It’s not.
All these “the GFW is not affecting the people of China, people who really want to visit a blocked site can use a VPN” FUCK YOU THAT’S NOT THE PROBLEM. Saying this is like saying “drug laws are pointless, people can get around it with underground market anytime they want.”
The GFW is a big deal.
Yeah, it’s totally ridiculous. A lot of Chinese people ask me how to get onto “the foreign internet" because they don’t have a clue. It’s also pretty hard to find and download a VPN inside of China because Durrr… most VPN websites are blocked and Baidu doesn’t exactly return VPN search results.
That said, you shouldn’t assume Reddit or Worldnews is indicative of the average Joe in the UK or US. So many teenage geeks and CompSci majors in the default threads… whereas I still think the majority of people in the US or UK don’t even know what a VPN is, because they don’t ever need one. I certainly didn’t before I came to China.
Yes I totally agree. I am leaving this god forsaken place and one of the biggest reasons is the internet.
Its simply a matter of my time. The party has sucked way too much of it out of me by making me wait and wait for the most basic stuff in our daily lives. Like my fucking email.
However at the same time the GFW is still a massive failure on its own terms. It changes nobody’s mind and hides nothing. Indeed, at this point what people do is watch was is blocked for signals about what the leadership is pissy about this week.