Volvo is owned by Geely, a Chinese automaker. Jaguar Land Rover is owned by Tata, an Indian conglomerate. Volvo is produced in the US as well, so the Chinese have indirectly cracked the US car market open. But Volvo is still a Swedish brand.

I see a world where BYD cars like Yangwang U8, or Leopard 8, are produced in the US and are depicted in Hollywood movies as status symbols. Like once Saabs, BMWs, Jags or Volvos were. Today, techno-optimism means Eurodecentrism.

Seeing the influencer iShowSpeed testing and buying a Yangwang U9 hypercar in China is a preview of that. History is running in reverse with the opposite outcomes, says Balaji Srinivasan. And iShowSpeed in China is like a reverse Boris Yeltsin visiting an American grocery store.

The US and EU have a paradoxical relationship. European Union is a client entity (a protectorate) of the US, with its origins in the Marshall plan, a kind of economic wing or extension of NATO. At the same time the US is seen here as the last colony of Europe.

The example of the former is EU’s inaction after NS2 blow-up, and a forced prisoner exchange with Russia under Biden in 2024, that saw a blowback from Germany and Poland.

The example of the latter is the letter by the EU commissioner, Thierry Breton, to Elon Musk, warning him not to platform Donald Trump on his own platform X. A Frenchman trying to censor political speech between two prominent Americans, on an American platform. A regulatory Brusselization of California is another example of a cultural hegemony, the EU thought it had over the US.

With Trump 2.0, I see a Eurodecentrism in the US, a continuation of the decolonization process away from the European cultural hegemony and financial influence (via the eurodollar system).

This article explores a surrealism school of international relations, and a possibility that Europe, where the blue tribe retrenched, might be the top enemy of the Trumpian US right now, not China. The Chimerica might in fact expand and integrate India - turning into Chimerindia.

The US and BRICS might in near future collaborate to develop special innovation zones in Africa. The old Western Europe might be the last to reform and is for a rude awakening. But ultimately it will also benefit, due to longitudinal arbitrage it has with Africa, that it can harness into Afro-European Dynamism.

Asia has experienced a century of humiliation and is reversing to the mean in global and cultural dominance that persisted over millennia. More specifically, both Asia and the US have experienced half a century of cultural self-humiliation by different variants of the socialist virus imported from Western Europe and customized at home. Ranging from Communism, Marxism, Fabian socialism, Keynesianism, Rousseauvian blank-slatism and wokism.

The Internet increases variance and retribalizes people, says Balaji Srinivasan. Internet also destroyed the Western or Eurocentric mental dominance, noted Alexander Bard, after his book The Netocrats, originally published in 2000, sold well all over the world.

When Japan won the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, it caused a mental unlock in the so-called third world countries. Non-Westerners can beat Westerners. Inequality is dynamic, noted Nassim Taleb, and Balaji divides countries (and cities and regions) into the ascending world and the declining world in a fractal manner.

The Trumpian US and Singapore have many things in common, noted Scott Bessent - they both focus on safe streets, secure borders and small government. In short: Denmark has lost and Dubai has won. Or: South Africa has lost, and Singapore has won. Or: Dems have lost and Deng (Xiaoping) has won.

You can see the 2023 Gallup poll of public safety and see places like Singapore, UAE and even El Salvador as the safest, and places like South Africa as the least safe. To be fair, Denmark is still fairly safe and well policed, but as I noted above, inequality is dynamic, and honestly Denmark as part of the EU can’t be viewed anymore as part of the ascending world or as a model country to emulate.

We are moving away from the Fukuyama-esque “getting to Denmark” dream of End of History, into the dream of “getting to Dubai” (or Singapore that inspired Deng’s China) that won as the (end-of-history) current example of a Left-Right efficient fusion of good governance, and is becoming commodified.

The world has retribalized into hundreds of memetic tribes, and three big meta-tribes: the Red, Blue and Grey tribes. They somehow map onto Culture, Science and Tech or conservatives, liberals and libertarians. But they span across countries in the noosphere enabled by the internet. Balaji talks about internet values that are the torch bearers of the Western values.

If we look at Western Europe today, the values of Scottish Enlightenment, such as free speech, are grossly eroded by censorship and hate speech laws, while China tries to dominate the AI industry by embracing open source and delivering breakthroughs, such as DeepSeek R1.

In the woke West, we went from blobocracy into idiocracy, but some countries may join the Rest and tech counter-elites to embrace netocracy. In the US of 2025, with the DOGE effort to make the federal government more efficient, we see a battle between secret aristocrats, who call themselves public servants, and the tech counter-elites, that Alexander Bard called netocrats, back in 2000.

I have a personal experience working in international relations, on EU’s Global Gateway projects, and helping companies to expand to places like Kenya. I try to employ “a public use of reason” and have an attitude of “how can I help”. But I have met “secret aristocrats” who try to damage companies in a similar fashion like the Blob and Dems went after Elon during the Biden administration.

The problem with oligarchy is that there are many small monarchs who aren’t accountable to anybody and can rule for decades. Anthony Fauci is a good example, as he saw people protesting him back in the ACT UP days in 1990. See Dallas Buyers Club for the context of why FDA has a huge invisible graveyard for delaying treatments due to slow regulation.

The peak predator theory by Dave Snowden, and the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone, are another expressions of this “too many small monarchs” phenomenon.

European mandarins are even worse than this. And they are also serving within these broken legacy institutions for decades, suffocating industries and making the whole continent poorer.

To fight these techno-pessimistic small monarchs and secret aristocrats of blue and broken legacy institutions, we need to empower a decentralized movement of techno-optimistic founders. Dark Dynamism, that I propose in a series of articles, tries to do just that by emphasizing lunarpunk moonshots and a center-out strategy to empower founders who can become small monarchs too (of their own opt-in communities and tech startups) - but working for techno-optimism.

Producing great things in a more distributed manner or even in a stealth mode, but not being too bottom-up “libertarian about it” and relying on the emergence of some counter-culture through DAOs and vibing.

I think of (Curtis Yarvin’s and Nick Land’s) Dark Enlightenment as too top-down, and of “dark emergence” (various Game B and complexity adjacent movements) as too bottom-up. Therefore I position Dark Dynamism as a center-out strategy (combining decentralization with monarchy-style leadership of tech startups and pragmatic antagonism that expands the Overton window and explores the political compass).

Basically the VC model of funding tech founders is right, and it can be scaled to empower pro-tech small monarchs - founders of startup villages, a kind of proto-network states, which come after tech startups, startup accelerators and startup schools.

In the “clown world” of Eurocentrism, in the remnants of the blue tribe Blob’s global rule today, everything is upside down: peace means war, global connectivity and democracy means censorship, innovation means preserving the blue status quo, building infrastructure means importing globally-harmonized and techno-pessimistic regulations that are turning the ascending world into a declining one.

It was Europe (commissioners Thierry Breton and Věra Jourová) and not anyone from BRICS who threatened Elon Musk, the richest man in the world but also a private US citizen, not to talk to the former US president, Donald Trump during his 2024 election campaign, on X, a platform that Elon owns.

It is possible to extrapolate from similar weak signals (alongside with the Munich speech of JD Vance in 2025 and Scott Bessent praising Singapore) and see the line of argument that people like Tom Luongo are making as valid - it is Europe and not China that is the biggest enemy, and Trump goes after the eurodollar system to decrease leverage of the Europeans and force them specifically (and blue tribe in general) to start spending their assets and collateral.

If this analysis is correct, Trump will boost stablecoins like Tether (and USDC) to increase the demand for T-Bills and also to disrupt the eurodollar system.

Here is Europe, we are “Europoors”, at least in terms of energy production - so there aren’t very good prospects for us, unless we do some profound changes and soul-searching and shift towards techno-optimism.

If these weak signals multiply, Eurodecentrism could become the theme and meme for 2025, as fighting the blue online censorship was in 2024.

We could go even further against the current consensus and propose a likely future, where Chimerica doesn’t contract and deglobalization isn’t happening, but it expands into Chimerindia. A kind of US and BRICS realignment. This is partially in line with the “Multicurrecy Mercantilism” book by Kathleen Tyson and her argument that globalization isn’t receding.

But instead of de-dollarization, with the rise of stablecoins we will see a further disruption of the eurodollar system, that favored Europeans and British banks who used to set LIBOR and now keep trying to put SOFR under stress, argue people like Tom Luongo.

Technology decentralizes, and equalizes power away from the legacy centers and gatekeepers. In 2007 mobile banking emerged in Kenya, and since then Africans paid for everything with their mobile phones, a decade earlier than Westerners. A bit later India and China overtook the West in digitalization of their government services. From Singpass in Singapore to paying with your fingerprints in India or having all services on WeChat in China.

With my writing about Dark Dynamism I try to build upon ideas of Balaji Srinivasan and Alexander Bard and stress a vertical dimension of gradually bootstrapping network states with the DDD of drones, dark factories and deurbanization.

The vertical dimension is obvious with asteroid mining in space, drones above our head in the low-altitude economy, and robots, as well as fully-automated mines and dark factories that can be put underground.

More abstractly, the third aspect of deurbanization aims to help with reversing population decline and preserve the (vertical) ancestral lineage that goes through time and is cherished especially in Asia.

Denmark was an effective fusion between social democracy and globally competitive commerce. The country is ethnically quite homogenous, unlike Singapore or Dubai. It brought us Kierkegaard, it has the Christiania commune, companies like Maersk, and social innovations like Højskole and had registered same sex partnerships back in the 1980s. Denmark, since the cartoon controversy in 2005, is also quite skeptical towards immigration.

In no way I want to undermine the accomplishments of the Danish, but when I say that “Denmark has lost and Dubai has won”, I mean that the end-of-history form of efficient government, where the (counter)elites want to move, and which has more sovereignty, is today represented by places like Dubai and Singapore.

To sound a bit silly, the world is obsessed with Dubai’s chocolate, but once the best restaurant in the world, the Danish Noma, has issued repeated statements that it will close soon. The counter-elite vibe shift is towards places like Dubai, Singapore, El Salvador and Milei’s Argentina. Again to be fair, Portugal was hot among digital nomads couple of years ago.

I think we will go even further, and contrary to the Left consensus, we will lean into more financialization of the (pseudonymous and crypto) economy. Think young code influencers earning on sites like Replit and children launching tech startups with AI.

And contrary to the Right consensus, we can say that the future will lean into more smart and high-skill migration and multiculturalism, like in Dubai or Singapore.

We can also see that the safest places in the world right now tend to be places with significant Muslim populations, like the UAE and Singapore. Interestingly, Nayib Bukele, “the CEO” of El Salvador, the country that went from very unsafe to very safe very quickly, is of Palestinian descent.

If some of the French suburbs or parts of the coast would be turned into special economic zones under the UAE jurisdiction, we would get something like a positive Houellebecq’s Submission. And if some places were also turned into techno-optimistic special innovation zones, we would get something like a tech-Submission through a top-down gradualist style, a la Deng Xiaoping.

But Dark Dynamism lies between charter schools and charter cities, and proposes a center-out gradualist solution towards network states through small scale experiments run by empowered tech founders and community founders on the next frontier, that is startup villages.

After tech startups, accelerators and startup schools have proven to work, the next step is to venture into startup villages - using VC and SWF capital.

The internet and tech founders from all around the world have unbundled the West and brought us, what Balaji calls, internet values of free speech (free AI, Crypto and Social tech) as the torch-bearers of the Western values.

But the Eurocentric woke blue tribe feels still morally superior, and here a movement towards post-woke “queer network states” would provide an alternative to the last remnants of a moral higher ground for the West.

In Eurodecentrism I see a WAGMI World. Not the WWI analogy of a sudden deglobalization, or the WWII analogy of fighting the axis of evil, but a reversal to the mean with a rising Asia, and US joining forces with Asia against remnants of the Anglo-Saxon Western Europe.

Hopium Wars and the blue tribe’s censorship are over. The center of the world moves to the Pacific ocean and to the global empire of the Internet. I think the West vs Rest paradigm is over, and thus a new division between the Internet, the Rest and Europe will be more pronounced. And the Rest, the US and Internet will get closer to counter Europe. Techno-optimism means Eurodecentrism.

Before, what I call, the Velvet Revolution 2.0 of Trump 2.0 happened, Balaji saw the future as the Internet plus India vs the blue America vs a centralized China. A version of his tripolar world idea of BTC vs NYT vs CCP - as the three main power attractors of today.

Balaji saw Democrats gradually embracing China (after Newsom met Xi in China and Xi visited SF in 2023) and thus a future world where the Internet plus the Indian diaspora support decentralization, while China supports centralization. If the last century was about the fight between capitalism and communism, this one is about decentralization versus centralization, he thinks.

I think, using the tensegrity (tension combined with integration) model by Buckminster Fuller and Balaji’s division of three (Red, Blue and Grey) tribes, that more tension with Europe is on the horizon, as the blue tribe retrenches there, while the US and BRICS will integrate more.

At the end, the American “pivot to Asia” (at the expense of Europe) might not be about being able to fight China better. But about Eurodecentrism, about embracing the “getting to Dubai” (or Singapore) dream of efficient government - scaling capitalism with Asian characteristics to the US - to dethrone the old colonialists in Europe from their moral and cultural high ground.

Europeans and the blue tribe will be the last techno-pessimistic people to reform - but in the future “Dems can get they Deng (Xiaoping) too” - perhaps someone like a reborn/rebranded Gavin Newsom.

Surrealism was about fighting the subconscious trauma and PTSD from the WWI through art. Today I think we are getting a preview of a surrealism school of international relations, where the red tribe unites globally against financial, hybrid and depopulation wars inflicted by the blue tribe on the world over decades.

Think Club of Rome’s influencing China’s one-child policy. Think EU censorship reaching Americans through global harmonization of regulation.

The blue America partnered with Europe to fight Russia in order to fight China. Red America partnered with tech (counter-elites), and I think will parter with BRICS, including China, to fight the techno-pessimistic Europe and the blue tribe.

In this surreal world, Chinese automakers such as BYD will open factories in the US, and situate them in red states, like the Japanese once did with their factories. We might see BRI projects expanding with the US support, and perhaps to the US (from high-speed rail to startup villages). Perhaps even some kind of tunnel connection across Bering Strait after some 120 years of proposals may become a reality.

We might see the Chinese, Americans and Indians co-investing all around the world to build new special innovation zones, in places like Africa. Combining the Chinese hard power to build infrastructure, with the American soft power to move hearts and minds, and the Indian + Internet’s smart power to expand the proverbial win-win pie through tech investments.

We are entering proof-of-work politics, when trust (between tribes) is low, hard assets are in vogue. Gold and bitcoin will shine, while the euro might not. We might see history running in reverse, but with the opposite outcomes, as Balaji says. We might see Eastern and Southern Europe growing more distant from the EU mandarins and partnering more with red America in the Trump 2.0 world.

After Europe isn’t the center of the world map anymore, but just a periphery it was before the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and after “getting to Dubai” dream becomes commodified, the next frontier becomes deurbanization, and the Dark Dynamism of building startup villages.

The old Western Europe might be the last to reform and to become techno-optimistic, but there is a hope for Europe too, because of longitudinal arbitrage it has with Africa. Norway and Nigeria are on the same time zone. So I predict Afro-European Dynamism as the saving grace even for the old Europeans and the blue tribe’s legacy institutions.

Once the Chinese, Americans and Indians accelerate tech progress and infrastructure buildout in Africa, it might be the Europeans who benefit from it too, via the longitudinal arbitrage and remote economy in the age of Starlink and VR that enable viable startup villages in very remote places.

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What would be a Zoroastrian accelerationism or Zufi accelerationism? Zufism is a synthesis of Zoroastrianism, Zen and Sufism advocated by the Swedish philosopher Alexander Bard.

Zoroastrians are the oldest and tiny religious minority that is extremely successful. There are around 200,000 Zoroastrians globally, with 69,000 (Parsis) in India, but they own a significant portion of the county’s wealth. Their population in India peaked at 115,000 in 1941 and since then has decreased by almost half.

