Pt.4 - Techno-Progressivism and China
A Normie's Guide to the Technocratic Era Pt.4
Trump the Neocon
The tech bros support Trump insofar as they embrace the economic policies of Trump which promote the development of AI, reduce regulation, and take a hawkish stance towards China. They are not interested in the anti-immigration message of the original Trump 2016 movement. Instead, they see him as another Ronald Reagan. A new, repackaged version of neoconservatism. In an interview with Bari Weiss, Marc Andreesen said:
It’s morning in America, so I’m very happy. I think the analogy for what’s happening right now is 1980—the transition from the ’70s to the ’80s and the Carter-Reagan race.
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I spent 2015–2020 basically confused. I tried deliberately to reset my own psychology. I was just like, I need to go think about this hard, and I need to read a lot and I need to go back in history. I had to basically completely rebuild my worldview. And that took six years.
James Burnham was super helpful on these topics. He was one of the smartest political scientists, philosophers of the twentieth century on American politics. He was a full-on communist revolutionary activist and a personal friend of Leon Trotsky in the 1920s and ’30s, and then he broke from communism in the ’40s, and he went hard to the right. And he helped found the National Review with William F. Buckley.
— Marc Andreessen on AI, Tech, Censorship, and Dining with Trump, Dec 10 2024, The Free Press (https://www.thefp.com/p/marc-andreessen-on-ai-tech-censorship-trump-democrats)
Techno-Progressivism likewise has no room for nationalism, favoring the deterritorialization of concepts such as the nation— literally, in this case. As right-wing progressives, they consider the nation to be merely a “social construct” in the way of global techno-capitalism.
In a 2003 article for the Shanghai Star titled “Shredding Job Myths,” Nick Land explicitly repudiates Trumpism.
"America has been losing manufacturing jobs to China, Latin America and the rest of the developing world. Right? Well, not quite."
Of course, manufacturing employment is declining in the US, and at the same time protectionist sentiment against developing countries is rising alarmingly. The importance of Reich's argument is that he clearly demonstrates there is no reasonable or economically coherent relationship between these two phenomena.
To begin with the familiar side of the story, economists at Alliance Capital Management, based in New York, found that between 1995-2002, 11 per cent of US manufacturing jobs disappeared. The situation was still more acute in other developed countries. Japan, for instance, suffered a 16 per cent fall in manufacturing employment over the same period.
Statistical fodder for protectionist populism? Think again. Those developing countries typically blamed for devouring manufacturing jobs in rich countries exhibited the same pattern themselves.
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To make sense of this data, narrow nationalism has to be abandoned and a global perspective adopted. The trends at stake have little to do with dog-eat-dog "zero-sum" competition between trading rivals, and everything to do with the overall evolution of the world economy. Worldwide manufacturing increased its output over this period (1995-2002) by an impressive 30 per cent. Yet over the same time-span, tens of millions of jobs were shed by the world's manufacturing industries.
Far from lamenting this trend, whether in the US, in China, or internationally, it should be enthusiastically celebrated. Manufacturers are producing more with fewer workers, and such productivity gains are the key to any improvement in general prosperity, which is to say: real economic growth.
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As the world economy continues to develop, employment opportunities will be focused in the service sector, which will ultimately expand to encompass the vast majority of workers in all successful societies, with only a diminishing rump of agricultural and manufacturing workers participating in the "primary" and "secondary" sectors. The result will be cheaper food and products, higher standards of living, more challenging and stimulating jobs and ever greater chances for creative participation in productive life.
Responsible governments everywhere will embrace these prospects, channelling their energies into managing the complexities of economic transition. To waste everyone's time with populist hysteria about "job stealing foreigners" is either sheer political cynicism or a futile struggle against the tide
But while they may not care about America as a national entity for identarian reasons, they do wish to bolster American economic superiority over China (or at the very least, exploit their rivalry).
China: the Techno-Progressive East
After CCRU in the 1990s but before “the Dark Enlightenment” in the 2010s, Nick Land moved to Shanghai. There, he found the closest thing to an already extant Techno-Progressive country.
