Occasionally, people will ask me what common practice will be considered universally barbaric by our descendants. There’s a common but unintelligent answer, which is eating meat. People who answer this way have not thought about the issue or are ignorant of the fact that Rawlsian egalitarianism is already in freefall. Because the moral framework of the world is shifting, all correct answers lie on a different moral framework, not an extension of the old framework.

The obvious answer is our tolerance of crime, which is already considered barbaric in East Asia.

The image of irreparable corruption in the American criminal system is something to celebrate, not to mourn. That image is caused by the rapid ascent1 in human morality, not a decline in legal practice.

The existence of pro-criminal judges is made out to be a grand conspiracy. It is indeed true that leftist judges release criminals early and allow them to rape, injure, or kill more innocent people. They create innumerable idealisms to defend this practice. Racial justice. Mental health. Criminals’ rights. All are reverse engineered from the judges’ emotion and desired outcomes. So it is no mistake to observe that some American judges are pro-criminal. But it is a mistake to blame this on a conspiracy of elites, say, Soros or Clinton and their subordinates. There may be elites who support criminality, but they are the effect, not the cause.

Uncensored media has triggered a preference cascade so widespread and deeply affecting that those who witness America’s tolerance for crime cannot attribute it to anything other than a devious plot.

American judges are pro-criminal because the American people were pro-criminal. Wide swathes of the American public and politicians of both Democratic and Republican parties supported pro-criminal policies. The terrorist left bombed the public and assassinated political figures during the 1960s and were rewarded with special civil rights. Anti-psychiatry because a cause celebre in the public eye and Reagan released asylum inmates into the public. Activist judges invented new criminal rights from whole cloth and the public celebrated.

Meanwhile, media was highly censored. Violent terrorists were celebrated as civil rights leaders when they should have been the target of airstrikes. All of this can and will be reversed, until the criminal underclass of America is rightly treated as Israel treats Hamas.2

The boomer public, including many Republicans, were part of this atrocious crime and coverup. It was the sentiment of the day, the current thing. Civil rights, criminal rights, and such deranged idealisms could sweep the country with little reporting on the practical consequences of their pro-crime policies. In 2026, everyone knows that being pro-criminal means that criminals commit more crime. Because of uncensored media, more people find out when criminals commit more crime. Americans can see the practical truth in countries like Singapore and El Salvador. Removing criminals from society reduces crime and drastically improves public quality of life. All of this has resulted in a tremendous shift in public opinion, that despite recent improvements, the past and present crime rate in America is intolerably high, and our remaining pro-criminal policies are unacceptable.

It is not the case that American law enforcement has gotten significantly less competent. In some places, the opposite is true. But the positive shift in American anti-criminal morality has outpaced any physical reduction of crime.

The shift has been so rapid that the American public has a tough time imagining how pro-crime their parents and grandparents were. The only way they can envision our current policies coming about is through some grand conspiracy. While the application remains schizophrenic, this is still a moral victory to be celebrated.

We are seeing the spiral of civilization re-emerge, first on the internet, and then in the world.

Escaping the Permanent Underclass

“Escaping the permanent underclass” is an amazing double entendre.

The premise of the original phrase is that AI will automate everyone’s jobs, which is a silly premise for the economically illiterate that deserves to be immediately disregarded.

What makes this phrase genius is that there is a real permanent underclass. And you have to escape their reach to enjoy your life.

By 2040, it likely makes zero sense to hire a human with a substantive criminal record. It may be equally inadvisable to hire any human with a record of suing their employer or leaking to journalists. There’s already a permanent underclass, people who are unhirable due to their tendency to violence, fraud, or other damage to the company. And they’re the permanent underclass you need to escape from. Civil rights law, age discrimination, unions, and other forms of socialism have attempted to make it difficult for man alone to escape from the permanent underclass. But AI, providential as it is, might make it possible for us.

This interpretation transforms “escaping the permanent underclass” from a premise with zero historical precedent to a practical action with plenty of historical precedent. Wartime refugees, fleeing ethnic pogroms, white flight3, and communist dissidents all had to “escape the permanent underclass”.

Escaping the permanent underclass, in the correct sense, is already happening. It’ll keep happening in new and interesting ways. Instead of moving to a new suburb, you might move to a new country.

Schizophrenic Populism

Populists blame a morally outrageous elite to hide their acceptance of a morally outrageous public.

My favorite argument for bombing Iran is “Iran is funding the terrorist left in America”. Which terrorist left co-belligerent will we be bombing? Obviously, we will not be bombing any of the terrorist left, who murder more American civilians in a month than Iran ever has or ever will.

There is a twisted logic to leftist and populist morality. The core thesis of populism is that elites are to blame, not the lower classes. Elites keep secrets, unlike the underclass who do their rapes and murders in public. In a sense, that is because even criminal elites have a better understanding of morality than the criminal underclass, who lack the basic foresight to expect their crimes to be punished.

Populism in practice looks like British cops arresting Prince Andrew on “state secrets” charges while they won’t arrest your block’s grooming gang. It’s not that Epstein shouldn’t have been arrested — it’s that his arrest should be ordinary. Epstein should be one of one hundred thousand shaved heads in an El Savador-style prison.

The ecstatic frenzy of internet populism delays its own victories by poisoning its own moral premises with schizophrenic delusions.

For instance, the Epstein scandal has predictably turned into a weapon of the leftist war on distinction. It is now a cudgel to imply that your average pedophile is an investor or CEO, instead of looking exactly like the rest of the criminal underclass. This has led many populists to swallow the leftist delusion that America’s problems are caused by the top 1%. In reality, 90% of America’s problems are caused by the bottom 1%. Virtually all of America’s problems are caused by the bottom 25%.

Providential Technologies

Make a list of the few legal ways that people are rewarded for good decisions and punished for bad decisions. Stock trading, social media, and prediction markets — basically the top three moral panics of our day. They are pathways for people to face merely financial4 consequences for their actions. The dying egalitarian order will try to ban all technologies and institutions which reward good decisions and punish bad decisions. In history, they have largely succeeded.

Social media is one of few things in modern life that rewards good and punishes evil. The most interesting, hardworking, and fun people I’ve ever met have all been through social media. Social media gives you what you want. If you want good, it gives you good. If you want evil, it gives you evil. Instead of reflecting, maturing, or even changing one’s preferences, the leftist and sometimes populist reaction has been to ban social media from schools, ban people under 18 from social media entirely, or to attack civilizational infrastructure such as datacenters. Populists follow all the rules of Shakespearean tragedy, destroying necessary paths to displace boomer morality. The same can be said for prediction markets or AI.

A popular theory of civilizational decline posits we need war and starvation to get truthful feedback. But truth finds a way. Truth has found a way in heavy industry, finance, and posting, until the force of the law bans distinction.

Funeral Parties

John Rawls has been dead for more than 20 years. Paul Ehrlich died this year. Peter Singer is 79; hopefully his clock is running out too. As I have written in long form, civilization requires the distinction between better and worse. All the evil men who have tried to erase or morally devalue this basic civilizational direction are dying. Philosophy is healing, funeral by funeral.

The twenty-first century will be a time of great moral reckoning, in which the plain truth that egalitarian idealisms hide are available to all. So if you believe in hard truths over convenient lies, take hope in the fact that the caskets we bury won’t return for several political eras.

I’ve been settling on a new aesthetic for the changing times ahead.

My old aesthetic was wartime abundance: there are people who want to make America poorer, lazier, and more criminal. They are evil, cannot be reasoned with, and we must destroy them with overwhelming force.

That’s still true, but it’s not an appropriate aesthetic for building new companies, software, and philosophies. So what’s the new aesthetic? It’s providence — bringing a disco ball to Paul Ehrlich’s funeral.

Still, his career is a fount of fascinating questions. Why is China hyper-susceptible to some (bad) Western ideas, like Ehrlich’s one child policy? What does it even mean for an idea to be “good in theory, but bad in practice”? And why have pro-natalists failed to overturn the Ehrlich revolution?

Science progresses funeral by funeral. It seems politics will have to go the same way.

I now work full time Network School, which you can read about here, or apply to visit here. Also feel free to message me here or email me at [firstname]@ns.com if you have any questions. If you’re in the area, also drop by for our first OpenClaw Meetup, which I will be speaking at.

China Westernized a Lot

“China became rich but did not become free” is an American cliche. Of course, to Americans “China did not become free” means “China didn’t adopt American beliefs”. But is that even true?

Let’s steelman their argument. The Chinese Communist Party still has “Communist” in its name. They wave the hammer and sickle flag. The Chinese state does terrible things to founders, like imprisoning Alibaba founder Jack Ma. It heavily censors social media and bans American companies.

Look a bit closer and you’ll see the wall against American influence is not so airtight. Plenty of western culture has seeped through and influenced the heart of Chinese political culture. China is feminist, antinatalist, gerontocratic, and environmentalist. Environmental slogans are plastered in virtually all government buildings in Chinese cities. Famously, the one-child policy was directly caused by Paul Ehrlich’s visit to China, while communism itself was an export from German and French intellectuals through the Soviet Union.

