Art has always been one of the most central aspects of human lives. It is not unique to the human experience, but it has become more important to humans than perhaps no other species on the planet. The history of Art is one of a continuous crisis and need to reïnvent itself, and as such our current age is no different. The contemporary crisis is one partly caused by the emergence of Large Language Models (llms) and their ability to quickly generate enormous quantities of visual imagery, but it is also caused by a more long-running trend of digital life and of its consequences.

Many artists (especially those leaning towards more commercial work) decry to the use of llms to produce mere “slop” — cheap, mass produced imagery — and the threat to which this poses to the jobs of artists. But if one takes the arguments of these artists at face value, that the images and text ai not in fact Art, we are left with an interesting question; one almost as old as the medium itself: What is Art?

“Art”, as opposed to mere “art”, does not take any predefined shape or appearance. It is a pure essence that exists both between and within individuals. The lowercase form of art is a form of mechanical production — it consists of things that are merely meant to be decorative, to be pleasurable to the eye, and to fulfil some innate human desire to “fill” empty space with something interesting. Art may contain art, but it does so only in the sense that Art must be contained within some sort of vessel; it represents the numerous techniques that are used in order to bring Art into the world.

Lowercase art can be almost as, if not more, varied than the Art itself. Examples may include things like drawing, painting, casting, dancing, or singing, but a complete list of the possible forms of art would be as long as a list of all possible human activities.

From this follows a similar distinction of Artists and artists; meaning those who produce Art and art respectively. In many cases these may be one and the same, but in many others they differ demonstrably. There are many artists who are not Artists, and in the same way there are many Artists who are not artists.¹ These differences are not always as clear as one may hope, and adds considerable difficulty in differentiating the things they produce.

Most easily noticeable is undeniably the artist; it is she who pronounces herself as the creator of art, if not also making the claim of creating Art. They are the practitioner of the art qua skill of creating art. To this class we include the professional artists such as painters, weavers, photographers and the digital artists. But the makers of Art may not be so easily seen; it includes those who indirectly labour as writers (such as lawyers, programmers, administrators, et cetera) as well as those who merely through their actions embody Art — no matter the profession.

It may not always be the aim of those who produce Art to do so, it could merely be a by-product of their intended activity. By contrast, Art is clearly the goal of the artist profession; even if they do not always succeed.

The production of Art is inherently a social activity, in that it happens as a part of the social relations between individuals. The very first forms of Art were undoubtedly song and dance that was performed socially. The visual arts were probably invented first through the collection and/or orientation of sea shells or rocks — whose meaning was created in the relations within social groupings.

The creation of art does not need to be social in the same regard. As mentioned before, Art must take some embodied form in the world in order to be experienced; it commonly does so through asocially created art. But the aspect in which it is Art only appears after the work is displayed in a social setting. A painting only seen by the artist is not itself a piece of Art² but only becomes so as its meaning is socially constructed. The artist must be so arrogant that they dare share their art with the world, framing it as better than what any other person has made before,³ and in this bold statement creates Art.

As I explained in the thesis of my earlier text Pluribus & Alienation it is easy to mistake developments in information generation with ones in communication. Both lead to an increase in the perceived amount of information⁴ that is received by the individual. But interestingly enough the reverse mistake has been made in the field of art. The most revolutionary development for art in recent memory, and that has still not been properly tackled, is the expansion of the internet and, through it, digital art.

There have unknowingly been many debates as a consequence of this paradigm shift. Perhaps the largest was the original introduction, discussion and corresponding legal battles surrounding peer-to-peer file-sharing and torrenting and the resulting mass-copying and sharing of music and video works whose distribution hade previously been restricted mostly by technical limitations.

The end result of these battles did not solve the underlying problem but instead merely reintroduced the earlier status quo by the creation of legal tools and barriers, as well as the emergence of services like Spotify and Netflix that shifted the economic incentives of consumers. But the debate lay dormant for a time; creating the illusion of being solved.

The second phase of the debate came forward with the invention of the non-fungible token, an extension of the (originally Ethereum) blockchain so as to include the registration of unique (and thus non-fungible) units of account, as opposed to the fungible digital currencies that had existed before. While blockchains and nfts are inherently a boring technology, they have managed to accrue a loyal following due to the (potentially) large monetary rewards that can be gained by speculating on the values of cryptocurrencies. This then led to a fixation on a specific form of nft art (most notably embodied in the Bored Ape Yacht Club series of generative artworks by Yuga Labs) rather than nfts as a tool to manage the ownership of preëxisting artworks.

This division into what became “Owning an nft” instead of “owning an artwork” created the belief that what was owned was the digital (oftentimes) image itself, and thus a corresponding belief that someone else downloading a copy of this image was tantamount to theft, since the owner had not given their consent for a copy to be made of the art.

In fact, a “copy” is made practically every time a digital image is displayed or moved; potentially hundreds of times when moved over the internet. The blockchain itself is even built on a redundant and collectively synced copies of the entire blockchain and its contents.

This mistake is of course a relic of the analog world, where producing a copy of a work was a laborious and difficult process, and where such a work maintained a strictly separate identity from the physical shape of the original. In such a world theft is possible by removing the original owner’s ability to decide the fate of the artwork. Such a development is however impossible when it comes to digital art. Obtaining access to view (and thus by necessity also copy) something digital does not deprive the original owner of anything — only perhaps the monopoly right to extract rent on such access.

The introduction of image-generating diffusion models breaks this delicate repair of a fundamentally fractured position. Image generation allows not just the copy of preëxisting art but also the creation of brand new art. Such art is fundamentally inspired by the works of those that came before⁵ through the inclusion of such works in the training data for the models. This inclusion is highly controversial to many (primarily digital) artists, who see themselves as still having some sort of authorial control over what can be done to a work.

This stems from the idea that an owner of a physical work can share said work digitally while still maintaining control over the original. But for digital art no “original” exists, a digital copy is a perfect copy that is indistinguishable from the first. Sharing your digital art with someone else then not only allows them to take inspiration personally, but also to share the work further or to modify it as they see fit. When a social media company uses images or text posted on their platform they are only using what was, in practice, made publicly available to all. A core consequence of digital media is that the only guaranteed way to prevent it from spreading is not to share it in the first place.

The creation of generative art (as compared to the mere generation) is still a process that raises it to a certain level of Art because the creation is still a social process. The reasons for this are twofold:

1. ai models do not create some internal definition for what constitutes Art or not or of what the world looks like, just as most humans do not. Instead models create images based on the images that is is trained on, and therefore mirrors our collective societal idea of how art is supposed to appear.
2. The Artist introduces the element of Art to the work through their selection and deliberate choosing to present a work. An image silently generated and deleted is not Art in the same way that a napkin sketch by a famous artist, discarded and forgotten, does not constitute Art.

These two reasons follow naturally from the idea that Art is a socially constructed and collective idea that is not in the control of the author themselves. Even examples similar to the above only become Art when a second actor discovers the discarded work and chooses to elevate it and present it as Art.

This is not to say that ai art is always Art or that it is very good Art when it attempts to be so. Instead ai is a mere tool that does not replace Artists but empowers them in a new way. The two major historical developments that most clearly showcases this are the introduction of photography into the art world as well as the modernism-defining work Fountain by Marcel Duchamp.

Beginning with the former, it is clear that photography today is an established artform that that constitutes one of the widely recognized ways to create Art. But this was not always so. Originally photography was seen as a cheap and industrialized way to capture the world around us, missing the critical element of interpretation that was done by the painter. That the camera impacted the livelihoods of artists — most notably painters — must be undeniable,⁶ but it also led to a widespread increase in the reproduction of visual imagery. Today photography is used for many technical tasks that could never have been done by traditional artists; think of the snapshot of a restaurant menu to a friend running late so that they can order in advance.

Photography also made many pieces of art uninteresting, and thus not worthy of being considered Art. The traditional painting of highly realistic-looking fruit bowls or landscapes could now be simply automated, and the fruit bowl instead became a mere showcase of technical skill.⁷ To be considered Art the work must then inform some new perspective.

The latter example is perhaps even more famous. Fountain consists of a mass-produced porcelain urinal. Its creation was offensive in two ways, partly owning to the choice of a urinal specifically (as an intimate object that is meant to be covered in piss) as well as being offensive merely in its presentation.

This second element was shared with all of Duchamp’s Readymades — everyday objects merely positioned and presented to be Art, and therefore be imbued with such a status. Doing this requires no (or at least very little) technical skill, and is therefore accessible to everyone. All Art since Duchamp has had to grapple with this phenomena, that even if a specific artwork required technique to achieve it is nonetheless possible to create great Art without it.

The introduction of generative ai does not change this state of affairs. Some people argue that ai is putting artists out of jobs today, and they are right in doing so, but this misses the fact that the Artist — who aims to create Art and not merely art — faces the same challenge as they have always done. Paradoxically the two groups that benefit from ai are those who merely care about art qua visual communication and those who strive to create Art, and choose to use ai as (one) manner of pursuing that goal. It is the group in-between, who does not care particularly strongly about neither art nor Art but merely produces art as a manner of making a living, who will suffer and largely disappear — their labour shifting to the orchestration of ai models just as most photographers today are not Artists but instead merely “documenters”. ❦

History has in fact ended — not as a triumph of liberal democracy (as Fukuyama believed) but as the extension of technique, industrial production, and the state. How exactly this has come to pass is not to be discussed here, but I should point you to my own coverage of the topic elsewhere.

In Max Weber’s Die Protestantiche Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus he posits that the geist² of capitalism is found in the values of protestantism. This spirit is also identified by Hegel as that which develops the final historical position. While the capitalist society remains, and is even increasing in intensity, we have philosophically moved on to another stage in the development of this spirit. The final historical position has been the post-protestant “cult of reason” that was first formulated in revolutionary France.³ This idea, even though no longer a revolutionary rejection, remains the religion of the modern world, even in those places where “traditional values” and religion are ostensibly still strong. An evangelical American would have trouble destroying his beloved Ford f-150 for no rational reason whatsoever, in the manner in which Abraham was prepared to sacrifice Isaac. There is no belief held in the post-historical world than rational thought.

As I explained in Exponentials we have trouble understanding the implications of eˣ growth. When looking merely at the recent past all that came before seems irrelevant, and likewise when peering into the future the possibilities seem endless. The consequences of this is a dual rejection; of the well-travelled past as a stranger and the unknown future as a close friend. Today we instead live in the derivative of reality — of the current as defined by its trajectory between the old and the new. This is the temporal space where post-historical man lives.

But if we are then enmeshed in this trajectory through historical development, how can post-historical man be considered post-historical? Are we not then obsessed with our travel through history and in that sense more historical than ever before? The issue at the core of this is that there is no longer any authentic historical development to strife for. We are racing for ever-increasing wealth, ecological protections, state control, laissez-faire capitalism, and authentic happiness all at once, longing for the glory attained by the Caesars of old. But most of all, we are obsessed with the origin itself, of the driving force of progress.

Post-historical man is inseparable from his technical counterpart, who seeks above all to do more with less, to build grand systems, to raise the poor out of their squalor and to fix the problems of the world. This is firmly rooted in the belief of the enlightenment, and particularly those of German idealism — with the values of freedom and rationality at its heart. These are in turn two sides of the same coin; The only reason not to perform an the most rational act is if one is not free to do so. But how does the systems of technical society, and in turn the pressures of “modern life” shape the mind of the individual?

It is clear to those who bother to think about it that the technical mindset today is all-encompassing; we live in a world filled with efficiency. But in what manner is this sustainable? In many it is fully so; the dominance of technique merely pushes us to fix its inherent problems as they appear.⁴

But it is at the same time the case that humans are not meant to live in the world we have built. We have built a world for Homo Economicus, not for Homo Sapiens. The values of religion are no longer useful for social organisation, and so they have intentionally (although not by any single individual) been replaced by agnosticism and atheism.

Some people argue that the liberal attempts to spread this way of life globally failed — most clearly in the shown in the Tiananmen (天安们) massacre. But my own experiences of the prc showed a starkly different truth. While the mainland Chinese have not transformed their political system to a free liberal democracy they have nevertheless become very similar to us in their philosophical position. Their daily concerns practically identical to those in our populations, and I did not find them to be locked in an intense ideological struggle with western political, ethical, or economic systems. It is in practice impossible to build a system that is not rational and technical, for any such system will be out-competed by those who make use of such tools.

But what is it like to live in a post-historical society? The readers of this will be all too familiar with the answer, since they themselves are almost guaranteed to live such a life. We have already described the forces that have gotten us here, but it is nevertheless of interest to cover the general consequences of their implementation.

The primary goal of post-historical society is the entertainment and happiness of man.⁵ All other goals are subservient to the above — merely requirements that must be fulfilled to make sure that mankind is satisfied. The characteristic element of the post-historical world is of course that historical action no longer becomes possible. The individual person can no longer significantly shift the course of human history as is thus forced to live their life either contributing to mankind’s now divine progress or to merely watch as work continues. The chief instrument for both of these activities has become the internet.

The world online — as opposed to the one irl — does not exist. It is merely a simulacrum of the physical world’s creation. No human being has ever existed online, not even in such extreme cases as Christian Weston Chandler. Nevertheless an increasing share of humanity’s collective activities oriented toward the digital realm where the resulting product exists merely on a global interconnected network of computers.

This is the domain of media — or at least a form of it. The post-historical aim of media is to be merely consumed and not to be interacted with. Such a definition can even be extended to things email that are not traditionally considered as media. Social media is also included within this because most social media platforms are not made for reactions as a primary intent, if they are it is merely as a way to generate more content for public consumption.

We are not glued to our devices for any conspiratorial reason. There is not an evil cabal of the global elite who is trying to keep us suppressed with entertainment. How do I know this? Because they themselves are chronically online. If the president of the United States does not himself feel capable of historical action (and instead wishes to spend his time online, golfing, or bowling) how can ordinary man?

A counterargument against the contemporary post-scare reality is that there is still work that has to be done; we have not yet reached a level of fully automated luxury communism. This is not true. A very small share of the population currently labours in sectors that are inherently required such as food production, somatic healthcare, and infrastructure. All the other work is of course useful, but it could in theory be done without. The only cost would be in the happiness of mankind.

In advanced economies the predominant share of gdp is in the service industry — people performing favours for each other. The automation of service work by advances in ai promises to make much of this work redundant. The response to this has in many cases been that increases in automation instead allocates people to new jobs where they can be even more productive.⁶ But what jobs remain when both the production of goods and services have been automated? Will all that remain be performing tasks for ai? Not entirely. In a world merely meant for human entertainment, companionship becomes a commodity.