He began to write a series of articles for Chinese publications such as the Shanghai Star and China Daily. In these articles, he praised the Chinese attitude as a welcome alternative to the West.
China was one of the few places in the world where authoritarianism still flourished. With the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the Cold War, it was thought that there was no longer any remaining rival to democracy anywhere. It was thought that democracy had conquered the entire world. But in China, there was no democracy. And yet, over the next few decades, China saw an unprecedented surge in economic and political power that soon made it a global superpower and the greatest rival of the West.
Instead of democracy, there was the recently-created Dengist “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” What was this strange ideology? Was it socialist? Capitalist? Nationalist? The West, with its stubborn dialectical political frameworks, struggled to understand the syncretistic new Chinese system.
Historically, the Chinese state was Confucist, and to a lesser extent Taoist and Buddhist. In the modern era, the Chinese state had thoroughly separated itself from its traditional culture and embraced the atheistic, materialist ideology of Communism. Under Mao, the Chinese had gained their sovereignty from both Western and Japanese colonialism, but the country was still an impoverished, 3rd world nation. Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, focused on pragmatic materialist concerns. He created a market system under the close direction of the state, which could enrich the country economically without it once again succumbing to foreign influences.
The new Chinese system was not the product of idealistic, academic theories but based on what worked in practice. What “worked” was defined in primarily materialist terms, but the CCP appeared to serve implicitly nationalist goals as well, creating a system that benefitted the Chinese nation as a whole rather than a smaller, particular group within the larger society. The leadership of Deng Xiaoping and his successor Xi Jinping is not unlike the CEO-despot posited by neoreactionaries such as Curtis Yarvin.
In a 2004 article for Shanghai Star, “China’s Great Experimentalist,” Land praises Deng’s leadership.
This spirit of experimentation, it might be argued, was Deng’s single greatest strength. It was because Deng recognized a similar experimental boldness in his predecessor, Mao Zedong, that he politely countered the critical remarks aimed at Mao proposed by feisty Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. Mao indeed made mistakes, as Deng readily confirmed, but the basic tenet of Mao Zedong thought “seeking truth from facts” also provided the sole reliable guide to correcting them.
Deng’s own pragmatic approach to social development built upon this founding principle of Chinese Marxism, abandoning all rigid ideological fixations in order to respond flexibly to reality, “crossing the river by feeling the stones.” To “seek truth from facts” is to proceed experimentally," and experiments do not always work.
Hailing from a British academic society whose best days were behind it, and whose liberal platitudes had led to social stagnation, it is easy to see why Land preferred China to the West. Uninhibited by traditional morality — whether Christian or Confucian — or European Enlightenment ideologies such as democracy, it was willing to experiment and take bold risks. It was technologically optimistic and economically dynamic. Land quickly became enamored with the virile Chinese nation.
America, although a generation behind Europe, was certainly feeling the same sort of stagnation and gerontocracy. This was due to an aging population, the Western cultural depression after the World Wars, and the high opportunity cost of experimentation for a reigning power versus a country with nothing to lose such as post-century of humiliation China. In this respect, it is hard not to sympathize with Land. However, what price are Americans be willing to pay for such “experiments”? Are we willing to sacrifice as many Americans as Mao sacrificed Chinese?
In a 2004 article for Shanghai Star, “Unnatural Experiences,” Land compares the Western romantic belief in the “sanctity of nature” with the more enlightened Chinese attitude towards the natural world.
Westerners seeking to overcome such feelings of incomprehension and cultural vertigo would do well to question some of their own deeply rooted assumptions about nature. In particular, the notion that nature is in its ideal state wild, "unspoilt", or opposed to cultural manipulation, is no less worthy of close attention than the artificial trees it disdains. While the conceptual opposition of nature to culture has long held a profound importance in the West, it is the influence of Romanticism that has most dramatically consolidated such thinking. Narrowly conceived, Romanticism was a predominantly European artistic movement of limited duration (from roughly the late-18th to mid-19th century) arising in reaction to Enlightenment rationalism and "artificiality". The romantics idealized nature as a sublime power dwarfing human efforts and aspirations, embodying a moral and spiritual purity associated with religious feeling. When the human world intruded in this sacred domain it was only as a solitary awe-struck wanderer, a lonely hero encountering nothing crafted by his fellows - except depopulated edifices devastated into ruins.
