Losing Naomi Wu to the CCP was a catastrophic loss to the FOSS community, I remember that she once went directly to confront a company (I think located in China) to demand for the release of their modified version of a copyleft software
That’s a chilling read. Wu was only ever on the periphery of my attention — some tech advice here, the odd flash of TMI there — so I thought nothing of it when she fell off the radar.
Realising that she had gotten so relatively big, despite her circumstances, that government agencies were only waiting for fickle Western users like myself showing signs of indifference, before doing …whatever they’ve done to her… serves as a constant reminder that not everone online is here on an equal footing with, say, the average North American or European.
I’d love if some of the terminally online keyboard warriors (that didn’t rally to support her last year) might at least do an investigation into her current situation.
Person. We’re talking about a person in a precarious situation who was basically doxxed by Vice, and more or less shrugged off by the general online public.
It’s not like you deciding you’re not into vaporwave anymore.
I was never into her or her content (IIRC, she wasn't making anything that caught my attention), so this was more of a general question (hence 'person or thing' in my question) rather than specific to her situation.
No, I’m talking about people seeing past f—ng fandom to the reality that others they meet online, or whose content they consume, may live under less free circumstances than themselves.
She was outed by Vice, which seems to have been met with apathy by the online community, and it looks like the authorities cracked down on her as a consequence. The insistence of some commenters to see this through a “fan” or “taste” lens is pretty blinkered.
When China’s prodigious tech influencer, Naomi Wu, found herself silenced, it wasn’t just the machinery of a surveillance state at play. Instead, it was a confluence of state repression and the sometimes capricious attention of a Western audience that, as she asserts, often views Chinese activists more as ideological tokens than as genuine human beings.
[…]
Naomi Wu’s devastating July 7th [2023] tweet alluded to a pressure that had long been feared by many, yet optimistically hoped she could manage to avoid indefinitely.
Ok for those of you that haven’t figured it out I got my wings clipped and they weren’t gentle about it- so there’s not going to be much posting on social media anymore and only on very specific subjects. I can leave but Kaidi can’t so we’re just going to follow the new rules and…
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