It wasn’t always like this. In the years before Xi became president in 2012, the internet had begun to afford the Chinese people an unprecedented level of transparency and power to communicate. Popular bloggers, some of whom advocated bold social and political reforms, commanded tens of millions of followers. Chinese citizens used virtual private networks (VPNs) to access blocked websites. Citizens banded together online to hold authorities accountable for their actions, through virtual petitions and organising physical protests. In 2010, a survey of 300 Chinese officials revealed that 70% were anxious about whether mistakes or details about their private life might be leaked online. Of the almost 6,000 Chinese citizens also surveyed, 88% believed it was good for officials to feel this anxiety.
For Xi Jinping, however, there is no distinction between the virtual world and the real world: both should reflect the same political values, ideals, and standards. To this end, the government has invested in technological upgrades to monitor and censor content. It has passed new laws on acceptable content, and aggressively punished those who defy the new restrictions. Under Xi, foreign content providers have found their access to China shrinking. They are being pushed out by both Xi’s ideological war and his desire that Chinese companies dominate the country’s rapidly growing online economy.
I am the algorithm, and I know you. I know you better than your friends know you. I know you better than your family knows you. I know things about you that you have yet to acknowledge about yourself. I know you because I am the sum of every move you’ve ever made online. I know you because I am you.
Mark Twain was dazzled by the Windy City. “It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago,” he wrote in 1883. “She outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them.” From mail-order to the remote control, the Ferris wheel to the drive-in bank—Chicago was the birthplace of them all. And while the term “skyscraper” has come to connote New York landmarks such as the Flatiron, Woolworth and Empire State buildings, it was first used to describe towers that rose on the shores of Lake Michigan.
Dressed in a leather jacket and a shoelace-thin tie, or with Armani trousers flapping around his trainers, Eric Griffiths would begin as soon as he reached the lectern. He spoke, as Hamlet instructed the actors, “trippingly”, pausing only to take small sips of a drink that looked like water, or one that looked like apple juice. His lectures were packed; they were such a hot ticket at Cambridge in the 1980s that Varsity, the student newspaper, listed them in its entertainment guide. When Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, now a professor of English at Oxford University, first attended, he asked the student next to him, “Are these going to be any good?” “Don’t bother taking notes,” she said, “just enjoy the show.”