If you want to peek into the Parsi culture in Mumbai, you can watch this short DW documentary on their obsession with maintaining classic cars and bikes. Alexander Bard calls this trait imploitation, the opposite of exploitation. Z/acc would combine this obsession for continuity with radical tech innovation and putting as many industries as possible on the TV price curve.

Accelerationism is about maximizing asymmetry, the radical zero-to-one tech innovation, while Zufism is about maximizing continuity and balancing constructive production (Asha) with creative destruction (Druj). These two forces are in pragmatic antagonism, a kind of tensegrity, a tension combined with integrity, described by Buckminister Fuller.

Combining insights from Forrest Landry and Balaji Srinivasan, we can say that culture is about continuity, while science is about symmetry (independently reproducible research) and tech is about discontinuity and asymmetry - a creative disruption.

Science emerges from tech and vice versa. Tinkerers through practical experiments come up with novel insights that are later codified by scientists. Tech progress gives us asymmetrical advantages and creates zero-to-one products and services. These are later copied in 1-to-n mimetic fashion - going from asymmetry of tech to the symmetry of reproducible science and management. From a project, an event to a process.

Forrest Landry explains how you cannot maximize continuity and symmetry at the same time, but need to compromise a bit - trading some continuity for symmetry or vice versa. A MAGA vs tech culture war on high-skill immigration is a good illustration of this - there can’t be a full global meritocracy, the concerns of native population need to be taken into account.

This is indeed beneficial, because as philosophers Slavoj Žižek and Jean-Pierre Dupuy explain, pure meritocracy would create an explosion of envy, resentment and mimetic competition. Today if few people read my posts on X or FB I can console myself that shadow-banning or algorithmic discrimination against links to Substack might be part of the issue, not just my poor form or content.

This has to do with the concept of legibility or “seeing like a state” versus “learning like a machine” - to use Balaji’s idea. AI is a black box, and it has a potential to be a much smarter regulator than the state - but the opaqueness will always be a factor. Dark dynamism embraces this opaqueness and tech acceleration while preserving the continuity of culture.

Humanism is not enough, but contra Žižek, we had enough of universalism, Platonism and Eurocentrism. Alexander Bard explains how Zoroastrianism inspired Judaism and the Western culture, but our dominant religions today sacrifice quality for the pursuit of universalism and quantity. The ideas of abstract Kantian universalism and monolithic nationalism are the enemy of Taleb’s fractal localism.

Today we are experiencing a reversal to the mean - as Asia is rising to its historic dominance in trade and culture, after a very bad century for China and India, due to Western imports of communism and Fabian socialism.

The internet increases variance and retribalizes the world, says Balaji Srinivasan. But a decentralized high variance society is unstable in the long-term and needs a rebundling and recentralization into new “socionts”, new social ontologies.

Balaji’s notion of optimalism, as the opposite of maximalism is protopian - we can gradually arrive in a better and a more WAGMI world. By 10x tech improvements that compound over time, year by year.

Humanism/culture is not enough, but also science and tech are not enough. We can see tech founders as today’s renaissance men, a combination of artists, philosophers and entrepreneurs. Tech is about discontinuity and asymmetry, while culture is about continuity and science is about symmetry. Tech is also about zero-to-one, a kind of first-person “founder mode” view, a new kind of will to power, will to transcendence, will to intelligence and will to wisdom. Science is a third-person view and culture is a peer-to-peer second-person view.

Z/acc or Zufi accelerationism combines the continuity of culture with ancient wisdom practices going back millennia, with modern science that is about symmetry (independently replicable research) and the tech disruption that brings asymmetry and discontinuity. Zoroastrians meditate about Asha and Druj - constructive and chaotic forces. We need both, but in a proper dosage.

Think of Californian culture - where a tech founder meditates in the morning how to destroy legacy competition during the day, only to party in the evening (or go to bed early to improve his longevity prospects, as Bryan Johnson is watching). Z/acc would add a dimension of continuity and imploitation (an obsession with maintenance and withholding pleasure that is the opposite of exploitation), as well as accelerationist disruption and zero-to-one asymmetry.

The success of z/acc would be measured in reviving ancient cultures like Zoroastrianism and Sufism, (increasing quantity of z/acc members well beyond 100,000 and quality of their lives and interactions), but also in putting as many industries as possible on the TV price curve, while also making products that are repairable, durable and increase sovereignty and antifragility of individuals and collectives.

Dark dynamism, as a broader concept, lies “between charter schools and charter cities”. It is a movement towards network states that will try to succeed in the next frontier - moving from tech startups, startup hubs and incubators to startup villages. Z/acc can be one of spiritual fuels for such a movement.

Z/acc would try to ideologically unite the red, blue and grey tribes. Because it maximizes red’s continuity of culture, blue’s symmetry of science and grey’s discontinuity and asymmetry of tech. It also unites the West with the Rest, as both techno-optimism and z/acc mean Eurodecentrism.

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We don’t live in a unipolar, bipolar or multipolar world anymore, we live in an exactly tripolar world, thinks Balaji Srinivasan. He calls these three powers attractors of today - NYT, CCP and BTC. We can roughly translate them as the Western soft power to persuade minds and hearts, the Eastern hard power to build infrastructure, and the global Internet’s smart power to innovate and create positive-sum (win-win) outcomes.

Bitcoin at 100,000 dollars is a world power, and bitcoin at a million dollars is a global government - but a kind of pro freedom one that nobody expected, thinks Balaji. This is just one of the pieces of a WAGMI world thesis.

Hard power is deterministic and serves as the foundation for soft power. Winning wars is what makes ideologies stick, thinks Samo Burja. We remember and admire Spartans because they won. Soft power in turn helps to attract global talent and tech founders (smart power) to your country, perpetuating a victorious circle. We can also contemplate a stupid power alongside hard, soft and smart power. It is a raw and irrational fundamentalism or maximalism, that can be also very powerful in its own way.

Interestingly, these three power centers of CCP, NYT and BTC are antagonistic to each other, but are also gradually getting closer to each other. Buckminster Fuller’s concept of tensegrity helps to explain this “tension and integration”.

China tries to position Hong Kong as a crypto hub. Bitcoin ETFs were approved during Biden’s administration, which was otherwise very hostile to the crypto sector (Marc Andreesen often talks how regulators debanked some 30 crypto companies only in their portfolio at a16z).

NYT as a central node of the blue tribe is getting closer to CCP, with Gavin Newsom hosting Xi Jinping in SF in 2023, and with the blue tribe across the Atlantic, from the US to the EU, copying China in censorship and debanking of political opponents.

Bitcoin is merging with states like El Salvador, and now with Trump’s America, after the announcement of the strategic bitcoin reserve. China surprised the world with DeepSeek R1 on 20th January 2025, by creating a leading open source AI reasoner at that time.

Balaji thinks that social media disintermediated the hub-and-spoke topology of legacy media that caused the Gell-Mann Amnesia - of people being amused how wrong media can be on a subject they are familiar with, but swiftly turning the page and delegating to experts on another subject and forgetting they probably shouldn’t completely trust the other news article either. Social media allowed regular people and experts to talk to each other directly and complain about overreach of bureaucrats.

Social media caused a shift from (tele)prompter politicians to podcast politicians and a general shift towards, what I call, proof-of-work politics, using a concept that is at the core of bitcoin. China and the US are big on the philosophy of pragmatism and China likes to use actions more than words - delivering proof of work like Huawei Mate 60 before the former trade secretary Gina Raimondo visited China, or DeepSeek R1 on the day of Trump’s inauguration as the 47th US president.

Trump’s MAGA populism is actually orthogonal, and in actions often antagonistic, to all three of these major power attractors of today - NYT, CCP, and BTC - while it is actually closest to the CCP in a sense of trying to use markets and technology to lift millions of people out of poverty (but in Appalachia, rather than in Inner Mongolia).

Biden’s blue America copied China in online censorship, Trump’s red America is copying China in deflating asset prices and housing costs. Trump has the tech counter-elites of the grey tribe on his side now and this can make a big difference, as tech founders like Elon Musk are competitive with China, while the old establishment is not.

AI censorship was the hopium of the old establishment. We are moving away from the Hopium Wars, where the old blue elites wanted to mimic China in using AI censorship to control masses, into giving a real hope and wealth creation tools to normal people.

In the previous administration we witnessed a “NATO vs normies” dynamics, where the security state’s Blob was weaponized to fight populism of the ordinary Westerners who were not woke enough. The reason of this Western hybrid war against own populations was the overproduction of surplus elites and a rise of a laptop class that found it easier to fight thought crimes online from a nice office with a hot cup of coffee staring at a screen, instead of keeping the streets safe by actual policing.

In this new era of Trump 2.0 we might see a realignment from “NATO vs normies” towards “NATO for normies”, and a shift from DEI 1.0 (diversity, equity, inclusion) towards DEI 2.0 (defense equity investments in a broad sense). It’s not exactly a shift from a welfare state to a warfare state, but rather a shift from a woke West to a WAGMI world - where satisfied normies (in the West and in the Rest), and a robust manufacturing base, are key to both economic prosperity and national security.

But reindustrialization and keeping the normies safe and satisfied will require novel approaches. And this is the thesis of Dark Dynamism. A definitive-optimistic vision of bootstrapping a desired future with DDD - drones, dark factories and deurbanization.

Politics is the sublimation of violence, and alignment is the sublimation of politics. Equity investments create alignment, and a growing role of gold and bitcoin, as global neutral reserve assets, sublimates violence and politics into alignment. A move from war towards softwar.

We witness a move from pushing equity in a woke sense, to expanding equity ownership - turning normies into (hard) asset owners and VC investors.

As Marc Andreesen said, in the past wars were won with manpower and machines, in the future they will be won with money and technology. Hence we need free and open AI, Crypto and Social tech.

Bannon’s and Trump’s “China, China, China” might be a hurt amour-propre and a resentment at a society that is going in the opposite direction to America, to paraphrase LKY and his book From Third World to First. Balaji divides countries and cities into a declining world and an ascending world. Nothing is stable, inequality is dynamic, as Taleb explains.

To be fair, the admission of China to WTO was the root cause for deindustrialization that led to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 and to the opioid crisis in the Rust Belt. Subprime loans and drugs were bandages for men who suddenly lost meaning and for families who lost the firm ground of stable jobs.

I wrote about three doom scenarios based on these three major power attractors. NYT unchecked leads to a doom scenario I call Nuclear Yolocaust Times - an online woke swarm in a mimetic frenzy to outcompete each other in virtue signaling leads to playing with fire - as we witnessed during the Russian aggression in Ukraine and the Western response that lacked the measured statecraft approaches from the Cold War era, when mutually assured destruction (MAD) was very salient.

The CCP power attractor leads to a doom scenario that John Robb calls the Long Night - a digital authoritarianism that is very hard to escape and can enslave us for decades if not centuries. And bitcoin maximalism leads to a Mad Max world, a low-trust society with very high transaction costs and opportunity costs - as division of labor collapses and security costs skyrocket.

A WAGMI World is the opposite of these three doom scenarios, a world where “we all gonna make it” and where these three power attractors find a pragmatic antagonistic cooperation, where they can all win and increase the proverbial pie for everyone.

It is increasingly either a WAGMI World or an NGMI World for everyone, as the three major power attractors of NYT, CCP and BTC are converging. These attractors also represent soft power, hard power and smart power centers. Take Elon Musk as an example - he is accumulating and accelerating hard, soft and smart power capabilities at the same time.

And thus we might see a growing global alignment through reciprocal actions regarding tariffs focused on boosting domestic manufacturing in the West, and opening equity investments for normies and foreigners on a reciprocal basis.

Politics is the sublimation of violence. And alignment is the sublimation of politics. Balaji says, that alignment can be achieved by culture, markets (e.g. equity investments for all employees) and robots (because they don’t have principal-agent problems). Less humans in the loop, less problems there are.

We might see the post-1945 world order ending by sublimating the MAD (mutually assured destruction) violence threat into a MAD political economy threat. By something like 1000x cheaper space launches and resulting Brilliant Pebbles umbrella protection against nuclear threats and by making a human civilization multiplanetary.

Balaji in his book describes three Leviathans - God, Network and State. God is dead, said Nietzsche, and meant that the Gov replaced it. Now we can say Gov is dead and the Network has replaced it. I think these three Leviathans can be loosely mapped onto these three power attractors.

Balaji thinks that the “proximate purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, and the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality”. Tech tribe has a dream of getting to Mars, a dream of longevity and a multiplanetary civilization that has religious undertones.

And thus God can be mapped onto the BTC power attractor as a flag of technology. Specifically the bitcoin’s Immaculate Conception, and generally technology as a provider of practical miracles, is where we feel God today.

“Orange coin is the new blue jeans and rock and roll”, says Balaji - a flagship of freedom and prosperity that blue jeans and American music once represented behind the Iron Curtain.

NYT is upstream of the State in the US, because a journalist can fire a politician and not vice versa. NYT as a sixth generation hereditary monarchy is a central node of the blue tribe’s Blob, trying to fight all the threats to bureaucracy (what they call “our democracy” in the possessive sense).

But to paraphrase Alana Newhouse’s concept of brokenism - our Western blobocracy decayed and turned into idiocracy, a negative sum situation where everyone loses, including the old elites whose children can also fall victim to insecurity and drugs on the streets. Without course-correction the blue tribe is getting to Venezuela instead of Fukuyama-esque “getting to Denmark”.

China (CCP) represents the State as the third Leviathan due to its scale and capacity. A country with hammer and sickle marketing on the frontend is being run on a turbo-capitalistic backend, inherited from Deng Xiaoping and inspired by Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew.

Trump and other defectors from the Democratic party are trying to escape the “getting to Venezuela” madness of the blue tribe and secretly run on the original “getting to Denmark” dream of effective fusion between social democracy and globally competitive commerce. But they should update this dream to post-LKY era with a dream I call “getting to Dubai” (and getting to Singapore, El Salvador with Bukele, Argentina with Milei or Miami with Suarez).

With Elon Musk as the leading proponent of the “getting to Mars” dream we see a red tribe - grey tribe fusion of these dreams in the Trump 2.0 era. Social media, especially after Elon’s purchase of Twitter, “allowed peasants to talk to each other directly and freely” and the woke industrial censorship regime couldn’t hold up this massive wave of freedom anymore.

And the result is that the “getting to Venezuela” dream evaporated and the blue tribe has to pivot - either to double down on far left silliness or to rebrand into some YIMBY pro-growth and pro-tech crowd.

Instead of getting to Venezuela, the blue tribe in this bloom scenario would adopt a new dream - of getting to a startup city. The red tribe would adopt a new dream of getting to a startup village, a precursor or a preview to Balaji’s network state, and a deurbanization move that is at the core of my Dark Dynamism thesis. Thanks to drones, dark factories and deurbanization we could see a sad blue city being shrunk into a happy red-grey startup village. No more burning Teslas, burning Weymo’s robo-taxis, needles on the streets and aggressive blue mobs.

And the grey tribe of tech builders, as the new counter-elites, would keep their dream of getting to Mars and serve both blue and red tribes, helping them to establish new special innovation zones - in urban or rural settings - as startup cities and startup villages.

Internet is increasing variance and retribalizing people, thinks Balaji. The noosphere is fracturing with scissor statements. With social media, people are realizing that their neighbors and coworkers think very differently from them, and every new issue and a new scissor statement cuts a community in half. And at the same time, people can form very niche, yet global, memetic tribes.

But the noosphere can also unite masses on a global scale for brief moments - due to what I call “grand glue gestures”, as the opposite of scissor statements. This leads to proof-of-work politics and podcast politicians instead of (tele)prompter politicians who just used to placate people with platitudes.

From Nietzsche’s will to power, and Alexander Bard’s will to intelligence, I think we are progressing into will to wisdom as the main driver of ambitious people today - because power is being decentralized and intelligence is available through the current AI revolution. The most precious capability is agency - and wisdom is a result of many failed and successful actions and experiments by current counter-elites, the tech founders.

A new civilizational state can be built around internet values of freedom, pragmatism and techno-optimism. A new global alliance will be formed around free speech, open technology and fair commerce. There is no stopping this train.