Beyond the wilder fringes of the environmental movement, such ideas might seem excessive today, but the broader romantic myth of nature - as something properly outside the realm of human influences - has deeply ingrained itself into the unconscious of the West. Among Chinese, however, this "myth of nature" - although echoing certain Taoist themes - scarcely exists. After all, it makes little sense in China's densely populated landscape, where every patch of earth has been intensely worked-over during 5,000 years of history.
Since at least the days of the Extropy Institute, Techno-Progressives recognized Christianity and environmentalism as their two greatest threats. Thus it followed that China, a rapidly technologically progressing country that was free from either of these, would be the greatest rival to America as the leader of the Techno-Progressive future.
As time went on and China continued to rise in economic, cultural, and military power, the American government increasingly began to see them as a geopolitical rival as well. This precipitated a new arms race between the East and West — one that would quickly involve a race towards the development of AGI.
Tesla and TikTok
The first Trump presidency was a turning point for free trade and marked the beginning of a new protectionist era. “Behind all the sound and fury of the election, is the US ditching a consensus around multilateral trade and investment,” says Granville who notes, in TS Lombard’s executive briefing on the 2024 US Presidential Election, that this steady vector is centred on the decoupling of the US and China.
The Biden administration approach was to limit decoupling with China to “a small yard with a high fence, namely foundational technology, leaving everything else to mutually beneficial economic cooperation,” says Granville adding: “but that’s not working out, the reality is rampant proliferation of this decoupling with China and this will continue regardless of the outcome of the US election.”
The hegemonic stability theory of globalisation – global stability most recently ensured through US hegemony – is unlikely to return under a Trump presidency advocating a return to trade nationalism, and according to Granville, would result in a fragmented world. Global fragmentation of global supply chains would leave countries to essentially “fend for themselves.”
Trump has proposed a baseline 10-20% global import tariff and 60% or higher tariff on Chinese imports. This will, no doubt, have an inflationary impact on US businesses. The impact will be less immediate than a corporate tax cut but will spike the cost of raw materials and manufacturing in the next decade, according to GlobalData, analyst Carolina Pinto.
“Regardless of who wins the elections, there is bipartisan support towards decoupling supply chains away from China. However, the trajectory of the trade war will be drastically different depending on whether Trump or Harris wins,” says Pinto.
“Big Tech is still and will continue to be heavily dependent on China for raw materials and high-skilled manufacturing. Trump’s proposed tariffs and deceleration of resource allocation towards implementing Biden-era initiatives, including the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act, will make decoupling from China more costly for Big Tech,” adds Pinto. So, what is the motivation for some Silicon Valley tech leaders to support measures that may ultimately harm their ability to grow their businesses?
According to Pinto, it depends on the type of technology. “For example, the US electric vehicles (EVs) market has not seen significant penetration from Chinese EV manufacturers. Protectionist policies will ensure that this continues. So, although reshoring may be costly, it secures US EV manufacturers dominance of the domestic market.” A manifesto promise not lost on Tesla founder Musk, no doubt.
And as with many other industries, Silicon Valley favours policies that will least impact its bottom line. “On one hand, it may favor Trump’s tax cuts and dilution of fiscal regulation. On the other hand, it may favor a more holistic financial and administrative support over IRA and CHIPS Act implementation to minimise the cost of reshoring production back to the US,” concludes Pinto.
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If Musk was the mark, then Trump hit the target hard. Aspirations of space travel, and tariffs on Chinese EVs, as well as tax cuts all have the leader of the Silicon Valley for Trump pack ready to don a red baseball camp and hold a fist up to rally crowds in support of his chosen candidate.
— US Election 2024: Silicon Valley turns towards Trump, Oct 31 2024, Verdict (https://www.verdict.co.uk/us-election-2024-silicon-valley-turns-towards-trump/)
In the emerging industries of the future, China was either highly competitive or outright ahead of the United States. Chinese manufacturers such as BYD outpaced Tesla in global EV sales, reflecting their growing market dominance. China was projected to achieve over a 50% share in global EV sales by 2025.
