The Way of the White Clouds: ethics, silence, and the web we were promised

I am writing this in July 2026 with a book on the table and a discomfort that will not sit as ordinary tech-blog material. The book is Lama Anagarika Govinda’s The Way of the White Clouds — in Italian, La via delle nuvole bianche: a Buddhist pilgrim’s account of Tibet in the last decade when that culture still stood largely intact. He walked immense stretches of Tibet on foot, an adventurous voyage through high country, and came upon remains of cities that were unknown even to the Lhasa Tibetans of that time. He is a giant. The book is not a travel brochure. It is a pilgrimage in the older sense — outer mountains and an inner centre — written so that something of that spirit would not simply vanish from memory.

Meditation is one of the strengths of Buddhist culture — a practiced attention that looks inward before it rushes outward. In a fast Western culture that seems to find time only to produce, and almost never to reflect on what it is doing, that strength is often underestimated. Production without reflection is not wisdom; it is acceleration.

I keep returning to it when I am thinking about ethics: what we still claim to care about, and how much of that claim is going awry while big tech shapes attention in the West and, differently but not less tightly, in China in the East. The web was sold to many of us as a machine for freer speech. It has often become another place where discrimination and forgetting work the way they do offline — sometimes worse, because the feed looks like knowledge.

A soft warning, and a candid answer

A few days after a Tibetan man set himself on fire outside the United Nations headquarters in New York — carrying a Tibetan flag, according to reporting that barely lingered in European timelines — I was talking with “E.”, a Chinese colleague who knows digital work from his own curriculum. I raised, softly, that I was aware of the Tibetan question; that years ago in Milan I had listened to a speech by the Dalai Lama. His answer was candid and, in its way, honest:

Regarding the Dalai Lama, tbh, I’m not very familiar with this person and what he shared with the Western world. I’m also curious about how he became a religious idol in the Western world. At the same time, I do know much about Tibetan history.

I do not mock unfamiliarity. Plenty of Europeans are vague about Chinese history; plenty of us are vague about our own. When I was a young high-school student I read La vera storia della lunga marcia and a life of Mao — and Tiziano Terzani on his experience in communist China — not as a specialist, just as someone who thought Chinese history mattered enough to open the books. What chilled me was the gap between a CV that signals historical and technical literacy and a shrug, days after a human torch at the UN, toward a figure who for millions of Tibetans is not a “Western idol” but a living centre of identity under pressure. Curiosity about Western fascination is fair. Silence around why someone would burn is harder to sit with.

Reporting named him as Lobsang Palden, also known as Lobga Rangzen — a Tibetan activist and former monk. Whether one says lama or monk, the gesture is the same: a body turned into the last signal when other signals are blocked. I will not pretend I have a tidy moral theory of self-immolation. I only know that it makes me shiver.

Amnesty International, responding to that death, put the longer pattern in plain words:

Amnesty International has documented decades of human rights violations against Tibetans, including severe restrictions on freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and cultural rights. Tibetans continue to face pervasive surveillance, arbitrary detention, restrictions on the use of the Tibetan language and the criminalization of peaceful expressions of Tibetan identity.

That is not a slogan from a Western “idol.” It is a rights organisation’s summary of decades. It belongs in the same breath as the flame outside the UN.

Human torches in European memory

In Europe we still grow quiet when we remember Jan Palach — the student who set himself alight in Prague in 1969 after the Soviet-led invasion crushed the Prague Spring. Francesco Guccini wrote Primavera di Praga; in that song Jan Hus burns again on the pyre — “Jan Hus sul rogo di nuovo bruciava.” Fire as history’s cruel refrain.

I grew up where Fra Dolcino passed and taught, not far from places tied to Margherita’s story — names that end in fire if you know the chronicle. Ask in Rome about Giordano Bruno and anyone who carries history will not be eager to chat lightly about human torches. The idea of a person becoming a torch still gives me the creeps. Every time.

So when Tibetans — monks, former monks, lay people — have immolated themselves in numbers that pass one hundred and fifty inside Tibet and in exile, and when one more does it in New York in front of the UN, I cannot come to terms with it. There is no calm place I can stand and say “this is where we are going” if people feel so oppressed that the last protest they see is to become a flame. E.’s unfamiliarity is understandable from someone who was not taught that chapter. Claiming you know history while this barely registers — that, to me, is depressing.

Big tech, two directions, one thin ethic

This may sound out of context for an IT blog. I am not sure it is. Platforms in the West and platforms in China both train us to scroll past what does not convert. Ethics becomes a compliance page or a keynote slide. The Tibetan question is awkward for Western politics too: when the Dalai Lama comes to Italy, officials often cannot speak with him openly because Beijing will be angry. That arrangement is laughable if you still believe diplomacy can mean something other than fear. I cannot accept it as normal. What unsettles me more is how little public talk there was, here, about the human torches themselves.

If we have the internet in our pockets and we stop paying attention to people who burn as a last sign — then our priorities have gone really awry.

I do really understand people who do not share my views. I am not asking everyone to become a Tibet activist overnight — I am not one myself, and that sucks, because probably we should be. I am saying there is something odd in a culture that sells connection while practising selective deafness — West and East, each with its own repertoire of silence. Govinda wrote so that a pilgrimage through white clouds would not be erased. The least the web could do, if it still means anything ethical at all, is not erase the people who are still trying to be heard — even when the only language left to them is fire.

Sources (for the factual anchors, not for the feeling):

• Lama Anagarika Govinda — The Way of the White Clouds / La via delle nuvole bianche (Astrolabio Ubaldini IT).
• AP — self-immolation outside UN headquarters, New York (2 July 2026).
• Amnesty International — statement on the New York self-immolation (summary: Amnesty International has documented decades of human rights violations against Tibetans, including severe restrictions on freedom of religion or belief, freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and cultural rights. Tibetans continue to face pervasive surveillance, arbitrary detention, restrictions on the use of the Tibetan language and the criminalization of peaceful expressions of Tibetan identity.)
• Francesco Guccini — Primavera di Praga (Jan Palach / Jan Hus).