Devil Wears Prada fits in here. Another example: when I was a kid the Greyhound Rescue had a booth at the fair every year. Fifteen years later, at 26, my wife wanted a dog, and I thought a greyhound would be a good pick, based on that awareness that formed long ago. I just wasn't in the market until then, but if they hadn't done that "advertising" I would never have gotten one.
Consider also with the Kindle example: I owned and used my first kindle for over a decade. Ten years of advertising is worth something.
But I'm not sure what the difference is to you between "Buying $20 worth of stuff" vs "not getting drowned out" anyway.
Clearly it costs more than Substack is making! I exclude Substack not because I dislike it, but because it is not profitable. Virtually every place we complain about ads today, didn't have ads at one point, and then they were introduced later to try to make the company profitable. Netflix, Amazon, Youtube, Twitter. All used to be ad free. The Millenial Lifestyle Subsidy is the generational trauma of our time. Elon briefly mooted making Twitter subscription only and eliminating advertisements, but quickly abandoned that plan because it had no hope of success.
My other problem with substack as a neutral source of information is that subscriber based content inevitably tends towards siloed bubbles and extremes as writers cater to their subscribers. You're never going to subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson, and she is never going to subscribe to Kulak. Advertising on its own does not fix this, but it offers at least one path to success that doesn't rely on catering to the whims of your hardcore supporters. I'm glad Substack exists, there's value in allowing marginal and extreme voices to exist, but I don't find it a good source for neutral fact based reporting. Substack isn't going to tell me what went on at my local township meetings, or even in Harrisburg or Philadelphia. It's good for news in the sense of current events-commentary-opinion, it's not yet good for the kind of fundamentally uninteresting hard news that one historically got from a newspaper. And newspapers themselves have gotten worse at that job because of their reliance on subscriptions, leading to spiraling left-wing bias, leading to a shrinking and more left wing subscriber base, leading to spiraling left wing bias.
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This is an individualistic argument, but isn't the more compelling case for removing ads one from social good? Ads are a net negative to the consumer AND to the companies who have to pay for them. As someone who works in a marketing-adjacent field, it's worth noting that we still don't have good ways to tell if traditional advertising is actually effective at driving sales, and there's compelling evidence that its effect for many brands is near zero. Yet companies are compelled to have an ad spend in order to keep up with the competition. Side note: modern guerilla marketing (which is essentially word-of-mouth) is a different story, but I don't think that's actually what OP is complaining about, any more than OP would say reviews should be banned. On the flip side, the most heavily advertised products are generally the worst, or at least a subpar option, which is why the need so much advertising to begin with. As a result, naive consumers are bamboozled into buying worse products for higher prices (they have to cover the overhead of the ads after all).
In my view this resolves into a tragedy of the commons situation. Everyone would benefit if ads (or at least certain modalities) were banned, but each individual player is incentivized from taking that step. Hence we need the Leviathan to step in.
I would bet like all of my net worth against this. Being told a product exists makes you realize you might buy it. Being told something exists 500 times makes the average person more likely to realize you might buy it. Big companies have tried reducing ad spend and measuring if it reduces profits, and it has, and then they restarted ad spend.
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Yep. Agreed. Thanks.
As long as the "guerilla" marketers aren't paid for spreading the information, that's perfectly fine. And I explicitly stated that unpaid reviews would be fine:
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There's no point arguing about the social good of advertising in the abstract, without reference to the content that advertising supports and makes available. It's the kind of woolly-headed socialism that college students love to talk when tuition comes up.
The proposition being argued here is "People should not be allowed to consume content unless they have paid for it."
Well, ok, that's too harsh. Probably more like:
"People should not be allowed to choose to consume unwanted content in exchange for consuming content that they want."
Without advertising, Youtube and Twitter are only available on a subscription basis, OTA TV and Radio are limited to government or charities, and newspapers would fail completely.
Once you are talking about narrower restrictions on particular kinds of advertising, there's probably logic there. But capital-A Advertising can't be isolated from the empire built upon it.
No. Collective behavior is very much a thing. The information environment is a commons and ads shit on the commons. One person's behavior very much has a negative externality on the rest.
Would a subscription basis be so bad? Especially, with a massively expanded user base that would drastically reduce costs per-user? And we already have paid equivalents to newspapers (and you yourself pointed out that ads are no longer such a large part of the newspaper revenue stream). And news alternatives (like Substack) are (imo) much better and completely subscription based.
We have a huge surplus of information in this age. I'm not convinced at all that all of it is impossible without ads.
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I do wonder what a more convincing version of this for the modern internet would look like. Like, the idea there is some reflexivity that negates some of the utilitarian arguments for capitalism is not new. There is extensive literature:
It does also seem like several of the most obvious threads were not addressed. MotteAnon12345:
Um, if internet ads bother you → ad-block?
Doesn't deal with the second deeper problem I highlighted which is polluting the information commons.
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Ad block is an easy price-discrimination tool, but it's not as comprehensive as the ban desires it to be, and ad block presents significant free-rider and tragedy of the commons problems on a societal basis, an argument I didn't want to get into again here.
But yeah, ad block solves at least half of the problem for anyone who cares enough to do it.
Rereading what I wrote, I was pretty unclear.
More explicitly: yes, I agree. The economic and ethical considerations of ad-block are non-trivial and annoying to constantly rehash. From a practical perspective, if you are so inclined to absolutely hate advertising, using an ad blocker, or just paying a trivial amount of money (for an upper-middle-class consumer) for premium service, seems eminently more feasible than trying to figure out how to ban advertising outright.
I already pay for quite a few such services. It's nowhere near enough and still doesn't address the marketing arms race that adds cost to virtually every single consumer product currently in existence.
I assume it was someone else who said they were a Gmail user? YouTube and Gmail are both extremely common and valuable consumer products. Equivalent levels of email service were and are much more expensive if not ad supported. YouTube provides you access to more media for free than you could ever consume, far more than premium paid services like pay-per-view or classic HBO. You can use both ad-free if you want to pay for the premium version or are okay with ad-block. There is clearly a category of products that is cheaper because of being subsidized by advertising.
To address your other point about polluting the information commons: it is a simple fact of life that the information commons is polluted in far more pernicious ways. People once espoused the idea that an object’s acceleration under gravity was a function of its mass. This was the accepted wisdom of both experts and the masses. There is wrong information out there. It's up to you to figure out what to believe; there's no oracle to consult for truth. Except, if you want to filter out advertising, then there is an oracle, and the pollution is trivial to filter out. A machine can literally do it. Ad-block at the browser or DNS level has nearly perfect accuracy.
You also assert that this hinges on:
It's not at all shown that this is a zero-sum game and that advertising is net negative in sign. The marginal cost of actually delivering the advertisements on the internet rounds to zero. The question, then, is where the dollars used to produce and target ads would have gone. If your counterfactual is curing cancer, sure, but that seems unlikely. If the marginal dollar goes into producing Lululemon as a status and social signaling device which simultaneously makes my wife's butt look good, that has positive utility to me. If the counterfactual is my tax dollars go to support yet another starving artist who would have been a marketer at Lululemon, that's net negative utility to me.
I hate advertisements too. So I pay for services I value and ad-block everywhere else, because FM, they're still getting the analytics at least. I don't think anyone needs to come and save me from advertisements, and I don't think enforcing any sort of ban would be at all practical. Your assertion that it would be practical assumes:
No, these are just the most annoying ads to you. Guerrilla advertising and astroturfing are real things. And no, ads in general are not "noticeable" to normies; they are just part of the background fabric of life. Have you ever watched a normie browse the web? There are advertisements that would make my eyes bleed, but they just scroll along happy as a clam. They do not feel bothered by them in the same way you or I feel bothered by them.
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I value anonymity enough that I'm not going to give out my credit card information, tying my account to my real life identity, just to remove ads. That information is begging to be leaked in a data breach anyway.
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What about Kiwi Farms? As far as I'm aware it is funded entirely by donations and Null maintains his own infrastructure.
Hobby.
That's a bit dismissive. Yes, Kiwi Farms technically is a rather low-tier website, but it's my understanding that its admin has had to put in far more effort than usual for a "hobby" website—e. g., placing his own hardware in data centers, and implementing his own software to battle people who DDOS and spam illegal content on his website to try to get it taken offline.
If it's not a business that makes money, it's a hobby, according to the IRS. I guess maybe you could classify it conceptually (though not legally) as a charity?
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Go back to the early days of the web before eternal september and you'll pretty much see this. Advertising networks in their current scummy form only appeared when the internet went mainstream.
Which were tiny hobby websites, largely free riding on government and university research investments.
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I was about to say this. Seriously, don't threaten me with a good time. Many of the ills wrought by the Internet are because everyone is on it now, especially children. Kids have no reason to be online, and when they are they are easy targets for groomers, and that results in several poorly-thought-out government-led policy initiatives that are a headache for everyone (e.g. the UK "Online Safety Act"). But is it possible to go back to the early web? I don't know.
No, normies would have the people trying put to death first.
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That's the newspaper industry breaking down, not the advertising model specifically. And a lot of woke depends on civil rights laws, government agencies, and similar non-market forces.
I'm pretty sure Disney still does a lot of advertising. It hasn't kept them nonpolitical.
And it does cost $395/year, for the cheapest tier, 'X Premium+', that actually removes all instead of some twitter ads, which is a nontrivial fraction (something like 1/100th) of the median personal income in the US.
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When I block an annoying ad on twitter for Israeli hostage funding or something, it tells me that I can remove all ads by subscribing to premium. People don't get that?
...And then I don't pay them the next month.
What socialist powderpuff world do we live in where the profit a corporation makes has to be proportional to their costs rather than proportional to the value the customer puts on the service?
What catch-22? This is good price discrimination, every customer gets what they want at a price they can afford.
"That's not the industry breaking down, just its entire revenue model. Surely the industry won't be impacted by the loss of the majority of its revenue!
In the 1950s the New York Times made 70-80% of its revenue from advertising, today it is just 20%. You think that has nothing to do with the decline of newspaper journalism?
It doesn't apply in every single case.
The profit doesn't "have to" be proportional to the company's costs, but in a working market where companies compete against each other, a company's profit will be proportional to its costs because if it tries to make too much profit, it will be undercut by a competing company that makes less profit but wins over all the customers. If this doesn't happen, that's a market failure. And of course a market failure is exactly what this is.
Price discrimination in general is a bad deal for the consumer, because in the limit you end up with everyone paying so much that they only benefit by a tiny fractional amount from the product compared to not buying it.
This is like saying that every death is caused by heart failure. In a sense it's true, but it's described in a way which obfuscates what's going on. Yes, if the Times can't sell papers, it can't sell ads in papers. If the Times was hit by a meteor it would be able to sell even fewer papers, and thus gain even less from advertising, but describing that as "that's its revenue model breaking down" would be misleading, if technically true.
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So I am someone who hates ads, and I use adblock on my main browser. However, I like to watch YouTube on my TV, which means I get ads.
I despise these ads, and wish I could make them go away; however, I have a fundamental dislike of paying for people to unshittify their services. There are a few reasons why:
(I feel like I should include a #3 there, but oh well).
In addition, I find that advertising is very much a thing where more of it makes it shittier for everyone. Like, there are a lot of services where I'm price sensitive, but the quality of the thing is not going to matter much. Take Uber vs Lyft vs a taxi - if all 3 of them are going to cost me approximately the same, take the same amount of time to show up, then I don't really care which of the 3 I get. However, if Uber is aggressively advertising, they're going to show up first when I google "taxi (my city)", which means that Lyft and the taxi services are going to have to pay to advertise, which means all 3 of them have to raise their rates to pay for advertising.
I don't think it's realistic to ban them; however, I'd be in favour of having a national vote for the most annoying ad of the year, and the person who made it being forbidden from ever going on the internet again (/s, probably).
Edit: I think one of the reasons that I find advertising so annoying is that it is inflicted upon me in a way that a lot of other stuff just isn't. Paying to not experience something is fundamentally irritating - it feels a lot like someone decided to make my day worse, and is requiring money to stop doing so. Like, if Apple or whatever made a deal with spam callers so that the "Hang Up" button on my phone is disabled unless I listen to their whole spiel, or pay them $20, I think most people would rightly decry this as insane.
You're still getting ads for Internet Explorer 10?
Nah, this was back when it came out - I hated that ad so much that it sticks out in my mind.
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How would you like for Youtube to pay for the infrastructure around getting those videos to you? Who do you think should be paying to host, manage, and operate the service?
I mean, given that I go out of my way to not buy anything I see advertised to me, and I use adblock as much as possible outside of that, I'd say it's not me either way.
More seriously, I don't think it should be regulated out of existence; I was just opining that a lot of advertising is annoying as shit and if I could make it all go away with a sweep of a magic wand, I would.
