Chinese Developer Sees Untapped Market in Gay Gamers

Image: Jamie Fullerton/Motherboard

In his central Beijing office, Zhu Qiming flicked at his smartphone screen. A small pair of yellow boxer shorts suddenly appeared on the digital hunk staring back at him from his device.

The briefs were designed to resemble Spongebob Squarepants’ head, complete with a scowling face over the bulge they were concealing. A few more finger flicks from Zhu caused the guy in the Spongebob boxers to be joined by a friend who was equally as buff, but sported an even skimpier pair of briefs over his considerable virtual package.

Zhu was giving me a demo of a forthcoming smartphone game with the working title Rainbow Town. As both its title and heavy use of near-naked men suggested, it looks set to be the gayest game ever released in China.

This is wholly intentional: Rainbow Town is the result of Zhu’s gaming company Star-G Technologies spotting a gap in the enormous Chinese mobile gaming market. Right now China is having its own ‘pink dollar’ moment, with an increasing amount of companies realising there’s money to be made marketing to LGBT customers. Small tech firms such as Star-G are leading the way.

“China is going though a ‘nationwide entrepreneur’ and ‘nationwide innovation’ campaign, and its technology industry is developing at peak speed,” Geng Le, founder of Chinese gay dating app Blued, said. Geng has been hugely instrumental in promoting LGBT-friendly business in China and has made his own app the equivalent of Grindr in the country. Geng: “China’s LGBT community is big: tens of millions of people. It’s a very good business opportunity.”

Image: Star-G

“LGBT people are gradually being accepted by the public—a few years ago the market would not be ready for a gay game,” said Zhu, who is gay. Although it is still believed that only a tiny percentage of homosexual people in China ever come out, Zhu is correct in asserting that societal attitudes are beginning to change.

We’re a long way from country-wide acceptance of non-heterosexual lifestyles in China, where homosexuality was illegal until 1997, but cities with significant amounts of international visitors such as Beijing and Shanghai are largely welcoming places for openly gay people. Chinese state media, meanwhile, almost invariably covers LGBT issues with a progressive, positive tone.

“With rising social tolerance, people in the LGBT community have begun to demonstrate their identity and meet other members of the community through a range of social activities, including games," Zhu told China Daily before I met him. "I see strong demand going unfulfilled, and that provides us with 'pink' opportunities."

One such pink opportunity is Rainbow Town, which is scheduled for release in March. An RPG-style game with elements of The Sims, it sees you guide your dreamboat avatar around a city going on virtual dates with other players, taking part in fashion shows and playing various mini-games.

Image: Star-G

Players link their avatars to their accounts on Blued, meaning there’s real life boyfriend (or hook-up) potential too. “If you like someone you can touch them,” said Zhu, bringing up a screen with yet another muscly hunk, this time wearing dungarees and a yellow hard hat. As Zhu taps the character’s chest on his screen red hearts appear and the character begins to blush.

Zhu claims that Rainbow Town will be the first Chinese video game to be specifically designed for gay people. As well as being fun for openly gay people in the country, he’s hoping it will offer a vital outlet to those who remain in the closet.

“I’ve always wanted to do something for gay people,” he said. “A purpose of this game is to let people do things they might not be able to do in real life, such as dress however they want to and just be themselves.”

When researching the title, Zhu found that gay people quizzed about what they wanted in a game kept mentioning gay marriage. As such, Rainbow Town has a church with a hunky minister in which avatars can get married, whereas in the real world gay marriage is not recognised in China. “We’re working on a baby adoption function too,” said Zhu.

The church might not go down well with authorities—the government promotes secularism and is often accused of persecuting religious people. It also strictly controls the media, banning content deemed unsuitable. Despite state media newspapers and websites largely demonstrating progressive attitudes towards LGBT topics, in March last year the government banned all depictions of gay people on television as part of a crackdown on “vulgar, immoral and unhealthy content.”

