Microsoft: "Where do you want to go today? The gulag?" posted by Richard Seymour

Microsoft have made a deal with the People's Republic of China to censor bloggers :

Civil liberties groups have condemned an arrangement between Microsoft and Chinese authorities to censor the internet.
The American company is helping censors remove "freedom" and "democracy" from the net in China with a software package that prevents bloggers from using these and other politically sensitive words on their websites.

The restrictions, which also include an automated denial of "human rights", are built into MSN Spaces, a blog service launched in China last month by Shanghai MSN Network Communications Technology, a venture in which Microsoft holds a 50% stake.

Slavoj Zizek once remarked that the extraordinary, outsized monuments stuck on top of buildings in Stalinist Russia mirrored the oppression of the workers by an outsized bureacratic elite - but the irony was that if anyone had said so they would instantly be chucked in the slammer. In another pertinent remark, he noted how cultural relativism was always-already inscribed in the global capitalist order: capital can tolerate these different cultural and political formations, can accomodate practically anything that does not challenge capital's functioning itself. Indeed, if anything it benefits from the creation of new market niches. Well, the latest market niche is ruthless repression by a police state. The obvious answer for Chinese bloggers is to replace the word 'freedom' with 'French'.