World Affairs

Michael Lewis and David Einhorn have a terrific couple of articles in the New York Times today. They cogently trace the structural causes of our current financial crisis and recommend a number of obvious fixes.

The critique which most resonated with me was the focus on short-term profits that leads to risky behavior and long-term failure. For example, starting three years ago, a private investor named Harry Markopolos repeatedly tried to sound the alarm about the Madoff Ponzi scheme, writing and speaking with S.E.C. regulators who did nothing to stop the enormous fraud. The reason no one stopped Madoff and the reason we are in this crisis is because all involved have misaligned interests.

OUR financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoff’s pyramid scheme, required all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in today’s financial markets is immense. Obviously the greater the market pressure to excel in the short term, the greater the need for pressure from outside the market to consider the longer term. But that’s the problem: there is no longer any serious pressure from outside the market. The tyranny of the short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to consider its enlightened self-interest.

The tyranny of the short-term manifests in credit rating agencies who make money off the firms they are supposed to rate honestly. It shows up in the S.E.C. where regulators seek good relationships with financial institutions in order to receive higher paying jobs in the private sector. It’s on display with bank executives who will be forced out if they don’t make short-term profits.

This is something about which I’ve worried for a while: how do we imbue our market-driven firms with long-term thinking? Quarterly earnings reports, expected to be better than 3 months before, seem like a good idea for shareholder accountability, but it also forces firms to make short-term decisions that may harm their long-term interests.

Lewis and Einhorn are dumbstruck that 18 months into this situation, next to nothing has been done to solve these structural problems. Although they have their disagreements with how Treasury Secretary Paulson is managing the problems (they advocate letting the banks fail), the more important, long-term problems haven’t been addressed.

Their solutions are:

1. Stop making regulatory decisions with long-term consequences in fear of their short-term effects
2. End the official status of the rating agencies - either privatize the rating or do it publicly
3. Regulate financial innovations like credit default swaps (see Bookstaber’s book for their danger)
4. Place capital requirements on banks or break up banks into parts that are small enough to fail
5. Don’t allow S.E.C. officials to work on Wall Street, but encourage the flow in the opposite direction

I’m glad sensible, structural proposals are being put forth and hope Obama and the incoming Congress head them.

I just finished Richard Bookstaber’s A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation and my head is spinning from the packed pages with dire implications for our financial system. Bookstaber’s decades of running risk-management for Morgan Stanley, Salomon Brothers and assorted hedge funds make this 2007 book seem almost prescient in light of today’s subprime-induced meltdown.

Bookstaber’s central argument is that financial innovation - Wall Street geniuses creating new products - increases the complexity of the market to an extent that it is impossible to understand and manage, leading to the dramatic events of the past twenty years. These are dramas Bookstaber saw first-hand, and by his own admission, helped engineer as an MIT PhD working on the cutting edge of finance.

The book is both history and theory, though being far from a finance expert (I often relied on my Dad’s explanations over the past two days), the theory was far more interesting and will be the topic of this post.

The history, though, is also compelling. It chronicles the numerous catastrophes of the past 25 years including 1987’s crash, the Internet bubble and Long Term Capital Management’s implosion. Bookstaber explains how these disasters were not due to outside forces (say, an oil shock), but due to the financial system itself. As investment strategies became increasingly sophisticated, aided by top mathematical models and cutting-edge technology, failure increased. The opposite should have been true: Nobel Prize winning academics were devising financial products and investment strategies to more fully quantify the market. However, fundamental, endogenous differences prove to be insurmountable barriers to financial perfection. The reasons are two-fold: the normality of accidents and the limits of human knowledge.

Complexity, Tight Coupling and Normal Accidents

I first encountered Charles Perrow’s book, Normal Accidents, while reading about another interest of mine: climbing. In his impressive book, Deep Survival, Laurence Gonzalez draws heavily upon Perrow’s insights to explain why accidents in outdoor sports are not only likely, they are standard. The idea showed up again when studying nuclear reactors in my Science, Technology and the Global Arena course last semester. A theory that applies equally well to climbing Mt. Hood, Three Mile Island and the fall of Long Term Capital Management should clearly be required reading, but many remain unfamiliar with Perrow’s brainchild, now decades old.