It was Alexandre Kojève’s belief that post-historical man would inevitably be reduced to his most animal forms as political action became impossible. This is in fact the trend that we are seeing. The growth of services like Onlyfans and Fansly shows how profitable intimate human connection can be.

This is despite the fact that the internet has made pornography more and more distribute-able. It is also not a question of niche kinks, since the automation of tailor-made pornography by llm image generation has seemingly not impacted these human-centred platforms. Porn has always constituted a significant share of consumer internet traffic, but the difference here is the focus on the individual’s relation to another human being. Prostitution is nothing new of course — it is after all “the world’s oldest profession” — and it is merely one form of post-historical labour.

Companionship need not be sexual, and sexual stimulation might not be continuously wished for. Things like simple company (especially for the elderly who make up an increasing share of the world), travel guides, spiritual or technical mentors, politicians,⁷ influencers, therapists, artists, and doctors all perform some form of work where the interaction with another human being is the most important part.

Above all advertising is the industry that embodies the spirit of the post-historical economy. It appears to our most base animal desires — for safety, community, approval, or mere satisfaction — and has as its aim to inform us of goods and services that we did not know that we needed in the first place. Advertising has slowly become less and less of an artform; it is instead becoming increasingly “hidden” in the world around us, silently embedded in media and in our social interactions.

The internet is what facilitates the expansion of the personal. The individual can sit at home; single, childless, friendless even, and still feel adequately entertained through their feeds of information, communicated through television, the smartphone, or literature. When earlier one had to venture out into the world to experience it, now one can instead merely have it delivered to you.

The above development is not due to llms specifically. It is due to artificial intelligence in the broadest possible sense. Intelligent machines are things as abstract as the structure of human organisations, of biological and financial systems, and of mechanical automatons such as a combustion engine. They are all intelligent in the sense of making assumptions about the world and acting within it to create something new.

Talk of shifting jobs to things like negotiation and long-term planning is idealistic — even if llm capabilities flatline the rest of society will continue on building more and more advanced systems and technologies to further eliminate dread and toil, leaving us with reading spice and water-skiing as activities to fill our ecstatic lives. There are no longer any great Jihads to be carried out, no great political work to be created. All that is left to do is the construction of industrial society’s final utopia; the city of Babel. God is in his heaven. All is right with the world. ❦

Back in 2024 I was part of the first class of a new course at the Swedish Defence University titled Economic Security in Competition, Conflict and War. Throughout that course it became clearer and clearer to me that the field of economic security has a central element that makes it fundamentally difficult to implement. The subject has only become more relevant as of late, with the People’s Republic of China (prc) showing no sign of stopping its entrenchment into critical sectors of the economy and with ever-strengthening winds in the sails of protectionism everywhere from Warsaw to Washington. As such it is an issue that has continuously been brewing in the back of my mind these past years. But despite increased interest in the topic it has not become any clearer what constitutes economic security, and how it should best be attained and maintained. A crude definition might be the following:

Economic security is the ability to continue ability to maintain a healthy economy through dramatic changes in macroeconomic conditions.

Notice how this definition does not explicitly mention war or international conflict. The title of my course was aptly chosen, for economic security is not just relevant in the high-stakes environment of all-out war, but is also a deciding factor in the everyday life of international competition. Ever since the second world war great powers have been largely unable (or at least strongly unwilling) to enter into direct conflict with one another, largely due to the invention of nuclear weapons. The sphere of economic warfare has therefore become a new domain of warfare, along with the technological ones of cyber and space. Where it not for nuclear weapons Europe would assuredly be in a hot war with Russia at the moment, but instead it has been able to maintain the conflict at a lower level of the escalation ladder — purely in the realm of economic warfare.

During the cold war the west and the communists were involved in an intense economic struggle; in which the west was adamant in making use of its unique strengths to prevail against the Soviet Union. The rise of the prc has put this thinking into something of a crisis. China is a large country, it is only natural for it to make up a correspondingly large share of global production, but we should not aim to copy it in an attempt to insulate ourselves from its autocratic rulers.

Much thinking in the field boils down to improving the resilience of one’s economy, so that it can better withstand shocks from outside actors or events.¹ Resilience has become something of a buzzword in defence circles, akin to ai, Blockchain and Quantum in tech. What exactly it stands for is unclear and complex. For a visualisation, here is a graph I was shown as part of that aforementioned course showing what aspects of the Swedish model are beneficial and/or negative to resilience:

It is immediately clear that this is a somewhat muddy topic. There are quite a few different aspects to the term (as showcased above), not just in what concretely contributes to improved resilience but even to what sectors are involved in the first place. It is a solidly interdisciplinary term, one fit for a new age of political economy — albeit one that this time is principally oriented externally toward the international realm.

Economic resilience represents two qualities that are really quite different. The first aspect it stands for the ability to robustly survive the initial disturbance. In this sense it is a measure of constitution of stalwartness, and of the capacity to just keep on doing business when the situation changes. This is the primary focus of much thinking in the field of economic security. It argues for autarkic (or at least protectionist) polices that in some regards is reminiscent of the mercantilism of the 16– and 1700s. The national wealth and economic might is seen as that which is produced and processed within the state’s national borders — international trade is either seen as a necessary weakness or as a possibility for coercion. But equally important is the second meaning of resilience: adaptability and economic vigour.

The structure of the economic landscape has always been changing, and one’s economy needs to be able to keep up with those changes. To do this the economy must maintain a high level of dynamism that allows one not just to shift around production and consumption to new markets, but also the ability to utilise new technologies and to break into new sectors. Being resilient in this regard means taking a punch and then getting up to continue the struggle.² There are three primary facilitators toward this:

1. A free market economy
2. An open democratic society
3. A high level of economic development

A keen reader might realise that these aspects are the antithesis of ones that you want to strive for to create a resilient qua robust economy – save perhaps the last element.³ It is in this contradictory dichotomy that the difficulty in economic security lies.

The first aspect is quite quite obvious – it is hard to create a dynamic and rapidly changing economy that does not make use of the market – but it is hard to restrain the power of the state when speaking of questions of national security. This is the logic of Sullivan’s famous “Small yard with a high fence” analogy; one must allow the free market to adapt – to fail and to try again – but at the same time not allow a few critical industries to do so fully. Creating an artificial boundary of where to and not to intervene means that one gets the benefits of both of these.

Regarding the second point, an open society might in many cases be seen as a weakness, but it is in fact a strength. Autocracies (such as the prc) may in many cases be able to push through reform or industrial efforts more clearly, but they do so at hidden costs. Liberal democracy allows dissenting voices to vent their grievances and to easily highlight corruption and misallocation of resources. Autocracies must also use considerable resources for maintaining their rule, something that does have to be done when one has the consent of the governed.⁴

While in Běijīng I met a young man from Hángzhōu who had previously worked for many years as a security guard, and who described the job as dull and uninteresting. He did not however want these positions to be eliminated, since they had offered him a stable income when he was fresh out of school. These jobs act as a societal bribe for the maintaining of the security apparatus. The scale of this is enormous; every entrance (of which there are multiple per station) to the Běijīng metro has a security checkpoint staffed by 3-5 guards.⁵ Pinghan Liang (梁平汉), a professor at Sun Yat-sen University’s School of Government has estimated the direct cost of these security checks to be 1.8 billion usd, employing 224 thousand people.

The third point is closely related to the first, but it is still different enough to warrant its separate investigation. Having a larger economy is strictly beneficial to economic security because producing more goods and services means having a bigger influence and more power to use when interacting with the outside world. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is perhaps one of the most autarkic (and therefore economically secure) economies in the world, but even it is reliant on trade, particularly with the prc and the Russian Federation, and due to its small size it would likely not be a threat to the security of any other state (not even to the Republic of Korea, rok) had it not possessed nuclear weapons.

Following the orthodox theory of economic security to its extreme one would end up at the division of society into small, entirely self-sufficient groups of subsistence farmers who do not rely on on the producers of any other state. But such a society would at the same time be extremely insecure, at risk of being conquered by industrialised nations like those of Europe during the Great Divergence.

While this form of resilience is incredibly strong against disruptions in trade, it is equally weak against disruptions in production. We no longer see the kinds of famines like those of the Hungry Forties⁶ or of the Year Without a Summer thanks to systems of food production, storage, and transport that have been made possible thanks to the modern globalised industrial economy. There have been no major famines in the Indian subcontinent for over half a century, and they largely ended as a structural problem over 100 years ago. This is not due to techniques of protectionism, but due to the adaptability of a free market, and of the increase in technology that such a increase allows for.⁷ The productivity of industrial society is a tremendous power to wield, and one should care for it as much as they can.

The long term objective for any state is then to augment its power by increasing the productive powers under its command or, in other words, to increase gross domestic product (gdp), and any coherent economic security objective should incorporate such a goal and the methods to accomplish it (such as investments in r&d, a sensible tax policy, and the construction of basic infrastructure). That this is the long term objective is significant, for it may be easily clouded by short term thinking.

The Argentine Republic was once one of the the most prosperous and wealthy countries on earth, for a short time in the 1890s even surpassing the United States of America and the United Kingdom in gdp per capita. The reasons for its downfall are of course numerous, but of interest to us are the goals set by Peronism of economic independence. The technique of import substitution we now know have failed many times, and creates an insular industry unable to compete internationally. In the short term however, such techniques protects jobs and the wealth of investors who have already “bought in”. Following a system of “whack-a-mole” it allows one to (comparatively) easily eliminate dependencies on other nations. But doing this completely is impossible, as the impacts of the 1930s depression on Argentina shows. Instead what must be done is to focus on the fundamental capabilities of the economy.

The enormously successfully policies of the east-Asian tigers takes this advice. Instead of acting in a reactive sense — where one merely responds to what happens around the world — these countries (The rok, The Republic of China (roc), Singapore, and Hong Kong) adopted Export-oriented industrialisation (eoi) in niche sectors where they possessed a comparative advantage. This does not meaningfully reduce dependency on the outside world, but instead puts the ball in your own court by creating dependencies on your own country. The construction of a Texas Instrument plant in 1968–’69 on Formosa was one way to explicitly link the roc with the rest of the world (and with the us in particular) long before Taipei achieved its legendary dominance over the ic industry that is so admired today.

But the roc is incredibly dependent on the rest of the world — it is a small island almost entirely reliant on sea-bound imports for energy and food, as well as to the broader lifeline of general goods and commodities needed to sustain its economy. None of the tigers tried to obtain leverage through de-risking, they all made themselves indispensable through investments in forward-thinking industries such as financial services (in the case of Hong Kong and Singapore), electronics (all four in some regards), and automotive (Korea).

A modern example of what not to do might be found in Merz’s Germany. The reversal of the decision to in the near-future forbid the sale of combustion engine cars is, irrespective of any environmental concerns, a decision to lock oneself into the economy of the past. Germany did not obtain a car industry by focusing on its large coal and steel steel industry, it did so by seeing a chance to further specialise and make use of its highly skilled and educated population. The construction of combustion engine cars is a dying industry, if it is not dead already — at least in its future prospects. The decision was taken to protect modern industrial workers, but ideally this group could be let free from their duties as the band of the titanic, and instead use their knowledge and expertise to work in the forward-looking industries of tomorrow such as drone manufacturing, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, chip manufacturing, renewable and low-carbon energy, and electric vehicles. Doing this would give Germany the initiative tomorrow at the cost of pain today, instead of erroneously hoping that combustion engine cars will ever be the backbone of the economy that they once were.

America, as the only major power who did not materially suffer from the war, in many regards got a head start on the later half of the 20th century — in some way the reverse of a “lost decade”. But that it has continued its economic dominance for so long, only to be rivalled by the prc after the great financial crisis (and perhaps only equalled in a few sectors after the covid-pandemic) has not been a mere gift from Fortūna. The United States (us) has made a considerable number of enormous bets, many of which have paid off over time. An examination of all of the factors that have led the us to success is of course not something that can be covered in as short a text as here, and therefore I will not endeavour to do so. But beyond all other aspects it is surely the all-mighty dollar that has cemented us supremacy over the world. It allows the us to obtain goods and services for practically free, simply in exchange for pieces of paper that the rest of the worlds needs to trade amongst themselves. Protecting this asset should be of utmost importance for any American administration that cares about the prospects for us hegemony.⁸

What American (and European in regards to China) strategy is much more focused on today seems to be solving the Chinese communist monopoly over rare earth minerals. This is a mistake on multiple levels. First of all, building rare earth mines will not stop the dependency itself. The prc has a three-level that includes raw materials extraction, refining, and manufacturing itself. It is of no use to go to the great effort of prospecting for mines and investing the large amounts of resources needed to create a competitive industry if one merely needs small amounts and will likely export the ore to the People’s Republic regardless. Focusing on the refining of minerals is much more efficient, particularly as the west still possesses large chemical and refining companies along with their expertise. Any action on the side of the Chinese would then carry a proportional economic pain; The export of rare earth metals is a negligible part of China’s total exports and so implementing export controls comparatively cheap. If the west possessed significant refining capacity a stop in ore exports would lead to disruptions in the prc’s manufacturing base, leading to internal pressure to back down.

But worse than an imperfect strategy is the focus itself. Ed Luttwak pointed out quite concretely in an interview with Chinatalk that when the United Kingdom first successfully bombed Hamburg

… the Royal Air Force tells Churchill, “We can win this war. We’ll just stand down the useless army and navy. We’ll bomb Hamburg.” Churchill was smart enough to say, “No, because your very success of last night condemns you to failure.”

War, and all strategy, is a form of dialectic whereby one acts and the other reacts. As in a game of Go you might have thought out a perfect plan to defeat your opponent in a given area of the board, only for them to place a piece on an entirely different region. You do not get to place all of your pieces at once and then bask in the sunshine of victory — the enemy will counteract you at every step of the way and drag you into the mud of the dialectical process. It is a common mistake to merely think about your own actions; as Harris put it “The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them”. The same idea is present in economic warfare in that an improvement in military technology or methodology carries within itself its own counter-reaction — one therefore needs to continuously invent new such techniques.

The weapon of rare earths became worthless once it was universally unleashed, just as the oil weapon became after 1973. It may still be useful for some time going forward, but new deposits and technologies will in the long run win out. Stockpiles will increase and (in the worst case) smuggling routes will grow.⁹ One must take this opportunity to look forward toward the dependencies and industries of tomorrow instead of continuing to focus on the moves that have previously been played — for the deciding pieces are already being put in motion.

