7 ms·

Letter from Shenzhen

81 points by prostoalex 8y ago

markovbot 8y ago
ug, this site disabled the fucking arrow keys. Do you want me to turn off Javascript? Because that's how you get me to turn off Javascript. fuck people who do this shit.
- anothergoogler 8y ago
  Yea, fuck people who provide free content. Use a script blocker like uMatrix if it upsets you so much.
- icebraining 8y ago
  They haven't disabled the arrow keys, you just have to focus on the content area (e.g. by tabbing to it), since only that <div> is scrollable, rather than the full body.
- sctb 8y ago
  Please not here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
cromwellian 8y ago
I think comparing this culture to open source is doing a disservice to open source. "Open Source" in the West has developed a code of ethics around transparency, crediting authors, and contributing back. A lot of it is done without compensation out of joy. Fly-by-night companies that just scrape together a bunch of ideas and parts from competitors and ship an MVP are not "open source". They're a proprietary startup. Moreover, some companies are deliberately selling fraudulent products, including those harmful to human health. Secondly, while the scanning of cards and displaying of Facial database entries might be impressive to you (the author), you know what's impressive to me? That the Japanese operated the first Shinkansen in 1964, and since that time, there's been effectively zero accidents due to manufacturing flaws or human error in routine service. When the Shinkansen is late or early by a few seconds, it is national news. Copying technology is easy, copying safety culture is much more difficult. How likely is it that all of the fancy investments in surveillance databases and wireless entry for China's trains, will also have deeply invested in the same quality assurance that the Shinkansen has? One of the problems the author doesn't mention is the 差不多 culture that leads not to just copying, but lazy copying of the originals. I once looked at buying a Chinese brand of Louboutin-like shoes for wife, until I read dozens of online reviews about how the stitching or glue came out after a few weeks. However, the manufacturer bragged about how they studied in Italy and adopted Italian techniques of hand stitching. There are a few brands these days that have evolved and have adopted a safety or quality culture, DJI for example, is a standout example of a Chinese company innovating on brand, quality, industrial design, fit-and-finish. I think China may need a much stronger domestic legal tort system and a few class action consumer lawsuits under it's belt, before a lot of the snakeoil is cleared away. (And yes, there are a lot of snakeoil companies in the US shipping MVPs and broken products. It's a matter of degree though. This is present in many countries, but for example, I would trust a Japanese manufacturer over an American or Chinese manufacturer.)
- njoro 8y ago
  I think Shanzhai in many ways is a better representation of the hacker spirit than open source these days. Many successful open source projects are essentially copies of other software, including things like Linux and Git. It is only these days, when people get paid to work on open source and abandoning things on Github is more the rule than the exception, that copying has become a bad thing.
  - sushid 8y ago
    I think the parent is saying that the spirit of open source doesn't mean you eschew safety or best practices, but that's what you see in Shenzhen's extreme capitalism. There are no safety regulations and competition is fierce so people can and will cut corners.
  - cromwellian 8y ago
    Shanzai doesn't benefit me if I have to reverse engineer competitors. The point of open source is that forking is not a bug, it's a feature. All of the clones of Linux used to make other distributions or products are in fact, the whole point of the enterprise. Now, which Shanzai company is openingly publishing their source, Solidworks files, EDA assets so I can quickly fork their problem and make a slight tweak and ship a new version? Yes, it's in the hacker spirit, in a sense, because hackers basically find whatever things necessary to glue together a solution. But it is not in the spirit of say, the Homebrew computing club, or other famous hacker communities that kicked off the computer revolution, because these clubs actually shared their designs and intended for other people to be able to build their own. My point is, someone who is making a product by taking someone else's product, cloning most of it, changing a few bits, and then selling it, without publishing their changes so that others can replicate it, is not doing open source, and they are a more of a 'Hustler' than a 'Hacker', when I take the definition of Hacker to mean in the sense of Steve Levy's _Hackers_, or say, Richard Stallman, or the members of the Homebrew Club of the 70s and 80s. (or the modern Maker movement) To what extent, are Shenzhen hackers documenting their methods, publishing their sources, and assisting others to replicate what they've done? I see a lot of fly-by-night entrepreneurial activity, attempts to get rich quick, and while that is needed activity, I want to see more evidence of a culture of sharing information and being community minded before I'd be willing to say it is equivalent to the open source movement or old-skool hackers.
ivanech 8y ago
Just an FYI, several of the images in the article are unreasonably large (>3000 pixels on the long side). It's really unnecessary, too - they just don't hold up to close inspection. We're talking like ~20 MB total.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  Yes I couldn't read the page due to this issue.
phyzome 8y ago
> It has become unfashionable to talk about censorship and surveillance in many intelligentsia circles in China Uh... "unfashionable" is one way of putting it, yes. Perhaps the word "dangerous" would fit better. -.- (You can get disappeared for being too uppity on such topics.)