A normal accident is one which unavoidable due to the structure of the system. Systems which lead to normal accidents are complex and tightly coupled. Complex systems are nonlinear structures where actions in one area cause events among the system. No individual completely understands a complex system, whether it be a space shuttle or modern market, and no amount of testing will ever uncover every possible outcome. By itself, a complex system isn’t prone to catastrophic accidents; the problem comes when the system is also tightly-coupled, meaning processes are time-dependent. If a book isn’t reshelved at a library immediately, no serious problem emerges because a library isn’t tighly-coupled. If, however, a nuclear reactor safeguard doesn’t kick in immediately, a cascade of errors will quickly lead to disaster. There is little slack in a tightly-coupled system, so exactness is important.

Today’s financial markets are both complex and tightly-coupled. They are complex, in large part, because banks hold leverage around the world - meaning that problems in Japan can quickly reach Brazil, even if no direct economic connection exists. “The tight coupling in financial markets comes from the nonstop information flow and unquenchable demand for instant liqudity.” The result is the presence of normal accidents of historic proportions. The history of financial markets also shows this: the famous Dutch tulip mania only reached manic proportions when someone had the bright idea of creating forward contracts, so traders could “buy” tulips that didn’t even exist and proceed to trade those pieces of paper on the expectation of a flower crop.

Financial markets, complex and tightly-coupled, are bound to have failures like the one crippling the economy today. The easy answer, resonating especially hard today, is to regulate the industry. Yet, the most common forms of regulation only add to complexity, and thus accidents. Bookstaber argues that regulation should seek to reduce complexity in the first place, rather than try to control it after the fact.

The Limits of Knowledge

The second theoretical discussion, and where I think Bookstaber is at his strongest, is in his discussion of the limits of human knowledge. In it, he channels some of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “black swan” proposition, but curiously fails to mention his fellow quant-turned-critic. Bookstaber takes three decently well-known concepts and molds what I found to be a spectacular chapter about epistomology (can epistomology be spectacular?).

The first of those is Kurt Godel’s proof that nothing can be proven invariably. The primary example are the self-referential statements known as the Liar Paradox. “This statement is a lie” cannot be true because doing so would contradict it. Godel’s point that not everything followed a logical path was magnified by Wener Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle which showed that by simply observing a particle, it was changed. The result was a recognition that it was impossible to objectively know something precisely, and the harder we tried, the more variance resulted. The ability to know the future disappeared because we could not accurately know the past or present. Bookstaber writes,

“This metaphor extens neatly into the world of financial markets. In the purely mechanistic universe of classical physics, we could apply Newtonian laws to project the future course of nature, if only we knew the location and velocity of every particle. In the world of finance, the elementary particples are the financial assets. In a purely mechanistic financial world, if we knew the position each investor has in each asset and the ability and willingness of liquidity providers to take on those assets in the event of a forced liquidation, we would be able to understand the market’s vulnerability… Practically, it wouldn’t work. Just as the atomic world turned out to be more complex than Laplece [Heisenberg's predecessor] conceived, the financial world may be similarly comlex and not reducible to a simple causality.”

The reasons are manifold, but rest primarily on the fact that traders do not exist in a vacuum and do not hold perfect information. Transparency increases result in liquidity decreases - as we seek to observe (by increasing transparency), we change the market (by altering the supply of liquidity).

The final piece of Bookstaber’s argument for accepting human ignorance is the work of Edward Lorenz, commonly known as the “butterfly effect.” So-called because a hypothetical flap of a butterfly’s wings may be magnified over weeks to effect the weather across the globe, it comes out of the recognition that minuscule perturbations can have astronomic repercussions. Indeed, because because Heisenberg showed that we cannot measure without some error, “for many dynamic systems our forecast errors will grow to the point that even an approximation will be out of our hands.” As Kevin Kelly pointed out, increased understanding only leads to increased awareness of ignorance.

Coarse Behavior

Then what about the billions of dollars run through advanced algorithmic trading schemes? How should an investment firm structure to avoid normal accidents? Bookstaber is weakest when it comes to recommendations (possibly because he is not a policy wonk, possibly because he runs a hedge fund of his own), but he does include some interesting discussion of the value of coars behavior.

Looking to biology, Bookstaber sees the cockroach as the ideal risk-manager; after all, it has survived tectonic changes in environment and continues to outwit human predators. The reason is because its defense mechanism consists of the rather unsophisticated rule: if a puff of air is detected by its fiber nervous system, it scurries. The puffs may or may not signal an approaching predator, but the cockroach runs anyways. As Bookstaber writes, “This risk-management structure is extremely coarse; it ignores a wide set of information about the environment - visual and olfactory cues, for example - that one would think an optimal risk management system would take into account.” That is, the cockroach filters out all but the essential, if at times inaccurate, indicator of doom. As Clay Shirky said at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo, it’s not information overload, it’s filter failure.

