Comment by natvod | Hacker News Reader

Comment by natvod | Hacker News Reader

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> When you demand that your people bow and obey, and imprison people like A1 WW, this goes against promoting and nurturing innovation

This is a common misconception, especially by people who have never lived in China. Thinking political censorship means people are docile all spheres of life.

Chinese people are actually much more prone to rant and fight over everyday injustices: shopkeeper ripped you off, denied entrance somewhere, etc. etc. They just have to be careful not to publicly blame any politicians for the issue or try to organize some group activity to protest it.

Why do you think the government cracks down so hard? Because they're scared: massive and violent people rebellions have erupted throughout Chinese history.

Many Chinese people are also quite creative and innovative when it comes to making money and getting ahead. Some home cooks make deals with restaurants to let their patrons sample their homemade spices with their meals and to buy jars of it if they like it.

Others have started groups on Wechat where members pay to get advice on X topic (http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2015-11/13/content_22...). There are tons more examples like this. In fact, I'd argue it can be easier to get your idea started in China because regulations are lax and it's much easier to network to get what you need.

Also, just to point out, in the West, the majority of people aren't exactly "rebelling against the status quo" and showing "opposition to the norm" because they can march in a protest or sign a petition.

To make it extremely clear if it wasn't already obvious, I'm Chinese and I've lived both on the mainland and in South East Asia.

> This is a common misconception, especially by people who have never lived in China. They just have to be careful not to publicly blame any politicians for the issue or try to organize some group activity to protest it.

You've contradicted yourself pretty quickly; you haven't disputed my main point: people on the mainland on a whole are not willing to rebel and dissent against people and ideas that are above them like the authorities or even their own parents - this translates to other parts of industry and major schools of thought. For example, one of the reasons the Internet has a decentralized architecture is because its designers didn't want to give the US government centralized control over it. Bickering with your peers over trivial things doesn't count, willing to question your boss, teacher, or someone higher in the food chain is what matters.

That said I'm not saying that things can't or will never change. I'm just pointing out the major obstacles to innovation on the mainland.

> Also, just to point out, in the West, the majority of people aren't exactly "rebelling against the status quo" and showing "opposition to the norm"

Not everyone dissents, but there's a large enough portion of the population that does to push innovation and progress.

> because they can march in a protest or sign a petition.

It's easy to make fun of it, but yeah this shows how ingrained rebellion and dissent is in our culture and accepted, which is one of the main foundations of innovation.

Check your history - the internet is decentralized because it was designed to withstand a nuclear attack, nothing to do with censorship.

Actually it was not designed for for nuclear attack either, but packet switched networks have intrinsic merits.

Packet switching is independent to the goal of interconnected network. It's just easier to do with packet switching.

Connection based internetworking also works, it's just a lot harder to make it work for the original use case.

I didn't say it was the sole reason, but 'one of the reasons'

http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/10/06/353...

"But the people who were actually building this system, they weren't really thinking about Russian attacks. They were kind of rebellious anti-authoritarian types — they wanted power to the people. They called it 'computing power to the people.' And so they created a system in which every node on the Internet has the ability to store, to forward, to originate information. ... This decentralized system made it hard for the Russians to blow it up, but it also made it hard for the government or corporations to control the Internet. ..."

Free speech is not part of Darpa's motivations for inventing the predecessor of internet.

Note that Internet is driver from some evolved tech off Darpa's research.

Again, internet was not designed to advance any political goal, but to withstand nukes. And the internet now days is different from Internet when it's born. The difference is probably more prominent than between a monkey and a human being.

BTW not sure a statement from a media expert can be a proof of Internet's design and implementation goal. I never saw Viny Cerf's similar statement. He did mention Internet is made open in the recent gcp event.

You're right. Freespeech wasn't DARPA's motiviation. However it was the motivation of at least one of the engineers of ARPANET.

"My bias was always to build decentralization into the net. That way it would be hard for one group to gain control. I didn’t trust large central organizations. It was just in my nature to distrust them." -- Robert (Bob) Taylor

That's from the Issacson's book.

Sure, as long it's made clear that DARPA's motivation has no intention of freespeech, and DARPA is the main driver behind early internet research.

DARPA may be the main source of funding, but without the caliber of the team that implemented it; it probably would have either failed or faded into obscurity. A lot of people who live on the edge, tend to have a very strong independent spirit that tends to be at odds with figures of authority.

FIDOnet's temporary connections over POTS copper is arguably more resistant to censorship of a populace.

FIDOnet is arguably the precedent to the Internet, certainly Net culture derives more primally from the BBS scene than any IP transported culture.

Broadband connects an IP addy to a blameable citizen.

This produces a fear of sharing a connection ( and thus liability ) - this is concurrent with the demise of public WiFi.

Wynn Wagner III (Opus BBS) reports a support request from a doctor in Vietnam,[1] who states the (Vietnamese) internet is censored but the phones are not.

For similar but different reasons Tom Jennings reports FIDOnet support requests from .ru domains.[2]

The internets current distribution model seems unlikely to survive massive infrastructure attack, major connection bottlenecks are too narrow now.

Radio HAMS remain the likely communication network of first resort after any large scale devastation.

Facebook is not particuarly more than a very large BBS, (with the addition of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon[3]).

"Though actual observation may be discontinuous, fear of observation is continuous. And, this constant fear of observation produces self-censorship, which, according to Winston, is a “habit that becomes instinct”. Consequently, the panopticon’s monopoly on the body gradually becomes a monopoly on the mind." [4]

[1] https://youtu.be/_Cm6EFYktRQ?t=17m50s

[2] https://youtu.be/_Cm6EFYktRQ?t=17m24s

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

[4] https://mylittleplanet.edublogs.org/2015/07/09/utopia/

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