Google announced on its company blog that Chinese hackers had attacked its users and as a result Google.CN may leave China due to the security breaches.

While unfortunate that Google.CN may be shutting down, my ethnographic work in China revealed five things that aren’t being told in the current story:

1. Many Chinese internet users don’t find Google to be very useful. Therefore, a Google withdrawal would not have any immediate impact on the daily Chinese internet user because most people search with Baidu, the reigning search engine in China.
2. Many Chinese internet users prefer Baidu over Google because using Baidu makes them feel more “Chinese.” Baidu does an excellent job at tapping into nationalistic fervor to promote itself as being the most superior search engine for Chinese users.
3. Chinese internet users don’t know how to get to the Google site. While they may “know” of Google, it’s a whole other matter when it comes to typing or saying Google’s name.
4. Google is primarily used by highly educated netizens. And even these users prefer Google.COM over Google.CN.
5. Google is not successful at reaching the mobile internet market.
   

I arrived at these insights after I spent over 300 hours conducting participant observation and informal interviews this past summer with government policy-makers, academics, youth, migrants, and low-income users. I was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (more info) to be a research scholar at the China Internet Network Information Center 中 国互联网络信息中心 (CNNIC), located in Beijing, China. The center is overseen by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). CNNIC manages the hardware aspect of China’s internet and produces quantitatively oriented research on internet usage in China. Their data provides policy direction for party ministries, information for private companies, and statistics for the government. While my main focus was not on Google (more info on research), the topic frequently came up and I started realizing that the non-use of Google provided a lot of cultural insights into the practices of Chinese internet users.

The blame for Google’s lack of success in China cannot solely be placed on this most recent episode with Chinese hackers. Other complications have started long before this occurrence, such as the myriad of ways in which policies work to favor Chinese companies over international ones, the difficulty in competing against government paid search results on Baidu, and the impossibility of providing consistent service when the government shuts down access to the entire Google site for few days. All of these reasons lie beyond Google’s control.

There are, however, other explanations that do lie within Google’s control in which they have failed to execute. The 3 main factors are: achieving brand recognition, creating a successful marketing campaign, and understanding usage contexts of non-elite internet users. Google should hold themselves accountable for these factors.

Google has failed at brand recognition. They have not been successful at making their services relevant for the average Chinese internet user nor have they made it easy for people to recognize, say, or even type in their name on a keyboard.

• People didn’t even know how to correctly pronounce and agree on the pronunciation of the name “Google.” When I was with a group of 5 youth, I asked them if they used Google, instead of getting an answer we launched into a 10 minute conversation trying to figure out the correct name. While it was clear that we were all referring to Google, the IT company, it was not clear which characters to use for its name. Google does not have an immediately recognizable name like Apple (Pingguo) or Yahoo (Yahe) or Baidu.  I, like many other Chinese people still refer to Google by its colloquial name, GouGou - doggy (狗狗).  While Google did consider GouGou as a name, in 2006 it announced that its new name would be Gu-Ge” (谷歌). But the name didn’t stick and so many people still continued to refer to Google as GouGou. Gu-Ge is supposed to mean “harvest songs”— romantic referral to a  “fruitful and productive search experience, in a poetic Chinese way”.  I guess that Google excecs thought, “Hey if Chinese peasants sings happy harvest songs for their productive crops, then Chinese netizens will use Gu-Ge for happy productive online searches!” Hmmmm…Back in 2006 I argued that the new name was quiet “a semantic stretch.” Even worse, it conjured up images of “slow and remote agricultural scenes,” said  Jin Ge, a researcher on Chinese online gamers. The new name was so unpopular that Google fans started an online petition in 2006 for Google to abandon Gu-Ge. Google didn’t listen. The lesson? When your market cannot pronounce, remember or correctly identify your name, you’ve got a major problem—especially when your names invokes images of sterile hinterlands or groins, grasshoppers, and shaving breasts.

The confusion over Google’s Chinese name also has other consequences: people were unsure of how to type in the name “Google” on the computer keyboard. When I asked people to take me to the Google site, I received a lot of similar responses of uncertainty.

• Some youth would attempt to type GouGou (the colloquial name for Google) and they would reach GouGou.cn or GouGou.com thinking that they were at the Google site because it looked similar to Google’s bare aesthetics even though the corporate symbol is a dog. Since many people, even me, still refer to Google as GouGou,  it’s not a surprise that people thought that they were at Google’s site even though they were at GouGou.com.  Others would type “Gogel,” which lead to nowhere.
• Those who typed Google with just one “O” (Gogle) would get to the Google site only IF they typed in .COM. domain.  If they just pressed the enter key after typing in “Gogle” it would take them to Gogle.CN, which is a phishing site (phishing sites try to get you to enter your password and email in the hopes to steal the information). This is even more confusing because Gogle.CN is designed to look like Google’s bare aesthetics. If you click on “Login 登录” in the top right corner where the Gmail login is usually located on the real Google site, you’re taken to a page that says Gogle.CN Login but its page is titled Google!  As you can see in the picture below and where I’ve circled in pink, it’s really misleading! I’ve noticed that most computers default to the .CN site in internet cafes, so this could hypothetically happen quite often if Chinese users try to go to Google and they type in the name  with one less “O.”
• IF youth did get to Google’s site successfully by either typing in the name correctly or going to Google.com, Gogle.COM, or Guge.COM/CN, it would usually be on their 5th or 7th or even 8th try - that is if they hadn’t given up yet and by then it was just clear that they were doing it because I had asked them to show me how to get to the Google site. It was quite obvious that going to the Google site was never part of their internet routine.

It’s not the case that people are unfamiliar with Google.  People know of Google, but they don’t want to use it because it’s associated with being “Un-Chinese.” Part of Baidu’s success lies in its successful marketing campaign against Google, using nationalism as one of their publicity strategies. It’s been working well. The campaign is so effective that netizens associate the use of Google with being unpatriotic. In this infamous Baidu commercial from 2006 (below), Baidu wins an intelligence contest over the its unnamed foreign competiter who is represented by the white male actor. Baidu succeeds in “knowing more” in the back and forth banter over the meaning of the scroll. Even the white man’s Chinese female lover decides to leave him for the Chinese scholar who “knows more.”

