Where Is Naomi Wu?

It was such a cute gadget.

A tiny computer, brushed aluminum on the outside, with a decent keyboard (albeit with chicklet keys), a Thinkpad-ish pointing stick that would even take a grippy Thinkpad “cat’s tongue” insert. A fairly fast X86 Intel processor, enough storage, and 8 gigs of memory. And now it was on sale at a low price.

I had to get one. And one I got.

Thus came my introduction to the remarkable Naomi Wu.

The tiny computer, the GPD Pocket, came loaded with the then-latest version of a crime against humanity called Microsoft Windows. Coming as it did from China, this was made even worse by being festooned with all kinds of spyware and crapware Microsoft hadn’t thought of yet. But that didn’t matter, because I was going to blow all that away and put good, secure, uncomplicated Linux on it.

Okay, it had various features that might not work well without some tweaking. But I have been using Linux since 1998, and before that OS/2 (an operating system so good that it took IBM seven years to destroy it). I was accustomed to the hacks (elegant solutions) and kludges (ugly solutions that nevertheless worked, sort of) necessary to make things that weren’t supposed to work somehow work.

(You wouldn’t believe how awful some of it was. The worst, I think, was the OS/2 “disk image,” in which you’d put something that just wouldn’t work under OS/2 on a bootable DOS floppy disk, then run a program that made the whole floppy contents into one file, which you could “boot” in a terminal and run it that way. It was how I had to run my fax card. Not pretty. But I digress.)

My GPD Pocket device arrived, all cute and shiny, and small like an Apple notebook machine that had been accidentally put in the dryer. Linux acted like it wanted to install, but there were problems.

I went online to search for solutions. It was possible to do this as late as the time in question, six years ago, before search engines were replaced by advertising delivery sites. I quickly found an instructional video by someone named Naomi Wu. I had never heard of her before. The video gave answers to the problems I was encountering.

That surprised me. Naomi Wu did not at first seem like someone who would be a computer genius. For a start, she was just one click this side of being an exhibitionist, it seemed. Surely she was saying things someone else told her to say. I mean, she called herself the “Sexy Cyborg.”

I looked at some of her other videos, and over the years followed what she was up to. Some of her creations were strange. Some were very strange. But she was the real thing. She knew her stuff. And her viewers would learn to employ that stuff, even if their projects were a little less exotic.

Who is this person?

I poked around and learned I was not alone in my puzzlement. Even more unusual, when there were discussions about her, even in the parts of the internet we should never, ever go, she would show up and explain herself. I mean the true internet badlands, places like the reprehensible 4chan and the often even worse Kiwi Farms. And in each case she spoke politely and in a straightforward manner, holding her head high the entire time. You had to be proud of her and her courage.

The internet did not respond in kind. Noticing that she was becoming well known for her considerable skills, particularly in 3-D printing, Vice magazine sought to do a story about her. When it came out, it included information that she said the writer had agreed not to publish. (I was not surprised; Vice was a pretty disreputable outfit, and there was not much mourning when it went bankrupt last year, nor particular surprise when George Soros, who has a history of such things, sought to buy it out. This year, it stopped publishing even to its own website and laid off most everyone, leading some of us to look forward to reading freelance pieces by those who betrayed Naomi Wu, on topics such as the best ways to survive by retrieving food from dumpsters.) Vice did make a half-hearted effort to snivel their way out of it, but no one was buying; meanwhile, they responded to her complaint by trying to torpedo her YouTube and Patreon accounts, taking away her income.

Naomi Wu’s reason for not wanting her details published is that she is in China, and it could get her in deep trouble. She described it all here. And continued here.

Now she has disappeared. Perhaps she has been disappeared. That’s not rare in China.

Naomi Wu — I don’t think that that’s her real name — has lived at best a complicated life. She says she was not deprived, but many people hearing her story would take a different opinion.

She was born in China during the one-child period, when Chinese couples were allowed to have only one child. The nature of Chinese culture is that girls marry and become part of their husband’s family. Boy children are responsible for looking after their parents in their later years. So if you were allowed only one child, it had better be a boy.

