[narrator]

I don't think China's being left behind. They have a successful system of censorship. In the west we are slowly being led down the path where we've moved our knowledge and understanding of the world to the hands of private companies who deplatform and delete whole universes of information on a whim. Large subreddits getting banned for example deletes tends of thousands of man hours of work from existence.

[AJ007]

EC2 and Google Cloud concern me a lot more than Facebook and Reddit. A lot of those censor-able platforms have only been successful because the users believed they were using something different than it actually was (surprise, Tumblr users.) We still have Wikipedia, Archive.org, Bittorrent, Tor, Bitcoin, and so on.

To define China's system of censorship as successful seems premature. We have had similar systems in the past, and while they maintained some form of stability for the status quo they ultimately hindered those society's progress.

"It is true that if you have a tyranny of ideas, so that you know exactly what has to be true, you act very decisively, and it looks good – for a while. But soon the ship is heading in the wrong direction, and no one can modify the direction any more." -Richard Feynman