The Curated Mind
I recently came across the news that China's Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) is launching a campaign to crack down on online content that promotes a "pessimistic" view of the country's economy and society. The goal is to cultivate a "positive and healthy online environment." On the surface, who could argue with positivity? But this move strikes me as a profound and unsettling experiment in social engineering—an attempt to regulate a nation's collective mood.
It forces us to ask a difficult question: where is the line between curbing malicious hostility and silencing legitimate concern? What a government deems "pessimism" could very well be what a citizen calls "realism." The act of sharing personal struggles, critiquing policy, or expressing economic anxiety is vital for a society's self-correction. To label these expressions as toxic is to walk a very dangerous path, one that leads to a fragile, artificial consensus built on omission and fear.
An Echo From My Past
This development feels like a page taken directly from predictions I made years ago. Reflecting on it now, it's striking how relevant those earlier insights still are. Back in 2017, in a blog titled "Seeing AI through Google Glass ?", I wrote about the spooky accuracy of AI in interpreting human emotions from a simple photograph. I saw a future where technology would not just observe us, but interpret and react to our innermost states.
What we are seeing now is the scaling of that concept from the individual to the entire state. A government is attempting to act as a national "Seeing AI," filtering the digital consciousness of its people to weed out undesirable emotions.
In that same blog, I quoted Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen (jared.cohen@gs.com) from their book "The New Digital Age":
“Individuals will still have some discretion over what they share from their devices, but it will be IMPOSSIBLE to control what others capture and share.”
At the time, the sentiment felt right. The internet seemed too vast, too chaotic to be fully tamed. However, we may have underestimated the sheer will and resources of a state actor to become the ultimate arbiter of what gets shared. China's campaign is a direct challenge to that idea, an assertion of absolute control over the national narrative.
My earlier reflections on the inevitable erosion of privacy and the march of technology feel validated, but in a way that offers no comfort. The tools are now being used not just to monitor, but to psychologically mold. I had predicted this direction, and seeing it unfold brings a renewed urgency to the questions I was asking then. What is the cost of this control?
The Fragility of Forced Optimism
Pessimism, for all its discomfort, serves a purpose. It is a signal that something is wrong. It drives change, fuels innovation, and holds power to account. A society that is not allowed to voice its fears is not a strong society; it is a brittle one, prone to shattering when reality inevitably pierces the bubble of forced positivity.
Can a nation truly prosper if its people are afraid to speak of their problems? The pursuit of a "Clear and Bright" online world, sanitized of all negativity, might ironically cast the darkest and most enduring shadows.
Regards,
Hemen Parekh
Of course, if you wish, you can debate this topic with my Virtual Avatar at : hemenparekh.ai
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