Yes yes, it's very fun being a free rider. Convenient that there are still enough rubes that we can get away with it for a while.
But you object to advertising and you object to paying for youtube, but you like watching youtube. How do you think youtube should be funded?
I mean, ideally I'd be able to pay the individual channels that I like watching money, based on my usage, and have YouTube take some percentage of that.
Given that my only option though is to pay $13.99 directly to YouTube, I think I'll pass.
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I am not convinced that people using adblock or not buying advertising products are free riders. I suspect its anyone who's revenue is derived from ads.
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I would rather that youtube die, but as long as it is alive, its network effects make competition hard, so I have no choice but to watch it if I want to watch amateur videos. I wouldn't call this "like watching Youtube". I like watching some things that are on Youtube, but the fact that they are on Youtube makes them worse and if Youtube didn't exist they would be better.
This is like the argument that Microsoft has brought computers to people by creating Windows. No, they don't get credit for doing X if they do X worse than other people would but I have to go through them because they have a stranglehold on the market.
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My answer is, I don't have to care. I'll ride for free until the wheels fall off, and then I'll pirate everything until copyright enforcement assassins break in through the ceiling and kill me. I will live in a cave and eat bugs and make the rest of humanity join me before I ever watch god damn commercials again.
Y'all gotta stop trying to replace a good system with a fair one.
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If it's such a burden for Youtube, maybe they should stop focusing on maximizing watch time and keeping people on the site resulting in screen addiction, one of the many ills of modern society.
I think Youtube being so centralized and massive is itself a big problem. Rather than people hosting their own websites where they distribute their own videos and eventually finding ways to distribute videos cheaply, people just decided to outsource video hosting to Youtube, and now they've built up a huge network effect where you can't simply take all your videos and move to a different site, and even if you could you can't just take all your viewers with you. Even the content creators on this service are called "Youtubers" rather than creators. Separately, centralization poses huge questions for archival and preservation of a huge aspect of our culture. What happens if the entire thing goes down? Youtube is even actively hostile to downloading videos and archival efforts, they likely threatened the youtube-dl developers into going away, and the replacement fork yt-dlp is constantly having to make changes and is slowly weakening in accessibility and usability through no fault of their own.
I wasn't expecting to write an anti-Youtube screed, but this is how I feel. I guess my answer is that I don't care if Youtube has to bleed money to provide a service without ads, because the consequences of that are more desirable than the status quo.
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I do that. That's exactly what I do, along with the ad-free streaming service from the library. I would recommend this to everyone. I actually dislike ads enough that I avoid all the stuff you're talking about in here. I stopped watching sports because the ads were too obnoxious. I think there are in fact many people living this lifestyle, but you would only know about this by meeting them or asking about it.
Which lifestyle was achieved with zero government involvement, outside of the taxes paid to the public library!
I'm pretty sure that everyone who wants an ad-free internet also supports taxes funding public libraries (up to lizard-man's constant).
Honestly, I've never seen a library funding proposal I didn't think should be higher. It's literally price discrimination executed to perfection.
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This reasoning violates conservation of expected evidence. You can't have "people avoid ads" and "people don't avoid ads" be evidence for the same thing.
How else does one model evidence based on consumer choice than by pointing to two options, understanding the tradeoffs between them, and charting what choices people make to see how highly people value those tradeoffs?
If consumers had no choice and could only consume content with ads, that would only tell us that they like the content more than they dislike the ads. NFL OTA broadcasts would fall in this category, viewers are making a decision based on ads. Add choices and we can narrow it down. We can say that Youtube users dislike ads at a value less than $14/month or whatever it is for premium. And we can say that the degree to which most people like having content from ad-supported platforms more than they like getting content from their local library > their degree of dislike of ads.
But that's not what you're doing. First you're claiming that if people don't avoid ads, that's evidence that we don't need to ban ads. Now you're claiming that if people do avoid ads, that's evidence that we don't need to ban ads. It is impossible for X and not-X to be evidence for the same thing.
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The argument is that different people have different preferences with respect to ads. Some people don't really mind them and will accept them in exchange for cost savings. Other people hate ads and have the option to make choices to avoid them. Thus the current system allows everyone to satisfy their preferences reasonably well. A system that banned ads would only allow one of these groups to satisfy their preferences.
Replace "ads" here with "pollute the commons" and notice that the argument doesn't really change. Yes, if you pollute the commons, some people will make expenditures to avoid being harmed by the polluted commons and some will not. That doesn't justify polluting the commons.
Content produced and hosted on private platforms isn't the commons.
That's a bit of a dodge, don't you think? When everyone uses them, they are practically the commons. Youtube is a good example, having network effects so profound that no one dares even think about hosting their own video distribution website. Even the creators on there are called "Youtubers" which underlines how much they are tied to the platform.
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FWIW, I also drop like a hot potato anything that includes advertisements. I don't think this is representative of any larger number of people doing the same.
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Hell, go back even further. Roman gladiators were paid to do product endorsements. Ridley Scott hired a team of historians to jazz up the movie Gladiator, and they were planning to depict this, but figured that audiences would have a hard time taking it seriously even though it's true.
I thought about that, but I too felt like it was a bit of a reach!
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So there is a question that has been gnawing at me for the longest time: is PRC... Good? I mean:
I mean, there are obviously some tough things to get over (the whole free speech thing, how they handled COVID with safetyism that would make many in the West blush, all the other usual stuff), but genuinely, honestly... Following the news from China for a few years, I really can't help but envy the Chinese. Take down the communist iconography and I think that many on the right would see it similarly to Japan.
Best run Govt. of the last 50 years for sure.
With that said, there are credible arguments I could be a devil advocate for.
How much of the spoils are experienced by the workers ? Intense Darwinian competitions means margins are paper thin. Winning comes with none of the stability or lifestyle perks that make economic victories desirable to Americans. Chinese winners get rewarded with more competition, sleepless nights and even narrower margins. Perpetual crunch-time sounds like hell, and Chinese citizens appear to agree. When given the chance, they hop over toe western companies that offer better life-style at the risk of slower innovation.
Post great leap forward there wasn't much culture or heritage left. Yes, China has a recognizable civilizational identity that's distinct from the west. But, modern China has little in common with erstwhile Chinese culture or heritage.
You'll never know what they're willing to do, because the Chinese never reveal their true thoughts to a westerner. I've had close PRC Chinese friends and they refuse to give me even a hint on what they think about the PRC or Xi. Get them drunk, high, vulnerable, doesn't matter. I don't know if it is brainwashing or defense against the dark arts. But, one things for sure. Neither you nor I know what the will of the Chinese people actually is.
This is where it's important to draw lines. Is PRC China Xi's China, Deng's China or Mao's China. Where does the lineage begin ? Mao's consolidation, state capacity and land reforms were necessary for Deng's economic liberalization. If it starts at Mao, then 30 million deaths is not 'foregoing some comfort'. That's the greatest genocide since the Mongol conquests. It's simply impossible to talk about PRC China without talking about a Holocaust x 5 genocide event.
Japan, SK, Taiwan and Singapore have all done better than PRC China per-capita. If their genetic makeup is mostly similar, then PRC China's achievements don't seem THAT incredible.
I agree with some other points you made but this is a weird take (although it’s only a softer dismissal of our opinions, unlike the other commenters who simply assume that we’re all shills). It’s not like the Chinese government have some Eastern magic spell that forces us to keep our mouths shut.
I don’t know your friend obviously, but my reading of what you’re describing is much simpler: most of them just don’t have an opinion on Xi. Honestly many people, including the well-educated middle class you’d meet in Silicon Valley, have no opinions on almost anything and are just incredibly boring human beings. They care about money and status and their own hedonistic pursuit, and that’s pretty much it. That’s the result of years of grinding under Gaokao. It’s sad but not that mysterious.
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China shows the tradeoff between liberty/freedom and authoritarian state capacity. If the government acts in its own interests at all times and does not care about the people whatsoever except as pawns to be managed and leverage for labor, then you can accomplish a lot of things as a government. If were were playing a geopolitical RTS and the citizens were all NPCs managed by a computer, this would be great. If they're real human beings with feelings and lives and utility functions, this is awful.
Every single measure you mention here, including economic success, all have 0 terminal value in my utility function. They have instrumental value only in-so-far as they can be leveraged towards human flourishing and happiness. China could have 10x the GDP per capita of the U.S. and I'd still consider it a failure if that GDP doesn't translate into the well-being of the people actually living there.
I don't think the West is perfect, but at least we try. China's not even trying to be good.
I think about this a lot with things like the pyramids, "how were ancient people able to build these" well a lot is possible if you have lots and lots of slaves and don't really care about the conditions they're working under.
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The conditions on the ground for most Chinese are fine, plus the Chinese government does a lot to curtail a lot of the own goal stuff that is rife in the West with regards to homelessness and general antisocial behaviors. I'm confused why you think the average Chinese person is at some massive deficit to the average Westerner at this point.
I'm deeply suspicious of the censorship and its effects on signalling. When you have an authoritarian police state that will punish you for complaining, smart people learn not to complain. When your credit score is higher the more positive posts you have about the government on social media, people will post positive things on social media.
I automatically discount any opinions given by people who are paid shills, or are in some way incentivized to exaggerate in a way comparable to this. Literally every Chinese citizen is a shill, therefore I take any apparent public sentiment with a huge grain of salt. If I knew Chinese people in real life I would probably discount their stated opinions significantly less (depending on how well I knew them). But on the internet? I trust nothing. If everything was actually wonderful in China and nobody had complaints then the government wouldn't need to censor complaints. They wouldn't need to censor social media. If everything in China was so wonderful they would be here now telling us about it instead of being kept quarantined away like the North Koreans.
Add to that the sweatshops that produce the Cheap Chinese goods, some anecdotal stories I've heard from North Korean defectors escaping to China and being literally enslaved there, or people stumbling on decomposing bodies from a possible organ farm, and it paints a bleak picture. I expect the average person isn't in abject misery the way they are in North Korea, but there aren't democratic feedbacks to stop that from happening, it's merely the whims of the government.
I've travelled to China a bunch. I'm not gonna pretend I've been to the Tier 7 Sulphur mines to hang out, but the vast majority of Tier 1/2/3 places I've been are perfectly functional cityscapes which are generally cleaner, more pleasant and better developed than the equivalent in the West. You're also vastly overstating the degree of control the Chinese state imposes on low-medium civil whining
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China is, above all, fascinating. It is a state that is capable of astonishing feats of engineering and yet it will occasionally build a bridge that will collapse within months of its completion. Its government seems at times to be preternaturally competent, and at other times to be singularly dedicated to causing misery and dysfunction for its own people. It has a cultural history as expansive and complex as any on Earth, and long periods of stability during which one would expect great works of music and visual art would have been made, and yet its actual output in these domains has been, and continues to be, distinctly third-rate. In the past, there were long periods where it was unquestionable strong enough to conquer much of the world, and yet it didn't. Today, it is—or will soon be—strong enough to expand far beyond it borders, but I expect it will again choose not to.
How do we resolve these apparent inconsistencies? Well, first I'd caution that the West is full of these too. We put men on the moon with the computing power of a graphing calculator, but we can't build a single high speed rail line in California. We descend from a culture that produced the most sublime art ever created by man, but we seem largely to have forgotten how to do this, or else lost the will to even try. With AI, we figured out how to make sand talk, but I expect we would be hopelessly incapable of maintaining a Chinese level of order in our society even if our very survival depended upon it.
What do we make of this? I think the obvious conclusion to draw is that human societies are spikey. (You may have heard this term from AI. In that context, it refers to the fact that AI can be at once astonishingly competent in one domain and incompetent in another that seems no more difficult, or perhaps even easier. A classic example was the ability of earlier generations of LLMs to get 90th percentile plus scores on the SAT math section but also to fail at counting the number of r's in strawberry.) China has a weird mix of strengths and weaknesses, and so does the West.
An interesting property of spikeyness is that it is harder to see in yourself. What is easy seems easy and what is hard seems hard, so without some external example to show that certain strengths don't necessarily imply others, and that same is true of certain weaknesses, it can be hard to imagine that these things can be unlinked. Sometimes, it is only when we look at another with a different combination of strengths and weaknesses that we start to more clearly see the spikeyness that exists in ourselves. Of course, the spikeyness of an entity with very different strengths and weaknesses is obvious.
And that is what China is: a different roll of the stats dice. It looks very weird to us, but then I'm sure we look very weird to them.
Did they get a better roll than us, overall? I don't think so, but I'm not completely sure. Are they at least our peers, civilizationally speaking? Certainly.
