Fantastic article, and the Chinese turn was unexpected but 100% correct.
I love the First Amendment and abhor censorship, and yet I have reluctantly come to believe that the Great Firewall of China will be a long-term benefit to that country. What China shows us is that, contra the whole line of technology-first scholarship following McLuhan, it’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters. China is not a utopia, but its citizens have a brighter future than ours, and they will be able to read about it, thanks to a sociopolitical system that still sees literacy as necessary and retains primacy over private capital.
This is anecdotal, but I was just in China for some time and the most shocking thing I found there was there are no iPad kids. Children run around and play and are generally social menaces in all places, and none of them are just given an iPad or whatever to shut them up and go on TikTok. It's so astonishingly different than my experience on the street in the United States. Hell, at once point I even watched an exasperated parent give her child in China an iPad so she would stop trying to play a musical instrument on the ground, and instead of using the iPad to browse Douyin or something she started running around using it to take pictures of everybody! It was shocking in the most beautiful way. Just re-enforces what was said in this article.