To combat this, the United States turned to tariffs and trade restrictions. In May 2024, the Biden administration announced plans to raise tariffs on Chinese EVs from 50% to 100%, with similar increases on advanced batteries and solar cells. To curb China's access to critical technologies used in the manufacture of EVs, the US imposed export controls on semiconductors and related manufacturing equipment. In spite of this, China retained its global lead.
Unable to compete on a level playing field, tech bros such as Elon Musk relied on these tariffs on China in order to remain competitive in the domestic market. Meanwhile, in the Chinese market, the tech bros were unable to influence the Chinese government as easily as the American president, and thus were at the mercy of the Chinese government’s regulations and policies.
In early 2021, Musk enjoyed a favorable relationship with the Chinese.
Unlike many businesses, Tesla had been allocated ample shipments by the bureaucrats who’d assumed control of protective gear supplies. The factory was being cleaned with a disinfectant that required a regulator’s license to purchase, too.
In its first week after resuming production, with Toyota Motor Corp., Volkswagen AG, and other foreign carmakers still unable to fully reopen, Tesla Shanghai made about 1,000 cars. By March it was up to 3,000 a week, a higher rate than before the shutdown. Around that time, according to people familiar with the conversation, an executive remarked in an internal discussion that Tesla didn’t just have a green light from the government to get back to work—it had a flashing-sirens police escort.
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Tesla’s rapid return to normal was consistent with the relationship the electric vehicle maker has enjoyed with the Chinese state since 2018, when it announced plans to build the Shanghai plant. Again and again, it has extracted perks other international companies have struggled to obtain, including tax breaks, cheap loans, permission to wholly own its domestic operations, and assistance constructing a vast facility at astonishing speed. Support from the government has helped Tesla turn China into its most important market outside the U.S.
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As Tesla’s presence has grown, it’s been fair to wonder if Musk has become Xi’s favorite foreign capitalist.
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Stung by years of protectionism and intellectual-property theft, and mindful that China has been accused of large-scale human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, few American CEOs are willing to publicly praise it anymore. Even fewer would say, as Musk did on a podcast over the summer, that “China rocks.”
— Elon Musk Loves China, and China Loves Him Back—for Now, Jan 13 2021, Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-13/china-loves-elon-musk-and-tesla-tsla-how-long-will-that-last)
Musk later came under fire for opening a dealership in the Xinjiang region, in spite of the American government’s concerns regarding China’s treatment of the Uyghurs in that area. It was clear that Musk was willing to cooperate with the Chinese, so long as the relationship was profitable.
However, the relationship would eventually sour between the two parties. Around the summer of 2021, not long before Musk began supporting the Republicans, he began to run afoul of the Chinese.
What is clear, however, is that the remarkable honeymoon Elon Musk enjoyed in the world’s most populous nation is over. After receiving red-carpet treatment from government officials, who granted Tesla the unprecedented concession of allowing it to wholly control its local subsidiary, the carmaker is now being forced to rethink its strategy, from customer service to public relations, in a market that’s key to Musk’s long-term ambitions.
The overhaul is a response to an unusual degree of attention from regulators, as well as a rash of negative press coverage and online criticism. Last month, the Chinese government ordered a recall of almost all the cars Tesla has sold in the nation — more than 285,000 in all — to address a software flaw. At the same time, the vehicles are being banned from some government facilities over concerns they could send data to the U.S., and local carmakers like Nio Inc. and Xpeng Inc. are mounting a vigorous challenge to Tesla’s dominance, winning over consumers with increasingly stylish designs.
None of these problems, of course, are unfamiliar to most foreign businesses in China, where a crash in consumer perceptions is often just one social-media storm away. But to a certain extent, that’s the point: Tesla’s high-tech halo, and Musk’s star power, may no longer be enough to protect it from the risks that others face there. The company appears to have misjudged the strength of its ties to the country’s leadership, a mistake that could threaten Tesla’s growth prospects in its second-largest market. It also provides compelling evidence of how fraught operating in China can be, even for those who appear to enjoy every possible advantage.