I don’t think Baidu is playing unfairly because American companies often tap into US nationalism with “Buy Made in the USA” campaigns. Google could be more creative in using strategic marketing to overcome its negative cultural stigma in China—a stigma that is actively nurtured by its competitor.

Another way that Baidu has had an advantage over Google is that Chinese and Hong Kong TV programming will show screen-shots of Baidu when they refer to the internet. Most recently I watched a a show on the Phoenix Channel (Hong Kong based) on January 22nd that showed several screen-shots of how Baidu helped a kidnapped child reunite with his biological parents after 12 years of separation. There are so many stories that talk about how the internet, as symbolized by Baidu, has helped citizens in everyday life. I have yet to see a negative TV segment on the internet that is associated with Baidu, rather these negative associations are blamed on specific applications, such World of Warcraft or specific places, such as internet cafes. Baidu itself is always in the clear, whereas Google is not. The only screen time Google gets on Chinese TV programming is when it is featured as another Western company disobeying Chinese laws. Google should be aware of how Baidu’s onscreen TV time contributes to its popularity and reinforces the notion that Baidu is good for the Chinese, Google is not.

But here’s the thing, solving the marketing and brand recognition problem is relatively simple when the bigger problem is that Google’s services are not useful!

• Youth didn’t see how any of the services offered by Google were easier to use than the ones that they were already using. This is because Google operates in an e-mail paradigm while other services operate in a messenger paradigm. One time when I was checking my Gmail account at an internet cafe, a youth asked me, ” how do you leave pictures and messages for others?” I would say, “just send them an email.” But here’s the thing - youth don’t have to send emails when they are using MSN Messenger. There’s a major disconnect in communication culture. Messenger-like services don’t operate on an email paradigm. QQ and MSN users can go to a friend’s MSN Live profile or QQ box to leave a message or post a photo. You can check on each friend’s page to see their last update.  It’s like a mini-facebook for every MSN user but just for your own contacts. If a friend wasn’t online, youth didn’t send them an email. Rather, they would click on the user’s name and write a direct message that would be sent immediately but read later when the recipient logged in at a later point in time.
• One teenager asked me how I shared music with Gmail. I tried to explain that I used Dropbox and I put the file my public folder and then give the url to my friend. By the time I was done with my explanation, she looked totally confused. I asked her how her and her friends shared music. She said, oh I just put it in my QQ box and my friends can go in and download it. My way didn’t make sense for them and my method didn’t even involve Google.  QQ and MSN make it easy for youth to exchange files without emails and without having to own your own computer. We need to understand what it means to live in an instant messaging paradigm as opposed to an e-mail paradigm.
• By the way, this is also what I’ve observed outside of the US in Mexico, where my most recent fieldwork continues to show that the primary online communication method are messenger services, not email.
• Baidu offers really good mp3 searches, Google doesn’t. Quite simple. MP3 is the most common file format for digital music. Chinese consumers really like to listen to music and they are used to having easy access to it. Music is one area of the internet that is most free from censorship and mostly widely available in China. Google did not provide mp3 search in fear of lawsuits from music labels. And when Google finally did sign a contract with 4 music labels to offer mp3 search, it didn’t work. Larry Salibra discusses his experience with google mp3. (Check our Charles Frith’s comments on this in “Is Google Stupid?”)

• Mobiles are becoming more popular and other companies are doing a better job of delivering mobile content and services. For example, several high school students showed me how they could access MSN Messenger and QQ chat on their cellphone for mobile internet. I asked them why they chose to use these apps. Some youth told me that they were already on the phone when they bought it (some were used), and others told me that it was really easy to download when you go the MSN or QQ site at an internet cafe. One of the most important reasons is that most people already have a MSN or QQ account. So when they begin to use mobile internet, the transition to using mobile MSN or QQ Messenger is an obvious one.
• For many of these low-income youth, mobile internet was used more frequently than internet cafes. They didn’t have a computer at home but what they did have was a cellphone that always had a signal. Another example is that cellphone companies have partnerships with Baidu or QQ Tencent to deliver mobile content. People would often show me a SMS of the latest news updates from Baidu. They told me that when they bought the cellphone, the vendor would help them sign up for the services. Google needs to think about how to cross into mobile services because other companies have deep relationships with mobile carriers to ensure that a new mobile user receives content from their company.

So who is using Google in China? Google is primarily used by elite Chinese users while Baidu is mainly used by non-elites. What’s the difference between elite and non-elite users? Elite users are those who are highly educated and can speak or at least read English. Interestingly, the biggest fans of Google were Chinese academics age 18 years and older. They used Google Scholar, Google Translation and Gmail for the same purposes as Western users. They relied on Google for their research and said that there was no site that even matched Google’s services. The way that Chinese professors, researchers, and academics work is more akin to the way that Westerners manage their relationships and projects. Therefore, the adoption of Google among highly educated Chinese is not surprising. Highly educated Chinese users organize and prioritize information in ways that are much more similar to Western users than non-elite Chinese users.

Sometimes you will hear me say, “I cannot imagine life without Google!” And it’s true - I can’t imagine living without my Gcal, Reader, Apps, Voice, Docs, and etc.  Chinese academics who read English would often say the same thing when we talked about Google, frequently professing their love for Google. For these intellectuals, they didn’t feel less “Chinese” for using Google. My impression was that they felt more informed, could access media beyond China, and were more aware of global discourses (this includes celebrity gossip).

While Google may have a loyal following among Chinese academics, they only make up a small percentage of the population. If Google wants to become a more popular search engine in China, it has to do a better job at reaching non-elite users. Google isn’t going to get anywhere as the search engine for the intellectuals of China. 

