In the Web 2.0 and social media community as much as anywhere else at the moment, the Olympics are a particularly hot typic, and it's brought up all sorts of off the wall discussions. Folks in the tech community, deservedly or not, always imagine themselves an expert on just about everything there is. This has a tendency to lead to tangential conversations and expert-like assertions that have little to no basis in fact or reality.
Leo Laporte, famed technology pundit and highly successful podcaster, quipped during the opening ceremonies: "I think we'll look back at this and say, this was when the American century ended and the Chinese century began."
I must admit, I was momentarily dazzled by the pretty lights, but Leo's statement jarred me back to reality. In the end, they were just a bunch of LEDs. A lot of LEDs, but the same sort of trivial electronic parts I had in my 30-in-one science kit as a child.
Then The Raw Feed's Mike Elgan put a name on it for me: the Culture of Fake:
I've written a lot on this blog about China's "culture of fake" -- the widespread creation of fake cell phones, cars, drugs and other products. Now, the "just fake it" solution is being used to create the impression of perfection at the Olympics. First, we learned, that the impressive "footprints in the sky" opening ceremony fireworks were computer-generated, and inserted into the live video feed. Then, journalists have discovered the existence of "not-so-great walls of China" that have been built to hide ugly neighborhoods. Now, it turns out, that cute little girl who "sang" at the Olympics was a lip-syncing actress, because the real girl (who won a nationwide singing contest) was considered too ugly by a Communist Party big shot. The tragedy is that the opening ceremonies were amazing, and Beijing is impressive, and that the fakeness diminishes, rather than enhances, China's image.
This doesn't stop the Hate-America-First crowd from latching onto the pretty shiny things from the other side of the planet and saying that its a portent of things to come. They'll even go so far as to say that America is just as bad, if not worse.
"Is it any faker than US culture? America is just as bad as China," they'll cry.
The difference is here in America that we have a little something called Freedom of Speech, and we like to document everything from our mistakes, our sins, and yes even our atrocities ad infitum. Need proof? Our president tells one little white lie about weapons of mass destruction so as to engage a costly war in terms of body counts and dollars, and the opposition party can't shut up about it for almost a decade.
"So you admit that the United States commits atrocities," they whine. "As long as the crimes are publicly known, that means said country is superior? Do you not see the irony?"
No, it isn't even ironic in the Morissette definition of the word. Learning from history and having the ability to affect change in our government and society is something that we have here. Information grants us freedom - freedom to change and freedom to reform. Chinese do not have this freedom. not seeing the very clear difference is to be willfully ignorant.
China has faked its way into modernity. They've reverse engineered Western science and technology that we wouldn't sell them because we knew we'd be selling directly to their military. They've created the illusion of creature comforts while it still only exist for the communistically created bourgeois. Denizens of their country are not allowed freedom of movement, religion, political view or speech. They don't even know, can't even know, what it is that is wrong with their nation.
Sure, the West has their sins to pay for. They don't have the veil of ignorance to use as a shield for why they allow all the bad things to continue to happen in our names and neighborhoods. At least, though, we have the power to end it and there is a segment of our population who has exercised their freedom of choice to work to that end.
In China, they don't have that choice. All the pretty lights and pretty lip-syncers won't change that fact.