Balaji talks about internet values as torch-bearers of the Western values. The Internet is a global empire that is more inclusive and universal than the West. The internet is actually a centristic and a “polytheistic” (multicultural) force that is in the middle between the woke leftist monoculture of the West and the very right-wing China of today.

The US could create a league of like-minded countries, like the Concert of Democracies idea from 20 years ago, but center it around free speech, techno-optimism and pragmatic antagonism.

Special economic zones were the innovation of Deng Xiaoping’s China that unlocked 100 trillion dollars with a moral innovation of “profit is good”. Special innovation zones, charter cities and network states with highly-aligned netizens can unlock similar magnitudes of prosperity through faster growth and freeing up tech founders to explore AI, Crypto and Social tech and longevity research.

The US could establish something like the International Technodemocracy Institute, alongside IRI and NDI, under NED or elsewhere. The institute would promote free and open AI, Crypto and Social tech, as well as small and local experiments in technodemocracy.

The digitally-native civilization state would bring both fragmentation and unification in geopolitics - we hear Trump talk about a bright future for Gaza and Greenland, but we could see also a move from Chimerica towards Chimerindia - unifying forces between three sovereigns with large populations and comparative advantages in hard power, soft power and smart power - China, the US and India - and their neighbors.

We could see Europe integrating with Africa to make use of longitudinal arbitrage. We could see Russia integrating both with Africa, India and China for the same reason - as it spans many time zones.

In 2023, Fiona Hill delivered a famous lecture where she framed events like the current Russian aggression in Ukraine as the West vs Rest conflict. The WAGMI world thesis presented in this article is about mean-reversion - the forces of globalization are too strong to reverse, as Kathleen Tyson, the author of Multicurrency Mercantilism book thinks.

The US dollar won’t be replaced by yuan and crypto with stable coins creates a new demand for T-bills. Just another example of the WAGMI World thesis. But the obverse of the WAGMI World is NGMI World - “we are all gonna make it” or we all are “not gonna make it” in a more aligned world.

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Both red MAGA and its blue BBB version of “Build Back Better” suffer from, what Peter Thiel would call, indefinite optimism or pessimism. The grey tribe of techno-optimists and tech founders should come up with a definite optimistic vision that would bootstrap the desired future.

I propose DDD, or drones, dark factories and deurbanization. Drones include all AI, automation and robotics. Dark factories require no lightning, as they are fully automated, and can be put underground or in remote places. Deurbanization is a bet at reversing the population collapse we witness across cultures and continents. With drones and dark factories we can shrink sad blue cities into happy red and grey startup villages.

I call this DDD vision Dark Dynamism, in a sense of an opaque renaissance. The opaqueness is driven by the rise of AIs, that are black boxes in particular, and by AI, Crypto and Social tech in general. It’s driven by BRICS that operate outside Western banks, by the return to gold as a neutral reserve asset, by rising decentralization and retribalization of the world. By multicurrency mercantilism and by tech startups, like Palantir, Anduril, DeepSeek or Unitree, that seem to rise out of nowhere with ambitions to dominate whole industries.

And the opaqueness is driven also by very strong mimesis that leads to preference falsification, especially among blue tribe’s pundits and blue institutions that are perfectly synchronized and very wrong on many issues, and unable to predict or articulate the future. For example, a China that is innovative and competitive across industries is news to them.

The opaqueness of a black box has a meaning also in the context of Newcomb’s paradox and one-boxing as an abstract metaphor for Puritan ethics and Weber’s paradox of reconciling the Protestant work ethics with predestination. To put it shortly, “one-boxing” the opaque box is a way to do “valley-crossing” from a local optimum to a higher optimum, and a way to lead a morally innovative and consistent life.

We can’t return to the 1950s of peak centralization driven by the printing press, radio and TV news. We can’t return to the Manhattan Project’s era when the US was running as a startup and attracted top engineering talent that had nowhere else to go, as the frontier was closed and titans of industry were crushed by FDR. We can’t return to the era of the Marshall Plan when half of the world was bombed out and the US was the world’s factory.

The blue tribe was all about “getting to Denmark”, an effective fusion of social democracy and globally competitive commerce. Think Højskole and Maersk. But today, the blue tribe is all about getting to Venezuela - about chaos, degrowth and anarcho-tyranny.

The opposite of anarcho-tyranny is a smart regulator with very low rates of false positives and false negatives, says Balaji Srinivasan. The opposite of a blue anarcho-tyranny is an effective fusion between the red tribe of pro-business conservatives and the grey tribe of techno-optimists. The old establishment versus masses and new counter-elites.

I argue that, instead of blue degrowth, this red-grey fusion is about dark growth. Instead of getting to Denmark - a universalistic dream - it is about many dreams. Like getting to Dubai. But not just Dubai, it’s about getting to Miami, El Salvador, Singapore and hopefully many more places soon.

Dark Dynamism is a somewhat similar idea to Bryan Johnson’s Don’t Die startup society with Blueprint protocol for longevity. But aimed at improving the longevity of a sovereign collective. Be it a tribe, a state, a network state or a civilization state.

Drones in a broad sense of AI, automation and robots provide symbiotic intelligence for human transportation, protection, learning, work and family life. It’s not just the emerging low-altitude economy, it’s also all the EVs with autonomous driving and humanoid robots. We need a new uniparty to compete with Unitree.

Dark factories in a broad sense, from cloud kitchens to autonomous mines, asteroid mining and orbital manufacturing reopen new frontiers on the vertical axis - from the subterranean domain to space. “No human, no lights” - except for vertical farms that use LED lights to grow food. Also in terms of alignment and agent-principal problems: the less humans in the loop, the less problems, and the faster, better, cheaper the outcome.

Deurbanization as the third D in the DDD of Dark Dynamism is made feasible by the other two Ds - drones and dark factories. By shrinking a sad blue city into a happy red/grey startup village with lots of kids and robots. Historians like Rudyard Lynch argue that people haven’t learnt how to live in cities yet. Therefore we see population declines and collapses throughout history and are currently experiencing them across cultures - from Japan or South Korea to Eastern Europe to Parsis in India.

In 2023 I wrote that I am a big fan of American Dynamism but I thought post-American dynamism is more likely. In 2025 I am not so sure. I think that Trump 2.0 is akin to FDR 2.0, but in reverse (dismantling the administrative state) and that we have experienced a Velvet Revolution 2.0 - with AI, Crypto and Social tech being set free.

Instead of great power competition we might get a smart power competition and more of a “WAGMI world” - where the rising tide and faster (dark) growth, with less mimetic competition, “lifts all the boats” and puts more products and services on the TV price curve.

The three key technologies of AI, Crypto and Social are upstream of many social changes - after decades of centralizing technologies of the printing press, radio and television we got decentralizing technologies. Like mobile phones, social networks, crypto, drones and now (open source) AI with step function changes, like DeepSeek R1 with 30x cost reduction that destroyed the decel “AI safety” plan to centralize and control AI among a few Big Tech players under the (US, UK, EU) state control.

Companies like Palantir and Anduril have started the American Dynamism trend by unlocking defense industry for tech startups. And if the US was the only place of such zero-to-one innovation, Dark Dynamism as a concept would be less relevant (even though the concept of opaqueness and DDD applies to these two companies as well).

But DeepSeek R1 made it clear for the normies that China can innovate and use Western values of freedom and openness embedded in the open source movement for its own means.

This embarrassed the West that in the last decade copied China with half-measures and slipped into digital authoritarianism, with censorship and debanking of political opponents of the blue tribe.

Dark Dynamism is compatible with both the network state and civilization state concepts. It stresses a vertical dimension (from subterranean domain to space) compared to network states that focus on horizontal decentralization and nuke-proofing digitally-native crypto nations that will compete with legacy fiat nations.

At the same time, Dark Dynamism pushes a horizontal dimension of network states further by stressing deurbanization - moving from sad blue cities to happy red/grey startup villages. It also stresses an orthogonal dimension of opaqueness and “valley-crossing” embedded in the metaphor of a black box in Newcomb's paradox.

Without open source AIs like Llama or R1 the proprietary versions would remain black boxes. But an arrival of R1, seemingly out of nowhere, is emblematic of a dark growth and zero-to-one innovation coming outside Silicon Valley.

Tech founders are definite optimists, while venture capitalists are indefinite optimists - investing in many startups with opposite hypotheses. Dark Dynamism with drones, dark factories and deurbanization adds a definite optimistic dimension to VC investing and connects it to sovereign wealth fund type of investing - like terraforming deserts in the Middle East using desalination plants. Think unlocking trillions through special innovation zones, as successors of special economic zones.

Ultimately Dark Dynamism can support a rise of a new civilization state, consisting of many network states, through a fusion of grey and red tribes, that avoids creating a universalistic monoculture. Balaji says that the continuation of Western values are the internet values - of free speech and free and open technologies.

We might not see another Manhattan or Apollo projects done by the US government anytime soon, but we might see a new Trump 2.0 administration supportive of “lunarpunk moonshots” - contra Mariana Mazzucato, the future is entrepreneurial network states instead of The Entrepreneurial State.

We are simply reversing to the mean from a very strange and ahistorical 20th century of peak centralization. There be dragons. Or rather drones, dark factories and deurbanization.

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USAID was DOGEd and their staff was twitterized, as people say today. But the US empire-building function of USAID will be very likely preserved at the State Department, as Mike Benz says.

If another development agency is spun-off, I think we will see something resembling VC investments in companies like Anduril and Palantir all around the world, supporting tech founders and startup society founders, and building special innovation zones, instead of the classic NGO support.

This will be a step function change in a decade-year long trend of private sector engagement in development cooperation.

Because civil society organizations are hard to scale and sustain, while tech startups are inherently scalable and have a goal not just to be profitable, but to dominate their industry verticals.

Even if state actors want to optimize for opacity, supporting businesses and doing commercial deals is preferable, due to FARA-like limitations in various countries. The USAID’s clandestine funding of ZunZuneo, as a twitter competitor in Cuba, often mentioned by Mike Benz, is just one example of a broader trend that even MAGA will lean into.

Mike Benz often says that “if something is too dirty for the CIA, they hand it over to USAID”. The reason is that USAID doesn’t require the approval of the US president for certain sensitive projects and activities that the blue tribe bureaucrats want to do but wouldn’t get past elected officials.

And these sensitive activities can be obfuscated by layers of plausible deniability and embedded in “humanitarian aid and development work”. Supporting companies in third countries, from tech startups to regular consultants, is the next logical step of going deeper and darker still. It solves for scalability, commercial sustainability, opacity and even prestige for the activists, at the same time.

True charity is investment, says Balaji Srinivasan. Very few people would give half of their net worth to a random person on the street to see him immediately become richer than them. But with venture capital investments this regularly happens. Peter Thiel invested in Mark Zuckerberg and both got richer, but the founder of Facebook got much richer than Peter Thiel. Venture capitalists figured out how to align incentives and solve the principal-agent dilemma through equity investments.

Equity investments create win-win or lose-lose outcomes for all shareholders, therefore they align founders with management and employees, as everyone has a skin in the game. Currently, equity investments are very underutilized in development cooperation.

Balaji says that skin in the game protects against evil (win-lose) actors but not against stupid (lose-lose) ones. This is true to an extent, because the point is to get stupid actors as quickly as possible out of the arena - and self-destruction does that. Therefore supporting tech startups is much more preferable and ethical than supporting NGOs (greetings to EcoHealth Alliance).

Some 15 years ago, at one foundation I worked on dozens of US-funded projects promoting “democracy and development abroad”, including in most of US adversaries. If something like a local FARA was a problem, and if the grant wouldn’t be registered or the funds withheld, we would do a commercial contract with a for-profit consultant instead of a grant. We would also develop an ecosystem of local companies that we would turn into local ESG leaders, as people call them today.

As with citizen journalism, you can disintermediate NGOs, by supporting individuals directly with something like convertible grants - that later turn into equity, if a milestone is reached and a tech startup is established. Think of it as a pre-seed funding in venture capital.

You can have a portfolio of portfolios approach and have a US sovereign wealth fund (SWF) providing investments to various managers and entities that would reinvest, but also “regrant and subgrant” - using convertible grants, that can lead to a commercial upside for the donor. And if they don’t, at least those actors that underperform are gone from the arena much quicker than NGOs that suffer from mission creep (again greetings to EcoHealth Alliance).

Convertible grants can be provided by some newly created entity like the Techno-Democracy Institute (TDI). Think IRI or NDI under NED, but for the grey tribe of techno-optimists. TDI would fund bottom-up and small experiments in techno-democracy - aligning aspiring community leaders with their constituents through free and open AI, Crypto and Social tech.

There is a paradox at the heart of the US empire. Europe is a protectorate of the US, while America is Europe’s last colony. NS2 blow-up and a prisoner exchange with Russia forced on Europeans during Biden’s administration are proof of the former. While the pressure from European mandarins, like Thierry Bretton and Vera Jourova, on free speech of US citizens like Elon Musk, not to platform a former US president Donald Trump on his own platform X, are proof of the latter.

The paradox of the US as an empire and the US as Europe’s colony can be explained by tribal lenses. USAID, the EU, OECD, NATO or even the UN can be viewed as apps running on a blue tribe’s operating system and serving the blue tribe’s Blob of unelected bureaucrats that have ruled the world through global harmonization of regulation and through soft power of blue institutions, from NYT and Hollywood to Harvard.

Blue tribe sees a European social democracy as the end of history - hence Fukuyama’s “getting to Denmark”. But things played out differently and the blue tribe is on the path of getting to Venezuela. Social and moral innovations in governance have happened elsewhere, first in Singapore under LKY’s vision “from third world to first”, then in China after Deng Xiaoping and in places like Dubai. And now in El Salvador and Argentina. We can call this trend of getting to Dubai, as opposed to getting to Denmark.

Tech is the opposite of woke, explains Balaji. To preserve free speech, in a broader sense of free AI, Crypto and Social tech, the new US administration needs to transform USAID into US Investment - building special innovation zones all around the world that will be under red and grey tribes’ jurisdictions. Think Building Man instead of Burning Man, as Balaji says.

Imagine a building competition in a HIMBY style that would create a startup village even faster and better than the Chinese can build infrastructure. And imagine this startup village would also serve as an “Olympic Village” for the Enhanced Games taking place there - connecting techno-optimists and longevity enthusiasts.

The opposite of leadership is receivership, says Balaji. The United States experienced receivership for a long time - under the blue oligarchy no leader was in charge, so petty monarchs like Fauci could proliferate and build their small kingdoms for decades. And the voters weren’t in charge for sure, while elected officials were very impotent and unpopular.

The trust in blue institutions cratered at the same time those institutions redefined democracy as a consensus of these same institutions, instead of the consensus of voters. Hence we lived through a decade of anti-democracy with half-measures in online censorship that tried to prop up the outdated half-soviet system in the West.

Instead of anti-democracy efforts abroad, the US could fund techno-democracy experiments. The continuation of Western ideals of liberty, equality and brotherhood with new tech tools and new frontiers.

Instead of (US)aid for the blue tribe, we could see US investment for moral and technological innovations of the red and grey tribes.

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The West was trying to beat China by copying China through half-measures in censorship and ESG-driven industrial policy.

China feeds opiates to the Western underclasses, while our old elites get high on their own AI hopium supply, trying to gain power through censorship.

Religion is the opium of the masses, claimed Marx. Today, we can say that a religion of AI safetyism, AI doomerism and digital censorship is the hopium of the old elites.

History is running in reverse with the opposite outcomes, says Balaji Srinivasan. Before the West was pushing opium to Chinese elites, now China is feeding the fentanyl addiction and homeless crisis in the US.

Before, the Rest tried to emulate the West - importing ideologies like communism, now the West copies China’s digital censorship coupled with a decade of something akin to the Cultural Revolution and ESG over-regulation.

Every successful political power is an effective fusion between the Left and the Right, says Balaji. AI for the old establishment is another ESG holy war, in terms of AI safety, and a very strong tool for online censorship that they hoped to control via regulations on both sides of the Atlantic. The DeepSeek R1 moment of an open source “flippening” in AI has vaporized that hope and turned it into hopium.