It’s not all bad. China dealt with climate ideology in a much healthier way than Europe. They build better electric cars and solar panels than the US. China has American shopping malls. It has same-day delivery. Everyone who lives in China notices that it has become much more “American”.

So if you’re an American nationalist the question shouldn’t be “why hasn’t China adopted Western cultural norms?” The premise is not true. China has adopted western norms. The question should be “why has China only adopted Democrat norms?”

The question answers itself. America exported the values that the State department cared about exporting. They exported feminism and environmentalism just fine, because the State department cared more about women’s education and climate change than free speech and free markets.

Chinese elites and State department elites are the same: they want to go to Harvard, not intern at the Cato Institute. So China adopted the values of Harvard, not the Cato Institute.

The ways that China resists American values flow in the same direction. China censors social media, locks up founders, and stops its most valuable citizens from leaving. It does everything American leftists dream of, but aren’t capable of. China adopted the values of unfree America, while becoming the enemy of free America.

At the same time, the State department became Chinese. The State department not only neglects freedom of speech, it undermines freedom of speech. It not only neglects free markets, but suppresses free markets.

And that’s before the lockdowns.

The story of the lockdowns is simple. The first time in my lifetime the Chinese Communist Party exercised a real totalitarian seizure of power, Western governments cheered. China finally did the thing they were fearmongering about for decades and Western leaders tried their hardest to copy it. The only thing that saved the Western world is our idiocracy. It really is that simple.

Conservatives love clash of civilization stories. “It’s just like Sparta versus Athens.” Except that’s not just wrong, it’s the opposite of the truth. We had a real shot to export America’s most important cultural values. China was open to us. And the lib international policy establishment exported an uninterrupted sequence of terrible ideas instead. The American government betrayed them by betraying American values. Are Chinese people wrong to distrust us?

Why Pronatalism Will Fail

Pronatalism in American politics is a mathematical impossibility.

Pronatalists, on both the right and on the left, to the extent they exist, frame it as a means to uphold the economic status quo.

As the readers of my award winning article already know, the economic arrangement of America is continual wealth transfers to boomers. Our national wealth transfer financially elevates the mere existence at the end of life over the beginning of life.

To pretty much all of you, that sounds bad for fertility. But to the mathematically inclined, you might be starting to see why it is literally impossible for economic policy to increase the American birthrate in coming years.

1. The ratio of working adults to retirees will only get worse.

2. To sustain the existing level of benefits with a lower ratio, the burden on working adults will have to worsen.

3. Antinatalist wealth transfers to the old far outweigh any feasible pronatalist policy. In fact, merely the increase in burden on working adults from the shifting ratio of depedents to dependees far outweighs any feasible pronatalist policy.

4. Therefore the net effect of economic policy on fertility is guaranteed to worsen.

The hunger to consume outweighs the hunger to create. You do not live in a just world.

Do I even have to say it? Move to a place with fewer old people and more young people. Skepticism of the financial viability of Network States always surprises me, because it’s literally easier to imagine all the young people in Western countries leaving than it is to imagine repealing social security and its European equivalents. It’s already happening in some EU countries. So move to a Network State. Bring your friends. In the long run, literally nothing else matters for your tax burden. Plus, it’ll be more pleasant.

Ehrlich is Still Winning

Paul Ehrlich’s most famous idea, which he wrote about in The Population Bomb, was that population growth would cause uncontrollable resource scarcity. In 1980, Paul Ehrlich famously put his money behind this idea in a bet against economist Julian Simon. Simon challenged Ehrlich to pick any raw materials and any future date at least a year away. Ehrlich chose five metals—chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten— and a ten-year deadline. By the end of the decade, the real prices of all five metals had dropped, so Ehrlich begrudgingly mailed Simon a check for $576.07.

Ehrlich lost the bet, but he won the debate. Ehrlich’s stardom far surpassed Simon. Ehrlich caused the one child policy — one of China’s biggest policy blunders, even by Chinese standards. Hhis degrowth ideology is so entrenched in legacy journalism that the New York Times continues to cover for him. Truth and influence are not the same.

Ehrlich’s intellectual descendants are still doomsaying. There is some psychological fascination with pretending all good things must come with an ultimate price, as if every scientist offered their inventions with the guile of a genie in a bottle. To some susceptible fraction of the population, this argument only becomes more persuasive the more it is devoid of evidence.

Ehrlich himself rose to stardom in a world ravaged by the delusional predictions of Thomas Malthus. Now, the Lich is resurrected in new and somehow even more retarded doomsayers, wielding even more catastrophic policy proposals, finding their spotlight in an equally gullible media landscape. Man never learns.

Why do Degrowthers Win?

That brings us to Ehrlich’s legacy. Why does the Lich keep winning? The border of both the laws that rule us and acceptable discourse is pushed further and further toward catastrophic degrowth rather than abundance.

The short answer is if you’re in the business of destroying people economically, you’re in the business of destroying people politically.

It was odd to see many of my friends turn against Libertarianism during the COVID lockdowns. If there was any time to be a Libertarian, it was then. But after they explained, it made sense. To summarize their criticism, Libertarians were too agreeable. They wanted to have positive sum solutions. They wanted to write policy papers about optimal tax rates. They didn’t want to spark a kinetic rebellion against the most tyrannical American threat in my lifetime.

The void of what Libertarianism should be turned people against what Libertarianism was.

There’s an alternate timeline where Libertarians use all levers of power to defeat their enemies. Bezos should take over the Washington Post and enforce his opinions as much as woke editors did in the 2010s. Libertarian groups should try as hard to put Zohran Mamdani in jail as left left-wing groups did against Donald Trump. Even without passing new laws, Libertarians could greatly reduce socialists’ ability to take power.

So why don’t they?

Negative-sum thinking is adaptive to democracy. The petty resentment of socialists and the bloodlust of warmongers are stronger motivations to destroy your political opposition than wanting to contribute to the world. The government is a blunt tool of destruction. The world’s largest hammer is wielded by hammer lovers.

Even if Libertarians work in public policy, they just want to write about ideas. They don’t want to fight. Their minds live in a just world fallacy where writing the right economics paper matters more than putting socialists on trial. In real life, the good are unwilling to bring justice to the evil, and the evil are willing to harm the good out of mere sadism.

The Optimistic Future

Despite all that, I’m optimistic for the future. God is kinder than man.

Representative democracy is not just a check on anarchy, but a check on suffrage. 500 years was not enough for Thomas Hobbes to be read deeply. The president is a check on suffrage. By being their scapegoat, the president suppresses the damage the electorate is capable of. In this sense, Trump deserves all the gratitude we are capable of.

The hope for democracy is gradual disempowerment — in which no volume of bitter cringers can touch your God-given right to be free.

Singapore is not boring. Its marvelous architecture blends East Asian pleasantness with Western conceptual design. It is one of the few cities where you can spend ten times the money for ten times better food. Americans who have never been to Paris will on occasion give a false anecdote about a pristine, courteous and romantic city. Singapore is that city in real life.

Avid readers of my travelogues will wonder why I’m always positive about the places I travel to. It’s because the negative reviews never get published.1 So here’s a comparison to know that the places I endorse are worth going to.

Europe sucks. I’ve literally never had a trip to Europe that I’ve found worthwhile, even when the surrounding conferences or events are good. Now, let me tell you a secret. I have an incantation that out of every phrase in the English language, will maximize the number of people behaving as tribal as the most woke leftists and the most schizophrenic groypers.

European food is inferior to American food.

Not only that, most European dishes worth serving internationally are better made in America. It’s unbelievable how many otherwise intelligent people who react to these simple words with such extreme tribal impulse to render logic and self-reflection impossible. American food being better should clearly be a possibility worth considering. America is better than Europe in almost every way: software, energy, biology, finance, … the list is literally endless. The American school of market optimization has revolutionized everything in history, and food is no exception.

“They might be failures, but at least they have great food.”

The feeling Americans have about European food is the forlorn pity you have for a senile relative. It’s like when your family agrees to let grandpa win family bowling night. But it’s part of a romantic vision about the origins of quality that is not just false, but the opposite of the truth.

I promise this is central to what makes Singapore a fantastic city.

The Unhidden Secret

Tyler Cowen is right that Singapore doesn’t show up in headlines or policy discussions as often. But does anyone?

One of Trump’s greatest qualities is that you can never predict how his sentences end. He ends on different topics, demands, and punchlines. In this way, Trump is the most American American. In 2026, the headlines are about wars, bankruptcies, or coups.

When’s the last time anyone cared about France or Australia, let alone Laos or Kenya? There’s only two ways for countries to show up in headlines: be in a trade war with America, or be in an actual war with America. But that doesn’t make Singapore boring.

