文/HuSir 转发

　　起床，摸到手机，锁屏上堆着昨晚的微信消息。没有 WhatsApp、没有 Facebook Messenger、没有 Telegram、没有 Signal、没有 Snapchat、没有 Discord、没有 Line、没有 KakaoTalk、没有 LinkedIn——不是因为不想用，是因为它们从网络层面就根本无法连接。微信是唯一的社交管道，它什么都能干，像一座包罗万象的巨型商场，你所有的朋友都在里面，所有的群聊都在里面，工作、生活、家庭、娱乐全部绑死在一个蓝色气泡里。你想出去？门锁了。

　　关掉微信，想搜点东西。百度查出来的前三条永远是广告，中间夹着百家号的低质量内容，再往下翻是自家产品的推荐。你想起以前用 Google，搜一个关键词第一页全是高质量的独立网站。现在你连找一个软件的官网都要翻三五页。Google 搜索、Google 图片、Google 学术、Google News、Google Flights——一个都打不开。DuckDuckGo 打不开，Yandex 打不开。必应能用，但国际版时不时跳回 cn 域名，你搜出来的结果跟百度差不多。偶尔搜索结果里有维基百科的链接——点进去，404。你已经被培训到看见 Wikipedia 这个词会条件反射地直接跳过。

　　想看国际新闻。BBC News、CNN、纽约时报、华尔街日报、路透社、Bloomberg、Financial Times、《卫报》——全打不开。你只能在微博上刷到几手转述。台湾的媒体报道同一个事件的角度你永远看不到——联合报、自由时报、苹果日报的网址全打不通。你在一个信息被精心裁剪过的世界里，但你没有办法比较，因为你不知道另一端长什么样。

　　打开 YouTube 想找个教程——连接超时。Netflix 打不开，HBO Max 打不开，Hulu 打不开，Disney+ 打不开，Vimeo 打不开，Twitch 打不开，TikTok 国际版打不开——你的手机上只有一个 TikTok 的灰色图标，点一下转圈，然后”网络连接超时”。你在 Bilibili 上看替代内容，但你很清楚那些视频经过了什么处理才能出现在你面前。想听歌。Spotify 几年前就彻底封了。Apple Music、iCloud 能用——那是因为数据存在云上贵州，物理隔离了。你在网易云搜一首英文歌——”因版权原因无法播放”，或者更糟：能播，但歌词里某一行被改写了，或干脆显示”该歌词正在审核中”。

　　想出门导航。Google Maps——打不开。不仅仅是 Google Maps 打不开，所有依赖 Google Maps API 的网站和应用也半残——很多国外网站的地址选择器、定位功能、门店地图显示，在国内打开就是白框。高德和百度地图在国内好用，但想查境外某条街怎么走——信息停留在三年前，或者根本显示不出来。Uber 打不开，Airbnb 退出中国后网站时好时坏，TripAdvisor 打不开。你在 Booking.com 和 Agoda 上订国外酒店——网页有时能开有时不能，看运气。出国前查攻略，Reddit 上的真实用户经验——打不开。Pinterest 上的图片灵感——打不开。你只能看小红书，但小红书上全是广告和博主收了钱的推广。

　　你是个做技术的。从早上开始就跟网络较劲。GitHub clone 一个仓库——几十 KB/s，一半的请求超时。npm install——镜像源总比官方的滞后几天到一周。Docker Hub——2025 年起被彻底封了，想拉一个镜像得找国内镜像站，但镜像站内容残缺，版本落后。MongoDB Atlas 连不上，Redis Labs 部分 IP 被干扰，AWS 文档时好时坏——你在文档页面前等到超时，浏览器白屏。Stack Overflow 有时候打不开，你报一个错只能靠猜。Google Fonts——被墙了，导致大量国内网站引用了 Google 公共资源却加载不出来，页面上的字体从默认无衬线回退到宋体，斑驳难看，但用户以为网站本身就这么丑。jsDelivr 时好时坏，CDNJS 时好时坏，Google CDN 全系打不开。Figma——时好时坏，有时协作编辑大文件时断连，你丢了一整天的改动。Google Analytics 的数据收不到中国用户——不是 GA 不好用，是 GA 的请求根本发不出去。ReCAPTCHA——经常加载不出来，导致你连某些国外网站都登不上去，因为验证码永远转圈，你卡在登录页进退两难。Cloudflare 的部分 CDN IP 在国内被干扰，很多用了 Cloudflare 加速的网站在国内打开极慢甚至白屏。