Peter Thiel thinks that the ESG movement advances China’s interest, because it decelerates the West in terms of technological progress and energy security. Balaji thinks of blue tribe as incompetent communists that try to copy competent communists in China.

We can view the grey tribe as competent (venture) capitalists and competent tech founders. What we saw with Xi visiting Newsom in SF in 2024 is maybe a preview of things to come - US Democrats, as incompetent communists, forming closer ties with the competent ones in China.

China after Deng Xiaoping copied the Singapore model and came up with a moral innovation of “entrepreneurship is good”. Deng Xiaoping said “it doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice”. This pragmatism transformed China and caused a $100T wealth unlock, installing turbo-capitalism on the backend, while keeping the CCP frontend marketing of the hammer and sickle intact.

Free and open AI, Crypto and Social tech, coupled with progress in longevity research can be a similar $100T wealth unlock for jurisdictions that embrace techno-optimism.

The progressive mind is obsessed with power and cares only about power. But progressives are good with words and painting narratives that can move hearts and stir strong emotions.

Over the last 30 years, the old Western elites squandered the biggest global lead the US had, as a hyperpower in the 1990s. Today China can build infrastructure orders of magnitude faster than the sclerotic West. Think something like 1000x. The hopium of our elites was that they can censor like China and use their soft power to market this censorship as fighting disinformation, without delivering any material progress in terms of improving security and welfare of citizens.

The West lost its hard power rapidly, because hard power is about building infrastructure and factories, not about dropping bombs. The result is a fact that in the case of US - China war over Taiwan, the US would run out of missiles in 8 days and it would take years to stockpile them again.

Startups like Anduril are trying to change that and turn the US into a global weapons shop instead of a global cop. Because the cop has no backup and was defunded by the woke blobocracy-turned idiocracy.

The current LLM paradigm in AI will probably not get us an AGI that can replace humans and become their overlord. AI is a symbiotic intelligence or an augmenting intelligence - helping top performers be x time better. But even narrow applications of Western AI get slower and dumber by politically correct frontier models.

Even today after Donald Trump has become the 47th president of the USA, Google’s AI product Deep Research refuses to answer facts that are against its woke ideology. Podcast hosts at Pirate Wires mentioned how they wanted to know which presidents have changed geographic names besides Donald Trump, and Google’s Deep Research refused to answer, and behaved like its Gemini sibling a while ago with the woke Founding Fathers fiasco.

We cannot beat adversaries like China or Russia with similar approaches in censorship and digital authoritarianism, where the USG in the Biden’s administration wanted to control and censor AI, Crypto and Social technologies and limit them only to a handful of players that would merge with the security state.

Free speech is the only comparative advantage the West has left. And we need to double down on that unique quality that was gravely eroded in the last 10 years. We also need to double-down on AI in defense tech besides “LLM poetry generators”, to paraphrase Alex Karp from Palantir.

We need a new uniparty that can beat Unitree - with better AI and robotics - leveraging our only comparative advantage of free speech in the West and attracting top tech founders to the West. JD Vance had a strong message to the EU at the Munich security conference: “shared values make for strong alliances”. No free speech means no security from the US, to put it more bluntly.

The West needs dozens of companies like Anduril and Palantir, that focus on sensor fusion and AI integration into modern weapons systems. Humanoid robots will not replace elite soldiers anytime soon and AI with exoskeletons can augment them and make them much faster.

Just a few years ago it was considered a “verboten” conspiracy to suggest China is fueling the fentanyl overdose crisis in the US. But the logic was clear - China is an autocracy, and so the fentanyl precursors need to be exported at least with the knowledge and approval of the CCP.

The US benefited from the Opium Wars that brought “a century of humiliation” to China. But now we live not just in an Asian century, but in an inverted century as well, thinks Balaji Srinivasan - the countries that were down will be up and vice versa.

Between 2011 and 2013, China has used more concrete than the US in the entire 20th century. China retired steam locomotives in 2005. And from 2008 until 2024 it went from zero to 46,000 kilometers of high speed rail. The country with the second largest HSR network in the world is Spain with over 2,000 km. China has a lead in energy generation and nuclear plant buildout, with 150 new reactors to be built in the next 15 years.

China can build ships 350x faster than the US, says Palmer Luckey. What’s even worse, all the commercial ships they build need to meet military standards, for example a ferry needs to be able to carry tanks. So they can convert all their commercial vessels into military ones in times of war. This is an expensive signal of their expansionist regional ambitions beyond Taiwan, thinks Palmer Luckey.

With DeepSeek R1 we might have witnessed a preview of things to come. An open source “flippening” where no country has a decisive lead in the frontier AI models.

The current restrictions on advanced semiconductor exports to China make sense only if the US can achieve a narrow and practical AGI in the next couple of years, otherwise they are counter-productive as they force China to be more innovative, think people like Dylan Patel. The popular scenario of superhuman AGI that brings singularity is unrealistic with the current LLM paradigm, at least according to people like Naval Ravikant and Yann LeCun.

Balaji Srinivasan says that the current LLMs work on use cases where the rules don’t change, or they change very slowly - like a language. But if they enter markets with adverse actors and constantly changing rules and competition, they might be like a shark washed ashore - a peak predator outside its habitat.

With the American lead on AI we might see “a short bright day before the dark long night”. John Robb has an AI doom scenario called the Long Night, where an authoritarian China dominates in the AI race and exports its technology to the rest of the World. As a result it will be almost impossible to organize opposition or protests in countries with Chinese AI.

Marc Andreesen got politically active when he saw regulation and censorship efforts from the Washington DC Blob in the AI industry that reminded him of the crypto industry crackdown and debanking under, what Nic Carter describes as, the Operation Choke Point 2.0. The censorship of AI is magnitudes more scary than the censorship of social media, because AI will control much more in our lives than conversations.

The old security establishment’s Blob wanted to control speech online, they wanted to introduce CBDCs and destroy the crypto industry. They wanted to limit AI industry to a few players and destroy AI startups. They went after energy companies and with ESG made building anything slow and expensive.

But in 2025, the Hopium Wars, where the woke decels thought they can copy Chinese digital authoritarianism and decelerate tech progress with ESG, are, it seems, over.

Trump’s free-speech diplomacy presented by JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference and the open source flippening in AI by DeepSeek R1 turned the one hope the old elites had to remain in power - digital censorship - into hopium.

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Steve Bannon attacked the network state idea by Balaji Srinivasan during an interview with Ross Douthat from the New York Times.

Some things change, some remain the same. Balaji vs NYT fight is eternal, but now he and the network state are being attacked at NYT by Steve Bannon.

Downstream media portrayed JD Vance as being 'weird', and now Bannon smears tech counter-elites as being weird and radical transhumanists.

But, Bannon is for the little guy, Mac Andreesen is for the little tech, and Balaji is for the little network (startup societies, network unions…).

They are all for the median voter's concerns, like secure borders and streets. They are also all opposed to global harmonization of regulation and for increasing the sovereignty of citizens and the US (where the First Amendment was constantly attacked by the Blob via the EU and Five Eyes partners).

We lived through a censorship and debanking era of half-measures in digital authoritarianism, copying China and Russia.

But free speech is the only comparative advantage the West has left. And the antidote to both CCP and NYT is BTC, to paraphrase Balaji. We need free and open AI, Crypto and Social tech - working towards techno-democracy, another balajism. The Network State book is a manual, not a manifesto. It's suitable for anyone who has a moral innovation, including conservatives.

Balaji mentions The Benedict Option as an example of a possible startup society in his book. Network state is about how a small and digitally-native startup society can gradually grow and get some kind of diplomatic recognition. Think Vatican, the Knights of Malta or the Bektashi Order - but started cloud first, land last. Network state is mostly about exit, but it is compatible with reform too.

We saw the State merging with the Network in China, as CCP took over their tech industry and crushed tech founders. We see the Network merging with the State in the US, as tech counter-elites aligned with Donald Trump as an FDR 2.0 figure. A Velvet Revolution 2.0 if you will.

To be generous to Steve Bannon, he is like Moses who choses himself not to enter the promised land.

To be less generous, he is the first disciple of Trump who went to Danbury prison for him, but whose primary skill lies in "flooding the zone with (bull)shit". He isn't a tech founder like Elon Musk who can do "practical miracles" with Neuralink. And he feels resentment, a hurt amour-propre to be a v1 and not a v2.

Bannon is famous for talking about a managed decline in the West. But I think he is too optimistic about the state capacity of broken institutions (see Alana Newhouse’s idea of brokenism vs status-quoism). All they can do today is an unmanaged decline. It's the evil (win-lose) vs stupid (lose-lose) distinction that Balaji talks about.

This can change with Donald Trump as he reins in the little monarchs that proliferate in oligarchies before they destroy them. Think Fauci. See peak predator theory and the story of reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone.

Elites in the West had for decades a Fukuyama-esque end-of-history dream of getting to Denmark. An effective synthesis of a high-trust society, strong institutions, rule of law, social democratic welfare state and globally competitive corporations.

But with our broken and woke institutions and an industrial censorship apparatus that redefined democracy as a consensus of those institutions, the West under blue tribe dominance has a dream of getting to Venezuela.

Tech counter-elites have a dream of getting to Mars. And red tribe today has a dream of getting to Dubai instead of Denmark. A dream of safe streets, pro-tech and pro-entrepreneurship culture and escaping global harmonization of regulation.

We needed to free-up social media to invent flying cars - to paraphrase Peter Thiel. Marc Andreesen explains how FAA prevented US drone startups from flourishing, while allowing Chinese drone industry to get ahead. It is easier to found a new country than to reform FDA, says Balaji. And thus a network state concept is a more accessible way to exit than getting to Mars and it is compatible with getting to Mars - by letting 100 special innovation zones bloom first.

Deng Xiaoping has transformed China and created a $100T wealth unlock with a moral innovation of “entrepreneurship is good”. He got the inspiration from LKY, who transformed Singapore from third world to first. Blue tribe in the US and the foreign policy establishment’s Blob as its core are doing the opposite - taking the West from first world to third. Getting to Venezuela is about unmanaged decline.

What we see with Elon and D.O.G.E. are glimpses of techno-democracy. Using digitally-native tools freed from censorship, like X, to effectively expose the corruption of public servants, who are in fact secret aristocrats, and to effectively organize a pro-reform community.

Balaji’s idea of techno-democracy is more bottom-up and peer-to-peer using decentralized crypto like ethereum and solana and social tech like Farcaster, Curtis Yarvin has a similar idea of automating your vote and delegating your power to empower people like Elon who can fight for your interests.

Elon is doing reform, rather than a more Balaji-like exit, and he is using a centralized social media that he bought - first reforming twitter and reducing its workforce by 80%, and now “twitterifying” the headcount of USAID.

True charity is investment, says Balaji. And so USAID might get reformed around a newly discussed idea of a US sovereign wealth fund. It can provide convertible grants and VC investments all around the world, to incentivize the boom of special innovation zones, new tech startups and startup societies with moral innovations.

The fight against censorship won’t stop with reforming USAID, the deep abstract enemy of free speech is global harmonization of regulation that allows the EU, the Five Eyes countries, OECD and UN to police the speech of Americans. These should be next targets of free speech advocates like Mike Benz.

Balaji says we live in a tripolar world - NYT vs CCP vs BTC. Blue America and China are for centralization and global harmonization according to their own visions, while bitcoin, and the free and open AI, Crypto and Social tech, are for decentralization. This third pole of bitcoin, as the flagship of technology, is at the core of concepts like the network state.

Tech counter-elites and the new Trump administration should extend freedom of speech to the rest of the world and help to establish special innovation zones in partner countries.

We live in a Red Queen world where you have to constantly innovate, to keep your spot. This calls for Red Queen conservativism - an understanding that we cannot go back to the 1950s of peak centralization and that reversal to the mean is a real thing.

Asia has dominated the world trade for centuries and the US needs to out-innovate its adversaries just to keep its current prosperity. MAGA is similar to Build Back Better.

But we might need a definite optimistic vision of the future, to paraphrase Peter Thiel. And I propose - DDD - or drones, dark factories and deurbanization.

Dark Dynamism if you will.

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A market whale can move the market, as we have seen with George Soros (with his deep pockets and US State Department connections) or pseudonymous crypto whales. An Overton whale can make a big splash in the market of ideas and shift the Overton window. Think Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin or Balaji Srinivasan. The theory of flex connects the two.

A flex here means a showcase of a proven zero-to-one edge in terms of technology or a network of connections. Examples include Elon Musk buying Twitter, Donald Trump attracting tech counter-elites, Huawei releasing Mate 60, as a proof it can avoid sanctions, and the recent R1 release by DeepSeek, which caused a paradigm shift in AI models.

George Soros is famous for his theory of reflexivity. Often markets get reflexive, when perceptions and reality diverge, and create positive feedback loops that create bubbles or pop them and where perceptions affect companies’ fundamentals. It’s similar to the mimetic theory of René Girard and connected to concepts like zero-to-one by Peter Thiel, virtualism by Bruno Maçães and simulacra by Jean Baudrillard.

During Donald Trump’s second inauguration as the 47th president of the US, tech founders and CEOs of American big tech national champions were shown prominently and were positioned next to the president. This was a signal both to the blue tribe domestically and to countries like China that the US cherishes its tech founders and sets them free to innovate. A flex towards incompetent communists at home and competent communists abroad, if you will.

A Chinese quant firm Deepseek released their R1 AI model on 20th January 2025 (the day of Trump’s inauguration), an open source competitor to o1 by OpenAI. Reportedly it cost them only five million dollars to train that model. It represents an open source “flippenning” and a paradigm shift towards more inclusive cost-effective and collaborative AI systems. Marc Andreesen called it an AI’s Sputnik moment, for the US and from China. But it also makes AI much more decentralized and available for the rest of the world.

During Biden’s administration, Huawei unveiled the Mate 60 phone in August 2023, right during a visit of the US Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo, to China. The phone featured a 7nm chip designed and produced in mainland China, and the launch was meant to send a signal that China can advance its tech despite sanctions on semiconductors.

Huawei got into producing high-end EVs, and R1 from DeepSeek might be just a foreshadowing of a much bigger leap in AI in the future. And thus a flex becomes reflexive.

These three examples of ‘flex’ show how actions speak louder than words and how theory (propaganda narratives, virtualism, simulacra) clashes with reality and crashes into the Real. We could add how Elon Musk bought Twitter to save free speech and caught a rocket booster with “chopsticks” while being busy campaigning for Trump.

Compare the rise of US and Chinese tech unicorns with almost non-existent EU’s AI startup scene and all the non-achievements coming from the EU, like GDPR, DSA and attached bottle caps. Ozempic is great, but Novo Nordisk was founded in 1923, so 70 years before the EU.

The R1 model by DeepSeek might burst the recent AI bubble and damage the Magnificent Seven stock rally, and/or it might accelerate us towards the bright techno-optimistic future where AI is suddenly much more decentralized and cheaper and thus accessible to anyone, from students in Kenya to artists in India.

Proof of work is what matters today. The Internet increases variance, says Balaji Srinivasan. It disintermediates the media and makes long tail content viral. We get very short TikToks and very long podcasts. Words are cheap, but Elons are scarce. Hence we enter the proof-of-work politics era.

Proof of work is necessary but not sufficient. A focused work is better than scattered heat of particles flying all around, to use Balaji’s metaphor of why we need non-entropic social media. But a novel work is much better still. A flex here means an unexpected and zero-to-one breakthrough that wasn’t expected - which is also connected to the dark growth trend.

To be flexing in a zero-to-one and a stealth-tech-innovation style, you need to be sovereign first. Therefore China is quite a different animal compared to Japan and the US can’t simply “Plaza Accord” China as it did to Japan, stopping its rise. Because it doesn’t have a root access to China. As China, unlike Japan, is not a vassal state of the US and has no US military bases and thus can do counter-intelligence much more effectively, as Balaji often mentions.

Similarly both Elon Musk and Donald Trump have zero-to-one edge that gives them next-level sovereignty and enables them to flex. Elon in terms of tech stack crucial for US national security - which made his fight for free speech and purchase of Twitter much more feasible, as Mike Benz often explains.

