"'The Chinese internet is collapsing at an accelerating pace,' the headline said. Predictably, the post itself was soon censored. 'We used to believe that the internet had a memory,' He Jiayan, a blogger who writes about successful businesspeople, wrote in the post. 'But we didn’t realize that this memory is like that of a goldfish.'... I searched for one of the most consequential tragedies in China in the past few decades: the Great Sichuan earthquake on May 12, 2008, which killed over 69,000 people.... My search found what had to have been a small fraction of the coverage.... I didn’t find any of the outstanding news coverage or outpouring of online grief that I remembered....When my Weibo account was deleted in March 2021... [i]t had more than three million followers and thousands of posts recording my life and thoughts over a decade.... 'If you can still see some early information on the Chinese internet now,' [wrote Mr. He], 'it is just the last ray of the setting sun.'"
Writes Li Yuan, in
"As China’s Internet Disappears, ‘We Lose Parts of Our Collective Memory’/The number of Chinese websites is shrinking and posts are being removed and censored, stoking fears about what happens when history is erased" (NYT).
On the other hand: "Many people intentionally hide their online posts because they could be used against them by the party or its proxies. In a trend called 'grave digging,' nationalistic 'little pinks' pour over past online writings of intellectuals, entertainers and influencers.... "
Posts
27 comments:
Coming soon to a Formerly free and constitutional republic near you.
Blogspot is one of the few places where the historical record can be preserved- that is, until Google decides they don't like the cut of your job. Coco Wang made some comics about the earthquake which were generally well-regarded among English audiences.
https://earthquakestrips.blogspot.com/
But, expect China-friendly media and pages to vanish more thoroughly in the West. As NATO schemes to decouple from China, they don't want reminders that decades of idiotic globalist policy brought us all to this point.
Back to the future. History becomes oral again. Pass it on.
pore over, not pour over.
In a trend called 'grave digging,' nationalistic 'little pinks' pour over past online writings of intellectuals, entertainers and influencers.... "
The similarity to Media Matters and others should suffice to dispel the NYT's insertion of the word "nationalistic."
"Globalist" is more apt to describe the "little pink" movement.
National Socialists, Democrazis, too, abortionists as the ultimate cancel culture. Lest we forget, the contemporary social conservatives were a reaction to the original social conservatives who celebrated the transgender spectrum, pedophilia, sadomasochism, and other liberal sexual orientations in parades. What a difference several thousand years make on societal memory.
What a perfect date to report this fact. June 4
Does the Wayback Machine not exist for Chinese internet? (I'm not sure what or who makes it "work" for Web pages I've read, TBH.)
George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Chinese Central Committee: "Past indiscretions are future opportunities ! Forward, Comrades !"
It will go about as well as the One Child policy has.
Here at home, our federal officials conveniently shop out these duties to their fellow travelers in the tech companies, but they use a much lighter touch. Instead of removing all of the history, they just remove the bits that offend them, and replace them with more agit prop.
This is what communists do.
They also censor. Deplatform. Arrest their opponents. And scream that flying certain flags make you evil.
The NYT, the Grey Lady, the preeminent sage of all things knowable on the mountaintop. 'little pinks' pour over past online writings of intellectuals....'
Don't you dare assume error; one needs must take it literally. The imagination boggles. What are the little pinks pouring?
"Does the Wayback Machine not exist for Chinese internet?"
It's called the Great Firewall of China. It doesn't just keep the foreign internet hordes from barging in, it also separates the peasants from improper interpretation of their own history.
Also, the "Dead Internet Theory" is very much alive there. There are petabytes of fake websites and fake destinations intended to simulate what you're looking for, there's even a Chinese bot-version of Facebook, all of it fake. It's like the Chinese version of the hotel California. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.
Sounds like what the Biden Administration wants to do here.
"Blogspot is one of the few places where the historical record can be preserved- that is, until Google decides they don't like the cut of your job...."
Look for me in archive.org
That's the hope of immortality
Yeah those terrible chicoms. Imagine it censoring people on the internet. Y'know like the Biden Adminstration, Big Tech, and the ADL.
Oh wait, when the leftists and Zionists do it, its not censorship its "safety" and "fighting Hate". You want to find a business wishing you a "Merry christmas" good luck. The correct word is "Holiday" comrade. We'll protect you from "christmas". LOL!
BTW, Google search has turned to shit. You can't get anything Google and ADL don't want you to see. Or plow through their propaganda to get to it. And a lot of old stuff before 2018 has simply disappeared. Trying to find what so and so said about the election campaign in 2012 was almost impossible, with Google trying to steer me to same 4 or 5 websites - all ADL/DNC approved.
But thank God, we're not Chinese!
"Look for me in archive.org"
Good to know where to find the old Althouse posts.
Oh wait, when the leftists and Zionists do it
The Protocols of the Ocean of Hate raises its hoary head again. What have the Zionists kept you from reading, Dork? Are they keeping the pro-Hamas crowds from organizing? Do they remove your posts? Do they trim certain articles out of your newspaper? Do they keep the newsdorks from quoting our Israel-hating president when he says Netanyahu "will kill any peace deal"? Have they censured all the hate-filled rhetoric from the lovely Congresscritters in the Squad? Can you not get enough Ilhan Omar on the Web?
What exactly have the Zionists stolen from you, Mr. Colonizer? Be specific.
The worry about the not immutable nature of the internet has given me a desire to purchase a set of older Encyclopedias. I'm not sure how far back I want to go but at least as far back as the mid 90s.
Canary in a coal mine. Hope you have backup on your own hardware Althouse.
The permanence of electronic storage of information has always been a joke.
It takes money and effort to curate and migrate information, and nobody cares about old information except archivists, historians, and other oddballs, who don't count when decisions about retention and migration come to be made.
The issue is real, and not just a matter of CCP or other government malfeasance--it's baked into the structure.
Archives.org started out well but is decaying before our eyes.
There are only so many servers in the world.
Like your phone, once you start getting full you have to choose to either back it up or start deleting.
The Chinese are just doing what the January 6 committee did...encrypt and delete.
“All hand on deck, evybody on deck! All hand on deck, evybody on deck!!!”
—- Charlie the Cook
In the 1975 movie Rollerblade, in a world taken over by corporations (sound familiar), there is a scene where the top IT guy running the worldwide Library Of The Future (LOTF) is disturbed that the entire 13th Century has been lost, the computers somehow misplaced. The IT chief concludes that the information retrieval system "...has become so ambiguous now, as if it knows nothing at all."
I grew up on some good SciFi, which ever since has been coming true faster and faster. Can't wait for reality to catch up to Logan's Run or Planet of the Apes!
It's not just the Chinese Internet that's dying. Ours is too.
--- ... stoking fears about what happens when history is erased.
Then they'll come after fiction like the NYT.
"The issue is real, and not just a matter of CCP or other government malfeasance--it's baked into the structure."
Writing in the Sand: The Need for Ultra-Robust Digital Archiving
Thanks to Mason G at 405pm--an excellent link to a description of the structural-systemic-technical problems with longterm digital (and other) data storage.
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