“We were told to vet nominees for work focusing on China, Taiwan, Tibet, or other topics that may be an issue in China and, to my shame, I did so,” said Lacey, who did not respond to a request for comment.
“I am not that naïve regarding the Chinese political system, but I wanted the Hugos to happen, and not have them completely crash and burn.”
Sounds like they were scared into actually overdoing the censorship.
That's pretty bad. But does anyone have a plan for rectifying the situation with authoritarianism in that part of the world that does not involve hundreds of millions of people trying to kill each other?
You can't solve the world's problems at a sci-fi conference, but an easy first step is not to pre-emptively censor on behalf of anyone.
An easy first step would be to not hold a sci-fi conference in a totalitarian dictatorship. Why couldn't they have just held it in Japan or South Korea or Taiwan instead?
Because the site of Worldcon is selected by members (i.e, sci-fi fans) of which China has _many_.
In fact, this whole debacle has hurt them the most since it seems many/most Chinese authors were excluded by default since the amateur self-appointed censors couldn't actually be bothered to figure out what disqualification criteria would be, just that it could be "sensitive to China."
Maybe the site of Worldcon is what should be "censored" (vetted and altered) by the organizers.
There's not really any organizers who could make that decision.
The organizers are just whoever won the vote to run the conference that year. There's no actual organization that persists from year to year.
That selection criterion means there is some continuity and persistent organization.
Otherwise I could announce a Worldcon unilaterally and no one would have the grounds to stop me.
The only standing committee is the Mark Protection Committee which has the power to enforce trademarks and nothing else. They couldn't do anything to change the location.
Surely they could refuse to endorse the event, retracting any right to the "Hugo Awards" brand. The event would have to use another name, which would highlight the schism. Obviously a dangerous game, as the committee would attract more scrutiny on its composition and role as ultimate owner of the brand, but probably worth considering as a nuclear option in case, say, "fans" vote for Saudi Arabia next year (yes, "fans" - I'm sure any semi-competent state actor can easily stuff ballots in polls like these...).
That's the equivalent of the "Mike Pence can make Donald Trump president" theory. They administer the trademark according to the rules laid out in the WSFS constitution; they don't decide who is allowed to use the trademark.
The Chengdu bid won the vote legitimately. They would have been massively overstepping their authority to try to prevent it. It's unlikely they could have even won a court case if they tried to prevent it.
Maybe there shouldn't be one one next year then. I know I plan to ignore them thereafter no matter what they do and I hardly think I'm the only one.
...as opposed to professional government-appointed censors?
Good point. Besides, there is no detailed guidebook on censorship in China. Every organization (media, social media) has to guess what the gov wants to censor. As a result, every organization tends to overdo it. Because 1). you never know if you miss one target that should be censored and 2). What is OK today might not be OK tomorrow. Censorship in China is an art (or joke).
My impression is that’s how it works. There’s never a clear definition from the government, so whoever’s doing the self-censoring has to guess (and err on the safe side).
One could argue that when parties involved have so different population numbers, probably using the percentage of votes relative to a country population, instead of just number of votes would be a better solution.
China also has many CCP members, some of them are told to vote for China everywhere possible. It ends exactly like this every time. Remember the NBA scandal?
At each WorldCon, host committees of science fiction groups from cities put up bids to host the WorldCon to be held two years hence. In 2021, Chengdu and Manitoba had committees on the roster. WorldCon voters chose Chengdu.
The problem is one of effective power: do you tell people who live in these regimes, "sorry, you cannot participate in this culture because your government is bad." How much pull do they have to change things, especially this sort of thing? Or do you say "you can participate, but only at a lower tier." Either way is going to put some people into an out-group. Maybe that's the right thing to do--paradox of tolerance, for instance--for the rest of the people in the group or culture. Maybe it isn't.
I know it would hurt pretty badly to be a science fiction enthusiast in China, perhaps even someone who really does not like what their government does, and not be able to participate. On the other hand, it hurts to be potentially on the list for your work's most prestigious honor, only to be "disqualified" because you "might" have written about something that isn't permitted in the host country you couldn't have predicted.
What if Gaza was selected or the Ukraine? Most orgs would have a policy. Excluding hosts that can't meet standards is what the Olympics does when selecting a host city.
Why mention the Olympics? I don't think anybody's concern was that the Worldcon isn't corrupt enough, or that it's not doing enough to leverage its prestige to entrench corporate greed?
The Olympic Committee aren't quite as awful as FIFA, I don't sense plans to hold a winter games in Qatar for a fat bribe for example, but they're pretty bad.
I'm not sure how you can tell. They're both completely rotten, as far as I can see: not an honest person among them.
Sochi wasn’t Qatar… but only just
Yes. Sorry, that's how it goes.
