Jimmy Wales, My Hero

There are few pieces of news these days that make me want to jump out of my seat, pump my fist in the air, and shout "Yeah!" This is one of them.

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, has refused to bow to the Chinese government's demands to censor the online encyclopedia, and has criticized Google and other companies for making the opposite decision.

I haven't talked about this issue before, but I feel that it's an important one. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and other companies that have censored their China content argued that Chinese internet users are better off than if those companies had stayed out of China altogether. In essence, Google is arguing that having some information is better than having none at all.

But that argument is wrong, for at least two reasons.

Reason #1: What Chinese internet users are getting from Google and co. is not a random slice of the truth; it is "information" with important pieces of truth selectively cut out. Chinese internet users don't necessarily realize that the information being presented to them has had key parts removed, so they are less likely to go searching for the missing parts. What Google et. al. are giving the Chinese public is not partial information, it's disinformation. Think of it as the difference between showing someone the first Star Wars movie, versus showing them all 3 movies but editing out the part about Vader being Luke's father. Disinformation is often worse than no information at all.

Reason #2: By refusing to bow to censorship - and thus being banned from China - Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo could have sent the Chinese public one very important piece of information - that something is wrong China. Chinese users, reading about the triumphs of Google, would have wondered why they were unable to access that legendary company's website. The discrepancy might have sown seeds of doubt about the government's repression of speech. But Google let this opportunity slip past.

So what Google and the others are doing is not, as its defenders insist, choosing between the lesser of two evils. It is creating an entirely new and unnecessary evil - prolonging the inevitable day when China's population realizes that ever-increasing censorship and a successful society are fundamentally incompatible. So there can be only one reason for these companies' self-censorship: greed.

In my mind, the decision of Google to censor its China site was a little-noticed watershed. Possibly more than September 11, it marked the end of the 1990s, the period when democracy and free markets and technology and the free flow of information were thought by much of the world to be inevitably ascendant. Google, the iconic darling of freedom-loving Western internet users, the undisputed leader in information technology innovation, kowtowing to an old-fashioned autocratic propaganda machine. The message is that information and markets don't always come out on top, and that an authoritarian, hyper-organized government with a huge weight of population to throw around is still the biggest beast in town.

We certainly appear to be entering an unsettling time.

But Wikipedia's stand means that there are still some who are fighting back - and Jimmy Wales isn't alone. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have started campaigns to pressure Google and the others to reverse their decisions, and now the UK House of Commons has piled on.

Good for them. Jimmy Wales, you're my hero.


BONUS READING GUIDE

1. This liberal evangelical pastor is the kind of politically-motivated Christian that I like to see. It's by embracing people like this, and working together with them, that the Democrats can work their way back to a majority - not by rejecting and taunting religion.

2. I really hope Al Gore runs for president in 2008. I think he'll gain a lot of support from Americans who wish that Bush - and the contested 2000 election, and Septmber 11, and the Iraq war - had simply never happened. But if he runs this time, I hope he chucks his artificially divisive "people vs. the powerful" shtick for a "we're all in this together" theme. The broad appeal of "An Inconvenient Truth" seems to be an encouraging sign.