WAGMI World
From a woke West to a WAGMI world. AI, Crypto and Social tech increase alignment.
We don’t live in a unipolar, bipolar or multipolar world anymore, we live in an exactly tripolar world, thinks Balaji Srinivasan. He calls these three powers attractors of today - NYT, CCP and BTC. We can roughly translate them as the Western soft power to persuade minds and hearts, the Eastern hard power to build infrastructure, and the global Internet’s smart power to innovate and create positive-sum (win-win) outcomes.
Bitcoin at 100,000 dollars is a world power, and bitcoin at a million dollars is a global government - but a kind of pro freedom one that nobody expected, thinks Balaji. This is just one of the pieces of a WAGMI world thesis.
Hard power is deterministic and serves as the foundation for soft power. Winning wars is what makes ideologies stick, thinks Samo Burja. We remember and admire Spartans because they won. Soft power in turn helps to attract global talent and tech founders (smart power) to your country, perpetuating a victorious circle. We can also contemplate a stupid power alongside hard, soft and smart power. It is a raw and irrational fundamentalism or maximalism, that can be also very powerful in its own way.
Interestingly, these three power centers of CCP, NYT and BTC are antagonistic to each other, but are also gradually getting closer to each other. Buckminster Fuller’s concept of tensegrity helps to explain this “tension and integration”.
China tries to position Hong Kong as a crypto hub. Bitcoin ETFs were approved during Biden’s administration, which was otherwise very hostile to the crypto sector (Marc Andreesen often talks how regulators debanked some 30 crypto companies only in their portfolio at a16z).
NYT as a central node of the blue tribe is getting closer to CCP, with Gavin Newsom hosting Xi Jinping in SF in 2023, and with the blue tribe across the Atlantic, from the US to the EU, copying China in censorship and debanking of political opponents.
Bitcoin is merging with states like El Salvador, and now with Trump’s America, after the announcement of the strategic bitcoin reserve. China surprised the world with DeepSeek R1 on 20th January 2025, by creating a leading open source AI reasoner at that time.
Balaji thinks that social media disintermediated the hub-and-spoke topology of legacy media that caused the Gell-Mann Amnesia - of people being amused how wrong media can be on a subject they are familiar with, but swiftly turning the page and delegating to experts on another subject and forgetting they probably shouldn’t completely trust the other news article either. Social media allowed regular people and experts to talk to each other directly and complain about overreach of bureaucrats.
Social media caused a shift from (tele)prompter politicians to podcast politicians and a general shift towards, what I call, proof-of-work politics, using a concept that is at the core of bitcoin. China and the US are big on the philosophy of pragmatism and China likes to use actions more than words - delivering proof of work like Huawei Mate 60 before the former trade secretary Gina Raimondo visited China, or DeepSeek R1 on the day of Trump’s inauguration as the 47th US president.
Trump’s MAGA populism is actually orthogonal, and in actions often antagonistic, to all three of these major power attractors of today - NYT, CCP, and BTC - while it is actually closest to the CCP in a sense of trying to use markets and technology to lift millions of people out of poverty (but in Appalachia, rather than in Inner Mongolia).
Biden’s blue America copied China in online censorship, Trump’s red America is copying China in deflating asset prices and housing costs. Trump has the tech counter-elites of the grey tribe on his side now and this can make a big difference, as tech founders like Elon Musk are competitive with China, while the old establishment is not.
AI censorship was the hopium of the old establishment. We are moving away from the Hopium Wars, where the old blue elites wanted to mimic China in using AI censorship to control masses, into giving a real hope and wealth creation tools to normal people.
In the previous administration we witnessed a “NATO vs normies” dynamics, where the security state’s Blob was weaponized to fight populism of the ordinary Westerners who were not woke enough. The reason of this Western hybrid war against own populations was the overproduction of surplus elites and a rise of a laptop class that found it easier to fight thought crimes online from a nice office with a hot cup of coffee staring at a screen, instead of keeping the streets safe by actual policing.
In this new era of Trump 2.0 we might see a realignment from “NATO vs normies” towards “NATO for normies”, and a shift from DEI 1.0 (diversity, equity, inclusion) towards DEI 2.0 (defense equity investments in a broad sense). It’s not exactly a shift from a welfare state to a warfare state, but rather a shift from a woke West to a WAGMI world - where satisfied normies (in the West and in the Rest), and a robust manufacturing base, are key to both economic prosperity and national security.
But reindustrialization and keeping the normies safe and satisfied will require novel approaches. And this is the thesis of Dark Dynamism. A definitive-optimistic vision of bootstrapping a desired future with DDD - drones, dark factories and deurbanization.