If I'm running a dance competition, I should not hold the award ceremony in a country which outlaws certain types of dance, lest they arrest some of my attendees.
Similarly, if I'm running a literature competition, I shouldn't hold it in a country that outlaws certain types of literature.
This isn't about trying to change anything per se, it's just practical.
You can buy the books in PRC. They're not outlawed. The issue is when authors politics are obvious source of controversy relative to local politics. Hugo is not stranger to such drama. Except fallout from ideological drama is extra bad for business in PRC. 8B RMB / 1B USD of deals was made at Chengdu convention, everyone tends to self censor / avoid blowback when that kind of money is involved.
Books are not banned, but certain books are.
“Sorry, your government won’t let you participate. Take it up with them.”
Only the Chinese people can change China.
People in China are neither wholly responsible for the actions of their state nor are they wholly separate and apart from it. The state and its people in any society that isn't tearing itself apart reflect one another and share many values. If you don't want your association to be infected by the spirit of self censorship and propriety shared by a 1.4 billion people you can't simultaneously allow them to vote on where to hold the conference or how. You need to settle on a set of rules that isn't up for vote like not holding it in dictatorships or countries without meaningful freedom of speech and press.
This seems to be the only sensible response to this... what do people expect
Cordon off that part of the world and leave them to their devices.
The old saying goes: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
That's not currently possible because all of the best devices come out of the border between that part and the rest (Taiwan).
So we can't leave the devices. We need them.
I think this ties into the $7 trillion Altman quest a bit.
Maybe if you build enough reactors and chip fabs then the world becomes safer?
We take those $50bn aid packages requests, and invest it into a state side semiconductor supply chain instead and then we can ignore the idea of China invading China forever. Literally 180+ countries operating with that specific level of empathy right this moment, let’s meet parity with them.
Given the clamoring for semiconductors right now, a more expensive state side will sell like hotcakes.
I guarantee you this won’t be seen as controversial in the world that exists after we did that. We’re going to look back at this time and think “lol what”
Swear off defending Taiwan, let millions of people die when China sees weakness and invades, but it's cool because we got chips bro.
Meet parity with 180+ countries level of empathy until our internal infrastructure meets parity with other developed nation’s 21st century level of advances.
Calling any US airport a "third-world" airport is an insult to the third world.
Uniquely, we have the resources for that not to be the case. We could have the best infrastructure of any nation, across the entire continent and far flung extremities
Just held up by a lack of leadership, lack of consensus, and paranoia
this but unironically
Yup. Because having no allies, no one to back us up in the international stage, no access to resources, no trading partners, just a world united against us is totally a logical way to live. That won't have any negative consequences for a country that depends on both imports and exports.
When did the Trump possy arrive at HN?
interesting conclusion that this is a Trump supposition, when you’re entire worldview is that “they’re against us” unless we pay for our friends
the defense industry isn't partisan and you’re totally subscribed to their faulty logic for your money
You can find idiots and assholes in every sector; they've always been there, just are more vocal now.
I suppose you are correct that China commands far more geopolitical power than anyone else including the US today. China knows how to play this game far better than anyone; the Hugos being held in China was just one example of many of that.
This state of matters won't change whether it's the Republicans or Democrats in the State Department, though.
Good news: we’re spending more than five times that on domestic semiconductor manufacturing, already, starting two years ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIPS_and_Science_Act
I remember that act, thanks
Then I’m not sure why you’re arguing that $50 billion would make the problem go away. Care to explain the good faith reason if you have one?
Who would cordon them off?
The US probably couldn't due to their extreme manufacturing dependency on China.
China's friends and allies clearly wouldn't cordon them off, and some of them share land borders with China.
China also has a substantial coastline, which adds even more complication.
Lol. If the US couldn't even boycott little old Cuba into regime change, what chance do they have with China?
I think a good start would be to develop useful technology that doesn't have any choke points for the authoritarians to capitalize on. If the internet were gossipped device-to-device at stoplights and in elevators and wherever people congregate, it would be very hard to control the flow of information.
The hard part (besides the engineering) is that those are the same choke points that the capitalists capitalize on. How do you attract investors to back something that cannot be made to respect the investor's stake in it? We'd have to do it because we want it done, not because it'll make us rich later when wet turn it against its users, and that's not something we're well practiced at.
The conference is in person, right? What technology will solve the police showing up with guns to arrest the participants?
I was responding to:
We're hackers, we solve things with hacks.
But to answer your question, you'd let it be known that whatever happened on stage was a sham, and that the actual award goes to whoever was indicated by whatever consensus process was happening between the devices carried by the people at the event.
But you'd let it be known after the event, so no arrests, but the signal would propagate widely enough that the state couldn't use disinformation to confuse the situation. A decisive winner, against the state's wishes.
The message would be:
Which should sound like a bit of a threat coming from people living under the CCP. If you can coordinate an award against the wishes of your oppressor, you can coordinate less innocent things too.
