**I had to turn off the comments on this node because spam bots are attacking it. It is literally the only node that gets hammered on my site???****
I had a surprise chance to hang out with some good friends last night over a beer. The guest of honor was our good friend who went to live in China last year and is home for a visit. He lives in the busiest of the Special Economic Zones set forth by Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s. I visited Shenzen in 2001 when my friend was just starting to visit the country. There were 7 million people there and if you climbed a hill, all you could see were construction cranes. Today there are 18 million people rapidly adopting an american flavor of urbanization; cars and fastfood with a distinctly Chinese style of space efficiency. This morning, after a long night of light sleeping, I am counting my blessings as an American.

I feel like I need to say that I am extremely happy to be able to walk on the sidewalks, drive with more than 1 ft of space between the next car, and work a sane amount of hours in a day. Even the lack of these luxuries can be comprehended, or experienced in some cities. But other things there have much more weight and tough feelings for me.
I feel fortunate because I can type this, or basically anything else I want to type, right here, with only so much as a bad comment to counter something I might have said. I can write about President Bush being a complete fool, fucking-up our country, and looking like a monkey. It is our right to do so! But the Chinese don't share anything close to these social/political mechanisms. I've known that they don't have these rights there for some time, but it took a long time to think about it enough and to talk to someone who lives in it, to get a better feeling about it; it's a hollow, sickening feeling in the stomach. If you talk on a cell phone there, and apparently everyone has at least 1, someone could be monitoring your conversation. If you are researching Tiananmen Square, you'll find that it doesn't show in search results in google. And if a source does slip through, it's done just that, slipped through China's central communications monitoring outfit. And further, they'll probably be at your door shortly wondering why you are interested in Tiananmen Square.
I'm also interested in Democracy. To me, Democracy is a social insurance policy for Americans; if we don't like something, we have the freedom to reorganize. But before we can reorganize, we have to have information about, and coordinate with, that which we want to reorganize. The freedom, trasparency, and steering of information is key in assuring we always have an escape route to better self-governance. The masses of China can watch lots fo things on TV, even from other countries. But when something comes on that the government doesn't agree with, hundreds of millions of people in China get the wool pulled over there eyes by way of airing nature scenes until the 'dangerious information' has passed. I still haven't decided if it would be in their governments best interest to just remove it all together, instead of letting the people know that there is something that they are not aloud to see or hear. Baffling.

I harbor a lot of tangled up feelings about the internet as a profound opportunity for the world. They hover around feelings of hope for an evolved, more powerful democracy; a more powerful people for the people. It is conversations like last night that make me drive harder to find that kind of organization, because we can and because we must. I have hope that we can organize around ecological principles and found a new economy that re-joins the ciyclical loop of the ecosystem.
The internet seems like a place for recreating more than anything else, here in the US. For the most part, it is viewed a a great big mall where we can consume from our office chair. But it is stories from other coutries that don't have the same freedoms as us, that really give me hope that it is more. There are people in eastern Euorpean and African countries using the internet as a powerful way to take the reigns of their oppressed lives.(read about some of those stories here) And I sure as shit hope that there are people in China having the strength and know-how to do the same.