And Trump has an edge in terms of attention economy and being a true outsider, a non-Blob creature, and a first American and a businessman who became a president without being a politician or an army general first.

The theory of flex proposes that an Overton whale can become a market whale or vice versa. But in needs to have a degree of sovereignty and a proven zero-to-one edge in terms of technology or a network of connections.

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Balaji Srinivasan says that a tech founder is above the university professor today, and in fact professors leave academia to become tech founders. And the current Western political regime in the post-FDR era, run by Blue America, puts scientist-bureaucrats, like Anthony Fauci, who control billions of dollars and influence policy for decades, above politicians. While the FDR era crushed industrialists, the FDR 2.0 is bringing tech founders to the forefront. As Balaji says, the history is running in reverse, with the opposite outcomes.

Nietzsche’s will to power as a concept was suitable for the industrial age and rising centralization that was produced by a centralizing technology of the printing press. As an industrialist you wanted to own newspapers and pay historians to write how factories are the pinnacle of development. People in the Bronze Age didn’t know they lived in one, the concept was invented during the industrial age by historians paid by factory owners, explains Alexander Bard.

In the internet age we aspire to create an AI God or ideally AI gods. God exists - but in the future, as Alexander Bard wrote in his book Syntheism. Will to power is necessary but not enough, will to intelligence becomes the primary drive. As Taleb said: “To become a philosopher king, start with being a king, not being a philosopher”.

Industrialists wanted to own a penthouse in London or New York to show off their wealth and proximity to power. Netocrats go to Burning Man to self-actualize and meet their peers, a kind of proof of work experience in the harsh desert environment. But we need Building Man, says Balaji Srinivasan, a kind of Olympics for the builders who leave something like a startup village and a vibrant tech community behind once the event is over.

In the network age both power and intelligence are getting decentralized and disintermediated. Agency becomes abundant and so people get the edge just by doing things, to paraphrase Joker in The Dark Night. If their actions were wise can be judged only in retrospect. Think of not just Elon with his highly diverse and successful companies, but Pieter Levels who challenged himself to create startups on a monthly cadence for a year.

Dave Snowden explains how in the complex domain the wisdom of decisions can be judged only in retrospect. Intelligence and wisdom are not the same. In the complex domain, you have to test the opposing hypotheses through parallel experiments on a small scale first. You have to be “in the arena, trying things, some will work, some don’t” to paraphrase Chamath Palihapitiya. But if these decisions were wise is known only counterfactually, if they bring a long-term and repeated success. Elon Musk’s startups were close to failing at the beginning, but they haven’t failed.

The current AI revolution driven by LLMs still hasn't penetrated the complex domain, like markets where rules are changing constantly and one needs to compete with adverse actors. Current AI might be like a shark washed ashore - a peak predator outside his natural habitat, to use Balaji Srinivasan’s metaphor. This is one of the reasons why AI will need to be combined with crypto tech, that is global and permissionless.

Elon Musk is valley-crossing, Mark Zuckerberg is hill-climbing. This is the difference between one-boxing and taking both boxes in the Newcomb’s Paradox. This is what Peter Thiel means by going all in and not being diversified. And this is what Marc Andreesen means when he says that Elon is taking the most risk out of the system that would prevent us from getting to Mars, as opposed to having no risk gene.

Similarly SBF did hill-climbing and tried to leverage his FTX gambit to influence US politics and became one of the largest political donors to Democrats between 2020 and 2022. He wanted to create a regulatory capture in the crypto industry while pushing ideas of effective altruism that has lately turned into a techno-pessimistic movement of AI decels. His gambit might have worked, but hasn’t. While many seemingly wild bets by Elon have worked so far - like purchasing Twitter for 44 billion dollars to save free speech. Therefore we can say that SBF is intelligent, while Elon is wise.

SBF had the will to power, and he had the will to intelligence, but lacked a kind of predictable and reliable moral compass and a grand vision of “getting to Mars”, that creates a fixed point in the future and a projected time that projects from that future into our current day - to use Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s notions of projected time and enlightened doomsaying by a prophet in a technical sense as someone who is between an expert and a futurist and has a counterfactual power to shape the future.

Today, scientists and bureaucrats are being replaced by the tech founders at the top of the prestige hierarchy as the new tech counter-elite entered politics in a big way. Politicians are replaced by social media influencers and actors. Priests were replaced by political activists in the 1960s, and these woke activists are being replaced by activist investors who went political - like Bill Ackman after 7th October 2023.

History is running in reverse, but now the new industrialists, the tech founders seem to be winning. We see a new kind of generalists and Renaissance men and women who are guided by will to wisdom - a will to shape the future of tech and civilization and having a clear moral compass grounded in dreams like getting to Mars. This is the next level of ambition, compared to the will to power and the will to intelligence. It is similar to Alexander Bard's notion of the will to transcendence.

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If you combine collective utilitarianism (Mohism) with the network state idea of Balaji Srinivasan you get network utilitarianism. The topology of networks is very different from geospatial topology. There is an asymmetry in distance - you can be close to someone, but they are not close to you - for example you follow someone closely on X/Twitter, but they are not following you and are not aware of you.

Or imagine a huge island suddenly popping from the ocean or disappearing under the surface next to an island where you live - as a metaphor of a new social network like TikTok or Instagram suddenly appearing, or MySpace disappearing next to Facebook.

Balaji Srinivasan redefines a nation as a densely connected subgraph in a social network. Social networks have borders that are opaque to the administrators and users, even though they can be mathematically defined as users that spend exactly 50% of their time on two social networks. But since the competing social networks don’t have a database of users and data about usage from their competitors they can’t find out where the border is exactly.

This is connected to a broader phenomenon I call dark growth. For example BRICS countries are operating increasingly outside Western banking for fear of sanctions and this keeps the West in the dark about their transactions and trade.

This opaqueness manifests itself also on the microlevel of a user generated content - social networks were pushed by the blue institutions to shadow-ban users to prevent the Streisand effect. And these users don’t know also if they aren’t outside the Overton window that keeps changing constantly, as do the dictionary definitions of terms that were once stable.

Moreover, society keeps splitting into myriads of memetic tribes based on global trending topics that turn into scissor statements - for example people on the Left and Right got split on the Gaza conflict after October 7 2023.

Interestingly, we saw sparks of the opposite movement through what I call grand glue gestures as the opposite of scissor statements. When in August 2024, Donald Trump got up and shouted: “Fight, fight, fight!”, after he got shot during a rally in Pennsylvania, and when RFK Jr. endorsed Trump, we saw instant endorsements from parts of the counter-elites in Silicon Valley. A kind of ASAP Asabiyya driven by a free X/Twitter that created a preference cascade, to use Timur Kuran’s term.

The post-war international order might have ended on 5th November 2024 with Donald Trump’s reelection. Suddenly his 45th presidency in the US wasn’t a random fluke but a harbinger of things to come, and Biden's presidency appears as a remnant of the previous regime. I called it the Velvet Revolution 2.0, but interestingly there were no people tearing the Berlin Wall. Twitter was liberated two years prior, in 2022.

Network utilitarianism focuses on maximizing the skills, health and wealth of the network, as opposed to a geographic entity. It goes beyond the tribe, city or empire.

Besides geopolitics and biopolitics, we get a focus on noopolitics. Interestingly enough, effective noopolitics isn’t conducted by statements and speech, but by proof of work - by grand gestures that become the glue that glues various memetic tribes of single issue voters together. Words are cheap and create scissor statements that split communities in half. But “catching rockets with chopsticks” or showing courage after being shot during a rally is hard to fake and replicate.

Proof of work is a useful concept from the cryptocurrency world that serves as a guarantee of digital scarcity. If politics is the sublimation of violence, alignment is the sublimation of politics. Jason Lowery in his book Softwar sees bitcoin as a global power projection tool through powergrids.

Luke Gromen sees the “bitcoin is the new oil” narrative, and a similar recent statement from Donald Trump, as a repeat of inflating the role of oil after the 1973 oil shock. Producers of oil were recycling their earnings into US Treasuries. The rising price of bitcoin is boosting the market share of stablecoins, and these in turn raises the demand for US Treasuries. It’s a WAGMI world for bitcoin, crypto, gold and the dollar.

WAGMI stands for “We all gonna make it” and it has one caveat - we are transitioning into a proof-of-work politics as an orthogonal axis that unites and permeates geo-, bio- and noopolitics. Words are cheap, Elons are scarce. Dollar will win if there are dozens of Elons, Palmers and companies like SpaceX and Anduril.

“Truth, Health, Wealth” is the new “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”, says Balaji Srinivasan. In practical terms this means improving learning, burning (of calories) and earning skills of a community. We need new media that are non-entropic and focused on “work instead of heat”.

Seeing 20 random posts with random links of memes from all around the world and just being immersed in the current thing is the current form of media that produces entropic heat, like particles going in all directions. A non-entropic media is focused on upleveling members of a tribe in specific directions - like learning, burning calories and earning crypto.

This requires new non-entropic social media that focus on crypto tasking and are able to extend the attention span and agency of large numbers of highly-aligned people both online and offline. Gregory Rawlins in his book The Human Swarm describes the concept of a metaconcert - where millions of people can temporarily collaborate online together.

Balaji Srinivasan says that destruction is orders of magnitude easier than construction and one reason is that destruction is much easier to do in parallel (like throwing bricks at windows by many people), but to construct something requires planning, division of labor and project management.

Curtis Yarvin writes about an “automated voting” app, where people follow the advice of a leader via an app and show up to do bloc voting and are thus able to influence politics effectively. This partly maps to Balaji’s idea of a network union. From a world where everyone is online we imagine a world where everyone (within a startup society or a network union) is aligned and does a daily proof of work time of activities or donates money instead.

Technodemocracy is also a related Balaji’s concept where you don’t just upvote people on social media from all around the world - but you are also able to sign a smart social contract with politicians and institutions - your vote and netizen fees are based on keeping promises by the politician to act as they pledged during their election campaign.

We can view Balaji Srinivasan’s technodemocracy as a proof-of-work politics that changes geopolitics, biopolitics and noopolitics. Words are cheap, Elons are scarce. China is currently winning the hard power game because they can build factories and infrastructure. But Elon is winning the smart power game and therefore China respects him.

We move from fiat politics and fiat science into crypto politics, and the disintermediated citizen journalism, citizen science and longevity/bio-hacking research - supported by crypto instruments and funded by crypto.

Network utilitarianism differs from individual and collective utilitarianisms in a focus on dynamic utility stemming from relations, long-term adaptability, health and resilience of the network. And proof of work is what protects the network.

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In the network age we experience digital(ly native) politics. Things that appear first online go from zero to one. Legacy institutions go from one to zero. All that is solid melts into air. The ascending and declining worlds are fractal - parts of San Francisco can feel like both.

Words are cheap, Elons are scarce. Network utilitarianism combines the good parts of state consequentialism and individual utilitarianism into a philosophy that serves the network (states and age).

Fractal frontiers are built through proof-of-work politics and grand “glue gestures”, as opposed to scissor statements that cut communities in half. We get ASAP Asabiyya that unifies counter-elites across memetic and political tribes - like after Trump got shot during his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Both one-to-n and zero-to-one are important. Copying and creating. Culture and tech. Process and event. Continuity and (a)symmetry. Hero worship is the weakness of the red tribe. The blue tribe is full of NPCs, heirs, and Paper Belt bureaucrats, but its power lies in decentralization across legacy institutions and across the Atlantic. The grey tribe has both the heroes in tech founders and decentralization across startups and industries.

Individual utilitarianism leads to addiction and San Francisco politics. This is the flaw in Effective Altruism, with SBF and his FTX as a prime example. EA wanted to test UBI in Africa, but FTX scammed Africans, stole their money and donated them to friends in rich places like Oxford and DC. Plus EA turned into a doom cult of AI decels a few years ago. Sad.

Network utilitarianism is closer to effective accelerationism (e/acc) as a counter-movement to EA. But it represents a post-posthumanist turn. Abundant energy and AI are important and humanism is not enough. But terraforming and regeneration are two sides of the same coin. Monism vs dualism of mind and body.

Another bug in the Western thought is universalism, which leads to SF politics being exported to the whole world and its critics censored on an industrial scale. “Seeing like a state” is oppressive and not enough, we need “learning like a machine”. AI can reform the declining Western states, but should serve as a tutor, a couch and an opt-in smart regulator for individuals and communities. Not an all-seeing global censor.

Collective utilitarianism or state consequentialism in the ancient Mohism is an interesting precursor to EA that is more scalable and focuses on improving lives and reducing harms on a societal level. But it also has a bug of universalism (which like Communism doesn’t scale).

The Asian culture of dashboard management, we have experienced a bit during Covid with daily updates on health statistics, and team dashboards in tech companies are practical examples that have similar logic to Mohism.

Nassim Taleb explains that the flaw of modern Western states is twofold - the all-absorbing monolithic nationalism and abstract Kantian universalism.

The State is the Leviathan from the industrial age that replaced the God-shaped hole after the old agrarian regimes fell with the rise of the printing press and modern bureaucracies. As Balaji Srinivasan explains, Nietzsche proclaimed God is dead, because the elites of his day stopped believing in him. Balaji sees three Leviathans that dominated throughout history - God, State, Network.

Balaji sees a nation as a densely connected subgraph of a social network. His network state concept that he explained in a book, is an effective fusion of two Leviathans - the State and the Network. Anyone with a laptop and a moral innovation can start a startup society. The next step is a highly-aligned online community - the network union. If the community is printed onto the land and acquires real estate, it reaches the level of the network archipelago. Once it achieves some form of diplomatic recognition we can call it a network state. In the same way bitcoin was once listed on Bloomberg and got recognition from a fiat institution - a crypto country needs recognition from a legacy fiat country.

Balaji proposes the motto of truth, health, wealth as the new “liberté, égalité, fraternité”. Network state aspiring entities can act as “fractal frontiers” for moral innovations that are relevant for these values.

Elon Musk clearly sees a truth-seeking AI as his moonshot. AI tutors can be a digital Aristotle for everyone. And free and open generative AI can help people from all around the world to tell their stories.

Health can be pursued through non-entropic social media (which focus on work as opposed to heat/distractions) that serve a particular community, with a longevity or biohacking focus, and where members engage in “proof of workout”.

Wealth can be stored in crypto and earned by investing and crypto tasking - today there are very young coding influencers on Replit, who come from places like India and code even on their mobile phones. If in 1800s everyone was a farmer, in 1900s everyone was a worker, in this century everyone will be an investor, thinks Balaji Srinivasan.

Free and open AI, Crypto and Social tech should push the Pareto-frontier and maximize individual agency, alignment and authenticity at the same time, while preserving, innovating and regenerating networked communities across time and space. Quality, quantity and duration of relationships and interactions matter. Completing the social graph is the game. Getting to Mars is the game. Regeneration means terraforming (Mars, deserts).

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We will not return to the Manhattan Project era, but we can do lunar punk moonshots. Dark growth is an alternative to both degrowth, and to what I would call a fragile growth that is highly concentrated and highly visible.

Dark growth means maximizing sovereignty, decentralization, opacity and speed of growth at the same time and thus avoiding mimetic competition.

It is connected to lunar punk, a concept that connects two ideas - an ability to escape detection via faster OODA loops than opponents (the “lunar” aspect) and a counter-cultural dominance (the “punk” aspect) that might win hearts and minds of your opponents as blue jeans and rock and roll won the sympathies of everyone, including the police and soldiers, behind the Iron Curtain. As Balaji Srinivasan says: “the orange coin is the new blue jeans” - bitcoin is the symbol of freedom and prosperity that the US once was.

Degrowth is a negative-sum (stupid) idea that creates a dog-eat-dog world where everyone wants to grab as much as possible from the shrinking pie. And a fragile growth has the Taleb’s Thanksgiving turkey problem. You can’t MAGA with four MAGA stocks dominating the performance of the S&P 500.

There were no true billionaires before bitcoin, says Balaji Srinivasan. Because the state can take your property rather quickly if it chooses to do so for any reason. You might wake up with your accounts frozen and your assets seized. With bitcoin you can take all your fortune with you in your head, but you can’t do the same with factories or houses.

