This is entirely unrelated, but it reminds me of a comment I saw on reddit that was very telling. Someone was talking about a colleague of his who was Chinese and had come to the US, and who, over dinner with some other colleagues, said: "I can't believe how smooth your propaganda is here in the US. In China it is crude and everyone can see through it, but here you almost miss it." To which all of the other colleagues replied: "What are you talking about? We don't have propaganda in the US!"
I wish I could find it, it was very telling of the climate in China (I assume, I've never been).
Just another special case of how centralized systems can't compete with distributed competition systems. Chinese propaganda comes from the government and doesn't have any reason to improve. In the US, you have propaganda from the two major sides of the government and various agencies, in addition to a wide-open market in propaganda in the commercial market which we call "marketing" and "public relations", in a constant unrelenting barrage in competition with each other: "Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?" "Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree."
Of course we're better at it, we've got tons more practice. For that matter our government isn't all that great at it, the best and most effective ideological propaganda in this country actually comes from commercial interests like Fox News and the New York Times. (And if you think one of those is much less biased than the other... ha!)
And also a reminder that the market will efficiently execute pretty much anything, regardless of the desirability of efficient execution.
And also a reminder that the market will efficiently execute pretty much anything, regardless of the desirability of efficient execution.
A couple of things here: 1) Many trained economists would say this is a woeful oversimplification or flat-out disagree. 2) Exactly what is meant by "efficient" and "pretty much"?
"Many trained economists would say this is a woeful oversimplification or flat-out disagree."
Many trained economists would also have to blow out the HN comment limit to fully explain what they meant. Accusing someone's economics of being "simplified" is a bit of a cheap shot, a PhD thesis is also "simplified". I don't think very many trained economists would have a hard time expanding my sentence into a reasonable claim. The propaganda market in the US is brutally competitive, and it almost all ultimate boils down to money for somebody in the end, no? (Some exceptions for truly ideological-only propaganda, sure, but those are the exceptions.)
I don't think very many trained economists would have a hard time expanding my sentence into a reasonable claim.
Not if you're espousing the woo-woo of market infallibility. markets are very good at lots of things. They aren't great at everything any more than Bayesian filters or genetic algorithms are infallible oracles.
Some exceptions for truly ideological-only propaganda, sure, but those are the exceptions.
Market infallibility woo-woo is ideological propaganda.
I didn't say infallible. I said efficient. Many of the problems with markets are that they are efficient in ways that people don't want them to be; they will ruthlessly pollute the environment or squeeze people right out of the system if that is what brings the maximum reward. Or, to the point at hand, ruthlessly optimize propaganda without much thought about the consequences. Many people make the mistake of conflating "efficient" with "desirable", but they are only related, not identical. (Actually damn near everybody makes that mistake, even economists, to be honest.)
I'm a big proponent of understanding why it works that way and trying to ensure the market works for us, not against us, and therefore I don't think letting it run unfettered is a good idea. I also don't think deliberately misunderstanding and demonizing it, then applying foolish and poorly-thought-out first-order-thinking-based controls are a good idea either, which is by far the most common alternative. It's like demonizing gravity and trying to legislate antigravity into existence.
There are certain things markets are not efficient or even particularly good at.
I also don't think deliberately misunderstanding and demonizing it, then applying foolish and poorly-thought-out first-order-thinking-based controls are a good idea either
Agreed. We probably need a better understanding of meta-markets.
I had a Chinese girl lecture me on how I was taken in by propaganda by believing that the Yuan/RMB was not pegged to gold. I had proof that it was pegged to the US dollar from 3 independent reliable sources but she wouldn't believe any of it.
Banning skype is simply an ineffective attempt to protect the propaganda misinformation machines in the people's republic of China.
Trust me I used that line of thinking. Cognative dissonance can be a doozy. It was like arguing with someone who believes in flat earth. No evidence can overpower a need to believe.
I'm an American expat in China and I've lived here for several years. I completely agree with the Chinese guy's statement and have thought the same thing myself many times, though I've never heard anyone else openly express it.
