Getting Out

In Shanghai, I watched young designers and artists move through the internet like it was a puzzle they’d solved. They used VPNs without thinking about it, switched between encrypted apps, shared links to things the government didn’t want them to see. It was all very competent and very tired. There wasn’t anything revolutionary about it—just people who wanted access to information and had learned to build the infrastructure themselves.

The surveillance state is real there. Cameras, monitoring, the Great Firewall cutting off huge swaths of the outside world. But what struck me was how it had become boring to them. Not in a nihilistic way—more like how you stop noticing the small inconveniences of daily life. You need a VPN to see what you want. So you get a VPN. You use encrypted apps. You’re careful what you say and write. After a while, it’s just how things are.

I don’t think much about what this means for the future—whether these kids will eventually have the freedom to not need workarounds, whether the wall gets higher, whether anything fundamentally changes. What I think about is the sheer effort required just to be an artist or designer in a place where information is controlled, where you can’t freely reference or read or see what you need to do your work. That’s the real cost of the system—not the danger, which is real but distant for most people, but the exhaustion of having to build around obstacles just to think.