Image: Star-G

There are no actions more lewd than gentle stroking for red heart ‘likes’ in Rainbow Town; Zhu has been careful not to incite the censor scissors. “We understand that gays like muscular guys, so we made the characters as nakedly appreciable as possible without them being completely naked. The government does have control over gay issues but the regulations for TV, films and the internet are more strict.”

Rainbow Town will be keeping things cute rather than kinky. “For our research we found a foreign game that’s a campus story—the professors would rip off the player’s clothes and have sex with him on the desk,” says Zhu. “We saw another one in which the player only does one thing: help male clients have baths. You rub naked men’s backs and if you do it right they moan. We won’t have things like that.”

Rainbow Town will get an English language release after the Chinese version comes out. In expectation of kicking off a mini gayming revolution in China, Star-G will release a different, pure ‘virtual boyfriend’ game in China soon too.

When the virtual town’s ribbon is cut it will mark another small step towards equality for all sexualities in China.

from Chinese Developer Sees Untapped Market in Gay Gamers

At Home With the Man Who’s Made Robot ‘Children’ for 30 Years

“My inspiration usually appears during the night,” said Wu Yulu, gesturing towards a metal shoebox with legs, a ratty tail, and a crude, pubic-like hair design scrawled on its back and ‘face’ in marker pen. He flicked a switch on the robo-rodent, causing it to noisily clunk-lurch forwards. “Sometimes at night, after my family falls asleep, I get up and walk in circles in my courtyard,” continued Wu. His voice trailed off as he flicked the switch again, rendering his creation still.

Earlier this week I visited the home of Wu, 54, who has become something of a mini-celebrity via Chinese media due to the vast family he has created. In a move that the over-analytical among us could view as the ultimate artistic statement against China’s recently scrapped single child policy, he has built 63 robots, mainly humanoids, which he describes as his “children.” They are additions to the two flesh and blood human children he has also produced.

Wu keeps his bionic babies in two lock-ups in Ma Wu Village, in Beijing’s Tongzhou district, about an hour’s drive from the city centre. The first room I visited resembled a cross between a chaotic car repair shop and the apartment of JF Sebastian, the genetic engineer character in Blade Runner who literally “makes friends” to share his home with.

Image: Aurelien Foucault

Rows of mildly disturbing toy-sized robots with doll heads and drawn-on gurns were lined up, pride of place in front of a wall covered with crispy old newspaper cuttings that named Wu as “Robodad.” Elaborate designs—a humanoid riding a bug; a hopping robot with a mullet haircut—were taped up too: small paper insights into Wu’s obsessive mind.

Many of the robots just walked, but there were many other skills on show, albeit most of them fairly rudimentary. One mustachioed yellow bot had a lighter in its hand and tubes running through its body, allowing it to ‘smoke.’ One had a boxing glove used for administering massages skewered on its right limb, with a hand fan held in its left. Another, with a permanent look of eye-popping surprise on its square face, smashed cymbals together at ear-spiking volume.

Wu named all the robots after himself and the number order in which they were created. Wu Number One, a small walking robot with a drawn-on beard and a battery power pack for a crotch, was the first he made, back in 1986. “After making Wu Number One I became so passionate, if not crazy, about robots,” he said. “My passion for them is beyond language.”

Wu said that before his robot passion came his passion for legs. He dropped out of high school, later working as a factory technician and garnering knowledge of robotics, but it was during school that the seed of his future vocation was sown. “I remember my classmates playing in the playground, chasing each other, dancing and hopping around,” he said. “I wondered: ‘Why are humans able to walk with two legs, with such flexibility and coordination? Is it possible to mimic humans’ walking through a machine?’”

When Wu powered up his most famous creation, Wu Number 32, it became clear that this was indeed possible, even on a tight budget. Most of his robots were made from scrap, or low-cost metal from a nearby steelworks.