- est 8y ago
  It's like the #1 rule of fight club.
0xcde4c3db 8y ago
> the time it takes to create, design, or build a new product decreases day by day This part really struck me. Outside of building websites, it feels like the opposite has happened in the US over the past 30 years or so.
- aj7 8y ago
  No products are created in Shenzhen. They are cobbled together from components designed and manufactured by others. This is not creating, designing. It is building something, I suppose.
  - wer716 8y ago
    So unless you "create" a completely new language or chipset, you are merely just "building" things?
- dnomad 8y ago
  This is the most incredible thing about China. The numbers are very clear: there are about 10_000 companies are being formed each day in China [1]. The government is actually investing heavily in these new firms and they receive all kind of economic, political and social support. Meanwhile in the US and much of the West new firm formation continues to plummet [2] and labor fluidity has collapsed leading to stuck wages [3]. You can see by the comments in this thread how much this state of affairs frightens people and of course all positive news out of China must be propaganda. It's unfortunate but all signs indicate this will likely continue until it's too late and Silicon Valley finds itself on the outside looking in. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13793288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13793288 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/business/economy/startup-business.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/business/economy/startup-... [3] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2016/files/2016015pap.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2016/files/2...
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
  Definitely not. I've been building hardware since I was in middle school and it has never been easier than it is now. What has happened that may make it seem that way is that the things people want to build are far more complex than 30 years ago. But even accounting for that, the level of effort is far less now.
matte_black 8y ago
Is Huaqiangbei still a good place to go to find products for white label or is it basically tapped out now?
watertom 8y ago
Censorship and surveillance kills enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit. China is about to put the clamps on what is driving their success and growth, it was only a matter of time. Totalitarianism will always kill itself.
- subsubsub 8y ago
  I can understand why Communism might have this effect, but why censorship or surveillance? Anything I can read on the subject?
  - musage 8y ago
    Not communism. Totalitarianism. > We don't know a perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of the whole planet. But we know enough about the the still preliminary experiments of total organization to realize that the very well possible perfection of this apparatus would get rid of human agency in the sense as we know it. To act would turn out to be superfluous for people living together, when all people have become an example of their species, when all doing has become an acceleration of the movement mechanism of history or nature following a set pattern, and all deeds have become the execution of death sentences which history and nature have given anyway. -- Hannah Arendt, in "The Origins of Totalitarianism", which I recommend. She also wrote > The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality. and > The fanaticism of the elite cadres, absolutely essential for the functioning of the movement, abolishes systematically all genuine interest in specific jobs and produces a mentality which sees every conceivable action as an instrument for something entirely different. You cannot decouple censorship and surveillance from that basic derangement. And how that combination in turn would kill enthusiasm, the ability to think new things, there's also many things said and written about that but I didn't save those because they seemed rather obvious. > The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but up in the attics the secret enemies of the regime can record their thoughts in perfect freedom — that is the idea, more or less. -- George Orwell He doesn't explain why it's a fallacy. But there's things to read on the subject, of course. I'd guess that just like very sociopathic individuals are essentially just feeding on and destroying others to buy some time before they fall into the black hole at their own core, so it is with power structures made from that foundation. Cancer cells die after they killed their host, an organism made out of just cancer cells wouldn't exactly fare better. That doesn't mean they can't eat the whole world and be the "most innovative" or the "most alive", all opponents being dead. They still will not innovate or be alive in any interesting sense of the words. People who cannot even face themselves cannot say or see anything interesting about the world.
shiburizu 8y ago
The author of this article makes several claims about how you can get an item remixed by the local shops and how you can skip over the marketing of a major western brand and just buy things almost fresh off the line. I don't doubt the fact that you can by things in obscure Chinese labels claiming they are from a certain brand, we do that here in my country where mall shops will sell you "original" products that skipped over any official Samsung/Huawei/Etc. vendors. But this entirely just headphones, chargers, batteries, etc. I'd really like to believe Shenzhen is a place where I can get an existing product remixed with any oddity I'd like but I also want to see a proof of that. Everything that these people ship out overseas to developing countries that resell their products no questions asked are selling smartphone accessories.
aj7 8y ago