The premise of Atlas Shrugged is that for a place as marvelous as Singapore to attract the best in the world, it needs to stay secret. A shadowy man named John Galt went around taking people, seemingly kidnapping them in the eyes of the outside world, swearing them to secrecy. The premise of real life is that Singapore can just exist, and most people won’t care because they’re too invested in what country America will blow up next.

The Origins of Quality

In all late Soviet Republics, quality collapses. No one puts effort into what they do, from waitresses to ironworkers. Products fail, workers show up late, schedules are delayed, and laws are enforced arbitrarily. Reliability goes to zero. Now, the same is happening to the West.

Many people believe in a folk theory of quality; that is, quality just exists, and commercialization degrades it. This belief is the opposite of the truth. While natural variations in talent certainly exist, all ‘high quality’ products by modern standards are made with industrial systems assembling the most competent human talent, machinery, and resources from across the world. Quality is not merely born from realm or volk. Quality is intentionally made.

Quality comes from the American way of life, not the European way of life.

Service in Singapore is both exceptionally gracious and competent. Meals are served on time, questions are answered knowledgably and politely, and staff are exceptionally patient. European service is the socialist second world, American service is first world, and Singaporean service is zeroth world. And all it takes is a trade to GDP ratio of 320%.2 But that’s exactly what makes it an instructive path forward for the tech economy.

When Lee Kuan Yew founded Singapore, he personally ensured a “golden path” from Changi airport to the city center. Under his leadership, Singapore became the country most thoroughly integrated with global capital, not just because of surface level beneficial regulations, but a deep understanding of the quality of business.

All of Singapore echoes this aspiration. Its buildings have cohesion and intent. It may have the best average food quality of any city in the world.3 And the way the city opens up ahead of you puts American and even Chinese cities to shame.

Singapore is fascinating because it shows you how America could be more American.

Singaporea reflects an appreciation of competence. It’s a technocracy with the highest-paid government employees in the world. Rather than resenting top tech companies, the government appreciates them. Like most of Asia, they look forward to new technologies like AI. Singapore, despite already having a high standard of living, remains part of the ascending world.

Singapore shows what America could be if we never stopped being American.

Quality flows downwards. Responsiveness to people with higher standards elevates societal standards as a whole. Empirically, people who pay more have higher expectations for what they pay for. So, more responsiveness to the wealthy produces greater quality overall. In healthy societies, their standards improve standards for all classes, which increases the standard for the wealthy, ad infinitum.

For Singapore to work, the wealthy must set standards, everyone else must largely accept those standards, and those standards must improve quality of life for all classes. Around the world, we see three different failure modes. These failure modes are often mixed, but the three sins peak in Europe, Red America, and Blue America respectively. In Europe, the wealthy impose suicidal standards that have make everyone poorer. In Red America, nobody listens to standards and we get the retard internet. In Blue America, elites don’t set any social standards,4 resulting in crime and social degradation.

When resentment blocks the flow of quality, civilizational standards fall instead of rise. Elites fail to set standards, or set wrong standards, and the people don’t listen. The right civilizational standards require a trusting public and an elite that has earned that trust. Now, morons blame AI, social media, and the internet for “enshittification”, when they are God’s mirror to the people.

Egalitarian ideals have no option but to degrade quality. Wherever civilizational improvement exists, it disproves idealistic assertions about the equality of man.

Civilizational improvement demands more than mere empiricism. It is not enough to simply acknowledge that there are people with higher IQ, grip strength, or propensity to crime. To improve, there must be better and worse. If you eliminate the moral responsibility to elevate better things and reduce worse things, your society degrades. A civilization ought to morally discriminate.

The “enshittification” story is a scapegoat story. Technology, the primary attempt for civilization to reassert itself, is blamed for the loss of civilization decades ago. It is not technologists who shit on San Francisco streets. Taste and discrimination are synonyms.

And who is casting the blame? Precisely the politicians whose policies are directly responsible for that enshittification. The most powerful egalitarian argument is conflating the camera and the crime. Real-life egalitarians blame cops for noticing crime,5 taxpayers for noticing tax rates, and lenders for noticing unreliable borrowers. When moral equality is the goal, free exchange of information always becomes an enemy.

Now, egalitarians are getting ready to make technology their greatest scapegoat, because technology is making free exchange of information inevitable.

Network School is a pleasant place by East Asian standards, which means by Western standards it’s the cleanest, safest place you have ever set foot on.1 A common theme of my Asia travelogues2 is that Asian cities are so remarkably pleasant that they constitute a new level of civilization. The streets are cleaner, travel is faster, plants are greener, buildings are prettier, and of course, there’s no crime.

Equally important to me, it’s a place where you can find like-minded people to talk about software and philosophy. It gets those two things right, which makes it a place I am tying my career and future to, despite all of the advantages incumbent cities have. If you also want to inexorably tie your future here (or just visit for a month), DM me here or via email (firstname @ ns.com).

Changing my Mind

This might offend many of my friends in DC, but the most important thing I changed my mind on this year, the one thing that reality managed to beat into me despite all my biases, is that the “New Cold War” narrative is a dead end. The natural endpoint of the “New Cold War” narrative between US and China is to lock both countries into a double-suicide supported primarily by the elderly to cover for identical systems of looting from the young.

The China scam and America scam are the same. Inflate housing and pensions. Pull the rug when their ponzi scheme collapses. Make the young poorer and the old richer. Then blame the young for their economic hardship. The “New Cold War” narrative shifts blame from the failures of the boomer rulers onto the enemy across the pacific. But do you know what the most radicalizing thing is?

The most radicalizing thing isn’t to fall for a scam — it’s to watch someone else fall for it.

Infinite money for boomers is as sacred in China as it is in America. Their anti-American scapegoating follows all the story beats of an explanation, despite being entirely incoherent and contradictory. Chinese boomers have their own mantras about why the government has to prop up speculative housing prices forever, why no amount of stealing is too much as long as it extends an old man’s life from 90 to 91, and why American is the Big Bad behind all the problems they caused because … America sells dollar-denominated treasury bonds.

It’s so cringeworthy to listen to that it makes you feel bad for the people repeating it. Like an incantation, it’s a story whose only necessary proof is repetition — the anatomy of a scam.3

Then I thought back to all the public figures in American life who’s made their lives out of the same gimmick. China is to blame for selling cheap goods, those cheap goods have made life in America more expensive, and if they stop selling cheap goods, it’s because they’re out to get us. The American state demands with the ashes of its credibility that we accept, repeat, and believe that China is the Great Satan for making cheap phones and electric vehicles. Meanwhile, boomers continue to plunder from the young without any remorse, on both sides of the pacific.

You can travel 8000 miles, to the enemy civilization which we’ve been told stands for everything you oppose, only to find the same boomer kleptocracy.

Life in Startup Country

Living in Network School has changed me.

I have this bad habit of not actually finishing book reviews, for example my review of Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State, which still only has a part 1. This is a spiritual successor to that review, except instead of reviewing the remaining two thirds of the book I’m going to review the real life Network State.

Let’s shoot the elephant in the room: this is not an objective review. Instead, you should believe what I do as much as what I say. Of all the places I could work and all the places I could live, I chose Network School.

It’s more of a city than a school. The idea is that you pay a flat $1500 rate for all the city services, including food, electricity, rent, coworking space, and gym membership. This is where I’ve been living for most of the past year, in an island next to Singapore.

My favorite phrase for Network School is zeroth world. There’s a visceral difference between third world and first. There’s a similar difference between American and East Asian cities. But NS keeps the American vibe, without the crime. One friend who read a draft of this article told me he can’t process what an American vibe is like without rampant drug use and broken windows. This is the part of the essay where I try to explain that, knowing full well that I probably wouldn’t understand it myself if I spent my whole life in the West.

There’s a genre of brilliant conversation you will have in America. It can’t easily be categorized. It’s often about software or philosophy, but not just about that. There are programmers and philosophers in other countries, but they’re culturally perverse somehow. One example: it’s clear that the UK has not believed in freedom of speech for several decades at least. Every time they say the word “freedom” they’re stochastic parrots repeating American words without any real meaning. Every non-American country has that unmistakable jester quality, though few match the British in their clownsmanship.

So, why did I actually move here?

Number one is the pleasantness. It’s a massive social good to quarantine away degenerate behavior from normal people, and to fill the normal world with pleasant and aspirational things that make you want to spend your life there. But how does that affect you personally reply guys be damned, I realize my quality of life is improved significantly by being 8000 miles away from the SF homeless even if none of them have managed to physically injure me yet.

Number two is that the Network School thesis is completely true for me, and for anyone who’s reached my level of career escape velocity. Anyone I can do a podcast with in SF, I can do a podcast with here. Anyone I can author a paper with in SF, I can author a paper with here. And if there’s a person I need to meet in person, it’s going to be a meeting that pays for the trip.