Google has built an empire of services that work for Western contexts and values. So it’s no surprise that their most loyal fans outside of the US are elite users who share similar class and occupational backgrounds with Western users. To reach new users with an entirely different set of cultural practices, Google has to rethink and reinvent itself for the Chinese market.  Sometimes, one size does not fit all.

It’s one thing if Google’s difficulties could just simply be attributed to government interference, and bad marketing and publicity. But that’s not the case. Their services just simply are not useful for most Chinese users. I suggest that Google dedicate itself to understanding the Chinese market in a socio-anthropological way. They should be hiring teams of Chinese and non-Chinese  ethnographers, sociologists, and anthropologists to work intimately in all phases with human-computer interaction designers, programmers, and R&D managers. Google should invest in long-term fieldwork for teams to immerse themselves in a diversity of environments. While usability tests and focus groups are useful for specific phases of app development, they aren’t as useful for understanding cultural frameworks and practices because by the time an app is being tested, it already has accumulated so many cultural assumptions along the way in the design process that users are asked to test something that functions in the programmer’s world, not the user’s world.

I hope Google doesn’t leave China because both sides would lose. I would like to see the Chinese government ease off of Google. And I would like to see Google.CN re-orientate itself to create such overwhelmingly great and relevant services that Chinese netizens will WANT to use their apps.

Competition and collaboration are essential factors for an innovative market.

The last thing that China wants to communicate to the world is that it does not offer a fair playground for companies to compete against each other or against government-cozy companies. One of the keys factors to sustain and increase China’s growth this century depends on its ability to attract capital. It doesn’t look good when the largest IT company does not want to work in China.

The success of China also depends on its ability to innovate. In the last few decades, followers have been favored over leaders. While this is slowly changing, companies like Google are a positive influence on the Chinese work culture because the company promotes a culture of innovation, research, and transparency. What this means is that it values risk-takers and creative minds. Working at Google gives many Chinese researchers, programmers, and managers an opportunity to engage with companies that have different protocols and values than local Chinese companies.

And lastly, collaboration is critical for innovation. If Google and the Chinese government cannot work through this together, then China would be signaling to the world that it just pushed out one of the world’s most innovative IT companies. If Google stays in China, it should think about how to become a leader for IT innovation in China. Some good ideas to consider can be found in Isaac Mao’s open letter to Google to “save [the] Internet in China.” Mao suggests that Google create a VC fund, develop anti-censorship tools, and improve Adsense. I am a big fan of his first suggestion of creating a VC fund as a way to nurture new Chinese IT companies. This is an excellent idea that would infuse the market with innovative companies that are more closely aligned with Google’s culture. With Google running a R&D like VC fund, it would diversify the players in the Chinese internet landscape, increase Google’s industry alliances, and nurture its ties to other IT leaders that may have deeper connections to other sectors

Whatever the outcome, we should not be misled to think that everyone is on the same page in the Chinese government. Like all large institutions, there are different alliances and divergent opinions. The Chinese government is not a unified front that necessarily agrees across all levels on its censorship policies. I believe that there is a lot of opportunity for change. I worked with a lot of smart and open minded people who were willing to explore different positions. The question is are those talented people in the position to bring things like innovation, competition, and collaboration together.

In the beginning of this post, I said that that if Google were to leave China, there would be no immediate impacts on the average Chinese internet user. However, the long-term impacts would be devastating. The Chinese IT industry would lose such a critical player. The Chinese government would appear and be stigmatized for being hostile towards international businesses and privacy protocols. The citizens of China would have less access to unfiltered information. And the world beyond China would lose a critical link to the country.  But also if Google really were to leave, it will be to their loss. Business wise, it just wouldn’t make sense. I hope that a compromise can be reached.

very side side note: aside from the design and branding issues that I discuss above, my personal opinion is that I don’t understand the rationale in the first place to hire a non-globally-minded-connected-Chinese to run Google China. Surely this could be the root of many of the issues? 

——-

Other view points on this topic:

• Alex Pasterneck -  Don’t be Evil v. Serve the People: Is Google a Benign Version of China?
• Larry Salibra - Google’s China Lessons: Forbidden Fruit and Face Saving Retreat

UPDATE - July 30, 2010: I gave a keynote on the Google-China Saga in June.

GOOGLIST REALISM: The Google-China saga and the free-information regimes as a new site of cultural imperialism and moral tensions

UPDATE  - September 18, 2010: I extend some of the ideas I first introduced on digital diplomacy on my commentary about digital imperialism and Haystack.

The Great Internet Freedom Bluff of Digital Imperialism: Thoughts on Cyber Diplomacy, Cargo Cult Digital Activism… and Haystack

When Google left China in early 2010, many attributed Google’s move as a valiant and moral response to the Chinese government’s strict information filtering rules. I disagreed with this point of view and wrote a post on Cultural Bytes on what I thought were the real reasons for Google’s quick departure from China. 

A few months later, I was asked to keynote the New Directions in the Humanities Conference at UCLA on June 29, 2010. This gave me the chance to rethink some of the original comments I made back in early 2010. In my original post, I argued that Google failed to create successful brand recognition in the Chinese market, to launch a recognizable marketing campaign that stood out against Baidu (the reigning search engine in China), and to understand the values of non-elite users in China. I then suggested that Google should’ve put more time in understanding the cultural orientations of Chinese users before expecting services that they had originally developed for Western users to just be readily embraced by Chinese consumers.

As I started preparing for my talk, I began thinking more about why the world’s largest search engine left the largest online market. I realized that my original post only barely scraped the surface of the Google-China saga. The bigger issue was more than a matter of Google failing to conduct proper ethnography and user tests on the Chinese market. The real issue is that China and Google see the world in different ways and this informs their outlook on how access to information should be mediated. And ultimately Google assumed that their world view would eventually trump China’s.

For my keynote, I make the case that Google failed in China for two reasons. First, drawing upon the ideas that I made in my original post, I discuss how Google never created useful services for non-elite digital users based off of my ethnographic work in China.

