Eurodecentrism

Surrealism school of international relations. From West vs Rest to Internet plus Rest vs Europe.

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.