— Tesla’s Fall From Grace in China Shows Perils of Betting on Beijing, Jul 5 2021, Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-07-05/tesla-s-fall-from-grace-in-china-shows-perils-of-betting-on-beijing)
China is an inhospitable longterm home for the tech bros, using them a stepping stone to develop its own domestic versions of their products. Like the US, it sees an inherent security conflict from foreign tech companies. And as technology becomes integrated with virtually every modern consumer product, this covers a range of industries.
So far, Musk’s dealings there have done little to undermine his position at home. Beloved by many liberals for his environmental credentials, hailed by Trump-aligned conservatives for his efforts to restore U.S. manufacturing, and—through SpaceX—trusted by the Pentagon to launch spy satellites, he seems as popular in Washington as he is in Beijing. But as relations between the two capitals deteriorate and an increasingly authoritarian China seeks to seize global leadership in key technologies such as EVs and artificial intelligence, it’s not clear how long Musk will be able to straddle this geopolitical fault line. U.S. politicians could decide they don’t want one of the country’s flagship industrial companies sharing knowledge with a strategic rival; Chinese leaders could adopt a less indulgent view of Tesla once it has served their purposes.
Under Xi’s economic strategy, “foreign companies are going to have pretty good opportunities, but they have to be aware that the ultimate plan is for all the advanced technologies to be Chinese,” says James McGregor, the chairman for Greater China at government relations firm Apco Worldwide. “I hope that Elon is going in there with both eyes open.”
— Elon Musk Loves China, and China Loves Him Back—for Now, Jan 13 2021, Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-01-13/china-loves-elon-musk-and-tesla-tsla-how-long-will-that-last)
In the world of social media, China also began to dominate. TikTok, a platform which featured a unique and innovative design created by Chinese ingenuity, was the most popular and by far most influential social media platform among Gen Z. During the Cold War, cultural soft power in the form of rock n roll, Hollywood, fashion etc. gave the United States a large advantage over the Soviet Union. Thus, control over social media was invaluable for more than simply economic reasons.
To respond to this social media encroachment from China, the US labeled TikTok as a national security threat and forced them to sell to an American company, going so far as to ban the app for all Americans briefly. During this brief ban, Americans migrated to another Chinese social media app, Red Note, which became the new most popular social media app. There was little here that the Americans seemed to be able to do to defeat the popularity of TikTok. They were as helpless as their Soviet predecessors.
Stargate and DeepSeek
The final and ultimately most important showdown between the United States and China was over AI. At the very least, AI is a “force multiplier” for technological advancement. Or, it may even lead to the “technological singularity” predicted by the Techno-Progressives. Either way, the country that leads in the development of AI will, at the bare minimum, be like the country that developed other breakthrough technologies of the past such as industrialization, television, the Internet, and so forth. In other words, whoever controls AI controls the future. And, of particular importance to the Accelerationists, this country will be able to set the technological standards and protocols concerning the use of this future technology.
This concern is shared by the US military. According a 2021 report from the US Department of National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, if China becomes the world leader in AI, it will supersede the United States “in every domain of warfare.”
Thus, it is not only the financial interests of Trump’s tech bro backers, nor is it only a geopolitical concern as it pertains to the United States’ global economic fortitude, but it is above and beyond all this a national security interest to outperform China in the development of AI. This can mean only one thing in practice — technological accelerationism at all costs.
To achieve this, the United States chose a “brute force” approach. It put strict controls on China’s ability to use certain GPUs — computer chips necessary to train Large Language Models such as ChatGPT. At the same time, the Trump administration invested in creating massive data centers using vast amounts of these chips.
The rapid development of AI systems over the past two years has stretched American infrastructure, with data centres emerging as a particular bottleneck. Cutting-edge models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude chatbots require enormous amounts of data and computing power to train and run.
“This project will not only support the reindustrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies,” OpenAI said in a statement.
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Leading figures in the AI sector, including OpenAI’s Altman, have argued that better infrastructure is essential for developing the next stage of AI models and competing with China for dominance of the technology.