Compare this to animals like the oddly named furu, a finely-tuned product of Darwinian selection - specialized in almost every way for its environment. The furu, though, suffered near extinction when an alien species was introduced to its lake. The parallels are clever: highly specialized financial models and strategies cannot last in a complex, tightly-coupled market where change comes fast and furious. Although fine-tuning may yield short-term payoff, the inevitable result (2-3 years in Bookstaber’s observation) is extinction.

Instead, he advocates an investment strategy configured for the unknown. In addition, the strategist seeking to avoid the fate of the book cover’s Icarus should simplify organizational complexity and introduce slack when possible by decoupling processes. The take-aways are many, but as endogenous pressures continue to wreack havoc on the market, Bookstaber provides a powerful argument against increased innovation which only introduces more normal accidents.

If you liked The Black Swan or Fooled by Randomness, or want to better understand today’s economy, I cannot recommend this book enough.

During the tragic post-election violence in Kenya late last year, a couple of technologists with ties to Kenya created Ushahidi, an innovative web service that allows witnesses to report crisis news from their mobile phone or computer. From the Swahili word for “testimony,” this non-profit has created a platform which allows for the crowdsourcing of reporting. It has already been proven useful in South Africa to track anti-immigration violence, and I’m sure sundry other uses will pop up.

I’m really excited for the possibilities this opens up. Ushahidi was an important tool for making the crisis in Kenya more transparent and capitalizes on the mobile penetration in Africa. Allowing more people to have the ability to express what they see is an important goal and Ushahidi is doing so in an open-source way which will make this as accessible as possible to all. Congratulations to the team!

RAND, the American think-tank, has released a systematic study of historical fights against terrorist organizations ranging from the Oklahoma City bombers to Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers to Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The examination concludes that a “war on terror” is a mistaken approach to beat a distributed, insurgent enemy. Instead, in most scenarios a policy of smart policing and intelligence gathering is the best to defeat terrorism.

According to the analysis, overwhelming military might is only effective “Where opponents are large, organised like armies and occupy territory, military methods are likely to be more effective.” Such cases as Colombia’s FARC deserve traditional battle techniques, but only 20% of insurgencies are beaten through military assaults.

Forty-three percent, the largest quantity, of terrorist entities which ended their violence did so due to acceptance into the political process. Forty percent were beaten through traditional police and intelligence work.

This supports the analysis done in “The Starfish and the Spider” which recognizes that distributed networks cannot be beaten through centralized attacks. Current American counter-terror policies, however, try to do just that. The report’s authors suggest that the United States treat the terrorists as criminals, not warriors. “”The United States has the necessary instruments to defeat al Qaida, it just needs to shift its strategy and keep in mind that terrorist groups are not eradicated overnight.”

The program in which I am at Georgetown, the School of Foreign Service, is famous for the required course entitled “Map of the Modern World.” The “course designed to provide regional overviews of the evolution of the world political map since 1800, including major nationalist, ethnic, boundary, and territorial conflicts and regional tension areas.” With only one grade, much of the course comes down to freshman SFSers huddled around tables quizzing each other on obscure countries, their colonial histories and territorial disputes. (What is the significance of Angola’s bifurcation?”) To the best of my knowledge, the course is unique in its scope and leaves students with a holistic understanding of the world’s geopolitical setting.

One of the defining questions of geopolitics, and international relations more generally, is national sovereignty. The idea that nations are bounded regions beholden to justifiable self-governance is fundamental to the international system. Yet, it is not universally and consistently recognized. In an op-ed for the LA Times, two graduate students, point out the incongruous application of sovereignty by the United States. We support separatist movements in Kosovo, but condemn them in South Ossetia.

If the United States wishes to avoid [Russia's regional aggression] like this in the future, we need to be more consistent about how we treat fledgling independence movements. Beyond Kosovo and South Ossetia, why do we encourage the independence of the southern Sudanese but condemn the uprisings of the Kurds in eastern Turkey? Why do we speak up for the Tibetans in China but tune out the Basques in Spain?