The idea of dark growth is connected to Palmer Luckey’s idea that the subterranean domain will be the next frontier. This implies a proliferation of drones, dark factories and deurbanization. If you have a dark factory, you can put it underground, as no lights are needed. And even more profoundly, no cities are needed. No commute, no unions and housing for workers are needed, as only a bare minimum of humans are involved. This means you can shrink a blue city into a grey startup village.

Dark growth is an alternative to both Make America Great Again and Build Back Better. MAGA and BBB are relying on a past that no longer exists - an exceptional period after WWII, when America was the factory of the world and many countries had their industries completely destroyed during the war. When applied to innovation and startups, dark growth becomes dark dynamism with three priorities: drones, dark factories and deurbanization - or DDD in short.

We saw memes of “Dark MAGA” and “Dark Brandon” and they hint towards intelligence and cunning as a dominant trait - instead of the Nietzschean “will to power” from the industrial age, in the network age we get the “will to intelligence”, says Alexander Bard. And dark growth is the next frontier - not exactly getting to Mars, but on a trajectory to that goal. It’s more like getting to a startup village, or a special innovation zone, that might get us (free and open AI, Crypto and Social) technologies that will be useful on Mars.

We can see Germany pursuing degrowth clearly - first shutting down its nuclear plants, now shutting down VW factories that are unable to compete with Chinese EVs. Sadly it’s a broader trend in the West, where Brussels’ bureacrats meet California politics.

Following examples can illustrate a direction towards dark growth in our adversaries that are very different from Japan in the 1980s whose growth the US was able to crush through the Plaza Accord, because, unlike China, Japan is a satellite of the West and doesn’t have the levels of sovereignty to do things described below and to keep the West in dark. Actually there are only very few countries with high levels of sovereignty - China and India come to mind.

Huawei unveiled Mate 60 in August 2023, right during a visit of the US Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo, to China. The phone features a 7nm chip designed and produced in mainland China, and the launch was an important proof point that China can advance its tech despite sanctions on semiconductors.

In July 2024, Xiaomi unveiled its dark factory for smartphones - a humanless, fully automated and self-improving factory able to produce 10 million phones annually. And in May 2024, Unitree unveiled its G1 humanoid robot for 16,000 dollars.

BRICS countries are seeking alternatives to the dollar system and the dollar technology to avoid sanctions and increase sovereignty (and I would add opacity). They don’t want to replace the dollar, but in words of Balaji Srinivasan, they want to unbundle the dollar.

Gold, or maybe soon bitcoin, are becoming the store of value and means of final settlement. BRICS countries are also engaging in what Kathleen Tyson calls multicurrency mercantilism, like opening bilateral swap lines. They use dollars for trade, but increasingly outside Western banks, also in a form of stablecoins like tether. Combined with the fact that every bank activity is a state secret in China, this leads to dark growth tendencies in countries that flipped the West in terms of the world’s GDP share.

The e/acc movement should strive for dark growth to avoid mimetic competition. Dark growth is also what I call an opaque renaissance - mixing the ideas of AI black boxes with one-boxing in Newcomb's Paradox (a kind of predisposition for “valley-crossing” to find a new local optimum that is at heart of Puritan ethics and the American experiment). A startup village is a related Balaji's idea to bootstrap network states.

Imagine a small family farm house in the countryside that has a dark factory beneath it and a vertical farm beside it. A dark factory is a fully automated factory that requires no lights to operate.

We are experiencing a political realignment from red and blue to green and orange, says Balaji Srinivasan. Green is the color of the dollar and ESG, while orange is the color of bitcoin and Mars. Degrowth versus techno-optimism is the defining political axis of our moment.

AI, robotics and digital fabrication with dark factories can save the West in the medium term - because they can be put underground and therefore could require much less regulation, in terms of ESG, labor laws and DEI. (Almost) no humans, (almost) no problems.

Network states are nuke-proof because of their geographically distributed nature. Dark growth as a concept adds the vertical, subterranean dimension and the focus on deurbanization (alongside drones and dark factories). It shares with network states the focus on opacity and sovereignty.

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Gov is dead. And the Network has killed it. SpaceX can build a huge rocket faster than the Paper Belt approves the launch.

My personal experience working in multiple sectors is that as a rule of thumb: an NGO can be 10x faster and more efficient than the state, a company can be 10x more efficient than an NGO, and a tech startup can be 10x more efficient than a regular company.

Starlink can deploy fast into areas hit by hurricanes or in Ukraine after the Russian invasion of 2022 - in a matter of hours or days. Joe Biden’s broadband program cost over 42 billion and connected zero rural homes so far. It is multiples of what was invested in SpaceX so far.

To paraphrase Balaji Srinivasan’s great observation - there are very few 100 billion dollar companies and even less trillion dollar companies. But the US increases its debt by a trillion dollars roughly every 100 days. Political billionaires going after tech billionaires won’t work. Heirs are not founders.

My personal experience is that flagship projects like the EU’s Global Gateway take years to design and sign, not to mention a slow rollout and a “soft” nature of these projects without tangible infrastructure components. And right from the start, the whole EU’s Global Gateway effort is 10 years behind China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

A similar example from Slovakia that I am personally familiar with - we are among the top five export-driven economies in the EU. But a soft loan instrument to support our exporters in the ascending world wasn’t piloted yet successfully - some 8 years after it was rolled out. Due to sad over-bureaucratization with multiple state actors involved in the approval process.

As Elon Musk points out - the more ministries and agencies are involved, the more time it takes to approve anything as meetings grow exponentially. It’s a multiplicative relationship of a vetocracy.

Some smaller countries, like Israel, Singapore or now El Salvador are called startup nations - but the last time a big country like the US acted as a startup was during the FDR era of the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program. Back then, the state could attract top talent, because last century was an unusual period of high centralization that peaked in the 1950s.

Meaning the frontier has closed in 1890s in the US, as the State destroyed many of the robber barons and captains of industry, so the top talent had to work for highly centralized entities as it didn’t have options of today, with the reopened frontier after commerce became legal on the Internet in 1991.

Balaji Srinivasan talks about three Leviathans - God, State and Network. In the agrarian age people believed in God. In the industrial age the elites stopped believing in God and started to believe in the State instead, so Nietzsche proclaimed “God is dead”. In the network age the elites believe in the Network and stopped believing in the State - because free social media makes the unmanaged decline of blue tribe’s institutions, satellite countries and cities in the West hard to unsee.

I have worked in international relations and development cooperation for 18 years and have seen the machine from various sectors in Slovakia and abroad - working for a foundation largely funded and founded by Americans, for a state agency, as a CSR and business intelligence consultant for large companies and as a co-founder of a startup incubator in Kenya and two nonprofits.

And as I mentioned above I can attest to similar stories as Dominic Cummings talks about. The State is orders of magnitude less efficient and slower than startups. It’s not like a Tesla versus the old cars we see in Cuba. It’s like (a wreckage of) “the chariot in King Tut’s tomb”, as Curtis Yarvin recently wrote on reforming the USG.

Both Dominic Cummings and Marc Andreesen talk about a failure to build the drone industry. In the US the FAA went after drone manufacturers, while ignoring Chinese competition, and the result is Chinese dominance in drones. In Britain the efforts to pivot the defense spending into new drone projects were canceled by the new government and the legacy military contractors still control the game.

Dominic Cummings describes how all cabinet meetings in Britain are scripted and pre-written by staffers, including conclusions. That ministers are NPCs in more than a metaphoric sense. But he sees more wiggle room in Britain than in the US for reforms that the Department of Government Efficiency under Elon and Vivek envisions.

The State run by the blue tribe and its permanent bureaucrats can de(con)struct, but it can’t build. And it goes after builders. It can censor and persecute dissidents and normies, but it cannot compete with adversaries like China or Russia through innovation, and instead copies them in authoritarian half-measures.

The metaphor of a chariot wreckage by Yarvin or a decrepit building in Alana Newhouse’s essay Brokenism is thus only partially correct - the State can still effectively inflict damage through extra-legal (illegal) efforts like unbanking political dissidents and the Operation Chokepoint 2.0, when it went after Crypto startup founders.

A complementary metaphor would be a dog versus wolf distinction that Yarvin makes when he describes USG’s military escapades with a quote from The Dark Knight:

“I'm like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one, you know, I just do...things.”

Another metaphor to describe the State vs Startups is one of an evolved parasite as opposed to a naked predator, like Genghis Khan and 20th century totalitarians. An evolved parasite that always changes strategy if its tricks are revealed.

A parasite that steals money from normies via the Cantillon Effect, among many very destructive things (think funding gain-of-function research and censorship industrial complex), while constantly renaming these efforts and projecting its ethical failings to adversaries from the red (conservative, pro-business) tribe and the grey (pro-tech) tribe. If the State censors ideological opponents, it calls it fighting disinformation, misinformation and malinformation. If the State prints money it calls it quantitative easing and when it saves banks, that binged on US bonds, it calls it BTFP.

But Fukuyama’s End of History can be viewed as an instance of a peak predator theory, with S-curves of peak predators like Microsoft being replaced by Google. The blue blobocracy, unchecked by a matching superpower since 1991, degraded into idiocracy, that we have experienced over the last four years, and will be replaced by a netocracy.

This brings us to the distinction of stupid vs evil. Evil is zero-sum, stupid is negative-sum. Western state under blue tribe dominance is the opposite of a smart regulator that has very low false positive and false negative rates. It’s an anarcho-tyranny that prosecutes, tech founders, normies and ideological dissidents and lets criminals roam free.

A broken and reversed food pyramid (created by USDA) causes obesity. A broken and reversed economic and cultural pyramid causes civilizational obesity. A “public servant” is a misnomer.

Permanent bureaucrats over-classify and hide their activities from public and behave like secret aristocrats, that are almost never mentioned or investigated by the media. They are over-represented in the economy while movies like Dallas Buyers Clubs, that show bureaucrats in a negative light, are as rare as Hollywood movies depicting life under communism. Censorship and unbanking showed permanent bureaucrats behave towards proles like kings once did.

The internet started only in 2020, says Balaji, when the online world became primary with people working remotely on zoom calls during lockdowns. The up-and-coming netocrats like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey are the true public servants - creating organizations that are not just orders of magnitude more efficient than the State or legacy companies, but also creating products that are orders of magnitude cheaper, faster and better - delivering massive “customer profits” as they put everything technology touches on a TV price curve.

Good news is that the blue tribe can crush the powerless, but it has a harder time challenging the power users. First they came for Canadian truckers for protesting Covid in 2022 - unbanking, censoring and threatening them in nasty ways (“First we take your driving license, then your insurance and then your children”). Then the blue tribe’s empty suits, to use Taleb's term, came for AI, Crypto and Social technology and tech founders, like Pavol Durov, Elon Musk, crypto or open source AI developers.

Marc Andreesen recently told Joe Rogan that 30 tech founders in their portfolio experienced unbanking.

And in 2024 they got a backlash from both the median voter and the tech counter-elites that aligned with Donald Trump. It is an open question if the Department of Government Efficiency will nudge the US and the West closer to current startup states like El Salvador with Bukele or Argentina with Milei.

But today we got a Saint Nicholas Day’s present of David Sacks as a new AI and Crypto Czar.

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The West needs to nurture dozens of tech startups like Anduril, Palantir and SpaceX. And it needs to do it ASAP.

The FAA effectively destroyed drone manufacturing in the US, while letting Chinese manufacturers, like DJI, dominate the market in the US. Marc Andreesen recently noted that 90% of drones operated by the US army and police forces are made in China. The same story of government overreach that backfired can be seen across industries.

We need to reverse the recent mission drift of the (security state) Blob that went “from tanks to tweets”. NATO’s Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, said in 2019 that “NATO must remain prepared for both conventional and hybrid threats: from tanks to tweets”. But incentives matter and trade-offs exist.

It is easier and safer to police speech online and work from home with a warm coffee in your hand than to fight actual crime on the streets. We have seen it in the UK, and in the EU, and indirectly in the US through various cut-outs and cushy jobs at Big Tech companies - the censorship industrial complex creates comfortable jobs for the laptop class.

The drive to please and reward the laptop class is at the core of the Western slide into anarcho-tyranny. But we need to empower the fab lab class at the expense of the laptop class. More builders and less bullshiters.

History is running in reverse with the opposite outcomes, says Balaji Srinivasan. In the past, extremism in the West was spread by poor young men. This time it is rich old women who are key blue tribe constituency doing the de(con)struction of the West.

Blue tribe’s way of keeping power and doing corruption is quite sophisticated. They do it by growing the ambit of institutions and their mission scope and hiring activists and bureaucrats for various bullshit jobs, to use David Graeber’s term. A company is driven by profit. A government agency or an NGO is driven by expanding its ambit and the number of employees.

Balaji Srinivasan thinks that if Mark Zuckerberg had bought NYT at the same time Jeff Bezos bought WaPo we would be on Mars already.

Media is upstream of moral and tech progress. The power flows from a paper into a party and into a polity. Imagine if all the attention that was given to supposed disinformation online and all the woke nonsense went to raise awareness of technologies like the ones Anduril and Palantir are building to defend the West.

Imagine if all the myriads of content produced to smear founders like Elon Musk would be replaced with techno-optimistic messaging. Most people are normies, or NPCs, and they engage in preference falsification, to use Timur Kuran’s term.

Imagine if there were more movies like Dallas Buyers Club, depicting institutions like FDA as hindering progress and killing people by acts of omission - by not approving medicines faster.

Sigmund Freud has one useful concept of projection that explains a lot of what woke progressives and the blue tribe are doing when they accuse people of disinformation and authoritarian behavior - they are projecting their vices onto their opponents. It’s like a thief shouting “catch a thief”.

The Founding Fathers in the US were writing under pseudonyms, a point stressed by Marc Andreesen and Balaji Srinivansan. American politicians like Jefferson and Adams engaged in rumors (disinformation) to smear their opponents in their own newspapers they owned. Ben Franklin created 15 pseudonyms that argued between themselves in his newspaper.

The AI and Social (media) tech democratized the access to information and content creation, but we are merely going back to a previous more decentralized era and will not return to an unusual era of peak centralization in the 1950s.

A 200 year old newspaper, New York Post, was censored and blocked from Twitter for a week before the 2020 election for publishing an investigative story about Hunter Biden laptops that was later proven to be true in court. This was an example of a direct meddling by the US (former) security state (officials) in elections while running a sophisticated censorship and propaganda operation on mass media to cover a corruption scandal.

After the 2024 election the meme of American Dynamism is closer to becoming real. It’s time to build, and free speech on post-Elon twitter is a crucial driver of techno-optimism. Next we need to make progress in debureaucratization, deregulation and decentralization, put abstractly.

And this means progress in drones, dark factories and deurbanization in concrete terms, to use the Thielian “definite and optimistic vision of the future”. I call this vision a dark dynamism.

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In the last ten years the West has copied China and Russia in order to fight them. We copy China with half-measures in online censorship and Russia with half-measures in managed democracy and persecution of dissidents. 

Jacob Siegel wrote a great piece for Tablet in 2023 describing how we got a de facto martial law online after Trump’s victory in 2016, that was blamed on Russian election interference. The result was that the whole world was censored online to fit into very niche and progressive values of Berkeley and San Francisco.  

The war on disinformation started a bit earlier, in 2014 and got to another level of algorithmic mass pre-censorship after Trump 1.0 and during Covid. Mike Benz talks about many of the same aspects of the censorship industrial complex on X and in his numerous podcast appearances.  

One egregious example was blocking of New York Post, a 200 year old newspaper, from twitter for a week because of a Hunter Biden laptops’ story that was later proven to be true. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was an unexpected blow to the censorship industrial complex that wanted to put the Internet genie back in the bottle.

To gain power, any group needs to form an effective Left-Right synthesis, thinks Balaji Srinivasan. The Left provides moral justification and the Right provides effective execution. Therefore the Great Awokening since circa 2012 is the other side of what I call NATO versus normies - the Blob abandoning free speech and interests of the median voter and worker, while using loud woke activists as a moral police on dissidents.

