China forbids the Internet to govern or parent
China forbids the Internet to govern or parent
The internet is like fire; great in a fireplace, not great in a baby's crib.
In a pathetic attempt to boost my engagement, I will contradict the indomitable, endearing, smart, gracious, wonderful Liz Wolfe on videogame bans and attack her argument made at over at Reason, an actual magazine. The argument goes like this; Freedom is good! Children should have it, too. “It's wrong whenever anyone attempts to restrict what people do to themselves without harming others” and children are autonomous individuals more so than resources to be carefully husbanded by the State.
Readers who are parents in America, if you are even wryly smirking, and not belly-laughing, please share this piece among your cohort of fellow adults. It’s important, as the US State declines, to seriously re-conceive our sociopolitics.
But this is unfair to Wolfe—I am also a Millennial without kids and unlike her, I am unmarried. It’s more than theoretically possible she will be a Momma soon. Really, how dare I claim the knowing depth and gentle wisdom of parenthood?
And why am I making excuses for People’s Republic? After all, it’s the CEE CEE PEE, “the Chinese GAWMUNIST PAWRDYY!”, spiritual Baby Boomers intone.
I would bet that most of my readership (God, I hope so) are not parents raising children. The Chinese, Bronson? You speak positively of the Chinese? They are evil incarnate, they are white slavers, they are opium huffing laundromat swindlers. They Chinese, they play joke, they put something in our Coke. To humanize China is an immense task, and downright unpatriotic. So, let’s try.
Surprising headlines, yeah? Our view of the Chinese—if we’re being brutally honest about many (even white Liberal) Westerners’ private estimation of Chinese and East Asian civilization more broadly—is that they have insect-like and robot-like qualities. They’re humans, but somehow both possessed of mechanical souls and a hive mind. Conformist. Inscrutable. Diligent. Quiet. This is sometimes couched in a public praise for their incredible discipline, and their smarts; everyone feels comfortable acknowledging East Asian intelligence manifested at least as a product of cultural and social habits. This is often done, though, with the accompanying implication they aren’t creative, that their accomplishments are ones of derivative scale, not innovation, and that they frankly don’t know how to enjoy life in the way cool Westerners do.
What could be going on here? Have the Chinese decided to give up so soon? Not quite. Here is a government webpage (note the authentic lack of https:// security!) from the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China:
Like almost all Americans, I don’t speak any variety of Chinese and won’t learn, because Google has solved that problem for me. Let’s take a look at the Letter on Reply to Proposal No. 4404 (Education No. 410) at the Third Session of the Thirteenth National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (one of the inherited qualities of Chinese government is their recapitulation of Soviet naming schema, which is charming after a fashion).
Your "Proposal on Preventing the Feminization of Male and Adolescents" has been received, and the reply to the business part of the Ministry of Education is now as follows:
1. Strengthen the allocation of physical education teachers
The Ministry of Education attaches great importance to strengthening the allocation of physical education teachers….In the next step, all provinces and schools will be required to increase the implementation of the "Management Measures for Part-time Sports and Aesthetic Education Teachers". In the "National Training Program" and "Provincial Training Program", they will increase their efforts to improve the quality and ability of physical education teachers, and at the same time, appropriately improve the teaching of physical education teachers. Methods and forms, pay more attention to the cultivation of students' "masculinity", and continue to add new physical education teachers through multiple channels.
After more talk about “Yeah, improve everything and improve it everywhere” repeated over and over again—Google translate isn’t perfect and bureaucrats will be bureaucrats—we glean some greater insight into Xi Jinping Thought:
Fourth, increase research on related issues
The Ministry of Education uses humanities and social science research projects as its starting point to strongly support the strengthening of research on issues related to youth mental health education. During the "Thirteenth Five-Year Plan" period, the Ministry of Education's Humanities and Social Research Project set up:
"The influence of the phenomenon of 'Internet celebrities' on the values of adolescents and countermeasures"
"Empirical research on the impact of residential segmentation on the development of adolescents from the perspective of urbanization"
"Research on the Display of Educational Function and the Construction of Adolescents' Spiritual Homeland"
"Research on Leisure Education Based on the Perspective of Cultivating Adolescents' Healthy Personality"
"Adolescents' Future Orientation Development and Peer Background: Follow-up Research"
Consider the long rising youth suicide rate, pan-demographic drops in math and reading scores, the doubling of screen-time over the last half decade, and the collapse of basic mores and youthful decency in America. Which society is actually full of thoughtless drones? Which society’s masses are actually addicted to opiates and other new, exciting opiate-like substances?
Speaking of stuff that’s addicting, you should sign up for this newsletter!
There are many reasons fMRI studies may be bullshit, but there are lots of reasons to take them as being directionally correct; internet addiction is real, and produces much literature using other methodologies confirming this.
Put in the simplest terms, when you successfully do things—anything—when you complete actions, your brain has pathways of neurons, brain cells, snaking through it where the cell to cell information is mediated by a flurry of neurotransmitter molecules acting as messengers between them. Are you, you? Or are you the result of whatever the food and drug influenced levels of neurotransmitters determined for your brain? Can you decide to do anything? We don’t need to answer that question, but we can unequivocally state that whatever conscious will you do have, it is exercised through your brain function, which turns into nervous function, which makes you do things like roll your eyes and mutter “Holy shit, Bronson, get to the goddamn point.”
The Chinese aren’t restricting online gaming to an hour on Fridays, weekends, and holidays because they hate fun, but because they love their children.