To me, Shenzhen is simply an orchestrated end-run around the intellectual property of others, with the government looking the other way. While the efforts there are not without sophistication, that sophistication is a small fraction of that intrinsic to the “borrowed” technology.
thinkpad20 8y ago
This article honestly reads a lot like propaganda from the Chinese government. It never even mentions the Great Firewall (unless I missed it?) and only barely mentions the security and censorship issues involved in writing software in China, even claiming that the reason it’s difficult to talk about security and privacy is because “so much of the grand technological experiment in China is still unfolding.” Right; I’m sure that’s the main reason. The article also breathlessly mentions that “there are still parts of the rural US without cell phone service, places where you feel untracked and like you might disappear. Yet even in one of the poorest provinces in China, QR codes will follow you from towns to villages.” Even if you assume that’s something that everyone wants, to ignore the implications of having that technology available in a highly invasive police state is irresponsible (in my opinion). Finally, I thought the line that “its strength is in extreme open-source, which stands in stark contrast to the increasingly proprietary nature of American technology“ is completely laughable in a country as notoriously insecure as China and in an era when use of open source software is probably at an all-time high in the US. (Edit: added newlines for clarity)
- Barrin92 8y ago
  Sorry but just because an article or opinion piece does not make censorship the central point of an article does not mean it is a piece of propaganda. I've been to China, while many people are certainly annoyed by the control, most seemed to be so for purely pragmatic reasons. "It hinders business, I can't get what I want", and so forth. Rarely have I seen someone go into a lengthy speech about government overreach or free speech. You simply should recognise that this is fairly low on the list of priorities of people in the country, most just want to get on with their lives. We should allow people to talk about the Chinese tech ecosystem without having to pay their due to Western audiences in the foreword. The ubiquity of smartphone consumer technology is portrayed fairly accurately. You really can do almost anything with your phone in almost any place (although I can't speak personally about rural areas, I've heard people mention it a lot, especially in the last tow to three years.) The open source edge that China has is primarily in hardware, not software, especially in Shenzhen. The knock-off culture allows you to bring something to the market or have something manufactured in virtually no time at very low cost. It is still primarily a manufacturing city rather than a services city, although that seems to be changing.
contingencies 8y ago
This article has almost nothing to do with Shenzhen.
tomcam 8y ago
Scrolling was painful on my iPad Pro.
lubujackson 8y ago
For a companion piece I highly recommend this hour long vid by Wired about Shenzhen. It's worth your time: https://youtu.be/SGJ5cZnoodY https://youtu.be/SGJ5cZnoodY Things that stood out to me was the maker mindset was so prevalent and competitve that it had filtered down to the buyers. So someone cobbles together some new widget for their phone and starts to sell it. Other people see it selling a nd copy it, but they make modifications. Shoppers see it for the first time and decide they want one with a purple strap, so they shop around until they find it or find someone who will make it that way. This is where the hoverboard fad bubbled up but also how and why it "flamed" out. I think it's a fascinating testbed for technology and creativity and economics.
- mattbierner 8y ago
  How can an outsider leverage this spirit to get something manufactured? I’ve got some stupid products that I just want to exist, things in the hover board vein, but haven’t found anyone who I can work with to take the idea to small batch manufacturing and get it tested in a marketplace. When I recently tried ordering custom sized rolls of paper tape from various Chinese manufactures of paper products, I ended up going with a company in the states because it was simpler to coordinate requirements and they didn’t require a hundred thousand roll minimum run
  - njoro 8y ago
    The truth is that it is hard as a foreigner. It is sort of like if you wanted to leverage Silicon Valley without speaking English or having a degree. Things are "leaking" out of Shenzhen from time to time, but it is still a pretty isolated from the west. In addition to the Wired documentary I would also recommend bunnie's blog and Strange Parts. https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4266 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4266 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw
graffoala 8y ago
Shenzhen is such a shithole. It’s like one of those pop songs that you find awesome and then play on repeat for one week and then you realize that it is just a shallow piece of shit music without any depth or thoughts behind it.
ausjke 8y ago
I ran an embedded design startup there for a few years, often times I could not push the changes back to the git server(via ssh, openvpn,etc) in USA, basically for small companies there is no guaranteed way to do internet-based development across the pacific ocean, it sucks and I bailed out, you don't really know how painful when you need git-push/git-pull/rsync the most while all you got is tcp-reset/connection-disconnected!
Kagerjay 8y ago
If anyone would like to learn more about shenzhen, I have two youtube channels that I like to watch about China. I personally have been to China many times, both rural and modern, and it definitely feels like a different world unlike any other country I've been too Video sources I like to watch: Strange parts: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw Seprenztra (the first western youtuber in china) https://www.youtube.com/user/serpentza https://www.youtube.com/user/serpentza