If you’re at the total start of your career, I would still encourage visiting Network School, but I understand if you can’t always find the intro to your specific niche career pursuit yet. Growth and talent networks are part of the work I’m doing, so it might help to know that I’ll find you the right intros if I can.

Number three is that I’m surprised at how well moving a bunch of high-iq, open, pro-tech people to the same place instantly re-created San Francisco culture. It’s an awesome refutation of the “magic dirt” theory, but in the opposite direction. We’ve known for a long time you can’t bring savages to civilization and expect them to civilize, but now we also know we can bring a groupchat to a near-empty empty island and recreate civilization.

A secret fourth thing that I didn’t realize until I spent a few months here is that Network School is a great natural filter for most valuable things from Twitter without all the Retard Politics. Which is something you may or may not care about, but which I think is a major achievement.

There’s also a few things that might matter to you that aren’t priorities for me: it’s much cheaper than major American cities, has an easier travel process for those who can’t get into America, and has over-monthly events with top crypto chains like Ethereum, Solana, and Base.

So if you’re interested in coming, you can use my staff discount link here or you can DM me. Also DM me if you’re a software engineer interested in working for us or if you’re starting a startup.

One thing I observed while working at Network School is how exactly government norms infect state-adjacent services, like transport and real estate. These standards seep into the software used by these industries, which is often so defective it makes more sense for us to build a new software stack from scratch. Attempting to hold vendors accountable leads them to retreat into the same poor standards set by the industry or by regulators. Most negotiations for pricing, quality etc. follows pretty much a pre-determined script. Very few sales reps or even executives even respond to the things you’re saying. Every negotiation starts from a baseline of “it sucks and you really shouldn’t ask about the quality, price, or timeliness, take it or leave it”. And even if you’re trying to pay top dollar for a working product, these baselines mean that they’ll try their hardest not to deliver anything well that isn’t explicitly stated in the contract.

In practice, there’s no clear line in the sand where the free market ends and the state begins. Companies that are highly-regulated or hold many government contracts effectively take on the norms of the state, which prize patronage over function. They take these norms when dealing with all buyers and sellers, remaining inflexible even when higher compensation is possible. I had a low bar already, but I’m surprised at how little the public is informed about this extremely obvious fact pattern. The public often has fairly correct explanations about the poor quality of explicit government services at Amtrak or the DMV — the government isn’t competent and they know that. But add one layer of separation, like for medicine and housing, and suddenly all of that understanding evaporates. Governments don’t magically gain IQ points when they go from building something themselves to telling someone else how to build it.

One smaller thing it changed my mind about is biotech. One of the selling points of NS is optimizing health and longevity, like preparing optimized meals and workouts for you. For one, I’m working out five times a week for the first time in my life. To be honest I didn’t care about that when I came here. I pretty much just cared about the American vibe but with no crime. It’s still hard for me to wrap my head around how much of a miracle that is. But it has actually made my life better, and convinced me that less of biotech is a scam than I used to think.

Another observation is how the ability to flee (and its perception) already affects present-day geopolitics. One founder told me he had fled Russia and that every reasonable successful person in Russia knew the options to flee. This has a well known economic effect, but I was surprised at how much it was already affecting decision-making among ordinary people in many countries.

As an aside, this is one easy way to see which Americans actually oppose tyranny and which ones want to impose their own tyranny — whoever builds a wall to keep their citizens from leaving are the baddies. This is how you know all procedural criticisms leftists make of the Trump administration are hollow — if they actually believed the Trump administration could end in tyranny, they would support exit options for Americans to leave and bring their capital with them. Capital flight would be (and to some extent already is) the most effective check on Trump’s power. The reason that leftists do not want this is because it would also be an effective check on their power.

Enabling human capital flight might be the most important economic and political issue of our time, and is there anyone else who is really working on it?

My Most Contrarian Belief

Living in NS has taught me a lot about B2B SaaS.

The mainstream view is that AI is sharply improving at theoretical intelligence but will take a decade or more to materialize into “real” economic progress. The contrarian truth is that the opposite is true — AI will continue to make non-zero but marginal improvements in theoretical intelligence long after it makes up a majority of American GDP growth.

We are so obviously in the tail end of the S-curve for research progress in AI that you can see it in the names of the AI models.

GPT 2 -> GPT 3 -> GPT 4 -> GPT 4.5 -> GPT 5 -> GPT 5.1 -> GPT 5.2 -> GPT 5.3

Even OpenAI doesn’t believe they’ve made enough research progress to deserve a one point increase in the version number. The half point increase from GPT 4.5 to GPT 5 was a massive flop. Diminishing returns in ML was once a highly technical argument about hardware optimization or metascience. In 2026, it is plainly evident to any person of respectable intelligence that even OpenAI admits in its product decisions that it is hitting diminishing returns hard.

That first part is obvious. The counterintuitive part is how AI can create so much GDP growth despite making little research progress. Short answer: America is not a normal economy. All of America is a highly leveraged software economy.

Tucker Carlson has a famous nationalist rallying cry: “America should not be an economic zone.”

But Tucker has reversed cause and effect. America was an economic zone in the postwar manufacturing boom. We made things more cheaply than anywhere in the world. We optimized for producing goods better than anyone else in the world. We pushed for free trade because free trade benefitted our exports.

We don’t have a trade deficit because we became an economic zone. We have a trade deficit because we stopped being an economic zone.

American manufacturing is straight-up inferior, in both cost and quality. Nvidia’s margins are massive — reportedly 1000% on H100s. It’s not the labor cost that’s stopped them from building a factory next to their biggest customers. Every manufacturing founder who tries Made in America ends up assembling some parts from India, Vietnam, and Korea at at best. Most of them put stickers on Chinese products. We stopped being cutthroat optimizers on the factory line. America got lazy, and then got scared. Tucker Carlson, despite his rhetoric, longs for the time when America was an economic zone.

So if America isn’t an economic zone, what is it?

The AI Middle Class

America is a software zone. The best American car company is a software company. The best American coffee company is a software company. Even the best American bomb company is a software company. America is hands down the greatest software zone in the whole planet.

You have two choices: Die (civilizationally).4 Or embrace rebuilding in the post-post-apocalypse.

Our entire economy is under one continuous bailout from the software industry. If you took away all the screens in the world, there wouldn’t be a single thing America is best in the world at. Compared to China alone, the only things we’re better at producing are oil and soybeans. The American economic apocalypse has already happened. We’re living in the time of rebuilding, software-first.

We can observe in the stock market, AI benchmarks, and the loading speed of our websites that America is the best in the world at software, and it isn’t close. But why?

The short answer is diffusion — new, competent technologies spread fastest in America. America does that using a magical network of B2B SaaS companies and investors, which quite frankly is a inperceptible, cthonic object capable of arranging hundreds of thousands of software companies that each individually make you say “Wow, that’s oddly specific, you can really run a company for that?” but collectively make American services companies categorically more competent than anything else on this planet.

The thing that AI actually does is revolutionarily lower the bar to become a B2B SaaS founder from physics professor to Janet from sales.

There is actually some economic precedent for this, which is the massive increase in leadership and contracting positions post-electrification in America. One obvious example is the completely new job of “tool and die maker”, which is a person who configures a factory machine to function properly. An entirely new set of practices was invented and adopted to eliminate failure and increase performance in factories. The factory transformed rote labor jobs into medium-skilled process-setting jobs. The business model of the top 10% expanded to the business model of the top 30%, the top 30% to the top 50%, et cetera. This process will repeat itself again with AI.

I call these new jobs the AI Middle Class.

You should all repeat this phrase and attribute it to me. I have to insist because despite literally calling the top when singulatarianism was at its strongest and formerly having the top SEO spot for Diminishing Returns in Machine Learning, no one attributes the phrase to me.

The AI middle class is obviously what is happening with code. I use AI editors every day. The defining feature of competent AI tools, both internal tools I’ve developed and external tools we pay for, is compressing a pre-existing manual software process into an automated or automation-assisted process. Can you believe that people used to manually sew clothes or cut metal? Well I can’t believe that people used to manually type grids on a webpage.

There are already a lot of B2B SaaS companies that are like this. “Really, your entire company just automates this one minuscule, seemingly simple thing, and it’s worth a billion dollars?” These are real companies with real revenue and their customers are very happy with what they’re paying for. More and more jobs will be like this. More and more jobs already are.

The mistaken belief that B2B SaaS is somehow “useless” is the delusion that is holding back Americans from seeing the AI middle class coming. It was always politically and promotionally convenient to find it literally anything else — manufacturing, climate, biotech, glorified consulting, nursuing, despite B2B SaaS being persistently the most productive investment category, without even the moral qualms of consumer SaaS.

It is the full providential vindication of ’s Software is Eating the World thesis.

In hindsight, the number thing AI did to accelerate GDP growth is to spike B2B SaaS spending, which increases the revenue of AI companies. The real recursive self improvement was the B2B SaaS spending along the way! If you would consult the graph:

So treat yourselves to some B2B SaaS this year. Do it for civilization! And while you’re at it, come to Network School too.