Second, I argue that the Google-China saga is an example of a contemporary clash in moral orders centered around information politics. Google exemplifies a hacker ethic that can be traced back to Enlightenment ideals of individual achievement while China reflects Confucian cultural norms of social harmony that emerged 2,400 years ago during the early Han dynasty. A moral order rooted in Enlightenment ideals rewards rebels, while a moral order rooted in Confucian ideals rewards followers. 

Access to information has become a battle site of cultural imperialism. Information politics is ultimately a struggle over meaning and symbols. Google, one of the main players, has successfully linked the commodification of information to an ethical system of social change which I call “neo-informationalism,” a retooling of neo-liberal ideals and a re-envisioning of imperialism based on information as a primary means to wealth expansion in the digital age.

My talk is split into 3 parts.  I explain the history of the Google-China saga and my disclaimers in the introduction. Part 1 is about why Google failed in China due to a lack of deep cultural understanding of the market. Part 2 is about how Google and China ascribe to differing moral orders. Part 3 is about Google’s unintentional engagement in imperialism. And in my conclusion I provide directions for technologists, academics, and businesses for how to move forward with lessons from the Google-China saga.

Here’s an excerpt from Part 3 and the conclusion. Pease take a look at my talk here (pdf download here). My assertions will make much more sense when the talk is read in its entirety. I’ve also included footnotes for follow up readings in the full version. The slides that go along with my talk can be viewed/downloaded here. And some pics from the conference here, and lastly the audio from the conference talk is here.

So let’s go directly into Part 3!

*I look forward to your thoughts on this topic. Plus, this is only the beginning of the Google-China saga!

___________________________________________

PART 3

From doing business with guns, germs, and steel to computers, code, and clouds

Some business analysts, politicians, and the Western media cheered Google on for standing up to China and relocating to Hong Kong which, mind you, is still a part of China. Others thought that the sheer size of the Chinese market would sway Google to stay in China, much like Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. But I want to highlight one particular analysis.  

Umair Haque, an economist and Director of the Havas Media Lab, claimed on the Harvard Business Review blog that by leaving China Google had taken an ethically motivated, not an economically motivated stance.  He argued that Google’s decision gives them an

“ethical edge…that’s always been at the heart of Google’s disruptive success.” “…a Google that doesn’t play by China’s rules is a better business, which creates more thicker [sic], sustainable, meaningful value.” 

In his Awesomeness Manifesto, he asserted that corporations engaged in “ethical production” are more financially successful and meaningful than those that don’t because they innovate in the name of a “higher calling” not in the name of profits.

Let’s consider Umair’s proposal on Google’s ethical edge. 

I agree that Google believes that they have an “ethical edge.”  They believe that they draw upon the qualities that stand opposite from evil— benevolence, compassion, and kindness— to  serve their higher-calling of introducing the world to information.

But I absolutely disagree with Umair that this “ethical edge” is anything new. This is a common moral trope of colonialism, imperialism, globalization, and neo-liberalism: ethical beliefs that justify expansionary practices of extracting commodities and creating new markets in the name of a “higher calling.” 

But instead of extracting spices, opium, gold, bodies, labor or oil, Google was trying to extract information from the Chinese market and then commodify that information as it provided it back to Chinese consumers — ostensibly in the name of “freedom”. The weapon of choice is no longer guns, germs, and steel, but free-information, open platforms, and distributed architectures.

Tropes of colonialism 

To be fair, this “ethical edge” isn’t just being practiced by Google. It’s also practiced by countless other technology companies that make their way from the West to other continents. It’s also the very rhetoric employed by many proponents of the free and open-source software movement, the ICT4D field (Information Communication Technology for Development), and OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) community.

So I ask us, why are we so invested in the idea of Google being in mainland China?  I suspect that one of the reasons is that Google’s relocation of its servers to Hong Kong opened up an existing set of anxieties among ourselves about America’s place in the global order.

But what Americans don’t get is that this openness is contingent upon America’s vision of keeping markets open, tearing down national borders, and creating an open ICT network that preserves America’s interest in being the world’s police, superpower and economic leader.
We thought that we could bring the internet to the world and the architecture would remain open.  What we didn’t expect was for countries to use the internet to advance their own agendas in the same way that the US was already doing: using their own culture, policies, and system of ethics. 

Algorithms of social change: new technologies, same old games

And here’s the kicker - in leaving China because the Chinese government wouldn’t conform to their rules, Google reproduced the very imperialistic behavior that have characterized the greatest imperial powers: leaving a country or region when they couldn’t get the natives to abandon their own way of thinking or adopt a new way of behaving.

What’s emerging is a new rhetoric of development and globalization in what I am calling neo-informationalism: the belief that information should function like currency in free-market capitalism -  border-less, free from regulation, and mobile. The logic of neo-informationalism rests on an moral framework that is tied to what Morgan Ames calls “information determinism,” the belief that free and open access to information can create social change. This moral framework of neo-informationalism is so naturalized that Google and like-minded companies work their way around the world unquestioned for their position on open information. Phrases such as “information wants to be free” reflect the techno-anthropomorphizing of information, a necessary step in naturalizing any neo-informationalist agenda.

Neo-informationalism is a re-visioning of a non-redistributive laissez-faire ideology of modernization theory transplanted into Western technologies that assumes surely people cannot be self-sufficient without unlimited access to the tools that connect them to the world wide web. Underlying this ideology is the notion that information openness and market openness are inseparable and non-mutually exclusive. Information openness can only be achieved through free-market conditions.

This is a model of social change that puts faith in objects, not in governance processes. Neo-informationalism and neo-liberalism work symbiotically to create what Wendy Brown calls the governed citizen who seeks solutions in products as opposed to the political process. While Wendy wasn’t speaking of technological objects per se, I make the case that this is indeed a variant of the hacker ethic; social change is made through direct programming of software code and interaction with technological devices while maintaining distance from the state.