　　你是个做 AI 的。ChatGPT 打不开，Claude 打不开，Gemini 打不开，Perplexity 打不开。OpenAI API 被墙，Anthropic API 被墙。Hugging Face 下载模型——限速到 KB，你下一个 7B 的模型要挂一整天，中间断了就得重来。Civitai 打不开，Midjourney 打不开，Stable Diffusion 的在线版打不开。你只能用国内的 AI 平台：文心一言、通义千问、豆包、智谱——但它们的训练数据、更新频率和开放程度，跟外面不是一个量级。Cursor、Copilot 这种 IDE 插件还能用，因为它们不走浏览器，但它们是微软的东西，像一座孤岛上的补给线，你不知道哪一天政策一变也断了。

　　想传个文件给国外朋友。Google Drive 打不开，Dropbox 打不开，Mega.nz 打不开，WeTransfer 偶尔能打开但大文件发不出去，SendAnywhere 时好时坏。OneDrive——国际版被干扰，国内版阉割严重，文件同步到一半就停在”正在等待服务器”。你只能回到百度网盘——非会员限速 10KB/s，充了会员后发现”该文件因违规内容已被系统自动删除”，没有任何申诉渠道。文件没了就是没了。你学会了重要文件一定要本地备份，因为云端不是你的，是他们的。

　　想卖点东西给国外用户。PayPal 能用但功能阉割严重，提现流程繁琐到令人崩溃。Stripe 个人无法注册，你必须有一个公司主体。你试了 whop.com——进了后台找不到上传文件的地方，折腾半天发现它是给 SaaS 社区用的，不是给你卖 HTML 小工具的。你试了 lemonsqueezy.com——注册好了，上传了，发布了，卡在税务信息那一步，说 Submit your tax information，但那个链接死活点不开，弹窗被拦截也好、换浏览器也好、无痕模式也好，就是点不开。你试了 gumroad——连网站都打不开。你试了 paddle——同样要税务信息。你试了 etsy——打不开。你想用 Stripe 自建一套付款链接——发现 Stripe 中国大陆个人无法成为 Merchant，你必须有一个香港或美国的银行账户。你转了一圈，回到闲鱼。十几个亿的同胞是你全部的市场。

　　你是做学术的。Google Scholar——打不开。arXiv——时好时慢，论文预印本加载几分钟是常态。Coursera 打不开，edX 打不开，Udemy 打不开，Khan Academy 打不开。ResearchGate 和 Academia.edu——部分页面能打开，但论文全文下载经常卡住。IEEE Xplore、ACM Digital Library、PubMed——在校内 IP 能用，出了学校就时灵时不灵。Z-Library 和 Library Genesis——被墙了很多年了。你写论文，光查文献这一步就比别人多花两倍时间——因为你得先翻墙，再搜索，再下载，再翻回来。

　　晚上想放松打游戏。Steam 社区、创意工坊、用户评测——全打不开，你能打开的就是商店和库，而且国服商店的库跟国际服是两套。Discord 语音打不开，你每次和朋友联机都只能微信语音通话凑合。暴雪退出中国之后，你买的守望先锋在国服没法玩了，去亚服——连不上。Epic Games 商店——时好时坏。PlayStation Network 进港服——要反复折腾 DNS。Nintendo Switch Online——联机体验极差，掉线是常态。Xbox Live——部分服务被干扰。Origin 和 EA App——打不开或慢到无法使用。Roblox——打不开。Minecraft 国际版——连不上官方服务器，你得用第三方启动器加国内的联机平台。你只是想正常联个机，但你得同时是网络工程师和系统管理员。

