Free flow of information is no defense against tyranny. 

In this Long Now Foundation Seminar, futurist Peter Schwartz debates historian Niall Furgeson. During the course of the debate, Furgeson questions why in 1991, Peter missed the most significant transformative trend of the last two decades: China. Later the two are asked what they think the next “big thing” will be – Schwartz: ‘climate change,’ Furgeson: ‘China is the next China’:

Furgeson: China will be the next China… We’re getting China wrong again… We’re heading for a far bumpier ride in China than the conventional wisdom allows. China is already more exposed to the consequences of climate change, because of it’s location and topography.

There’s also a demographic disaster unfolding as a consequence of the one-child policy… There’s going to be a huge oversupply of men, and undersupply of women in many parts of China; and more seriously there is going to be a huge imbalance between the generations within a space of 20 years that is going to cause huge difficulties for China’s practically non-existent welfare state. So if I had to pick an outlier,  it would be the ‘China screw-up’ which I think is the one thing most people think is not going to happen. 

… there are some really amazing videos you can watch of a nakedly nationalist nature that don’t seem to be government generated. My strong impression is that we underestimate the extent to which the internet and the cell-phone are allowing not liberal progressive d3mocratic forces to gain ground in China but rather the opposite. They are actually allowing a quite old fashioned, to our eyes, early 20th century nationalism to mobilize a generation in ways that I’m not even sure the Chinese leadership are in control of… The China we’re going to get is not the China of the BRICs story, it’s a China with profound social and economic problems which it will try to address by the kind of nationalism that we even forget exists. [1:17:00]

Perhaps it’s the culture shock, but all this seems spot on, in so far that conventional wisdom and mainstream media attention focuses much more extensively on the ‘economic miracle’ narrative. Do we ignore this potential worst-case at our own detriment? Unsure. 

More generally it seems that the liberalizing effects of technology are glossed over with a base assumption that their long-term effects will be dem0cratizing and socially beneficial. There are already several disturbing examples of ‘bottom-up’ censorship. In China the ‘50 cent army’ is employed to swamp potentially sensitive material with large amounts of pro-party rhetoric. The relevant question is: ‘are there effective means to separate quality information from noise / deliberate disinformation?’ So far, yes – but it seems blithe to assume such a trend will continue in perpetuity.