What I want to point out is that while this is a very reasonable process being accomplished by very reasonable people — Westerners creating products and policies for Westerners - I am not comfortable with pushing this belief on others in the name of a “higher calling.” This is a simply a redux of cultural imperialism that says “we know better than you, and if you don’t believe us, too bad you have no choice, because we’re offering you emancipation by giving you access to our Internets.”

We should question any ethical system that reproduces a familiar trope of colonialism. Whereas past waves of imperialism used Religion, Science, or Globalization as a rhetoric of development, the new rhetoric of neo-informationalism is used as a guiding principle for entering new regions—ethical principles that can be used as proxies for pushing our belief system onto other people. As a result, the work can be less about free information and unlimited compassion and more about desires for free-access to new markets and new commodities.

CONCLUSION

Create understanding

So does this mean that we have to give up on Google? No, the world doesn’t work in binaries and neither should you nor I. I depend on Google for most of on my online communication. I’m known among my friends as a Google evangelist. I force my friends onto gmail and its amazing filtering capabilities. I heart Google and could talk about its services ad naseum. But while I love the technical aspects of Google’s products, I am at the same time critical of the limits and affordances of its technologies. Technologies are never just technologies. They are machines laden with cultural expectations imbued by their creators.   

But herein lies my fear: What if we start thinking that there is no alternative to the institution of Google? What if the “Google model” starts to become what we think of as the most natural way to do things? We need to question any ”reality that presents itself as natural”and that includes something as apparently innocuous as Google.

We need to make sure that we don’t succumb to Googlist Realism. Much like Capitalist Realism, the belief that there is no alternative to the reality of capitalism as a way of life, Googlist Realism is the belief that there is no alternative to Google as our search engine and as our gatekeeper of information. The belief that capitalism can improve life is now supplanted by the free-information regimes of neo-informationalism - the belief that unfettered information access is life. 

 Google has successfully linked the commodification of information to an ethical system of social change. This rhetoric is so strong that I worry that we could lose our imagination for any other form of information reality or social change outside of a Google-like model. I also worry that those who question this model will be framed as enemies of freedom, information, and social change.

Google and China have their own visions for the social life of information and for the role of information in society. We should be equally critical of a corporation with algorithms that create a consensual consumer culture based on advertising clicks as we are of a country with policies that create a consensual citizenry based on obedience through a paternalistic form of governance. 

But we should also be equally hopeful of a corporation with digital applications that create access to information that was reserved for the privileged as we are of a country with social policies that empower people to explore their talents and scale their services through government-supported, free-market entrepreneurship.

Summarizing the five main points that I’ve made today

1. As countries create their own internet policies, information politics will become a key site of contestation in a globally networked society. 
 

As corporations and governments use the ethics of neo-informationalism to look for new markets and cheap labor, some countries will also counter these efforts with their own ethics. Capitalist growth depends not only on the physical architecture of ICTs, but also on the reach of an ethical system to support the open use of ICTs.  Ethics do matter. In the absence of religious or governmental heroes, the digital economy also needs its own goddesses.   

Just as we’ve created public institutions to regulate, debate, and check transnational corporations in times of excess neo-liberalism, we’ve got to create similar institutions for information in times of excess neo-informationalism. As Theodore Porter demonstrated in his insightful work on accounting as a system of information and a site of ethical battles, “the history of information is almost synonymous with the history of large enterprises.”

 
 2. Information disjunctures will increasingly fall along moral and ethical disagreements between institutions, reflecting tensions in regional values and beliefs.

Institutions that mediate information will increasingly have to deal with a diversity of moral orders that are regionally specific, originally proposed in the the “Górniak hypothesis” in 1996.  We have to realize that just like any other institution, the internet will be implemented and used in such a way that it maps onto existing social forces, institutions, and values.

That is why understanding regional internet culture is important.

Here I draw upon institutional theory and in particular Philip Agre’s amplification model of how new institutions don’t necessarily create new social behaviors, rather they amplify existing ones. This theory explains why Google has not “changed” China to become a nation modeled in the image of the US. Even something as open as the internet will be localized. This is because 1.) not all people/countries are the same and 2.) not all sovereign nations will welcome neo-informationalism as envisioned by the West. Many countries and individuals are suspicious of how “The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, alongside the U.S. Trade Representative, the Federal Communications Commission, and other apostles of neo-liberalism, used multiple levers to pry open global networking to corporate-commercial investment” argues Dan Schiller.

   
3. I also argue that what’s at stake in the clashes of moral orders is the determination of meaning. Google isn’t just an information processing entity, it is a meaning-making entity. 
As a meaning-making institution, Google is in the business of standardizing and universalizing the domination of “autonomous [and public] information” as attached to democracy, liberation, and excellence (Porter  228). Whoever controls information and the means of dissemination, controls meaning and the symbols associated with it—hence culture. 

For nation-states, culture becomes an even more powerful instrument of social control which will increasingly be mediated through digital means.

For corporations, culture becomes an an ever more powerful instrument of profit and this will increasingly be mediated over digital information spaces where our desires and preferences can be sorted and indexed.

4. There is a diversity in cultural orientations and they matter in how technologies are used, received, and created.

As companies start designing more software for a diversity of communities and conditions around the world, there is a greater need to understand how culture is exhibited in emotive and tangible ways. We can no longer ascribe to traditional binaries that place culture on a local level and money on a global scale. However geographically stationary some groups may be, ideas and energies are mobile. But this does not necessarily mean that mobility leads to greater flows in cooperation, rather it can also lead to greater fluxes in stability. A nuanced understanding of cultural orientations as an ongoing narrative will be required to navigate this space. 

5. Institutions will continue to make attempts to bound the internet. But in a digitally-mediated network society where communication streams and physical contact are more frequent than ever, it becomes harder to maintain silos of communication. The digital mobility of ideas, people, and images means that moral orders are coming into contact with each other.

