Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - The Greater Firewall

Episode Date: April 24, 2019

China’s next generation surveillance technology is being used to build out the world’s internet. But China is also exporting new philosophical and business models. Hao Wu explains how live streaming in China is powered by failures and James Griffiths explains why the free and open internet may soon be replaced by Cyber Sovereignty. Chapter five in the new ToE Failure miniseries.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called The Greater Firewall. China is right now with live streaming because the platform has evolved into such a complex ecosystem. Everything feels like supercharged and more extreme. This is Hao Wu, the director and producer of The People's Republic of Desire, a new documentary film about live streaming in China. Live streaming platforms in China have learned a little bit from platforms like Twitch or Periscope in the U.S., but primarily the business model as well as how they market the platforms, what kind of content being produced on this platform to appeal to the users,

they're very Chinese. Live streaming platforms like YY are not copying American companies like YouTube or Twitch. Instead of pressing a like button on YY, fans press the money button. 2014 and 15, it wasn't there for the live streamer to make a decent living. So YYFM very early on just figured out how to encourage the fans to buy digital gifts for their live streamers in order to get their attention. Because if they want to be able to have some real communication with a live streamer, their only way is to spend some money. So the live streamer will notice them. Otherwise, there's tens of thousands of people chatting at the same time in that busy chat room,

and the live streamers would never be able to see who's actually chatting. There was one element, though, in Hao Wu's movie that did not seem foreign to me. In fact, it was uncannily familiar. The early days of live streaming, live streaming appealed primarily to what in China we call a population. can be loosely translated as a loser. So basically the young people with no good education, no good job prospects, They call themselves diào sì losers. While putting this Theory of Everything miniseries,

Failure, together, we've come across the term fail son a lot. A number of young men use this term jokingly to acknowledge their lack of motivation and prospects,

both in terms of employment and relationships. And while fail son might be a niche term here in America, in China, dao se, well, that's a word everybody knows. Because that's a way of saying, okay, I'm a loser, so what? Because in some ways, the loser in a society that when they have no hope, when they are backed up into a corner, it's like, I give up.

The only thing that can sustain my self-esteem is by calling myself a loser. I accept it. I give up, right? So I surrender. And so early live streamers usually came from this group of people. They have no social status in Chinese society. And so a lot of times what they talk about during their live streaming shows were crass topics and dirty jokes that appeal to people of similar backgrounds like theirs.

Or it's going to be pretty girls dressed very nicely, exposing a shoulder, and just singing very cheesy pop songs. In his film, Hao Wu follows two popular live streamers who emerged from this loser demographic. That met Shen Man and Big Lee,

one female, one male live streamers. I just feel like they are very open and they are not afraid of sharing the truth about their life, sharing about their frustrations with the internet technology. They also have their respective family dramas. Both Big Li and Shen Man have drama. Big Li wants to stay true to his Daoist roots while desperately holding on to

his newfound fame and money, while poor Shen Man has to deal with her family, who feels entitled to her money and support. In this clip, Shen Man's father is actually chastising her for going on a vacation, saying she should have given him the amount of cash that she would have spent if he'd come along. In the film, we also meet a few Dao Se fans of both Big Li and Shen Man, fans who, through hardship and toil, save up cash so they can hit that money button too.

But they fail to make contact with their idols because there are other fans with way more money. Once a live streamer attracts a lot of poor fans, then the rich patrons who want to patronize that live streamer by buying him or her a lot of digital gifts, costing a lot of money, in order to show off in front of the poor. Because rich people in real life, they hang out with other rich people. They don't stand out. But online, in a particular showroom, for example, like Shaman's, every night there are 20,000, 30,000 people watching,

and most of them are dirt poor. And for rich people to come in and say, I spent throwing $10,000 and buying Shuman digital diamond rings, the fans will clap and say, oh my God, you're so rich, so awesome. The rich get a huge ego boost from that. So how much money are these guys spending? One of the guys I follow in my film, he has spent over two million U.S. dollars on the platform already.

