leira

When I left China 9 years ago, I used to think the internet with social media is a great democratizing power. It opens information to common Chinese to the extent that the government cannot control all the narratives anymore, especially with social medias like Twitter.

Now after staying in US for 9 years, I'm not sure if the internet is such a positive power any more. It might actually just be the opposite. With internet and social media, it enables information bubble to form. It enables people to live in totally isolated worlds. And it is almost impossible to penetrate through the bubbles to reach the other side. In US, it fueled the ever growing polarization in the society, essentially created 2 or more totally different US'. While in China, the government creates its narrative bubble through its propaganda machine and censorship. Rather than the liberation of people's mind we hoped to see, we actually seeing people's opinion more converged to the official narrative.

I'm afraid, even someday CCP loosens it's iron grip of censorship, we still won't see the information freedom we hoped for. But rather bubbles like US, just with one giant bubble of official narrative, and many tiny bubbles of other opinions, which can never penetrate the giant bubble.

Reminded me of Closh (https://github.com/dundalek/closh), which is a Bash-like shell based on Clojure. Both Babashka and Closh runs Clojure code directly from shell.