The authors point out that our approach seeks to weaken competitors (Russia), while supporting allies (Spain). While this approach (realism) seems to make sense, it weakens our principled stance for sovereignty. Self-determinism movements around the world play close attention to how major powers approach other separatists. For example, Taiwan is known to be an ardent supporter of self-determination due to their relationship with China. Canada, on the other hand, wants to avoid a precedent which will see Ontario Quebec go its own way.

In the end, the authors argue for partitioning existing states as only a last resort. Good-faith efforts at bringing minorities into the government are much safer options. History shows that new states lead to more disputes, locally and abroad.

And, besides, an entire class of SFS students don’t want to memorize a whole new nation for their test.

I remember the first time I saw Hans Rosling present his Gapminder project. In a TED video he wowed the crowd by bringing boring tables of statistics to life through stunning animations. His innovative presentation of data dispelled myths and misconceptions. By making statistics something we could visualize, Rosling showed me the power of a good visualization.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w]

That is why a new project called GeoCommons is so exciting. GeoCommons is the consumer product that includes “Finder!” and “Maker!”. They allow, as you might expect, anyone to find or make stunning maps of geo-coded data. Data sets are easily exportable to mapping services like Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth. When they unveil Maker! in the coming weeks, expect it to do for geo-visualization what the Google Maps API did for geo-mashups. Take, for example, the map below.

According to TechCrunch who covered GeoCommons today, the orange circles represent carbon emmissions while the darker shaded regions show heavier population densities. Because of this map the amorphous issue of air quality in China is reified. The possibilities are endless and hundreds are already available for examination.

I am incredibly excited to see what geographical data people are able to make concrete. Data is only as good as it is understandable and tools like GeoCommons and Gapminder make data understandable at a glance. They reveal the truth more than a spreadsheet ever could.

It seems the media likes nothing better than a good symbol and nothing says “Rise of China” like the Beijing Olympics. Picking up on the theme, David Brooks has an article on collectivism versus individualism where he provokes that China’s rise through collectivism is a threat to the power of the American dream.

Touching on a topic I mentioned a while back, Brooks explains the fundamental differences in worldview held by Asia and the West. While the West values individuals and their success, Asians seem to prioritize collective harmony. For example, show a fish tank to an American and he sees the biggest fish and its actions. An Asian, on the other hand, sees the relationships between the fish. In experiment after experiment, “Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.”

For much of history, individualist societies excelled economically, but Brooks thinks the rise of China may point to a change in that narrative.

“But what happens if collectivist societies snap out of their economic stagnation? What happens if collectivist societies, especially those in Asia, rise economically and come to rival the West? A new sort of global conversation develops.

The opening ceremony in Beijing was a statement in that conversation. It was part of China’s assertion that development doesn’t come only through Western, liberal means, but also through Eastern and collective ones.”

However, I think Brooks is missing a key point. I’m not an expert on either economics or China, but my understanding of the rise of China is that it hinged upon economic liberalization led by Deng Xiaoping. By opening up to international trade and moving towards a market system, China paved the way to the double-digit growth which has characterized its recent years.

What Brooks alleges, then, is that China has embraced capitalism while maintaining a collectivist spirit. In Ted Koppel’s recent miniseries entitled “The People’s Republic of Capitalism,” he interviewed a Western-educated Chinese youth who thought government censorship and repression was acceptable because it was bringing China out of poverty and improving millions of lives. Brooks sees this sentiment, which I believe is widespread, as a collectivist capitalism.

I disagree. I think it is driven by self-interest; it is individualistic. Those suppressed are not supporting the suppression. They don’t think collective harmony for growth is good, like Brooks supposes. The Koppel interview shows citizens who are being personally benefited by markets - the selfishly driven interaction of individuals. The rise of China - an economic phenomenon of GDP growth - comes with increased individualism. My intuition is that while it may masquerade as collectivism (”all of China is benefiting from this system, so suppression of dissent is okay”), it is really individuals seeing themselves benefit and liking it. Brooks thesis, as I understand it, would be supported by an active Falun Gong member supporting his suppression because his family is richer than last year. And, although I haven’t looked hard, I don’t think that is happening.

[Image credit]

A new type of narrative is taking hold among the coverage of the military conflict between Russia and Georgia. A number of sites are writing about the “cyberwarfare” being waged by pro-Russian forces against the Georgian government. It seems that, like Estonia a year ago, entities evoking the ire of Russia must be forced to combat widespread botnet-based DDoS attacks. I think there is little doubt that such occurrences will be increasingly part of real-world conflicts, but people are rushing into framing this as warfare, which will only lead to military-based reactions - something I fear.