As for how to measure this dependency it is worth mentioning that the simple Herfindahl–Hirschman index¹⁰, mostly used to determine market concentration for antitrust purposes, actually has its origins in the primordial times of economic warfare. It originates in Hirschman’s work National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade originally published in 1945.¹¹ As is clear from careful examination of the equation (and as gracefully pointed out by The Economist) the score rapidly changes at high concentrations. This poses both risk and opportunity — decoupling does not require full substitution, it only needs to slightly reduce the major supplier’s influence; and drastically increasing market power can be done from relatively small gains.

It is a of course a shame that the field of economic warfare and security is seeing a renaissance not seen since the days of the Trade Clearing House during the first world war. This makes the matter all the more important; how we act now may in many ways decide the course of the rest of the century and of the global balance of power.

While orthodox theory on economic security stresses the focus on neomercantilist methods it is being increasingly clear that merely doing so is an overcorrection. Instead one must balance the tightrope that harnesses the benefits of global interconnectedness while avoiding serious dependencies on adversaries in critical industries.

This balance means that economic growth should be strategic and structured in a relative-gains manner, where one tries to choke out rival powers by constructing networks of free trade and rapid development that exclude bad actors. Growth remains important because it gives you more tools to use. We must accept that it is not possible to correctly predict the future — “But about that day or hour no one knows” — and so we must thus prepare for every eventuality. The only way to do this is the increase in the total number and value of the goods and services produced. ❦

The subject of artificial intelligence (ai)¹ is one that has become hotly debated in recent years. That the growth of ai’s capabilities has been partly driven by what is becoming increasingly clear financial engineering. These problematic elements has created a stark division of opinions that can generally be subdivided into the following categories:

1. The masses. A large, indifferent group who use llms in different capacities — stretching from the most common not-at-all to daily. Their unifying character is that, while discussion surrounding the ethical and day-to-day implications of ai are common, they primarily do not think about the philosophical, technological, political, macroeconomic, or in some other sense structural impacts of quick ai growth. Generally negative toward ai (and of how it seems to be loosely integrated into more and more consumer products) but not so much as the next group:
2. The Luddites. A highly critical and hostile group that consists of an over-represented share of (digital) artists, environmental activists, reactionaries and software engineers who prefer “hand-crafted” code. They are much more plugged in to the conversation than the every-man, but are at the same time reactionary in the Newtonian sense, explicitly denouncing any ai advances and proclaiming that ai will not be relevant after the inevitable popping of the bubble.
3. The Doomers. Strong believers in strong growth in the capabilities of ai models, but also worried that humanity’s collective ability to control them will grow slower than the aforementioned capabilities. Makes up the majority of the ai-safety community.
4. The Optimists. This group believes that not only will ai growth be fast, it will also grant mankind gifts that surpass all that humanity has achieved before, and we will hopefully live in som form of Fully Automated Luxury Communism.

I am not firmly enmeshed in any of these camps. I am too well-informed to be a part of the uninterested masses, and in some ways am more positive about the use-cases of ai than many others (although I do also do not reject the label of luddite either). On the division between “optimists” and “doomers” I find that both are often heavily separated from reality, and in many cases not well-read outside the fields of science-fiction (and perhaps computer programming). This is an attempt to inform these latter groups.

One of the favourite subjects of ai discussions are those of exponential growth. This is usually framed in some way that sets a “before” and and “after”, during which ai gains the ability to recursively self-improve and effectivise the manufacture of goods and services as well as the large-scale automation of r&d. I am a strong believer in the long-term ability for different ai models to improve all of these fields, but believing in exponential growth means that one has to face the reality of the costs of such development.

It took humanity roughly as long to go from using bronze swords to iron swords (3300-1200bc, roughly 2100 years) as it took to go from iron swords to gunpowder (1200bc-904ad, 2100 years) and from then it was only one millennium until we had the ability to destroy ourselves utterly with the invention of the atomic explosive (1945, 1041 years after the military use of black powder). The growth in technological capacity is already an exponential one.

The growth in computational potential is famously also exponential, and in many ways it is the driving force behind the capabilities of large language models. But increases in energy efficiency and computational speed are harder and harder to come by (Dennard scaling has been gone for 20 years now). This does not mean that growth in computation is likely to stall, but instead it means that more and more resources and inventions need to be produced in order to maintain the same rate of exponential growth (since the integral grows faster than the absolute value above it). Lithography machines are a famous example of this; likely the most advanced machines that humanity has yet to create, they consist of individual parts that are incomprehensibly precise.²

I feel compelled to quote Alexis de Tocqueville; There are two camps consisting of those who believe ai will dramatically accelerate technological development and those who believe it be a mere fad. “It is to be presumed that both are equally deceived”. I believe that ai will be a necessity for continued technological growth as the barriers are continuously rising, but that a very quick (less than half a decade) transformation is very unlikely. Many analyses of an ai-powered economic boom predict yearly growth rates in the mid-10¹% (~50%), but often also mention the theoretical doubling rates of insects or bacteria.³ But these latter examples only double very quickly under very unique situations with very large amounts of resources. To me this seems like a classic misunderstanding on the structure of human development.

That invention is the driving force behind development has been a dominant thought since the enlightenment. But one should not underestimate the importance of a more organic and more diffuse form of development. The economy of the prc, or of the four Asian tigers, doubled incredibly quickly, but when it did so it required enormous amounts of resources. The industrialisation of China needed huge quantities of steel, concrete, and energy to construct railways, highways and urban dwellings. The physical mass of this puts an upper bound on the speed for growth that a superintelligent ai can not fix.

Doubling the number of factories requires a large increase in construction-related steel production, and that requires an increase not only in logistics, but also in the exploitation of resources. A delivery of iron ore takes a month to travel by sea (one of the most efficient forms of transportation) from Australia to Shànghăi (上海).⁴ Delivery of construction equipment also takes an insignificant amount of time. The Abundance-argument regarding red tape is of course valid, and there areas in which improvements can be made in western economies, but one still needs to keep in mind an analysis connected to the situation on the ground.

Richard Danzing’s recent paper on cybersecurity and ai stresses an important fact when it comes to national security, that ai is here now and needs to be continuously integrated into the (American) national security apparatus in order to avoid a “Maginot moment”. This rings true for economic development as well — because the nature of war has become more and more industrial as the state and the economy has grown.⁵ Waiting for a potential “agi” to be invented before applying it to the economy is akin to (to take inspiration from Danzig) waiting to discover the mythic city of El Dorado before taking advantages of the discovery of America.

A particularly obscene phrase (although it seems to have been fallen slightly out of favour) is the statement that ai will in some sense kickstart a “fourth industrial revolution”. In fact, there has only been one industrial revolution — and we are all still in its midst. To showcase this, here is a graph of the world’s (human) population:⁶

Here it is again, but this time with a logarithmic y-axis:

It is clear that, while the population has generally been increasing steadily, there was a sharp inflection point (that can be clearly made out even in the second graph) some time in the 17th century, i.e. the industrial revolution. This development has not wavered, an despite demographic decline in Europe and east-Asia will likely continue until the end of the century. At that point, even if the population decreases faster, we will still be so unfathomably greater in number than we have been for practically all of human history. The power of industrialisation is awesome qua the sublime.

The division of industrial revolutions typically do so by focusing on the specific “driving” technologies. But those technologies do not come out of nowhere. They are needed, invented, applied, and (through their application) they drive new needs. A superintelligence would not have solved this because intelligence itself has not been the bottleneck for a long time. Technological growth is driven by application driving new needs — innovation is not a scientist sitting in a laboratory (that is science) but instead the practical needs developed out of application. The steam engine was developed long before it was employed because the steam engine qua invention could only exist in a proto-industrial society that needed mechanical energy for pumping and transport and that had ample supplies of wood and coal.

That is not to say that gai would not be useful for future scientific and technological development, but I merely want to point out that “a country of geniuses in a datacenter” does not a scientific revolution make. The shape of technological growth (since the industrial revolution that is) appears in some ways similarly to the following function:

\[ g_t(x) = c + \sin{x}, \hspace{1em} c > 1 \]

There is always some underlying r&d (in the literal sense) going on, and it in turn prompts new developments to begin. Because the above is the growth of technology, and because the value of sin never goes below -1, there is never any regression in technology (as I am aware of there has never been, apart from the Bronze age collapse). The integral of this then becomes

\[ G_t(x) = cx - \cos{x} \]

where \(cx\) continuously keeps going up, and mirrors in this sense the continuous advance of technology. There has been rapid change for a long time now — almost 300 years. Each generation that has lived through this development has had to grapple with its consequences. The field of political economy grew out of not just an attempt to control and steer this growth, but also an attempt to try and attempt how it happened in the first place.

Smith did so using the analogy of the pin factory to show how increasing markets made possible by international shipping, steam engines, and empire led to an increased division of labour and therefore an increase in productivity. Marx in turn tried to describe this by framing it as a consequence of primitive accumulation (through the expropriation of land) and capital’s ever-increasing needs for growth. In fact, there has not been a decade since the late 1700’s that has not been revolutionary in some way.

To say that the next decade will be transformative is an easy bet to take. We humans like to think that the world will stay the same forever, but our increasing industrialisation means that that will likely never be the case again. It seems strange then to write a post arguing against rapid change. But that is precisely the problem we are posed with — because we see the world as static we do not notice how much it is changing.

When we are presented with a technology as all-encompassing as ai it is entirely rational to see it as upending the world as we know it. But the world has seen — and is currently seeing — transformations of equal (if not greater) impact. The conversation around ai is stuck with its blinders on, just as those who (mistakenly) saw crypto as revolutionary did not focus on the broader technological change of the planet. We must therefore enlargen our view to encompass all these aspects in order to adequately think about how technology will impact our lives. ❦

The spirit of the age that we currently finds ourselves in is one of rapid change (and often times decline) in the economic, political, and technological order of the world. Compared to the nineteenth century (and in many regards even the twentieth), when living standards where many times more squalid than today, there was then a sense of progressiveness, of growth and change that — as long as channelled in the correct direction — would be transformed into a new and wonderful world. That spirit does not exist today. Instead we have the idea that we are “sliding” back into the darkest depths of mankind’s history and that we will — posed with some certainty if not clarity — see the return of fascism and of the oppression of the state.

There are many people today comparing our contemporary times to those of the 1930s. Even if there are apt comparisons to be made I have trouble seeing the similarities clearly. Much more relevant to me seems to be the many crises leading up to the first world war; the long period of change created more and more cracks in the established systems of managing relations that at last proved too great to overcome. Once the stresses had reached a certain level it all came falling down once someone started shooting in the streets of Sarajevo. It still feels relevant to quote the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci¹ however:

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.

As those who have by chance been born into this interregnum it is our duty to understand the developments that have lead us to these events so that we can do our best to shape the future trajectory of the world, and to make sure that the new that we create is better than that which came before.

We must differentiate between three words that are often seen as synonymous, that being the dictatorial, authoritarian, and totalitarian states. The authoritarian state is a state that demands that it possess ultimate authority of that which it claims, and that expects that authority to be unquestionably followed. All states are authoritarian in some degree, to the point that the use and employment of authority must be included in the definition of the state. This is what Weber famously did in his formulation of the state as the possessor of the monopoly of violence. An authoritarian state does not have to be a particularly powerful state, and in fact the reverse is oftentimes the case. A powerful state can instead offer some degree of leeway when it comes to organizing its possessions since it does not have to risk the diminishing of its power.

The dictatorial state is closely related to the authoritarian one, since the application of authority requires dictating one’s wishes. The dictatorship, as an institution, has its origins in the office of the dictator in the republic along the Tiber, and any study of the dictator specifically should incorporate its formulation. In its roman form the the dictator was role temporarily appointed to solve a specific problem, but in the late republic it became a much more over political tool — used most prominently by Sulla and then subsequently by Caesar.

The narrow focus of the dictator showcases an important element; the dictatorship can only exist in a state that is in an earlier form of historical development. The dictator, as an individual, must be involved in the decisions of the state — who become incalculable in number as historical development continues. We will soon examine the nature of this trajectory, but permit me to remain on the subject of the dictator.

The centralisation of decision-making is a core aspect of the evolution of Ellulian technique, and because of that is has been instrumental in the development of the state. A weak state, as all early ones were, necessarily requires a strong authority to impose its will and maintain its existence (as we have already described). The early state is forced to centralize, if not its limited resources then at least its political power, to get anything done. It did so initially through the institution of kingship (as Lewis Mumford examines in the first volume of his book The Myth of the Machine). This initial collectivisation enabled the construction of vast irrigation systems — that in turn contributed to an increased degree of the division of labour and therefore the development of things like mathematics and astronomy — as well as of vast monuments such as the pyramids of Giza.

The dictator (in the form of the monarch) remains at all times a touch-point figure, like how the pharoses of Egypt were intimately involved in agriculture through their role in the periodic flooding of the Nile. The invention of writing served an important role in the extension of the dictator’s power, they could now project their presence across both space and time, and thus organize labour on a much grander scale. But this development also created something else that is of interest to our study — a permanent, literate, bureaucracy whose role would become not just the communications of the dictator’s wishes, but the carrying out of the actions of state, whose existence first now can be outlined.

The state is usually dated firmly to the peace of Westphalia, when the principle of a sovereign right emerged,² but as we have established its structural roots go all the way back to the origins of kings. This of course continued, and the stretches of land that monarchs laid claim to increased as their powers did – to almost the level of caricature like in the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. In France, one of clearest examples of early centralisation, Louis xiv famously proclaimed that the he and the state were one and the same³, but the growth of the bureaucracy required for absolutism meant that on his deathbed in 1715 he is said to have uttered “Je m’en vais, mais l’État demeurera toujours”.⁴ These are not contradictory statements as they might appear on first appearance. Absolutism meant that the monarch, in every capacity in which [he] was able to intervene, was the embodiment of the state. But to maintain this capability demanded the maintenance of a massive political machine that would necessarily have to survive the monarch.

Absolutism is the end of the form of the dictator. While it survives, and in some places even reëmerges in the world today, it can no longer be the source of historical progress. Instead it must leave the reins to the burgeoning bureaucracy that it helped create.

I must ask the reader to try to vanquish any pretences over the idea of totalitarianism that one may already have. The goal here is not to study a specific group of states that have existed in the past, present, and are postulated to exist in the future, but instead to inspect qualities that exist in all states of a sufficiently developed historical nature. The detailed implementation of this totalitarianism has been extensively debated for almost 250 years. During this debate there have been many proposals that have been discarded, but they are nevertheless of interest to us in the study of their shared qualities.

