Daily Balajisms – Realignment from Red vs Blue into Orange vs Green
Orange tribe of tech progressivism vs Green tribe of status-quo statism.
The political compass is rotating by 90 degrees, says Balaji Srinivasan. The main conflict is not between the Left and Right, or Blue vs Red, but between the technologically-progressive libertarians and technologically-conservative authoritarians.
It’s Cloud vs Land. Network vs State. International capitalists vs nationalists/socialists.
Orange coin is the new blue jeans. A symbol and continuation of Western ideals of freedom and prosperity. Crypto is to the US, what America was to Europe. A new frontier, says Balaji.
This realignment creates strange bedfellows and alliances between old freedom-of-speech leftists, classical liberals, technologically progressive libertarians, and conservative people on the Right.
Balaji Srinivasan thinks there is a shift from wokeism to statism underway. If 2010s were about wokeism, the 2020s are about statism. He gives a metaphor of how the tone shifted from “defund the police” to “fund the Capitol Hill police” within a year.
If the current TradFi Winter, (central) banking crisis and de-dollarization trends continue, there will be an attempt at bitcoin seizure, and bitcoin maximalism will go mainstream and will takeover the Republican party. Like the wokes took over the Democratic Party in the last decade.
Balaji Srinivasan believes that bitcoin maximalism is the most underrated political movement. Like the woke phenomenon, it is a movement that operates primarily on a network and not within a state structure.
Communism was about redistribution of wealth and the struggle between workers and factory owners. Wokeism is about redistribution of status, and the primary arena is not a factory floor, but a social network, thinks Balaji.
Both woke and tech tribes came out of post-war dispensation, and grew with the era of personal computers and the internet, says Balaji. Woke is strongly opposed to fascism and tech to communism.
They both turn constants into variables. Conferences turned into virtual or IRL meetups. Instead of owning a car you can uber to work. The gender binary gets contested. The fiat currencies gets challenged by crypto.
Wokes say “we are all equal” and bitcoin maximalists say “you ain’t the boss of me”. As left and right libertarians, they might be opposed, but the vector-sum of their push is downwards on the political compass – towards more anarchy. This is the core of Balaji’s sci-fi scenario of American Anarchy vs Chinese Control.
If you imagine riots of summer 2020 and Jan 6 of 2021, but 100x more intense, you get the American Anarchy sci-fi scenario. The Chinese Control scenario is the digital authoritarianism, powered by AI, that becomes 10x stronger than the current Chinese system of surveillance, as a reaction to a failed coup d’etat. And it will get exported worldwide.
Balaji thinks that the three main power attractors today are NYT, CCP and BTC. Or soft power, hard power, and smart power. In the West the main political divide will be between those who believe institutions are broken and those who believe they can be reformed. Brokenism vs status-quoism.
The conflict will be between the Orange tribe of tech progressivism and the Green tribe of status-quo statism.
BTC over NYT, paradigmatically.