But before we irrevocably frame the issue as one of war, we need to ask if it even is so. Last year during the Estonia attacks, Tim Lee wrote a post arguing that what was happening was little more than petty vandalism. While the media reported that the government, banks and media in Estonia were being targeted, it was really only their public websites. He asked, would the average American even notice if Congress’s website was down?

“I suppose it would be a bit of a pain if I wasn’t able to check CNN or my bank account balance. But that’s not “cyber war.” It’s petty vandalism. It deserves the attention of network security experts at the companies whose websites were targetted, of course, but it’s ridiculous to get NATO involved or to act as though Russia engaging in this kind of “cyber warfare” is even remotely on par with Russia launching cruise missiles against Estonian targets.”

Although in Georgia, obviously, real war is taking place, the cyberattacks don’t seem to be taking down critical infrastructure. Instead, the websites of government ministries have been compromised. In response, the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has created a blog using Google’s hosted service. With Google’s network engineers protecting the integrity of the site, the ministry can use it to provide information updates. Will other governments come to depend on hosted solutions for their websites? So far consumers and commerce have taken to cloud computing with a vengeance, and one wonders if government, too, will do so. The same benefits of outsourcing internal IT will make it useful for governments to host their websites at specialized hosting services.

In recent days, there have been a number of cool translation-related initiatives which have come through my feed reader. In the past, I’ve mentioned how translation is going to be important to avoid the fragmentation of the world wide web, and these developments are welcome solutions.

The first are the hints of a new service from Google called Translation Center. Google knows that its mission of making all the world’s information universally accessible requires widespread, accurate translation. The new service, uncovered at Google Blogoscoped, will bring together translators and those seeking translation. Volunteers and professional translators can bring web content into other languages through a manual translation effort through tools provided by Google. It is unclear if this will be a marketplace with payment or just voluntary exchanges. This development comes 7 years after Google offered volunteers the ability to translate Google services into their native language through Google In Your Language. This effort has seen the explosion of more than 100 localized versions of their site.

Secondly, TechCrunch reports that VoIP provider Jajah has introduced JAJAH.Babel which provides instant Chinese-to-English translation through a phone. Users call a number, speak Mandarin or English into the phone, and a few seconds later the translated version is read back. Apparently the technology works pretty well and could come to replace in-person translators who accompany business people, diplomats and others around the world. I’m surprised that the service works with Mandarin which I would have thought we be a more difficult language to translate, so I hope they expand it to other languages soon. Imagine the help this will be to tourists in China who now have a phone number which can explain to the natives what they need, in their own language.

Finally, a post from the recent iSummit held by iCommons explains the difficulties and promises of multilingualism online.

While statistics are difficult to get, it appears that less than a third of the web’s users use English as a first language, and only a third of all websites are in English. Unfortunately, building a multilingual web is more complex than simply using an automated translation service. Computers have yet to understand local contexts, cultural references, and do not have a proper grasp of grammar… Translation is extremely difficult, especially in a distributed context. For example, when translating from English to Chinese, one has to decide whether Traditional or Simplified Chinese will be used. Furthermore, a volunteer from Taiwan may use different characters or metaphors to describe events than a volunteer from Beijing. As such, volunteer management is often more structured and complex than one would initially assume.

These questions will certainly loom large for Google as they embark upon the Translation Center, but hopefully they can create a compelling product which motivates people to lend their language skills to bridging the gap between societies.

Update: Google now has Google Translate for iPhone.

It’s official: China is now the largest Internet market with 253 million users. The number is only 19% of the Chinese population, well behind the 70% of Americans who are Internet users. Recent years have seen a noted increase in Internet penetration, especially among younger citizens. The rapid economic development of China has led to a significant segment of the population which has both the time and the money to be online.

There are many obstacles to the realization of international connectivity; among them:

• the difficulties of deploying digital infrastructure,
• the high cost of connections,
• language barriers, and
• cultural differences.

The first two barriers are certainly complex tasks which rely on technical, political and economic variables, but my gut feeling is that they are not as important as the other, less tangible hurdles. Undoubtedly someone with a more sophisticated understanding of network deployment could tell me why the Internet’s global penetration is not a guarantee, but on this topic I am optimistic. There is a hearty demand for the information-bearing networks and, in tow, a swarm of would-be ISPs, web services and advertisers seeking to support the demand. With development, we will see the digital divide crumble.

