Hopium Wars
AI censorship is the hopium of the old establishment.
The West was trying to beat China by copying China through half-measures in censorship and ESG-driven industrial policy.
China feeds opiates to the Western underclasses, while our old elites get high on their own AI hopium supply, trying to gain power through censorship.
Religion is the opium of the masses, claimed Marx. Today, we can say that a religion of AI safetyism, AI doomerism and digital censorship is the hopium of the old elites.
History is running in reverse with the opposite outcomes, says Balaji Srinivasan. Before the West was pushing opium to Chinese elites, now China is feeding the fentanyl addiction and homeless crisis in the US.
Before, the Rest tried to emulate the West - importing ideologies like communism, now the West copies China’s digital censorship coupled with a decade of something akin to the Cultural Revolution and ESG over-regulation.
Every successful political power is an effective fusion between the Left and the Right, says Balaji. AI for the old establishment is another ESG holy war, in terms of AI safety, and a very strong tool for online censorship that they hoped to control via regulations on both sides of the Atlantic. The DeepSeek R1 moment of an open source “flippening” in AI has vaporized that hope and turned it into hopium.
Peter Thiel thinks that the ESG movement advances China’s interest, because it decelerates the West in terms of technological progress and energy security. Balaji thinks of blue tribe as incompetent communists that try to copy competent communists in China.
We can view the grey tribe as competent (venture) capitalists and competent tech founders. What we saw with Xi visiting Newsom in SF in 2024 is maybe a preview of things to come - US Democrats, as incompetent communists, forming closer ties with the competent ones in China.
China after Deng Xiaoping copied the Singapore model and came up with a moral innovation of “entrepreneurship is good”. Deng Xiaoping said “it doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice”. This pragmatism transformed China and caused a $100T wealth unlock, installing turbo-capitalism on the backend, while keeping the CCP frontend marketing of the hammer and sickle intact.
Free and open AI, Crypto and Social tech, coupled with progress in longevity research can be a similar $100T wealth unlock for jurisdictions that embrace techno-optimism.
The progressive mind is obsessed with power and cares only about power. But progressives are good with words and painting narratives that can move hearts and stir strong emotions.
Over the last 30 years, the old Western elites squandered the biggest global lead the US had, as a hyperpower in the 1990s. Today China can build infrastructure orders of magnitude faster than the sclerotic West. Think something like 1000x. The hopium of our elites was that they can censor like China and use their soft power to market this censorship as fighting disinformation, without delivering any material progress in terms of improving security and welfare of citizens.
The West lost its hard power rapidly, because hard power is about building infrastructure and factories, not about dropping bombs. The result is a fact that in the case of US - China war over Taiwan, the US would run out of missiles in 8 days and it would take years to stockpile them again.
Startups like Anduril are trying to change that and turn the US into a global weapons shop instead of a global cop. Because the cop has no backup and was defunded by the woke blobocracy-turned idiocracy.
The current LLM paradigm in AI will probably not get us an AGI that can replace humans and become their overlord. AI is a symbiotic intelligence or an augmenting intelligence - helping top performers be x time better. But even narrow applications of Western AI get slower and dumber by politically correct frontier models.
Even today after Donald Trump has become the 47th president of the USA, Google’s AI product Deep Research refuses to answer facts that are against its woke ideology. Podcast hosts at Pirate Wires mentioned how they wanted to know which presidents have changed geographic names besides Donald Trump, and Google’s Deep Research refused to answer, and behaved like its Gemini sibling a while ago with the woke Founding Fathers fiasco.
We cannot beat adversaries like China or Russia with similar approaches in censorship and digital authoritarianism, where the USG in the Biden’s administration wanted to control and censor AI, Crypto and Social technologies and limit them only to a handful of players that would merge with the security state.
Free speech is the only comparative advantage the West has left. And we need to double down on that unique quality that was gravely eroded in the last 10 years. We also need to double-down on AI in defense tech besides “LLM poetry generators”, to paraphrase Alex Karp from Palantir.
We need a new uniparty that can beat Unitree - with better AI and robotics - leveraging our only comparative advantage of free speech in the West and attracting top tech founders to the West. JD Vance had a strong message to the EU at the Munich security conference: “shared values make for strong alliances”. No free speech means no security from the US, to put it more bluntly.
The West needs dozens of companies like Anduril and Palantir, that focus on sensor fusion and AI integration into modern weapons systems. Humanoid robots will not replace elite soldiers anytime soon and AI with exoskeletons can augment them and make them much faster.
Just a few years ago it was considered a “verboten” conspiracy to suggest China is fueling the fentanyl overdose crisis in the US. But the logic was clear - China is an autocracy, and so the fentanyl precursors need to be exported at least with the knowledge and approval of the CCP.
The US benefited from the Opium Wars that brought “a century of humiliation” to China. But now we live not just in an Asian century, but in an inverted century as well, thinks Balaji Srinivasan - the countries that were down will be up and vice versa.
Between 2011 and 2013, China has used more concrete than the US in the entire 20th century. China retired steam locomotives in 2005. And from 2008 until 2024 it went from zero to 46,000 kilometers of high speed rail. The country with the second largest HSR network in the world is Spain with over 2,000 km. China has a lead in energy generation and nuclear plant buildout, with 150 new reactors to be built in the next 15 years.
China can build ships 350x faster than the US, says Palmer Luckey. What’s even worse, all the commercial ships they build need to meet military standards, for example a ferry needs to be able to carry tanks. So they can convert all their commercial vessels into military ones in times of war. This is an expensive signal of their expansionist regional ambitions beyond Taiwan, thinks Palmer Luckey.
With DeepSeek R1 we might have witnessed a preview of things to come. An open source “flippening” where no country has a decisive lead in the frontier AI models.
The current restrictions on advanced semiconductor exports to China make sense only if the US can achieve a narrow and practical AGI in the next couple of years, otherwise they are counter-productive as they force China to be more innovative, think people like Dylan Patel. The popular scenario of superhuman AGI that brings singularity is unrealistic with the current LLM paradigm, at least according to people like Naval Ravikant and Yann LeCun.
Balaji Srinivasan says that the current LLMs work on use cases where the rules don’t change, or they change very slowly - like a language. But if they enter markets with adverse actors and constantly changing rules and competition, they might be like a shark washed ashore - a peak predator outside its habitat.
With the American lead on AI we might see “a short bright day before the dark long night”. John Robb has an AI doom scenario called the Long Night, where an authoritarian China dominates in the AI race and exports its technology to the rest of the World. As a result it will be almost impossible to organize opposition or protests in countries with Chinese AI.
Marc Andreesen got politically active when he saw regulation and censorship efforts from the Washington DC Blob in the AI industry that reminded him of the crypto industry crackdown and debanking under, what Nic Carter describes as, the Operation Choke Point 2.0. The censorship of AI is magnitudes more scary than the censorship of social media, because AI will control much more in our lives than conversations.
The old security establishment’s Blob wanted to control speech online, they wanted to introduce CBDCs and destroy the crypto industry. They wanted to limit AI industry to a few players and destroy AI startups. They went after energy companies and with ESG made building anything slow and expensive.
But in 2025, the Hopium Wars, where the woke decels thought they can copy Chinese digital authoritarianism and decelerate tech progress with ESG, are, it seems, over.
Trump’s free-speech diplomacy presented by JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference and the open source flippening in AI by DeepSeek R1 turned the one hope the old elites had to remain in power - digital censorship - into hopium.