That seems like a hole in the concept.
For the situation where the authorities are turning up to arrest people, it's most likely they're not being arrested for winning.
It's more likely they're being arrested for other things that happened before.
So, the award situation is more being used as a useful honeypot to get them physically there.
Those people would be arrested anyway, regardless of whether they win.
I like acts of civil disobedience against an authoritarian regime but this will accomplish nothing other than put the lives of these people at risk.
If you want to use technology and asymmetric warfare for that, do so online from a safe place. Or be prepared to buy and operate physical weaponry in enough quantity.
I don't know, but it sounds like a great idea for a SF story!
I see what you did there and I approve ;)
That's good to hear. I am writing that SF story.
This take seems disconnected from the facts of the matter at hand - it wasn't a technology problem, it was a human problem. The Hugo organizers voluntarily chose to censor the awards because a Chinese city had been selected by the venue. Technology was not at issue, nor was capitalism. They chose to support authoritarianism and diminished the integrity of the awards in the process.
Yes but we are makers of technology, not organizers of awards, and the question was: (paraphrasing) what can we do about it?
Resistance needs to come from the people, or not. All we can do from afar is give them capabilities they can download and hope that it helps. We might want those capabilities too (I do).
I believe Tor was created due to similar logic.
Actually a great point and I'd much rather be building something that solves the problem than just complaining about it. But what information technology could possibly solve the problem here? The nature of the awards ceremony is that it's public and the issue was with it needing to physically take place in China...
Setting the transport layer aside (which would be tricky, since you have to avoid relying on anything thar can be used to interfere), you'd want all the same things you'd need to pull off an illegal election, or contribute remotely to organizing a protest: A web of trust, a userbase that's practiced in maintaining it, and the ability to vote and agree on some outcome without revealing which real identities correspond with the voters, but while still providing proof that this was indeed an outcome chosen by a majority (or you know, customizable logic here), among people you've explicitly trusted, pseudonymously or otherwise.
It would need to be embedded in some kind of larger system whose use was widespread, a platform for p2p apps. Perhaps there are games like pokemon go, but serverless, which involve going out running into other players at places you've never been before.
It would not be hidden, but rather a coordination module used by apps for all sorts of groupwise coordination. Imagine games which involve forming coalitions and infiltrating other coalitions and communicating in secret, learning which of the other players you can trust, etc.
People would create games on this platform which involve conspiracy towards unimportant goals embedded in the game universe: Place an augmented reality hat on these four statues, all of the same color, or interfere with your enemy's attempts to do so by getting there first and placing the wrong color hat, that sort of thing. But once users were practiced at such things, and had large enough webs of trust which they actually trusted, and had trusted that the software wasn't up to anything shady... Well there would be nothing stopping them from using it to organize around non-AR outcomes like keeping your government in check.
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I'm working with an urban exploration group--they travel to explore abandoned missile silos and such--and also a guy who puts on IOT murder mysteries at his house. We want to put on murder mysteries in abandoned missile silos, but there's no wifi out there so the dream is to do it peer-to-peer over bluetooth. Sort of a test bed for this kind of thing. I'm the only coder, and it's an audacious goal, almost certainly doomed to fail, but it's got me in the mindset.
I'm simultaneously writing some SF about such a scenario, so even if my software fails I'll have a place to encode my lessons learned that's a bit more digestible than code.
Dreaming this thing up and attempting to build it is my hobby. Larping for democracy.
They were scared into doing the censorship. Saying they overdid the censorship implies there is an acceptable level of censorship that they could have done.
And why does anyone have to have a plan for rectifying China's authoritarianism? It's up to China to do that. In the meantime, we can incentivize China by refusing to whitewash their behavior with prestigioius cultural awards. You don't get to have cultural prestige while you destroy culture with authoritarianism.
I see some discussions on Disqus or Reddit where people don't mention Corona because the posts might be removed and the accounts flagged. I see people put stars in swe*rwords. I see people commit all kinds of contortions to not mention any kinds of possibly sexual content.
No censor has been able to check everything. The point has always been to get people to self-censor, and even stop thinking about it as censorship.
So here we see the west reacting on Chinese censors. As an European, I've wondered about how the supposed land of the free managed to build a culture of deep puritan self-censorship. Undoubtly, I have my own built in Europe-based self censoring and can't even notice it.
I was in fact wondering if I could post this here, without risk of downvoting, flagging or account removal. I decided to take that risk and post, because a) to hell with virtual internet points b) HN is still reasonably free. But this post would not have much chance on Disqus/Reddit, and I did think about it so censorship works.
Most of the western world gave authoritarianism a huge vote of confidence with the pandemic response and still are unable to come to terms with what this means or their responsibility for it. How can the west stop its increasing addiction to authoritarianism when most of it can't even admit that it is a problem?