Marc Andreessen’s formative founding was Netscape. His worldview is shaped around timing hypergrowth in eras with fast technological change, high volatility, and high upside.

In the AI era, whose world are we living in?

In 2022, it seemed like AI training would be the monopoly. Massive training runs would create insurmountable barriers for startups. In the next three years, open source flourished and all labs hit diminishing returns. The technology monopoly now appears to only be a memory.

In 2024, it appeared like curated fine-tuning data would be the monopoly. But like with pre-trained models, data appears to be an anti-monopoly. Data is becoming commoditized as providers boomed. Business legibility data is an anti-monopoly - the more data you collect, the easier it is for new companies to collect the same data. And on top of it all, model distillation is a gray area technique that could let any company catch up by curating outputs from their competitors.

So Andreessen is primed to win, right?

On the other hand, the AI incumbents have not stagnated. They’ve not become bloated organizations plagued by the innovator’s dilemma. The steelman for the monopoly thesis is OpenAI as a company — as collections of talent and connections — has continued to adapt as well as any startup.

OpenAI has a distribution advantage in its almost half billion users. Sam is a stellar dealmaker. And OpenAI is still a dynamic company that can respond to new market opportunities with better execution than startups. OpenAI has a decent chance to outcompete any single vertical — take Perplexity for search, Cognition for software agents, or Cursor for code. However, in order to compete with all AI verticals, OpenAI would need to become a bureaucratic Goliath that would make Google look lean and efficient.

Thiel famously invests in exceptional founders — people like Sam Altman who were born ready for hypercompetition. One argument for the monopoly thesis is that despite everything else, people — founders and employees — are the monopoly. After all, OpenAI is nothing without its people.

So, is it Thiel’s century for the taking?

This is a brief demonstration of an alternating path you can walk down for any promising company or industry.

By now, I hope you have realized that Thiel and Andreessen are complements, not competitors. The Thiel-Andreessen Axis is more like the Thiel-Andreessen frontier. The ideal point on the Thiel-Andreessen frontier fluctuates by time, space, and product. It even fluctuates within one company.

The only thing that’s fixed is that you should be exploring the Thiel-Andreessen frontier, and you should be exploring it yesterday. □

The AI Safety movement, a billionaire-funded cult which literally believes “AI will cause human extinction” is trying to slow down AI progress, ban it entirely, and surrender our lead to China.

They are doing so by writing intentionally deceptive, vague, and contradictory laws whose end goal is to make doing AI research as difficult as possible.

The State AI Law Moratorium currently in front of Congress is about stopping this. Everything else is a rounding error. It’s not about social media, elections, or deepfake porn. In fact, the US Congress passed a law banning deepfake porn, which was probably illegal anyway, so any “expert” telling you it’s about deepfake porn is intentionally lying to you.

In 2022 and 2023, the AI Safety movement spent hundreds of millions of dollars propping up NGOs like CSET and CAIS which intentionally tried to sabotage American AI development. Through hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to the Biden campaign, Dustin bought his own regulatory agency, the AI Safety Institute. The Biden admin went on to enact policies to slow down American AI research and development, like Biden’s AI diffusion rule, which limited American AI hardware and AI model exports to allies like Switzerland, Portugal, and Israel.

Why would the Biden administration talk one way and act the other?

The AI Safety movement has a concerted strategy of lying about its intentions. MIRI, one of the foundational organizations of the AI Safety movement, admits that this is the organized strategy of most major NGOs in the AI Safety movement.

The main funder of all this is Dustin Moskovitz, Biden/Harris’s largest 2024 donor. He is a major reason why the Biden administration talked tough on supporting AI, but all his actions slowed down AI research. What Dustin said, Biden did.

Congress had a different reaction to the AI Safety doomsday cult. Nancy Pelosi and House Science Democrats said their beliefs had “little to no basis in evidence” when calling for Governor Newsom to veto SB 1047, a narrowly-stopped California bill that motivated the State AI Law Moratorium in the first place. A bipartisan coalition rejected the AI Safety cult bills during the Biden administration, including in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

All of this is to say that the debate over the moratorium largely exists to cover up what the moratorium is actually about. We are talking about everything other than the actual threat. This is a massive problem — and the intentional strategy of the AI Safety movement. They can’t persuade congress with their sincere beliefs, or even provide any evidence to back them up. What they can do is spend hundreds of millions of dollars distracting us, trying to sneak through laws in deep blue States that de-facto apply to all Americans (which they’re currently trying to do in New York).

That is why the only reason why we are debating social media, child safety, or the already-federally-banned deepfake porn. The concerted strategy of the billion-dollar AI Safety movement is to distract, lie, and sabotage.

Social media regulations or child safety regulations which do not single out AI will not be affected at all. There are plenty of existing state laws that address the concerns being debated now without unfairly targeting AI and without going as far as to ban AI.

Doesn’t that mean the State AI Law Moratorium is not strong enough? Why can’t the AI Safety cult use those levers to ban AI? The answer is that if they used those levers, they would have to ban the entire internet. Their radicalism would be completely exposed, with practical consequences for everyone. And no one — no Republican, Democrat, or Independent — would actually support that.

This example gives a clear illustration to why the State AI Law Moratorium hurts the people it should hurt, and doesn’t hurt the people it shouldn’t. The harms addressed by child safety laws are largely real — they’re real problems happening to real people, which we want to stop regardless of whether AI is involved or not.

Meanwhile, the harms addressed by the AI Safety cult are completely fake — a fiction with “little to no basis in evidence” according to a wide bipartisan coalition. Their “solutions” are attempts to use brute force to solve fake problems with the “side effect” of banning AI.

That is why we need to pass a State AI Moratorium.

Find Lumpenspace:

lumpenspace

Clouded with discontent. & brooding in their minds terrible Bings

By Lumpen Space Princeps

https://x.com/lumpenspace

Mentioned in the episode:

lumpenspace

WMTP 2: DeepSeek, RL:DTF, and the weirdest ever cake.

Author’s note: just as I was requesting feedback for this essay, OpenAI seems to have published a paper covering these same grounds, likely with more practical use. I haven’t read it yet; I thought it would be more fun to publish mine and then check the overlap…

Read more

a year ago · 22 likes · 1 comment · Lumpen Space Princeps

https://github.com/lumpenspace/raft

https://www.amazon.com/Impro-Improvisation-Theatre-Keith-Johnstone/dp/0878301178

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03335

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12948

https://x.com/richardhanania

https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Woke-Corporate-Identity-Politics/dp/0063237210

https://www.amazon.com/Public-Choice-Theory-Illusion-Strategy-ebook/dp/B09L9Y2W7S

By some twists of life, I happen to know many people on both extremes of the IVF debate – self-identified ‘trads’ and ‘transhumanists’. In reality, their core premises are incompatible at the most fundamental level. Their core disagreement is about human essence — whether there is something immeasurable and particular to a human person that cannot be replaced by someone with similar or ‘better’ characteristics.

By ignoring the fundamental difference in belief and assuming that all people hold the same assumptions as themselves, each side is blindly wading into what could become an all-out war.

The core assumption of the transhumanists is that no such essence exists, or that biological augmentation, selection, and creation will have no negative effect on such an essence. Whether you think that’s true or not, it is a grave error not to realize that many people believe the opposite.

Now, I see once again that the gap in core premises is much wider than initially thought. I came to this while thinking over the core premises of the transhumanist argument and spotting an exchange on Twitter.

Ari: To wit: the wish is not that her mother had won the genetic lottery *but that her mother had never been born*.

Andy: This argument is straightforwardly true on its own terms, but it insists on a maximalist interpretation of the conditional past that we don't employ generally. Almost any wish about the past entails annihilation. If that's unacceptable, so be it, but it's not relevant overall

Ari: This isn't a Star Trek multiverse scenario, or Sliding Doors, or "what if I'd gone to med school," or whatever. It's extremely simple!

Embryo selection takes a specific individual human organism that already exists, tests it, and then either ends its life or lets it continue.

Your older brother is not your younger brother. I am not Taylor Swift.

There is an actual person who is Noor Siddiqui's mother. Had Orchid been used to treat that person's blindness, her life would have been ended before she was born. No metaphysics required to get this!

I had a hunch about Ari's mistaken assumption. I spoke to a friend who is a self-identified transhumanist who asked not to be named, who confirmed this hunch. Ari is assuming that straightforward personhood —the difference between your older brother and your younger brother — is still of essential importance to the transhumanist. For the transhumanist, not even that is true. It is indeed simply of no consequence if you were murdered and replaced by your unborn brother who's given the same experiences and the same ways of life, especially if he grew up to be a 10% ‘better’ person. The same is true for various Lazarus-like augmentations and de-novo creations of life. The point is not simply that embryos have no essence, but that none of us have essence. “Why would we have essence?” That's the question they're asking.

