Velvet Revolution 2.0
The twin orange revolutions of tech and politics.
Politics is the sublimation of violence, and alignment is the sublimation of politics. The Velvet Revolution of 17th November 1989 in Czechoslovakia earned its name because people got rid of socialism without violence and retribution towards the old regime. The Velvet Revolution 2.0 in the US is about free speech, free enterprise and free (AI, Crypto & Social) tech.
Americans got fed up with the woke nonsense and unmanaged decline of their country for decades. The blobocracy led to idiocracy, and may soon be replaced with netocracy, envisioned by Alexander Bard in 2000.
Five years ago Balaji Srinivasan said that “Social media is American glasnost and cryptocurrency is American perestroika”.
With Elon, the US got the glasnost/free speech in AI (Grok) and Social (X) tech. With bitcoin, crypto and stablecoins the Rest (countries like El Salvador) is getting perestroika and the trend might soon arrive in the West.
El Salvador with Bukele and Argentina with Milei are the foreshadows of what is to come in Trump 2.0 America. Or imagine Rwanda with Kagame, where drones are delivering blood to hospitals since 2019, but that somehow miraculously escaped the genocide of 1994.
Or just imagine a red FDR 2.0 that unwinds the permanent bureaucracy created by the blue FDR 1.0. Or imagine LKY’s Singapore as the inspiration for Deng’s refounding of China on a turbo-capitalistic backend.
Blue (tribe) was good, now it’s chaos. Now it can only de(con)struct, but can’t build. History is running in reverse, with the opposite outcomes, says Balaji Srinivasan. And with Trump 2.0 we might see an FDR 2.0 figure that reverses FDR’s legacy of sprawling permanent bureaucracies that decelerate tech progress.
Blue tribe today is in a sad state, because it can only do half-measures in censorship, political violence, persecutions and propaganda. We are all Soviets now - says Niall Ferguson - and he might be too generous in fact.
I’ve said for years now that the blue blobocracy-turned-idiocracy will soon have a worse reputation than Communists did after the fall of the Berlin wall. And I say it as a child of political prisoners.
Communists had many flaws (see the Black Book of Communism), but they were at least pro-tech and could build infrastructure and keep the streets safe and clean. (Compare the streets of Belarus to streets of Venezuela/SF if you want to compare the old authoritarian left with the new authoritarian left).
Chinese communism is a dominant form of communism now, and since Deng they switched their backend into turbo-capitalism. China has built over 40,000km of high-speed rail. It has around 100 EV makers and 430 EV models and plans to build over 150 nuclear reactors by 2035.
Elon catches a rocket with a “chopstick” while campaigning for Trump - but China copies the tech a month after. So clearly, free speech (free AI, Crypto, Social tech) is our only comparative advantage in the West.
We used to have the Fukuyama-esque dream of getting to Denmark. An effective Left-Right synthesis of social democracy with global commerce. But the internet increases variance, as Balaji says. So I think we have three dreams today: getting to Dubai (red tribe), getting to Venezuela (blue tribe) and getting to Mars (grey tribe).
With Trump 2.0 and Elon we have the merger of red and grey tribes. Maybe the tech counter-elites don’t need to flee to Dubai anymore, and Dallas will do the trick. Or places like SpaceX Starbase, to be more precise.
Balaji compares Biden’s presidency to an alternative history where the communist hardliners have done a successful coup against Gorbachev and we had four more years of the old regime. But the gerontocratic blobocracy had turned into idiocracy - and almost everyone could see the emperor had no clothes in 2024. In fact he was not there, mentally.
Biden has tried to follow up on Trump’s policies towards China and reindustrialization, but as Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz have pointed out in their post-election podcast episode at a16z - industry after industry has suffered greatly under Biden administration and only 0.4% of the CHIPS and Science Act funds were disbursed. Energy sector felt the same oppression as crypto and AI.
In some ways Build Back Better is just a rebranding of MAGA. But the blue tribe can’t build, they can only de(con)struct. But MAGA is also not straightforward. As Balaji has pointed out - we can’t easily go back to the US of the 1950s, with prosperity for single-income high-school educated families - because it was a very unusual period where half of the world was destroyed after WWII and the US was a manufacturing and military superpower. We can’t go back to the 1990s either, when the US was a hyperpower after the USSR collapse. Now BRICS have flipped the West in the share of world’s GDP.
A reversal to the mean is a hard thing to beat - Asia dominated world trade for centuries, but had a very bad last century. Europe emerged powerful after the Enlightenment - but now Scotland has returned to the previous era - abandoning free speech with new hate speech laws.
Marc Andreessen has tweeted that we need to put everything on the TV price curve - hyperdeflating costs of everything with technology and deregulation. I think we can do DDD as an alternative to both MAGA and BBB.
DDD stands for drones, dark factories and deurbanization. I call it dark dynamism.
People in tech and MAGA talk about decentralization, debureaucratization (Elon’s D.O.G.E.) and deregulation. These need to happen - see the story of LKY’s Singapore that inspired Deng's refounding of China on a turbo-capitalist backend that unlocked some $100T of wealth.
Politics doesn’t scale, but technology does. For example Communism is viable within the extended family, but fails on a larger scale. Some form of socialism can work on a scale of a city or a city state. Basically getting to Denmark is a nice dream for the West - but like Singapore, Denmark is a sui generis country with a small population.
Still, there are successful kibbutzim and communes that survive until this day. But similarly to Balaji’s scenario of “China can make a pencil” I think with technology like Starlink, AI and dark factories (with no lights needed due to full automation) various viable charter communities, startup societies or startup villages can 10x in size and productivity.
These technologies make deurbanization viable. And deurbanization as another form of decentralization (like free speech, free AI, Crypto and Social tech) can save the West and stop global depopulation. This is a big enough goal for Elon Musk - D.O.G.E with good and efficient governance, LKY-Singapore-style, is just a subroutine to get to that (lunarpunk moonshot) goal.
Basically people still haven’t figured out how to live in cities, and cities self-destruct given enough time - SF saga and the blues of blue cities is not unique. Rome went from 1m to 30k population - a 97% drop, resembling some crypto rug pull.
Deurbanization itself - impossible as it seems for normies - is also just a subroutine of a larger dream central to the grey tribe - of getting to Mars.
Exciting times we live in, and let’s see if this Velvet Revolution 2.0 brings a counter-revolution or will inspire Democrats to reverse course. Like when LKY’s Singapore inspired Deng to switch China’s backend to turbo-capitalism.
We could see someone like Newsom in California doing 180 and becoming what I call Dem’s Deng - combining the safe streets, global commerce, dashboard management, pro-tech and pro-wealth Asian culture of Singapore with more recent experiments in techno-optimism and libertarianism from El Salvador and Argentina.
Vivat the rocket man, the orange man and the orange coin!