　　想看一些有深度或独特的英文内容。Substack 上你订阅了十几个 Newsletter——所有链接打不开，每篇都得挂代理读。Medium 上有大量高质量的技术和思想文章——打不开。WordPress.com 上很多独立博客——打不开。Bloomberg 的付费专栏——打不开。Financial Times——打不开。Feedly、Inoreader——RSS 阅读器本身能用，但你订阅的境外资讯源被封了，它抓不到内容，你打开一个空空的文件夹，不知道是源死了还是墙了新添了一条规则。你的阅读列表越来越窄，因为你能读到的东西已经被过滤过了。

　　想付一笔国外账单。Cryptocurrency 交易所——币安被墙，Coinbase 被墙，OKX 国际版被干扰。Robinhood 和各类国际券商——打不开。你买不了海外的基金，投不了海外的股票，付不了海外的订阅。你遇到想买的服务，发现它的支付系统不支持中国发行的信用卡——不是因为技术问题，是因为 Stripe 等支付机构限制了大陆发行的卡片。你有钱，但你花不出去。

　　你想要解决这一切——翻墙。翻墙本身就违法。《计算机信息网络国际联网管理暂行规定》第六条写得很清楚：任何单位和个人不得自行建立或者使用其他信道进行国际联网。你买 Shadowsocks、V2Ray、WireGuard 代理，用第三方机场翻墙——轻则运营商断网警告，重则罚款甚至拘留。你买来的代理服务，端口随时被墙探测封杀，节点三天两头换，你被迫频繁更新配置。每一次翻墙你都在赌。你不是在用一个工具，你是在从事一种轻微犯罪的日常实践。

　　但即便翻出去了，你依然在控制之下。

　　你的手机是国行手机——出厂不预装 Google 服务框架，预装的应用商店里没有翻墙工具。你的 iPhone 是国区 Apple ID——App Store 里没有境外社交软件，没有 VPN 客户端，有些甚至搜不到名字。你用的是国内运营商——4G/5G 流量出口有独立的审查节点，跟家用宽带是两套过滤系统。你在外面用流量，有些网页能打开，回家用 Wi-Fi 就不行了，你得记住哪条路走哪个门。

　　而这些还只是显性的墙。更缜密的是隐性的那一层。

　　你发了一条朋友圈。词句在脑子里过了一遍安检，删掉几个疑似敏感的词，检查了两遍，发出去。一个小时后点进去——”该内容已被删除”。没有通知，没有原因，没有申诉入口。你甚至不知道是哪几个字触发了审核。你再发一次，这次删了更多词——发出去了，但显示不可见。你的话不存在了。你甚至不知道它什么时候不存在的。

　　你在微博评论区看到一条跟你想的一样的热评，你点了个赞。过了五分钟刷新——热评不见了，只剩一个”该评论已被折叠”。你在新闻 App 里看完一篇文章，拉到最底下——评论区空空如也，你明明记得早上看的时候有一百多条。你没有疯，是它们被删了。

　　你想注销一个用了很久的网站账号。网站要求你手持身份证拍照上传——姓名、身份证号、人脸，全部绑定。你犹豫了一下，锁上手机。算了，留着吧。你继续收到它的推送，继续被它的隐私政策覆盖，但你走不掉。

　　刷抖音。你搜了一个话题，刷了一会儿发现推荐流里全是同质化的内容——你被限流了，没有通知，没有解释，只是你的账号被标记了。你在小红书上搜了一个城市的旅行攻略，接下来三天广告位全推那个城市的酒店和机票——推荐比你还懂你，但推荐的内容范围是划定好的。