To be fair to the transhumanists, their worldview is an extension of the everyday logic of high modernism. We call an Uber driver and they're completely undifferentiated. If an Uber driver dies in a crash, it's of no importance to you. You never knew the guy and another Uber driver will be on the way. Most modern processes are abstracted in this way — your groceries, your coffee, your packages, your appliances, and so on. Social convention might lead some, but not all, to say that they would still grieve for this Uber driver. But that's the fading convention of a dead world.

What’s fascinating is that both the trads or human essentialists and the transhumanists diagnose this problem of disenchantment — of the gray, mundane, bureaucratic world we're surrounded by — but they have opposite solutions. Trads argue that defending the human essence, most of all from transhumanists, is what's necessary to overcome this world, rescue humanity from dystopia and restore our past greatness. Transhumanists argue that the only way out is through. That far from a capitulation to the grey world, discarding these fading conventions is awesome, healthy, and will take us to greater places.

You might step back and notice these are two completely mutually incompatible ways of life. In the classic Schmittian definition, this is a precursor to war, or at least political conflict. Plan your futures accordingly.

Ari Schulman has appeared on the From the New World podcast to discuss these issue at a great depth.

https://arenamag.com/articles/mr-deepseek-goes-to-washington

One quote:

At no point in 2024 did I hear DeepSeek mentioned in Washington. Late January was when everything changed. A major lesson I’ve learned in the nation’s capital is that it takes around two years for academic and industrial common knowledge to migrate to the swamp.

So honestly, the DeepSeek information cycle came faster than I expected. But unsurprisingly, the pre-DeepSeek policy talking points stayed the same. DC remained fixated on export controls and infrastructure projects. The hard truth is that being two years behind means missing out on important chunks of reality. Remember — the DC wisdom was that two years was the difference between Chinese and American AI. As it turned out, it was the difference in time between reality and reality in Washington.

Summary on twitter:
https://x.com/psychosort/status/1930433938650181885

A one-tweet summary of my argument on science funding:

The most important thing I want Washington to take away from how DeepSeek caught them off-guard is this: however well-funded some AI companies are, there are still so many pieces of the American AI ecosystem that need funding - room to experiment - to take off.

Legibility is the foundation of their companies. “Because LLMs will drastically lower the cost of information, reading that information to begin with provides a huge advantage,” the stories continue. That’s all great in theory. Their proponents even have a few recent examples to justify their argument. Take human feedback data for ChatGPT or indexed search data for perplexity. Specialized data does enable real product breakthroughs — that much is correct. In 2022 or 2023, data moats appeared strong. Think about what that specialized data accomplished. In the case of ChatGPT, it created a “friendly assistant” persona that helps users interact with LLMs in a more intuitive way. In the case of Perplexity, it enabled LLMs to browse the internet and other large datasets.

Both of those are important breakthroughs, but if you’ve tried a selection of AI tools recently, you’ll notice that they are the opposite of a monopoly. Every major AI lab has successfully copied the “friendly assistant” persona. Almost all major AI labs now have a search integration. Even in the cases where specialized data created the most value, the features created by that specialized data spread far and wide — they became a de-facto industry standard.

To understand why people expected specialized data to be a moat, rather than a commodity, we have to return to the original data moat thesis. Originally, raw quantity of data was one piece of assembling a runaway “god model”, which was believed to become a natural monopoly for whoever created it first. This thesis collapsed as all AI companies suffered diminishing returns from scaling.

Afterwards, the data narrative flipped from quantity to quality. Specialized data became more valuable and a new data narrative emerged — that AI models would commoditize all repetitive work and the new data moat was turning unreadable, “soft” workflows into readable, automatable workflows. This data thesis had a more realistic expectation of AI model abilities, but blindly copied assumptions about data from the god-model system. In the god-model system, the role of data was to bootstrap a positive feedback loop that would develop into a runaway AI — a natural monopoly. In the modern system, the role of data was to enable moderately-intelligent AI models to do repetitive work on previously inaccessible systems. In the god-model system, data created a moat because of a short-term singularity, not something intrinsic to data itself. In the modern system, data is part of a long-term business equilibrium, which creates a moat because … ?

One early way that the data thesis failed was model distillation. Model distillation is a fancy term for AI models being trained on other models' outputs. This might happen intentionally as a strategy for companies to catch up, as OpenAI accused DeepSeek of doing to them in a congressional report. It can also happen accidentally, as more people post OpenAI model outputs to the internet, its style becomes part of the public set of training data. So the gains from specialized data in a model like the first version of ChatGPT became commonplace overnight.

Work through why these examples failed to become monopolies. Reinforcement learning from human feedback, the technique used to create the initial version of ChatGPT, was a genuine breakthrough in customization and UI. But why did that fail to create a moat? The answer is because once that style was crystallized, both in theory and in practice, it became easier to copy, not harder. For a natural monopoly like Facebook, the fact that Facebook already exists makes it harder, not easier, to build a copy of Facebook. Model data is the opposite of a natural monopoly.

As Martin Casado told me in a podcast last summer, “The marginal value of the next bit of data for the leader is actually lower than that for a challenger. So even without the distillation, historically in AI, we've seen this perverse economy of scale where the leaders take a lot more investment to make reasonable gains relative to challengers.”

Now, startups and legacy companies alike are repeating the same mistake as the leading labs. And they are trying to build their moat on a foundation even less stable than ChatGPT’s assistant persona — business processes. There’s a core truth to what they’re doing: it’s very valuable to make the hidden parts of business processes visible to AI models, especially as they become the limiting factor for AI automation.

But start thinking about model distillation and ask yourself for any given process, whether the second company that automates that process has it harder, the same, or easier than the first. The elephant in the room is classic model distillation — if a competitor gets its hands on your model output, your data moat is over. But even without model distillation, there’s only one reason why illegible process data is more difficult than collecting legible data, like we do from the internet or internally in modern companies — we haven’t figured out the system to collect or quantify it. The hard work of a data collection pipeline is in its design, engineering, and debugging. Once those tasks are done and the first version of a software product exists, it becomes easier to reverse-engineer, follow, and improve upon. Process illegibility is not a moat; it is a textbook example of an anti-moat.

To be fair, making this data legible creates a massive amount of value. The incentives for surfacing, collecting, and integrating data can be improved by creating strict legal contracts with large firms or tight patent laws around AI systems, though neither of these solutions are without drawbacks. However, once you’re talking about creating novel legal solutions to properly capture value, you’re already incredibly far from the natural monopoly paradigm.

Data is less moat, more bailey.

Let me ask a question: What’s the limiting factor in this process? Is it my willingness to write things? Is it the usefulness of things that I write? Or is it your willingness to read things? Let’s be honest — I know most of my readers don’t read every article. And even if you do, there are almost certainly comparably good writers you aren’t reading.

LLMs are the most voracious readers of all. They really have read every article on my Substack and every podcast transcript. And for that, they can better summarize my arguments, refer more people to my writing, and better integrate my worldview into my queries. Compared to friends who don’t write or don’t publish publicly, it is noticeably easier for me to get LLMs to write in the way I want. The benefits to being publicly known are so vast and practical to regular users of LLMs. This improvement is not limited to the style and content of writing; it includes more easily creating images, diagrams, code, workflows, and business processes similar to whatever you or others have written about. With every piece of information you publish, you are making LLMs serve you better.

I’ve seen this comparison made live dozens of times in parties, dinners, and groupchats. I called this public intellectual privilege, as a joke, but the name stuck. Now, I’m constantly asked to explain it.

The concept of public intellectual privilege is simple: your public data helps you. Believe it or not, this is a controversial belief. For example, take Simone and Malcolm Collins, who have posted dozens of hours of their children playing. “It’s for their own good,” Malcolm told me once. They’ve told me that most people disagree — and some have gone as far to excoriate them for posting about their children. But the Collinses are right. And for children in the age of widely available LLMs, they couldn’t be more right.

Peter Thiel famously asks founders “What is one true thing that almost no one believes?” In his book Zero to One, he provides a lesser known addendum to this question: “A good answer takes the following form: Most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x.”

One of the best answers for x is this: “with rare exceptions, it benefits us to hide personal data.” The truth is the opposite: “with rare exceptions, it benefits us to share personal data.”

I have greatly benefitted from the era of public legibility. I hate networking. I hate explaining the same thing over and over on a hundred sales calls. I despise repetition.

The internet had shifted to scales in favor of marketing over sales. Instead of ‘schmoozing’, I write these articles, and I’m incredibly grateful for that. I can write well, write them once, and thousands of you will read them.

With the advent of LLMs and open-source AI, the shift from personal sales to personal marketing is being taken to its extreme. When you write for the public, you influence LLMs and their users. For some time, this Substack was the number one result for “Diminishing Returns in Machine Learning” on Perplexity. Due to algorithm changes or competition, that’s no longer the case, but I wish it still was. This influence is both exoteric — visible to everyone — and esoteric — visible only to those who read carefully. Sometimes, LLMs directly link, quote, or cite my articles. At other times, they reference stories, ideas, and framings I’ve written about without name-dropping.

