I wrote a piece about jailbreaking iPhones as a teenager, LLM distillation, Huaqiangbei, Charles Dickens, Henry Ford, and the spirit that lives between copying and creating
>Is jailbreaking, copycatting, and distilling uniquely Chinese? I am not entirely sure whether I have been assembling this history in order to understand it, or in order to feel better about myself—to find, in the sweep of industrial precedent, some retroactive absolution for a teenager who jailbroke her phone and felt righteous about it. The shame is real and specific. It still arrives reliably whenever a headline announces that a Chinese company has stolen something. I feel it on behalf of people I don’t know, for acts I didn’t commit, through some mechanism of collective guilt I have never fully reasoned my way out of.
we did it too! for years after the iphone came out in the usa, they were carrier-locked to at&t because of an exclusively agreement. I worked at a used phone store at the time, and our best business by far was buying these iphones, jailbreaking them (for free app stores), and then unlocking them (for use on other carriers) to sell to americans who wanted to use tmobile, or european tourists looking to use them back home
This is such a personal piece. It brought me straight back to Zhongguancun in the 2010s. It was exactly as you described—chaotic but eye-opening. China was cranking out electronics at the time, and you could find almost anything in the market. I really appreciate your perspective. It’s definitely fresh; even for those of us who lived through the era, we rarely take a step back and re-evaluate it like this.
“The shame is real and specific. It still arrives reliably whenever a headline announces that a Chinese company has stolen something. I feel it on behalf of people I don’t know, for acts I didn’t commit, through some mechanism of collective guilt I have never fully reasoned my way out of.”
This feels very true at the moment. There's pride in what's being built now in China that people want to move away from the old stereotypes. We're all hoping to witness more ingenuity. Yet, as you pointed out, ideas don’t exist in a vacuum. They need to be shared, exchanged, and evolved to mature. In an era of open-source models, expanding that shared knowledge pool feels like the natural next step for societal evolution. And even though I can't exactly offer justification for every instance of piracy, your article certainly provides a new framework to understand "why" this situation exists. And perhaps, as usual, we’re giving China too much heat.
I really enjoyed your writing. It’s very intimate and touching, and it spoke to me on a personal level.
You provode a very interesting perspective. The material is timely. It seems the litigation is coming as fast as the technology is advancing; every other line in the New York Times reminds us "(The Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have denied those claims.)"
As a musician, I know that nothing is ever 100% original, and I appriciate your logic, but it seems like a bit of a stretch to compare "what China’s AI labs are attempting atempting" ; to drive "the price of a token toward zero" and Ford with the automobile. Personally, I dont have any stake and don't care one way or the other. As far as I'm concerned everything should be free-ware, and ride-sharing would have been better off as a voluntary carpool system (like it was supposed to be). There was a pre-Web-2.0-unicorn book by Lawrence Lessig who explored this, "Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy." Of course that got bulldozed.
What you think of now as "Silicon Valley’s doctrine of 'smooth, seamless' user experience—the idea that technology 'just works,'" is what Apple has been selling since before the i-anything. I assure you that nothing was ever REALLY smooth and seamless that had to do with computers, and still isn't.
Your recounting of visits to the electronics swap meet in China reminded me of going to the Santa Clara Fair Grounds with my dad back in the day. That was in the days of ISA cards and floppy disks. For me as a kid, I was there for floppy disks; games. Years later in the early 2000's there multiple surplus computer stores in Santa Clara. If you drove around to these you could cobble together a desktop machine for 1/10th the price of a retail Dell or HP. Of course all of this was way before the iPhone.
>Is jailbreaking, copycatting, and distilling uniquely Chinese? I am not entirely sure whether I have been assembling this history in order to understand it, or in order to feel better about myself—to find, in the sweep of industrial precedent, some retroactive absolution for a teenager who jailbroke her phone and felt righteous about it. The shame is real and specific. It still arrives reliably whenever a headline announces that a Chinese company has stolen something. I feel it on behalf of people I don’t know, for acts I didn’t commit, through some mechanism of collective guilt I have never fully reasoned my way out of.
we did it too! for years after the iphone came out in the usa, they were carrier-locked to at&t because of an exclusively agreement. I worked at a used phone store at the time, and our best business by far was buying these iphones, jailbreaking them (for free app stores), and then unlocking them (for use on other carriers) to sell to americans who wanted to use tmobile, or european tourists looking to use them back home
wow!! this is the corner of apple’s history im less familiar with. so fascinating…
This is such a personal piece. It brought me straight back to Zhongguancun in the 2010s. It was exactly as you described—chaotic but eye-opening. China was cranking out electronics at the time, and you could find almost anything in the market. I really appreciate your perspective. It’s definitely fresh; even for those of us who lived through the era, we rarely take a step back and re-evaluate it like this.
“The shame is real and specific. It still arrives reliably whenever a headline announces that a Chinese company has stolen something. I feel it on behalf of people I don’t know, for acts I didn’t commit, through some mechanism of collective guilt I have never fully reasoned my way out of.”
This feels very true at the moment. There's pride in what's being built now in China that people want to move away from the old stereotypes. We're all hoping to witness more ingenuity. Yet, as you pointed out, ideas don’t exist in a vacuum. They need to be shared, exchanged, and evolved to mature. In an era of open-source models, expanding that shared knowledge pool feels like the natural next step for societal evolution. And even though I can't exactly offer justification for every instance of piracy, your article certainly provides a new framework to understand "why" this situation exists. And perhaps, as usual, we’re giving China too much heat.
I really enjoyed your writing. It’s very intimate and touching, and it spoke to me on a personal level.
thank you for the thoughtful comment <3
You provode a very interesting perspective. The material is timely. It seems the litigation is coming as fast as the technology is advancing; every other line in the New York Times reminds us "(The Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have denied those claims.)"
As a musician, I know that nothing is ever 100% original, and I appriciate your logic, but it seems like a bit of a stretch to compare "what China’s AI labs are attempting atempting" ; to drive "the price of a token toward zero" and Ford with the automobile. Personally, I dont have any stake and don't care one way or the other. As far as I'm concerned everything should be free-ware, and ride-sharing would have been better off as a voluntary carpool system (like it was supposed to be). There was a pre-Web-2.0-unicorn book by Lawrence Lessig who explored this, "Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy." Of course that got bulldozed.
What you think of now as "Silicon Valley’s doctrine of 'smooth, seamless' user experience—the idea that technology 'just works,'" is what Apple has been selling since before the i-anything. I assure you that nothing was ever REALLY smooth and seamless that had to do with computers, and still isn't.
Your recounting of visits to the electronics swap meet in China reminded me of going to the Santa Clara Fair Grounds with my dad back in the day. That was in the days of ISA cards and floppy disks. For me as a kid, I was there for floppy disks; games. Years later in the early 2000's there multiple surplus computer stores in Santa Clara. If you drove around to these you could cobble together a desktop machine for 1/10th the price of a retail Dell or HP. Of course all of this was way before the iPhone.