Naïtowl - አደይ አበባ

There’s a concept that is prevalent in Chinese discourse but largely absent in the west, the way fish don’t talk about water: 話語權 It literally means “the power of speech” but functionally it’s closer to “agenda-setting power” or “narrative authority.” Let’s go with narrative authority. For just about most of my life, the west possessed narrative authority almost by default. Narrative authority is why Mark Carney becomes an overnight sensation for acknowledging a few home truths that the global south has been voicing for years if not decades. It’s the first time somebody with mega narrative authority said those things. Narrative authority is the ultimate soft power. In Carney’s pheasing, it is the privilege to “name reality.” Until a fact is articulated by someone with narrative authority, it might as well not be exist. Even if it is obvious to billions of people. There are many ways narrative authority can fall apart. A big one is loss of control over platforms. TikTok is the perfect example of this. As a Chinese-owned platform, it had no incentive to privilege the pro-western POV. The danger was obvious to leaders in the US and so they moved to neutralize it. But this is bolting the door after the horse escaped. The vibe…it has shifted. Because TikTok is just the symptom. The true root cause of the loss in narrative privilege is the erosion of relative power. As China accumulates material power, it starts gathering and asserting its own narrative power. TikTok was forced to change leadership and then lobotomized. RedNote is banned in Taiwan. The EU is flirting with a “democracy shield”. Everywhere you look, political entities that once boasted of their commitment to free speech are starting to play defense against hostile or unaligned narratives. At this point the decentralization of narrative authority is an unstoppable global mega-trend. As this unfolds, there will be more intrusive censorship in the west and perhaps a loosening in the east. I don’t see a reversal with China becoming the free speech superpower no matter how powerful they get…with a population of 1.4 billion they will always be wary of speech without walls. But the walls will rise in the west, and that will come as a rude shock for the citizens who grew up with seemingly untrammeled discourse as a part of their birthright.