Normal people, the normies, want cheap electricity, cheap gas, clean and safe streets, low inflation and interest rates, and affordable high quality public services, like education and healthcare. The more products and services are on the TV price curve, the better for normies.  

The Blob, the security state that is at the core of the uniparty in the US and the blue tribe globally, has been openly against free speech since the twin populist uprisings of Brexit and Trump in 2016. Curiously, Britain after Brexit got a raw deal and went even more into an unmanaged decline. I think this is due to language and network proximity to blue America. 

America is Europe’s last colony, and the EU is a satellite of the US at the same time. An example of the former is Thierry Bretton writing Elon Musk not to discuss with Donald Trump on X - an EU bureaucrat threatening two US citizens, the richest man on Earth and a former president who is also running for office in 2024. An example of the latter is the EU’s silence over the blown-out Nord Stream 2 pipeline or EU members like Germany and Poland complying with the US-Russia prisoner swap in 2024. 

This paradox is resolved through network proximity of the transatlantic Blob and old establishment elites in the West. EU is just another app of the Blob, something like Lyft or Bolt, if Uber is busy in your area. If the First Amendment prohibits certain actions in the US, the Blob uses the EU or Germany, or any Five Eyes country to regulate the US Big Tech companies indirectly, through global harmonization of regulation. 

An Orwellian entity from the UK, CCDH was key in organizing an advertising boycott that was meant to “kill Musk’s twitter”, an objective they explicitly stated in their leaked presentations. 

Elon Musk with his purchase of twitter for 44 billion dollars have saved free speech as a core Western value for now. But a weakness in conservative mindset of prevalent in the red tribe is the hero worship. Why we have so few people like Elon Musk is an interesting question, but an insufficient decentralization is a key issue in defending free speech.

Twitter described itself once “as a free speech wing of a free speech party”. But some two years ago it was almost entirely overtaken by the Blob. To fight the invisible invasion of the blue tribe we need more pro-speech services like X, Farcaster, Nostr, Rumble, Substack.

Balaji Srinivasan has created Nakamoto Coefficient to measure degree of decentralization by number of entities that need to be compromised to get to 50% of control of a certain protocol or project.

Balaji also talks about social war, a war waged on a network - where the goal is to turn some nodes of the network graph from red to blue or switch some nodes off - by canceling them from certain platforms or by pre-censoring (shadow-banning) them.

We have witnessed a war on the normies and a war for the noosphere for at least a decade. We saw an invisible invasion of institutions - done by the woke activists and journos working in tandem with the digital censorship of the security state (the Blob) - as a Left/Right fusion that underpinned the blue tribe dominance globally.

The sublimation of war is politics and the sublimation of politics is alignment. We need a new uniparty built around techno-optimism and free speech.

There is a danger of a single story and the blue monoculture is making our noosphere fragile. Let a hundred flowers bloom, let’s regenerate our noopolitics (maybe with something like Balaji’s techno-democracy and market for votes) and let’s make our societies work again for the (median voter) normies.

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To compete with China, the US needs a new uniparty focused on free speech and techno-optimism. 

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is projected to deliver close to 90% of all mass to orbit in 2024, around 15x more than China will do, with 6% share of the market. The rest of the world will have the remaining 4%. Greetings to Europe.

Clearly, the grey tribe of techno-optimists can compete with China, as Balaji Srinivasan says, and the blue America cannot. Blue tribe can only do half-measures in copying China in digital authoritarianism and censorship.

Semiconductors and commercial aviation seem to be two industries where China is behind, but they are ahead in electric vehicles and drones. “Speed is our only moat”, says Beff Jezos, a co-founder of effective accelerationism.

I think speed of innovation is necessary but not sufficient. We need to compete on an orthogonal axis that is hard to copy. And what is hard to copy? A free society is hard to copy. Free speech, free and open computation, commerce and conversations are hard to copy. A constructive high variance society is hard to copy. 

Therefore we need to return to free speech diplomacy. We can call it free speech and tech diplomacy. Specially focusing on free and open AI, Crypto, Social tech. Because free speech is keeping us alive and it is our only comparative advantage in the West.

China is great at copying and scaling technologies and the West is at risk of becoming another Xerox PARC, thinks Balaji Srinivasan. A place where innovations arise, but are ultimately scaled and produced elsewhere. China can also innovate - from BYD Yangwang cars that can jump or swim in the water to cheap G1 humanoid robots by Unitree for $16,000.

On 13th October 2024, Elon Musk’s SpaceX catches a rocket booster with “chopsticks”, while he was campaigning for Donald Trump and presented Tesla Robotaxi two days earlier. But on November 5, three weeks later, we read news that a Chinese startup Cosmoleap has the same design with “chopsticks” in its pitch deck and the Chinese Long March 9 rocket turned into a clone of the SpaceX Starship rocket. 

Amazing achievements like catching a rocket booster with “chopsticks” might be the similar to the four-minute mile. A “zero to one” soon becomes “one to many”. Hardware is hard, as the saying goes, but paradoxically it is easy to copy, explains Balaji.

Over the decades the uniparty in Washington DC ruled the American empire for the benefit of the median voter. They made sure that people in the US had cheap gas to drive, food to eat, gadgets to play with and clothes to wear. It’s actually hard to produce a pencil - with all the raw materials and inputs that need to be sourced from all around the world. 

And securing these supply chains was the purpose of the Blob, thinks Mike Benz, a strong critic of the current security state establishment that lost the plot some 20 years ago and doesn’t serve American industry and ordinary Americans anymore. 

It’s NATO versus normies today, but it used to be NATO for normies before. Blue (tribe) was good, now it’s chaos. Or anarcho-tyranny to be more precise. Anarcho-tyranny is the opposite of a smart regulator, thinks Balaji Srinivasan.

It punishes regular citizens and lets criminals roam free. A smart regulator has low false positive and false negative rates - it is able to rate the actors and prohibit bad actors from the arena. Think Uber or Amazon and their star rating systems.   

I think we need to reverse the mission drift that Mike Benz often talks about, when NATO gradually went from tanks to tweets - creating sheltered workshops for the laptop class and bullshit jobs for bureaucrats who think they can put the put the genie back in the bottle and police the internet on an industrial scale. And in this way, win the war on normies in the noosphere. I think we need the “from tanks to tweets” trend and have the opposite doctrine - from disinfo to drones. I have a related idea of DDD - drones, dark factories and de-urbanization. Or Dark Dynamism.  

Balaji has a chapter in his book the Network State called China Can Make a Pencil, a scenario where AI, digital yuan and robotics enable China to have a bird’s eye view of the economy and make the whole economy computable. China also controls big portions of supply chains for critical raw materials and rare earth minerals.    

Now blue tribe is openly hostile to founders like Elon Musk and values like free speech. But such founders and values are the only comparative advantage the West has left. We used to have a Fukuyama-esque dream of "getting to Denmark". But the internet increases variance, as Balaji Srinivasan says, so now I think we have three dreams:

getting to Venezuela (blue tribe)

getting to Dubai (red tribe)

getting to Mars (grey tribe)

But I predict a white-pill positive scenario of a realignment around techno-optimism, where the decels and degrowthers will be marginalized and pushed out of the blue tribe and the YIMBYs and e/acc folks will dominate. Remember, even communists were for tech progress. 

So after the realignment around techno-optimism we will see these three dreams:

getting to a startup village (to use Balaji’s term to bootstrap network states) 

getting to Dubai (or any startup city) 

getting to Mars

Politics doesn't scale, while tech does, and so I predict many progressives, conservatives and techno-optimists will start their own communes and startup villages, following the network state playbook, while many previously blue cities will follow the Singapore and Dubai path to prosperity. 

But to stop depopulating we need to deurbanize. With Starlink, remote work, AI, automation, and dark factories, a startup village can have an economic output of today's towns and cities.  

And everything will be about "getting to Mars" - a new uniparty will form around techno-optimism, and a new Blob will blossom, if you will. 

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Sometimes reforming a country isn’t enough. It needs to become a startup nation again. How can a country embrace effective accelerationism (e/acc)? I lay out a scenario for Slovakia (slov/acc) that can serve as an inspiration for eu/acc and any other country that wants to be refounded on techno-optimistic principles. 

TLDR:

1. Introduce English as an official language. It’s a lingua franca of the internet. 

2. Reduce and abolish ministries and agencies with no skin in the game. Give officials English and Excel tests. If they fail, give them a generous severance package. 

3. Create digitally-native twins of public services and gradually use them in special innovation zones.

4. Create alliances with tech counter-elites and jurisdictions like Argentina, El Salvador and UAE.

5. Create special innovation zones, bootstrap them as startup/athlete villages by hosting Building Man and Enhanced Games competitions. 

6. Digital diplomacy on X instead of traveling to Western satellites. Free speech and techno-optimism instead of industrial censorship. 

7. Create Bangalore Four as an alternative to V4. As a way to bootstrap a new NAM - a network-aligned movement for techno-optimism and techno-democracy. 

8. Promote free AI, Crypto and Social tech. Buy bitcoin and stand for bitcoin as a flag of technology. 

9. Regular bounty competitions as a way to do (industrial, education, demographic) policies. Stop subsidies, use convertible grants. Use universal learning stipend and pay for results to increase and maintain (STEM) skills of citizens. 

10. DDD as an alternative to MAGA/BBB. DDD - drones, dark factories, de-urbanization as a definite and optimistic vision of the future. We can call it (doing) dark dynamism. A dark growth instead of de-growth.

from EA to e/acc

Effective accelerationism is a response to the failures of effective altruism that has turned into a bunch of decels advocating AI doomerism. 

Fake EA is FTX stealing from Africans to donate to Western EA organizations which buy lucrative properties, like castles to hold workshops. True EA is Elon Musk spending 44 billion to purchase X and save free speech and the West. Because free speech is the only comparative advantage we have against our adversaries.  

Slovakia is a symbolic country and needs to become a significant country fast. We are a satellite of the West, which is itself a satellite of blue America. Blue was good, now it’s chaos. This year we saw a clear difference between “(tele)promter politicians” and “podcast politicians”. It’s the difference between blobocracy-turned-idiocracy versus netocracy - as envisioned by Alexander Bard in 2000. 

slov/acc refounding steps:

English as a lingua franca of the noosphere

1. Introduce English as an official language because it is a lingua franca of the internet. Countries have geographic borders, the noosphere has languages as borders of minds. Slovakia has a smaller population than Nairobi. Kenya has over 40 tribes and some are bigger than the Slovak population. The biggest group of English speakers online will soon be Indians. And India is the largest democracy and might be the torch-bearer of internet values, especially if the West experiences further economic and (geo)political turmoil. Greatly incentivize teaching of all five UN languages. 

A startup country with smart regulations

2. De-bureaucratize by radically reducing or abolishing many ministries and agencies at the national level. Every public official on the ministry/state agency level should pass an English and (MS) Excel test. Those who fail, will be laid off with a generous layoff package (e.g. 12 month severance pay). They can re-apply again if there is a need, and if they improve their skills. Following the example of Argentina, we can (suddenly or gradually) abolish several ministries - especially those where no one has a "skin in the game". Like the Ministry of Education - it doesn't manage any schools directly, public officials don't teach, if the results get worse they don't feel any consequences.  Do a zero-based budgeting but for regulations - every regulation at least since 2000 (and maybe since FDR’s presidency for the US) should be updated using digitally-native versions.  

3. Create digitally-native twins of various public services at the Office of the Government run by very few people with the support of free and open AI, Crypto and Social technologies. One person has a clear responsibility and is supported by an engineer and a designer/lawyer. Test these services in small and parallel experiments, e.g. on a scale of a town or a special innovation zone. 

Attracting techno-optimists from all around the world

4. Create strong alliances with counter-elites from the red and grey tribes. People like Elon Musk are at the intersection of red and grey tribes. What Hungary is for conservatives, Slovakia can become for techno-optimists. India is a key partner because of its size, talent pool and a sovereignty to set standards and regulation in AI, Crypto and Social tech. Attract founders of technology companies from all over the world. Work with countries like Argentina, El Salvador,  Hungary, Rwanda, Serbia, Singapore and UAE. India has the third largest number of tech unicorns, after the US and China. Slovakia has zero tech unicorns. Czechia has one.   

5. Create special innovation zones (SIZ) with polycentric law and something like reverse Charter Cities idea by Paul Romer - by importing (inspirations from) jurisdictions like Prospera, UAE, Israel, Argentina, El Salvador, Singapore, Palau, India, Hong Kong, Rwanda (google "Rwanda drone delivery" )... in a limited geographical  area - a startup village. Something like an industrial park, where you can also live. These startup villages will be built anew, around autonomous driving, in a modular HIMBY-style. SIZ can be bootstrapped by holding Building Man and Enhanced Games competitions (Builders competing how quickly one can build infrastructure for an enhanced athletes' villages). They can be gradually built in the proximity of each other and connected by a hyperloop or (Boring company) tunnels. The SIZ will experiment with triple-entry accounting (a local entity will mirror its activities globally on a blockchain such as Ethereum or Solana).

Towards techno-democracy

6. Digital Diplomacy focused on free-speech. Diplomacy and attracting investors and tech founders  is done almost exclusively online - on X, Farcaster, Nostr and similar open protocols. Radically limit the travel of bureaucrats to blue tribe areas -  like Brussels and the Western jurisdictions that are just satellites of blue America. Because they have zero "agency" and innovation potential and are in an unmanaged decline. Everything can be solved via zoom, mail or twitter/X spaces. We want to be green and eco-friendly, don't we? But do travel to the jurisdictions of the red and gray tribe - from Texas to UAE and Rwanda.

7. Create Bangalore Four as an alternative to V4. Bangalore, Belgrade, Bratislava and Budapest can form a techno-optimistic group of countries, the basis of something we can call the new NAM. A network-aligned movement, which has internet values ​​and  techno-optimism at its core and promotes open and free AI, Crypto and Social technologies. Something like the Concert of Democracies proposal from 2004, but the focus of Bangalore Four will be improving techno-democracy (aligning politicians and citizens with tech and moral innovations) and the lives of median voters. 

Free computation, commerce and conversation

8. Promote free AI, Crypto and Social tech. Buy bitcoin and stand for bitcoin as a flag of technology. Attracts bitcoiners from all over the world like Salvador. Make cities like Kremnica the center of bitcoin tourism for "bitcoin pilgrims".  Thanks to nuclear energy and geothermal energy we can attract live players in AI and Crypto - by behaving like a live player. The central bank will start buying gold and bitcoin. We will tax bitcoin like gold - at 0%. We will attract investors from all over the world with ETFs for various time-tested cryptocurrencies - such as bitcoin, ethereum and solana. We can let people save in bitcoin and accumulate bitcoin every time they transact. We can use an example of US sanctuary cities and simply ignore several dumb EU regulations, including GDPR and DSA. We can work with the incoming US administration, tech counter-elites and red states in the US to build sanctuary cities for techno-optimists. If the EU has a problem with that - we need to have India on our side (which is one of a few sovereign countries) as a backup and a leverage. We can also have a backup plan to use the Indian tech stack, in case the West/blue tribe would want to cut us off banking infrastructure.

9. Organize regular bounty competitions online. Most policies - from educational to industrial and demographic - are carried out through regular online competitions aimed at Slovaks and the whole world. Something like the X Prize - which is organized by the president or the prime minister (instead of their official visits to the West) in cooperation with people like Elon Musk. Most of the subsidies can be abolished and replaced by a much larger financial reserve of the prime minister, the president and a few key ministers - and invested as convertible grants that fund tech and moral innovations and bootstrap startup societies and startups. Convertible grants are converted into equity if a milestone is reached (e.g. a startup is founded). This will create a sovereign wealth fund with a few decentralized fund managers and a future income. The idea here is to run a startup country, like FDR during the Manhattan Project would. Instead of universal basic income we can try something like a universal learning stipend - paying for results through proctoring exams annually, especially in STEM - to uplevel the skills of citizens. 