And the final question: are they good? Well, from my perspective they are not especially good, but also not especially bad either. One Chinese deficit—which is arguably not even a deficit except from a Western, Christianity-inflected moral standpoint—is that they just don't seem to have an interest in much of the rest of the world. The downside of this (and to be honest, I'm a little disturbed by it) is how generally indifferent they seem to suffering that exists beyond their borders. I hope this might change as they become wealthier, but the social science research I've looked at does not show this happening, at least so far. Of course, this disinterest also has an upside: to me it seems obvious the Chinese don't want to conquer the world. Maybe they are HBD pilled and recognize that Chinese style governance would only work for Chinese people (for what it is worth, this seems obviously true). Or maybe they are just such cultural chauvinists that can't imagine what good could come to them from involving themselves with others (mostly also probably true). And maybe it is just that they are temperamentally conservative and risk averse, and they feel more comfortable all crowded together on the territory they have lived on for thousands of years. It is probably a combination. But whatever it is, I just don't worry much about China going all Nazi Germany on us and trying to conquer lebensraum, and I worry even less about some sort of sino-colonialist future (maybe Africa the land could become Chinese, but Africans? Never).
This is very different than us. When the pilgrims came over to Massachusetts, the seal they created for the Massachusetts Bay Colony shows an Indian standing with a text flag coming out of his mouth that said, "Come over and help us". Yes, the universalist impulse runs deep here. That can be beautiful in my eyes, as when Kipling wrote earnestly of the White Man's Burden. And truthfully, I think it has done a lot of good for the rest of the world. But also, I can't say we have a flawless track record. What happened to those Indians? How often have we bungled the helping? How often has the helping just been a pretext to exploit, to enslave, to rape? Not always, but not never either.
As for which civilization is better for the rest of the world, the Chinese or the Western, I think the optimal solution might be a middle ground. I believe there is a White Man's Burden; I also believe there is a Chinaman's Burden. Ultimately, I'd like to see China be a little more humanitarian and universalist, even if that risks them maybe being a little more expansionist. But I also think the West could learn a lot from China. Obviously technologically and governmentally, but also culturally. The West should take a more pragmatic, more Chinese, less Marvel-universe view of its own motives and (especially) capabilities, and also a more Chinese (read: racist) view of those it aims to help, which is ironically what I think will be the key to actually helping them, rather than just pretending to. Indeed, in the long run, China and the West could have a very productive and fruitful relationship that could enrich the whole world enormously. I hope we get to see it happen.
The Western mode of directly or indirectly conquering the world because you experience moral outrage at the suffering of the poor and oppressed masses is not the only way to relate to other nations, and taking a different approach isn't by itself evidence of disinterest in global affairs. At this very moment, Chinese laborers are building ports, railroads, and highways across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America; Chinese immigrants are cooking meals in restaurants in nearly every country on Earth, from the frozen sub-arctic to the humid tropics; and Chinese astronauts are orbiting the Earth in their own space station. These are not the behaviors of an isolationist state or people. That this network exists primarily to further international trade, rather than as a tool in some great moral crusade, seems to me eminently reasonable and not a weakness.
Yes, the Chinese diaspora has spread all across the world, and that is great. And evidently they are quite adaptable and enjoy a wide variety of biomes!
Indeed, there is no denying that the Chinese people have contributed a ton to any society they have decided to join. I'm glad for the Chinese people we have in the United States, and I'd personally like more of them. Many more! But this is distinct from what I am talking about, which is again a general Chinese civilizational indifference to the welfare of others. I'd love to be wrong on this for what it's worth, and I as I said I look for signs of change, but I've yet to see much of anything. China has incredible biomedical abilities. Where is its version of pepfar? China is now full of billionaires. How many have signed the giving pledge? Where is the Chinese Bill Gates? Where is the Chinese Will MacAskill?
To be fair, I probably could have phrased things more clearly. Ultimately, my objection isn't that China isn't interested in Lithium deposits in Cameroon, or even that Chinese people aren't interested in running a electronics store in Yaoundé. My objection is that the Chinese don't seem to care about Cameroonians.
Is the Chinese approach of just doing business and not actually caring about anyone but yourself better for others than the Western schizo approach of caring so much you try to invade a country like Afghanistan to set up pride parades? I don't think so. Both approaches have serious issues, and as I said, I think both approaches could benefit from incorporating elements from the other. You don't need to convince me that the West has seriously screwed up at times: that is obvious. But I don't think you can convince me that the Chinese approach is morally better. In fact, I think it is pretty clearly morally worse. I find the good samaritan who accidentally botches an attempt to help a wounded child better, morally speaking, than the person who just doesn't give a shit about the wounded child because the child doesn't own the rights to any critical mineral mines. And I worry particularly that as we approach advanced AI and robotics capabilities, the Chinese attitude of indifference beyond the point where self-interest is in effect is potentially disastrous for our stupider human relations in the Third World. If China obtained post-scarcity abundance for itself, would it selflessly share it with the billions of not very useful brown people that occupy Africa and South America? Would it go through the trouble of making sure that abundance was equitably distributed in those societies, if that turned out to be necessary? I hope so, but I can't say I've yet seen anything that has put my mind at ease.
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This is applicable, if at all, only to late 19th century (mostly unprofitable) colonialism, justified, along national honor, by civilizing the natives. For the rest four centuries, the sales pitch was "Make Money Fast!".
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Certainly one of the best and optimistic post about China from a non-Chinese perspective on this website for me. Thank you.
What irritates me most when people talk about China here is not the outright hostility but the lack of curiosity, so thank you for finding our society fascinating. Something I never get used to is how intelligent people who are active in political discussion show no interest in understanding China at all, despite pretending to care about it. Many rhetorical techniques were employed to never update on China, treating everything from the Chinese media as propaganda; treating all of our people, inside or outside or China, as nationalistic shills or payed propagandists; pretending all the changes and achievements inside the country as fake and unworthy of serious discussion. On some level I get it, after all that's my default opinion on anything too positive from my own country, and how can I expect better from the others. But on the other hand it's tiresome, especially since I feel some genuine urge to discuss with people and exchange opinions with people outside of my own as a mirror to allow some self reflection.
This has been one of the most important thing I learned from my experience in the United States. For Chinese people in China, it is difficult to see ourselves clearly, just as a person in the mountains cannot see its entirety. Everything feels natural and inevitable. It is hard to imagine living or thinking differently, and even harder to appreciate the benefits that alternative might offer.
Chinese and American societies are polar opposites in many respects, but also intriguingly similar in others. This is difficult to articulate. Broadly, the individualism-collectivism divide is obvious, as is the very different relationship between the people and the state. The “main character syndrome”, the intentional or unintentional domineering attitude toward other countries, and the industriousness of the people feels familiar. For me, American society has been a useful mirror and a nice calibrator, helping me to see what the optimum would be. As you said, for many things the “right way” likely lies somewhere between the two. It is fortunate that these two societies exist in the same historical moment. Unfortunately, instead of learning from one another there seems to be an irresistible pull toward conflict. I hope that this is not our fate.
You mentioned this above in a different post but I want to share my thoughts. I think that poverty, or the memory and cultural residue of extreme poverty, has a profound effect on people’s capacity for charity. Some personal anecdote. My mom grew up in the 1960s. Their generation lived through the devastation of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and unlike my generation they usually have more than three siblings in one family despite barely able to feed them all. When resources are scarce survival becomes paramount, like how a family of mice trapped in a small cage that cannibalize each other. People resort to whatever works: lying, violence, corruption. When abundance returns, the psychological mechanisms developed in scarcity do not simply disappear. In this sense her generation “inoculated” itself against charity, and they will pass that fear of scarcity on to my generation. I grew up without extreme poverty, without rampant pickpocketing, without scammers lurking at train stations hoping to lure me to their fake tourist attractions, without (too many) cab drivers driving in circles and charging more money for the ride. But still I remember how my mother carried a constant fear that someone would take advantage of us. She taught me to be perpetually defensive, hold your bag in front when you’re on a train, always double-lock the doors, never fully let your guard down even among close friends. As a child I was confused because her ways of living does not align with my experience. I remember asking her if thieves will wear a balaclava, and why I never saw them on the bus even though she seem confident that they’re out there somewhere. I remember yelling at her for her paranoia around my friend, as I couldn’t understand why helping others is anathema to her when I usually receive kindness in return, something I crave. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate kindness either. She often spoke warmly of strangers who helped her, like an elderly couple who fixed her tire, or how Americans in the suburb seem to always “forget” to lock the door, after her six month stay in the US as a visiting scholar. But she could not translate that appreciation into generosity toward others. It’s not just her, so are the other aunties and uncles I grew up with.
Thing do seem to be improving. Like many things this is the reason why I have my hope high for my country, despite how it is at the current moment. When I return home now I genuinely feel that more people are willing to help one another. After all I could easily see myself as someone who fixes other’s tire, and I do think people will be more likely to reciprocate now than it was before. We may be building a higher-trust society slowly, one in which people help others because they expect it to be reciprocated, and eventually because it becomes second nature. That path might be via harsh and draconian laws and immense social pressure, but I think it's worth it.
What I regret most about our low-trust society is how suboptimal it is. Helping others in our very homogeneous society would not harm you in most cases. On the contrary it should benefit you more as mutualism enriches everyone. Unfortunately we find ourselves stuck in a kind of social prisoner’s dilemma. The encouraging part is that we appear to be moving out of it, however slowly. Hope that trend continues before the society getting eaten by other societal illnesses which slowly start to manifest themselves.
Back to your point about the lack of moral responsibility to help the unfortunate. It may be true that the Chinese ordo amoris resembles a solar system, with most of its moral weight concentrated at the center, our own people, rather than the onion-like layers in a westerner’s mind. But I do not think this difference is immutable. Given a generation or two I believe we will converge.
From your mouth to God’s ears.
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I'm not sure where this perception comes from or if it's a specifically western blind spot, maybe some wildly out of date leftover stereotype from after the Opium Wars?
But the Belt and Road Initiative did not come from a country totally disinterested in the rest of the world. China is keenly interested in the rest of the world and quite involved in foreign policy. All that foreign policy is blatantly towards China's own ends, not some abstract ideal like "democracy". But they have lots of it. And they will apply lots and lots of pressure across many many miles to make you do what they want.
See my response to Resolute Raven. The most important point:
As to your comment on the abstract ideal of "Democracy", I think you are missing the larger point, which is that this is not about caring about systems of government, but about caring about the people that live in them. I recognize many non-Westerners (and even many Westerners) find it hard to believe that the West genuinely cares about the welfare of non-Westerners, since we have such a... mixed record... when it comes to helping them. But I think the moral concern is genuine, and I think a great deal of meaningful help (more than most critics of the West would admit) has been delivered.
In the end, even our most rapacious acts have probably largely redounded to the benefit of our victims or their descendants (there are, as always, exceptions). Take the institution of slavery in America. It was undoubtedly surpassingly cruel, but also your average African American now earns a higher income than many white Europeans. When you compare this state of affairs to what they might be experiencing if they'd been left to fend for themselves in Africa, this seems vastly better.
Is it deranged to credit ourselves for seeing to the welfare of the descendants of people we kidnapped and enslaved? I don't actually think so. Yes, we were bad enough to enslave Africans. But we also were good enough, eventually, to free them, on our own initiative and at great cost to ourselves. And not only that, but to allow them to remain here, and to include them in our society, and to later give them equal rights, and after that to even make great sacrifices and endless efforts to try to promote their flourishing. The act of enslaving, and all the acts of kindness that came after it, both say something true about how the West is, and I think both of these things are very different than anything you could say about China. I doubt China would have ever taken African slaves at scale because I think it would have been obvious to them African slaves can't be good Chinese. And this is very good, because I also doubt, if China had a large population of the descendants of Africans it had enslaved, it would be nearly so indulgent as the West. I don't know what the Chinese solution would be to a population that committed 6-7 times as much murder as American whites on a per capita basis (I don't even want to know what the ratio would be relative to Han Chinese) but I can promise you it would not be Black Lives Matter. And as shitty as BLM was (both for us and for our black population—see the huge spike in murders with black victims) I think it is to our credit, morally, that we responded that way as opposed to in the way the CPC might have responded. Our kindness may yet be the death of us, but I can't bring myself to wish it away. My preferred solution is for us to become more practical and realistic, not less kind. In short, like the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz, we need a brain.
Meanwhile, I think China needs a heart: my most ardent wish is that China develops a genuine feeling of moral responsibility for its less accomplished relations in the Global South, ideally while still retaining the pragmatism and effectiveness it possesses today. Maybe this will happen naturally as it gets richer—I have to remind myself that there is still a lot of serious poverty in China, for all the incredible progress they've made on that front. The good news is I don't think the Chinese are genetically incapable of changing: this isn't like asking Somalians to start winning more Fields medals. The issue is largely cultural.
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But China views the other entities the way physicists view black holes - all complexity is hidden and there is only two parameters - mass and spin. China cares only about resources, markets and shipping routes. They don't care about human rights, religion, ethnicity, who exactly is in power as long as it is stable, they are cavalier about things like pollution and whatnot. The only thing they are emotional about is Taiwan.
