The Surprising Similarity Between the US and Chinese Internets

Joe Weisenthal (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

Tracy, remember how in the late 90s, the internet was starting to become a thing, and people thought it would bring liberalism and democracy everywhere?

Tracy Alloway (0:33)

Utopia.

Joe Weisenthal (0:34)

I totally bought into that. People look back at that, and they're like, oh, they were naive. I don't blame them. I think I bought into that too.

Tracy Alloway (0:41)

I mean, there was something very wholesome about the mid-90s internet culture, where you could go to everyone's little individual blog, and people were mostly talking about their hobbies and things like that. Or at least that was my experience of it. Probably colored by the fact that I was in middle school at the time. But it seemed very innocent.

Joe Weisenthal (0:58)

It was very cool. It was very decentralized. So now we associate the internet with a handful of tech oligarchs that control various kingdoms, maybe you could even say, within the internet, whether it's the Meta Kingdom or the Amazon Kingdom or whatever. But it was very decentralized. Everyone had their own little sites cobbled together and so forth. And I totally bought that idea. It was just like, oh, we're all going to talk to each other. We're going to work things out. And there's no way that authoritarian governments could ever control this. And we will finally realize the true promise of democracy and all that stuff. I totally bought into it.

Tracy Alloway (1:33)

Fast forward to 2026 How would you describe the internet now?

Joe Weisenthal (1:37)

I mean, the word that always comes to my mind, and there are many words, is just this sort of like sheer like sort of tribalism and conflictualism on every level, right? Nationalism, racism, bigotry, anti-Semitism, sexism, et cetera, it's just like riven with that. It's riven with conflict and so forth. It's heavily centralized. All of this sort of utopian promise, I'm like, didn't really pan out that way.

Tracy Alloway (2:03)

I would say cesspool.

Joe Weisenthal (2:04)

Cesspool is a good one too.

Tracy Alloway (2:05)

You have to try really, really hard nowadays to find good and useful corners of the Internet.

Joe Weisenthal (2:12)

Yeah, positive.

Tracy Alloway (2:12)

I'm not saying that they're not out there, but it is interesting how far we've deviated from that initial utopian premise of the Internet. The other thing that's happening, we're recording this on, let's see, January 27th. What's interesting is that we're starting to have even more discussion about the power of the platform. So over the weekend, there have been some allegations that TikTok, for instance, is censoring Minneapolis video or video of the Minneapolis shooting. And that's just after the new ownership took control of the platform. So they spun off the US business, now it has all these new owners, and people are starting to talk about, well, maybe they're censoring or even if they're not directly censoring some stuff, maybe the algorithm is influencing what people see.

Joe Weisenthal (2:59)

Totally, and then there's one other dimension before we get into the conversation that I think is very important here, which is that the Internet is splintering geographically, right? So we've known for a long time, of course, people talk about the firewall in China and the Chinese Internet, but it's not just China, right? We see the UK establishing its own rules, and we see Australia establishing its own rules. We saw the thing a couple years ago with Brazil temporarily banning Twitter, etc. And so there's all these sort of intermingling of digital platforms and national sovereignty. And I really do believe, to some extent, that a lot of the leaders around the world are looking at China in a seemingly more controlled Internet, like with jealousy, right? And they're saying, oh, we would love to have this level of control over our sort of town square, etc. And some countries have the First Amendment, so that makes it very tough, etc.

But it really feels like there are so many aspects of the Internet that are sort of not panning out, and people are like, we want to constrict what people could see, we want to tighten the algorithms, we want to curb some kind of discourse, etc. And I think this is going to be one of the biggest stories of our time.

Tracy Alloway (4:09)

Yeah. With China specifically, there's still a big question, which is whether or not the censorship of the Internet basically allows it to act as a sort of like safety valve that lets people, you know, blow off some steam, but not enough steam to actually threaten the regime over there, or whether it's actually a tool or could be a tool of social change because people are to some extent allowed to say some stuff. I think that question is like still kind of unanswered.