81 points by prostoalex 8y ago

ug, this site disabled the fucking arrow keys. Do you want me to turn off Javascript? Because that's how you get me to turn off Javascript. fuck people who do this shit.

anothergoogler 8y ago
Yea, fuck people who provide free content. Use a script blocker like uMatrix if it upsets you so much.
icebraining 8y ago
They haven't disabled the arrow keys, you just have to focus on the content area (e.g. by tabbing to it), since only that <div> is scrollable, rather than the full body.
sctb 8y ago
Please not here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

cromwellian 8y ago

I think comparing this culture to open source is doing a disservice to open source. "Open Source" in the West has developed a code of ethics around transparency, crediting authors, and contributing back. A lot of it is done without compensation out of joy. Fly-by-night companies that just scrape together a bunch of ideas and parts from competitors and ship an MVP are not "open source". They're a proprietary startup. Moreover, some companies are deliberately selling fraudulent products, including those harmful to human health. Secondly, while the scanning of cards and displaying of Facial database entries might be impressive to you (the author), you know what's impressive to me? That the Japanese operated the first Shinkansen in 1964, and since that time, there's been effectively zero accidents due to manufacturing flaws or human error in routine service. When the Shinkansen is late or early by a few seconds, it is national news. Copying technology is easy, copying safety culture is much more difficult. How likely is it that all of the fancy investments in surveillance databases and wireless entry for China's trains, will also have deeply invested in the same quality assurance that the Shinkansen has? One of the problems the author doesn't mention is the 差不多 culture that leads not to just copying, but lazy copying of the originals. I once looked at buying a Chinese brand of Louboutin-like shoes for wife, until I read dozens of online reviews about how the stitching or glue came out after a few weeks. However, the manufacturer bragged about how they studied in Italy and adopted Italian techniques of hand stitching. There are a few brands these days that have evolved and have adopted a safety or quality culture, DJI for example, is a standout example of a Chinese company innovating on brand, quality, industrial design, fit-and-finish. I think China may need a much stronger domestic legal tort system and a few class action consumer lawsuits under it's belt, before a lot of the snakeoil is cleared away. (And yes, there are a lot of snakeoil companies in the US shipping MVPs and broken products. It's a matter of degree though. This is present in many countries, but for example, I would trust a Japanese manufacturer over an American or Chinese manufacturer.)