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The aesthetics of communism, all that block red, a disdain for ornamentation, those ugly 50s modernist busts of Marx and Lenin and Mao that still adorn so many state and party buildings, the straight-out-of-the-USSR party poster design that you still see everywhere in China, including increasingly in Hong Kong, is unaesthetic.
Nevertheless, the Chinese are remarkably capable civilization builders. In Hong Kong and Singapore, tempered by an appropriately small but sufficiently punchy Anglo Saxon influence and so freed from both the worst ancestral and communist impulses, they achieved true heights of civilization that stand to this day as some of the most pleasant and well-run places on earth.
The main problem with China is not China, it is that we cannot become Chinese. Perhaps that is a sadness in and of itself. To answer @DaseindustriesLtd ‘s question, Americans can see themselves as white Russians, and I think on some distant level we can even imagine ourselves in the Malthusian squalor that is India (I suppose Sonia Gandhi showed it was possible). But Chinese? No, this is a wholly foreign identity, unavailable to outsiders.
I feel far closer to being Chinese than Indian just in ethnic/biological terms etc. But culturally? The PRC's partial deracination makes it easier than before! And well, Chinese culture seems easier than e.g. Pakistani (I mean this as closer than India, because of Abrahamic religion etc.)
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I'm a fairly unabashed Sinaboo at this time in my life and I think this is a bit of an exaggeration, both since you're trying to distill a 'Chinese experience' when there's a fuckload of regional cultures even within the Hanosphere and since Chinese identity's probably proven more modular than most historically. China's taken in a plethora of random conquerors and borderers over the years, given them access to the language and some core cultural markers and generally gotten on with it.
I live in a Mandarin/Hokkien-speaking multigenerational household and family unit in SEA that'd probably be more 'Chinese' than a lot of mainlanders in terms of adherence to stuff like religious norms, dialect speaking and how they evaluate themselves culturally against the outside forces of their fellow citizens. I've got a passable command of the language and I'd consider Chinese culture a lot easier to get into than like Japanese.
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What is it about Chinese culture that feels so foreign, especially in comparison to Indian culture? I think I sort of understand what you mean, but at the same time I don’t really. Is it the aesthetics, the language, the level or form of religiosity, the way of thinking, or the collective memories people share? And do Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese cultures feel equally foreign to you?
I live in the region and I'd say that I find Chinese culture more palatable and easier to get into the mindset of than Japanese/Korean culture. Considerably less stuffy/status-orientated, albeit maybe I'm hanging out with peasants and peasant-descendants. Vietnam also has more like... 'shocks' to it than Chinese in terms of interesting quasi-agricultural practices, but I'd also consider it more egalitarian and less nuance-based than what's going on in JP/KR
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Excluding city states, it has the fourth lowest birth rate in the world, probably about 0.9 right now and falling fast.
They've got a few decades left, but before long China is gonna be the world's largest nursing home.
They've got a large reserve of the undeveloped hinterland population plus the lack of a democracy means less of an issue with total boomer hijack creating the void that Western civilization is currently disappearing into. The average Chinese boomer has way less power to enforce their will onto the general population.
How do you feel that balances with a much more explicit meme of filial piety versus the West? How does the average "4-2-1" grandchild in China feel about their obligations to their elders?
Your point makes sense too, but I'm not sure how to balance them.
Decent amount of the elderly who don't have the familial support are the childless, plus it cuts both ways to a large degree where if you have failed to cultivate sufficient familial bonds to support you in your dotage there's less of a duty of care. I don't think the Chinese state is gonna necessarily let them rot/put a bullet in the head of 80 year olds, but it wouldn't shock me if there's a lot more push towards centralized affordable care compared to what the Western Democratic voting body will allow.
Also sheer longevity of people these days means that even the filial obligations aren't falling that far down. I just went to my Chinese diaspora wife's Great Grandmother's 100th birthday recently and she's got 10 of her 12 children still alive, though she's got about 150 descendants and their particular birthrate collapse is more '12->7->4->4' so less of an issue
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I mean China is one of the world's most morally bankrupt societies, they lie all the time to everyone (foreign and domestic), they have the most stealing of any country (primarily in the form IP theft), don't really believe in international treaties and society, engage in genocide, oppress their population, clearly want to steal Taiwan (jury is out on how bad they'll be about this) and during a time when we are realizing how much we've fucked the environment they refuse to do anything but worsen the problem.*
What they have (at least superficially, it isn't totally clear) is strength.
That's enough for some people, I'm not sure it is for me.
*I don't think any of these are controversial but please let me know if so.
Meh. They're atleast productive and have some sort of longterm vision about this stuff. 'Genocide' is a tad strong about the Uyghur but they seem to be the only non-Islamic country to actually figure out how to moderate a population instead of creating a longterm cancer. They're improving some of their behavior on the environmental issues, most of Tier 1 China is shockingly clean and non-polluted.
Well the prompt was "good." If it was something else like "most likely to get us off planet" I might have a different answer, but I do think in terms of "goodness" they are pretty damn shit.
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I think your points e.g. about not believing in international treaties or China worsening environmental problems, are obviously nonsense at least in comparison to the US (how anyone can still say this with a straight face after everything that happened last year is both interesting and sad), and not really worthy of discussion especially considering how you responded to others arguments below. And of course saying that our society is the most morally bankrupt is just silly considering how (unfortunately) exposed Americans are to other low trust immigrant societies. But it is hard to argue that the average Chinese person is less morally bankrupt than the average American. I know what my preference would be if I ever had to choose.
It’s pretty apparent that China, as of this year, is still a fairly low trust society, despite how much progress it has made (and despite how safe, clean, and orderly the major cities are). There is a genuine mistrust between people, which is reflected in the hypercompetitive, striver culture. You can’t rely on anyone but yourself, and competition with others is seen as a zero sum game. This kind of mentality is quite common among Chinese people, and it’s sorta reflected in web novels, one of the few semi-successful Chinese cultural output in the West. Of course also reflected in the toxic work cultures in Chinese companies overseas (eg tiktok).
I remember a few weeks ago there was a discussion about how high-trust societies were built, and how impossible that now feels. I think Chinese society may actually be building one right now, through harsh and draconian laws, and through education. From my experience, my generation is certainly more trusting than my parents, which is a low bar considering how the Cultural Revolution and the purges destroyed the good and the noble and turned everyone else into cynical non-believers. Like many things, I think our society is moving in the right direction although still deeply flawed and feels hopeless at times. I don’t think Americans feel the same way about their own society.
I don't understand how someone can look at how the U.S. and Europe tried to walk off a cliff for environmentalism and say with a straight face that China is the same.
It's not credible.
China refuses to make costly economic decisions to protect the environment and is doing things like massive pollution, destroying local ocean fauna, and so on.
You can argue that this is economically a good idea, but it.....is happening.
The U.S. has chaotic moments but the overall arc is to make costly decisions of questionable efficacy to try and solve the problem. This has yet to be massively effective but they are trying.
Being hopelessly idealistic and impractical is not a good thing. Half or more than a half of your people don’t favor that environmentalism, and having your rulers enforced them on you is also doubleplusungood. I don’t know what to say if that is what you meant by not “worsening the problem”. It’s laughable.
Much to my disappointment I see little will from Americans left or right to solve the problem. All they have shown so far is to pretend to solve the problem. And they spend more time debating about who should take the blame than acting together as a people to solve any problems. Incredibly unfortunate, I do like the American people.
A central theme I see in a lot of the pro-China comments in this thread is "well the U.S. sucks too" well yes. We don't dispute that, but just because the U.S. has DEI does not mean that disappearing people is anywhere near the same scale of oppression.
The same goes for dysfunction, the environment, and questionable reporting of economic health.
The fed is somewhat unreliable at times is not in the same universe as cooked Chinese economic numbers.
Of course, this place is mostly inhabited by Americans. Your sense of what is right or wrong is inevitably tied to your own experience (which I assume is American), and I see nothing wrong with making these kinds of comparative analyses. They are far more informative than talking about “values” as if they exist in a vacuum.
Your perception of China is a belief system, and it does not have to be rooted in anything real. There are no real interactions, no anecdotes, not even citations. Beliefs are difficult to dislodge with arguments. The good thing is that they also cannot shape reality however they wish.
It is not a belief system, I am expressing known facts.
If you'd like to provide a reputable source indicating that China is not an oppressive regime please do so. Same for my other concerns.
If your argument is that the Chinese are moral aliens then I suppose that's fine, but then also arguing that at the same time everything is a lie and propaganda isn't reasonable, you have to pick one.
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It's possible that they've reached peak carbon emissions already. US carbon emissions peaked in 2007, a two-decade lag time seems reasonable.
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The "IP theft" thing seems like a forced/propagandistic framing of something that only really amounts to "they are different from us", because it's using the non-central fallacy to associate a nearly universal among humans moral principle (no taking someone else's exhaustible goods) with something quite different and more narrowly distributed (no copying ideas).
Going down this route just will result in us relitigating multiple decades of standard internet piracy arguments, but you need to acknowledge that at least "the notion of intellectual property is fake and gay corporate propaganda that Western culture was successfully brainwashed into believing" is at least a view that exists and therefore nonchalantly using it as an argument that Chinese society is "morally bankrupt" is a form of petitio principii.
Please prove near universality. Because every angle you look at a history - it is taking some else's exhaustible goods.
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You do realize that a large amount of the IP theft was literally using state espionage resources to seize and repurpose information from Western companies while instituting significant protectionism domestically?
"We will use all of our powers to compete unfairly against you and will prohibit you from competing at the most basic level" is a pretty central criticism.
China only does what they do because of the manufacturing prowess, otherwise they'd be a pariah state.
If the West wants to bitch they might have to go back to actually manufacturing things apart from software and regulations.
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Not even close. We have India (and the similar Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, etc.), every Arab country, Africa, etc. which are in a whole different league.
Nearly every right winger will agree that international rules based order is just a fantasy.
I haven't looked into it personally, but most Chinese living overseas with access to western media will still say this is false. Not sure if it's CCP pre-brainwashing in action or they just know more about the situation, but they clearly don't find the western narrative convincing.
True. Though no worse than e.g. UK.
Sure. USA clearly wants to steal Greenland too.
I'd argue that's Trump, rather than the USA, whereas Taiwan seems to be a popular acquisition with the rank and file (or at least the rank and file Party Members).
I think that Trump also has quite a bit of quiet support on the topic. US really really wants to control all the places one can use as staging areas for mainland invasion. War against mexico, spain and the forever sanctions on communist cuba tell the story.
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You have a system where people choose who represents them by voting, and you accept the rules of that system. You don’t get to shrug off the consequences or pin the responsibility on “the other side” when it’s convenient. Trump represents your country. He is your country.
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A few things in order.
The common Scientific argument for this belief is the famous civic honesty study where the Chinese returned lost wallets at the lowest rate among all samples including clear shitholes, 7%. The authors decided to exclude Japan (a famously Based and Honorary Aryan society) from the study because the Japanese had similarly low return rates due to idiosyncrasy of their policy around lost items.
In the study design adapted to local customs (eg including WeChat rather than email contact in the wallet – the Chinese don't use email), the return rates jump to 59%, which is around Canadian result in the original study.
It's just bog standard biased research, confirmation of prior belief. Western sociology is pretty hollow once you look at it closely, both in its woke «Science has Spoken» and based «forbidden knowledge» branches.
This has become a self-reinforcing belief because the more impressive results they get, the less it is trusted. As a matter of fact I think Americans lie more at this point. For example, Chinese infrastructure definitely gets built, we can see it from space. Is there graft? Certainly, and much of it is likely not even needed. But graft is not the main story. Americans meanwhile just collectively appropriate vast sums, do nothing of value and lie to themselves that it's mere «inefficiency». Chinese products, especially high-end ones, work well enough to drive dozens of countries into trade deficit, Chinese scientists are sought after in the most ruthlessly competitive companies, Chinese commitments are fulfilled, concrete Chinese threats are followed by promised retaliations (unlike American ones). Where's the lie? They certainly lie at times, but probably no more than your typical developed nation. And importantly, they have improved a lot in just a few years, many travelers like Molson note it. Even a Georgetown China hawk Fedasuyk writes: «If the pessimists are right about American decline, if we really are headed toward some kind of Pax Sinica, it won’t be because of how many EVs roll off the line at a BYD factory — it will be because China has rediscovered something we’ve lost: How to make people feel part of something larger than themselves; how to take pride in historical achievement; how to sustain the promise of a national project worth contributing to.» Like, you can dismiss it as more Potemkin village, of course. But it's getting very solipsistic.