Image: Aurelien Foucault

Image: Aurelien Foucault

Image: Aurelien Foucault

Image: Aurelien Foucault

Image: Aurelien Foucault

Wu flung open the lock-up’s doors then leaped into a red rickshaw with a man-sized, Simpsons-yellow humanoid in front of it. He hit the ‘on’ switch. The robot’s ears waggled as it shouted a tinny but friendly message: “Hello everyone! Wu Yulu is my dad and I am taking my dad to the shops. Thank you!” It stepped forward, hauling Wu out of the building for a stroll.

The ludicrous spectacle of the rickshaw ride and the array of oddball robots arguably presented Wu as a talented eccentric, maybe one with a bit of ‘mad genius’ in him. But he actually came across as an introverted, understated sort: slightly weary at answering questions, and making grumpy mutterings about his electricity bill being affected by my visit. “Many farmers are into making inventions,” he said with a shrug. “They may not make as many things as I do, but many are interested in this.”

He’s right, to an extent: instances of rural Chinese with spiraling penchants for construction and invention often pop up in Chinese media. The 2014 case of the Shandong province farmers who gave up work to build massive Transformers robots out of cars is a particularly striking example. But still, Wu’s sustained creativeness—30 years of robot building for personal use and counting—feels unique.

I wondered how the obsession affected Wu’s family life. British comedian Paul Merton visited him for a 2007 documentary about China, in which Wu’s wife said she had considered leaving her husband due to his all-encompassing hobby. The fact that he burned the family house down in 1999 due to unstable voltage levels in equipment he was using can’t have helped, either.

Wu’s two sons are now 28 and 29, and he claims that his family now supports his robot interest. It took them a while to come around, though.

Image: Aurelien Foucault

“When I first started my family, friends and neighbours called me idle, a black sheep, insane and stupid,” said Wu. “I didn’t farm so the farmland went to waste. I couldn’t make money—for the first ten years of this I was living on credit. But in 2004 I was invited to a farmers’ invention competition where I won first prize and 10,000 Yuan ($1,450 US). Since then, they started to understand.”

Wu now makes money renting out his farmland and occasionally making robots to order, although he still keeps the vast majority of his creations for himself. After 30 years making these metal kids, his attachment to them isn’t waning.

“They are closer to me than my actual children in some ways,” he said, perched next to a weird bowing robot with corrugated tube arms and a grubby doll head impaled on top of it. “The time and energy I have invested in every single robot is huge and every time I finish one I have a great sense of achievement and feel like the happiest person in the world.”

Wu didn’t crack a smile once during our meeting, but I’ll take him at his word.

from At Home With the Man Who’s Made Robot ‘Children’ for 30 Years

China’s ‘Tinder for Dancing Grannies’ Is Sparking a Dance Revolution

Last Saturday morning, in front of a picturesque lake in west Beijing’s Lianhuachi Park, I watched 80 dancers in red skirts, sailor hats, aviator shades, and street gang-esque fingerless gloves dance to a thumping EDM beat mixed with traditional Chinese music.

The members of the Beijing Lianhuachi Happy Sailor Club, complete with their enormous sound system, meet every morning to bring a whirlwind of flapping red neckties and music to the otherwise serene park. “Our dances are adapted from traditional sailor dances. This one is called a six step pass,” said dance leader Wu Xiao Juan as the group members twirled behind her. “It consumes more energy than regular dances. It’s the kind of dance we’re addicted to!”

The sailor dances are variations of square dancing: an addiction for millions of people across China who regularly dance in groups, usually in parks or in front of residential buildings they live in. Members mainly join groups via word of mouth or WeChat, China’s hugely popular messaging app. But this year a potential digital revolution in the country-wide square dance community has been sparked by the success of Tangdou Square Dance: an app and website that has been described as the Tinder of square dancing.

Image: Junru Huang

Gu Bao Yuan, another Happy Sailor Club leader who I contacted through the app, said that since the summer he has recruited around 20 new dancers to his 200-strong sailor dance community via Tangdou, which uses location services to match dancers with nearby groups. Not everyone can become a Happy Sailor, though. “Many people don’t specifically do sailor dances—we don’t approve their applications,” said Gu from behind his aviators.