njoro 8y ago
I think Shanzhai in many ways is a better representation of the hacker spirit than open source these days. Many successful open source projects are essentially copies of other software, including things like Linux and Git. It is only these days, when people get paid to work on open source and abandoning things on Github is more the rule than the exception, that copying has become a bad thing.
- sushid 8y ago
  I think the parent is saying that the spirit of open source doesn't mean you eschew safety or best practices, but that's what you see in Shenzhen's extreme capitalism. There are no safety regulations and competition is fierce so people can and will cut corners.
- cromwellian 8y ago
  Shanzai doesn't benefit me if I have to reverse engineer competitors. The point of open source is that forking is not a bug, it's a feature. All of the clones of Linux used to make other distributions or products are in fact, the whole point of the enterprise. Now, which Shanzai company is openingly publishing their source, Solidworks files, EDA assets so I can quickly fork their problem and make a slight tweak and ship a new version? Yes, it's in the hacker spirit, in a sense, because hackers basically find whatever things necessary to glue together a solution. But it is not in the spirit of say, the Homebrew computing club, or other famous hacker communities that kicked off the computer revolution, because these clubs actually shared their designs and intended for other people to be able to build their own. My point is, someone who is making a product by taking someone else's product, cloning most of it, changing a few bits, and then selling it, without publishing their changes so that others can replicate it, is not doing open source, and they are a more of a 'Hustler' than a 'Hacker', when I take the definition of Hacker to mean in the sense of Steve Levy's _Hackers_, or say, Richard Stallman, or the members of the Homebrew Club of the 70s and 80s. (or the modern Maker movement) To what extent, are Shenzhen hackers documenting their methods, publishing their sources, and assisting others to replicate what they've done? I see a lot of fly-by-night entrepreneurial activity, attempts to get rich quick, and while that is needed activity, I want to see more evidence of a culture of sharing information and being community minded before I'd be willing to say it is equivalent to the open source movement or old-skool hackers.

ivanech 8y ago

Just an FYI, several of the images in the article are unreasonably large (>3000 pixels on the long side). It's really unnecessary, too - they just don't hold up to close inspection. We're talking like ~20 MB total.

jessaustin 8y ago
Yes I couldn't read the page due to this issue.

phyzome 8y ago

> It has become unfashionable to talk about censorship and surveillance in many intelligentsia circles in China Uh... "unfashionable" is one way of putting it, yes. Perhaps the word "dangerous" would fit better. -.- (You can get disappeared for being too uppity on such topics.)

est 8y ago
It's like the #1 rule of fight club.

0xcde4c3db 8y ago

> the time it takes to create, design, or build a new product decreases day by day This part really struck me. Outside of building websites, it feels like the opposite has happened in the US over the past 30 years or so.

aj7 8y ago
No products are created in Shenzhen. They are cobbled together from components designed and manufactured by others. This is not creating, designing. It is building something, I suppose.
- wer716 8y ago
  So unless you "create" a completely new language or chipset, you are merely just "building" things?
dnomad 8y ago
This is the most incredible thing about China. The numbers are very clear: there are about 10_000 companies are being formed each day in China [1]. The government is actually investing heavily in these new firms and they receive all kind of economic, political and social support. Meanwhile in the US and much of the West new firm formation continues to plummet [2] and labor fluidity has collapsed leading to stuck wages [3]. You can see by the comments in this thread how much this state of affairs frightens people and of course all positive news out of China must be propaganda. It's unfortunate but all signs indicate this will likely continue until it's too late and Silicon Valley finds itself on the outside looking in. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13793288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13793288 [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/business/economy/startup-business.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/business/economy/startup-... [3] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2016/files/2016015pap.pdf https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2016/files/2...
HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
Definitely not. I've been building hardware since I was in middle school and it has never been easier than it is now. What has happened that may make it seem that way is that the things people want to build are far more complex than 30 years ago. But even accounting for that, the level of effort is far less now.