Politics is the sublimation of violence, and alignment is the sublimation of politics. Equity investments create alignment, and a growing role of gold and bitcoin, as global neutral reserve assets, sublimates violence and politics into alignment. A move from war towards softwar.
We witness a move from pushing equity in a woke sense, to expanding equity ownership - turning normies into (hard) asset owners and VC investors.
As Marc Andreesen said, in the past wars were won with manpower and machines, in the future they will be won with money and technology. Hence we need free and open AI, Crypto and Social tech.
Bannon’s and Trump’s “China, China, China” might be a hurt amour-propre and a resentment at a society that is going in the opposite direction to America, to paraphrase LKY and his book From Third World to First. Balaji divides countries and cities into a declining world and an ascending world. Nothing is stable, inequality is dynamic, as Taleb explains.
To be fair, the admission of China to WTO was the root cause for deindustrialization that led to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 and to the opioid crisis in the Rust Belt. Subprime loans and drugs were bandages for men who suddenly lost meaning and for families who lost the firm ground of stable jobs.
I wrote about three doom scenarios based on these three major power attractors. NYT unchecked leads to a doom scenario I call Nuclear Yolocaust Times - an online woke swarm in a mimetic frenzy to outcompete each other in virtue signaling leads to playing with fire - as we witnessed during the Russian aggression in Ukraine and the Western response that lacked the measured statecraft approaches from the Cold War era, when mutually assured destruction (MAD) was very salient.
The CCP power attractor leads to a doom scenario that John Robb calls the Long Night - a digital authoritarianism that is very hard to escape and can enslave us for decades if not centuries. And bitcoin maximalism leads to a Mad Max world, a low-trust society with very high transaction costs and opportunity costs - as division of labor collapses and security costs skyrocket.
A WAGMI World is the opposite of these three doom scenarios, a world where “we all gonna make it” and where these three power attractors find a pragmatic antagonistic cooperation, where they can all win and increase the proverbial pie for everyone.
It is increasingly either a WAGMI World or an NGMI World for everyone, as the three major power attractors of NYT, CCP and BTC are converging. These attractors also represent soft power, hard power and smart power centers. Take Elon Musk as an example - he is accumulating and accelerating hard, soft and smart power capabilities at the same time.
And thus we might see a growing global alignment through reciprocal actions regarding tariffs focused on boosting domestic manufacturing in the West, and opening equity investments for normies and foreigners on a reciprocal basis.
Politics is the sublimation of violence. And alignment is the sublimation of politics. Balaji says, that alignment can be achieved by culture, markets (e.g. equity investments for all employees) and robots (because they don’t have principal-agent problems). Less humans in the loop, less problems there are.
We might see the post-1945 world order ending by sublimating the MAD (mutually assured destruction) violence threat into a MAD political economy threat. By something like 1000x cheaper space launches and resulting Brilliant Pebbles umbrella protection against nuclear threats and by making a human civilization multiplanetary.
Balaji in his book describes three Leviathans - God, Network and State. God is dead, said Nietzsche, and meant that the Gov replaced it. Now we can say Gov is dead and the Network has replaced it. I think these three Leviathans can be loosely mapped onto these three power attractors.
Balaji thinks that the “proximate purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, and the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality”. Tech tribe has a dream of getting to Mars, a dream of longevity and a multiplanetary civilization that has religious undertones.
And thus God can be mapped onto the BTC power attractor as a flag of technology. Specifically the bitcoin’s Immaculate Conception, and generally technology as a provider of practical miracles, is where we feel God today.
“Orange coin is the new blue jeans and rock and roll”, says Balaji - a flagship of freedom and prosperity that blue jeans and American music once represented behind the Iron Curtain.
NYT is upstream of the State in the US, because a journalist can fire a politician and not vice versa. NYT as a sixth generation hereditary monarchy is a central node of the blue tribe’s Blob, trying to fight all the threats to bureaucracy (what they call “our democracy” in the possessive sense).
But to paraphrase Alana Newhouse’s concept of brokenism - our Western blobocracy decayed and turned into idiocracy, a negative sum situation where everyone loses, including the old elites whose children can also fall victim to insecurity and drugs on the streets. Without course-correction the blue tribe is getting to Venezuela instead of Fukuyama-esque “getting to Denmark”.
China (CCP) represents the State as the third Leviathan due to its scale and capacity. A country with hammer and sickle marketing on the frontend is being run on a turbo-capitalistic backend, inherited from Deng Xiaoping and inspired by Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew.
