The global tech community was shocked recently to learn of Ghostnet, a cyber-snooping operation that orginated in the PRC and whose virus had turned up in over 1200 computers in over 100 countries, not an out-sized number at all, but discretely targeted, and thus harder to detect. You can find a link to the full 53-page report on Scribd (which you'll need to join to download, but it's worth the email address and password you have to give to get it). To summarize, the capabilities of Ghostnet are extensive, and the main computers of the Dalai Lama's office were clearly compromised. David Gelernter, a national fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, recently wrote, concerning the likelihood that China was the culprit in engineering and spreading the virus:
After the Dalai Lama's office sent an e-mail
invitation to a foreign diplomat, Beijing diplomats happened to phone
the same diplomat and discourage the visit. A China-bound traveler who
had used the Internet to help put Tibetan exiles in contact with
Chinese dissidents was stopped at the Chinese border, shown transcripts
of the online exchanges, and warned to cut it out.
And so it goes. Gelerntner argues, persuasively, that what we're seeing here is the Second Cold War: "China is our new Cold War enemy, and her
favorite weapons will also be novel: financial weapons, trade weapons,
cyberweapons. Welcome to Cold War II."
It's not news to anybody that technology changes lives, and that it is currently
changing our lives here in America, sometimes in ways that seem insufferable. It still isn't clear to me why anyone would want a Twitter update on my choice of an espresso over a latte as I'm standing in line to teach a class that my caffeine addiction will cause me to start a bit late. The problem is, however, that the technology in question reflects the gravitas of the culture that embraces it. So six students in Chisinau, Moldova--the only post-Soviet Union country that elected a communist government--started an anti-government rally recently using Twitter and instantly had summoned 10,000 students to the protest. (Read the NYT account here.) Our own election of Obama marshaled the text-technology in similar ways, and the cell-phone videos from Tibet have left a lasting record of the atrocities inflicted by the Chinese in Tibet throughout 2008.
So the new technology, like all new technologies, mirrors the intention and morality of those who use it. Twitter then, the very same Twitter, can be an agent of narcissism or an advocate for civil liberty. Twitter doesn't come with a user manual, a code of ethics, or even the vaguest guidelines for how the human animal might represent itself through its one-line updates. But all we have to do is read the updates and draw our conclusions: we are both magnanimous and narcissistic.
Recently, the Dalai Lama and his special envoy Lodi Gyari have called on all Tibetans everywhere to record their suffering over the past fifty years, a project that will clearly profit from the video and web technologies available today even to amatuers. (Our very own TEXT Project at Arkansas is an example.) Central to this effort is Harry Wu, the founder and director of the Laogai Research Foundation. If you don't know Mr. Wu's work, you need to become familiar with it. "Laogai" means "reform through labor," and the term generally refers to Chinese labor camps--where Mr. Wu spent 19 years of his life. He is now an American citizen and has taken up the Tibetan cause. He has curated an exhibit in Washington, D.C. on the Tibetan struggle, and he is a significant force in encouraging Sino-Tibetan dialogue. His ideas are in line with Martin Luther King Jr.'s who encouraged the poor whites in the South to understand that they had more in common with the poor blacks than they did with the middle-class white Southerners who were behind racism's corporate and cultural structure. Wu is making a similar argument about the Tibetans and the Chinese, and how they should be looking at what they hold in common. And he might well be right.
The economic problems in both Tibet and China--read about the struggles of one of China's billionaire women in the March 30 issue of The New Yorker--are fertile ground for unification across lines of race and ethnicity, the kind of unification that, if it occurred in China, would have an immediate and long-range global impact. As the Dalai Lama ages, and finally retires to his spiritual practice, and ultimately dies, the transitional period would benefit from this kind of economic revolution. In the meantime, the 17th Karmapa is waiting in line, but that in and of itself is enough for another posting . . . in the meantime, watch the following video for a good introduction to this extraordinary young man, and the problems that he currently confronts.
Follow this link to watch the video.
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