Dark Dynamism

10. DDD - drones, dark factories, de-urbanization as a definite and optimistic vision of the future. Many people talk about debureaucratization, deregulation and decentralization in abstract terms, promoting a kind of indefinite optimistic future, to use Peter Thiel’s framework. Drones stand for all kind of robots, AI and automation. Dark factories are fully-automated factories, requiring no lightning, that can be put underground, opening a subterrain domain for business. De-urbanization can stop population decline and means building startup villages and Special Innovation zones thanks to tech innovations like Starlink and moral innovations like remote work and network states. DDD can be an alternative to Make America Great Again and Build Back Better. We can call it Doing Dark Dynamism. The Internet increases variance, as Balaji Srinivasan says, we can promote both 996 culture, the remote work culture, and the big family work-life balance culture. 

An obvious place to start is attracting a Tesla factory to Slovakia to build Tesla Robotaxis and deploy them in SIZs/startup villages. Then we need to attract drone startups or a new drone company that Elon Musk might create as a missing link between Tesla and SpaceX. Then we need to attract startups in the dark factory space. China is ahead here, but we might do this as a joint challenge together with Bangalore Four countries. And de-urbanization through startup villages specifically (and network state movement in general) might be also an interesting way to reverse population decline. And Elon Musk, among others, might be interested.  

Feel free to challenge or add your own ideas by commenting here on Substack Notes or on X (@jakubsimek). 

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Politics is the sublimation of violence, and alignment is the sublimation of politics. The Velvet Revolution of 17th November 1989 in Czechoslovakia earned its name because people got rid of socialism without violence and retribution towards the old regime. The Velvet Revolution 2.0 in the US is about free speech, free enterprise and free (AI, Crypto & Social) tech.  

Americans got fed up with the woke nonsense and unmanaged decline of their country for decades. The blobocracy led to idiocracy, and may soon be replaced with netocracy, envisioned by Alexander Bard in 2000. 

Five years ago Balaji Srinivasan said that “Social media is American glasnost and cryptocurrency is American perestroika”.

With Elon, the US got the glasnost/free speech in AI (Grok) and Social (X) tech. With bitcoin, crypto and stablecoins the Rest (countries like El Salvador) is getting perestroika and the trend might soon arrive in the West. 

El Salvador with Bukele and Argentina with Milei are the foreshadows of what is to come in Trump 2.0 America. Or imagine Rwanda with Kagame, where drones are delivering blood to hospitals since 2019, but that somehow miraculously escaped the genocide of 1994. 

Or just imagine a red FDR 2.0 that unwinds the permanent bureaucracy created by the blue FDR 1.0. Or imagine LKY’s Singapore as the inspiration for Deng’s refounding of China on a turbo-capitalistic backend. 

Blue (tribe) was good, now it’s chaos. Now it can only de(con)struct, but can’t build. History is running in reverse, with the opposite outcomes, says Balaji Srinivasan. And with Trump 2.0 we might see an FDR 2.0 figure that reverses FDR’s legacy of sprawling permanent bureaucracies that decelerate tech progress. 

Blue tribe today is in a sad state, because it can only do half-measures in censorship, political violence, persecutions and propaganda. We are all Soviets now - says Niall Ferguson - and he might be too generous in fact. 

I’ve said for years now that the blue blobocracy-turned-idiocracy will soon have a worse reputation than Communists did after the fall of the Berlin wall. And I say it as a child of political prisoners. 

Communists had many flaws (see the Black Book of Communism), but they were at least pro-tech and could build infrastructure and keep the streets safe and clean. (Compare the streets of Belarus to streets of Venezuela/SF if you want to compare the old authoritarian left with the new authoritarian left). 

Chinese communism is a dominant form of communism now, and since Deng they switched their backend into turbo-capitalism. China has built over 40,000km of high-speed rail. It has around 100 EV makers and 430 EV models and plans to build over 150 nuclear reactors by 2035.

Elon catches a rocket with a “chopstick” while campaigning for Trump - but China copies the tech a month after. So clearly, free speech (free AI, Crypto, Social tech) is our only comparative advantage in the West.

We used to have the Fukuyama-esque dream of getting to Denmark. An effective Left-Right synthesis of social democracy with global commerce. But the internet increases variance, as Balaji says. So I think we have three dreams today: getting to Dubai (red tribe), getting to Venezuela (blue tribe) and getting to Mars (grey tribe).  

With Trump 2.0 and Elon we have the merger of red and grey tribes. Maybe the tech counter-elites don’t need to flee to Dubai anymore, and Dallas will do the trick.  Or places like SpaceX Starbase, to be more precise.  

Balaji compares Biden’s presidency to an alternative history where the communist hardliners have done a successful coup against Gorbachev and we had four more years of the old regime. But the gerontocratic blobocracy had turned into idiocracy - and almost everyone could see the emperor had no clothes in 2024. In fact he was not there, mentally.    

Biden has tried to follow up on Trump’s policies towards China and reindustrialization, but as Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz have pointed out in their post-election podcast episode at a16z - industry after industry has suffered greatly under Biden administration and only 0.4% of the CHIPS and Science Act funds were disbursed. Energy sector felt the same oppression as crypto and AI. 

In some ways Build Back Better is just a rebranding of MAGA. But the blue tribe can’t build, they can only de(con)struct. But MAGA is also not straightforward. As Balaji has pointed out - we can’t easily go back to the US of the 1950s, with prosperity for single-income high-school educated families - because it was a very unusual period where half of the world was destroyed after WWII and the US was a manufacturing and military superpower. We can’t go back to the 1990s either, when the US was a hyperpower after the USSR collapse. Now BRICS have flipped the West in the share of world’s GDP.

A reversal to the mean is a hard thing to beat - Asia dominated world trade for centuries, but had a very bad last century. Europe emerged powerful after the Enlightenment - but now Scotland has returned to the previous era - abandoning free speech with new hate speech laws. 

Marc Andreessen has tweeted that we need to put everything on the TV price curve - hyperdeflating costs of everything with technology and deregulation. I think we can do DDD as an alternative to both MAGA and BBB.

DDD stands for drones, dark factories and deurbanization. I call it dark dynamism. 

People in tech and MAGA talk about decentralization, debureaucratization (Elon’s D.O.G.E.) and deregulation. These need to happen - see the story of LKY’s Singapore that inspired Deng's refounding of China on a turbo-capitalist backend that unlocked some $100T of wealth. 

Politics doesn’t scale, but technology does. For example Communism is viable within the extended family, but fails on a larger scale. Some form of socialism can work on a scale of a city or a city state. Basically getting to Denmark is a nice dream for the West - but like Singapore, Denmark is a sui generis country with a small population. 

Still, there are successful kibbutzim and communes that survive until this day. But similarly to Balaji’s scenario of “China can make a pencil” I think with technology like Starlink, AI and dark factories (with no lights needed due to full automation) various viable charter communities, startup societies or startup villages can 10x in size and productivity.

These technologies make deurbanization viable. And deurbanization as another form of decentralization (like free speech, free AI, Crypto and Social tech) can save the West and stop global depopulation. This is a big enough goal for Elon Musk - D.O.G.E with good and efficient governance, LKY-Singapore-style, is just a subroutine to get to that (lunarpunk moonshot) goal.

Basically people still haven’t figured out how to live in cities, and cities self-destruct given enough time - SF saga and the blues of blue cities is not unique. Rome went from 1m to 30k population - a 97% drop, resembling some crypto rug pull.         

Deurbanization itself - impossible as it seems for normies - is also just a subroutine of a larger dream central to the grey tribe - of getting to Mars.  

Exciting times we live in, and let’s see if this Velvet Revolution 2.0 brings a counter-revolution or will inspire Democrats to reverse course. Like when LKY’s Singapore inspired Deng to switch China’s backend to turbo-capitalism. 

We could see someone like Newsom in California doing 180 and becoming what I call Dem’s Deng - combining the safe streets, global commerce, dashboard management, pro-tech and pro-wealth Asian culture of Singapore with more recent experiments in techno-optimism and libertarianism from El Salvador and Argentina. 

Vivat the rocket man, the orange man and the orange coin! 

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Bangalore Four is a sci-fi scenario where Belgrade, Bratislava, Budapest and Bangalore will gradually replace what is today known as the Visegrad Four – Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.

Over the last two decades I have been many times to the MFEA conference room in Bratislava, and recently saw that the Ministry changed the design at the podium from Good Idea Slovakia to “sovEUreignty” - a play on words combining “sovereignty” and “the EU” - a small country trying to emancipate from the Blob, a bit.

But, there is no sovereignty without techno-optimism. Hungary is the champion of the red tribe of conservatives. But its fate was sealed when it banned Uber long time ago. In 2023 the US has sanctioned International Investment Bank based in Budapest, a COMECON relict from the Cold War era. Hungary immediately withdrew from the organization.

RUSI asked if Czechia and Slovakia are the new radical center of the EU, back in 2022. During her Lennart Meri lecture in 2023, Fiona Hill spoke about the passing of pax Americana as the Rest rebels against the West.   

But we don’t live in a unipolar, bipolar or multipolar world. We live in exactly a tripolar world, writes Balaji Srinivasan. He summarizes it as NYT vs CCP vs BTC. Or the US vs China vs the Internet. Plus, countries like India, El Salvador, Singapore or UAE – places Balaji calls international intermediates that embrace global commerce and decentralized technologies.

When you are Google, you go all in on open source to compete with Apple and Microsoft. India is the most populous country, and the third most powerful country and a country with the third highest number of tech unicorns, after the US and China. Therefore it can become a safe haven for decentralized and open technologies – like AI, Crypto and Social – in the same way as India has built its generic medicine industry.

Bitcoin has become the flag of technology, in the era when great protocol politics is replacing great power competition. “The 21st century doesn’t belong to China, the United States, or Silicon Valley. It belongs to the internet.”, writes Balaji.  

We move from Western values to Internet values – global and open protocols bring the promise of free speech, free commerce and free computation – right at the time when the West is turning authoritarian.

When Google wanted to compete with Apple and Microsoft, it embraced open-source software. Small countries like Slovakia and large blocs like the EU need to embrace Internet (free and open AI, Crypto, Social tech) and India to survive in the tripolar world.

‘The backward will be beaten’ is a Chinese saying similar in spirit to Andy Grove’s “only the paranoid survive”.  We live in a world of Red Queen dynamics – where you must keep running as fast as you can, just to stay in the same place. We have to constantly innovate, adapt and evolve to keep our relative position and way of life.

Former Yugoslavia and India were once major players in NAM - The Non-Aligned Movement - reacting the bipolar world during the Cold War and trying to preserve their independence.

The techno-optimistic Bangalore Four can give birth to a larger “network-aligned movement” a new kind of NAM, that combines the ideas such as the network state by Balaji Srinivasan and the civilization state by Bruno Maçães with today’s sovereignists or populists, who often just reflect the priorities of the local median voter, as Dominic Cummings puts it.

But masses don’t change regimes and don’t bring about emancipation and sovereignty. Only empowered counter-elites do. Populism, conservativism, classical liberalism or libertarianism all need a great doze of pragmatism, pragmatic antagonism and techno-optimism to succeed in today’s world.

Both MAGA and Biden’s Build Back Better are envisioning a return to some lost prosperous era, like the US in the 1950s. But it was a highly unusual time, when most of the world was destroyed by WWII and communism and when a high school graduate and a manual worker in the US could support a middle class family life with one paycheck only.

But now we are experiencing a reversal to the mean - to a long era when Asia dominated the world economy for millennia. Both India and China had a terrible 20th century with imported ideologies of Socialism and communism, lots of conflict and division.

India is the largest democracy and a torch-bearer of Western values. If small countries like Slovakia want a bit of sovereignty in our tripolar world, they need to bet on India and techno-optimism.

Less V4 and more B4 is the way. Bangalore Four, ftw.

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Until 2016 America was doing free speech diplomacy and supported various open source and privacy tools that dissidents all around the world could use.

After the twin revolutions of 2016, Brexit and Trump, the Blob reversed the narrative completely into "free speech is killing us" and built a whole industry around global censorship. (See reporting by Jacob Siegel, Mike Benz and Mike Shellenberger)

But in fact, free speech is keeping us alive. It is the only comparative advantage the West has left. Free speech is the core of American dynamism. Not (just) high tech innovations that China can copy fast.

Because a free society is very hard to copy. 

I did my civic duty to report on online censorship efforts in my home country of Slovakia, like decels at Gerulata Technologies who are doing narrative control using AI and advocate against open source AI. And I recently spoke at a free speech event in Prague with Mike Shellenberger.

Jon Stokes had a great observation how the photo of Putin and Kim Jong Un in a car is actually not funny, because the joke's on us for believing anything we have seen on twitter for all those years - like how Russia should have collapsed in 2022. But I think a big part of this sad story is the de/amplification of certain online content by the Blob, with AI censorship on an industrial scale. Luckily, Elon Musk bought the platform and rebranded it X.

Elon Musk thinks that AI should optimize for maximum truth-telling and curiosity. Because a woke AI can be easily reverse-engineered into an anti-woke AI. But one cannot reverse the laws of physics. This is similar to Scott Alexander’s observation how rational argumentation (which is based on free speech) is the only asymmetric tool we have. Because violence, propaganda and censorship can be easily reverse-engineered, scaled and escalated by our adversaries.

Sadly we in the West are copying the Chinese Great Firewall (see the EU's DSA) and their cancel culture. With a big delay.

We need to reverse this ASAP - and extend the classic American view of free speech to the whole West.

The EU has copied the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative with our Global Gateway, which is largely a marketing exercise that is 10 years late. Now the EU copies Great Firewall and is 20 years late doing online censorship.

The core of American dynamism is free speech, free commerce and free computation. Or free and open Social, Crypto and AI technologies. Not STEM and high-tech skills.

I hear people I respect, like Mike Solana at Pirate Wires, proclaiming even today that China can’t innovate. I think that’s cope. Instagram finds it hard to copy TikTok algorithm and China has hypersonic missiles and DJI drones. If Unitree G1 humanoid robot for $16,000 isn’t innovation, than I don’t know what is.

We can take the Peter Thiel view that true innovation is only going from zero to one. Creating the first and dominant Paypal, Facebook, Tesla, SpaceX, Palantir and hopefully once also Anduril.

But China can clearly do 1 to infinity - copying, improving and scaling high-tech faster than the West. They have built 39,000km of high-speed rail in 15 years. They can build rail 50x cheaper and have 200x ship building capacity of the US.

And with WeChat we can argue they can also do zero to one, as Elon Musk tries to copy them, not vice versa.

What’s worse the West nowadays copies China and Russia in order to beat China and Russia, losing its soul and values in the process. But as Vivek Ramaswamy said: "we’re not gonna beat China by being China. We’re going to beat China by being ourselves.’"

The old establishment, that Balaji Srinivasan calls blue America, or the blue tribe, and Mike Benz likes to call the Blob ( a security state establishment at the core of the blue tribe), actually copies China in online censorship - often using their satellites like the EU or Five Eyes partners - like the recent case when Australia tried to ban a video globally, but lost in a court case, when Elon Musk challenged them.

And with the recent presidential debate between Trump and Biden in the US, it is becoming clearer by the day that we copy Russia in what people like Matt Taibbi call a managed democracy. Like keeping a Potemkin president and preventing Democrat voters from selecting a real alternative in regular and open primaries.

“Are we the Soviets” asked Niall Ferguson recently in his recent essay that sees many parallels between the current state of the US empire and the Soviets right before the end of USSR.

In his book The Network State, Balaji Srinivasan, describes how "history is running in reverse with the opposite outcomes". And he provides dozens of examples - like USSR being the senior partner to China back during the Cold War and now China being the senior partner to Russia.  Or Russians suffering from deaths of despair in the 1990s and now Americans suffering from the same.

New censors and totalitarians like Věra Jourová must fail with their efforts, because we are free people and the freedom of speech is the core principle of the West.

If someone breaks the law, police should arrest them. No need to break encryption for everyone and copy China in online censorship.

The US needs to return to pre-2016 free speech diplomacy and extend the First Amendment values to the whole West - and do exactly the opposite to what blue America does today, using EU mandarins to censor the whole world via global harmonization.

The EU should copy American free speech values and laws and stop copying China.

The core of American dynamism is free speech not high-tech. And free speech is the only comparative advantage the West has left. China closes the gap in high-tech rapidly, but they can't copy a free society.

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