China may be the country of enormous economic growth, of the Chinese wall and of good food, it is also the country of great food scarcity, of the digital firewall and strong censorship from the government. The Chinese people are not happy about this, and content creators have already found a solution.
permaweb
Creative people in China use according to The Wall Street Journal the decentralized platform Arweave to circumvent censorship. Arweave describes itself as a “global, permanent hard drive based on blockchain”. By storing data in various places worldwide and recording it with blockchain. A ‘permaweb’ it calls itself, that 404-erros and sneaky edits by the creator or by others does not allow.
If someone wants to take the content offline, they must have anyone who keeps a copy delete the data. The platform has its own token and has in 2020 receive investments by among other things Andreessen Horowitz and Coinbase Ventures.
Bepopulation has had enough
It may sound a bit dystopian, but in China it is welcomed with open arms. The Chinese government uses a extremely strict corona policy† No infected case is allowed to roam freely and people are literally locked up in their own homes. In addition to food shortages, for example, this also results in people showing what is happening on social media and expressing their frustration. These posts are being removed on Chinese social media platforms to keep order, but the population has had enough.
The Wall Street Journal interviewed Dereck Yi, a lawyer from a Shanghai technology company. His employer puts NFTs on OpenSea to spread the truth. A Chinese publisher chose to put the articles of about 100,000 writers on Arweave. Is this the beginning of real freedom in China? Or is it a never-ending fight against a dictatorship? Time will tell.