Last month Tangdou, which launched in 2012 as a straightforward video sharing website before focusing on square dancing, announced that it had received $15 million in its second round of funding. As well as the matching service it provides communication platforms for dancers to announce events and chat, but is mainly driven by videos. The app and site are swamped with dance videos, including many tutorials, with both Tangdou-created clips and those made by groups around China sometimes clocking up millions of views.

Before I visited the Happy Sailors I headed to Tangdou’s office in north Beijing. There, the sound of the young, hoodie-wearing staffers’ keyboard tapping merged with muffled pop songs spilling from the company’s dance studio, located next door to the computer hubs. Every so often a few staffers leaped up from their computers and pop there for a quick dance, giggling and twisting in front of the studio mirrors.

Image: Junru Huang

Gao Jing Xuan was warming down after filming her latest video. She is Tangdou’s full time dance teacher (they also use around six freelance teachers) and makes around three tutorial videos per week, often filmed on an iPhone using the app’s recording function that can add various trippy visual effects to the dances.

“The highest amount of views I’ve got on one is over one million,” she said, sending me a link to a video showing her busting moves to techno-pop. It’s impressive, although the lyrical content contrasts somewhat with the cutesy visuals. Sample lines: “I’m so cute and so happy about myself/Whenever I feel happy I want to have sex/I feel like I’m so cute and I want to kiss you/Whenever I feel sad I want to have sex”.

The techno-underpinned raciness doesn’t seem to be putting off users. Wang Yuan, Tangdou’s CEO, said that last September the app and site had 2.5 million daily users and that their target is to get up to three million by June 2017. Most users are middle-aged or elderly women, many of whom are retired and have dancing as their main hobby. Wang said that their deep obsessions with dancing combined with the country’s explosion in smartphone usage have driven Tangdou’s success.

Image: Junru Huang

“Square dancing is no longer just a way to keep fit,” he said. “It’s now a lifestyle where you can find a sense of belonging. There is a saying among square dancers: ‘If you dance fast enough, the loneliness will not catch up’.”

This expanded sense of community is important for many square dancers – often known as tiaowu dama, which means ‘dancing grannies’—not least because they often cause controversy. For some reason not everyone in China is a fan of loud music blared for hours on the street or in parks, with the government recently clamping down on dancing in public.

When they are not dodging bullets or excrement aimed at them by angry local residents, the so-called dancing grannies are often busy managing their families’ finances. Advertisers have identified them as an economically powerful bunch, with Tangdou selling advertising to firms keen to tap into these focused, often wealthy community members. The company estimates that there are around 190 million tiaowu dama in China: a huge potential market.

Image: Junru Huang

Tangdou shifted focus from its website to its app last year, due to more and more Chinese now using smartphones as their main way of accessing the internet. According to statistics database website Statista there are around 563 million smartphone owners in China, but my meeting with the Happy Sailors suggested that the firm still faces challenges by relying on smartphone use.

“Most of our dancers are middle-aged or elderly and don’t have the best knowledge of smartphones,” said group leader Wu. “Many of them have to ask their children to teach them to use it, then only about ten to 20 percent of them do use it.” Fellow leader Gu added: “But we do think it’ll develop in a positive way. The dancers love to try and learn, even though they may be a bit slow. The app is easy to use.”

Already, though, Tangdou has changed the way that dancers such as the Happy Sailors operate, with public video posting creating rivalry between groups that filters down from group leaders using the app. “We used to let new members dance at the front,” said Gu. “Now when we film we put great dancers at the front to set an example, and we always make sure we wear our uniforms to look good on camera. The competition is intense, but it’s a good thing. The groups learn from each other and it means the dances get better.”

Image: Junru Huang

The rising competition level seemed to be inspiring impressive dance standards. I watched the Happy Sailors as they performed the last dance of the morning: a brilliantly choreographed flurry of arm swoops and nimble, line dance-esque footwork. It’ll make for a good video.