Living in an extremely alien culture allows you to see things about your own culture that are hard to notice when you're immersed.
I can be a little more specific about how the propaganda systems work.
The Chinese system:
According to the news, there are more blue skies in Beijing this year than last year, and more blue skies last year than the year before. The pollution situation is getting better and better very rapidly. It's definitely false, but they print it anyway.
Youku and Tudou (Chinese Youtubes) will often have videos of advanced Chinese missiles or other weaponry as the featured video on the front page.
When the Chinese media runs a story on the US, there is a high probability it is discussing some negative aspect of the US (high murder rate, copious drug usage, poor governmental handling of environmental disasters).
And of course you have the censorship end of it: Sina Weibo (Chinese Twitter) and Kaixin (Chinese Facebook) posts are ajax-filtered for sensitive keywords and give you a big red warning if you try to say "bad" things. Or sometimes you'll come back to your computer and some posts you made a couple hours ago are just deleted. Clearly someone monitoring the networks noticed and removed your undesirable content.
I think we can agree the system is used a bit like a blunt instrument. But it works. People, especially the mass population with relatively poor education, really do believe the stuff. America loves war. China is an extremely peace-loving country. Americans love guns and drugs. Chinese pollution is significantly better than a few years ago. Etc.
In the US, on the other hand, "propaganda" is more closely woven into consumer demand and people's value systems.
If an organization wants to convince you of a message, they don't lie outright, they omit information that would cause you to believe to the contrary.
Let's talk about Iran for a bit. In China, there have been a series of articles about recent terrorist attacks in Iran and evidence that the bombers were supported by US intelligence agencies. I don't have strong feelings about how America should treat Iran one way or another, but I find the notion that we were involved at least plausible. But the headlines in the US papers don't mention possible American involvement. If it is mentioned in the article bodies, it's usually as a passing statement which the reader is likely to casually dismiss ("the Iranian government issued a statement that the US was involved in the attacks").
So the emphasis is different.
If you looked at the NYT on the first day of the Wikileaks stories, they wove stories from the cables, and the story they chose to focus on was how Iran was angering many other nations in the Middle East.
Again, it's a matter of what the media chooses to focus on and what it chooses to neglect. There were tons of potential stories in those wires - why did they choose that one as the most important?
And a lot of information in the US media is conveyed on top of a set of assumptions. When Wikileaks broke, the major news organizations mentioned that not all of the cables were being revealed, as some of the information might have posed a threat to national security. Whose national security? The US's. Why is that necessarily a bad thing? What if the cables had contained information that posed a threat to Chinese or Russian or Iranian national security? Would that have been a bad thing too? Or would that, instead, have been a matter of freedom of speech?
And we can also look at how people in the US choose to consume information that confirms their existing beliefs. Fox News and the Huffington Post. The fact that liberal and conservative news exist at all should tell you that the information inside is politically biased. I think they could fairly be called conservative and liberal propaganda. In these cases, Americans are not bludgeoned by unwanted propaganda, they actively seek it out.
In short, in the US, people actively pursue biased information and news organizations don't blatantly lie, they just emphasize and deemphasize certain facts in accordance with a value system that the consumer already holds. I would call that a more subtle propaganda system than what happens in China.
There are, of course, a few similarities between the two systems as well. A short commercial that says "Support our troops!" may not seem like propaganda to you until you've seen one where there's a Communist flag waving in the background.
"news organizations don't blatantly lie" - This actually happens a lot more than most people realise. You've read countless "quotes" that were simply made up by a reporter because they couldn't get somebody to talk to them. I'd be surprised if there was a single issue of a major newspaper out there which doesn't contain at least a dozen outright lies.
>A short commercial that says "Support our troops!" may not seem like propaganda to you until you've seen one where there's a Communist flag waving in the background.
When I watched a movie in theaters in the US last year, I remember being jarred by the strident nationalism and militarism in an ad for the Army shown before the movie. On the other hand, right after that, a movie trailer I'd seen in Canada a few weeks before had some mildly gory scenes stripped out in the US version. Go figure.