And when I was filming him, he said, OK, I'm trying to control my spending. I'm only spending thirty five thousand U.S. dollars a month. Wow. And who's more important, the rich patrons or the Daoist? That's interesting. The live streamer would fail if there's no dao se anymore. Because as long there are dao se poor fans around, there's always going to be a chance a rich patron will want to patronize to show off in front of the poor. But if there's no poor fans, there's no basis for the rich to appear in any showroom to patronize the live streamers. But at the same time,

if you lose your rich patrons, the Daoist Sam Daoists will leave as well because they were there to watch rich people spend. And it's an amount of money they would never be able to earn in their own lifetime. They were not necessarily there to appreciate your quote-unquote talent. Both Shen Man and Big Lee favor the rich patrons over the Dao Se

because they are both competing to win the PlatformYY's annual top livestreamer contest. And in this competition, votes are pretty much the actual dollar amount spent by the fans. So this competition is really not about talent or real popularity. It's about how many rich patrons you can attract and how willing they are to buy you a shitload of votes. Of course, YY doesn't care where the money comes from. Whatever the patrons or the fans spend on buying digital gifts, YY takes between 50 to 60 percent. So it was extremely profitable. In the end, neither Shen Man nor Big Lee win a Best Livestreamer Award.

And Big Lee takes his loss especially hard. After his rich patron failed to deliver on his votes, his Dao Se fans abandoned him as well. And they made it clear to him that in their eyes, he is now a real loser. In the end, only the platform wins. Haowu filmed this documentary back in 2014-20152015 and the live streaming scene in China has already fundamentally changed. Because the authorities have cracked down on companies like YY, forcing them to quash all the dirty humor and expose sexy shoulders. All the stuff that appeals to the Daoist. According to writer and journalist James Griffiths, these crackdowns are part of China's Great Firewall. So what is the Great Firewall? I kind of separate it into two parts. The international level,

which is the part that's actually a firewall. That's what if you type in facebook.com or something inside China, it sends the request out, it hits the firewall, the firewall says no, and it doesn't fulfill the request. And that's what the term the Great Firewall was coined to originally refer to. But I think it's more useful to think about the Great Firewall as the stuff that happens within China, within the boundaries of the Chinese internet itself. It's important to understand that most Chinese users are not trying to circumvent the firewall in order to get to blocked sites like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. They're using equivalent Chinese services. So they're using Weibo, which is basically China's version of Twitter, and they're using mainly WeChat, which is kind of the closest parallel to Facebook in terms of how people

use it as a social network and connecting with their family and friends and stuff. And so these companies have been almost delegated by the government to conduct the censorship and that's really effective both because it saves the government a ton of money because they don't have to employ all of the human sensors and tools to police the content online but also because there's no real guidelines, like you don't get like a big book of censorship when you open an internet firm, you kind of have a broad idea based on certain laws with things like separatism

and pro-independence speak and stuff. But when it comes down to the more kind of granular censorship, there isn't really any guidelines. So these companies have to make decisions themselves. And so to protect themselves, they generally trend in the direction of greater censorship and kind of more control. Because if you censor something that shouldn't have been censored, there's no real issue. But if you fail to censor something that really,

really should have been censored, you could potentially lose your license, you could be suspended, or you even have your entire web service shut down. So that's the censorship which really affects people day to day. In a way, these Chinese companies are doing the exact opposite of what YouTube is doing. According to some recent reporting, YouTube's lawyers are advising executives to avoid any exposure to controversial videos on the platform because they could lose their liability protections. So in the U.S., it's anything goes. And in China, it's control everything. In his new book, The Great Firewall, How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet,

James shows us just how advanced China's alternative model of the internet is. He takes us into the Xinjiang province, where the Chinese government is cracking down on the Uyghurs, a primarily Muslim population. Xinjiang is a really interesting case because it has always been this kind of testing ground for Chinese rulers. And then in recent years, Xinjiang has been kind of hyper-militarized in terms of policing and thenized in terms of policing.

And then also in terms of surveillance, there's a surveillance feed and it can spot every single individual car that passes underneath it. And it can assign it a tag and then it spots the people as they walk through and assigns them a tag. And so if you are the police officer looking at this, you can then follow that person in theory from camera to camera to camera around the city and track their movements. This is a huge ramping up of the surveillance and the control that was already kind of built into the firewall. What's going on in Xinjiang is extremely dark. Uyghur activists and their family members are disappearing and massive re-education camps are springing up. But James believes that all of this is simply a beta test for updates to China's entire Great Firewall. Xinjiang is the testing ground, but the intention seems to be to roll out this stuff to the rest of the country. I mean, facial recognition, this kind of like

super advanced surveillance tech is already being rolled out to a lot of places. And quite openly, the government's boasted about arresting various criminals who've been on the run for ages because they've been spotted by one of these sophisticated cameras. The AI sphere and the surveillance sphere is kind of a booming one in China. And it's one where there's quite a lot of internal competition for, you know, these very expensive government contracts and things like that. And we've seen a handful of firms that have been really successful in China. And then they're also marketing themselves to other countries around the world, countries that have kind of already adopted or are adopting the censorship side of the firewall and are now being encouraged to adopt the surveillance side.