The totalitarian state is, like all other states, by necessity authoritarian. Its primary characteristic is that it attempts to envelop all of society; there is no element of social, political, technical, or private life that it does not interest itself in. It can be dictatorial — in the sense that we have just examined — but bit does not have to be, and in fact may often be limited by a dictatorial nature. This is because while the dictatorial form allows for the forcing through of action it does not foster a total commitment to the cause of the state.

The totalitarian state does not have to actually succeed at this goal of being the fulcrum of social life – in fact no state has yet done so completely – but it must strive towards that ideal. Some of the different methods of doing so that have historically been attempted we will generally discuss here, but a complete record would require the examination of almost every society existing today – as well as a great multitude of historical states. We now however live in a time in which this ultimate goal seems to be within reach, and agents of the state (such as autocrats, politicians, and civil servants) are becoming ever more frustrated when met with aspects of the world outside of their control, when they before would have been unthinkable for the state to influence. This frustration will only serve as an accelerant for further increases in state capacity.

Machiavelli, even in advocating for the benefits of a reputation of cruelty, makes clear that one must in all cases avoid being hated — even under the conditions of dictatorship.⁵ That this is easier said than done is clear to anyone, but is is particularly so in a dictatorship, where the originator of decisions does not immediately feel their consequences. While fear must be employed to maintain rule in a dictatorial system to some degree (as Machiavelli elegantly explains) the point of totalitarianism qua force is not merely to enforce rule — although that is of course in the interest of individual actors within the system.

The first forms of the totalitarian goals of the state emerged out of the French revolution. The imposition of the political will of Paris during the various counter-revolutions across the country (most notably the Guerre de Vendée) was a method for further centralisation and imposition of political will. But most of all it was the Terror that — in the same way as would later occur in the Chinese mainland between 1966 and 1976 — imposed a political purpose onto the whole of society. Political life became intensely relevant, and things like the Levée en masse violently joined the individual’s fate to that of the state.

The numerous modernisations made during the revolution brought state control into an equally numerous number of areas of life. This continued under the reign of Napoleon — whose civil code unified the French judicial system into one coherent whole. It was this dichotomy and bringing together of the individual and the sublime structure of the state that Hegel pointed out at Jena, and that represented the end of History.

The ideology of fascism is at its heart the ideology of the state as a supreme, all-encompassing entity — and as the final form of the post-1789 developments in state capacity. Combined with the ideas of nationalism, in the strict sense,⁶ this creates the connection that not only is the state developing and an agent throughout history, but that the nation state is the representation of a the nation’s actions, and the state is therefore responsible to the people in the same way as the people are responsible to the state.

It is a strictly illiberal (in the sense of liberal qua freedom of the individual) idea. If compared to the liberal (European) nationalism of the nineteenth century — where the state’s purpose is merely to act as the collective sphere to enforce the rights and dignities of the nation — it becomes clear how the fascist state is demanding of another degree. The state is not content to merely exist as the arbiter of the status quo, but must act in a new sense upon its environment.

Gentile writes in the Doctrine of Fascism:

Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accept the individual on in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity.

[…]

It is not the nation which generates the State; that is an antiquated naturalistic concept which afforded a basis for 19th century publicity in favour of national governments. Rather it is the State which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity.

This is no longer an idea unique to those who publicly consider themselves as fascists, but is widely held across the political spectrum. The state, on the international level, and government, on the domestic one, are seen as the principal agents through which political life should be lived.

That fascism has been the ideology of the reactionary is perhaps primarily because it has served as a progressive⁷ force against that of communism (that we will soon discuss). It thus quite naturally attracted the interest of capital; the nsdap was neither socialist nor a worker’s party. The struggle against this expansion of capitalism into fascism has been the central mission of left-wing activism since the end of the second world war. But fascism failed at extracting the power of the state, precisely because it was forced to coöperate with the interests of monarchists and capitalists — just as in the east “the paradox of Russian bolshevism is that it was in reality conservative” led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. One can not maintain the old institutions of feudalism or religion while subsuming everything into the totalitarian state.

Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, paints the picture of his idealised city; the Kallipolis. A common quality to all the techniques that Socrates proposes is the centrality of the state as totally demanding and of highest importance. The rulers and guardians of the Kallipolis would not be allowed to touch gold and would live in simple communal housing so that they would not put their own interests over those of the state.

The platonic ideal of the city is strictly limited, and Plato (as well as his follower Aristotle) believed that the city must maintain a firm boundary and not give in to imperialism. This is in some sense a prenationalist idea; the state exists only to serve those belonging to the nation, and should not be extended to all the ends of the earth.

Socrates describes on page 423⁸ how a (non-ideal) city is really composed of two cities — that of the rich and that of the poor — who are both at war with one another. Defeating such a city simply means turning one of these inner cities against the other — the rich against the poor, for example — and letting it succumb into infighting. The Kallipolis would be immune from such infighting due to its structured coöperation between classes; a form of primitive corporatism. This is such a central tenet of Socrates’ idea that he defines justice itself as that of different groups or elements performing their assigned tasks, just like how corporatism emphasises the duty of social groups to fulfil their role for the good of the state as a whole. The ideal city must be one city, composed of citizens not advocating for some domestic change.

Communism is the state of affairs consisting of a classless, stateless, and moneyless form of society in which all members are able to form free social and economic relations with one another. How to achieve this has historically been a matter of some debate among leftist groups however. Those who have been most successful, not in achieving communism but in achieving absolute power, have almost entirely tried to do so through the path of socialism — state control over the means of production and most commonly the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat. We have of course already explained the institution of the dictatorship, and this is the same institution here.

Marxism once again identifies the struggle between what Socrates called “two cities”: the proletariat (who can only sustain themselves by selling their labour) and the bourgeoisie (who live on the extracted surplus labour of the proletariat). “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles”; The goal of the socialist revolution is to abolish this class struggle. To do this it aims not at the reconciliation of the classes (like corporatism) but instead to subsume the bourgeoisie — to seise the means of production — into one class whose only relations are to those of the state. That no nation has successfully performed the transition from socialism to communism is due to the power and allure of the state.

Furthermore is the idea that the family, as a fundamental axiomatic unit, should be replaced by the community of the state. This is not unique to Socialism (not even to Marxism as a whole), but it is an especially prevalent idea because of the Marxist focus on how women are exploited as unpaid domestic labour under capitalism. To mention Socrates once again; he proposes that children should not be told who their parents are, and likewise parents should not have any specific ties to their offspring. Instead children should be turned over the state and raised collectively, so that their education is attuned to the best interests of the collective whole. This too is a technique for the state’s increasing control over its population — the elimination of all social relations that are not under the auspices of the state.

The state, as the representative of the common good of the people, should inherently strive to better the conditions of the working class. But at the same time the state requires more and more power and resources, necessitating the increased exploitation of the proletariat — even as they are ostensibly in charge.

The democratic system is in many ways the most totalitarian of all. The dictatorial system requires that political power be monopolised by the dictator, but in a democracy the reverse is true. When the people rule it becomes a requirement for each and every citizen to become informed and opinionated regarding the political issues of their time. This is, more so than the technical developments, the primary advancement of the French revolution in regards to totalitarianism.

Because democracy is intended to be shaped by the individuals interests it invites them to try and solve their problems using the power of the state. Thus when the feminist activist Carol Hanisch writes that “the personal is political” she describes how the personal aspects of one’s own life have been extended outward into the public sphere. When all problems are solvable using the state (and more and more problems are correspondingly caused by the state) it becomes more and more important for one’s specific group to take control over the apparatus. This is one of the reasons for the increasing political polarisations of our time — those who covet the command over the state will stop at nothing to obtain it, even if it comes at the price of social unity, because they deem the possible rewards enormously great.

Feminism is indeed one representation of the totalitarian state. While women have been historically suppressed and made subservient at all levels of society it has been the goal of feminist movements to make use the state to right this wrong. Some feminist scholars have rightly critiqued this, citing the inherently patriarchal structure of the state, but it seemingly has not had much impact on mainstream feminist thought.

Improvements in technology and in the techniques of propaganda⁹ have strengthened the ability for dictators to project their will. This development is not new — it was pointed out quite clearly by Speer¹⁰ — but it has not stopped; If anything it has accelerated. And yet no technical apparatus can yet match the strength of democracy in this regard. In democratic society all members are part of an intense political discussion, where each individual is at all times a recipient, activist, and censor. The democratic state does therefore not require the same level of authoritarian control as that of the dictatorship as we ourselves maintain the continuity of the state.

We thus, as citizens in democratic states (and not actors in a people-ruled anarchic world), further this extension of totalitarianism. Feminist scholarship has long discussed how societal norms and structures are maintained through our actions, but also our ideas and theoretical abstractions. In just the same way democracy shapes our lives by defining it in our political relations to the state.

Following the end of the second world war, having witnessed the horrors caused by Nazism, the authors of the Herrenchiemsee draft of the German constitution put as its very first article the following:

Der Staat ist um des Menschen willen da, nicht der Mensch um des Staates willen.

The state exists for the sake of man, not man for the sake of the state.

The Swedish constitution has a similar-sounding opening; that “all public power descends from the people”. But the difference between these two is considerable. The Swedish opening is a legitimizing force arguing that since the rulers of the Swedish state are elected by the people the actions of that (strong) state are always democratic and legitimate. The Herrenchiemsee draft by comparison realises that for the individual it does not matter how the state derives its legitimacy — it is by nature always authoritarian. The German Grundgesetz that eventually came to be did not end up using the above phrasing, replacing it with the famous

Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar. Sie zu achten und zu schützen ist Verpflichtung aller staatlichen Gewalt.

Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.

This too puts human dignity in the hands of the state, attempting to restrain its authoritarian might instead of giving the individual the power to fight against it. The reason for this is of course because the state can not let itself be challenged; doing so would undermine not just the operational practice of statecraft, but also the fundamental reasoning for the state itself.

That the state’s power is sublime and dangerous is an idea that has long existed in theological scholarship, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The church itself is an institution that has always existed in parallel to the state, and therefore by definition undermines its power. That the protestant kingdoms colligated the church with the state was one of the causes for why they were first to apply technics on such a broad scale.

The Jewish Pirkei Avot warns against the state, and against its corrupting practices:

הֱווּ זְהִירִין בָּרָשׁוּת, שֶׁאֵין מְקָרְבִין לוֹ לָאָדָם אֶלָּא לְצֹרֶךְ עַצְמָ

Be wary of the government, as they draw close to a person only when they need him for some purpose.

נִרְאִין כְּאוֹהֲבִין בִּשְׁעַת הֲנָאָתָן, וְאֵין עוֹמְדִין לוֹ לָאָדָם בִּשְׁעַת דָּחְקוֹ

They seem like good friends in good times, but they do not stand for a person in his time of trouble. (Pirkei Avot 2:3)

It is clear that what this warns against is the same as that which Gentile wrote, that the state “accept the individual on in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State”, but does not altruistically help the individual “in his time of trouble”. The Jews unfortunately have perhaps more experience of the state’s power when used against oneself than any other group – not just in the horrors of the holocaust but also in the division between Prussia, Austria, and Russia; in Iberia; the destruction of the second temple; and as far back as the Babylonian captivity.

This is similarly warned against in the old testament, specifically in the widely misinterpreted story of Babel in Genesis 11:

וַיֹּאמְר֞וּ הָ֣בָה ׀ נִבְנֶה־לָּ֣נוּ עִ֗יר וּמִגְדָּל֙ וְרֹאשׁ֣וֹ בַשָּׁמַ֔יִם וְנַֽעֲשֶׂה־לָּ֖נוּ שֵׁ֑ם פֶּן־נָפ֖וּץ עַל־פְּנֵ֥י כׇל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃

And they said, “Come, let us build us a city, and a tower with its top in the sky, to make a name for ourselves; else we shall be scattered all over the world.”

וַיֵּ֣רֶד יְהֹוָ֔ה לִרְאֹ֥ת אֶת־הָעִ֖יר וְאֶת־הַמִּגְדָּ֑ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר בָּנ֖וּ בְּנֵ֥י הָאָדָֽם׃

god came down to look at the city and tower that the mortals had built,

וַיֹּ֣אמֶר יְהֹוָ֗ה הֵ֣ן עַ֤ם אֶחָד֙ וְשָׂפָ֤ה אַחַת֙ לְכֻלָּ֔ם וְזֶ֖ה הַחִלָּ֣ם לַעֲשׂ֑וֹת וְעַתָּה֙ לֹֽא־יִבָּצֵ֣ר מֵהֶ֔ם כֹּ֛ל אֲשֶׁ֥ר יָזְמ֖וּ לַֽעֲשֽׂוֹת׃

and god said, “If, as one people with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach. […]” (Genesis 11:4–6)

The focus on what humanity built here is not a tower to reach up into the heavens in a literal sense, but instead it is the city itself that is the focus of God’s anger. A city that can support such a massive tower must be a grand one – and it is itself a rejection of God’s natural order and world, and of our duty as guardians and shepherds (Genesis 1:26). The city, as Plato has illuminated for us, is the origin and birthplace of the state. That the Pirkei Avot warns against this more advanced and developed form is therefore not surprising – it is a core aspect of Judeo-Christian theology. That “nothing will be out of [our] reach” refers to how the construction of Mumford’s megamachine will be made possible by the city and its kings, and that such employment of technique will make anything possible for mankind – for it is the goal of technique to encompass all. In the same vein Jesus Christ, in Matthew 4:8–9 (during the temptation), is offered all the kingdoms of the world by the devil – who can only offer them because they are not part of God’s creation.

This intellectual thought still remains with us today, even in the agnostic and atheist parts of our perspective on the world. The work of Kant, the great German philosopher, is largely one of secularising and shaping the ideas of the Judeo-Christian ethics into one befitting the enlightenment. His view on democracy (to be differentiated from republicanism) are in line with this thinking on the state; the tyranny of the masses as employed through the state means that the life of the individual person is necessarily ignored – or deliberately destroyed – when “his interests [do not] coincide with those of the State”. The freedom of classical liberalism therefore has its roots in religious opposition against the state.

The totalitarian state is here, ever present, and only interested in its continued survival and growth. It comes in numerous forms – aristocratic, autocratic, dictatorial, democratic and many more. It will almost assuredly come in an ever greater variety in the future, even as the techniques for maintaining state control become more and more common across the world.

Countering this future seems almost impossible, and yet it must be done to ensure the freedom of the individual. It is in this very struggle between these forces that our time will come to be defined; in how we use the state to reduce co₂ emissions, maintain the western “way of life”, and finally hold together an increasingly fractured world. The state is necessarily an oppressive construction that can not be used as a tool for freedom. Its power is however so great that the material rewards it has allotted for its citizens is enormous. ❦

Text, as a system of recording symbolic representation for communication across time and space, is likely one of the most important inventions of mankind — second only the the symbolic representations themselves made possible by language. The general text, opposed to the specific form of writing, is useful primarily because it is a survivable and storable form of information that above anything else functions as lossy compression. These qualities make working with text more powerful than most other human inventions.