“Why don’t you have a go next time?” asked one of the dancers, waggling her smartphone at me. Maybe I will. But I’d best start off at the back, I replied.

from China’s ‘Tinder for Dancing Grannies’ Is Sparking a Dance Revolution

I Went to a Chinese Robot Shop to Witness the Coming of the Sex Dolls

When I arrive at the 5S shop in Changsha, the capital city of China’s south central Hunan province, store owner Mr. Xiao is struggling to prevent a nearly-nude “female” humanoid doll from toppling off a chair. As Xiao finally manages to place the doll in a stable sitting position then cover its rather large, jiggling silicone breasts with a slinky pink shirt, he explains that “her” name, or rather that of her model, is Magic Beauty.

Magic Beauty has an iron skeleton but no mechanical parts, although the same cannot be said for pretty much everything else for sale at 5S. Customers are greeted by a humanoid in a brunette wig and traditional red Chinese dress that bows and babbles welcome messages when people walk past sensors near her feet. The small, popular singing and dancing Alpha robots jiggle around here and there. Dominating floor space, though, is a fleet of gleaming waiter robots, most of them holding trays as they endure being prodded repeatedly by curious children.

Now that Magic Beauty is clothed, albeit scantily, today’s store browsers don’t seem to realise what its true purpose is, and happily pose for family photos with the life-size doll. It seems most visitors have come to let their kids play around and take selfies with what Xiao has on display, but not actually purchase and go home with a robot waiter or humanoid sex companion.

Xiao, though, is keen to explain to me that Magic Beauty, which retails at 3,800 Euros ($4,270; £3,290), is very much designed to be an object of affection.

Photo: Motherboard

“It is for people who don’t have a wife,” said Xiao, who requested I give him a pseudonym. “You can kiss and have sex with her. Her legs can be parted and you can feel her tender skin.”

Most people in China and beyond still view humanoid sex bots and dolls as an uncanny taboo. The question is, will owning something like Magic Beauty ever become more widely accepted in mainstream culture in China and beyond?

*

When President Xi Jinping called for a “robot revolution” in China’s robotics industry in 2014, I’m not quite sure that something like Magic Beauty is what he had in mind. But the very existence of the 5S store, which opened in June, is indeed one result of an industry booming in the country. Xiao, an entrepreneurial type, has stakes in robot factories that supply his store, which is one of five other similar outlets he owns across China.

“You can kiss and have sex with her. Her legs can be parted and you can feel her tender skin.”

In 2013, China overtook Japan to become the biggest consumer of industrial robots in the world, having bought one-in-five industrial robots sold globally that year. President Xi, calling for his “robot revolution” a year later, declared: “Our country will be the biggest market for robots, but can our technology and manufacturing capacity cope with the competition? Not only do we need to upgrade our robots, we also need to capture markets in many places.”

Xi’s words have been backed up by generous subsidies for companies building and using robots, leading to stimulation of domestic and export markets. The primary focus has been on industrial robots designed to replace, at least partially, human factory workers. But one quirky side effect has been stores like Xiao’s cropping up, bolstered by lower manufacturing costs for their products and increasing spending power among the Chinese public.

Photo: Motherboard

It is the waiter robots that really drive these places. Xiao’s cheapest server bot, a four-foot-tall pink clunker that looks a bit like an oversized Jelly Baby holding a tray, sells for about 18,000 Yuan ($2,700; £2,080). The most expensive robot waiter, which is much taller, has more flexible arms and legs plus an interactive face screen, and goes for 65,000 Yuan ($9,740; £7,510). Xiao says he’s sold around 1,000 waiter robots so far this year, mainly to restaurants looking to cut staff costs as well as have a funny plastic humanoid scooting around delivering dumplings.

But are these service platforms really more than a gimmick? When I visited a robot-staffed restaurant in 2014 in Kunshan, a city near Shanghai, owner Song Yugang told me that they were. He said that having robot waiters allowed him to run the restaurant with a human staff count of around six; without the robots he’d need 20 humans.

“A robot can work for seven to eight years and more than ten hours a day,” Song said at the time. “Waiters and waitresses work for eight hours every day, nine at most. You need to provide accommodations and meals. But our robots consume three Yuan [50 cents, or 30 pence] worth of electricity a day at most.”

