Unmediated Thoughts

Digital Vice as Class Warfare

In the mid-19th century, European powers fought two wars against China’s Qing Dynasty to force it to continue accepting a particular vice: opium. The opium trade filled the coffers of a small group of European traders and governments while unleashing enormous social damage inside China. The Qing state, militarily overmatched, was physically incapable of stopping the flood of narcotics, which hollowed out families, degraded individual dignity, and rendered Chinese society vulnerable to politic...