Preface

Dear reader:

What good fortune that we meet.

This is the first time since coming of age that I have properly kept a blog. Not yet knowing the customs here, I am bound to make mistakes — please do point them out; I am all ears.

Those of us who write programs like to greet anything new with a “Hello world!”, and I am no exception. But I don’t want to brush this occasion off with a quick demo, the way I did when learning new tools. Since I don’t know whether a post can still be edited once published, I have decided to spend this first one talking in earnest about how the Chinese internet feels to me — lest an already deserted blog look more careless still. If it turns out posts can be edited, I may keep a running digest here of the projects I am attempting and the research that interests me.

I plan to address you, my visitors, as “readers” (读者)¹; I hope as well that we may discuss things together and improve together. Of course, if the term displeases you, leave a comment and we can talk it over.

If you disagree with my views, please don’t hold back your advice. I also hope my other posts can be of some modest help to you, my readers.

How the Chinese internet feels to me

In my early days exploring the Chinese internet, I could feel the open spirit of its webmasters and bloggers. But that original openness of the internet seems to be fading before humanity’s undying greed. It is a competitive process, resembling the evolution of species in nature — except that it plays out on the internet, and the reality differs in one subtle way. In nature, the urge to reproduce drives evolution, diversity makes it possible, and the environment decides its direction. Mapped onto the internet, that should have read: “Service providers’ urge to expand drives the iteration of their services; providers offer diverse solutions to meet users’ needs; and the direction the internet evolves is decided by all of its users.” Here the Chinese internet proved exceptionally clever: once its service providers had grown large, they began — like humans — to remake the environment itself. And that changed the course of the internet’s development.

At first, they simply hoped to profit from the services they provided, usually by simple means: banner ads, sponsored posts. Born alongside advertising was the notion of “traffic” — visitors as a stream to be counted. Having tasted the sweetness, providers realized the enormous value buried in user traffic and began scrambling to attract it. Had they stopped at attracting, things would still work like natural selection: user needs deciding internet services. But remember — service providers are humans, humans far better at remaking and inventing than the average user. One reason our species rose above the other animals and defied natural selection is that we are better at reshaping our environment. In the agricultural revolution, humans likely went from gathering wild wheat to planting it deliberately, and step by step to a semi-settled life of waiting for the harvest. From then on, humanity stepped out of the environment’s constraints and began to remake it: we planted crops and penned animals, all but freeing ourselves from the environment. I take pride in that.

Sadly, in the biosphere of the internet, the script I was handed as a user is not humanity’s. Now we can explain the behavior of today’s Chinese internet: web platforms carve up the traffic; apps harvest the web’s traffic; mini-programs harvest the apps’ traffic; then come cross-platform frameworks harvesting traffic from every platform at once, and bots of every kind attempting to steer public opinion. This is what service providers’ power to remake the environment looks like. The endgame of this play is users penned in and mechanically managed — as we are now. I don’t know whether humanity as a whole truly stands in awe of nature; but I sense that the Chinese internet’s service providers feel no gratitude toward their users.

I am, of course, not content with the way things are. In later posts I will explore building a peer-to-peer internet with ordinary users as its foundation. Whether a network of that shape can survive today’s internet, where hierarchy and centralization hold the advantage, I do not know. But I do know this: nature has a way of teaching humanity a lesson, every now and then.

Footnotes

1. P.S. (July 2026): When this letter was first published, I addressed you as “fellow students” (同学). Rereading it three and a half years on, the term struck me as quietly casting myself in the teacher’s seat, so I have changed it to “readers” across the site — this letter included. ↩