Information is a massive public good. By sharing these ideas with more people, LLMs make it easier for users — or the LLMs themselves — to build upon these ideas and apply them to the real world. The person to benefit the most from those downstream ideas could be yourself. An LLM that recognizes your beliefs, experiences, and preferences can better help you. Practically, it has a better understanding of what you want when you ask it for a piece of software, a business plan, or a travel itinerary. The more complex the process, the more availability of context matters. Don’t make my word for it, take the world of companies collectively spending billions of dollars adding their own internal data to versions of LLMs. When it comes to writing, it’s uncontroversial to say that making your writing available to humans helps you, and more people are coming around to the idea that making your writing available to LLMs helps you too.

I’m interested to see whether more companies take the logic of the internet to the same extreme as me by open-sourcing their data to train LLMs. Some technical arguments suggest that making data available from the start of training is more efficient than existing post-hoc modifications like Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback (RLHF). Of course, most companies have no practical way to train a model from scratch, so their only option for the former would be to make their data available for the base model available to everyone.

However, this general idea is much more controversial when it comes to information about your private life. That is where it is most important to get this prediction right — It will be a massive personal advantage to put your preferences, your needs, and your worldview on the internet.

In 2010s era tech politics, the debate raged over consumer data. As the story went, “Big Data” was ruining your life by collecting detailed information about how you use their apps. There were real downsides to Big Tech worth addressing — collaborating with the surveillance state, censorship, mental health problems, and locking out competitors. But at this point, the practical benefit of being known to the world — to people and increasingly to LLMs — vastly exceeds the cost. Laws like GDPR that seek to limit, not fairly expand, data access are blowing up a massive public good. These laws’ supporters — self-appointed guardians of the consumer — are hurting the people their laws are intended to protect the most.

If a company knows more about you, it will offer you better, more useful positive-sum deals. This was already an inconvenient truth about companies like Amazon. Laws that made it harder to access and keep user data just resulted in less convenient search results. The reason is simple: questions are complex. The more historical data a person or algorithm has, the fewer generalizations or false assumptions it will make. When you ask ChatGPT to order packages, book an airline ticket, or write a piece of software, the same rule applies. And it's infinitely more convenient to have that information available from the start than to have to specify these details over and over again.

The word “privacy” in political terms has become corrupted — and now means something completely different than its historical usage. There are really two meanings of “privacy” — privacy from the NSA and privacy from cookies. There is and always has been a real concern for privacy — privacy from your government. There are even fair criticisms of tech companies over this real concern, which have cooperated with government censorship and surveillance. The modern privacy movement behind laws like GDPR do less than nothing to protect our freedoms from our government. They do exactly the opposite.

Public intellectual privilege is true for civilizations as much as it is for individuals. The more information is available — about America, about the liberal West, about Western civilization — the more LLMs will be pulled towards us. For individuals, public intellectual privilege pays in better recommendations, better instruction-following, and better personal experiences. For civilizations, public intellectual privilege pays in better institutions, better social fabric, and a better historical record.

By scrubbing themselves from the internet, many countries are choosing to imprison themselves in an unrecorded past. They deserve their suicide. Pray that your civilization will choose to be part of the future instead.

Hear Curtis speak on building political momentum, the Performative Right, the Trump Everything App, modern-day Manhattan Projects, the good and bad of automation, the Chinese trade strategy, and what lessons AI research can take from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

These episodes were recorded over the course of 2022 and 2023. I took them down during my time in DC, but they have been among the most requested episodes to be brought back.

Find the author:

Gray Mirror

A portal to the next regime

By Curtis Yarvin

https://x.com/curtis_yarvin

These expectations were detached from reality. Actual Afghans and Iraqis were tribal, ethnic, and sectarian. They had priorities other than freedom and prosperity. It turned out that Bush’s values weren’t universal at all; they were just the priorities of Western conservatives. Without a system of hard power in place, Iraq and Afghanistan became a security vacuum exploited by militias, insurgents, and terrorists. American puppets were corrupt and uncompetent. No nations were built in the process.

Trump won two elections by running against the Bush-era foreign policy. Vance, Rubio, and Trump himself are committed to avoiding those mistakes abroad. But they’re making the same philosophical mistakes with their enemies at home.

‘We will be greeted as liberators" was how many moderate conservatives thought about Harvard, Columbia, and other Ivy League universities. The idea was that once grant money is on the line, the natural moderate constituency of Harvard — the people who just want to do research and admit the best students — would finally have an excuse to act.

By mid-April, we were mugged by reality. Harvard completely refused to stop its DEI and affirmative action programs. Harvard leadership chose being racist to whites and asians over collecting hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants. They would not be greeting us as liberators.

I’ll admit that I fell for this way of thinking too, especially at the start of 2025. There were Harvard faculty and other insiders who personally assured me that leadership would be pressured into complying with Trump’s demands. It’s now clear that we were wrong.

There is now abundant evidence of Harvard’s past and continuing commitment anti-white racism.

The purpose of a system is what it does. The purpose of Iraq and Afghanistan is not and was not to make its people prosperous. The purpose of Harvard is not to produce research or to benefit its students. The purpose of Hezbollah Lebanon is Islamic Jihad. The purpose of Hezbollah Harvard is anti-white racism. Without a regime change in leadership, the purpose of Hezbollah Harvard will continue to be anti-white racism.

I can no longer see any moderate case for restraining or the Trump administration on this issue. Godspeed.

Hong Kong shows both the potentials and limits of Abundance politics. Its governance choices have been better than most urban cities. It has definitely changed politically. Its demographics are in decline. But whenever I find myself on the streets of Hong Kong, its fall feels incredibly overdetermined.

For all its crumbling, Hong Kong has remarkably little crime and pollution. Relative to the West, Hong Kong builds more housing and has lower crime. It regularly builds 40+ story buildings. Hong Kong has built into the mountains and reclaimed land from the sea. 25% of its developed land is reclaimed shoreland for new construction. It’s a strong example of the thesis that low crime makes it easier to build a political coalition for more housing, commonly heard when comparing the liberal West and East Asia.

Hong Kong fights to bring down prices in more controversial ways. One radicalizing thing about East Asia (China, Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong) is the acceptance of natural class differences. The Baumol effect is a choice. You can have perfectly functional (perhaps even more functional) societies with massive income inequality. And if you do, you will have 3-6x lower costs of food, transportation, delivery, and most other goods. Every economically literate person knows the welfare state hurts when you have to pay your taxes. It’s less well known that it contributes to a stagnant, conformist society by pricing out the rapid business experimentation enabled by low-cost labor. Westerners travelling to East Asia often remark that food and drinks are much more competitive and generative in the East — take the drink variation in Western coffee shops versus Eastern bubble tea stores. Easterners come up with new drinks practically every week. The same is true for many everyday consumer goods and services. Maybe that’s incompatible with democracy. If it is, that’s democracy’s loss.

On the other hand, lower costs have not spared this city from the seemingly inevitable pessimism, infertility, and credentialism problems as every other Western civilization. Hong Kong is infected with climate catastrophism as much as any Western country. 2010s cringe social engineering is abound — paper straws, carboard utensils, bag bans, you name it. Being in Hong Kong and Shanghai within weeks, it maeks a clear difference in quality of life. Environmentalist signs proliferate across the city like a virus.

Nostalgia is as strong as any city in the West. One popular Hong Kong cafe chain is an Asian Denny’s, literally immortalizing the 70s with employees who still wear blue jeans and pinstripe shirts.

They serve classic Hong Kong fast food dishes like traditional milk tea, French toast, and spaghetti bolognese. The food is well prepared, but it simply does not match the quality and complexity of modern cuisine. It’s difficult to explain the semi-random selection of Western foods entered into the Hong Kong culinary canon. Much of it comes from British inheritance, along with daily food shopping, double-decker buses, and British accents in english-language government announcements.

Bakeries in Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan are magnificent — indisputably higher quality than France or the UK. They’ve convinced me that baking requires the form of quality control that is done uniquely well in East Asia, much like semiconductor manufacturing.

The nostalgia and climate politics of Hong Kong are carbon copies of the Western right and left, respectively. While Shanghai’s dynamism feels like America, Hong Kong feels like Europe in its geriatric decline. Pessimism, Malthusianism, and gerontocracy are pervasive. What’s worse, almost everyone feels like there is nothing they can do to reverse that trend. Let me be clear — prices are lower, service is better, and quality of life is higher. But the Hong Kong flavor of nihilistic managed decline is indistinguishable.

One last picture that didn’t fit anywhere:

There are parks like this everywhere in the city. Otherwise, it’s a very Western city with typical construction, offices, transit, highways, et cetera. I’m told by many people that Shanghai is China’s most Western city.