Photo: Motherboard

Professor Hongen Liao, of Beijing’s Tsinghua University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, suggests that shop owners like Xiao are being astute by focusing on humanoid robots that do more than just entertain.

“With developing technology and greater demand, there will be more shops like this,” Hongen said. “We will see fewer gimmicks as consumers will look at the functionality and actual application of the robots. Robot waiters can cut down the cost of hiring human waiters. We are currently seeing both a shortage and higher cost of labour force.”

Read more: Eagerly We Await the Coming of the Sex Robots

But let’s not forget the sex dolls—Xiao seems giddy about their development. He shows me mildly disturbing smartphone messages and pictures of splayed out humanoids from potential customers in Southeast Asia who have contacted him to register interest in buying sophisticated models like Magic Beauty, which Xiao says is currently mainly being exported to Europe. He expects these kinds of products to be among the most lucrative items he sells via his store as well as exports.

Female “companion” units such as these are becoming more complex, as highlighted recently by Ricky Ma Wai-kay, a Hong Kong man who made international headlines by creating a bot that looked startlingly similar to Scarlett Johansson and talked back if you called it “cute”.

Ma’s robot was not a sex toy. But as he told the South China Morning Post, “Many people feel very alone and some people are not skilled at communicating. I don’t think they should fall in love with robots but [having a robot companion] could help them psychologically.” Ma added that he was working on a handbook to allow other men to create their own female robot beaus.

“Just as porn drove the development of the internet, sex robots are likely to drive the development of domestic robots.”

Xiao is quite open about promoting his sex dolls and the nitty gritty of how customers can get sexy with them—and clean up afterwards. I ask how hygienic everything is, which prompts him to reach into a drawer and pull out a handful of objects that come supplied with Magic Beauty.

“Cleansing powder, condom, oil, stimulation tool,” he clarified, gesturing to the latter gadget, a plastic tampon-like device with a USB connector on a wire coming out of the bottom. Its shape leaves no need for explanation about where either end of it is intended to be inserted into what according to Xiao is merely the first generation model of Magic Beauty.

“Later she will be able to speak with people, hug, and give feedback while having sex,” he explained. “There are old single people who have sex with young girls; this robot will prevent them from doing wrong things, satisfying their needs. It’ll provide convenience for people.”

*

So, will we ever really get to a point, in Chinese society or beyond, where having one of these things is no longer widely considered taboo? Dr. David Kreps, a senior lecturer at Salford Business School who recently chaired the Technology and Intimacy: Choice or Coercion conference, believes it’s just a matter of time.

“Just as porn drove the development of the internet, sex robots are likely to drive the development of domestic robots,” Kreps told me. “There is likely to be boom in demand for all kinds of such technologies.”

“These are, in essence, just high-tech sex toys,” he added. “Their sophistication will never trump a lover’s touch. That said, their use and social acceptance is likely to help with the ongoing sexual revolution since the 1960s, freeing people to enjoy their bodies in ways once frowned upon.”

Xiao and Magic Beauty.

If the trajectory of high-tech sex toy development does indeed continue in the manner Kreps and many other industry figures expect it will, who knows? Maybe soon there’ll be a version of Magic Beauty sat on a chair by the door of a 5S store on every major Chinese city high street.

“People here have been able to eat good food and buy good clothes for a long time but there are not that many things for fun,” said Xiao. “What I do is new technology, which I believe represents where the future is.”

And with that, he places the USB stimulation tool back in its drawer and shoves it shut.

Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day by signing up for our newsletter.

from I Went to a Chinese Robot Shop to Witness the Coming of the Sex Dolls

The Smog-Sucking Tower Has Arrived in China. But Can It Stay There?

Daan Roosegaarde reached into the pocket of his suit jacket, pulled out a plastic bag filled with black powder, and waved it around.