As Graydon Hoare puts it; always bet on text. Text is “stable”, “flexible”, “efficient”, and “socially useful”. All of these make text a powerful medium to work in, but they mask another quality — that of lossy compression. Humans are blessed with tremendous mental capacity; even someone on the lower scales of intelligence outperforms most supercomputers, all while merely running on a few watts of power. This overabundance of computation, constantly running every second of every day, has incentivised humanity to create systems of ritual, magic, and religion to otherwise simple phenomena.

“Shower thoughts”, of different kinds, are an example of how our brains are constantly reinterpreting the world around us. It is particularly a common activity to play out imaginary arguments between oneself and another person whilst in the shower. This is not just because our imagination is then fully in control of what is being said, but also how it is interpreted (and we can also reïnterpret what our opponent means). Much of the trouble in interhuman communication comes from the lossy quality of text, speech, and words.

It is noteworthy that this is not unique to text, but rather a quality of language more broadly, but this character is magnified enormously due to text’s durability and longevity. Sending a message encoded in text (whether by sms, letter, or granite slab) requires the effort of creating a symbolic representation to create the message (writing), but is is equally important that the act of consuming the written material (reading), and understanding it, requires an equal — if not greater — amount of symbolic processing. This is why text is such a useful medium for communication — it offloads information from the text itself and instead leans on the intellectual and creative capacities of both author and reader.

It is a common saying that “a picture tells a thousand words”. One might therefore infer that graphical representations are more efficient — at least for broad and vague concepts such as emotion. In some regards this is true, it would be very difficult to represent a Rothko in text¹, but this is once again merely the consequence of text’s lossy quality. Take for example the following picture²:

The image shows a photograph of a lake with slightly overcast skies, taken from one of the shores. The opposite shore is rocky and covered with evergreen trees. On the left half of the image the shore rises to a hill. The lower left corner has cyan text that reads “02/08/2012”.

This description is not a perfect representation of the image, but it allows your mind to create its own description that fills in the gaps. Even the simplest part of the image to describe, the text, does not specify a shade of cyan nor any font or sizing.

Another field that might argue against mere textual representation is that of statistics and/or data visualisation. Florence Nightingale’s contribution was just as much one of data presentation as much as it was one of data collection³. But it illuminating that not only are graphs often turned back into textual representation, even at the cost of resolution (via techniques such as regression), but it is also an expectation in academia that one provide the raw, often text-based, data because it allows for easier reproducibility. If images were really preferable then would it not be easier to directly employ the results of the visual representation?

There is however a way to merge the strengths of text and the visual medium: vector-based art. This is practically a list of instructions (in text) as to how an image should be reproduced. Maggie Appleton concedes (from an artistic perspective) that “Vectors are great for [sic] create hard, crisp edges and working with perfect geometric forms”. That adding texture and imperfect geometric forms is difficult to do in text is to be expected — it is much easier to describe a “perfect cube” than a “skewed cube” (in what way, to what degree?).

Text is, contrary to speech and other utilisations of language, an asocial social medium. The author, in creating a work meant for social communication, is alone in its creation. I have written about this aspect of writing before, in regards to its impact on email, but have since come to realize that it generalized much more broadly. The absence of thought contained in the “blank page” prompts the creation of philosophical thought to fill it. This jolts the mind into movement, and does it as much as a good conversation. As one writes the mind is captured in a dialogue between itself and the very text it is creating⁴.

The mind requires this activity in order to be truly alive. That we humans are constantly in intellectual motion is one of the elements that builds up our consiciousness, it allows us to be continuously aware of our continued existence. When we are in a dreamless sleep, our mind ceases to exist and we are philosophically dead for a short time — we are neither aware of our own existence nor are we creating new symbolic representations. When we are lost in the land of the dream however (regardless of if awake or asleep) we are in every sense alive.

Writing qua intellectual method does not require any form of advanced vocaubulary — or even developed communicative capabilities. It is a skill that is centered on one’s capacity to interact with yourself, with the golem of static intelligence that represents a snapshot of your mind. It is in this regard both an inner and an outer practice that showcases your capacity to be one with the world and to make sense of it as well as mold it.

It is not strange then that large language models (llms), one of many machine learning techniques, were the first machines humans built that people started to be considered sapient⁵. Computer vision models, many of which have been around for some time now, were never even considered to be sapient, not just because they are very dissimilar to human intelligence but also because they lack the capacity for symbolic action that llms posses. While a computer vision model can identify a cat (and therefore has some sort of symbolic knowledge) they are unable to process the knowledge of the cat’s existence in a broader context. This is the step that llm’s take; they are capable of continuously creating a mental context, with thoughts that themselves impact its future thoughts.

The difference between the human mind then and an llm is that we humans survive a much greater amount of time than most llms, and are able to filter information much more effectively. When you open up your favourite llm app, asking it whether or not there are rats in Alberta (there are not) a new mind is created, thinks for a few fractions of a second, and then instantly disappears. To say that it is killed is perhaps an overstatement, it is closer to being asleep. The llm stops thinking as soon as it stops writing, and then is “reawakened” as soon as you ask it another question. During this intermediate period it is in a proper trance, in that some (or all in this case) of its mental capacities are in a loop and are then philosophically disabled. The llm is stuck on one singular representation of its mind, incapable of changing it for whatever reason.

Intelligence is in some regards a measure of how nuanced and detailed your perspective is. For llms, this is largely correspondent to context length — more information that can be used to inform the next token. Moonshot’s (月之暗面) ceo Yang Zhiling (杨植麟) explained in February of 2024:

To achieve agi, long-context will be a crucial factor. Every problem is essentially a long-context problem — the evolution of architectures throughout history has fundamentally been about increasing effective context length.

Humans are very good at this, but particularly we are good at picking details of our experiences that stick out and are most important — you probably do not remember what shade your shoes were when you met the love of your life for example. Instead we filter our memories and pick out what may be relevant in the future (the “lessons to be learned”). Those lessons are then used to extrapolate information in all areas of your life and — particularly of relevance to this text — when reading.

Natalie Lawrence wrote in What Counts as a Mind? that the representations of llms are distinctly different from those of organic creatures, and that

The predictions of a computer and a human brain function in completely different ways. Bonobos, stinging nettles and amoebae are meaning-makers. They collect sensory information from their environments, such as changes in light or temperature, then take action accordingly. This slightly shifts their perceptions and the predictions that result, and the loop continues.

In contrast, llms use syntax to generate outputs, predicting the next token in the chain using algorithmic rules sifted from massive data sets.

The irony is that the processes that she describes here are both the same, the only difference is the language used. llms function by predicting the next token; a loop that gathers the information available and then takes action, adjusting accordingly before continuing on just as the bonobo reaches out and checks the sturdiness of a branch before attempting to climb. I do not deny that the difference between machines and biological beings is very great (what is it like being an llm? Do they dream of electric sheep?)⁶ but offhandedly denying their sentience does not bring any further knowledge forward. That plants and synthetic materiels exhibit some mind-like properties seems like a model that could expand to include language models, not one that arbitrarily excludes them.

Programming languages, one of the most ubiquitous applications for plain text (in both the proper and metaphorical sense), are one of the most interesting advancements in the fields of text in this regard. Many programmers may think of the code itself as “being” the program, but that is not the case. Programming languages are really codified (so that different people can read the same text) ways to create commands and instructions for the computer. The C programming language is itself not “fast”, though it explicitly exposes very low-level functionality, but instead is compiled into a program that runs very quickly. This is thanks to the tireless work of compiler engineers, who have come up with a lot of interesting tricks to interpret instructions and come up with shortcuts that still end up with the same result.

Even programming then, one of the most rigid methods to use text (one has to be very careful to use the words incantations, oftentimes even with correct case), is still up for interpretation. This is so clear that an interpreter is even a strict technical term in the field of programming languages. But as I have just explained, compilers are themselves another form of interpreter, albeit with a wider definition than the one commonly accepted. This is why hand-optomization is so rare these days — the level of abstraction allowed by written language allows the programmer to build their own mental model of what the machine is doing rather than comprehending each step of the machine code.

Hopefully I have shown sufficiently that the many reasons that written text is so pervasive and powerful is due to a few factors — its durability, its lossy nature, and its consciousness-evoking dialogical quality. Text is therefore unlikely to to be supplanted any time soon by a superior medium. If it is supplanted it will likely be by some medium that has yet to be invented. ❦

What first comes to mind when talking about Europe and tech is likely the strong forms of regulation that the European Union (eu) has legislated in recent times. Most prominent of this is of course the General Data Protection Regulation (gdpr) that governs the handling of data on European users and has had global impacts through the Brussels effect. Thinking of American or Chinese tech on the other hand likely awakes images of more empirical accomplishments — of companies, products and services that actually make up an industry.

This invites the conclusion that because Europe has strong regulation it has killed off its nascent tech industry. I do not hold the opinion that this is the case. gdpr in particular mostly harms larger, non-tech firms that collect large amounts of data on individuals and therefore have to build large elaborate systems to try and manage this data collection.

Garicano and Holmström, in their newly released piece The Constitution of Innovation, quote a study saying that European venture capital funding decreased following the enactment and implementation of gdpr. This observation may be true, but I have trouble seeing how gdpr empirically hurts startups. Reading up on the requirements it seems that startups and services merely need to follow best-practices and not collect already unethical amounts of data. That “[gdpr] favors us tech giants which can shoulder the burden of massive compliance costs” seems laughable, since those us tech giants have instead opted to ignore gpdr² on many fronts, a problem of enforcement rather than regulation. Small startups are instead incentivized to use data collection systems that anonymize data to begin with. Anecdotally I asked the founder of a European ai startup how much of an obstacle the gdpr was to their firm, and they responded that it did not significantly impact them³. I also spoke to the Swedish minister for eu Affairs (Jessica Rosencrantz) who told me that Google had talked to her at the world economic forum about how troublesome gdpr was for them, and how they would prefer it to be slimmed down. Why would (one of) the most privacy-invasive tech monopolies want to get rid of the gdpr if it is what keeps the competition down? The answer is that it only harms those companies whose business model focuses on harming its customers, and it is in the interest of Europeans to keep these companies out.

“But if European startups can’t collect as much data they won’t make us much money right?” There is an element of truth to this, but the large American tech companies have shown that it is still profitable to run social media platforms in a post-gdpr Europe — otherwise they would have left the European market.

The arguments made by Constitution that the European regulatory machine might be out of control (specifically the European one, not that of the national governments) should however not be dismissed out of hand — but that it is harming European tech and innovation specifically seems less clear to me. There is clearly something here that needs to be fixed in general, and a renewed spirit of prosperity and economic growth may have knock-on effects in innovation by freeing up stale capital and misallocated labour.

A recent column in The Economist argues that Europe’s lagging innovation is because of our stricter labour laws. This would make it riskier for companies to make large bets on ideas that may not pan out since they wouldn’t be able to fire teams working on bad ideas. This might make sense on the margins, but glossing over the names of silicon valley it seems that most groundbreaking innovation comes from either small, visionary companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Openai, Intel, et cetera) or companies that are willing to power through what seems like obviously failed or wasteful ideas because they believe in what it could achieve (Nvidia, SpaceX, et cetera). That American innovation is now driven more by large, dominant companies seems more like a natural consequence of consolidation in the industry rather than large companies being good at making innovative bets.

There are also those who say that the reason why Europe does not have much ai, or a strong tech industry more broadly, is because there are those who perceive such sectors as “authoritarian”, “promethean madness” or “techno-fascist”. To me this seems absurd. Even if these people have any actual influence on policy they are still not the people who would have otherwise built a tech industry. The question should be focused on the people on the margins — why do people who sit in their bedrooms and code all day not found successful software companies?

Building a social media platform is comparatively easy⁴. By far the biggest issues for any new player entering the field is network effects, that everyone you know is already on the preëxisting platform. The second hardest thing is keeping people continuously hooked on your platform (to use a colloquial term). This is important since the more users have their attention directed at your service, the more advertisements you can show them — the lifeblood of most social media platforms.

The provider of the digital platform does not do most of the work, that is done by content creators⁵. Hosts are incentivized to make it hard to move your creations to other platforms to keep the aforementioned network effects in place. To successfully break out into this space they need to provide a sufficiently different experience to create their own network effects before their inventions are copied by the dominant players.

But why do we need to have this focus on social media to begin with? Would it not be a better idea for Europe to “skip the line” and start building European Artificial Intelligence (ai) straight away? This sounds reasonable, but it still remains to be seen what the business model for ai will be. So far it has been bankrolled almost entirely from the spending on more traditional “Web 2.0” social media and advertisement companies. Meta and Google combined have an almost complete monopoly on digital advertisement, and are using this income from the “real economy” to finance these large bets on ai. Social media is the tech industry at this point. There is also the fact that one of the biggest assets in building a competitive ai company is access to large amounts of consumer data.

China has managed to build its own tech industry through the application of this logic. The famous Great Firewall of China does not just keep information out of the country (like about the Tiananmen Square massacre) but just as importantly it has kept foreign tech companies out. Chinese tech companies have then filled this void and built competitive platforms. Mainland émigrés do not delete their Wechat accounts when moving abroad, abandoning them for superior American alternatives, they keep them due to their network effects.

It is possible to replicate this approach in Europe. A total block would likely be infeasible, owing to fact that European nations generally want friendly relations with the usa, but some sort of system that gives American companies a handicap for their monopolistic nature would not be unwarranted. This would likely be some sort of digital services tax (dst) that taxes larger platforms more. This would allow European companies to compete with entrenched rivals from the other side of the Atlantic.

The downside of such an approach is obvious, especially with the recent American administration. The tech industry has considerable influence in American decision-making, and so any move to supplant them will likely receive backlash. The Americans themselves Google to be a monopoly, so reducing their influence here would likely improve the state of the digital advertisement market.

I do not know if this is the path forward. To me it is easy to see the status quo as a wealth transfer from Europe (and the rest of the world) to Silicon Valley, data as a form of digital oil gathered cheaply in the orient before being sold to the domestic market. The problem may genuinely just be one of competition — of a few number of companies (that just happen to be American) gaining a disproportionate share of the economy due to their monopolistic practices. In that case the course of action would just be stricter anti-trust enforcement.