As information, culture, symbols, and ideas become more mobile, it will become harder for any entity to unilaterally enforce their own moral orders. Because of this, we’re going to see more collisions in moral orders as information becomes destabilized and detached from its geographic point of origin. 

The internet is a host to amazing forms of participatory culture and will continue to be so precisely because its network architecture allows a diversity of interactions to take place - from gated communities to open spaces. Nation-states can try to create a bounded internet, but with some people and ideas more mobile than ever before, it becomes harder to enforce global digital walls. 

In a digitally mediated world, the logics of replication do not function according to a mechanical order. A la Gilles Deleuze, Manual de Landa, and Felix Guattari, I think of Lucretius’s quote on atoms:

“When atoms are traveling straight down through empty space by their own weight, at quite indeterminate times and places, they swerve every so little from their course, just so much that you would call it a change of direction. If it were not for this swerve, everything would fall downwards through the abyss of space. No collision would take place and no impact of atom on atom would be created. Thus nature would never have created anything.”

As the moral orders of nations collide, some will clash and some will cohere. But the guarantee is that something is going to happen. It’s already started and we’re going to need people to deconstruct this and place what’s happening in context amid all the noise.

Values in our technologies

Let us be attentive to the values that shape the way we interact with information and the architectures that mediate it.

Today I’ve talked about how beliefs and values are layered onto our technologies and inform our expectations for how they are used. These technologies are never just technical, but they are social and luckily for us they are observable.

A few week ago, Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple said, ”We’re not just a tech company, even though we invent some of the highest technology products in the world,” he said. ”It’s the marriage of that plus the humanities and the liberal arts that distinguishes Apple.” 

Let us be in dialogue with Steve Jobs and Google with some liberal arts magic. Kant, Bentham, and Descartes drew up a new ethical order at the turn of the Industrial Revolution that was a response to the social transformation from the printing age. This is happening now for the interneting age. The liberal arts is positioned with the analytical tools to be part of this dialogue. We should be doing all that we can to make our work public.   

We cannot just leave this agenda to the technologists. We cannot let the new myths about freedom and information to pass without question. We must use critical theory, ethnographic methods, and common-sense to question how cultural values play out, in and around technology. Values not only reproduce contemporary tensions, but they are also sites of contestation. 

*UPDATE: here are some articles published after my talk (June 29, 2010) that I think are worth the read

• July 23, 2010. Paul Denlinger. Google China Is Struggling To Rebuild Its Business  
• July 15, 2010. Paul Denlinger. Who Won in Google’s Showdown with China?
• July 10, 2010. Kai Pan. Henry Blodget Doesn’t Know Crap About the Google China Drama.
• July 11, 2010. Paul Denlinger China: Google backed Down Over Censorship Laws

UPDATE  - August 30. 2010:  I started a research blog, Information Peripeteia,  with Morgan Ames tracking the rhetoric and discourse around free-information.

UPDATE  - September 18, 2010: I extend some of the ideas I first introduced on neo-informationalism on my commentary about digital imperialism and Haystack.

The Great Internet Freedom Bluff of Digital Imperialism: Thoughts on Cyber Diplomacy, Cargo Cult Digital Activism… and Haystack

Over the last few months I’ve been following the developments around Haystack, an “anti-censorship tool” for Iranian internet users. As the media was fawning over Haystack as a free speech tool and its co-creator, Austin Heap, as a poster-child for digital activism, I observed conversations unfold on the Stanford’s Liberation Technology email list-serve where members began to raise some serious concerns about Haystack’s major security gaffes and its shady beta release.

Jillian York has written biting analysis of the media coverage of the Haystack Affair. The Economist has a great review of the events.

Projects like Haystack reveal so much more about our own fears of the world. But the bottom line is that Haystack was blown out of proportion from the very beginning for something that it wasn’t. The Haystack Affair, however, is not an isolated incident; it is a continuation of projects coming from Westerners who place their own narratives on people and situations they really don’t fully understand.

The Internet Freedom Bluff

The Haystack Affair, like the recent Google-China Saga is just another technology that has been caught in the digital geo-politics of what I’ve been calling, neo-informationalism. Neo-informationalism is the belief that information should function like currency in free-market capitalism—borderless, free from regulation, and mobile. The logic of this rests on an ethical framework that is tied to what Morgan Ames calls “information determinism,” the belief that free and open access to information can create real social change. I write more about the roots of neo-informationalism from hacker and corporate tech culture in my analysis on the Google China Saga and on my research blog on this topic, but I think what’s important to note here is that we are starting to see that the neo-informationalist agenda is not only built into the way we and corporations promote our technologies, but is reflected in our state policies. This all started with Hilary Clinton’s talk on internet freedom in early January of this year, which marked a clear turning point in US foreign policy. The talk didn’t just reprimand China for not making it possible for Google to do business on Google’s terms in China, it also announced to the world that the US was embarking on a new crusade for freedom - internet freedom.

And here’s the thing - the people being recruited for this new crusade aren’t your typical jingoists who tend to support protectionist policies and centralized controls on information, but techies who believe in free-information in the name of liberty and rights for all human beings. Just as much as neo-liberalism successfully incorporated the Left and Democrats to support open markets in the name of “development” when really it was all about the control of money and power, neo-informationalism incorporates lefty digital activtists to support freedom and open information when in reality it serves to benefit Americans and their allies at the end of the day - not real social change in the places that need it the most. (Hackers be aware!)

Free-markets, like free-information, need to be created. Free-markets are maintained through the heavy subsidization of the US military industrial complex. We are all familiar with this kind of imperialism- the exploit of resources in other countries so that we can maintain our standard of living (e.g. military build up in the Persian Gulf to protect oil fields). But what’s emerging is a new form of domination that I call digital imperialism - the exploit of other countries through digital means so that we can maintain our status quo. The former does it in the name of free-markets, the latter does it in the name of free-information.