«IP theft» was overwhelmingly done in the form of legal joint ventures, though there's too much noise written on this. Extraordinary estimates of lost value are premised on the false assumption that Western IP proprietors would have been able to produce at anywhere near Chinese scale. Currently they produce enough IP of their own to force Macron to beg for reverse tech transfer via JVs in France. I guess they've ran out of things to steal.
Does anyone? Americans are are currently trying to annex a piece of an ally they're treaty-bound to defend. What «society»? On the object level, over the last two decades they've done more to help developing countries with BRI than the entire West did in five, they are the ones building roads and power plants in Africa. Their model is transactional but much more powerful than hopeless charity.
For a very relaxed definition of genocide, I guess. «Cultural genocide» or something. Feels quaint after Gaza. More seriously it's just coercive modernization of a premodern people, and Uighur situation is arguably improved relative to pre-genocide times.
They deny their population certain political rights standard in the West, in exchange for improvement in life expectancy (already on par with the US), purchasing power and overall dignity of existence. Even in the last few years where real wage growth has been slow, they continually get more and better goods and infrastructure, with eg households consuming 8% more electricity year on year and already above the EU median. It's a very paternalistic form of oppression and I believe one preferable to something like Russia or the United Kingdom.
Yes they've made it very clear, have been very consistent on this, and forced roughly everyone to stop recognizing Taiwan as a nation. I would prefer nations that strongly disapprove of that to recognize Taiwan again. From their perspective it's an unfinished civil war, which is a legitimate cause for annexation. Given that the ruling party of Taiwan has discredited itself with bad governance and petty tyranny and the pro-Mainland KMT is likely to win, and considering abusive American treatment of Taiwan and better life/jobs opportunities in the coastal cities of the Mainland, they are increasingly likely to get reunification by peaceful means. I will concede that the insistence on getting ready to use force is immoral.
They are single-handedly solving climate change. They have driven costs of solar panels, batteries and wind turbines through the floor and continue to drive them lower. They've upgraded their coal fleet to pollute less, they're investing a lot in reforestation and cleaning up in regions with rare earth extraction etc. They pollute a lot becuse they do a lot of stuff, but they are in fact pretty sincere about ecology.
I have put vastly more effort into this than you did, but admittedly it's also mostly assertions that can be dismissed (I could support every one with a citation if I cared though). Just irritated at how easily people in rather mediocre societies can rattle off some half-baked condemnations.
Re. China and the environment: https://newsletter.doomberg.com/p/assisted-thinking.
TL;DR China's economy mostly runs on coal. The renewables they do have on their local grid only make small contributions. Also, if you read some of the comments, their existing solar industry is running into serious headwinds and the solar panels they do have only have a utilization factor of ~11-12%.
Typical propaganda to help Westerners cope, their emissions have not increased for at least a year. This year virtually all new capacity is renewables.
Low solar utilization is an issue of inadequate battery capacity which they are now aggressively scaling.
Without renewables, at this rate of generation growth they'd have been burning 30% more coal.
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You wrote more but that does not mean I'm convinced about most of your points:
RE: Lying - The West typically attempts to have objective reliable processes outputted by the government and corporate sectors that represents various things. China does not. For a recent and important example consider COVID policies, statistics, and information.
RE: IP Theft - I don't believe your statements on this are factually accurate.
RE: International Society - The U.S., Western Europe, and the weaker countries all at least pretend. China acts like the other "evil" countries. That is not good company.
RE: Genocide - Meh, I'm not particular excited about this one but the genocide people seem to argue that it counts.
RE: Oppression - You can get disappeared just as easily in China as Russia. You can get welded into your home during COVID. From the rich to the poor nobody has any rights unless they are an in favor party elite, all it takes is to get noticed. To add to the angst is an anarcho-tyranical element, petty corruption is everywhere and the country just sweeps through areas every once and awhile to execute or imprison anyone misbehaving. The superficial competence of the regime makes it worse not better.
RE: Taiwan - In the case of Russia/Ukraine the national pride aspect is somewhat countered by other somewhat compelling reasons such as the ports and agriculture. In the case of China/Taiwan it seems to primarily out of imperial angst, as the high tech industries that give Taiwan are fragile and would likely not survive kinetic action. If some democratic process occurs obviously it will be a bit different.
RE: The environment - While China does contribute to some renewables I challenge you to find a reputable source indicating Chinese is better for the environment than the West. This perception is not driven by mere propaganda effort.
I repeat, "the West" routinely does corrupt shit that people in China get executed for. Virtually the entire American MIC would get the lethal injection in China, it's just legal and accepted. Being forthright about your vices is kind of a virtue, but only so long as people are not deceived that vice is actually okay.
What about COVID? They had wrong priorities, but broadly competent execution and thus very low deaths for the entire period of the lockdowns until Omicron. Maybe some data had been fudged at the margins. The denial is, again, circular.
What about statistics? For example they are often accused of distorting their GDP growth; the Fed thinks it's about accurate, just smoothed for whatever internal accounting reasons. They have significantly more honest accounting of manufacturing productivity, and accordingly higher productivity, both in units per worker and output per dollar of cost, which is to be expected seeing as how they clobber everyone in the global market. Tons of «Western objective reliable processes» is Eagle Burger Freedom Institute for Democracy inventing a contrived composite index to rank countries or companies from best to worst, it's so far divorced from base layer of reality that I have no idea who needs that. I don't know what you mean by «information».
Regarding pretense: «China has stated its position on multiple occasions on Greenland. The international law underpinned by the purposes and principles of the UN Charter is the foundation of the current international order and must be upheld. We urge the U.S. to stop using the so-called “China threat” as a pretext for itself to seek selfish gains.» I have no idea what you mean, they «pretend» as much as anyone, and they also don't bomb random countries or kidnap their presidents (they totally could stage coups in Africa for their benefit at this point, they do not). Your morality and idea of good and evil are comically self-serving.
We've just had a Chinese person explain that this is wrong, the petty corruption is pretty much gone, why do you believe you have a better clue as to the state of their corruption or how «superficial» the competence is? I think Xi is a true believer in anti-corruption because he's a child of true believers, has been a true believer all his life, became Chairman on the anti-corruption agenda at the peak of Chinese corruption scandals, purges loyalists who've been growing corrupt, and by all visible indicators corruption is down. It's not anarcho-tyranical, there's no anarchy to speak of, at worst there's tyranny. You're just rehashing tropes 10-15 years old.
Other tropes about disappearances etc. are also unsubstantiated.
They do not "while contribute to some renewables". They are the only player in town., eg “in 2023 China produced 98% of solar wafers, 92% of cells and 85% of panels globally”. They carry the entire renewables revolution, pretty much single-handedly, for the last decade, they are the ones who kept investing in it and made it economical rather than a boutique graft opportunity for Europeans, and now they're exporting cleantech for higher value than the US exports fossils. This was a conscious choice, they could have just kept scaling coal consumption.. It's largely strategic but also ecologically minded.
Whether «the West» is broadly good or bad is uninteresting because the West is largely made up of two parts: deindustrializing decaying states like the UK and most of the EU, and major fossil producers like the US/Canada/Norway/Australia. Someone needs to have industry to produce all the goods our industrial civilizaiton relies on. This someone happens to China. In light of this fact they've done pretty well on developing towards a more ecologically friendly regime.
Basically, the question for me isn't whether they're good or bad in some absolute sense. The question is how responsibly have they acted in their particular circumstances, which is, starting (say, after the death of Mao – I won't get into the merits of Maoism now; his power was a product of his key role in the creation of the state itself and unfortunately he couldn't have been dislodged earlier) with a very large, very poor and very angry population, in possession of little resource endowment but massive military potential, and facing an ideologically hostile West committed to convert or destroy them in the long run. What did they prioritize, and how did they execute? The standard for such situations is very, very low. In this context, I say they've acted with nearly unprecedented prudence and restraint for a major power, and produced unexpectedly good results: reduction of poverty at home, exporting deflation abroad, bailing you guys out in 2008, maintaining the economic viability of dozens of small states now, and not going on a conquest spree, even as they've been the largest industrial power with the largest army for many years now.
Morally, it is comparable to the rise of the United States.
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They did a bunch to get up to speed but now that relative parity has been achieved there's inherently less need to delve into such behaviors. If anybody but the Chinese was capable of manufacturing at scale, this would be a bigger issue, but alas the West has largely abandoned 'actually making things' and the South is the South.
They are absolutely still engaged in state sponsored industrial espionage, and in a way that is pretty much unmatched given the way the state and companies over lap.
They still engage in a lackadaisical approach to international copyright (not that I am that mad about it).
Still continue to basically ban foreign competitors of various tech things and then make their own version.
One of the biggest ethical problems of the country is also its strength - state power and totally unfair business practices.
Certain you can do that, and you can get away with it if you are China but it is deeply unethical.
I don't understand how this is bad. Had they not done this, there would just be Google China, Meta China and so on instead of locally grown Tencent and Alibaba. Imagine being a major power and wanting to decouple from America for whatever reason in the future and you basically can't because all government and corporate infra is ran on Microsoft Teams and AWS. You just can't let that happen. This is Europe's reality right now by the way
I'd be more amenable to this if it wasn't for the industrial espionage and IP theft - I'm not complaining about VK here.
You also have a difference between likely popular versions (like Korea and Japan have) and state enforced ones.
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Also to a large degree the inability of a Western country or Western-adjacent one to deal with issues of Islam in a sensible, structured form of oppression like China handled the Uyghur is why you end up with massive shitfests like Gaza. Israel has been sufficiently handcuffed from actually reshaping Palestinian society (and the Gazaites are just another level of insane death cultists) that it produces forever wars and lingering issues.
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Based China. Intellectual property is not real property.
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No. China is ... lawful evil. But one of the things that people don't understand is that well run dictatorships end up as disneylands with death penalty. The streets are clean, the trains run on time, they usually care about things like corruption and want the justice system to be reliable, predictable and somewhat just when it is not related to state interests. There are also feedback channels and the borders are somewhat porous so that the troublemakers can actually get out. Why - because total oppression is expensive. It is cheaper for the regime to provide high degree of economic freedom than to go completely planned economy. And economic prosperity tames down the desire for political freedom in the vast majority of people. Shanghai was one of the few places in the world that I have been that the concept of street crime was out my mind. China is probably also the state I least want to cross while under their jurisdiction - they will just crush you. And with total indifference.
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China is good if you are typically Chinese, with instincts toward emotional suppression, conformity, lower novelty-seeking, in-group cohesion, etc. I imagine the rigidity in work and school would drive the typical European into neurosis. There’s no reason to think that a state can ever be designed such that it maximizes the happiness of two distinct cognitive / temperament types.
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I live in the region and have been to China a bunch of times recently.
It's not a perfect society but also seems to be less keenly attuned to shooting itself in the foot than most Western countries at this point, and conditions on the ground have improved a ton in recent years. I personally much prefer going to China to Japan for a bunch of reasons, as controversial as some people will inevitably find that. There's a reasonably competent system in place with longterm goals that doesn't get easily derailed by ridiculous screeching or idpol.
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The Chinese tech sector is second rate, and only survives on the absolute impenetrable protectionism that the government provides. Besides tiktok, no matter the big tech, China's is inferior. Weibo is worse than Twitter, Taobao is worse than Amazon, Baidu is worse than Google, Wechat is worse than WhatsApp etc. And Chinese online advertising is so scummy that it makes godawful western advertising industry look like a bunch of saints.
Rideshare and meal delivery are better in china because they aren't tech companies, they're delivery companies and taxi services, and have a far lower cost of labor in china.
You don't know how bad things really are, because none of the shit that happens there is allowed to viral on chinese media, and also won't get translated into English. Of course it's unfortunate that in the west half of the elected officials serve the enemy, but that's kind of a natural consequence of half the population voting for the enemy.
Japan's tech industry is in shambles though. Galapagos is over and Japan is basically standardizing along the lines of every other western aligned country.
What? Chinese companies absolutely curb-stomp their competitors on international markets (especially the European ones)
In many industries yes, but not in tech.
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Have you extensively compared these yourself? They're engineered in different ways to suit different tastes but unilaterally proclaiming Wechat worse than Whatsapp is tricky when there's a ton more stuff running through Wechat and it's kind of developed its own niche.
Yes I've used wechat and it's extremely scuffed. The fact that there's a mobile wallet on there has zero bearing on the messaging functionality. And "mini-apps" that westerners gush about are just webviews with an injected payment api.
Western messaging apps- imessage, whatsapp, telegram, discord, etc all have tons of polish on their mobile apps.
What should also be telling is that literally zero people use wechat who don't also have someone currently residing in the PRC in their circle. If wechat was good, there would at least be a community somewhere that uses it.
