Daily Balajisms - Global Greys vs Blue America

Without the grey tribe, Blue America is not globally competitive.

Blue America has blown the biggest lead in human history, says Balaji Srinivasan. The US was a hyperpower in 1991, after winning the Cold War. It could win everywhere without fighting. Now it fights everywhere without winning.

The old establishment has inherited the post-WWII order but is increasingly senile and did not reproduce elites that could be founders – live players who start things from scratch.

 Blue America is run by heirs who try hard to keep relevant and dominant and constantly attack and fight tech founders, the new counter-elites. Founding vs inheriting is the difference between build-rich and born-rich, explains Balaji.

But the tech tribe is global. Like Kurds in Iraq, tech tribe has its own foreign policy, says Balaji. Elon Musk still travels to China and takes high-level meetings, and is celebrated there as a tech founder. Netanyahu recently jokingly called Elon Musk the unofficial president of the US.

Musk can’t become the US president, because he was born and raised in South Africa. He probably doesn’t want to run for president either – as he lives in the new paradigm of a netocrat in an global economy of attentionalism, where the internet has become a new global empire.

Elon is an example of a global grey – a tech founder and tech tribe member that has not just factories around the world, but also a vision to “Occupy Mars”.   

The Blue America was once a force for good that helped post-Communist countries in Eastern Europe to thrive, but now it represents the chaos that we see in blue cities and the woke culture export that sows division and cannot build in the physical world.

According to Anduril’s founder Palmer Luckey, who is resolutely pro-Ukraine, the famously corrupt Russia can produce ammunition 10x cheaper than the US.

But Elon Musk puts 8x more payload to orbit than China. And China puts as much as the rest of the world combined - 80/10/10 percent.

Without the grey tribe, Blue America is not globally competitive. The American dynamism meme is probably too late to tame China, but it represents the new assertiveness of the grey tribe that was constantly under attack from Blue America for over a decade.

I think we will get something that I call post-American dynamism or fractal dynamism – the grey tribe is truly global as Balaji says. And they will increasingly exit the dysfunctional US as once Indians leave India to thrive abroad. Crypto is already leaving and even Hong Kong seems more welcoming that the DC. The Silicon Valley was partially moved to Miami during Covid.

Now VCs and startup founders are active in places like Dubai. The next move might be founding special innovation zones in the form of startup cities to make use of longitudinal arbitrage in the age of Starlink and remote work. 

First of all, the members of tech tribe need to realize that they are a tribe. I call it pragmatic antagonism – being a Blue pawn is not enough – they don’t let us build and decentralize. Tech founders are already global but tech tribe needs to discover its self-identity and this is what Balaji calls tech-Zionism – how a reverse diaspora that is formed first in the cloud gets printed onto the land.