Your post is interesting but it misses a key point: Selection bias is everywhere, but in the US and most other countries you do not get run over by a truck if you watch Fox News, run your own blog or decide to make fun of politicians.
Yes. It's a long, well thought out post that's entirely non-sequitur. The poster doesn't understand the difference between true propaganda and spin.
The NYTimes has its own opinion, but it is definitely not an instrument of the US Government.
He also implies that because China has clunky methods which are obvious they don't have any subtle ones. Having clunky methods doesn't rule out having subtle ones. I don't speak Chinese, but I find it exceedingly hard to believe that China doesn't employ both clunky and subtle forms of propaganda.
Having clunky and detectable methods isn't better, either, as you claim, it's worse, because they're more invasive. That's the whole point. That's why we don't want censorship, or the great firewall, or our non-violent dissenters rotting in jail.
Anyway, maybe you live in a relativistic world where everybody's country is only as good as they're told, but I'm smart enough to discount my own bias, and I know that the US is a freer place to live than China.
That's exactly my experience. The average middle class person knows for a fact that he is lied to and information is withheld from him. They know what youtube is and they know their government is blocking it.
In spite of even wikileaks, no one can believe the exact same thing goes on here.
Most people forget or don't know that Skype was created by the founders of Kazaa and they are hackers (like us) at heart and they built strong encryption into it protecting (actually) the privacy of their users' audio conversations. Skype's encryption has been a heated issue to governments who cannot wiretap Skype for various reasons law enforcement or otherwise.
The thing to remember with China is that there is a law on the books so that practically everything is illegal. The law isn't there to tell you what you can or can't do, it's there so that if you piss off the wrong people they can come down on you like a ton of bricks "legally".
The law isn't there to tell you what you can or can't do, it's there so that if you piss off the wrong people they can come down on you like a ton of bricks "legally".
I knew someone that spent some time in China, and she said that for things like speeding, the cops will actually call you stupid for not trying to out-run them if they try to pull you over for something like speeding.
[ I wouldn't try to apply this to all of China though. It's a large place, and it could just be something local to where she was (I forget where exactly, it was a few years ago that she told me about it). ]
I hate making generalizations about huge entities like states, but I can't resist on this one. I think this kind of thing will ultimately trip China up, and prevent China from ever gaining a significant technological lead. The more closed their internet is, the less ideas people will be exposed to, and thus there will continue to be less innovation.
Obsessively trying to force toothpaste back into the tube does not telegraph a general sense of well-being and confidence. China may be a 'superpower'. But a 'superpower' like the US? Or the USSR?
Obviously they've avoided the worst tendencies of the latter, but will they every master the best aspects of the former?
Alternately, will we continuing relentlessly undermining our own advantages to the point where China doesn't have to bother taking civil liberty seriously?
When you have an economy on the scale of China's you can afford to lag the cutting edge. A captive market of 1.3B people makes up for a lot of inefficiencies.
false positive? just used skype few hours ago (in china). Tom-skype actually does have a VOIP license. The original news was circling in chinese media days ago but no one really gives a $@/7 coz bans like this occurs every year
Skype's been deemed illegal, but that doesn't mean it won't work in China (like so many other illegal things there). As the story says, no one is sure how the government will enforce the ban yet. This is likely a stall tactic to allow state run competitors to play catch up.
I'm reading http://craphound.com/ftw/ For The Win By Cory Doctorow right now. In it some of the main characters try to join a Gold Farmers Union, and the argument of how they can effectively mobilize is that now anyone in the world can instantly communicate and organize for workers rights and fair wages. Before these communication tools only the rich had the ability to organize countrywide and worldwide, but with access to skype or other VOIP tools the workers can have the same level of organization.
Maybe Cory Doctorow has a fan in the Chinese Communist party and they decided to nip that particular problem in the bud.
I wish I could find it, it was very telling of the climate in China (I assume, I've never been).