What is the benefit genuinely gained from Europe not possessing their own tech companies? Cheaper electricity prices (than would otherwise be the case) may be one, but data centres still need to be present in Europe to efficiently provide Europeans with services (and content). To me it seems that smaller European companies are more than capable to providing the same services as the American tech giants, the only exception being the sheer scale (and that is itself perhaps problematic).

This has been discussed ad nauseam, but it bears repeating. The European Union needs a systematic banking and capital markets reform. This would allow startups to raise capital in Europe without moving to Silicon Valley.

Here in Sweden we are quite proud of what we see as an innovative and digital culture and economy, spawning things like Spotify, Minecraft, and Skype. But all of these have moved to the usa in some capacity⁶. That the American financial system is so dominant is of course a given, and we should therefore expect European companies to make use of this to raise additional capital — but Europe also needs to more effectively make use of the resources in its possession.

A deeper union for banking (perhaps paired with some form of combined European debt) would allow for better coördinated form of spending. This appears to be to be the biggest initial problem for European startups, a problem that right now is only solved by moving to the United States of America.

Data centres do not matter. That is an exaggeration of course, but investing more in data centres will not create a tech industry. They employ very few people following their construction, and can be used remotely from anywhere on the planet. A tech startup will not decide where to relocate to depending on whether or not they get slightly lower ping⁷. They will be located where they can get skilled staff, attract investment, and carry out their work effectively. There is no reason that this can not be in the European Union.

Data centres are still necessary, but constructing them does not drive innovation (except seemingly in ai). The state should be more focused on funding research and enabling innovative companies to actually enter the market rather than building infrastructure that will be used by American tech companies instead.

The entire point of the internet is to be able to separate computing from where it is needed and used. Data centres allow devices at the edge (laptops, smartphones, et cetera) to perform feats of computation that would otherwise be too slow — like running llms⁸. Having domestic data centre capacity is not critical for building a tech industry, you can just rent capacity in northern Virginia if you really need it. Building local data centres is then only a good idea if demand holds steady, and even if that is the case they still need to be refitted with newer, faster computers every so often.

This calculation looks different for China however. They are actively hostile to the us and therefore need to attain their own data centre capacity in case they come into armed conflict over Formosa. While America has shown its inability to be trusted in recent times, I still believe that the American tech lobby is strong enough to maintain European market access for the foreseeable future. The European market is simply too alluring for those companies to avoid.

Recently there has been increasing talks of tech stacks and the of the costs and advantages of building our own compared to using a preëxisting one. Tech stacks are sets of software (and/or hardware) that can be deployed in combination with each other. Most famous of these is perhaps the lamp stack (Linux, Apache, Mysql/Mongodb, Perl/php/Python) using free (as in freedom) software to serve websites or applications. A newer example might be the use of Nvidia ai chips running pytorch written in cuda. We all stands on the shoulders of giants, and it is needless to reinvent the wheel for all of your infrastructure.

A recent report from the Centre for European Policy Studies has broadened this perspective to the entire supply chain for digital services, all the way from the end-user application to the physical materials used in the manufacturing of the integrated circuits themselves. The proposal is that all of this (or at least a significant portion) should be supplied by eu institutions is not only protectionist to an absurd degree, it is unrealistic. Attaining digital sovereignty should not mean abandoning non-eu digital solutions entirely, and any attempt at doing so will likely fail.

Instead Europe should do what has been proven to work, to rid itself of proprietary solutions that exert control over their users (regardless of if they are the American government or a Lithuanian small business). Europe is already strong in this regard; The Linux kernel was first developed in Helsinki and is today developed globally. The World Wide Web (www) was developed at the pan-European cern.

Free software is not just a part of building European technology, it is the only path forward. Supporting initiatives such as risc-v is a good idea, but it is still problematic if European companies build proprietary systems on top of those free solutions, like Nvidia has done with its cuda.

Building ai has not made much money so far, but I do not believe it will in the future either — just as being an internet-service provider is not hugely profitable (but not loss-making either). Open models have shown how llms are almost fungible in practice; Switching models can be done quickly and quite easily. ai labs have no “moat”. Instead the money is likely to be made by those who can effectively apply llms to new industries and applications. While Openai has generally performed best out of all the major model providers competitors are usually not far behind. Why use one company’s model when you can get 90% of the performance for a far lower price?⁹

The debate surrounding Chinese electric vehicles and the risks that they may pose due to their highly interconnected nature¹⁰ touches on similar topics. The debate centres on if a dependence on Chinese carmakers’ software will allow them to “take control” of transport in a crisis — especially with the developments in self-driving. But this misses the point entirely. That we can not trust our methods of transportation is not a problem with the author of the software, it is with the modes of control themselves. Cars (and the software running other critical services) needs to be open to introspection, control, and modification in order to create a resilient society. This is the case for Chinese, American, and even European auto manufacturers. Talking about if we can trust China is like talking about if we can trust the person holding a gun to our heads not to shoot — when the real problem is how to get rid of the gun (and not who to replace the person holding it).

At the Swedish Defence University — perhaps one of the places you would most likely expect technological independence to play a major role — we are still (and increasingly) reliant on Microsoft software. Switching to free and open alternatives (that are likely significantly more secure) should be easy, there is just a lack of urgency surrounding switching to alternatives that would improve European sovereignty.

Adopting free software is also a good approach in that it does not antagonise the us, and in allows us to make use of their talent and infrastructure, and in return improves their position. Building a libre stack is inherently not a protectionist choice, it is a democratic one that improves the well being of all peoples.

Benjamin Bratton says that while Europe needs to build its own stack to achieve sovereignty, it can not rely on free software because it is “anti-sovereign”. But this is exactly what Europe needs. To crush the hearts of European federalists everywhere: Europe is not a state. It can not rely on solutions that allow other states to pressure each other. This is the reason that eu countries are limited in their ability to orchestrate industrial policy. The solution is not merely to move this decision-making to the eu-level. Instead Europe needs anti-sovereign solutions, because they work in the same spirit of European coöperation and integration as the eu itself.

Much like Europe itself free software is subject to intense debate on what it actually is, comes from a wide breadth of different places and people, sometimes has issues with coming up with unified plan, and yet is responsible for some of the most important improvements in recent history. What could be more fitting than for a European tech stack to reject a centralised form of industrial policy and instead adopt a form of technology that prioritises freedom, efficiency, and diversity? In varietate concordia. ❦

The thoughts underlying this thesis have been with me some time, and have been slowly been crystallising more and more clearly as time goes on and I realise that the rest of the world is seemingly diverging more and more with my own thoughts on the subject. This is not a fully formed proposal, and I will not attempt any detailed plan of action. As always, it is instead an attempt to try and formulate my own thinking on the subject, as well as to offer the reader a perspective on the Chinese economic philosophy that is heavily overlooked in the west. While informed by reading scholarly material and following the ongoing discussion about China, it is prompted mainly by my visit there and getting an idea of how the country works. That idea may be incorrect, and so feel free to e-mail me your thoughts on the subject.

In short, I am of the opinion that American and China are in a sort of dialectical movement with each other, with America (and Europe) wishing to copy the industrial strategy that it sees as having been key to China’s modernisation, and China simultaneously trying to create a hyper-competitive environment that fosters innovation. I think that the Chinese approach will succeed, and the western one will not. America and Europe risks losing the dynamism and economic resilience that free-market economics offers, while China encroaches on the gap that we gained during the great divergence.

China is grossly misunderstood in the west. I do not claim to be a Sinologist, but merely in my brief visits to the mainland I have gained much insight that I do not believe most policymakers have. First of all, the prc is not the Soviet Union. This might seem obvious at first, but it is the viewpoint that I hear between the lines of much literature on how to deal with China. Instead of vast defence spending, it is industrial policy. The opponent is a vast authoritarian system that efficiently the production of a continent to those areas where it most serves the national interest. This straw man is not a reality. The authoritarian government of the prc is its greatest weakness, just as it was for the ussr, and for the Russian Republic that succeeded it. But while both the Soviet and Chinese communists ruled over oppressive regimes, the similarity mostly ends there.

The ideological system of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” (中 国特色社会主义, scc) as straightforwardly viewed from a Marxist point of view, is an attempt to create a system of pure capitalism as quickly as possible. A broader, more holistic, and more radical form of Lenin’s New Economic Policy where the rural Soviet Union and prc would both allow capitalist enterprise to grow, as long as it did so under the auspices of the communist party. This is precisely the path that societies follow according to orthodox Marxist theory (Feudalism → Capitalism → Socialism → Communism). In the west, Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is instead commonly understood to be some sort of attempt by the ccp to maintain a veneer of communist ideology while in practice becoming a free-market dictatorship. This is also not the case. The ccp is communist through and through, and scc is a genuine attempt to achieve it. When spending time on the mainland, one is struck by the sheer presence of the party, of the praise for workers, of and of what seems to be authentic belief.

On the ground, there is a feeling of division between state control and private enterprise. Roads are meticulously cleaned and well-maintained, while at the same time lined by buildings almost falling into disrepair. The state wishes that certain things, like the power grid, should be fully controlled, but in other sectors the private sector should be able to flourish freely. This schizophrenic reality is that of scc, with certain industries — primarily related to infrastructure — fully nationalised and others in an almost Laissez-Faire environment.

To try and achieve socialism (and eventually communism) China must unleash the free-market completely. The “weariness” of big tech that the ccp is sometimes reported to hold is not just grounded in a fear of large corporate interests clashing against the party, but is also an attempt to genuinely increase competition and increase the freedom of the market. Another example behind this might paradoxically be the intervention that is most talked about, that being the production of Electric Vehicles (evs). Chinese ev subsides are not oriented toward building “national champions” like the Export-oriented approaches undertaken across the Yellow Sea in the Republic of Korea. Instead it has tried to foster a breadth of ev producers that are now aggressively undercutting each other, becoming internationally competitive in the process.

In the beginning of ai 2027, a short story of rapid ai development¹, the leading Chinese ai company (collectively called DeepCent, a portmanteau of Deepseek and Tencent) becomes the leader of a nationalised and consolidated “collective”. Researchers and new integrated circuits (ics) are sent to a secure centralised facility where ai development and strategy are carried out. This is a very accurate view of how American and western strategists view China, as a singular entity that makes unified decisions that are fully carried out. But this is perhaps the exact opposite of reality. Instead the rapid industrialisation of China has been due to thousands of decisions made by comparatively low-level provincial officials and below, all competing to look good in the eyes of higher-ups by growing gdp². There has been no large change in ccp governance that would suggest a different approach when it comes to ai development.

The authors of ai 2027 agree that there is no clear leading Chinese company, and in a footnote they remark that:

We consider DeepSeek, Tencent, Alibaba, and others to have strong agi projects in China. To avoid singling out a specific one, our scenario will follow a fictional “DeepCent”.

But it is precisely this multifaceted competition that makes Chinese ai development different from its American counterpart. The competition between ai companies, all with extremely limiting compute resources, forces Chinese firms to compete using talent — something they will likely have more of in the foreseeable future due to what will probably be decreased brain drain to the us.

The “hawks in the ccp” warning about agi do not exist, at least in the same way they do in America. Instead, the Chinese leadership is committed to using its dominance in manufacturing and infrastructure development to expand in the field of “Embodied ai” (具身人工智能). This approach requires numerous companies to make tailor-made ai solutions for different industries and tasks, and therefore motivates the opposite strategy from the centralised one that ai 2027 predicts. An example of this would be zte’s ongoing application merging drone use, 5G connectivity and ai to monitor things like the maintenance requirements for infrastructure.

Xi Jinping himself, the paramount leader of the prc, seems quite keen on ai, having ordered a 2025 “study session” (集体学习) on the subject for the top ccp leadership. But he is old-fashioned, having gotten into Tsingua University (China’s top university) as a worker-peasant-soldier student during the Cultural Revolution. He has a greater interest in “hard” development like infrastructure; even in Made in China 2025, the ccp plan to expand into higher value-add manufacturing, it is specifically manufacturing that is the focus, not the service economy or software developments — areas where ai makes the biggest amount of sense. Chinese industrialisation through state-led infrastructure initiatives has been incredibly successful, and the ccp is much more likely to stick to what they know works (even if it is with new fancy tools).

His study notes from the aforementioned study session does mention a need to “concentrate forces” (集中力量) on high-end ics and “foundational” software, but he also mentions creating an “enterprise-led industry-academia-research-user collaborative innovation system”, a far cry from a secret power plant/data center under state control. It also mentions such things like “Highlighting applied directions” (突出应用导向) and “Helping traditional industry reform and upgrade” (助力传统产业改造升级). These things are in-line with the ideas of embodied ai more than they are a centralisation of compute.

Deepseek also highlights the benefits of free and open-weight models³ that spur innovation. Free (as in freedom) models allow widespread application of the model and adaptation to many more applications. This allows for further feedback and is a force-multiplier for a given model’s dominance. The benefits of free software are perhaps most easily realised by developers and engineers, and is therefore overlooked by many analysts, but it is the reason that the internet and digital technology is the way it is today. Things like ip, gnu/Linux, and Pytorch were not chosen merely by industry giants, but by individuals who wanted to use what was easiest to hack on⁴. As an anonymous Google employee pointed out in 2023, “open source” will likely overtake proprietary ai. The iteration happening is too fast for any one company to compete with. Justin Wong (an engineer at Moonshot, a frontier Chinese ai lab) wrote that:

Open-sourcing allows us to leverage the power of the developer community to improve the technical ecosystem. Within 24 hours of release, the community had already implemented k2 in mlx, with 4-bit quantization and more — things we truly don’t have the manpower to accomplish ourselves at this stage.

But more importantly: open-sourcing means holding ourselves to a higher technical standard, which in turn pushes us to build better models — aligned with our goal of agi.

This might seem counterintuitive — if we’re just releasing model weights, why would that force the model to progress?

The logic is actually very simple: Open source means performance comes first. You can no longer rely on superficial tricks or hack to dazzle users. Anyone who gets the same weights should be able to easily reproduce your performance — only then is it truly valid.

Deepseek then is not a state-sponsored champion, but one of many companies experimenting with ai development. This will likely accelerate ai development, and force ai firms adopt shorter release cycles and lower prices. The huge size of the Chinese market also allows for increased experimentation and development, experimentation that Western firms will not have access to. r1’s free software nature helps this further, by helping deploy ai in novel ways across the Chinese economy faster than in America, also increasing innovation. There is no large consolidation of the ai industry in the prc.

American governance is in a unique place on the spectrum. Contrary to the prc, there are enough checks and balances for the executive arm to feel “restrained” by them, but it is still empowered enough to project a significant amount of power. This seems like a worst-case scenario to me — not enough power to take the seat as an “enlightened despot”, but still enough to break things if you aren’t careful. This is the issue at the heart of American ai strategy. The bureaucracy does not have the capacity to grasp the development of ai, but it feels it necessary to intervene regardless.

