I dunno. We're not anywhere near the level of China (here in the USA).
To achieve that, we'd need
1. The fourth estate to become a government agency (functionally)
2. Facebook to have government agents on-site that employees have to follow the orders of
3. The existence of a "department of cultural well-being" with total authority to regulate art, media, news, etc
4. Laws on the books outlawing esoteric orwellian concepts like "distributing harmful rumors" or "disrupting the cultural well-being of the United States."
Certainly any one of those steps would have me in front of the capital with a big bottle of water and a picket sign, ready to settle in for the long one.
The question is not how far removed you are, but do you believe human nature is the same and therefore you are capable of becoming the same. In the US there is a strong constitutional tradition against certain encroachments, yet all evidence points to the people accepting the same erosion even with those safeguards.
You might be willing to stand in front of the Capitol (or so you say), but not so for most people, especially given the right "patriotic" motivation, poverty, or fear.
The PRC has active bureaucrats working in nearly every info company in the country. They are the Party's Cultural Representative and their word is law.
There is no equivalent in the USA, not even close.
Seems like a difference without distinction if the outcomes desired by the government are achieved through retired agents and a variety of pressure points.
The illusion of "average citizen control" is more common in USA population than China it seems, whether this control is real is debatable.
The current American government regularly issues proclamations that major news organizations are publishing fake news. It sure doesn't seem like they're achieving their desired outcomes there. Maybe that's not a fair comparison - have any major Chinese companies been able to say "yes, we understand Xi Jinping wants us to do X, but we think he's authoritarian and wrong so we won't do it"?
I agree there's a long way between the USA and China for the reasons you mention.
Still, something nags at me. The USA has all those things in some less government-oriented sense, not organised by a totalitarian party but by a vaguely defined group of powerful people who all live in the same few cities, who all share the same worldview, who all work extraordinarily hard to keep people they disagree with away from the levers of power and who share this same basic mindset:
1. The press is incredibly uniform in America; all papers take explicit political positions despite their role supposedly being to neutrally inform their readers, and they all supported Clinton in the last election. As a foreigner I frequently encounter astonishing falsehoods about my country in supposedly respectable and internationalist papers like the New York Times.
2. Facebook doesn't need government agents to team up with the press in support of an agenda - activists in its employee and management base will ensure it does that anyway.
3. There's no formal department of cultural well-being, but there is nonetheless an exceptionally strong set of beliefs amongst a tiny group of people (the elites/the establishment/the swamp/whatever you want to call them) which do relentlessly impose on news, art, media, etc. Witness how every superhero movie now contains explicitly woke and feminist storylines.
4. "Distributing harmful rumours" and "disrupting the cultural wellbeing" exists in the west too, we just call it hate speech / trolling. Different terms for the same thing and our social networks have WeChat like policies towards them.
Whilst the driving force for this doesn't come from government, and there's no formal party per se, the end results are surprisingly similar on a less extreme scale. And if Clinton had won the policy alignment between the government, Hollywood, Big Tech and newspaper owners would be nearly total: you don't need a totalitarian state when those who have power over information or culture all agree with each other on what must be done anyway.
> As a foreigner I frequently encounter astonishing falsehoods about my country in supposedly respectable and internationalist papers like the New York Times.
This is news to me - do you have examples? I'd be very interested in learning more.
>activists in its employee and management
Those are citizens, not government officials. And right now I'd be inclined to say that the average bay area Facebook employee's desires align very little with that of the federal executive branch of the USA, so this point doesn't work for me.
> Witness how every superhero movie now contains explicitly woke and feminist storylines.
And witness not only how you haven't been sent to xinjiang and reeducated for disagreeing with their values, but they weren't sent to xinjiang for producing media that's explicitly against the ruling executive and Senate party in America's value system.
The promotion of equality for men and women, besides, is a far shout to what is happening to activists in China.
The last article I read on Brexit in the NYT started by claiming the British economy was shrinking, and went downhill from there. As far as I can tell Americans are receiving a completely garbled view of anything EU or Brexit related.
Also although I'm not Russian, see practically anything related to Russia, Russian Twitter bots, etc.
right now I'd be inclined to say that the average bay area Facebook employee's desires align very little with that of the federal executive branch of the USA, so this point doesn't work for me
I think you missed my point, because I did say in my post "if Clinton had won, the alignment between government and the Hollywood/big tech/etc nexus would be complete". But she didn't win, so you're right, to some small extent they're different. That said, the executive is so huge in America that even a guy like Trump is very limited in how much he can steer it.
I was also very careful to say that the things I'm comparing are not on the same scale, so, your last paragraphs are merely making points I already concede. I am not claiming the USA and China are the same, I clearly stated they aren't, but it's important to reflect on the similarities. After all the Chinese regime is not primarily enforced by the actual executive branch, but rather by regime loyalists in positions of power in so-called private industry as well. It's not people who directly report to Xi Jinping censoring WeChat. It's WeChat employees themselves who try to guess what might be ideologically compatible, or what might be "best for Chinese harmony".
A far-reaching ideology that has the explicit support of the power structures creating communication services, art, culture, news and sometimes government, and which considers censorship ("deplatforming" in western NewSpeak) to be an important and legitimate tool for preventing the spread of rumours ("hate") is definitely something to sit up and take notice of.
Finally, I'd remark that modern feminism has nothing to do with promoting equality for men and women. Quite the opposite.
What it boils down to is that the narrative of the US is that we are "free" and a "democracy", so the powerful must use more subtle and subversive techniques to achieve the same goals as autocrats elsewhere such as China.
Don't get me wrong, the US is still better than China on this front, but my response is simply to say that it's not so binary.
I've used my words many times and all that ever happens is that I get shouted down or called a conspiracy theorist, so I decided to lead with evidence directly responding to the OP's points, and then follow with words. Did you not see those?
If you frequently get called a conspiracy theorist it's most likely because... you're a conspiracy theorist. Like, you claim in some of your posts that NPR is a mouthpiece for Lockheed Martin, and that Jeff Bezos decides what the Washington Post will print.
Now, maybe those conspiracies are real, and you're seeing something the rest of us are too blind (or too deep in the pockets of Deep Hacker) to see. But then you have to work extra hard to build the case and persuade, with a cogent narrative. That requires a lot of work! It's not very fair. But it's the only way you're going to get people to listen to you, if that is an outcome you want.
Then your arguments weren't convincing, which I sympathize as being very frustrating.
Certainly this approach was likely far less convincing - I feel no motivation whatsoever to click a bunch of random links having no idea their content. Furthermore, should I do so, I may arrive at a very different conclusion than you intend. I do give you props for coming to the table with so many sources, whether they're quality or not I have no idea.
To achieve that, we'd need
1. The fourth estate to become a government agency (functionally)
2. Facebook to have government agents on-site that employees have to follow the orders of
3. The existence of a "department of cultural well-being" with total authority to regulate art, media, news, etc
4. Laws on the books outlawing esoteric orwellian concepts like "distributing harmful rumors" or "disrupting the cultural well-being of the United States."
Certainly any one of those steps would have me in front of the capital with a big bottle of water and a picket sign, ready to settle in for the long one.
China is very far removed from us.