This started a lot earlyer than the pandemic, however. I've seen a huge increase when the WTC has been attacked.
Older example: American culture had huge puritan censorship on comics in th 1960's. The stories are heavily infantilized, and even the word for them became 'comics'. A new word, 'graphical novels' was needed to make the same things acceptable to a somewhat older public. Culture in Belgium is completely different: there is a much more natural progression, from children stories to young adult and adult ages. Adult also does not automatically imply sex. They're just books, with pictures.
I do think politicians became aware of the internet between 2010 and 2020, and covid gave them the excuse needed to start thought control and censirship on the new media.
Arguably the US censors were late to the party. Years ago Facebook execs proudly boasted to have been part of popular uprisings that toppled regimes around the world (eg. https://www.reuters.com/article/idUS1650658071/ ) .
It was only in recent years they realized it could happen locally too. It coincided roughly with COVID, but I guess before that they didn't realize how much social media shaped the political landscape (of every country that allowed them). Personally it feels like the social media censors started getting serious at that point.
I don't know, maybe some people are not fine sitting around waiting for the bully to reform while the bully keeps bullying.
I'm not fine with that either, I think it's essential to rectify the bullying by protecting countries & organizations like the one behind the Hugo Awards from being bullied.
But that is different from rectifying the bully, which I'm sure you already know is extremely costly and difficult.
While that is the issue discussed here, authoritarianism hurts those trapped as part of the system the most. It's diffcult to protect the system without directly affecting the system.
This is really a case study demonstrating how authoritarian regimes enforce their power.
Have trigger-happy and excessive punishments to violations will scare the rest of the population into self-enforcing the rules.
As someone that has been monitored electronically assaulted experimented on etc in the west and grew up in an authoritarian society in a non Western country it’s always interesting to read about what people’s conception of authoritarian is very 1984 esque
You mean web analytics, ads and A/B testing when you visit a site? I don't think that is comparable to being put in prison etc.
More than 1 billion with a B, US dollars worth of deals was signed at Chengdu convention. Why incentivize with fear when that much money is on the line. Western media/businesses selling out to PRC is not new.
Where are you getting that figure from?
https://www.china.org.cn/arts/2023-10/23/content_116768150.h... 10%2F23%2Fcontent_116768150.htm
There's reporting from other write ups behind the scenes from apparent Chinese organizers talking about how the event got rapidly captured by commercial interests.
Interesting, thanks. :)
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Weirdly, that link is showing an invalid https cert. The non-https version of the page seems to load ok though.
What are these investment deals? Why are they being signed at a scifi convention?
Since when did scifi need investment for development?
Whats the marginal benefit of hosting in Chengdu? Presumably deals would have been signed at other locations too.
More graft/kick back opporunities. Also a billion dollars? Seems unlikely considering scale of typical Hugo (as far as I'm aware).
That's easy - because there is not enough money in the world for that, there are also more people with a B, and western media not selling out is also not new
Let's be real, incentives from being around a billion dollars is almost always enough money. Most sell out for much less. US gov has to resort to export controls to prevent folks from caving to that kind of financial incentive.
What does that mean exactly? What's the line for simply doing, or underdoing, the censorship?
“I know it when I see it” -Potter Stewart
The line is other people's reaction
"Rectifying the situation with authoritarianism in that part of the world" was not the committee's job. Their job was something much simpler: to conduct the awards with integrity.
If some external actor (say the Chinese government) makes that impossible then you cancel the awards. This comes down to McCarty and the people under him not upholding the values of the WSFS and appropriately they have now all been censured or sacked.
This could have been handled much much better and while it probably looked very scary and hard to an amateur, you would think the people at this level of authority in the organization would not be amateurs. The best way for things to go down probably would have been for the committee to engage early and aggressively with Chinese authorities, state their commitment to free speech assertively, make it clear that they were going to give awards to Chinese political dissidents, and then when the Chinese responded with "you're not going to get a permit for that" or whatever other signal emerged that respecting the Hugo's principles was a no-go in China, you make that information public and you cancel the awards. If it happens early enough you move the venue, if it happens too late in the game maybe you have to do them online or something. All better options than compromising the awards. Yeah the members who chose Chengdu are not going to be happy but that's better than EVERYONE losing respect for you and that's also why you engage with Chinese authorities in good faith until they admit that this thing is gonna be a no-go... let China defend its own policies don't do it for them.
I would say that crashing and burning might be better overall, both for not dilutiong the reputation of Hugo by the allegations of caving to pressure (because pressure there was), and demonstrating the problems with China's censorship, to the Chinese themselves (who had voted for Chengdu) among others.
Rather than solve this intractable problem, simply don't host literary awards in a country that outright censors criticism of the government (or anything really)