“This is Beijing smog,” Roosegaarde said, before gesturing to the seven-metre tall, gently humming metal tower we are stood next to in the Chinese capital’s art district, 798. “We collected it from the tower yesterday. Incredibly disgusting.”

Dutch designer Roosegaarde’s smog souvenir may be disgusting, but it’s the byproduct of an invention that he has touted as a potential alleviator of China’s pollution problems. His “smog-free tower” sucks air, filters it with ion technology, with Roosegaarde having explained: “By charging the Smog Free Tower with a small positive current, an electrode will send positive ions into the air. These ions will attach themselves to fine dust particles. A negatively charged surface — the counter electrode — will then draw the positive ions in, together with the fine dust particles. The fine dust… is collected together with the ions and stored inside of the tower.”

Image: Jamie Fullerton.

With the dust collected, the tower then spews out cleaner air through vents, creating a “bubble” in the area surrounding it that contains, according to Roosegaarde, up to 70 percent fewer pollution particles than the pre-cleaned air.

China could do with its air being filtered, with the government having declared “war” on pollution many times in recent years. New Chinese environmental laws introduced in 2015 demonstrated that authorities were serious in tackling the roots of the problem, cracking down particularly hard on polluting factories.

According to Roosegaarde, officials from China’s Ministry of Health visited him at his Rotterdam-based company, Studio Roosegaarde, to find out more about the tower. And more government officials are visiting it this week, as the tower begins a tour of five Chinese cities.

But is this more than just a massive publicity win for the trendy Dutch studio? Reports about pollutant dust filtered by the tower being used to make diamonds made it sound too good to be true: a mega-bling vending machine sucking smog then firing out sparklers.

“This is not just a symbol or artistic gesture,” Roosegaarde said.

Still, we have some questions.

IS THE TOWER MORE THAN JUST A MASSIVE AIR PURIFIER?

“That’s like saying a satellite going to the moon is the same as driving a car,” Roosegaarde told me.

Still, by making air around it cleaner, the tower is essentially doing the same job as the indoor air purifiers that have fuelled a recent boom industry in China, just on a larger scale. Roosegaarde and co-creator Bob Ursem, nanoparticles expert at Delft University of Technology, say their tower can churn out 30,000 cubic metres of clean air an hour.

Image: Jamie Fullerton.

This makes it a symptom-treater rather than something addressing the causes of pollution, of course. Roosegaarde says it is designed to be placed in public parks.

“By making a place where people can feel their air quality difference you can create engagement with people [about wider pollution issues] so they begin to think, ‘We need to make a whole city smog free,’” he said.

CAN SMOG COLLECTED FROM IT BE TURNED INTO DIAMONDS?

Roosegaarde has benefited from media speculation about this process but now distances himself from it.

“We never used the word diamond,” he said.

Roosegaarde claims that the firm did get diamonds from pollution dust made, but as the process required so much energy it didn’t chime with the firm’s environmentally friendly ethos. Instead, they sell jewelry featuring little blocks of compressed pollutants.

To continue the smog-into-diamonds idea would be doable but, according to Clive Hill, founder of Washington, DC-based synthetic diamond firm WD Lab Grown Diamonds, it’d be tough. The process involves putting carbon under incredibly high temperatures and amounts of pressure.

Image: Jamie Fullerton.

According to Roosegaarde, smog particles collected from his tower before it arrived in Beijing were 42 percent carbon; he has been quoted as suggesting that diamonds could be made from such matter.

However, as Hill told Motherboard, “You’d have all sorts of contaminates [with that carbon percentage]. I don’t think you could make a diamond at 42 percent. You’d have to purify it, and if you didn’t get the purity too good you’d have a very funny looking diamond.”

WILL IT BE ROLLED OUT ACROSS CHINA?

This, rather than making diamonds, is Roosegaarde’s end game. Although the tower’s only China appearance so far has been as a showcase in Beijing, he is targeting an uptake of 800 units in cities across China. He is collaborating with Chinese investment and production firm Winworld, based in the northeastern city of Tianjin, to plan production.