Neo-informationalist policies, such as the new “internet freedom” foreign policy to ensure free and flowing information, compliment neoliberal practices in corporate welfare to keep markets free and open to the US and all of our allies who benefit from our work.  Neo-informationalism works on two fronts - on a policy/political and on a corporate/market level. Governments are increasingly flexing power through information policies. This is what Sandra Braman calls the new “information state,” replacing the bureaucratic welfare state. In her book (must-read), Change of State: Information, Policy, and Power, she argues that this new information state influences the way states govern down to research, internet/network connections, and policy. Alongside with changes in governance, corporations also draw upon neo-informationalist rhetoric as its modus operandi for extending its reach and maintaining its current policies even when they may not benefit groups of users. I and many others have argued that the corporate efforts of companies such as Google must constantly be checked (just like any other institution) to ensure that their policies are benefiting users, not just the corporation.  Tim Wu’s latest book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, speaks to this very concern - that the history of ICTs in the US show that when a corporation is able to monopolize a technologial innovation, its action switch to centralizing the control of the medium. The internet is built on open protocols, but this doesn’t mean that the very institutions that are invested in keeping those technological protocols open are always equally invested in what’s best for their users.

The narrative of internet freedom is a myth - it’s a myth that Americans have constructed about the technology. We hear this perpetuated with rallying cries such as, “If we don’t do X, the internet will no longer be free!” How is this different from, “If we don’t invade X or control Y, then American will no longer be free!” Then to add to this you have the hackers and techies arguing that “information wants to be free,” reflecting the techno-anthropomorphization of information. All of these statements create the larger narrative that OUR internet is free and other internets are unfree.

The internet as freedom myth rests on a binary that the internet is a platform that either promotes freedom or total control. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s book, Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, attacks this Western binary and asks, ” How has the Internet, a medium that thrives on control, been accepted as a medium of freedom? Why is freedom increasingly indistinguishable from paranoid control?” The silver lining in her argument is that she shows how the internet came to be constructed as a tool for empowerment - mainly as racial and sexual empowerment in the US.

But now this myth of internet freedom has become internalized within our media sphere and among digital activists. And at times the real concerns of serious issues like net neutrality get mixed into the internet freedom rhetoric that has now been adopted by the State Department. The danger of seeing the internet as a binary is that we lose the ability to see how the internet is manifested in various ways depending on institutional contexts, how the internet AMPLIFIES existing conditions.

It’s also a dangerous way of seeing the world because we begin to believe that real social change can happen if the internet was just “free” and if all information just flowed freely. The internet creating more democracy is a myth (Matthew Scott Hindman’s book, The Myth of Digital Democracy, makes this point). Now we have this tech deterministic argument wrapped up in our state policy. And it’s quite powerful when you combine it with the current neoliberal efforts to over-ride “inefficient” governments and regulators to create more “efficient” markets.

Neo-informationalism and neo-liberalism work symbiotically to create what Wendy Brown calls the governed citizen who seeks solutions in products as opposed to the political process.  Neo-informationalism is a re-visioning of a non-redistributive laissez-faire ideology of modernization theory transplanted into Western technologies that assumes surely people cannot be self-sufficient without unlimited access to the tools that connect them to the world wide web. Underlying this ideology is the notion that information openness and market openness are inseparable and non-mutually exclusive. Information openness can only be achieved through free-market conditions. This is a model of social change that puts faith in objects, not in governance processes. And now even our State Deparment is pushing this agenda as it fits quite nicely with the efforts to bring democracy to the world - esp where we need it the most- our oil fields.

Now I have no qualms with countries advocating for democracy, but like sami ben gharbia, I am very critical of the hypocrisy in this new crusade. In sami’s  latest (and awesomely researched) blog post, The Internet Freedom Fallacy and Arab Digital Activism, he writes that

“the U.S cannot be regarded as credible in their new crusade for Internet freedom as long as they maintain the same foreign policy which is, as many Arab affairs specialists and activists describe it, a hypocritical and counter-democratic one.” 

As Western countries such as the US become more invested in promoting freedom through information practices, we will see more projects that attempt to fulfil the political promise of spreading and maintaining democracy abroad (see Evgeny Morozov’s article on this topic). We’re returning to some good old post-Cold War policy making. This time around, however, state governments no longer need to spread information and knowledge by erecting universities abroad when they can now offer internet circumvention technologies that will give the world access to all information.  It’s digital imperialism as its best - the marriage of computer programmers who believe in free-information and state governments who believe in freedom. And therein that marriage came the short lived baby named Haystack. But rest assured, there will be more babies that come out of this new public-private partnership of digital activists and government actors. And when these babies come, will the media and people remember the Haystack Affair or will we repeat the same old mess?

Avoiding Cargo Cult Digital Activists
These messy digital affairs are often fueled by digital activists who unknowingly get caught up in these neo-informationalist landscapes. This graph by sami ben gharbia illustrates the new context of digital activism. There are whole host of new players who want to promote this new crusade of US cyber diplomacy through the internet by working closely with digital activists and grassroots organizations. Sami warns that if digital activists do not exercise more discretion in who they become involved with, they can end up supporting the very policies that they are fighting.

It may sounds alluring at first to collaborate with the government when it appears that there is a shared goal to promote free and open access to information. It’s especially alluring to groups who already believe and practice this. I am embedded in a community of hackers, techies, and organizers who believe in free-information as a practice. While I share similar values, what I see happening is that many digital activists are quick to jump on any international case promoted by the media where information does not appear to flow “freely.” Then they launch some project and naively step into a larger geo-strategic power struggle that has nothing to do with free-information for all and everything to do with freedom for some.

Austin Heap, fell into this power struggle. Even worse, he prematurely courted the media’s attention (and the media courted him) before having a solid product. Putting my anthropologist hat on, i would say that Austin Heap was just doing cargo cult science. Physicist Richard Feynman used this term to criticize scientists who conduct and promote their own scientific projects just to secure research funds and media attention. (more on the history of real Cargo cults). The point is that you can’t take cargo cult science seriously; giving it more attention (like the media did) only encourages more spectacle.

