A better draft, improved by some thoughtful rewriting of the individual paragraphs. The central thesis is familiar to me, mostly from listening to what I say myself. Although I sometimes use the Taoist metaphor myself, I think as real political analysis it isn't very strong. Even an Internet designed to CCP specifications would still leave the people overall better informed than they were before, certainly no closer to being the uncarved block. The Party needs the Net to help it know what is going on in the China it governs, and to make its presence felt, hardly to become invisible.

That people who have little to hide and aren't very important shouldn't store their credit cards, their contacts lists, or their photographs somewhere they can easily be pillaged is hardly a sophisticated lesson we're unready to learn: no previous generation of human beings since the beginning of civilization has been inclined to store what is precious to it somewhere unguarded. This aspect of the problem is just a temporary madness caused by ignorance. But by the time we recur to the central habits of previous humanity, we may have lost the technical freedom to do what everybody before us was able to do, and which our progeny will intensely regret. What the Party wants is realtime access to actual behavior and the ability to predict future behavior of one point seven billion or so individuals. One generation from now, if we have not prevented the technical structures from forming and crippled or eliminated the Party, they will get what they want.

As you weren't using the section headings, or changing the privacy settings on the essay, I removed the excess material so the text would be easier to read.

1. In a society held together by digital networks, people who know how software works, who can understand and change the physiology of the species-wide nervous system, are a privileged class.
2. Individuals are likely to be unable to understand how the digital technology running human society works. Only those who have specialized education and who know how to ask the right questions will be "conscious" participants in a growing fraction of the whole life of every human being.
3. Educated people can eliminate their ignorance about how society actually works, but to do so requires effort that even most educated people will not make.

1. Power benefits from ignorance about how society really works. The more people do not consciously understand how their technology is used to control them, the more thoroughly and peacefully they are controlled. You could have said that this is one of the most important political ideas associated with Laozi (老子).
2. The ability to learn how society really works depends on the transparency of the software that is the physiological layer of this nervous system. You cannot know how WeChat or Baidu services are affecting you unless you know what is being done with the data they aggregate about who accesses your messages or photos and who else's messages or photos you access. That's probably impossible. But you can know, if you are doing your personal messaging and photo-sharing through a FreedomBox that costs $50 and does everything the "cloud" companies do for you, but only for sharing with the people you actually mean to share with, that no one is using that data or information about who accesses it to control you.
3. Which would lead to a third point, namely that the technology doesn't control the social outcome, the people who control the technology control the social outcome. If that is us, democracy is possible. Otherwise it dies.

Trust issues

-- By LianchenLiu - 26 Oct 2015

Section I

Subsection A

That false sense of security comes from our ignorance: if we cannot see it, it does not exist. I do not see anyone is viewing my conversation on WeChat? , therefore, no one is. If we have to use a legal term for it, it is probably willful blindness. For me, I have never been into “tech stuff”. I do not know how to code; I do not know what kind of information software or apps are gathering. How to secure my activities on phones or computers is beyond me, and I am not going to bother. I think most people share my attitude of indifference: they do not know how computers or phones work, and they are not going to bother figuring it out.

Because we do not know, we trust the people who know, whether they have a good intention or not. When software becomes a necessity in human life, the ability to create software is power, just like the ability to read and write in ancient societies was power as well. In a typical Han society in ancient China, the capability to read and write was in possession of a class that has exclusive access to the ruling power. This class is called Shi (士). This scene has come up in many literature depicting the life of ancient Chinese. A messenger from the royalty posted a piece of paper on the wall of the town hall, and people started to gather around that post and discuss the content on it. Peasants, merchants, soldiers, who think they can recognize one character or two on the post, argued with each other on what the post says, until an old Xiucai (秀才), who is at the lowest level of the Shi, clears his throat. Recognizing the sound, the crowd becomes quiet; they parts away to make room for the learned man to come forward. In reverence, the crowd listens as he reads each character.

In the age that most men are illiterate, the men who are not hold the power: they communicate commands to generals thousands of miles away, make tax record of the remotest village on the land, and write history about the deeds of every emperor. The Shi derives the power from the fact that most men struggled feeding themselves and their families, and had no time to learn to read and write. Coding is a new form of power, and the power is derived from the fact that most men are too lazy to learn about it. One thousand year ago, when time was scarce in a common man’s life, the class that can afford the time to learn is warranted access to power. Nowadays, time is no longer scarcity, as technology has freed human from most of the repetitive work that our ancestors spend most of their time on. With money becoming the new scarcity, the capitalists are given the access to power. The class of Shi, while trusted with the lives of their people, had done more ill than good. Similarly, why capitalists/ coders who run the biggest technology companies should be given trust freely by the public, relying on nothing but their good will?

When Zuckerberg spoke in fluent Chinese at Tsinghua University about devoting his time and energy to serving the community, one should be on notice that many members of the Shi had vowed to save the people from sufferings. Not that they were making intentional lies. It is just that human can hardly resist the temptation to achieve personal gains by screwing their fellow men, when no consequence will attach. Our ancestors were limited by time constraint to learn to read and write. However, our limitation is only our laziness. While a peasant, living in the Ming Dynasty, could not possibly be blamed for being illiterate, the public in our age has a civil duty to educate themselves on things that are running their phones and computers. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Facebook might have been established with the simple intention to connect people, but when such connection has been established, it is almost impossible not to exploit it. I am not saying that the public should stop using Facebook. I am saying we should inform ourselves and evaluate what kind of risk we are exposed to.

Subsub 1

Subsection B

Subsub 1

Subsub 2

Section II

Subsection A

Subsection B

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