Unitree vs uniparty

Only free speech and techno-optimism can compete with China.

To compete with China, the US needs a new uniparty focused on free speech and techno-optimism. 

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is projected to deliver close to 90% of all mass to orbit in 2024, around 15x more than China will do, with 6% share of the market. The rest of the world will have the remaining 4%. Greetings to Europe.

Clearly, the grey tribe of techno-optimists can compete with China, as Balaji Srinivasan says, and the blue America cannot. Blue tribe can only do half-measures in copying China in digital authoritarianism and censorship.

Semiconductors and commercial aviation seem to be two industries where China is behind, but they are ahead in electric vehicles and drones. “Speed is our only moat”, says Beff Jezos, a co-founder of effective accelerationism.

I think speed of innovation is necessary but not sufficient. We need to compete on an orthogonal axis that is hard to copy. And what is hard to copy? A free society is hard to copy. Free speech, free and open computation, commerce and conversations are hard to copy. A constructive high variance society is hard to copy. 

Therefore we need to return to free speech diplomacy. We can call it free speech and tech diplomacy. Specially focusing on free and open AI, Crypto, Social tech. Because free speech is keeping us alive and it is our only comparative advantage in the West.

China is great at copying and scaling technologies and the West is at risk of becoming another Xerox PARC, thinks Balaji Srinivasan. A place where innovations arise, but are ultimately scaled and produced elsewhere. China can also innovate - from BYD Yangwang cars that can jump or swim in the water to cheap G1 humanoid robots by Unitree for $16,000.

On 13th October 2024, Elon Musk’s SpaceX catches a rocket booster with “chopsticks”, while he was campaigning for Donald Trump and presented Tesla Robotaxi two days earlier. But on November 5, three weeks later, we read news that a Chinese startup Cosmoleap has the same design with “chopsticks” in its pitch deck and the Chinese Long March 9 rocket turned into a clone of the SpaceX Starship rocket. 

Amazing achievements like catching a rocket booster with “chopsticks” might be the similar to the four-minute mile. A “zero to one” soon becomes “one to many”. Hardware is hard, as the saying goes, but paradoxically it is easy to copy, explains Balaji.

Over the decades the uniparty in Washington DC ruled the American empire for the benefit of the median voter. They made sure that people in the US had cheap gas to drive, food to eat, gadgets to play with and clothes to wear. It’s actually hard to produce a pencil - with all the raw materials and inputs that need to be sourced from all around the world. 

And securing these supply chains was the purpose of the Blob, thinks Mike Benz, a strong critic of the current security state establishment that lost the plot some 20 years ago and doesn’t serve American industry and ordinary Americans anymore. 

It’s NATO versus normies today, but it used to be NATO for normies before. Blue (tribe) was good, now it’s chaos. Or anarcho-tyranny to be more precise. Anarcho-tyranny is the opposite of a smart regulator, thinks Balaji Srinivasan.

It punishes regular citizens and lets criminals roam free. A smart regulator has low false positive and false negative rates - it is able to rate the actors and prohibit bad actors from the arena. Think Uber or Amazon and their star rating systems.   

I think we need to reverse the mission drift that Mike Benz often talks about, when NATO gradually went from tanks to tweets - creating sheltered workshops for the laptop class and bullshit jobs for bureaucrats who think they can put the put the genie back in the bottle and police the internet on an industrial scale. And in this way, win the war on normies in the noosphere. I think we need the “from tanks to tweets” trend and have the opposite doctrine - from disinfo to drones. I have a related idea of DDD - drones, dark factories and de-urbanization. Or Dark Dynamism.  

Balaji has a chapter in his book the Network State called China Can Make a Pencil, a scenario where AI, digital yuan and robotics enable China to have a bird’s eye view of the economy and make the whole economy computable. China also controls big portions of supply chains for critical raw materials and rare earth minerals.    

Now blue tribe is openly hostile to founders like Elon Musk and values like free speech. But such founders and values are the only comparative advantage the West has left. We used to have a Fukuyama-esque dream of "getting to Denmark". But the internet increases variance, as Balaji Srinivasan says, so now I think we have three dreams:

getting to Venezuela (blue tribe)

getting to Dubai (red tribe)

getting to Mars (grey tribe)

But I predict a white-pill positive scenario of a realignment around techno-optimism, where the decels and degrowthers will be marginalized and pushed out of the blue tribe and the YIMBYs and e/acc folks will dominate. Remember, even communists were for tech progress. 

So after the realignment around techno-optimism we will see these three dreams:

getting to a startup village (to use Balaji’s term to bootstrap network states) 

getting to Dubai (or any startup city) 

getting to Mars

Politics doesn't scale, while tech does, and so I predict many progressives, conservatives and techno-optimists will start their own communes and startup villages, following the network state playbook, while many previously blue cities will follow the Singapore and Dubai path to prosperity. 

But to stop depopulating we need to deurbanize. With Starlink, remote work, AI, automation, and dark factories, a startup village can have an economic output of today's towns and cities.  

And everything will be about "getting to Mars" - a new uniparty will form around techno-optimism, and a new Blob will blossom, if you will.