The news of the WeChat ban gives me a strange, surreal, sense of grief. The few years I spent working on it at Tencent changed the way I thought of product design and introduced me to some of the most talented, passionate folks I've met.

I'll always remember when I first arrived in Guangzhou in mid-2014 and joined my team at tail end of development of a video feature. Team was excited and had a few days left to come up with a really killer splash screen to intro it, and new boss asked me to help prototype ideas.

I stayed late at night bouncing between mocks and code, trying all sorts of crazy things. At some point, the team had the idea that the splash screen ought to have a song by Xu Wei, I guess rumored to be a favorite of head honcho Allen Zhang.

After banging out a few concepts, I left to get sleep, and returned to news that the boss hated all of them, but luckily they'd come up with something better. The new splash displayed all your friends' videos and was set to a different Xu Wei song, 我们:

The splash had this stock photo with the headline "视频时代" -- "the video era". Tapping the button took you into the special montage screen showing your friends' first videos using the feature.

Hearing the song makes me nostalgic. I've learned a ton at my current gig back in the US, but I hadn't had any moments like that with a team so consummate about what they were creating that they spent a week just trying to get the perfect splash screen.

Some months later, there was a meme on the Chinese internet with people posting pictures of themselves with a loved one with the caption "我们". A senior PM involved posted this song to their newsfeed, with the caption "我的我们."

As I learned about all the different ideas about software design in China (which I wrote about on my blog) it made me optimistic for future, where we'd break past SV path dependence and see all sorts of wacky, diverse perspectives from the world reflected in apps on our phones.

My point in telling this story isn't to say the ban is wrong (the geopolitics are pretty complicated!) but to counter some of the sentiments I've seen from otherwise woke tech folks engaging with the topic in lazy, often xenophobic abstractions and no real curiosity.

If you're a technologist and you still cling to the quixotic belief that we have a power to change the world with what we do, you have no excuse to let petty politics and nationalism stop you from learning from the best on every side of every divide.