In this new era of cyber democracy in the name of “Internet Freedom,” we’re going to see more cargo cult technologies from digital activists. Some technologies will suck and some will work, but the problem is that the tools that make false promises to users can actually cut off dialogue instead of cultivating it.

And that is the MOST CRITICAL danger of tools like Haystack - they are distracting mirages for the digital activists on the ground doing the grueling work of keeping conversations open, encrypting banal and politicized convos, working with local communities and governments to improve their information services, and building participatory sites. As we walk through the dessert of global affairs, let’s not be distracted by the mirages and keep our eyes on the real goal, which is to cultivate relationships where we can learn from each other and support communities so that they sustain themselves economically, politically, and socially.

My issue with projects like Haystack is that the creators attached a political ideology to its software. By politicizing the “tool,” it becomes less useful because its only targets high-value users, which then exposes them to greater danger. Sometimes, the most depoliticized tools are the most beneficial in highly politicized situations. Youtube is a great example of a real life working anti-censorship tool. It’s the most popular website for video uploading and viewing and the third most trafficked site in the world. It’s subversive because it’s popular and because it has no stated agenda for target users. Tor is another example of a widely used anonymous software that doesn’t set an ideological narrative for its users.

Doing more harm than good when stories are forced
What I’ve learned throughout my years of organizing is that activists too often have a pre-set narrative for the  outcome in which they are trying to change. In my early days of activism in youth media in NYC, I was too invested in creating one outcome for the youth that we were trying to “save” from the projects. It didn’t help that we could only find funders who would give grants for promises of “measurable change” for “disaffected and media illiterate youth” from the ghetto.  Change is possible, but genuine and sustainable change has to be negotiated and determined by the community. This to me is what I love about participatory tools that bring people together whether it is an inviting warm fire or hip-hop music or an internet meme.

Over the last few years of researching technology and migrants in China, I’ve seen scores of anti-censorship projects (from art to technology to straight up protests) aimed at freeing Chinese people from their “censored lives.” These projects, propped up in the name of freedom, can often hurt the very people they are trying to save or the people who are working to improve the situation without the spotlight of international media attention (this is the topic of Linda Polman’s book on the harm of many humanitarian aid efforts). I’ve seen this happen way too many times. Some of the most exciting social reforms in China are happening in places without any international NGOs or media attention or activists waiting to tell their deportation survival story.

I think the underlying work of activism is the goal of revealing concentrated or unfair forms of power. Yet, often times in these macro discussion of geo-political and international diplomacy making, we forget that power is not possessed but exercised. If this is the case, then activism is less about redistributing power but more about igniting people and communities to believe that they have the power to represent their own stories, lives, needs, and hopes. Some of the most exciting prospects for change are tools, projects, and institutions that facilitate people to code their own space, to program their own lives, and to represent their own stories. As geographer John Allen argues (pg 163), “there is no everywhere to power.” While we may all be immersed in “arrangements of power,” power is not evenly distributed. Can this be the exploit then for digital activists?

Truths and Stories
Philosopher Martin Heidegger tells a story of how a farmer uses traditional technology and a Westerner uses modern technology with a piece of land. While the farmers see the land as something to cultivate, the Westerner with her/his modern technologies sees the land as a resource where only one thing is possible - maximum yield for profit. The farmer sees her/himself as the steward of the land while the Westerner sees her/himself as the beneficiary of the land. Non-modern technologies cultivate objects for the most sustainable path while modern technologies in the West exploit resources for the ‘maximum yield at minimal expense.’

Heidegger was concerned about the Western approach to technology because it sets the world up as a set of calculable and coherent forces. This way of seeing and doing penetrates our subconscious as we approach countries, communities and then individuals. When armed with technologies that helps us make rational and calculated decisions, it reifies what we see as the truth - ours!  Heidegger argued that the modern Western spirit is not whole because there is no such thing as just one “truth.”  For the spirit to be whole, Heidegger suggests that we need to be open to a greater variety of truths.

To me, the beauty of the internet is that in the tradition of other communication tools, it offers other ways to experience different realities and truths. Tools like Haystack reify our truth - that others live in repression and Americans live in freedom. If you create a tool that is only for people to fight against repressive governments, then you’re forcing one use scenario for your users. Projects that go in with a pre-set story or mission is a myopic way of interacting with the world because it can prevent the possibility of other stories from emerging that were never imagined in the first place. And this worries me because having a pre-set story of “liberatory technology” stunts the imagination for other innovative possibilities for social change with technological objects and with people.

Cut off what?
Short of killing the actual leaders in repressive countries (which the US has done and continues to support), social change can take a long time. It’s not sexy and it doesn’t grab media headlines. The people at NGOs and companies creating awesome possibilities and dialogues around the world in this space aren’t in the New York Times for every community they work with or every bridge they build. The states that are experimenting with alternatives to neo-liberlalism and trying to create a sustainable present don’t even get press attention (great article on how  South America has become neoliberalims’s weakest link).

If the goal for activists, in Zizek’s words, is to not dirt[y] the balls of those in power but to cut [their testicles] off, then we should cultivate trust abroad, not destroy it. My concern is that digital activists have not learned from our own history. Haven’t we learned from countless projects, such as how we totally screwed up Afghanistan, that we tend to create chaos when we naively simplify our actions as a matter of freedom and democracy? So how about we work on “Internet freedom” on our own soil first? There’s a lot of work to be done and stories to be told. Here’s some projects and people who are doing awesome work on good old American soil:  Jennifer Pahlka  at Code For America, Anil Dash’s work at Expert Labs, Gina Trappani’s app Think Up, and Noel Hidalgo’s work at the NY State Senate.

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And while I have your attention, could I engage you in some satire on this very topic of giving “help” to others? For some laughs, watch this video from the Armando Iannucci Show. Its the best thing I’ve seen in a while.

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thanks to Calixte Tayoro for forcing me to write my thoughts up on this topic :)