“Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” JFK’s inaugural address is an iconic rallying cry for civic duty and national pride. Today, young people are still asking what they can do—but the answers they’re finding are increasingly unsettling. The reason? They’re turning to the internet […]
Tag: internet
Beyond Wall Four: Attack on Titan’s Condemnation of Fascism is Woefully Misunderstood
This article contains spoilers for the anime adaptation of Attack on Titan up to Season 4 Episode 22. Some sources may link to external sites that contain spoilers for the manga and/or anime episodes that have not yet aired. In November of 2021, Representative Paul Gosar (R–AZ) tweeted out a truly baffling video in which […]
WeChat isn’t China’s Facebook. It’s something bigger.
It’s often hard for people outside of China to wrap their heads around the vast capabilities of WeChat. Writing it off as a “knock-off Facebook” does it an injustice. In fact, it might be the most potent form of propaganda China has ever employed. “China’s App for Everything” may appear to be but a copycat […]
Double-Edged Sword: The Weaponization of the Digital Landscape and its Impacts on American Democracy
By Alexander Casendino Breakthroughs typically arise from strange beginnings. In his early years as a student at Harvard, Mark Zuckerberg had no clue that he would forever change the world upon launching the “hot or not” website, FaceMash. The same concepts and software behind Zuckerberg’s sophomoric project would later be applied to the social media […]
Wanted: Young, White, and Angry
My friend was killed by a neo-nazi. It’s a strange thing to type out, but it’s true. Even stranger, though, are the details: killed by a former classmate of ours. He picked my friend up in his car, drove to a local park, and then stabbed him. This is a boy who was once my […]
The Conflict of Curation
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell in his dystopian 1984 warns that the mediums through which individuals receive their news, political history and current events hold influential power. Today, while sources of news have never been as present, the mediums in which individuals receive the […]
A Case for Opening the Great Firewall
“Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world,” read the first email from China to Germany in 1987. Today, the prophecy looks rather ironic; China’s internet censorship protocol, “the Great Firewall,” blocks Chinese netizens from Google, Facebook, and the rest of the world. To ask for total internet freedom is impractical, […]
“Under the Dome”
China’s internet censors strike again, and this time, the country’s already deteriorating environment becomes the victim of their restrictive policies. A newly released documentary, “Under the Dome,” instantly went viral on the internet as the most thorough investigation of China’s pollution problems. In its first week the documentary attracted more than twenty millions viewers and […]
Mr. Xi Jinping, Tear Down This (Fire)Wall
In Beijing, signs throughout the city read: “Patriotism, Innovation, Inclusiveness, Virtue.” Like most political slogans, this particular one relies heavily on wishful thinking and an element of deception. China ranks 22 out of 50 OECD economies in innovation, a surprisingly low number given the prowess of the Chinese economy. Innovation itself is synonymous with taking […]
e-Estonia: A Model for Success
At the outset of World War II, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin approved the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the famous non-aggression pact that divided Europe into German and Soviet spheres of influence. The treaty was predicated on the assumption that the two great powers would achieve preeminence on the European continent, and following the war, the Soviet […]