Banning Apps Doesn't Kill Them. It Markets Them.

India blocked Telegram and immediately triggered a rush to VPNs and competing platforms. This is not surprising. It is, at this point, a documented phenomenon with a name in academic literature: the Streisand Effect, first formally theorized by Jansen and Martin in a 2015 paper in First Monday, which showed that attempted suppression of digital information consistently amplifies its reach. The Indian government is not unaware of this. The ban is as much a signal of political intent as it is an operational measure.

The ASML Chip War Follows the Same Script

The US government says ASML's most advanced lithography equipment may have ended up in China. ASML says it hasn't. The commercial logic ASML cites cuts directly against the allegation: why would they risk their export license for one customer? But the dynamic underneath is the same as the Telegram ban. Export controls on semiconductor equipment have accelerated China's domestic chip ambitions in ways that purely market forces might not have. Prohibition creates the demand signal that justifies the investment. China's chip independence push is, in structural terms, a Streisand Effect operating at the level of national industrial policy.

Scent, Sound, and What Can't Be Blocked

There's a stranger parallel in the art world this week. The Icelandic collective Fischersund, led by Sigur Rós frontman Jónsi and his siblings, has spent a decade making multisensory art that is deliberately difficult to distribute, reproduce, or block. Scent can't be streamed. A perfume can't be banned. The collective's implicit argument is that the most durable art forms are the ones that resist the infrastructure of both distribution and suppression. In a week when India banned an app and the US tried to contain a chip tool, the most radical act might be making something that simply can't be stopped because it can't be copied. As the Rhizome archive project has long grappled with: what happens to culture that can't be preserved digitally? Sometimes that's a vulnerability. Sometimes it's armor.