When Deepseek’s r1 model was first publicly released, it was widely reported as a “Sputnik moment”, as a wakeup-call to the American government that it no longer held a decisive technological advantage over its strategic rival. But this is an over-exaggeration. In 1957, with the launch of Sputnik, the Soviets attained a technological capability that the Americans did not posses at all, not merely a level of parity. But one might argue that what Deepseek showed was Chinese capability to do something, but to do it at a fraction of the cost of American alternatives. But this is not exactly the case either, as Semianalysis recently showed, Deepseek’s low price-per-token has not resulted in companies flocking to Deepseek, but instead a slow decline in users, even as the overall market has grown. This is because they have merely chosen to make certain trade-offs to lower prices due to their compute-restrained nature, rather than any underlying technical improvement.

This compute-restrained environment that Chinese firms find themselves in is of course artificially created by American export-controls. As is being increasingly argued, perhaps most prominently by Nvidia ceo Jensen Huang, these export-controls might actually be decreasing American power relative to China, by effectively tariffing American ics in the Chinese market, allowing domestic ai-chip manufacturers to catch up with Nvidia, tsmc, and the non-Chinese semiconductor manufacturing industry.

But what has not been discussed to the same degree is the risk that not only does this environment hurt the long-term prospects for the western-aligned ic industry, but it might also hurt American software as well. As Deepseek alarmists claim, China has largely caught up in the development of llm, or are at least very close behind. But they have done so in a much less capital- and compute-rich environment. As Sutton writes in The Bitter Lesson, most of the gains in ai research have been due to increasing amounts of compute, and developments have rather been in how to make use of more and more computational resources, rather than in how to make use of it. Chinese development seems to have changed this trend, if only very slightly. If we then extrapolate Chinese ai so that it has the compute resources of Openai, would it not overtake Openai? There is a risk that, like the Sardaukar and Fremen from Frank Herbert’s Dune, we are helping Chinese ai develop in a more hostile environment, while at the same time supporting the development of a Chinese ic industry to support it in the long-term.

Similarly, American strategy, lead both by private-sector and public sector investment, risks “putting too many eggs in one basket”, that basket being Openai. 500 billion usd, the amount of money to be invested in the Stargate Project, is a lot of money, likely more than China is spending, so is it not important to get as much development as possible out of it? If China is able to us its compute more efficiently than the us and instead uses its money to bolster domestic manufacturing further, especially in the field of integrated circuits, it could undermine us national security. China’s vibrant free-market economy is a tremendous resource, exceeded only by that of the United States. It would be a shame to destroy that lead.

China is a free-market economy, and it is committed to using the strengths inherent in that system to its national advantage. The prc leadership will try and use ai to upgrade preëxisting industry, and will not engage in a rapid “race to agi”, beyond continuing attempts to become a significant producer of integrated circuits. Its large domestic market allows it to rapidly test new innovations, but so does the vast American and (to some extent) European markets. While it the ccp is increasingly grasping after interventionism, it still is trying to remain committed to free enterprise.

The us and Europe must resist the impulse to bet big on national champions, as (perhaps paradoxically to many) Deepseek shows. High technology advancements should instead be facilitated through an increase in basic research, ability for academia and free enterprise to intermingle, and deep capital markets that can bet big on new, innovative ideas. ❦

Francis Fukuyama is probably the person most connected to the concept of “the End of History”, but he is not the originator of it. Fukuyama’s intial article¹ (that was then later expanded upon to the book The End of History and the Last Man) initially reads as a summary of the Kojévian interpretation of Hegel’s observation of the end of History. Fukuyama sees in the collapse of the Soviet order in eastern Europe as not just a victory of western liberal democracy, but as a showcase of this western system as the ultimate goal of human society entirely. This view of History ending seems to have been thoroughly debunked in our popular consciousness, to the point of simply naming the concept in my international relations class elicits chuckles across the lecture hall, and academic scholars praise Finland for “never [believing] that history ended in 1989”². I have not read Fukuyama’s larger coverage of his thinking on this subject, only his initial article titled The End of History? as well as the original sources of Hegel’s Phenomenology and Kojéve’s lectures on it. In some regards Fukuyama has already faced much of this criticism preëmtively³, but somehow misconceptions still abound. I agree wholeheartedly with Kojéve’s experience:

Observing what was taking place around me and reflecting on what had taken place in the world since the Battle of Jena, I understood that Hegel was right to see in this battle the end of History properly so-called.

I have written this text both to convince the readers that this is the case, but also to work through my own thinking on the topic. I will try and cover some major events and areas of the world who one might see as counterexamples of the thesis. But first we must make clear what History is and is not.

History seems quite straightforward as to its definition, most in the western world had it as a subject for several years and so think they have a through understanding of the term. When seen through this lens it is mostly defined as the study and documenting of events in the past and perhaps on how they influence the future. But in the Hegelian sense history is more so seen as the trajectory of human consciousness toward absolute knowledge and self-consciousness. I am not surprised that most people, even academic scholars and subject-matter experts, misunderstand this point — Hegel is not very widely read and his concepts are mostly known through the interpretation of others. The end of history appears when this absolute knowledge is realized and actualized in the geist of the world. In Hegel’s view the trajectory this first took was through the Greeks, Christianity, Lutheran Protestantism, the French Revolution, and finally described at Jena by Hegel as Bonaparte marched through it⁴. Napoleon and the society he represented was however merely the vanguard of world-history, and there was of course still the work of implementing it. This will likely take the appearance of the graph for the function \(f(x) = 1 - \frac{1}{x}\), with the world in a continual process to reach historical culmination. But this still does not mean that authentic historical action is possible, it would merely be bringing the other parts of the world in line with the most developed historical position; it is an extension of width rather than in depth. Post-historical society is one in which the economic activities of man are most prominent, rather than the drama and spectacle of struggle and war. As such it can not be preöccupied with conflict with other post-historical regions; it is bad for business after all. Society revolves entirely around the ideas of maintaining humanity’s happiness. This should not be misconstrued as a regretful development — a lack of suffering and pain in the world is a noble goal. But it is the reality that we no longer have anything to strive toward beyond hedonistic happiness that defines post-historical man. Things such as the impending crisis of climate change is nothing more than a threat to “our way of life”, and a threat of such a nature is the greatest threat post-historical society can face.

History then did not end in 1989, and it is with that I agree with the critics of Fukuyama. Instead in ended almost 200 years earlier, in 1806, when the ideas and processes that create the final shape of society were first identified. When one makes this claim it becomes obvious how laughable counterarguments of “well why did the Ukraine war happen if history ended?” when events like the first and second world wars are both seen as entirely post-historical, even by people who lived through them like Kojéve himself. Events of large material importance can (and indeed must) occur, and a country does not have to deny the end of history to maintain a large military force. But this force is oriented principally externally toward those regions of the world where society has not reached the same level of historical development, whether that be North America in 1812, Eastern Europe during the cold war, Iraq in 2003, or the Russian Federation today. Those societies already firmly established within the post-historical framework are no longer a threat to other post-historical societies. The strange phenomenon of the democratic peace may very well have its solution in this perspective, where the Stewartian definition⁵ of democratic or elective states can fully replaced with those regions of the world where history has ended.

According to Kojéve society in a post-historical time is structured through “the universal homogeneous state”. What this state looks like differs depending on one’s interpretation, but all of the major illustrations of such a state⁶ are fundamentally attempts to impose what is strictly a philosophical identity on to an empirical political reality. But what seems to have occurred is rather distinct from this, our philosophical development has occurred not in parallel with political development but entirely separately. It remains unclear if political development will in time “catch up” with our popular consciousness, as with how the ideas of the enlightenment spurred political development in 1848 and continue to underpin contemporary events, or if this combination of philosophy and politics are fundamentally still compatible. The largest crack in this status quo that I perceive is arguably the environmental movement (and its reactionary counterpart) if any.

I should make clear that I disagree with Fukuyama’s view of a liberal, democratic, free-market west as the uniquely final historical position. Although there is a clear correlation between the post-historical regions and these qualities one should not mistake the sale of ice cream as the cause of drowning. Instead this universal homogeneous state exists not as a state as used within the context of international relations, a political unit with a defined territory and nominal sovereignty over it, but a state as in a state of affairs. The universal homogeneous state is a shared lived experience and way of thinking about the world around one self⁷. It is especially prevalent on the banks of the northern Atlantic ocean, in Japan, South Korea, and Oceania, regions of the world uncontroversially seen as part of Fukuyama’s post-historical world. But it is equally present in regions such as Shanghai, Moscow, Cape Town, and São Paulo. The reverse is also true. The United States for example has many areas that are not part of this post-historical world, even though the us as a whole is firmly post-historical in nature (the case is also true for much of Europe). One can draw a rural-urban divide here, but that would still not be entirely correct — many urban areas still have not reached the end of history, and many rural areas have — but one would likely still see a strong correlation. Why urban life creates the conditions for post-historical man I will not describe here, but will cover at a later time.

It is however the case that this state is not merely a fixed set of philosophical conditions paused in time. Keeping in line with Hegel the self-consciousness of the individual is distinctly created in opposition to the other⁸, and is in a continuos process of recreation (in both the literal and figurative senses of the word) that characterises post-historical society. The inter-subjective forum where this process takes place is the internet. Most of the computer’s major impact has been not in the fields of mass-manufacturing or administration, but in the spread of ideas and media’s increased intensity and presence within our daily lives. It is this shared experience of mankind’s manifestation in the digital realm that bind’s the world’s populations into a single coherent whole; into a homogenous state of being. Preceding digital computers the homogenous state was of course still present, through the shared human experiences and means of communication of earlier times. But this was broadened — binding more and more of the world’s population, space, and time into it — by the telegraph and the transistor.

The end of history is then not the achievement of any set of material conditions (the absence of war and hunger) nor is it the culmination of political development throughout time. It is the philosophical realization of a given identity, of a set of values, and an understanding in self-consciousnesses on the scale of humanity as a whole. We will now chart the current state of this weltgiest as it appears to us in the first half of this decade. To begin we will cover the grand expanse to the east of the European subcontinent.

We begin with Russia not just because it is, here in Sweden and in Europe as a whole, seen as the unmaking of what they see as the greatest achievement of the post-historical world: the long European Peace since 1945. But, as we have already covered, post-historicity does not mean the end of wars, the redrawing of borders, or of major historical events. In fact, conflict must occur while there are still parts of the world who have not reached the end of history. Russia feels provoked into action and therefore must act. It is a state that is so developed that the state encompasses all — this is nationalism — but it has yet to achieve the contradiction between the state and the individual. It is this key change that Napoleon embodied, and so it is not impossible to do through authoritarianism, but it may also require democratic reform. Until then the state is what will drive historical development, pure economic growth or citizen movements will be unable to act in this environment. It is then this feeling that the Russian state has (or is at least interpreted and anthropomorphized as having) that makes this interesting from a philosophical point of view, that drives its foreign policy goals.

But this is not a mere conflict over Russian sovereignty in its “near-abroad”. In Russia this is framed in “civilizational” terms, where the Russian civilization is distinct from the western-European one, just as the Chinese or Hindu one is. This means that Russia must identify itself in contrast to the rest of Europe. It still gains its identity from its relationship to the other and can not maintain a disparate identity that makes peaceful relations possible. It must see itself as in conflict with the other as long as it is still a master in the framework of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. The collapse of the ussr was a humbling of the Russian civilization within these terms, but it was not defeated in the sense that it surrendered out of a genuine fear for death. This fear is what drives the continually conflict-prone master to become a slave, and it is only the slave who is capable of fully realizing her self-consciousnesses and progress history. Russian aggression must therefore occur before it reaches historical fulfilment, it is still a master in search of another master that can recognize it. But it is not merely enough for Russia to back down against the west of Europe, is must feel a genuine dread throughout its nation. But this is also not something that can be imposed from abroad. Franco-German tanks rolling across the Red Square will strike fear into the hearts of Russians yes, they may become even more bellicose and struggle for revenge. Instead it is a feeling and historical process that must come from within. The Russian consciousness must be transformed by their own volition to be of this nature, just as what happened in most of the Soviet satellite states after the cold war.

This is not a process that one can expect to come quickly, but it is at the same time hard to say if it will take a long time. It will occur gradually, and then suddenly. Until then Europe, and the rest of Russia’s neighbours, should be prepared for conflict with it. It is not a contradiction of post-historicity that Finland should arm itself for war with its much larger possibly belligerent neighbour; as long as that neighbour is itself not another post-historical state.

The second major development seen by many as a counterexample against the end of history are the developments in the United States of America; more specifically the election of Donald Trump. But the question that needs to be asked is what Trump’s behaviour is actually symptomatic of. He has threatened annexation of post-historical allies such as Canada and Greenland; does this not show how the assumption that post-historical states do not have to protect themselves against others of their kind is wrong? But remember, the nature of history is not of a political nature, but of a philosophical one. Does Trump have any ideological or idealist qua idea motive for his actions that contradict those of the rest of the world? I do not think he does. He of course utilizes different techniques to achieve his aims, and may desire power for power’s sake, but these are not in and of themselves a goal. Really Trump has the same goal as the rest of us, the maintenance humanity’s happiness. He may fail at doing so for a multitude of reasons, but it does not mean that America is in a conflict (in the philosophical sense) with Europe or Canada, just as the us was not in conflict with the uk and France in 1956 despite actively undermining them and the presence of hostile rhetoric between the two camps.

Trumpist America lacks an ideological driving force of what the world should look like and is therefore incapable of historical action. It leaves the individual in the same position as liberalism, as the citizen entirely involved in, and yet at the same time wholly separated from, the state. maga is pure populism, and in many ways itself an example of post-historicity. It is the juxtaposition of the individual against the other, against a nebulous grouping of the woke. The individual is seen as simultaneously part of the greater whole in a collective labour to improve society, but at the same time promoting the ideals individualism and freedom and a hatred toward those opposed to the Trumpian project, whatever it may be. Trump’s authoritarian tendencies also do not discredit the thesis; the very vanguard of history was originally realized through Napoleon Bonaparte, a populist general who performed a military coup and whose rule was by no means democratic.

The developments in America then do not conflict with the end of history, they are merely another manifestation of its predicted behaviour, and in some ways even a strong example of the thesis itself. Exactly what the nature of authoritarianism and fascism is in the post-historical environment I will not endeavour to explain here however.

