China and Facebook are flip sides of the same coin. Both want to reach into your privacy and shape your innermost thoughts. The Communist Party desires to transform people into obedient citizens who won't step outside the boundary of approved thought. The internet giants want to understand and shape your needs in order to offer frictionless commerce and entertainment, taking a cut of every transaction as they do so.
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The problem is both approaches charge straight through the norms that have us taken thousands of years to evolve. The danger is that our politicians still don't recognise this has now the most critical issue facing society today.
In China we're rightfully horrified that the party is demanding the right to determine the way individuals think and demanding we accept its construction of the world. We dismiss stories of re-education camps in Xinjiang because they don't seem proximate enough to affect us. It's more difficult to ignore the incarceration of Chinese Australian dual-citizens but, because understanding the issues involved is difficult (and we don't want to provoke our major trading partner too much), we accept that Beijing acts differently.
What's dangerous, however, is that no politician seems capable of articulating why such interference must stop at the borders; why it must not be allowed to frame either university tutorials or local suburban festivals; and how pluralistic values work. That's not the same, however, as a free-for-all, watch what you want, indulge as you choose, throw the others to the devil approach that ignores any social obligations in the name of freedom.
If a private American company suddenly began charging us every time we used our roads we'd be horrified, yet that's exactly what Facebook and the other internet monoliths have managed to do when we go online to shop or communicate. Just because you're not sending money directly to these companies doesn't mean you're not paying for their services; just because you seem to be getting the information you want doesn't mean it isn't being shaped and controlled in ways you wouldn't choose.
Business is focused on harnessing your unacknowledged, intimate desires to sell its products. The fact that this consequentially shapes your thinking is a completely inadvertent, yet essential, by-product of then market economy.
The idea that the state could regulate and determine what we see and how we interact is completely repugnant.
The internet, which once seemed to promise unlimited freedom of ideas, has actually turned into a constricting blanket. Instead of offering us new vistas it's shaping our thoughts by blocking out anything 'inconvenient'.
It's easy to understand how an authoritarian government, like that in Beijing, might do this. To understand how this happens in the 'free' market consider choosing partners. Today (allegedly) one in five couples meet online. Control that algorithm and you can push people together, even inadvertently.
Studies have shown the simple order in which profiles are presented can have a significant effect on matchmaking. So that's why it's bad luck if your picture profile immediately follows someone exceptionally handsome or beautiful; it's not you, it's them. This demonstrates, however, how easily technological determinism creeps into our way of life. It's why our electronic presence has become as important as our physical self.
Our politicians, however, have failed to grasp this critical fact.
The Western liberal narrative insists truth will win out and, if this was a clear battle of values, so it would. But its not. The field is obscured and our view shaped by technology we don't control. In the new, military, buzz phrase, this is a "war of perception" and it's already all around us.
Maybe the politicians will realise how important this is during the election campaign, when they try to get a message out on Facebook, or Google, or LinkedIn, or on some other platform only to realise it's refusing to deliver the note where it's wanted. That's why you need not worry about the recently introduced legislation threatening to 'jail' tech-companies bosses whose platforms 'live stream' massacres.
Broadcasting executions will still be possible because, for all Scott Morrison's fulminating, no court would find any executive guilty as long as they 'attempted' to remove such content.
The fact is they'd never be able to remove everything and that's the logic behind tech's push-back. The companies argue they're doing what they can, which is true but totally irrelevant. They just don't want government attempting to regulate their business or touch their operating model and profit base.
If a few live-streamed deaths get through, well, that's just bad luck for all.
The trouble is that as the question's currently phrased, the other alternative's equally unacceptable.
The idea that the state could regulate and determine what we see and how we interact is completely repugnant.
No matter how well-intentioned a regulator may be; no matter how determined it is to enhance society, the inevitable effect will be censorship and, worse, attempts to 'shape' the contours of society.
This - not taxes, and not the economy - is the biggest issue the country faces. And yet instead of debating how we are going to properly regulate the internet both the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader are wandering around pretending there's no problem, nothing at all.
If we choose not to act, others will choose for us.
Nicholas Stuart is a Canberra-based writer
