The Journal of Post-Digital Geopolitics

In the dec­ade or so since Gold­man Sachs gave a good acronym to the BRIC coun­tries, many of us have sat through count­less meet­ings, listen­ing to pun­dits make wild gen­er­al­isa­tions and call it wis­dom: mainly that the cit­izens of these fine four coun­tries desire our products, ser­vices, and cul­ture like a man in the desert wants water. This is espe­cially true about the inter­net and China. The Chinese wait­ing for X, or the Chinese will do Y online being almost as good for the mor­ale of West­ern indus­tri­al­ists as the x-hundred-million New Con­sumers Yearn­ing for Your Product story. Tak­ing Face­book to China is told like we’re tak­ing Levis into East Germany.

Of course, it’s non­sense. The Chinese inter­net is just as mature and soph­ist­ic­ated — if not more so — than it is in the West. We just don’t have the report­ing to know it, or per­haps the will to under­stand, say, the size of QQ or RenRen.

Hap­pily, Tri­cia Wang’s writ­ings on the Chinese inter­net are dif­fer­ent to most — they’re based on actual eth­no­graphic research, on the ground. As they with­drew earlier this year, one of Wang’s older blog posts did well to cut through a good deal of the assump­tions made in the anglo­sphere about Google’s place in the Chinese internet.

Now that Google has returned to China, her latest, is longer, and very much worth the read.

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.

The full speech, from which the blog post is derived, is here.