The cultural divide is what worries me.

The instantaneous, global spread of ideas is unprecedented in human history. Sure, the Silk Road is a fascinating example of the globalization of products and diseases; even a few ideas made the journey. Sure, by some measures the world was just as globalized prior to WWI. But the scale and extent of the current global information society dwarfs historical comparisons. For the first time in history, ordinary citizens have the capabilities to connect across the globe to people of wildly different backgrounds, histories and interests. It was supposed to be a sovereign realm unto itself where “governments of the industrial world… have no sovereignty.” Nationalism was supposed to disappear, to dwell in history with the horrific wars and conflicts it supported.

The reality, is quite different. The Economist notes that, “the very people whom the Internet might have liberated from the shackles of state-sponsored ideologies—are using the wonders of electronics to stoke hatred between countries, races or religions.” How can these painful distortions of humanity be limited in the digital realm? The answer, of course, isn’t clear, but my intuition is that it will not depend on hardware or software. A future free from conflict - digital and physical - will be paved by breaking down the cultural differences and coming to understand the reasons for differences of opinion.

One area technology may help is in breaking down the language barriers which make meaningful conversation difficult. Tools like Google Translate are a good start, but they are far from perfect and understanding the nuance behind political differences requires much more than what is available now. Instead, we must rely on human translation which introduces a level of bias (no matter how innocent the translator) and, oftentimes, shifts discussion to another location, as is the case with Global Voices.

Take the example that the New Yorker did in a recent piece on China’s rising cybernationalists. By all accounts, Tang Jie is on his way to becoming an accomplished academic who has a firm understanding of the West and the current international diplomatic scene. Tang is also the creator of an incredibly popular video which capitalized upon and created a nationalistic uproar earlier this year following the Tibetan protests in March and Olympic torch debacle in Paris. The video, embedded below, is full of crescendos of dramatic music, potent imagery and conspiratorial suggestions of a new Cold War run by a “cabal” against China.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=MSTYhYkASsA]

But below this sensational 6 minutes, as Evan Osnos’s excellent article explains, is a sophisticated, thoughtful thinker who approaches political disputes openly.

When people began rioting in Lhasa in March, Tang followed the news closely. As usual, he was receiving his information from American and European news sites, in addition to China’s official media. Like others his age, he has no hesitation about tunnelling under the government firewall, a vast infrastructure of digital filters and human censors which blocks politically objectionable content from reaching computers in China. He’s baffled that foreigners might imagine that people of his generation are somehow unwise to the distortions of censorship. “Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed,” he said. “We are always eager to get other information from different channels.” Then he added, “But when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed.”

However, although Tang and his friends point out valuable discrepancies in how America runs foreign or trade policy, the truth of the matter doesn’t get translated into his video. What has happened is a cultural homoginzation of tools, but underneath remains a cultural deviation of values. Both Students for a Free Tibet and Tang Jie communicate with supporters via online videos, but the underlying differences are masked by the same sensationalism that poisons CNN and Tang’s video.

A screenshot from Tang's video

In a rapid-fire media environment, the sort of enlightened exposure between thoughtful objectors needs to be cultivated - on both sides of the Pacific. Grace Wang is one of those enlightened thinkers, but the crazed online mob got in the way:

At Duke University, Grace Wang, a Chinese freshman, tried to mediate between pro-Tibet and pro-China protesters on campus. But online she was branded a “race traitor.” People ferreted out her mother’s address, in the seaside city of Qingdao, and vandalized their home. Her mother, an accountant, remains in hiding. Of her mother, Grace Wang said, “I really don’t know where she is, and I think it’s better for me not to know.”

Although I’m beginning to sound like a Luddite, I am anything but. For a long time I was outspoken in my belief that China was acting horribly in Tibet. The Internet, and listening openly to others, has given me a deeper, more levelled understanding. I think attentively designed conversations will arise in the amazing information landscape of the Internet. We just need to consciously recognize the technical and cultural inputs to do so. And we need to recognize that they may not be universally embraced. For example, although the American tradition is steeped in recognizing freedom of expression as a foundational element of political discourse, a majority of polled Chinese approve of government control of information. So, I’m reminded of Rebecca MacKinnon’s headline during the recent Tibetan protests: Is discussion possible? It is a question of acute importance whose answer relies on both the technical and cultural.