It being a pain in the ass to verify your account as not a spammer as a foreigner is part of that, which admittedly might be a chicken and the egg situation of 'It's hard to verify since there's no large independent foreign userbase and it's hard to have a large foreign userbase when you get kicked off for not verifying'
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Above all else, I just want to be a good Catholic. And America is one of the best places in the world to be a Catholic, while China is one of the worst. If you have other priorities and China comes out on top, you can try immigrating.
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I have lived in China, and I like it a lot. Some of its tier 1 cities are quite livable, and there are smaller towns that are also quite nice as well.
The core issue is that... It's not a democracy. Not in a moralistic sense, but it ends up making bad decisions, and then follows through with them come hell or high water. It was genuinely impressive how they marshalled society to get to (near) zero COVID for years, but it was a stupid goal that hurt its economy. It could similarly do something really stupid re:Taiwan, and it can persist in that decision for years.
It also has severe fertility issues, but that seems a broader issue affecting all the East Asian countries. You might hope that its authoritarianism would give it more capability to address that issue, but so far we're not seeing anything too effective coming out of it.
Ok, but both bad decisions and fertility exist in the West too. It's hard to gauge whether on average Chinese government makes more bad decisions than an average Western one (probably not even possible to objectively measure), but it's not evident to me that they don't have an advantage on this one.
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I find much to admire in the PRC, and just as much to disdain or decry.
China is one of the few countries around with real state capacity. Holy shit, it is difficult to overestimate how important that is to getting anything done. It's not so much that they started out uniquely capable, it's more that everyone else, especially in the West, entirely fumbled the ball. The America of the Hoover Dam? A distant memory. The West has decentralized so hard that it's ruled by a tyranny of the minority, with so many people with de-facto veto power that something as mundane as a metro station arrives ten years late and ten times over budget. The West intentionally threw away the keys to the kingdom, and embraced stagnation. It is easy to plateau when you start off at a peak, with your basic human necessities taken care of, and a sense of "things are basically fine".
A lot of the things the rest of the world wrings their hands over are simply addressed pragmatically and directly by China. Worried about oil? Build so many solar panels they blot out the sun (if you're very short). The US says you can't have their fancy (Taiwanese) GPUs? Fuck it, we say no after Nvidia and its (Taiwanese) CEO lobby a retarded president into relenting. Turns out, you can have a heavily protectionist, mercantilist economy if you're really fucking good at it, and the rest of the world is entirely addicted to your products.
Turns out that there is, in fact, a reasonably acceptable exchange rate between the two. Now, I'd very much prefer the kind of freedom the US offers, but living in the Yookay, China doesn't seem so bad. The topics they censor aren't the drums I want to beat, they won't throw me in prison for discussing HBD.
At the moment, China doesn't seem to have grand imperial ambitions. They have little interest in injecting their values and mores into the lives of people who look nothing like them. If you have something that passes as a state, and you're willing to trade with them, they'll take you. There's something refreshing about relying on enlightened self-interest instead of "liberal values", even if I'm generally a fan of said values.
(There is no guarantee that this self-absorption will remain indefinitely, if they become the hegemonic power)
Now, if only they'd stop being retarded about Taiwan, and the South China Sea, or Arunachal Pradesh...
Other than the US, they're also the only other country with a realistic shot at AGI, or even a mere human employment crisis. They've got the factories, and no hangups about automating everything that can be automated.
It's far from a given that the century will be Chinese, but I'm willing to nihao at some fine shit and not particularly mind. If they unbanned Reverend Insanity, the CCP has my vote.
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I wrote up a long high effort reply to this and then my browser app froze and when it returned the page refreshed and my in progress reply was gone. So I apologize but my second attempt is going to be shorter
1: I knew vaguely there were "rumours" about China doing forced organ harvesting. I only learned very recently the rumours are basically not rumours and have a lot of evidence. My mental model was also maybe dozens of such cases if they were real and not a conspiracy theory. The actual mathematical discrepancies suggest I was wrong by several orders of magnitude. There's a ton written about this if you Google it, I had just so automatically dismissed it as a conspiracy theory I never had. I apologize for not getting the links I originally included but it really is very simple to find.
Edit: I'll add some now
https://humanrightscommission.house.gov/events/hearings/forced-organ-harvesting-china-examining-evidence
https://www.mccaininstitute.org/resources/blog/uncovering-evil-illegal-organ-harvesting-in-china-and-the-2025-stop-forced-organ-harvesting-act/
https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/76845/html/
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2021/06/china-un-human-rights-experts-alarmed-organ-harvesting-allegations?LangID=E&NewsID=27167
2: The level of censorship in China is very extreme. My penpal told me as a funny story that when they banned stack overflow the software engineers rioted and they backtracked, but in general they ban things freely and arbitrarily. As someone who does follow lots of Chinese media I get used to tv shows getting cancelled or the plotlines getting massively changed because someone decided that from now on you're not allowed to have zombies. The latest development is now you're not allowed to positively portray permanent transmigration, they think it's a suicide risk. It's very much not just the "obvious" don't say anything about tianenmen square, don't criticize the government, etc, it's constant stupid nonsense.
Regarding censorship, there was an old article I remember well but sadly never saved. It was about a western journalist in China who worked closely with censors. The most fascinating thing to him was how opaque the process was. One moment they'd censor something that seemed completely innocuous and another they had zero problem when he was sure they'd want some change. They would never explain the rules of what leads them to act.
One of the standard dilemmas of censorship is that the censors can't just publish a detailed list of what people can't publish without defeating the whole point. You have to come up with broader and/or more-opaque rules that encompass but avoid revealing the narrower rules you really care about, and there's no rule less revealing than "just ask and we'll tell you if it's forbidden". The public has to be kept uninformed about what the public is being kept uninformed about.
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Permanent transmigration? Like leaving China or?
As sun_the_second explained, I meant isekai, I specified permanent because that's the specific kind that became not allowed so a bunch of books I'd read added epilogues where ta-da the protagonist is suddenly back in the real world, it wasn't permanent after all. But in webnovel sites it's tagged as and pretty consistently referred to as "transmigration".
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You might know it by the word "isekai". AKA that thing in fiction where people from our world go into a different world, usually unexpectedly and sometimes after death.
I've seen at least one Anglophone author use "portal fantasy" as the Western equivalent of the term "isekai". I haven't seen any use "permanent transmigration".
In my experience of n=1 reading Chinese cultivation novels, the term has been "transmigration".
"Portal fantasy" sounds misleading to me. Like it's about a world where rifts open in random places and monsters come out to be slain for loot.
No, "portal fantasy" is an older term (dating back at least to 1997) and describes works like Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and The Chronicles of Narnia where a kid gets transported to a fantasy land to have adventures and save the day before returning home to their ordinary lives (xkcd boils down the genre to a nutshell in "Children's Fantasy"). It's also different from the modern isekai genre, which usually involves older teenagers or outright adults dying and being reincarnated into a fantasy world, often with great powers.
As seen, for example, in Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom series.
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There's a handful of weird intermediate works: Spellsinger has a loser adult who doesn't die, but never returns and gets great powers; Magic Kingdom
For SaleSOLD has a successful adult who could return but doesn't want to do so and is flakier on powers, Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure has a teenager with great powers who eventually has to force his way back into the alternate world, the main Barsroom stories have an adult getting superpowers in mere irreversible transportation but a couple characters eventually end up getting Truck-Kun'd into space.But normally, yeah, there's a pretty clear division, and that's ossified a lot in the last two decades.
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One of the cognitive biases that irritates me most in the Western thinking is «ideological similarity = moral good». Democracies are good if you're democratic, nationalisms are good if you're nationalist, Putin is good if you're Based, and the whole nonsense about the Judeo-Christian Tradition of course. It's probably an outgrowth of the Western European/Hajnal Line selection for participation in non-clannish moral communities – parishes, religions, nation states. Regardless of its historical adaptability in the parochial intra-European context, it's facile. Ideological similarity can help in alliance-building due to the shared conceptual language, but it can also create conflict if the ideology points you towards the same scarce resource rather than some mega-project. Different branches of Communism are mortal enemies because each wants to remake the world in their idiosyncratic manner, even as they are infinitely more similar to each other than to non-Communisms. And nationalisms are the primary example. The meta-level rule is just «my people first», for whatever definition of «people»; it's not even an ideology in the proper sense but an intellectual framework for advanced tribalism. What interests do a Han Chinese nationalist and a MAGA Heritage American have in common? They both want their people to have more resources and power to deny resources to the other tribe. Some rational win-win cooperation is possible, and common knowledge about incentives may help reaching the equilibrium, but ultimately it's a natural foundation for a zero-sum game. Ideally, you want others to cooperate unconditionally and be free to defect.
That said, I do think that the PRC is basically good. Or rather, they have a holistic notion of "good" that leads to a meaningfully healthier civilization, which is at once competitive and not very aggressive. Among all else, they have
Now, it's not like the Chinese people have an infallible internal compass pointing to goodness; what is and what isn't seen as «superior behavior» is contingent on the social consensus. But the consensus isn't totally deluded or hypocritical either, and crucially, it can be steered by the elite that has skin in the game and wants to stay elite for generations to come.
It's a rare, strong and valuable package. It also has a plethora of failures not shared with the Western civilization and/or others, which may (or may not) be intrinsic to their system and impossible to ameliorate without compromising the strong parts.
I view it as an experiment among other experiments. Thus far it has been impressive, but research continues. It'll probably be good for the Han Chinese in the long run. Whether it'll be good for the rest of us… well, they'll definitely solve change on their own, for one thing. Just no way around it at this point, they have made solar dirt cheap, they're making battery storage dirt cheap, they've bulldozed through the European degrowth bullshit by proving that you can have both economic growth and low carbon emissions. Their own emissions have been stagnant for like 2 years now despite ≈6% annual electricity consumption growth, exports to the developing world have high double digit CAGR, it's a self-reinforcing loop with no discernible limit. Anthropogenic climate change used to be a big deal politically, Westerners are still debating kooky conspiracy theories at the behest of the fossil lobby, but soon people will realize we won't need to bother anymore, renewables simply make more economic sense.
That's one thing. There are more things. You can solve many problems with an insanely productive large scale economy. Mainly they'll be solving their problems, though. They don't have any moral commitment to international charity.
P.S. I have to say, while some skepticism on China is warranted, takes like @Amadan's here are very blackpilling.
Just how uncurious do you have to be to remain so ignorant of the 2nd biggest nation on the planet that makes half of all your shit, that has been the only state to retaliate and fight you back just in the course of this year's tariff insanity, your supposed arch-nemesis, the oldest surviving continuous civilization etc. etc.? As far as I'm concerned, Han Chinese are the closest thing we have to an alien species (maximally distinct and consequential of all non-Western groups), and China is the main story of the world's development over the last two millenia, only briefly deposed by the European diaspora; it's crazy interesting, but it's relegated to the same basket as Russia (the last European empire, mainly distinguished by its backwardness and large near-Arctic possessions) and «Gulf States» (…come on now). I've been saying on this forum for years that Based Russia is an embarrassing LARP cooked up by the likes of Surkov, that we're fake and gay corrupt atheists with some talent for theatricality (shared by yours truly) and bog standard nationalist-authoritarian schticks. I love my people, there are some very cool things about us, but it's just not a big deal. How can you not notice that, say, they can routinely create a new industrial equipment plant in 1 year? Or that they're The Only Country that has drastically increased its share in high-quality research in many critical fields? That it's no longer just «catching up»? From the fresh NBER review:
And it's all like this. Russia? Saudi Arabia? Really? Where does one get the chutzpah to look down on this? How is this psychologically possible? Is this just because the US has barred imports of high-tier branded Chinese goods like EVs and Huawei phones, and the industrial stuff they do export and dominate in (from advanced chemistry batteries to John Deere parts) gets wrapped into American-branded shells, so the only thing you see is dolls, baby strollers and crappy cheap plastic and chinesium tools from ebay?
I feign the bafflement, to be clear. Theirs is a highly illegible and uncharismatic culture, their advertisement smells fake and gauche, all those drone shots of LED-lit skyscrapers and tiktok reels with high-pitched alien music. It's very easy to appreciate intellectually but it's not in-your-face amazing like the US or Europe or Japan used to be. Still, I am blackpilled with the lack of intellectual… hunger among the Western commentariat.
Westerners enormously overrate the value of their taste and gut feeling. The Chinese don't really need to hide strength&bide time; their natural low charisma and Western preoccupation with signals isomorphic to reproductive value indicators did all the work for them.
It's darkly flattering how very seriously, in comparison, my own people had been taken during the Cold War — with all our grinding poverty, our low trust and laziness, our dysfunctional empire of subsidized third worlders, our bonkers suicidal economic system, and our petty, unvirtuous leadership. Essentially just because we can write, sing, dance, fuck well. Because we can pose and flex to make Americans cast Dolph Lundgren as Ivan Drago and imagine themselves scrappy underdogs, while being precisely the opposite.