　　你在 Bilibili 看视频，看到一个弹幕上说”完整版在 YouTube 搜 xxxxx”，你复制了链接，打开 YouTube——打不开。你关掉浏览器，在椅子上坐了一会儿。你没有生气，甚至没有沮丧——你已经习惯了。习惯到意识不到这是一件不正常的事。

　　你出国旅行或出差的时候，在酒店连上 Wi-Fi，打开 Google Maps 查附近的餐厅，在 YouTube 上看一个视频，在 Twitter/X 上刷几眼朋友的最新动态，在 Instagram 上看看关注的摄影师新发的照片，顺手打开 Reddit 刷刷趣闻，点开 Medium 读一篇存了好久的文章，打开 Spotify 听歌，用 WhatsApp 跟当地的朋友约时间——那一瞬间你才恍惚地意识到：哦，这才是完整的互联网。

　　回国落地，打开手机连上国内基站的那一刻，所有 App 图标依次变灰。你低头看着它们，没有点。

　　你不点了。你甚至没有意识到你不点了。

　　这才是局域网真正的样子——不是一堵墙，而是一个你早已不再尝试翻越的围墙。它不需要时时亮着红灯警告你，因为你的脑子里已经长出了一个检查站：在点开一个链接之前，你的大脑先替审查者跑了一遍——这个能点吗？这个应该不能。算了。

　　每天早上醒来，你打开同一款软件，刷同几个平台，看同几类内容，跟同一批人聊天。你生活在一座数字化的围城里，这座城什么都有——商城、学校、医院、公园、广场——只是每一堵墙都在你不知不觉中向内收缩，一年比一年小。你从来没有离开过这个房间，所以你不觉得这个房间小。你以为房间就是世界的全部。

　　直到有一天你从门缝里瞥见了一眼外面的样子。然后你转过头，继续刷手里的短视频。

　　那一眼，你没跟任何人提起过。

---

Life Inside the Intranet — A Mainland Chinese Person’s Digital Daily

By HuSir

You wake up and reach for your phone. The lock screen is piled with last night’s WeChat messages. No WhatsApp. No Facebook Messenger. No Telegram. No Signal. No Snapchat. No Discord. No Line. No KakaoTalk. No LinkedIn. Not because you don’t want to use them — they simply cannot connect at the network level. WeChat is the only social pipeline. It does everything, like a colossal all-in-one shopping mall. All your friends are in it. All your group chats are in it. Work, life, family, entertainment — all locked inside one blue bubble. You want out? The door is bolted.

You close WeChat and try to search for something. The first three results on Baidu are always ads, sandwiched between low-quality content from Baijiahao. Scroll further and you get recommendations for Baidu’s own products. You remember using Google back in the day — searching a keyword brought up high-quality independent sites on the first page. Now you have to flip through three to five pages just to find an official website. Google Search. Google Images. Google Scholar. Google News. Google Flights. None of them open. DuckDuckGo — blocked. Yandex — blocked. Bing works, but its international version keeps redirecting back to the cn domain, and the results are about as good as Baidu’s. Occasionally a Wikipedia link shows up in your search results. You click it. 404. You’ve been trained to reflexively skip past the word “Wikipedia” without even thinking.

You want to read international news. BBC News. CNN. The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal. Reuters. Bloomberg. The Financial Times. The Guardian. All blocked. You can only catch secondhand summaries on Weibo. You’ll never see how Taiwanese media cover the same event — the websites of the United Daily News, the Liberty Times, and Apple Daily are all inaccessible. You live in a world where information has been carefully tailored for you, but you have no way to compare, because you don’t know what the other side looks like.