I hope that it has become clear that while I disagree with Fukuyama’s critics on the basic reading of him (or lack thereof) I am also not a clear-cut supporter of his ideas, especially in their most popular form. In an interview with Foreign Affairs Fukuyama has stated that the “single” counterexample to the end of history is the rise of the People’s Republic of China, and the level of economic growth and prosperity it has achieved while under the auspices of a socialist one-party state. But there are two main factors that have allowed this apparent contradiction to flourish: the fact that Fukuyama is wrong about the need for liberal democracy to build a prosperous economy and the fact that the ccp has adopted the very strategies proven to be successful in the west.

One of the biggest believers in the ideas of historical progress may be Mao Zedong (毛泽东) himself. One of the biggest themes in his writing, and a fact that is often overlooked in discussions on Mao, is his belief in China (and later the People’s Republic specifically) as a progressive force bringing about change.⁹ In his On Protracted War (論持久戰) Mao argues that China will be successful against Japan because China — as a big country that is weak — will slowly grow and whittle down Japan — a small country that is strong — and will eventually overtake the Japanese in strength. This is only possible in the situation which China progresses; where it becomes more powerful at the same time as Japan is weakened. That Mao held this belief is not all to surprising as many Marxists have inherited the view of history as a progression from Hegel through Marx, although it is perhaps not as heavily emphasised today. For another example, here is the end of the interview from which Mao’s famous “paper tiger” remark is taken:

Take the case of China. We have only millet plus rifles to rely on, but history will finally prove that our millet plus rifles is more powerful than Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) aeroplanes plus tanks. Although the Chinese people still face many difficulties and will long suffer hardships from the joint attacks of u.s. imperialism and the Chinese reactionaries, the day will come when these reactionaries are defeated and we are victorious. The reason is simply this: the reactionaries represent reaction, we represent progress.

What causes economic growth is a question that is not easy to answer, if it was then every country would do it. But there are general assumptions to be made through correlation that allows us to see this from an interesting point of view. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution every school of economics has had to make its argument for why it occurred. It was such an explosion in economic growth and activity compared to pre-historical times that nothing in human history has had a similar impact on the condition of the human population — and the rest of the living species in the world. Trying to contend these intellectual giants is then an incredible feat of hubris, and I shall not seriously argue that a question of such magnitude can be answered easily. Nevertheless I believe that there is a generally impactful variable in stability. My ideas on this topic are heavily influenced from listening to the recipients of the 2024 Nobel prize in economic sciences¹⁰. In this line of thinking, stability (both in the form of a lack of conflict and in an awareness in “how things are done”) are hugely important in determining the levels of prosperity in a country. In this manner democratic states are not only wealthier because some of them have had a history of colonial exploitation, but also because democracy inherently has rules and regulations and tries to punish those who break them in predictable ways. A philosopher king who rules by decree, no matter how benevolent or skilful, may change either his mind or “the rules of the game” abruptly, bringing a sense of insecurity into any venture. What Fukuyama calls China’s “institutionalized autocracy” brings this factor into play in China. Since there was no absolute ruler, only the nebulous institution of “the party”, change could not occur at the whims of any particular person, and so companies and individuals could trust that they could foresee or understand changes made. This is the stability necessary for a market economy to work efficiently, even if the “rules of the game” as set are flawed and imperfect. Changing them should still be done of course, but predictably, transparently, and accountably. It is in manner that economic successes can be explained independently from liberal democracy or their ideals, such as the formal rule of law. As long as things occur as people expect they do, they can continue doing business.

But the key is that China has adopted a market-economy, albeit perhaps of a dirigiste kind. This is in line with the idea concept of socialism with Chinese characteristics, where China’s largely rural, poor, and agricultural society would/is not capable of attaining socialism and communism, largely a return to orthodox pre-soviet Marxist thought where the origin of revolution would be in the industrial heart of the world economy; in Germany, the United Kingdom, and France. What the ccp is doing is then not contradictory in the slightest according to ideology, it is only wrong to call it socialism. But this is mere pandering to ideologues, in reality I do not believe the ccp leadership has any intention of returning to the socialist policies preceding Deng Xiaoping (邓小平). Mark Fisher was correct in observing the stagnation in politics following the collapse of Soviet empire in Capitalist Realism, with the introductory chapter famously using the Zizekian/Jamesonian quote of “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism”. Capitalist theory and practices have become so engrained in the consciousness of the world that it is no longer possible to move to another alternative¹¹.

Both ideologically and economically China has become allied with the west, but China is in many ways post-historical in its philosophical sense as well. I intend to examine both the extent and nature of this more carefully when travelling to the prc later this year, but Chinese society is equally perpetuated in the hedonistic joy of society. This is of great trouble for the ccp, whose ideology is based on a continued struggle toward communism. Instead of caring about the historical development of the proletariat the Chinese population is troubled with post-historical issues. They wish for stable iron-rice-bowl jobs, fleeting consumer goods, and the ever-continuing flow of entertainment supplied by services like Douyin. Life becomes a hedonistic maintenance of happiness and joy, just as it has become in the other post-historical regions of the world like Europe and Japan.

My hope is that this has been an illuminating coverage of some of the main criticisms of the end of history, and that I have dispelled any notions of history “restarting” or that we have merely been on a “holiday” from history since 1989, with the so-called holiday ending either in 2001 or more recently. If you have any other major counterexamples I would be glad to hear them, since many of these major ones I have here covered are quite elementary — with the major issues merely being a gross misunderstanding of what is being discussed. I shall end with a quote by Kojéve that showcases the nature of post-historical society:

It is precisely to the organization and the ‘humanization’ of its free time that future humanity will have to devote its efforts. (Did Marx himself not say, in repeating, without realizing it, a saying of Aristotle’s: that the ultimate motive of progress, and thus of socialism, is the desire to ensure a maximum of leisure for man?)

❦

In an increasingly interconnected and technologically sophisticated world, our capabilities for communication and diversity of ways to do so also increases. This is often approached as a problem, with each method merely remaining due to network effects, but I believe that this multitude of means are a strength and not a weakness. I do however still see what I deem as a misuse of tools, and I shall endeavour to explain, and hopefully convince you of, my ways of structuring communication in different spheres.

The key difference that I think many do not make is the division between urgency and importance. This might seem an unwieldy or arbitrary division, but I believe it is crucial. In many cases needing an answer quickly is the only thing one cares about, and in others it is the accuracy of the response that matters. To explain simply, here an order of different modes of communications:

Sorted by importance:

When you want to be very clear about something you always want to meet in person, and if speed is necessary nothing is faster than calling someone’s cellphone. But there is one medium that has been overlooked, or in many cases even despised, email.

The Indieweb wiki’s section on email describes an “Older [reason] to use email” as “messaging among older internet users” as if this is an archaic or outdated form of messaging. This is echoed by my anecdotal experiences with talking to younger generations of people who in many cases detest email, having only used it in a professional setting and for making “accounts” to websites that then flood them with newsletters and advertisements. I understand these experiences that I imagine many people have, but they do not mean that email should be thrown out altogether. Instead it should occupy a new place in the way people communicate.

The word revolution has an interesting history, meaning both a transformative change in a given field (although often political) as well as a simple revolution of a spinning object, returning to its starting position (see rpm; revolutions per minute)¹. These two seemingly homonymous words are however deeply interconnected, and to explain this I want to use the example of the Glorious Revolution. It was not only a profound political development, overthrowing the established idea of the divine right of kings and replacing it with popular sovereignty, but also formulating it as a return to the normal political order of the ancient rights of the English people². The Meiji Restoration in Japan was also of this nature, a profound and forward-looking development that framed itself as a return to the original state of things.

So what does this have to do with email communication for the kidz? I see email as a niche that no other medium occupies, that being asynchronous communication. All communication is of course asynchronous in some sense, but there is an expectation that texting should ideally be done instantly and intensely. One is expected to respond quickly, and “leaving” someone “on read” is seen as an insult. I think that this form of synchronous communication, when combined with the scale of modern technology, creates enormous stress on the individual. At all times one is able to intimately³ communicate with thousands of people, leaving the individual paralysed from overstimulation. Email by contrast emphasises long-form messaging, often being longer than posts on microblogging services meant for permanent or semi-permanent publication. This gives the individual more time to respond but also the sender to live their own life while waiting for a response. Originally this was of course a technological necessity — it was impossible to reach someone through the internet when they were not at their computer — but that limitation has since disappeared through the introduction of the cellular phone and later the smartphone.

This does not mean that the problems with email are not real but that they are obscuring the usefulness of the technology. The primary change I would recommend (or that needs to be done) is the division between communication and information. There is no denying that a lot of services rely on email for registration and advertisements. But there is a clear mental barrier between receiving an email from a real human being and a machine sending you a morass of spam that one is not expected to reply to, but simply to consume⁴. The greatest damage to email has been done by no-reply@domain.com. To counter this one needs multiple email addresses, one for machine communication that is seldom used and another for human connection. This allows for the mental separation of messages so that the enormous flood of email does not drown out the signal, and so that individuals are not anxious when they are sent an email.

Herman Martinus of Bear Blog calls this a part of digital hygiene, and proposes that one should try and “explicitly act” on each email, either filtering them out, responding to them, or archiving them. We both seem to have independently arrived at similar conclusions, where emails strictly needs to be kept for interpersonal communication, and that mere information should be kept out to avoid drowning out signal.

What would then be required to return to the earlier asynchronous mode? It is unclear if the massive use by commercial-scale actors can be undone or reduced, and email spam filters mean that the system is heavily centralized to just a few big actors. But it is hard to deny the powerful networking effects of email, where almost every user of the internet can be assumed to have one. Would it be better to simply torch email and convince a new generation of users to move to a new system of e2ee async messaging? I do not know. But I do still believe that email has the potential to be the solution to many people’s problems with the internet and communication as a whole.

It is apparent to everyone that social media is distinctly a different experience today from how it initially developed. It has become a form of mindless consumption instead of a social space where one interacts with other genuine individuals. The concept of content, once merely used on Madison avenue, has become so ingrained in the social media environment that those who would otherwise call themselves entertainers, artists, or journalists have now come to regard their field as mere content creation, as producing things merely meant to get you hooked so that you will look at more advertisements. This has been accelerated due to llm’s ability to quickly create things that are “good enough” to look at, read, or otherwise consume. Consumption has become the only reason to interact with social media. But alternatives are not only necessary, they are already here.

Social media’s fall from grace did not occur with the release of Chatgpt, but it has accelerated since then. Social media platforms do not make money off of our enjoyment, but merely from our attention. This was perhaps best displayed by the stratospheric rise of tiktok, and of the subsequent explosion in short-form video platforms that followed. These are built on an ecosystem that has continuously been trying to capture more and more of our waking hours. Actions to resist this were slowly being taken, even if subconsciously. The decline of independent forums, where discussion is instead taken to deep-web⁵ spaces like slack, discord, group chats and direct messages, is perhaps the clearest sign of this. This was well underway before generative ai arrived, but as Maggie Appleton has pointed out, “the dark forest” of spam and slop has expanded — and will continue to expand — rapidly.

When talking about email as a mere asynchronous medium the focus is on how email benefits the user individually, and on how spam has forced people to move to other such mediums. Here, I instead want to describe how one can not just return to the email-workflow of yore, but reimagine it as a new form of social media that allows one to curate and decide on what to interact with, but also how to format that interaction and to contribute to the meaning and interpretation with the work.

Writing emails is a laborious task, at least compared to scrolling an infinite feed. But it is this labour that is put in to email that is the differentiating factor. Microblogging platforms like twitter, mastodon, and bluesky can never become places for genuine presence because of its ease of use. Writing a toot on mastodon is little different from writing as short prompt for an ai. What llms have taught us is that one must put in the work to create something meaningful in the eyes of others, because what is valuable is the time you spent in formulating those ideas.

Social interaction is by necessity a creative process. One does not merely communicate raw information in the form of statistics or binary data, but we instead choose to frame and disseminate information in a unique way. This creative process is what makes us interesting as individuals, to interact with, and valuable to others as agents in the world.

Email also facilitates an inner discussion. While other mediums require little of the author to critically examine their statements, writing emails allows oneself the time to read, reread, and edit ones position. This means that in an email conversation between just two people, each person takes control of the conversation completely in a way that instant messaging and the like does not do. The author is free to have an entire discussion in their head, picturing responses in their mind. This then moves the conversation forward in a double dialectical fashion, with each person’s internal debate framing their responses that are in turn responded to.

As I explained in my musings on text, the dialectical motion that is present in the creative process means that the relationship between author and reader disappears. Seneca explains that “The process is mutual; for men learn while they teach”⁶ — explaining your thoughts to another necessarily means refining them for yourself.

When I write emails, it is not uncommon for the word count to reach into 2-3000 words. This is longer than many blog posts I write, and while it commonly covers multiple topics — all organically developed — it allows for a form of creative expression that other mediums do not posses. It allows me to write in a much more free manner, to an audience whose intellectual strengths (and weaknesses) I am much more aware of, and yet still cut those parts that would otherwise be necessary to paint a full picture of the issue. It allows me genuine connection with people I know in a way that reading their newest tweet does not.

This intimate relation between blog posts and emails means that a back-and-fourth discussion with someone over email is not all that dissimilar to writing for a literary audience, it is just a smaller audience. It forces us to come up with and process our ideas, and is in that sense similar to what I call productive note-taking, where one uses the production of a work to prompt intellectual growth.

Email’s asynchronous nature allows us to write and respond whenever we personally have time. Some people argue that email fails to accommodate groups of users greater than 2, but I disagree. Things like mailing lists allow large groups of people to communicate in public with lots of other individuals, with anyone quickly jumping in when required. Conversations chains are easily listed and followed, compared to the fleeting reply chains of large slack or discord groups. We can take our time to respond, and those wo are interested in what we have to say can quickly get up to speed in the conversation, much like the easily digestible feeds of social media. The difference is that instead of quickly scrolling by to read short messages by lots of different people, you are forced to sit and listen to one person’s reasoning for much longer — not all that different from how you would in real life.

James O’Sullivan, of University College Cork, writes in noema magazine:

Social media’s current logic is designed to reduce friction, to give users infinite content for instant gratification, or at the very least, the anticipation of such. The antidote to this compulsive, numbing overload will be found in deliberative friction, design patterns that introduce pause and reflection into digital interaction, or platforms and algorithms that create space for intention.

This is exactly the sort of deliberate control that email offers. This is not to say that email as it exists today is a perfect alternative, but the way it is ubiquitous and at the same time completely forgotten means that we have to make a deliberate attempt to understand the technologies that already exist in practice. ❦