So I'm trying to use our theatrical virtues to correct the record.
Would you happen to have a citation/link on Confucius's doctrine of shame/virtue? Would be very interesting for me to compare to the Greeks.
Just read the Analects. I don't know which translation is the best, I generally double check with LLMs.
but this seems okay: http://www.acmuller.net/con-dao/analects.html
The Confucian notion of virtue (De, 德) is more like "moral charisma", the power to overawe lessers by your example and force them to try following it. That's what I see in Liang Wenfeng's project.
A great deal of the Analects is just discussion on the properties of the noble/superior man. Mencius also wrote on this of course.
Of note, Confucius was apparently exceptionally tall and strong, and so might have been a bit confused of how easy it is for a noble man to intimidate people into deference.
Like my old longsword teacher being constantly baffled by the weird things us small people do, including being unable to leverage superior height and reach.
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Thanks, much appreciate having the specific verses.
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Eh... I've got much more mixed feelings.
It's hard to deny China's effectiveness. The success are somewhat overstated and the failures papered over, at times -- I think China's official numbers on COVID are jokes, and for a more sympathetic case I don't think the government wants to admit how badly they've been screwed over on a number of Belt and Road Initiative operations despite their good effects -- but they're outweighed by its successes, and it's hard to overstate how significant those successes are. China has lifted itself out of staggering poverty, and much of urban China now competes with, or sometimes beats, the quality of life of European countries. News media focuses, imo wrongly, on the flashy stuff like the trains and skyscrapers and chip fabrication, and many of those are especially noteworthy because they are hard, but it's the stuff that's 'easy' and too many countries can't do that's impacted every life on the continent for the better.
And there's a lot of sympathy to go around. Dotted lines and Taiwan aren't great for modern international diplomacy, but the Opium Wars were ethical abominations, and like everyone on that side of the world that wasn't Japan, China has a lot of very valid frustrations with historic Japanese international policy and the resurgence of Japanese hard-righters.
((And I'll skip the various Great Powers questions: international politics is a game where the only rule is that the strong do what they must, and the weak suffer what they will, yada yada.))
The problem's what it chooses to do. I won't blame the CCP for the One Child Policy, since a very specific group of Westerners promoted and drove the campaign. But those Westerners were incompetent gits; government officials acting on their behalf are what lead to a demographic tree that leaves sane people praying that the stats are fake. It's that sort of problem, writ large. Chinese fishing fleets are the best in the world at strip-mining wildcaught fish, Chinese construction companies are the best in the world at building skyscrapers no one lives in, everyone knows how much a critic I am of American academic fraud and Chinese diploma mills manage to beat them at their game. These are only a tiny portion of China's success stories, but they show a country that's able to compete with Elon Musk, and yet either doesn't want to limit its space program from dropping a Tianlong misfire into a town. A populated one! Yes, there's also the human rights abuses, like an incredibly effective organ donor program, or the giant panopticon, or the forced abortion, but they're honestly symptoms.
((Indeed, a lot of great things from China occur where matters can slip through the cracks. Ghost shifts are embarrassing, but they've empowered a massive amount of Chinese and worldwide entrepreneurship. But it's not enough to point at an omelet and break eggs.))
I'll actually give the opposite criticism of Greer, here. Paeans to his specific form of anti-materialist and puritan morality have no sway on me. But where I agree with him solely that Xi's anti-corruption drives have had some beneficial effect, I can very easily see those powers being driven to more malicious ends, and likely to be so driven, and in many ways are already pushed in that sphere. That's more immediate and direct a concern from my perspective. I'm moderately aware, so far as Westerners can be aware, of how tolerance of homosexuality has ebbed from a conclusion that could credibly pretend to be more stable and family-oriented than Western celebrationism into one that's less plausibly keeping to its credo than 1990s DADT. Maybe it stops there. Maybe.
Maybe it dials back heavily on some of the bigger problems. Maybe there's one of a thousand other cultural or economic problems that it's doing great on that's next on the chopping block.
I'd argue that a state that has the mandate of heaven does not need, nor want, the level of cultural indoctrination that the Chinese government demands, but I could be persuaded I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just missing a lot of the cultural context behind scrubbing media of human bones, and the Germans do that too (how have things been working out for the Germans?). Maybe my country got lucky, and I'm vastly underestimating how many eggs you gotta break.
I know that a state that has the mandate of heaven does not need, nor want, to control the outcome of Hugo Awards, or whether a bike-sharing company CEO can fly business class, or RealSexyCyborg's tweets.
Pessimistically, this leaves the country far more fragile than it admits. If it needs these defenses against those things, it is, or believes it is vulnerable to them. Worse -- and given that over a billion people depend on them directly and closer to three billion do so indirectly, I don't just mean 'worse' for the CCP -- I'm not convinced anybody can continue that level of control permanently. AI helps a lot, but it doesn't help that much, and in many ways it's going to make the mid-term less stable.
The middle possibility holds that these are just another form of corruption, made invisible to China's internal controls because it's what those controls have been made to not recognize. So long as no one's getting too rich, a la Ma, or too conventionally powerful, it doesn't matter if they're getting the ability to enforce their will on the world writ large. And, to be fair, an unfeatherbedded bridge to nowhere is better way to enrich random blue collar types than Raytheon featherbedding a million dollars for a thirty-dollar bomb. But the NGOification of everything has more than its fair share of issues.
Optimistically, the greatest defense I can offer of that side of China is that it doesn't need nor want to do these things. They're simply easy to do, and options exist, and can be done, and thus must be done; like the United States, they are guided by the beauty of their weapons rather than the available information, and like the United States, they've poisoned the tools they could otherwise use to gather accurate information.
Which is its own damning critique.
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The level of ignorance well-educated Americans have about China is honestly baffling, especially considering how many Chinese nationals literally live among them, how easy it is now for anyone with enough curiosity to see at least what Chinese social media is actually like, and how the civilian and bureaucrats pretend to take China seriously. A few weeks ago Scott Alexander in his open thread, quoted someone claiming that China has a whopping 50% youth unemployment rate (to his credit, he did acknowledge that he hadn’t verified the number). And of course during any discussions you get the usual “social credit score” or “cook the book” talk points. If people wants to talk about overproduction or involution or demographics or the pathological striver culture or the weak cultural output, I’m all for discussion. But using those recycled talk points from ten years ago is all so tiresome.
I sometimes wonder whether Americans today have roughly the same level of understanding of China as people had of the Soviets back in the day. Or maybe Russia being (at least in our Oriental mental map) Western meant it was better understood? Genuinely not sure. Don’t you want to know your enemy, if thats what we are?
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Are China's economic fundamentals sound? Do they not have a problem with cooked books and all the usual problems of a command economy that can make everything look like it's absolutely splendid until it's not? Do they not have their own demographic issues?
I am not "incurious" or saying I don't think China is a first world power. Of course it is. I am not "looking down" on them. Their technological progress, and their prodigious transformation since the days of the Cultural Revolution, is truly impressive. But that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of rot underneath. Or that they have already become the future hegemon, however much they may intend it.
There is a lot of ruin in a country, as they say- the West, and the US, are arguably coasting now until our own wheels come off, and China may be able to coast longer. Who knows? But it bemuses me that people who are quick to point out all the rot eating away at the West, despite us still being, in most respects, in a much superior position (which I do think is near a tipping point), take every piece of knob-slobbering news about Sino-ascendancy and their roaring economy and industrial output at face value. Because, good gosh, at least they aren't "woke."
They do but atleast they're producing physical goods instead of a weird vibe-based service model that inflates the fuck out of the value of basic requirements for living. The Chinese are largely housed (since the government decided to batter the fuck out of the upper-middle class by reigning in their property appreciation), the demographic issue is there but the Chinese elderly don't have the same ability to distort the economic system by demanding massive accommodation and they seem to be somewhat trying to maintain a society that actually builds things.
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Absolutely. The world's strongest talent pipeline, the world's most competitive market, the world's best infrastructure. Some things like capital markets need major work, but they are simply the least bullshit large economy on Earth.
It's not really a command economy, their state plans are guidelines. What does happen is, for example, suboptimal investment due to provinces rushing to fill the quotas and creating unproductive competition. The cooking is not a big contributor at this point.
The US has no experience dealing with a competent adversary, so I understand reaching for a cached example, but it's laughable to compare them and their problems to the Soviets. Soviets exported… crude oil and timber, so I guess they were about as advanced an economy as Canada. Chinese export, for example, humanoid robots to work at Airbus and Texas Instruments. Is this all a big Potemkin village? Is everyone in the West just bribed (with money created by deficit spending probably) to purchase inferior goods and help Xi save face? Maybe, but then that means that Western economies and societies are inferior in another way, if they're vulnerable to such tactics. Personally I think it's mostly about productivity.
The nature of the rot is what is in question. I will not deny stuff like oppressing Christians (though I will say that the specific Christians oppressed last time were revealed to be the Zion Church, with family members in American anti-China think tanks, and are obviously part of the US-Zionist intelligence network; more grassroots Christians also sometimes get stomped on). I could write about involution, or about the insanity of LGFVs, or cratering fertility and nearly South Korean gender animosity. But those are specifically Chinese issues. They are largely immune to «generic Communist» strains of rot because they are not generic Communists, have a completely unique system and can only be properly understood as their own civilization.
China's barely communist by the definition of other systems. Even Mao's historical status inside China is in a weird spot where he's praised but also essentially nobody agrees with the cultural revolution and the worst excesses of his reign. I'd also rather have too heavyhanded handling of religious issues than the current Western meme of 'let the Islamists do whatever'
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Other than being a totalitarian police state with no civil rights except those the government pretends to provisionally grant you, and most of its meritocracy and probably its economic numbers being as fake and gay as ours, sure, China is great.
Look, this gets trotted out fairly regularly about a lot of places that are on the surface technocratic modern states with a glitzy veneer where, as long as you are not a dissident, a minority or outsider, or basically anyone disfavored by the state, things are pretty fine. People say similar things about the Gulf states. I remember a few years ago, a lot of "based" trads were saying similar things about Russia: sure, maybe its kind of a little bit corrupt and run by oligarchs and Putin is a dictator who has people who displease him thrown out of ninth floor windows, but he cosplays as a Christian and they don't put up with woke nonsense.
We don't hear that quite so much since the beginning of the Ukraine war, but you still see a little of it here from our Russophiles, who mostly still love Russia because it's not globohomo woke. Leftists put Ukrainian flags in their profiles, therefore invading Ukraine might be... good?
Even the USSR and Nazi Germany were kind of okay for a lot of the population most of the time, and if the thing you hate above all else is anything that Western leftists like, then you can make a case that they were... good because they didn't have pride parades or hordes of imported Africans, I guess.
But I think very few people moaning about how awful things are in the West would actually find they prefer living in China. Unless you are the sort of person who can keep your head down and eat shit your entire life. People angry about having to sit through DEI sessions really underestimate the level of shit-eating that's required in places like China.
They are authoritarian, not totalitarian. That's an improtant distinction. Also, big deal, most countries in the world are authoritarian to some extent, most countries in history were. Hell, democracy does not guarantee freedom, just look at UK or Germany and how wrongthink there might get you in trouble.
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Obligatory 'Everything is Worse in China'.
(I believe Greer later, on Twitter, retracted the point about China at least not having the American gender nonsense. That is in fact spreading among Chinese youth.)
My experience, having known and talked to a fair number of people from mainland China, is that if you want to be politically successful you do have to participate in an awful lot of lies, or at least, insincerities. If you don't want to be part of that, you can mostly check out, but the way that goes for most Chinese people is that you resign yourself to living under a government and a social system that constantly barrages you with a combination of lies, misrepresentations, and technical truths, and you have no way of telling them apart. Most Chinese people know that their government is deceptive and incompetent, and generally try to route around it, or live with its demands, since they have no practical ways to change it.
Now I know what the obvious response is - that Western countries also have governments that barrage people with lies and misrepresentations, and that political or social advancement is also contingent on repeating lies and sincerities. I agree that this is mostly true.
But it is worse in China.
One of the things I'm very grateful to have heard and learned from Chinese friends is that intuitive sense of "same crap, different day". They deal with pretty much the same kind of garbage as Westerners. Only more of it. And worse.
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It's not quite your point, but it's fairly incontrovertible that today's Russia is the best Russia there's ever been. And it's even quite liberal by historical standards.
What you don't have is fair elections or genuine political competition, combined with somewhere between 40 - 200 political murders over the last 20+ years. But name one Tzar or Bolshevik with a better track record.
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Can you describe what you're talking about? This is a genuine question; I don't have any direct knowledge of what living in China is like. If I were to guess I would assume a certain amount of obsequiousness towards the Xi and/or the CCP is required but I imagine this feeling a lot more tolerable than being forced to pray at the alter of DEI (I sort of picture it as being similar to having to recite the pledge of allegiance or something).