China isn't just exporting technology to censor and control the internet. It's also now exporting a new doctrine of how the internet should work. Cyber sovereignty. The internet's always kind of seen as something without borders and something that isn't the same as oil rights or trade. It is its own thing. And the doctrine of cyber sovereignty says, no, that's wrong. The internet is something that is constrained by borders. You can police those borders exactly the same as you would do your land ones, and you shouldn't let anyone use the internet to influence your country in the same way that you wouldn't let them send little green men over your border

to influence your politics. The internet was seen as this tool of US foreign policy, and it was deemed necessary to have a counter political idea to that. This counter political idea has emboldened China to not just ignore human rights concerns but to also go on the offensive whenever it feels its internet sovereignty has been attacked. James begins his book with a story about what happened to GitHub, a US-based code repository. It was hit with this massive denial of service attack,

which was eventually traced to the same infrastructure as the Great Firewall, and it was kind of dubbed the Great Cannon by researchers. It was designed to knock GitHub offline. It did for several days, and it created huge amounts of problems. On March 26, 2015, GitHub was the target of a distributed denial of service attack that originated from China.

It targeted two anti-censorship projects on the GitHub servers, Great Fire and CNNY Times. The latter simply included instructions on how to access the Chinese version of the NewY Times. The latter simply included instructions on how to access the Chinese version of the New York Times. This is an important kind of change in attitudes with the census. They used to not pay as much attention to stuff that happened beyond the borders of the Great Firewall, beyond the borders of China. And that tolerance has completely evaporated.

Last year, a number of hotel chains, airline companies around the world had a huge amount of pressure brought on them to change how they referred to Taiwan, in particular, not to refer to Taiwan as a country. So if you had a drop down menu that just said countries couldn't have Taiwan on it, you had to change it to what they would really prefer is Taiwan, comma, people's Republic of China. or you change your dropdown to say areas or countries and territories, anything that lets the Chinese say, well, these people aren't referring to Taiwan as a country.

It's kind of this spread of Chinese-style political correctness. In the past, you definitely couldn't refer to Taiwan as a country inside China. Now, from their perspective, you shouldn't be doing that anyway. This isn't so much about the Chinese market. The demands weren't that you changed your website in China. It was that you changed your website everywhere.

So the Great Firewall has three components. Technology to censor and block what's coming into China. Technology to control and surveil what's coming into China, technology to control and surveil the people inside of China, and a legal framework of internet sovereignty, which provides China with justification to attack infrastructure that exists beyond its borders. This is the internet that China is selling to the rest of the world. It will go to an allied country or a kind of sympathetic regime and will say, not only will we sell you the infrastructure and we'll come and build the core infrastructure of how the internet will operate in your country,

and thank you, we'll take your money for that. And they'll give you the legalistic framework for how to exercise that control over the domestic internet. And this is perhaps kind of the most pernicious influence because the technology isn't necessarily going to lead to censoring. But giving these countries pre-built legal frameworks for controlling the internet is a really effective tool for spreading the censorship. And we've seen this in a number of countries already. Russia in particular has kind of moved from its own parallel model of internet censorship very much towards the Chinese one in terms of both legal framework and then also in terms of the technology

of how the internet works inside Russia. Russia is just one example. China is now providing gear and training to countries like Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Nepal, Egypt, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico. And while the U.S. is making moves to challenge this advance of Chinese technology, it's finding it much more difficult to push back on the idea of cyber sovereignty. It comes at a time when global confidence in the internet is perhaps lower than it's ever been

for a number of very legitimate reasons. But that makes it more difficult to argue for this kind of vision of the free and open internet when we ourselves in our own countries are constantly kind of vision of the free and open internet when we ourselves in our own countries are constantly talking about all of the problems generated by the free and open internet. And I'm not hugely optimistic that we're going to see a kind of alternative model that will arise to fix the broken one that we have in the West without adopting the hyper-controlled, much more sinister model that they have in China. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything.

This installment is called The Greater Firewall. This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and Andrew Calloway. You can find links to James Griffith's book, The Great Firewall, and Hao Wu's film, The People's Republic of Desire, on the TOE website, which is theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's greatest podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.