• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1830 0

truths, it has become nearly impossible to awaken people’s political consciousness, even to fight authoritarianism. How can you, when everyone is busy buying plasma TVs (Chinese today buy TVs with the biggest screens in the world, beating Americans by four inches), shopping for stuff online (a company linked to the Iranian government launched an online supermarket the same week that the authorities decided to ban Gmail), and navigating a city with the highest number of BMWs per square meter (that would be Moscow)? Even the official media in Cuba, that stalwart of revolutionary values, now broadcast TV series like The Sopranos, Friends, and Grey’s Anatomy. In early 2010 they reportedly broadcast a pirated version of the movie Avatar shortly after it opened in U.S. theaters. (The communist critics, however, remained unconvinced; “predictable ... very simplistic ... reiterative in its argument” was the verdict of movie buffs from Granma, the official daily of the Communist Party of Cuba—perhaps they didn’t get the memo about the 3D glasses.) It’s hardly surprising that fewer than 2 percent of Cubans tune in to the radio broadcasts funded by the U.S. government through Radio Martí, Cuba’s equivalent of Radio Free Europe. Why should ordinary Cubans take any risks to listen to highly ideological and somewhat boring news about politics if they can follow the travails of Tony Soprano?

The same young people America wants to liberate with information are probably better informed about U.S. popular culture than many Americans. Teams of Chinese netizens regularly collaborate to produce Chinese-language subtitles for popular American shows like Lost (often they find those shows on various peer-to-peer file-sharing sites as soon as ten minutes after new episodes air in the United States). Could it also be some kind of modern-day samizdat? Maybe, but there is little indication that it poses any threat to the Chinese government. If anyone is “lost,” it’s the citizens, not the authorities. Even authoritarian governments have discovered that the best way to marginalize dissident books and ideas is not to ban them—this seems only to boost interest in the forbidden fruit—but to let the invisible hand flood the market with trashy popular detective stories, self-help manuals, and books on how to get your kids into Harvard (texts like You Too Can Go to Harvard: Secrets of Getting into Famous U.S. Universities and Harvard Girl are best sellers in China).

Feeling that resistance would be counterproductive, even the Burmese government has grudgingly allowed hip-hop artists to perform at state functions. The regime has also created a soccer league after years without any organized matches and increased the number of FM radio stations, allowing them to play Western-style music. There even appeared something of a local MTV channel. As a Western-educated Burmese businessman told the New York Times in early 2010, “The government is trying to distract people from politics. There’s not enough bread, but there’s a lot of circus.” Once Burma is fully wired—and the junta is supportive of technology, having set up its own Silicon Valley in 2002 that goes by the very un-Silicon Valley name of Myanmar Information and Communication Technology Park—the government won’t have to try hard anymore; their citizens will get distracted on their own.

Today’s battle is not between David and Goliath; it’s between David and David Letterman. While we thought the Internet might give us a generation of “digital renegades,” it may have given us a generation of “digital captives,” who know how to find comfort online, whatever the political realities of the physical world. For these captives, online entertainment seems to be a much stronger attractor than reports documenting human rights abuses by their own governments (in this, they are much like their peers in the democratic West). One 2007 survey of Chinese youth found that 80 percent of respondents believe that “digital technology is an essential part of how I live,” compared with 68 percent of American respondents. What