Wu Liufang's controversy, internet addiction, and the carnival of capital

Everyone, today let's talk about Wu Liufang, the story of a former world gymnastics champion transitioning to the internet. After retiring as a world gymnastics champion, she unexpectedly became a borderline dance streamer and was criticized by another Olympic champion, Guan Chenchen. What exactly happened here? Wu Liufang quickly gained followers amid controversy, from tens of thousands initially to two million when her account was banned, and then to six million after it was unbanned. This wave of actions is like a splash in the torrent of the internet. But behind the splash, the platforms, algorithms, and that out-of-control information infrastructure are what truly need to be discussed. The platform first froze the account, then restored it, objectively driving this round of 'revenge following.' Wu Liufang has been exploring the internet path for nearly a decade, from teacher and coach to online streamer, she made borderline videos and attracted fans. It's like we're all playing a game called 'Internet,' with simple rules: you can only earn income through attraction. I'd like to do internet too, but I only write miscellaneous articles for sales, occasionally venting complaints. This time the goods are genuine, place your orders, my internet dream, now please switch to the VCR. Now let's talk about that MCN agency, Dahai Xingchen. Their founder is a Pickup Artist, specializing in teaching street pickups, but these are obviously just small scripts. Dahai Xingchen precisely targeted a basic human need: to be loved. But this kind of love is hard to satisfy nowadays. They launch various heart-stirring content, teasing people's desires, actually satisfying people's sexual fantasies. No need for love, no need for sex, sexual fantasy is enough. Sexual fantasy is a wonderful thing; it doesn't have to be explicitly shown. So, although laws set clear boundaries and major platforms have specific requirements for streamers' limits, there will still be legal and compliant content serving the purpose of creating sexual fantasies, and that's called borderline. How to view the borderline phenomenon? Some say to strictly regulate and narrow the boundary, but how narrow is narrow enough? This is actually a very slippery slope, from 'white silk, blue fire Gatling' to 'Arab wide robes,' where do you plan to stop? The more the regulatory power cracks down, the more it may provoke public backlash. Because these platforms survive on human weaknesses, they pinpoint users' pain points and launch various streamers posing and teasing, actually satisfying people's sexual fantasies. And this is part of addiction. Back to Wu Liufang personally. She started striving after retiring at 19, from teaching to coaching, then to online streaming. Her videos are indeed very 'borderline,' but this also shows her personal choice. If everyone is 'borderline,' then boundaries are constantly expanded, promoting competition, encouraging innovation, and driving progress. The essence of a market economy is to engage in borderline activities as long as it's not illegal. But the real question is, why do borderline streamers uniformly engage in soft porn? Why do they always test the bottom line? Because going borderline downward just serves those who have fallen into addiction. How addictive is falling? For example, porn sites make up less than 5% of all websites worldwide, but they attract nearly 30% of all internet traffic, meaning they can drain a person at 6 times the efficiency. Why do people accept this? Because the brain's reward mechanism is too simple to trigger and too easy to replicate. It's like cheating in life. In evolution, to ensure reproductive behavior has sufficient material security, thresholds must be set for sexual behavior. But now? People indulge in momentary pleasure, pursue material interests, and love and sex become shallow. Awake, they share joy; in the end, they scatter. Originally atomic individuals, why quantum entanglement? Internet platforms are like cyber hallucinogens; they create a false sense of satisfaction through algorithms, making people addicted. This is actually smoking spiritual opium, ruining one person at a time, one generation at a time. There's an internet meme: 'I am irreconcilable with pornography, gambling, and drugs,' but any addiction is enough to kill a person. We discipline and alert ourselves through personal morality and inner drive. But if the social and cultural atmosphere allows businesses to profit from human weaknesses, the cost is inevitably the annihilation of civilization. Finally, we face the carnival of capital. Internet platforms are the masters of information infrastructure, constantly strengthening user stickiness, with recommendation algorithms as the key. These platforms use algorithms to cater to human animal instincts, and the ways to make money are all written in criminal law. But these platforms don't realize that laws need improvement, legislators need to learn to keep up with technological acceleration. We must reduce the commercialization of information, so that traffic monetization is no longer the main reward for content creators, to reduce sensory stimulation and emotional teasing, to deter producers of junk content, so that tech companies cannot settle for being advertising firms, and ultimately represent the people in negotiating with tech capital, letting technology provide public services and making information infrastructure public.