You open YouTube to look for a tutorial — connection timed out. Netflix — blocked. HBO Max — blocked. Hulu — blocked. Disney+ — blocked. Vimeo — blocked. Twitch — blocked. The international version of TikTok — blocked. On your phone, there’s only a gray TikTok icon; tap it, it spins, then “Network connection timed out.” You watch alternative content on Bilibili, but you know exactly what processing those videos went through before they could appear in front of you. You want to listen to music. Spotify was completely blocked years ago. Apple Music and iCloud work — because the data is stored in Guizhou, physically quarantined. You search for an English song on NetEase Music — “Cannot play due to copyright reasons.” Or worse: it plays, but a line in the lyrics has been rewritten, or it simply says “These lyrics are under review.”

You want to navigate somewhere. Google Maps — blocked. It’s not just Google Maps itself — every website and app that relies on the Google Maps API is half-crippled. Address selectors, location features, store locators on foreign websites — they all show up as blank white boxes in China. AutoNavi and Baidu Maps work well domestically, but try looking up how to get to a street outside China — the information is three years out of date, or doesn’t load at all. Uber — blocked. Airbnb left China and its site comes and goes. TripAdvisor — blocked. You book a hotel abroad on Booking.com or Agoda — the page loads sometimes, sometimes it doesn’t, it’s a roll of the dice. Before a trip abroad, you want to read real user experiences on Reddit — blocked. Visual inspiration on Pinterest — blocked. You’re left with Xiaohongshu, where everything is ads and paid influencer posts.

You work in tech. The fight with the network starts first thing in the morning. Cloning a repo on GitHub — tens of KB per second, half the requests time out. npm install — the mirror is always several days to a week behind the official registry. Docker Hub — completely blocked since 2025. To pull an image you have to find a domestic mirror, but those mirrors are incomplete and lag behind on versions. MongoDB Atlas won’t connect. Redis Labs — some IPs are jammed. AWS documentation loads when it feels like it — you wait in front of the docs page until it times out, your browser goes white. Stack Overflow sometimes won’t open, so when you hit an error, you guess. Google Fonts is blocked, which means countless domestic websites that reference Google’s public resources can’t load them — fonts fall back from the default sans-serif to SimSun, messy and ugly, but the user assumes the site was just designed that way. jsDelivr works on and off. CDNJS works on and off. The entire Google CDN family is blocked. Figma works on and off — sometimes it disconnects mid-collaboration on a large file and you lose a whole day’s work. Google Analytics can’t collect data from Chinese users — not because GA is bad, but because GA’s requests can’t get out. ReCAPTCHA frequently fails to load, locking you out of certain foreign websites because the captcha spins forever and you’re stuck on the login page, unable to move forward or back. Some of Cloudflare’s CDN IPs are jammed inside China — many sites using Cloudflare’s acceleration load painfully slowly or show up as white screens.

You work in AI. ChatGPT — blocked. Claude — blocked. Gemini — blocked. Perplexity — blocked. The OpenAI API is blocked. The Anthropic API is blocked. Downloading a model from Hugging Face — throttled to KB speeds. Downloading a 7B model takes all day, and if it disconnects midway, you start over. Civitai — blocked. Midjourney — blocked. The online version of Stable Diffusion — blocked. You can only use domestic AI platforms: Ernie Bot, Tongyi Qianwen, Doubao, Zhipu — but their training data, update frequency, and openness are on a completely different level from what’s outside. IDE plugins like Cursor and Copilot still work because they don’t go through the browser, but they’re Microsoft’s things — like a supply line on a deserted island. You never know when a policy change will cut them off too.

You want to send a file to a friend abroad. Google Drive — blocked. Dropbox — blocked. Mega.nz — blocked. WeTransfer works occasionally but can’t send large files. SendAnywhere is unreliable. OneDrive — the international version is jammed, the domestic version is heavily neutered, file sync stops halfway at “Waiting for server.” You have no choice but to go back to Baidu Netdisk — 10 KB/s for non-members. You pay for membership and discover that “This file has been automatically deleted due to violating content.” No appeal channel. The file is gone, and it’s gone for good. You’ve learned to always keep important files backed up locally, because the cloud isn’t yours — it’s theirs.