I couldn’t stop thinking of ’s argument that China is the most culturally American country. Both countries have similar Ponzi dynamics in education, welfare/pensions, healthcare, and growth markets. Both countries have a highly anticipatory economy — the economic mood of flying at the edge of our seats. It always feels like the bubble is just about to pop or that the economy is just about to rip, although the reasons differ.

At their core, the American and Chinese social contracts have the same bug; they are both gerontocracies — rule by, for, and of the old. Walking around China, it's obvious that the cringe autocracy vs. democracy narrative has nothing to contribute to either country's most pressing problems. Those problems are shared: low fertility, insolvent pensions, no generational turnover, and decline of meritocracy. Deng and Reagan can both increase GDP. Neither Xi nor Trump can fix the birthrate. The Chinese strain of this bug is called “Laid Flat”: Chinese youth no longer believe working hard will reward them with career growth, profitable investments, or solvent pensions. As a result, they are doing the bare minimum — laying flat.

Something incredibly striking about the Chinese people, especially Chinese domestic tourists, is that the most fashionable people are in their 60s or 70s. There is an entire generation of older Xers/younger boomers who are clearly incredibly actively in swapping their outfits for freshly weaved, style-of-the-week fashion. They snap pictures as often as women in their 20s and even livestream on Chinese apps. I didn’t take any pictures of these strangers, but here is a similar photo I found online:

Their style is distinctly modern, not quite traditional Chinese and not quite Western. It’s actually more unique than the styles of the other fashionable group, Chinese in their twenties or late teens, who tend to have a haphazard mix of Western and Japanese styles.

Chinese payment technology is very overrated. At a pure technology level, Alipay is worse than Apple Pay / Google Wallet. Payments have higher error rates and lag times. Ultralow-latency servers and clean interface design are exceptionally American technologies. No one does it better than us. If WeChat could switch to American servers today, it would.

What makes the Chinese payment economy really work is the lack of crime. China has these open-concept malls where a floor is populated by dozens of stores you can freely walk between, without separate doors, scanners, or security. It would be trivial to just take stuff from one of these stores and run, but no one does. From these photos, it’s entirely unclear which is the freer country.

I'm radicalized by how much of the daily problems Americans have could be solved by just two things: building housing and arresting criminals. Do those two things in American cities and no place in the world could ever compare to us again. Peter Thiel argues that it’s precisely because we're so much better than everyone else at the other things that we can subsidize NIMBYs and criminals that would just destroy every other political order. By 2025, everybody knows this is true, but still very few people properly weight how much this is true.

I thought I hated traveling, but actually I just hate Europe. Specifically, I hate Europeans — lazy, entitled, and immoral people. China is a more American country than most of Europe. Chinese restaurants are open late, competent, basically American. Despite the censorship, militarism, and political control, I’d be much happier with more of the world becoming like China than more of the world becoming like Europe. Being in Europe is bad for the soul. When it comes to urgency, aspiration, attention to detail, and will to do a good job, it’s China, India, and America on one side and Europe on the other. To be clear, I don’t dislike ethnic Europeans, but it feels like every ethnic European with any vigor is either already in America or applying for an American visa. Caesar would be an American. Napoleon would be an American. Adam Smith would be an American. Even Karl Marx would be a Berkeley student. America is the real life Galt’s Gulch, where all the talented people in Atlas Shrugged have fled, while Europe is the real life crumbling ruins. Whether because of anti-American attitudes, language barrier, or sheer size, China and India seem to have avoided that fate so far.

Something bothers me far more about Chinese social media users than Western social media users. I think it’s that Shanghai’s physical territory has become a negative of digital space, far more than most of America. To Baudrillard’s chagrin, there’s still a difference between Disneyland America and the rest of America, but much less of a difference between Disneyland in China and the rest of China. Even outside of tourist areas, shops, restaurants, and streets are optimized for social media events, deals, and reviews.

Time is cheap in China. Everywhere, shops beg for reviews and promotions, offering free treats in return. And when time is cheap, markets for time-saving technologies is poor.

From my conversations with people in the Chinese / East Asian startup world, there are fairly extensive problems with Chinese startup capitalization. Tens of thousands of words have probably been written about this; start here. That is likely America/SF’s greatest advantage. The American government can never win by becoming more like China, but perhaps it can win by making the entire country more like OpenAI.

Find Yuri:

How To Subvert Subversion with Yuri Bezmenov

A dissident's guide to modern urban progressive life through sarcasm, memes, and data.

https://x.com/yuribezmenov22

Mentioned in the episode:

How To Subvert Subversion with Yuri Bezmenov

How To Win America's Counter-Cultural Revolution

Comrades: American capitalists have a responsibility to protect our civilization from communists…

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a year ago · 165 likes · 48 comments · Yuri Bezmenov

How To Subvert Subversion with Yuri Bezmenov

How To Make Arranged Marriage Great Again

Comrades: I made my first speaking appearance at NatalCon last weekend. It was an epic gathering full of great patriots who love their families. Here are my remarks…

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a year ago · 95 likes · 25 comments · Yuri Bezmenov

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How To Subvert Neuroticism, Narcissism, and Nihilism

Comrades: Babies are downstream of culture…

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a year ago · 145 likes · 32 comments · Yuri Bezmenov

https://www.fromthenew.world/p/the-natalism-conference

https://www.fromthenew.world/p/why-i-am-not-a-pronatalist

Musk’s vision is that AI becomes integrated with X to form an “everything app”, analogous to Chinese company WeChat. Altman’s prospective platform may indicate similar plans. Several of his competitors — xAI, Meta, and Google — have long benefitted from their platforms because they provide two prominent uses to AI development. First, they accelerate growth by making AI apps available to their user bases. Second, AI companies can use the data generated by users or by user-AI interactions to improve their AI models.

It’s clear that Altman would benefit from having a social media platform of his own, but creating one is easier said than done.

More on the relationship between AI, social media mechanisms, and the Trump administration’s understanding of AI markets.

The heated fight between Musk and Altman stems from their winner-take-all vision of AI, where the first to god-like AI wins a de facto monopoly. AI differs from traditional media technologies by being both the medium and the control system. Becoming the sole provider of AI doesn’t just mean charging monopoly prices — it could mean control of the entire media ecosystem or commercial infrastructure of the internet. An AI-first social media platform not only communicates the views of its users, but controls them at the same time. The combination of autonomous bots and traditional social media algorithms provides a powerful mechanism for controlling public opinion on the platform.

Find Nathan:

https://x.com/NPinkoski

https://firstthings.com/archive/?_author=nathan-pinkoski

Mentioned in the episode:

https://firstthings.com/actually-existing-postliberalism/

https://firstthings.com/spiritual-death-of-the-west/

https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-the-deep-state-took-down-nixon/

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/whole-society-american-politics

https://www.amazon.com/Catholicism-Christ-Common-Destiny-Man/dp/0898702038

Me, in City Journal:

The report’s authors even suggest that, without global controls on AI research, AI systems could cause human extinction: “Eventually it finds the remaining humans too much of an impediment: in mid-2030, the AI releases a dozen quiet-spreading biological weapons in major cities, lets them silently infect almost everyone, then triggers them with a chemical spray. Most are dead within hours; the few survivors (e.g., preppers in bunkers, sailors on submarines) are mopped up by drones.” It’s a forecast more grounded in severe mental illness than empirical reality.

For a long time, the overlap between factual descriptions of the motivations of AI Doomers and acceptable political language was close to zero. I’m glad that’s changed, Goldwater rule be damned.

As promised, I explain the concept of S-curves to the City Journal audience. Though this likely isn’t news to regular readers of this newsletter.

The history of innovation offers reason to doubt the safetyists. Every major research field in history has eventually reached a point of diminishing returns, where useful discoveries become increasingly rare. The pattern holds across disciplines—physics, chemistry, and economics—and is visible at a more granular scale, too, from antibiotics to railroads to CPUs. Initial bursts of progress taper off as fields mature, following an economic pattern known as the “S-Curve.”

Despite gains in computing power and economies of scale, fundamental AI research is getting harder, not easier. The core problem is that the remaining unsolved challenges are growing more complex faster than our tools are improving.

Finally, I direct readers to ’s wonderful cost analysis of currently existing AI regulations.

In practice, these laws work as jobs programs for lawyers. Rinehart found that up to 1,140 compliance hours per business may be necessary for a single regulation, the BIS reporting rule. Dozens of these regulations, applying to tens of thousands of companies, compound into billion-dollar compliance industries. The regulations function as an annual tax of hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. They raise fixed costs, preventing new startups from competing and benefiting incumbents.

Exformation

How much might AI legislation cost in the U.S.?

ICYMI: Utah is considering a bill that would force social media companies to share social graph data. My recent op-ed in the Deseret News, and its accompanying tweet thread, explains this bill and why social media interoperability isn't the best path forward. I also had…

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a year ago · 9 likes · Will Rinehart