matte_black 8y ago

Is Huaqiangbei still a good place to go to find products for white label or is it basically tapped out now?

watertom 8y ago

Censorship and surveillance kills enthusiasm and entrepreneurial spirit. China is about to put the clamps on what is driving their success and growth, it was only a matter of time. Totalitarianism will always kill itself.

subsubsub 8y ago
I can understand why Communism might have this effect, but why censorship or surveillance? Anything I can read on the subject?
- musage 8y ago
  Not communism. Totalitarianism. > We don't know a perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of the whole planet. But we know enough about the the still preliminary experiments of total organization to realize that the very well possible perfection of this apparatus would get rid of human agency in the sense as we know it. To act would turn out to be superfluous for people living together, when all people have become an example of their species, when all doing has become an acceleration of the movement mechanism of history or nature following a set pattern, and all deeds have become the execution of death sentences which history and nature have given anyway. -- Hannah Arendt, in "The Origins of Totalitarianism", which I recommend. She also wrote > The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality. and > The fanaticism of the elite cadres, absolutely essential for the functioning of the movement, abolishes systematically all genuine interest in specific jobs and produces a mentality which sees every conceivable action as an instrument for something entirely different. You cannot decouple censorship and surveillance from that basic derangement. And how that combination in turn would kill enthusiasm, the ability to think new things, there's also many things said and written about that but I didn't save those because they seemed rather obvious. > The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but up in the attics the secret enemies of the regime can record their thoughts in perfect freedom — that is the idea, more or less. -- George Orwell He doesn't explain why it's a fallacy. But there's things to read on the subject, of course. I'd guess that just like very sociopathic individuals are essentially just feeding on and destroying others to buy some time before they fall into the black hole at their own core, so it is with power structures made from that foundation. Cancer cells die after they killed their host, an organism made out of just cancer cells wouldn't exactly fare better. That doesn't mean they can't eat the whole world and be the "most innovative" or the "most alive", all opponents being dead. They still will not innovate or be alive in any interesting sense of the words. People who cannot even face themselves cannot say or see anything interesting about the world.

shiburizu 8y ago

The author of this article makes several claims about how you can get an item remixed by the local shops and how you can skip over the marketing of a major western brand and just buy things almost fresh off the line. I don't doubt the fact that you can by things in obscure Chinese labels claiming they are from a certain brand, we do that here in my country where mall shops will sell you "original" products that skipped over any official Samsung/Huawei/Etc. vendors. But this entirely just headphones, chargers, batteries, etc. I'd really like to believe Shenzhen is a place where I can get an existing product remixed with any oddity I'd like but I also want to see a proof of that. Everything that these people ship out overseas to developing countries that resell their products no questions asked are selling smartphone accessories.

aj7 8y ago

To me, Shenzhen is simply an orchestrated end-run around the intellectual property of others, with the government looking the other way. While the efforts there are not without sophistication, that sophistication is a small fraction of that intrinsic to the “borrowed” technology.

thinkpad20 8y ago

This article honestly reads a lot like propaganda from the Chinese government. It never even mentions the Great Firewall (unless I missed it?) and only barely mentions the security and censorship issues involved in writing software in China, even claiming that the reason it’s difficult to talk about security and privacy is because “so much of the grand technological experiment in China is still unfolding.” Right; I’m sure that’s the main reason. The article also breathlessly mentions that “there are still parts of the rural US without cell phone service, places where you feel untracked and like you might disappear. Yet even in one of the poorest provinces in China, QR codes will follow you from towns to villages.” Even if you assume that’s something that everyone wants, to ignore the implications of having that technology available in a highly invasive police state is irresponsible (in my opinion). Finally, I thought the line that “its strength is in extreme open-source, which stands in stark contrast to the increasingly proprietary nature of American technology“ is completely laughable in a country as notoriously insecure as China and in an era when use of open source software is probably at an all-time high in the US. (Edit: added newlines for clarity)

