Daily Balajisms - American Anarchy vs Chinese Control

Two not-so-sci-fi scenarios

Balaji Srinivasan writes in his book, The Network State, about two possible future scenarios, that he calls American Anarchy and Chinese Control.

He describes the American Anarchy scenario also in a short poetic essay on Bari Weiss’ The Free Press. When Trump got elected, people feared the West is doomed and many countries might slide into tyranny. There were books like Timothy Snider’s On Tyranny.

But Balaji sees the West as being on a historical arch towards decentralization, after a centralizing 20th century with peak centralization around 1950s. Back then, there were only a few TV and radio stations and the whole society was watching the same news and sitcoms.

Balaji sees three top power attractors today as CCP, NYT and BTC. Or Communist Capital, Woke Capital and Crypto Capital. While China is sliding towards more pronounced nationalism and authoritarianism, the other two attractors are left-libertarian (woke, NYT) and right-libertarian (bitcoin maximalism).

The wokes and bitcoin maxies might be opposed to each other, but they both push downwards on the political compass – and sum of this vector is more anarchy in the near future. The US cannot be invaded by other countries, but it can be defeated by itself.

Jakub Simek @jakubsimek

File this as another weak signal for the possible coming future scenario @balajis calls American Anarchy versus Chinese Control. The US might be headed where Russia was in the 1990s. More men died of violent deaths back then in Russia than during concurrent Balkan Wars.

Jakub Simek @jakubsimek

"In total, a staggering 83 active-duty soldiers stationed at Fort Bragg died in the 18 months ending June 2021.. .. just three Fort Bragg soldiers died in overseas combat, meaning these elite troops are a dizzying 27 times more likely to die stateside.." https://t.co/U8ZDXHaUct

Instead of the horse-shoe theory, where the left-authoritarians and right-authoritarians resemble each other when they go into extremes, Balaji proposes a figure-8 theory – where also the left-libertarians and right-libertarians become similar in their actions and narrative. One says “we are all equal”, and the other says “you ain’t the boss of me”. They both see authority as illegitimate.

Balaji often mentions a Chinese proverb: “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide.” This implies that the East (with China and India, which both experienced quite a turbulent last century) is in its centralizing arch, where the state is gaining capacity to execute large infrastructure projects, like high-speed rail buildout in China, or Aadhaar digital identity and payments stack in India.

The Chinese Control sci-fi scenario, according to Balaji, might happen as a result of a coup d’etat attempt in China, that will be blamed on the West in general, and the US in particular. As a result, China will use its AI capabilities with full force, in an attempt to clamp down on any dissent and thus destroy the remnants of civil society and free discourse.

Furthermore, China will later export this technology to countries around the world in a bid to make new allies in return for providing security for the ruling elites. This global digital dictatorship scenario is also similar to what John Robb calls the Long Night.

Liberal democracies are dancing on a tightrope between chaos and tyranny. India and the Internet, with global, free and open web3 protocols might be the torch carriers for the Western ideals of freedom and prosperity.

Balaji calls countries, that might end up mediating between American Anarchy and Chinese Control, the International Intermediates. These might be places like Dubai, India, Israel or Singapore, where netocrats seek refuge.