Her parents kept making girl babies and kept having them aborted. Finally, her mother lied and said this pregnancy was a boy. Naomi Wu, a girl, was raised as a boy, all through high school, to avoid family embarrassment. It was not until she got to college that she could for the first time admit she was a girl. That’s an unfair shortening of the story; if you have half an hour you can hear the whole thing, from her, here. Please do watch it. An important part is that having been raised as a boy, she was expected to do boy things, among them liking girls. Girls liking girls is, however, highly frowned upon in China.

Her YouTube channel was probably the most popular of any coming out of China, though that’s not as big a thing as it seems, because YouTube is banned in China. She used a VPN, also illegal there.

Now grown up, she lives, or lived, and worked in Shenzhen, China, a high-tech industrial center. She is also a strong advocate for free and open-source software and products.

(As I write this, I realize that I do not know whether it is correct to talk about her in present or past tense. Chilling, and sad.)

Some of us wondered how she got away with her work for so long. There were hints from time to time that the ice on which she skated was indeed thin.

When would it all catch up with her? We now, perhaps, know.

Here’s her Tweet from July 7, 2023: “Ok for those of you that haven't figured it out I got my wings clipped and they weren't gentle about it- so there's not going to be much posting on social media anymore and only on very specific subjects. I can leave but Kaidi can't so we're just going to follow the new rules and that's that. Nothing personal if I don't like and reply like I used to. I'll be focusing on the store and the occasional video. Thanks for understanding, it was fun while it lasted.” (Kaidi, to whom she referred, is her partner, as we now put it, and to exacerbate things she is also a Uyghur, the Central Asian Muslims who in China are primarily occupants of slave-labor camps.)

She blew the whistle on a company that claimed to offer N95 masks that actually weren’t N95 at all.

The proximate cause of her apparent disappearance, as Jackie Singh explains in detail here, was a discovery that Naomi Wu, an experienced coder, had made. It seemed that the cute little cellphone keyboard applications developed by the Chinese company Tencent, and used by just about everyone, were spyware. They could log keystrokes, and did it outside of even very secure applications such as Signal, so things that were sent securely could be “phoned home” by the keyboard app itself.

It seems, though the evidence is coincidental, that this was one too many cats let out of the bag, and the Chinese communist government of Winnie Xi Pooh acted quickly, with the results (probably understated) in the Tweet quoted above.

You should read Jackie Singh’s piece entirely. The most frightening thing, to me, was something that Naomi Wu said to her in an interview right after that Tweet, when the reaction to it from her Western fans was ho-hum, “meh” in common parlance:

“Literally the only thing that was keeping me online for the past few years was they were worried it would make China look bad if they cracked down on me. Now that they know that I could be dead in a ditch tomorrow and no one would give a sh*t or say a word I’m 1000x less safe here.”

To he best of my knowledge, that was the last any of us in the West heard from Naomi Wu.

The silence has been deafening. People on the internet, especially young, enthusiastic websters, have long been thought unbelievably shallow, in it for whatever they could get out of it, and unwilling to take a stand on something important unless there was profit in it for them. We needn’t think that anymore — now we know it’s true.

What can be done? I do not know. Our government won’t lift a finger even for American citizens or very well known Chinese figures trapped under the thumb of the Disney-character’s evil lookalike, or the Uyghurs, unless there’s some political gain to be had, such as with the tattooed LGBT WNBA player who couldn’t be bothered to leave her dope at home during a visit to Russia.

And truth is, there are a lot of heroic people also in line for our concern.

I only know what I can do. It isn’t much, but it’s more than nothing.

I was about to order a whole bunch of Chinese stuff, to build a new computer. It would be really cool, too. It is amazing the advances in technology and the reduction in price that have taken place lately, and my current machine is a decade old. But you know what? I decided I can get some more mileage out of the current box, and I sent a note to the Chinese suppliers saying that I’ll buy from them when we have reliable information as to the whereabouts, health, safety, and happiness of Naomi Wu. And when I buy things in the future, I’ll make an effort, not so much to buy American — we make next to nothing nowadays, but to not buy Chinese.

That’s probably what we’re all going to have to do before long, anyway, so why not give it a bit of meaning?

China was afraid that silencing Naomi Wu would make the government there look bad. Let’s prove them right.