The Committee to Nuke Elysium

The Net Delusion is most useful as a reminder of how fleet-footed, rather than leaden, many authoritarian regimes are in their cyber-policies. China is a veritable powerhouse of disinformation technology – not only building effective mobile, social networking and gaming platforms in which users trade off efficiency for surveillance, but also inducing the required netiquette on those services. The Fifty-Cent Party, for example, is an army of blog-commenters who get paid for every dissident blog they snow with patriotic, party-approved rebuttals. More subtly, China encourages blogging that highlights local corruption or poor services, while keeping a ceiling on more ambitious political critiques