You want to sell something to users abroad. PayPal works but with heavily crippled features, and the withdrawal process is maddeningly convoluted. Stripe won’t let individuals register — you need a company entity. You tried whop.com — got into the backend and couldn’t find where to upload files. After wasting half a day, you realized it’s built for SaaS communities, not for selling little HTML tools. You tried lemonsqueezy.com — registered, uploaded, published, and then got stuck at the tax information step. It says “Submit your tax information,” but the link absolutely refuses to open. Popup blocked? Switch browsers? Incognito mode? Nothing works. You tried Gumroad — the site itself won’t even load. You tried Paddle — same tax info requirement. You tried Etsy — blocked. You thought about building your own payment link with Stripe — only to discover that as an individual in mainland China, you cannot become a Stripe merchant. You need a Hong Kong or US bank account. You went full circle and came back to Xianyu. Your 1.4 billion compatriots are your entire market.

You’re in academia. Google Scholar — blocked. arXiv — intermittent and slow, loading a preprint routinely takes minutes. Coursera — blocked. edX — blocked. Udemy — blocked. Khan Academy — blocked. ResearchGate and Academia.edu — some pages open, but full-text PDF downloads frequently hang. IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, PubMed — they work on campus IPs but become unreliable the moment you leave the university network. Z-Library and Library Genesis — blocked for many years. Writing a paper takes you twice as long just on the literature review step — because you have to scale the firewall first, then search, then download, then scale back.

At night you want to unwind with some games. Steam Community, the Workshop, user reviews — all blocked. All you can open is the store and your library, and the library on the China server is a different catalog from the international one. Discord voice chat — blocked. Every time you want to play online with friends, you have to make do with a WeChat voice call. After Blizzard left China, the Overwatch you bought is unplayable on the China server. Try the Asia server? Won’t connect. The Epic Games Store — unreliable. PlayStation Network accessing the Hong Kong server — you have to fight with DNS settings. Nintendo Switch Online — the online experience is terrible, disconnects are routine. Xbox Live — some services are jammed. Origin and the EA App — won’t open, or are too slow to use. Roblox — blocked. The international version of Minecraft can’t connect to the official server — you have to use a third-party launcher plus a domestic multiplayer platform. You just want to play a game online normally, but you need to be both a network engineer and a system administrator.

You want to read some thoughtful or unique English content. You’ve subscribed to a dozen newsletters on Substack — all the links are blocked, every single post requires a proxy to read. Medium has a wealth of high-quality technical and intellectual articles — blocked. WordPress.com hosts countless independent blogs — blocked. Bloomberg’s paywalled columns — blocked. The Financial Times — blocked. Feedly and Inoreader — the RSS readers themselves work, but the overseas sources you subscribed to are blocked. They can’t fetch content. You open an empty folder and you don’t know whether the source died or the firewall added a new rule. Your reading list keeps shrinking, because everything you can read has already been filtered.

You need to pay an overseas bill. Cryptocurrency exchanges — Binance is blocked, Coinbase is blocked, OKX International is jammed. Robinhood and international brokerages — all blocked. You can’t buy overseas funds, can’t invest in foreign stocks, can’t pay for foreign subscriptions. You find a service you want to buy and discover its payment system doesn’t accept credit cards issued in China — not a technical problem, but because payment processors like Stripe restrict cards issued in mainland China. You have the money, but you can’t spend it.

You decide to solve all of this — by scaling the firewall. And scaling the firewall is itself illegal. Article 6 of the “Provisional Regulations on the Management of International Networking of Computer Information Networks” states it very clearly: no unit or individual may establish or use other channels for international networking. You buy proxies using Shadowsocks, V2Ray, WireGuard. You use third-party “airport” services to scale the wall. At best, your ISP sends you a warning and cuts your connection. At worst, you face fines or even detention. The proxy service you paid for — its ports are detected and blocked by the firewall at any moment, the nodes change every few days, and you’re forced to update your configuration constantly. Every time you climb the wall, you’re gambling. You’re not using a tool; you’re engaged in the daily practice of a minor crime.