I don’t hate videogames. I have likely played more of the Elder Scrolls and other many other properties than Liz Wolfe, and almost certainly written more Papyrus code and made more models in NifTools for Skyrim mods than her. This is not said with arrogance, but the kind of weaselly shame-but also pride-but mostly shame that an older man feels when someone discovers forgotten photographs of his younger self in a garage, with an electric guitar, and a very dumb haircut, and worse clothes, like that was going anywhere.
The Chinese understand that videogames over stimulate reward pathways, particularly for young men. Even if just simple black and white geometries,
, the human mind, and particularly the nerd-jock mind, which is a decidedly masculine bifurcation, begins sharply focusing on objectives and parameters. In fact the earliest version of Lunar Lander was pure text. It may as well have been spreadsheet management. This pattern repeats endlessly. EVE Online, which is a fully spaceflight-combat based videogame that looks like this:
Ultimately sees the most dedicated participants managing resources like this:
Why are men like this? Why do women find themselves competing with COD?
Because me and the boys gotta kill the enemy tribe and take their loot, babe. Putting on our amateur evopsych hats, it’s not hard to speculate and just-so-story our way into why videogames are a dark hijacking of men’s deeply primal need to discover how dynamic structures function, an atavistic impulse to engage with and improve semi-random reward into reliably responding systems, and a drive to win, not just in absolute terms, but against others.
As Curtis Yarvin, appearing to have taken a left turn into relationship blogging rather than discourses on political power (he has, but also, he has not) puts it:
Everyone has an inner monkey. But some people have a MONKEY. It is no surprise that these big-monkey men and women are a disproportionate proportion of the people you read about in books.
…Your monkey is part of you. Your monkey is your friend. Your monkey is you. Your monkey can even be useful….You just have to know he’s there—and about how big he is… you can ask a simple question:
Does my monkey want this?
…The answer to this question does not determine your choice. A decision that makes the power-monkey happy may well be a good decision. But since you are not your monkey, you should make your decision after subtracting its opinion…am I doing this only because it makes the monkey happy?
Yeah, so, he’s not merely talking about the problems of relationships, is he?
Similarly, this is not merely a far smaller, far less important (but more FUN than Dear Uncle Moldbug’s, hahah—old man! ) blog post about videogames but about the profoundness of the Chinese view of a State’s relationship to Nation.
Where the Taliban are a postmodern movement-State, the People’s Republic of China is a nation-State in the tradition of the Long 19th Century; the Peking regime could only be more old fashioned by reintroducing queue tonsures. Their conception of State power is wholly predicated on the health of the nation, and nothing else. But they aren’t interested in that other product of the aforementioned era, Liberalism, insofar as it demands the liberation of the individual, nor the fabrication of egalitarianism between individuals. They call this 中国特色社会主义 or ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’, and the exercise is left to the reader to figure out what it means exactly to have Socialism oriented within a Nationalist framework. But they don’t stop there.
The best that parents concerned about the gutter trash being given to their kids through the boob-tube can rely on in the US are a spate of MommyBlogs (BTW, for my male readership, which is almost all of it, you’ll never meet more hardline reactionary and freakin’ based people than the mothers of your kids, and this been observed in many social movements, so give the girls a break.):
Here is a list of the best Christian movies for families. You don’t need to settle for entertainment that doesn’t glorify God. In fact, what you put into your mind will eventually come out of your heart.
Have you heard the saying, “Garbage in, garbage out?”
Think about it. How many of you have had a nightmare after watching a yucky movie?
Guilty.
Actually, it wasn’t even a horror movie. I watched The Fly and was a mess for weeks. I kept dreaming I was having a big larva for a baby. True story.
The point is that what you read, listen to, and watch frames your thinking.
So true, bestie. But these noble efforts of Amerikaaner Karens are quite small; they contend with a hurricane of pozzed media, engulfing every young mind.
In China—the fight to ensure kids are sound and strong comes from the State. The mission of the nation-State of the People’s Republic is to ensure that the Chinese people are healthy, educated, ambitious, and numerous. Constant gaming impedes that and saps the vitality of its young men, so it’s gotta go.
Look again at the social research occupying Chinese attention (with the caveat that Google Translate is fickle, and perhaps they aren’t so based):
"The influence of the phenomenon of 'Internet celebrities' on the values of adolescents and countermeasures"
"Research on the Display of Educational Function and the Construction of Adolescents' Spiritual Homeland"
It’s hard to think what American values exist for kids anymore besides those purveyed by ‘influencers’ on TikTok or YouTube (recall screen time factoids). Only horrors come to mind when I imagine the result of our US civil servants being tasked with constructing a spiritual homeland for the American youth.
In fact, what a framework of thinking about children as autonomous individuals might end up yielding in the US is what we have already; a ship of State that is sailed by children, from establishing Gender Studies departments in universities in Afghanistan before establishing rule of law, to reacting to every last attempt to enforce basic border control with temper tantrums.
It doesn’t stop at videogames. The Cambrian explosion of Zoomer-American sexualities complete with vexillologically reinforced territorialism is also something China has decided is just not going to be on Chinese internet:
QQ, the Tencent-owned messaging platform used by over half a billion in China, now blocks search terms like "gay" or "LGBTQ," Protocol has learned.
The software, available on both mobile and PC, allows users to find strangers and public group chats with key words. On Aug 30, searches with words like "gay," "lesbian," "LGBTQ," and "蕾丝" (a Chinese slang term for lesbian) come back with a notice: "Use the Internet in a civil manner. Say no to harmful information." QQ shows the same notice when users search for pornographic content.
An offense to American norms?—whatever those are anymore—sure, I s’pose. But China doesn’t intend to copy America’s future in place of a Chinese one. Far from the government appointing itself the role of parent, the Chinese government has decided that the Internet must not be allowed to do so.