Shanghai

Has Finally Made Me A Social Media Hater

I spent two weeks Shanghai. The most shocking thing is that it’s very GREEN!

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 Noah Smith’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.