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Geopolitics

Violent Beijing Protests Target Japanese Embassy As Island Showdown Escalates

LIBERTY TIMES, UNITED DAILY NEWS (Taiwan), BBC

Worldcrunch

BEIJING- Some 20,000 irate Chinese protesters besieged the Japanese embassy in Beijing on Saturday, venting their anger over the Diaoyu Islands dispute that has created the most combustible conflict between the two Asian powers in memory.

The demonstrators climbed trees, burned the Japanese flag, shouted that the Diaoyu Islands belong to China and threw stones into the embassy compound, reports the Liberty Times daily of Taiwan.

At least a dozen different Chinese cities have witnessed attacks on Japanese citizens and property, reports the BBC. The two countries are in a hardening standoff over who has rights to the group of islands in the East China Sea, known in Japan as the Senkaku Islands.

The demonstrations have been building for five days after Japan announced plans to purchase the islands, in an attempt to effectively nationalize them. Saturday, however, the protests spread around the country, and swelled in the capital, forcing large numbers of Chinese riot police in Beijing to try to push the crowd back from Tokyo's embassy only to be insulted “Are you a Japanese or a Chinese?”, according to the United Daily News of Taiwan. (See video below)

Among other reports of violence was a Japanese car belonging to the police in Shenzhen turned over by protestors; a Japanese-owned supermarket in Qingdao, Shandong Province, looted by a crowd of 3000 people.

Despite the escalating violence -- Beijing hadn't seen such large riots since 1999 when U.S. military planes bombed the Chinese Embassy in Serbia -- no serious injuries were reported.

Beyond the street violence, Saturday morning also saw the websites of the Japanese Supreme Court and the Japanese economic newspaper, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, hacked into. The newspaper site had “Don’t invade Chinese territory” plastered in Chinese across the main page, according to the NHK television news relayed by Liberty Times. “This is the biggest Sino-Japanese diplomatic crisis since 1972” the Japanese media declared.

So far, the Chinese media are playing down this news and there is no specific mention of the attack on the embassy. All reports have come from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singaporean news sources.

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Ideas

Look At This Crap! The "Enshittification" Theory Of Why The Internet Is Broken

The term was coined by journalist Cory Doctorow to explain the fatal drift of major Internet platforms: if they were ever useful and user-friendly, they will inevitably end up being odious.

A photo of hands holding onto a smartphone

A person holding their smartphone

Gilles Lambert/ZUMA
Manuel Ligero

-Analysis-

The universe tends toward chaos. Ultimately, everything degenerates. These immutable laws are even more true of the Internet.

In the case of media platforms, everything you once thought was a good service will, sooner or later, disgust you. This trend has been given a name: enshittification. The term was coined by Canadian blogger and journalist Cory Doctorow to explain the inevitable drift of technological giants toward... well.

The explanation is in line with the most basic tenets of Marxism. All digital companies have investors (essentially the bourgeoisie, people who don't perform any work and take the lion's share of the profits), and these investors want to see the percentage of their gains grow year after year. This pushes companies to make decisions that affect the service they provide to their customers. Although they don't do it unwillingly, quite the opposite.

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Annoying customers is just another part of the business plan. Look at Netflix, for example. The streaming giant has long been riddling how to monetize shared Netflix accounts. Option 1: adding a premium option to its regular price. Next, it asked for verification through text messages. After that, it considered raising the total subscription price. It also mulled adding advertising to the mix, and so on. These endless maneuvers irritated its audience, even as the company has been unable to decide which way it wants to go. So, slowly but surely, we see it drifting toward enshittification.

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