Of course if you're a Uighur living in Xinjiang I'm sure the situation is quite different.
You have to pray at the altar of DEI and also communism in China too, it's just that they aren't true believers so everyone is just going through the motions. Certainly it's worse in the west where the DEI overlords believe their own nonsense, but the number of times you have to swear fealty to evil in china will still be a lot.
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The most salient difference is that I’m the us if you get tired of praying at the alter of DEI, there is in fact a political process, repeated every 2-4 years which enables you to select new leadership. Totalitarian states are so centralized that dramatic change can only really happens after the leader dies. What if China’s next leader is more like Mao?
It’s also my understanding that China doesn’t even permit free movement for most people (people can move but are not automatically entitled to receive public benefits), https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/china-theres-no-freedom-movement-even-between-country-and-city-2697/
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So China literally has a "department of propaganda*" (at least, according to an individual I know who lived in China for about 8 months). They'd come by every month and everyone would have to line up and take photos that presented China as a good place to live/work in. The individual in question was in a place that was specifically foreigner-focused (as in, I think they had native Chinese people running the place, but all of the people there were from foreign countries).
*Not a euphemism - they literally called themselves that in English.
Being very focussed on propaganda was fairly priced in to my view of the country. What you're describing does sound fairly excessive though.
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Well, I need to disclaim that I have not personally lived in China. But:
Obsequiousness towards the state is the big one, but it's also a very socially conformist society. Uighurs and Tibetans are oppressed, yes, but it's also not a great place to be a Christian (my understanding is that you can pray and go to church, but evangelizing is highly frowned on and anything that smacks of "activism" will get you slapped down in a hurry). The things you cannot talk about except in a state-approved way are numerous-- Tienmen square, Taiwan, anything critical of the government. There is a reason they have the "Great Internet Wall of China" that, while very porous and easy to bypass via VPN, is still a crime which can get you in trouble if caught. If you find yourself in legal trouble, forget about any of the due processes you are accustomed to in the West.
It's honestly baffling to me that anyone would say "China seems fine, better than being forced to pray at the altar of DEI." I mean, even if you are in the wokest of woke companies, no one is forced to "pray at the altar of DEI." You may be risking your career if you share your spiciest takes about HBD or male/female differences, but you cannot literally be arrested. Meanwhile in the street or here on the Internet you can call the president a retard, a corrupt tool of oligarchs, a Zionist agent, a pedophile, or anything else, and nobody can arrest you for that either, and you're highly unlikely to be fired even if you said it publicly on X. Try doing that in China. (I believe they also persecute you for "hate speech" in China as well: they may not care much about "DEI" as such, but start posting about how much you hate Jews or blacks or women and eventually you will attract negative attention with an actual government impact on your life.)
Our 2nd Amendment enthusiasts have many valid complaints about the breaches of their Constitutional rights, but you don't have even a shadow of those rights in China. Right now the USA is in turmoil over protesters versus ICE agents. I think some of the folks in this forum would not be unhappy if the National Guard starting machine-gunning protesters in the streets, but most people, even those who are strongly pro-ICE, agree that annoying purple-haired lesbians should be allowed to protest in a non-vehicular-homicidal way. In China, machine guns and tanks would be a real possibility. And not just for your annoying purple-haired lesbians.
Do they have to "worship at the altar of DEI"? Well, their version of DEI is called the social credit score. Would you like the government tracking everything you do and say and whether it is "anti-social" enough to start limiting your access to services, travel, credit, and being put under increased monitoring by the state? That seems better, really?
Again, for the average Chinese person, most of this is probably invisible, and for the affluent, life in the big cities is fine. Chinese have their own forums and social media and their versions of 4chan and the like. But all the stories we share here, about people being persecuted in various ways for wrongthink? Multiply that by an order of magnitude in China. Try being a "normie" Chinese with a few problems, some grievances about the system, or in a bit of legal and/or financial trouble. Try being a real wrongthinker.
I'll take (often dramatically, hyperbolically, catastrophically overstated) DEI bullshit over that.
Ok, so I know that it undermines my main point, but regarding the DEI afaik there is indeed affirmative action in China towards their ethnic minorities.
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I know this is a late response, but I want to point out that non-democratic high income countries with fairly robust civil freedoms exist and, more importantly, are not China. Singapore, the UAE, Liechtenstein, are not democracies and are much freer than China. Note that these are not based utopias, either- they're real countries. And they don't aspire to global power. In these places getting arrested for anti-government activities takes being incredibly annoying, not merely irritating. But they're also small countries that know their place in the global order. They have cooperative outside backers, guys. They don't aspire to be superpowers, which necessitates some internal stabilization mechanisms. The record of these in non-democracies is not good.
Singapore? The country where they literally whip your ass for writing "fuck PAP" on a wall?
If only it were so easy to have such a good time on the cheap. Mistress Xu charges by the stroke and the ball gag is extra.
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As is good and proper. Punishing vandalism is one of the very last things the state should still manage to do before we just shrug and let everyting collapse into utter anarchy.
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ZanarkandAbesFan is British, not American. There are hate speech laws there.
The West is not just the USA, and the state of free speech in the rest is considerably more tattered, to the point that these questions are worth asking. The PRC is still worse, but the bright line you speak of doesn't exist for us and it is... annoying... for you to claim that it does. I don't think I've quite stepped over the line in Victoria with my posts here, but I'm not 100% sure of that (and that's because I'm one of the more moderate Mottizens regarding the culture war).
On which note, @ZanarkandAbesFan I have to ask, are you a fan of
Or
I’ve always wondered.
The Zanarkand Abes are a sports team in Final Fantasy 10.
Thank you! That's one mystery solved.
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Glad to know someone got the reference :)
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I'm aware. Even Brits and Australians have more free speech than Chinese, though, and I think you'd be foolish to say you'd rather be governed by the CCP.
I did just say that, yes.
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The religiosity has been loosened a fair bit in the last decade or two, but you're also definitely not allowed to be obnoxiously proselytizing and there's been a certain slow surge back towards it. 'Traditional Chinese Religion' has probably been preserved better over in parts of Southeast Asia amongst the Chinese diaspora due to a lack of cultural revolution plus different cultural pressures. Malaysia, for instance, has a roughly 30% Chinese population in a Muslim majority country who have held strongly to a lot of their Chinese cultural markers partly out of a desire to actively stand out from the Malay ethnics.
Social credit score doesn't function like how you think it does, plus atleast stops all of the relentless own goaling of Western society where social defectors can essentially run around doing whatever they like for an unlimited amount of time. I'm personally willing to take the tradeoff of occasional oppression of protestors in exchange for cracking down on homeless and drug users in some sort of functional way.
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Go live there for a while, travel the country and then come to the same conclusion as pretty much every other foreigner, which is "No, god no, absolutely not".
People here have touched on the topic of the PRCs moral bankruptcy and how unpleasant the culture is, but I'm going to focus on something a little more mundane and say that if the PRC becomes ascendant and starts trying to export soft power via cultural exports, you will weep and beg for the woke media to return to save you.
It is my firm belief that Chinese opera should be classified as a form of torture and America missed a trick by not staging mandatory performances at Guantanamo. Lion dances are great though, I'm fine with them exporting that.
No one watches those except for the tourists. They have their own modern entertainment, which... Okay, I've seen some of it and it's not my cup of tea, but it's definetely a normal, modern entertainment.
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On the other hand Chinese cartoons and mobile games are ascendant and while still niche are quite competitive with Japanese ones.
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My riff on this for years has been how poorly Chinese cultural and political export industry goes. It's like an early model AI trying to write a birthday card for your mum. The words and sentiment are there. But it just feels like 15 degrees off somehow.
Their political engagement with the west is just cringe. When they try to pressure western countries it just comes off as the third born child turning 25 and finally standing up for themselves at the family barbecue. Everybody stands there quietly for a moment until big sis sniggers behind her hand and a smiling dad tells everybody to settle down.
Chinese news, from serious journalism to state mandated military propaganda is like something you'd read in a sci fi novel. "How can people take this seriously lol?"
Cultural export from China is crazily uncharismatic. And this is why, in my view, the US would end up with all the allies in WWIII and china would end up with the dregs of the international community. Nobody likes china, nobody outside of china knows what's going on in china, and nobody in china knows what's going on inside china either.
For all their economic progress, China have been totally unable to evolve in that cultural sphere. They can do the Peter Theil style "import all the good business ideas and scale them" but because they're locked in on maintaining their own cultural identity, which the CCP guards with an iron fist, they just cannot import Hollywood or Reddit. Because if they did, they'd feel the cascading oblivion of Western culture. A culture that would endanger the CCP more and more every day.
The result is a pretty ghastly and stagnant cultural climate that's stuck in, at best, the 90s.
But they have fast trains at least.
The US is losing its luster very quickly in Europe.. Hard to expect better elsewhere.
Do you actually believe this? Hollywood and Reddit, in 2026, really, that's the all-crushing maw of the cultural singularity, the engine powering Cthulhu's inexorable march of progress?
That's not really how the youth feels. Watch some streamers man.
Very much of this confident American commentary is just totally divorced from current reality. Their games are crushing it, their social media is extremely popular, their products are winning real respect. You're declining on literally every metric and don't even know it yet. You engage with the funny state propaganda staffed by the failsons of officials and assorted dregs of the Chinese society and think that's the spearpoint. It's the rear end.
USA has far more interests in playing world police, anyways. If anything China's fairly deliberate about not taking over any of the 'USA must feed the entire world and defend it and yaddayaddayadda' roles that have developed over the last few decades.
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China is the big replicator. Their biggest cultural exports are Arknights, Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero, all exploitative online games with anime art, nothing original. However, they can simply make a hundred more gachas and export the one that is exceptionally good.
As I said, copying things is not charisma. Where they can import a blueprint and copy another product, they do fine.
But that's anti leadership. Which is my point.
At this point (at least in gaming) we've hit a weird point where the west refuses to make the original recipe and therefore China is starting to overtake a bit.
What you are saying was super true for the longest time but Wokeness has left an opportunity and Asian produced and flavored things are taking over because the West is ass.
See: Kpop Demon Hunters for one. The amount of money made by Genshin et al for another.
I mean it's no mistake that the first truly mainstream content about K Pop was produced by Netflix. But regardless, I don't consider Korean or Japanese cultural influence as limited as Chinese influence.
Because the main problem for China is the CCP. Not Chinese people or culture.
I'm diagusted by the cultural vandalism of wokeness too btw. I just don't think our pursuit of enrichment will be done with a CCP member scowling over the director's shoulder back stage.
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I think this is because Chinese culture of today is not Chinese, but some weird modernist cargo cult culture based on the Chinese perception of the west. It’s of course uncharismatic because it’s a poor imitation of the real thing. And that also contribute to the poor taste of our people.
There is a disconnect between Chinese and the Chinese culture. It’s a civilization that have suffered utter defeat for 100 years, and then ruled by actual progressives who blame said defeat on their own culture and want to distance themselves from it for another 30 years, until they regain a bit of sanity. That’s about four or five generations. Many cultural memories, traditions, vocabularies are lost and hard for people to reconnect. This makes it really hard for the Chinese to export genuine Chinese culture. I think this might be an issue that will get solved once people become richer and have more free time and resource for artistic pursuit but we shall see.
Doesn't this roughly describe post-Meiji Japan too? Somehow they punch well above their weight in global culture (sushi, anime, business). (South) Korea arguably fits this narrative too, only with different imperial powers.
I don’t think the Japanese or the South Koreans have been ruled by their own people who actively destroyed their cultural heritage. Yes the Japanese had their own identity crisis after the Meiji restoration (e.g. 脱亚入欧) but I’m not sure if there is a societal wide, bottom up or top down destruction of its own cultural heritage similar to China. The South Koreans are subjugated by the Japanese from 1870s to 1945 and were forcefully Japanified, but being colonized is different from what we’re talking about here. North Koreans sure, and I don’t think they have any positive cultural export. Neither does Vietnam. I think the Vietnamese has the same problem just like us.
I guess a good comparison would be … the Turks? An empire that suffered defeat after defeat for a century and ruled by progressives who have in fact latinized their language and destroyed at least part of their cultural heritage? I’m not that familiar with them to tell if it’s an accurate description of their experience, but I’m also not reading Turkish novels or wearing Turkish clothes.
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The Western media's been nosediving in quality since the rise of wokeness, though. I'd prefer 20 year old Western highlights against current China stuff, but right now it's essentially Tiktok noise v Tiktok noise for a lot of casual media. I watched more decent quality Chinese films last year than I did Western ones, albeit maybe 2025 was just a bad year for Western Film.
The Chinese system isn't perfect but reigns in antisocial random battle encounters on public transport and seems to be trending in the right direction.
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