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"There Should Be More Than One Voice in A Healthy Society": Infrastructural Violence and Totalitarian Computing in China

Published: 18 October 2021 Publication History

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese citizens were caught up within a public health crisis and an expansive censorship and propaganda infrastructure built by the Chinese government over the past few decades. In March 2020, we interviewed 24 Chinese citizens to understand how they experienced censorship and propaganda during the first few months of the pandemic. Drawing from the lens of infrastructural violence, we document state violence inflicted on the Chinese people at the infrastructural scale, penetrating ordinary citizens' minds and daily lives. We examine three dimensions of infrastructural violence: epistemic violence of truth distortion, emotional violence of state retaliation, and interpersonal violence of relationship deterioration. Based on our empirical findings, we reflect on how infrastructural violence is constituted through totalitarian computing technologies. We stress the need to study the geopolitics of technology and propose a research agenda for studying totalitarian computing.

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  1. "There Should Be More Than One Voice in A Healthy Society": Infrastructural Violence and Totalitarian Computing in China

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    cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
    Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 5, Issue CSCW2
    CSCW2
    October 2021
    5376 pages
    EISSN:2573-0142
    DOI:10.1145/3493286
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    Published: 18 October 2021
    Published in PACMHCI Volume 5, Issue CSCW2

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    1. china
    2. coronavirus
    3. covid-19
    4. infrastructural violence
    5. totalitarianism

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