But even when you get out, you’re still under control.

Your phone is a mainland Chinese model — it ships without Google Services Framework pre-installed. The preloaded app store has no VPN tools. Your iPhone uses a China-region Apple ID — the App Store has no overseas social apps, no VPN clients. Some apps can’t even be found by name. Your mobile carrier is a domestic one — 4G/5G traffic passes through independent censorship nodes, a separate filtering system from your home broadband. When you’re out using mobile data, some pages open; when you come home to Wi-Fi, they don’t. You have to remember which door to use for which road.

And all of this is just the visible wall. The more insidious layer is the invisible one.

You post a Moments update. The words go through a security checkpoint in your head first. You delete a few suspiciously sensitive words, check them twice, and post. An hour later you open it — “This content has been deleted.” No notification. No reason. No appeal process. You don’t even know which words triggered the review. You post again, this time deleting even more words — it goes through, but it shows as invisible to others. Your words don’t exist. You don’t even know when they stopped existing.

You see a top comment on Weibo that echoes your own thoughts. You give it a like. Five minutes later you refresh — the comment is gone, replaced by “This comment has been folded.” You finish reading an article in a news app and scroll to the bottom — the comment section is completely empty. You distinctly remember there were over a hundred comments this morning. You’re not crazy. They were deleted.

You try to delete an account you’ve used for years. The website asks you to take a photo holding your ID card — name, ID number, your face, all bound together. You hesitate. You lock your phone. Forget it, I’ll keep it. You continue receiving its notifications. You continue being covered by its privacy policy. But you can’t leave.

You scroll through Douyin. You search for a topic, scroll for a while, and notice that your recommended feed has become a stream of identical content — you’ve been shadow-banned. No notification. No explanation. Your account was simply flagged. You searched for travel tips about a city on Xiaohongshu, and for the next three days every ad slot pushes you hotels and flights to that same city. The algorithm understands you better than you understand yourself, but the range of content it’s allowed to recommend is predetermined.

You’re watching a video on Bilibili. A danmaku comment says, “Full version, search xxxxx on YouTube.” You copy the link. You open YouTube. It doesn’t load. You close the browser and sit in your chair for a moment. You’re not angry. You’re not even frustrated. You’ve gotten used to it. So used to it that you no longer realize this isn’t normal.

When you travel or go on a business trip abroad, you connect to the hotel Wi-Fi. You open Google Maps to find nearby restaurants. You watch a video on YouTube. You scroll through Twitter/X to catch up with friends. You check Instagram for the latest photos from the photographer you follow. You casually open Reddit for some fun threads. You open Medium to read an article you’ve had bookmarked for ages. You open Spotify to listen to music. You use WhatsApp to make plans with a local friend. And in that moment, it hits you with a jolt: oh. So this is what the full internet looks like.

You land back in China. The moment you turn on your phone and it connects to the domestic cell tower, all those app icons turn gray, one by one. You look down at them. You don’t tap.

You don’t tap anymore. You don’t even realize you don’t tap anymore.

This is what the intranet really is. Not a wall. It’s a fence you stopped trying to climb a long time ago. It doesn’t need to flash a red warning light at you, because a checkpoint has already grown inside your brain. Before you click a link, your mind runs it past the censor first: Can I click this? Probably not. Never mind.

Every morning you wake up and open the same app. You scroll the same platforms. You consume the same categories of content. You chat with the same people. You live inside a digital walled city. The city has everything — shopping malls, schools, hospitals, parks, squares — it’s just that every wall is quietly closing in, a little tighter each year. You have never left this room, so you don’t think the room is small. You think the room is the whole world.

Until one day you catch a glimpse of what’s outside, through a crack in the door. Then you turn your head, and go back to scrolling the short video in your hand.

That glimpse — you never told anyone about it.