China's internet watchdog freezes 10 too-trashy online video services before they undermine socialism China's internet watchdog has called out several live-streaming channels for showing trash TV amid Beijing's crackdown on "unhealthy content". The Cyberspace Administration of China (CACC)yesterday called out 10 live-streaming platforms - including Bilibili, Tencent-backed Huya and Douyu, Bytedance's Xigua Video, and Baidu's …
If you've followed the problems Naomi Wu has had from western companies - big ones - you'll see that capitalism plus conservative activists can have the same effect.
(If you've not heard of her, she's a Shenzhen - based tech polymath: vlogger. maker, coder, designer. Her tech content is pretty awesome. But she has people gunning for her pretty much permanently, and it's almost entirely from the West. While there's a big dose of good ole fashioned misogyny, it's exacerbated by people who don't like the way she dresses (or doesn't)
Wow, there is danger there, bright, young, with a mind and a real presence, so a danger to the closed mind end of society wherever they are from. The same old, same old; recycling scrap in new products is fine, recycling tired old ideas into the same old tired attitudes is not.
If all trashy content, vulgar and/or scantily-clad presenters were banned from our TV screens it would be The End of Civilisation As We Know It. Rioting in the streets, statues of Lord Reith being torn down, stand-offs between Pro- and Anti-Love Island factions, dogs lying down with cats, etc etc....
Oh hang on - is the last one of those vulgar content as well?
>Why are Communists and Facisits always so prudish?
Prudishness isn't anything to do with economic systems.
There are very similar prudish forces in our own societies. There has always been a tussle between what's regarded as public decency and people who push the envelope. What China is pushing back against would be problematical for British TV as late as the 1970s. We run different standards today so shows from the 1970s and earlier would fall foul of modern censors.
(BTW -- My mum used to watch something called "The Black and White Minstrel Show" on BBC TV. Look it up.....)
The core ur-motivation / ur-mechanism is not Economics.
It's Status. Via Virtue. Proxied (FAR more) cheaply via Virtue-Display.
Standard global human mechanism for acquiring status. Haven't found a culture where this is not true. Nor a time period.
And since the psycho focussers on acquiring status have very limited minds (necessarily / by definition), they live in zero-sum worlds.
Easiest way therefore to get a benefit is to pay a cost. Give up a pleasure, for example. Benefit therefore "logically" necessarily accrues. Zero sum world, right. Gotta balance out.
And if you are (or know YOU REALLY SHOULD BE} higher status, then logically YOU shouldn't pay that cost; the little people should.
Ipso facto; non cogito ergo sum.
IMO the political piece is irrelevant. It's all about control over people. Look at the fundamentalists in whatever religion you care to name* and you'll see the same thing - "we want to stop you doing things we don't approve of".
It's the old definition of Puritanism: that horrible feeling that somebody, somewhere is having a good time.
* Except for the Church of the FSM. Obviously.
No, not for the clamping down on freedom obviously.
Applause for attempting to raise the intellectual level of media consumption. Given the mindless shit spewing out of such platfrms as Netflix, Disney, Hulu, et all and 95% of the internet, I can only give the Chinese government a thumbs up for doing something that might actually raise the IQ of the populace a few notches by stopping people sucking on the media sump-pump! I can only hope they drive people off the internet and down to their local bookshop or library...or wait we closed all those 20 years ago!
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