Altman said earlier this month the Trump administration could boost domestic AI companies with “US-built infrastructure and lots of it”.
— SoftBank and OpenAI back sweeping AI infrastructure project in US, Jan 22 2025, Financial Times (https://archive.is/6Lbbf#selection-1583.0-1583.65)
The larger the data centers, the more powerful the AI models could become. This would, in theory, give the Americans an unsurmountable advantage over China.
However, China was not slowed down by these developments. Instead, it overcame them through cleverness. DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, developed a model that rivaled ChatGPT and Claude while utilizing a fraction of the resources.
DeepSeek employed a process known as model distillation, wherein a large, complex model (the "teacher") trains a smaller, more efficient model (the "student") to replicate its performance. This approach allowed DeepSeek to create compact models that performed comparably to larger counterparts but required significantly less computational power.
To enhance reasoning capabilities without increasing computational demands, DeepSeek also integrated chain-of-thought prompting. This technique encourages the model to articulate its reasoning process step-by-step, leading to more accurate and interpretable results.
DeepSeek also adopted a Mixture-of-Experts architecture, featuring a vast number of parameters (e.g., 671 billion in DeepSeek-V3) but activating only a subset (e.g., 37 billion) for each token processed. This design ensured efficient inference and cost-effective training by utilizing specialized "expert" subnetworks within the larger model.
Through these innovative methods, DeepSeek not only matched but, in some aspects, surpassed the performance of its rivals, all while operating under resource constraints imposed by American sanctions. And to add extra insult to injury, it open-sourced its new model, in contrast to the closed-source proprietary models jealously guarded by the American tech bros. This made the new, high-performance model available to the public for free, allowing users access to theis lightweight model without paying the American tech companies a dime.
One can imagine that whatever lingering doubts might have remained about the prospect of unregulated AI development evaporated after the release of DeepSeek. The fate of the tech bros’ wealth and the continued global hegemony of the United States depended on defeating China in the AI arms race at any cost, and so far China was easily keeping pace with the United States in spite of its best efforts. The last thing that the United States could afford to do would be to decelerate.
"I think the Chinese companies are catching up very fast," Sacks said. "We haven’t lost our leadership here. The DeepSeek R1 model is basically comparable in capabilities to the OpenAI 01 model, which came out about four months ago. So they are kind of hot on our heels here, and I think we basically have somewhere between a three and six month lead on them. But they are catching up very, very fast."
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"There are still great advantages to having a lot of chips," Sacks argued. "And I think that this is an area where America can continue to lead, [and] is in the build-out of this infrastructure and having the most advanced chips."
"It is true that DeepSeek has shown new ways for AI models to be efficient, and I think our AI companies are going to learn and adopt those efficiency techniques as well," Sacks added. "But you still want to be able to scale, compute, and the data centers are essential for that."
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Sacks went on to criticize the priorities of American AI companies during the previous administration, calling them "complacent" and "woke" on initiatives such as diversity, equity, and inclusion.
"I think that our AI companies got a little distracted," Sacks said. "To be honest, I think that maybe they got a little bit complacent. They didn't realize how close these Chinese companies were to them. They wasted a lot of time on things like DEI. You saw there was like woke AI, there were, you know, the models were basically producing things like black George Washington. And I think that when you're complacent, you think that there's not global competition, you can indulge in those sorts of things."
"We just can’t afford to get distracted by things that don’t matter," Sacks advised. "Like President Trump said, I think it's a wake-up call. They've got to focus on being scrappy and and on competing. And I think you're going to see them get, I think, a lot more focus now on on the competition."
While Trump repealed former President Joe Biden’s 2023 executive order that required some AI developers to share their results of safety tests with the federal government, he did not repeal Biden’s latest executive order on AI, which aims to build "large-scale data centers and new clean power infrastructure."
— There is a 'wake-up call' for US to be the leader in AI, says White House AI and crypto ‘czar’, Jan 28 2025, Fox News (https://www.foxnews.com/media/wake-up-call-us-leader-ai-says-white-house-ai-crypto-czar)