Trump and other defectors from the Democratic party are trying to escape the “getting to Venezuela” madness of the blue tribe and secretly run on the original “getting to Denmark” dream of effective fusion between social democracy and globally competitive commerce. But they should update this dream to post-LKY era with a dream I call “getting to Dubai” (and getting to Singapore, El Salvador with Bukele, Argentina with Milei or Miami with Suarez).
With Elon Musk as the leading proponent of the “getting to Mars” dream we see a red tribe - grey tribe fusion of these dreams in the Trump 2.0 era. Social media, especially after Elon’s purchase of Twitter, “allowed peasants to talk to each other directly and freely” and the woke industrial censorship regime couldn’t hold up this massive wave of freedom anymore.
And the result is that the “getting to Venezuela” dream evaporated and the blue tribe has to pivot - either to double down on far left silliness or to rebrand into some YIMBY pro-growth and pro-tech crowd.
Instead of getting to Venezuela, the blue tribe in this bloom scenario would adopt a new dream - of getting to a startup city. The red tribe would adopt a new dream of getting to a startup village, a precursor or a preview to Balaji’s network state, and a deurbanization move that is at the core of my Dark Dynamism thesis. Thanks to drones, dark factories and deurbanization we could see a sad blue city being shrunk into a happy red-grey startup village. No more burning Teslas, burning Weymo’s robo-taxis, needles on the streets and aggressive blue mobs.
And the grey tribe of tech builders, as the new counter-elites, would keep their dream of getting to Mars and serve both blue and red tribes, helping them to establish new special innovation zones - in urban or rural settings - as startup cities and startup villages.
Internet is increasing variance and retribalizing people, thinks Balaji. The noosphere is fracturing with scissor statements. With social media, people are realizing that their neighbors and coworkers think very differently from them, and every new issue and a new scissor statement cuts a community in half. And at the same time, people can form very niche, yet global, memetic tribes.
But the noosphere can also unite masses on a global scale for brief moments - due to what I call “grand glue gestures”, as the opposite of scissor statements. This leads to proof-of-work politics and podcast politicians instead of (tele)prompter politicians who just used to placate people with platitudes.
From Nietzsche’s will to power, and Alexander Bard’s will to intelligence, I think we are progressing into will to wisdom as the main driver of ambitious people today - because power is being decentralized and intelligence is available through the current AI revolution. The most precious capability is agency - and wisdom is a result of many failed and successful actions and experiments by current counter-elites, the tech founders.
A new civilizational state can be built around internet values of freedom, pragmatism and techno-optimism. A new global alliance will be formed around free speech, open technology and fair commerce. There is no stopping this train.
Balaji talks about internet values as torch-bearers of the Western values. The Internet is a global empire that is more inclusive and universal than the West. The internet is actually a centristic and a “polytheistic” (multicultural) force that is in the middle between the woke leftist monoculture of the West and the very right-wing China of today.
The US could create a league of like-minded countries, like the Concert of Democracies idea from 20 years ago, but center it around free speech, techno-optimism and pragmatic antagonism.
Special economic zones were the innovation of Deng Xiaoping’s China that unlocked 100 trillion dollars with a moral innovation of “profit is good”. Special innovation zones, charter cities and network states with highly-aligned netizens can unlock similar magnitudes of prosperity through faster growth and freeing up tech founders to explore AI, Crypto and Social tech and longevity research.
The US could establish something like the International Technodemocracy Institute, alongside IRI and NDI, under NED or elsewhere. The institute would promote free and open AI, Crypto and Social tech, as well as small and local experiments in technodemocracy.
The digitally-native civilization state would bring both fragmentation and unification in geopolitics - we hear Trump talk about a bright future for Gaza and Greenland, but we could see also a move from Chimerica towards Chimerindia - unifying forces between three sovereigns with large populations and comparative advantages in hard power, soft power and smart power - China, the US and India - and their neighbors.
We could see Europe integrating with Africa to make use of longitudinal arbitrage. We could see Russia integrating both with Africa, India and China for the same reason - as it spans many time zones.
In 2023, Fiona Hill delivered a famous lecture where she framed events like the current Russian aggression in Ukraine as the West vs Rest conflict. The WAGMI world thesis presented in this article is about mean-reversion - the forces of globalization are too strong to reverse, as Kathleen Tyson, the author of Multicurrency Mercantilism book thinks.
The US dollar won’t be replaced by yuan and crypto with stable coins creates a new demand for T-bills. Just another example of the WAGMI World thesis. But the obverse of the WAGMI World is NGMI World - “we are all gonna make it” or we all are “not gonna make it” in a more aligned world.