“That’s why I’m here,” he says. “[To plan to roll out] anything less than 800 would be naïve.” This will require government interest being converted to firm orders—Roosegaarde’s biggest challenge yet.

The prices of the towers have not been revealed. While they don’t strike me as being cheap, Roosegaarde is characteristically confident they will be popping up around China before long.

“What’s the price of clean air?” he says. “What’s the price of living two years longer? What’s the price for having your children being able to play outside?”

Probably a lot more than it costs to stick a big smog-sucking tower in a park. But that this thing has got as far as China is still seriously impressive. Whether it will stay here or not is still up in the (temporarily cleaner) air.

@jamiefullerton1

from The Smog-Sucking Tower Has Arrived in China. But Can It Stay There?

A Man Tried to Destroy the Internet to Keep Photos of Him Dancing Offline

Image: Screencap of NetEase.

Celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence, Justin Bieber, and Leslie Jones have all had private photographs distributed on the internet without their consent in recent times. Any action they took against the leaks after pictures of their passports, driver’s licenses, or nudes hit the web was, of course, sadly too late to prevent them from living online forever.

A novel, albeit violent way of preventing such online intrusion has been highlighted by the actions a middle-aged man from China’s eastern Shandong province with the surname Liu. He recently feared that incriminating photos of him dancing in an amusing way were about to go online. His solution? Break the internet, literally, before that happened.

Liu was arrested in the city of Weifang on August 19 for breaking into and tearing out the wiry innards of four China Telecom service boxes, according to Chinese news site NetEase. When asked by police why he had been heading around the city mutilating the boxes in the dead of night, after being caught doing so on CCTV, he said that he had been concerned that photos and videos of him dancing in the street may go online and cause him to lose face. Losing face, meaning being embarrassed in front of people, is considered a much more serious social event in Chinese culture than in most of the west.

Image: Screencap of NetEase.

He told the police that in June, when he was new to Weifang, he had felt compelled to join in with a public “granny dance.” These synchronized dances, common in cities across the country, are typically busted out by middle-aged women next to residential blocks as a way of keeping fit in the evenings. They are usually soundtracked by either traditional Chinese music or nosebleed techno blasting from a portable amp. Even before Liu’s case came to light, they have long been associated with controversy.

As the so-called granny dances tend to take place in heavily populated residential areas and often cause a racket, complaints against them are common. In Chengdu, in the western Sichuan province, there have been reports of water balloons being hurled at dancers. In Wuhan and Changsha, in the south central Hunan province, excrement has been lobbed at them. In 2015 the government responded to the controversies by issuing strict rules about dancing in public spaces.

Nobody lobbed poop at Liu when he made his impromptu dance in Weifang, but he told police that he noticed that sniggering people nearby were capturing his moves on their phones. It wasn’t until August, though, that he had a sudden fear about images of him dancing being put online, so he decided to try and break the internet by destroying the communications boxes.

His somewhat drastic measure seemed to work on one level, at least. After Liu embarked on his path of destruction China Telecom staff noticed that their internet service was down near the points he destroyed, leading to police checking CCTV footage from the areas and discover who the culprit was. Liu, who had already spent seven years in jail for previous crimes, caused around 10,000 Yuan ($15,000) of damage.

Reports of the case didn’t go viral, but many netizens on Chinese social media platforms such as Weibo and WeChat were quick to give their thoughts about it. Some were supportive, with one commenter saying: “You can go away if you don't like his dance. Nobody forces you to watch. What makes you think you have the right to mock the guy? The photo taker has no morals.” Another, meanwhile, pointed out a flaw in his destructive plan, commenting: “He didn't realize there are 3G and 4G.”

Details of any trial or sentencing for Liu have not been made public. Neither, though, have any images of Liu dancing, meaning that so far he’s been successful in not being ridiculed online for his moves. Instead, he’s being ridiculed for believing that he could break the internet by tearing the wires out of a bunch of telecoms boxes.

from A Man Tried to Destroy the Internet to Keep Photos of Him Dancing Offline