Barrin92 8y ago
Sorry but just because an article or opinion piece does not make censorship the central point of an article does not mean it is a piece of propaganda. I've been to China, while many people are certainly annoyed by the control, most seemed to be so for purely pragmatic reasons. "It hinders business, I can't get what I want", and so forth. Rarely have I seen someone go into a lengthy speech about government overreach or free speech. You simply should recognise that this is fairly low on the list of priorities of people in the country, most just want to get on with their lives. We should allow people to talk about the Chinese tech ecosystem without having to pay their due to Western audiences in the foreword. The ubiquity of smartphone consumer technology is portrayed fairly accurately. You really can do almost anything with your phone in almost any place (although I can't speak personally about rural areas, I've heard people mention it a lot, especially in the last tow to three years.) The open source edge that China has is primarily in hardware, not software, especially in Shenzhen. The knock-off culture allows you to bring something to the market or have something manufactured in virtually no time at very low cost. It is still primarily a manufacturing city rather than a services city, although that seems to be changing.

contingencies 8y ago

This article has almost nothing to do with Shenzhen.

tomcam 8y ago

Scrolling was painful on my iPad Pro.

lubujackson 8y ago

For a companion piece I highly recommend this hour long vid by Wired about Shenzhen. It's worth your time: https://youtu.be/SGJ5cZnoodY https://youtu.be/SGJ5cZnoodY Things that stood out to me was the maker mindset was so prevalent and competitve that it had filtered down to the buyers. So someone cobbles together some new widget for their phone and starts to sell it. Other people see it selling a nd copy it, but they make modifications. Shoppers see it for the first time and decide they want one with a purple strap, so they shop around until they find it or find someone who will make it that way. This is where the hoverboard fad bubbled up but also how and why it "flamed" out. I think it's a fascinating testbed for technology and creativity and economics.

mattbierner 8y ago
How can an outsider leverage this spirit to get something manufactured? I’ve got some stupid products that I just want to exist, things in the hover board vein, but haven’t found anyone who I can work with to take the idea to small batch manufacturing and get it tested in a marketplace. When I recently tried ordering custom sized rolls of paper tape from various Chinese manufactures of paper products, I ended up going with a company in the states because it was simpler to coordinate requirements and they didn’t require a hundred thousand roll minimum run
- njoro 8y ago
  The truth is that it is hard as a foreigner. It is sort of like if you wanted to leverage Silicon Valley without speaking English or having a degree. Things are "leaking" out of Shenzhen from time to time, but it is still a pretty isolated from the west. In addition to the Wired documentary I would also recommend bunnie's blog and Strange Parts. https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4266 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4266 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw

graffoala 8y ago

Shenzhen is such a shithole. It’s like one of those pop songs that you find awesome and then play on repeat for one week and then you realize that it is just a shallow piece of shit music without any depth or thoughts behind it.

ausjke 8y ago

I ran an embedded design startup there for a few years, often times I could not push the changes back to the git server(via ssh, openvpn,etc) in USA, basically for small companies there is no guaranteed way to do internet-based development across the pacific ocean, it sucks and I bailed out, you don't really know how painful when you need git-push/git-pull/rsync the most while all you got is tcp-reset/connection-disconnected!

Kagerjay 8y ago

If anyone would like to learn more about shenzhen, I have two youtube channels that I like to watch about China. I personally have been to China many times, both rural and modern, and it definitely feels like a different world unlike any other country I've been too Video sources I like to watch: Strange parts: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw Seprenztra (the first western youtuber in china) https://www.youtube.com/user/serpentza https://www.youtube.com/user/serpentza