Three main powers today, according to Balaji Srinivasan, are: Communist Capital, Woke Capital and Crypto Capital (CCP vs NYT vs BTC). The Chinese Communist Party says you must submit, because they are powerful. The wokes say you must submit, because you are powerful. And the bitcoin maxies say you must keep your head high and be sovereign.
While Balaji Srinivasan is closer to the BTC part of the triangle, he says that maximalism in any of these three directions is bad, but the absence of submission, tolerance or sovereignty is equally bad.
China is becoming the center of hard power because they can out-execute anyone in the physical world and build orders of magnitude faster than many Western countries. It is fair to say, that it takes the EU longer just to design and negotiate a new development aid initiative, and sign contracts with African counterparts, than for China to build a new port or a town.
China builds half of worlds ships, around 15x more than the EU. China plans to build 150 reactors in 15 years domestically for $440B – more than rest of the world has built in 35 years. China has managed to build 38,000km of high speed rail since 2008. Spain, as the second country with the longest high-speed rail network, has around 2000 km. China accounted for a third of global energy transition investments in 2021 and these grew by 60% compared to 2020.
New York Times is still the center of soft power, because it is upstream of Western politicians and other mainstream media. NYT has a global reach and a patina of prestige press, thus it influences the discourse all around the world.
Balaji describes the origins of techlash since 2013. Traditional media were disrupted by Google News and social networks and their revenue collapsed. Their regional monopolies evaporated and they engaged in ruthless competition just to survive.
Since then, many traditional media started to spice up their content with what we would call woke words today, in an attempt to get attention of wider audience. Trad media alienated the tech elites and became a kind of tabloids for the midwits – an infotainment for the professional managerial class.
And thus gradually mainstream media turned into what Balaji calls downstream media – producers of clickbait headlines and wrappers around tweets. Main action now happens online, and downstream media just comments on it.
Balaji says that bitcoin maximalism is probably the most underrated movement today. But one can see the cracks in the Matrix as countries in the periphery of the global empire start to embrace bitcoin as national currency. From El Salvador to Central African Republic.
A healthy dose of tribalism is ok, but if taken to the extreme, bitcoin maximalism alienates all other crypto founders and considers other coins as scams. Too much sovereignty is counterproductive, as division of labor and societal trust make us rich.
I think, currently it is relatively easy for Western politicians or entrepreneurs to get noticed by NYT or BTC crowds and get some respect from them. All you need is sufficient distribution and an Overton-window smashing ability. But it is hard to get respect from the hard power. It seems that Elon Musk is the only exception, that proves the rule. He can deliver Starlink to Ukraine in two days and he managed to change the joint-venture rules in Shanghai for his Gigafactory.
One would be wise to optimize for the biggest possible respect and recognition within this CCP-NYT-BTC triangle. If CCP is the center of hard power, and NYT is the center of soft power, web3 is becoming the center of smart power (Balaji says, engineers and hackers are upstream of robots and drones). And any maximalism or over-zealous tribalism can be considered a stupid power.
The stupid power of zealous activism and maximalism in all three directions (CCP, NYT, BTC) has its catastrophic risks and doom scenarios. A digital authoritarianism of CCP, unchecked on a global scale, can lead to what John Robb calls the Long Night scenario. BTC maximalism can lead to a Mad Max world. And wokes with their twitter-maximalism unchecked can bring us to a scenario I call the Nuclear Yolocaust Times.


Balaji explains that soft power is stochastic, while hard power is deterministic. If twitter swarm and prestige media gang up on some politician or influencer, they can eventually damage his or her reputation, business and income. People increasingly don’t trust downstream media, but downstream media can still destroy trust in others.
One area where the old US establishment could still flex their muscles is the digital hard power of deplatforming, cancelation, (internal) sanctions and freezing of dissidents’ accounts. This is different from the twitter swarm, because this is Big Tech being an extended arm of state security agencies – and just receiving and deterministically fulfilling orders of who to shadowban, as we have seen with the recent Twitter Files revelations.