Victor Wang

China is the exception to every rule. They can afford nationalism, because they are at billion-person civilization scale rather than million-person nation scale. They can actually afford autarky, because they already produce billions of widgets not just for themselves but the world. And they can even afford communism, because in reality they practice capitalism. Finally, China can ride the tiger in the AI Era by just centralizing everything and creating the largest walled garden in existence. The infrastructure already exists, in the form of the Great Firewall and the Chinese Internet ecosystem. So China can just mandate that every WeChat user do whatever proof-of-human that the government wants, and that the top tech companies filter any AI content the party doesn’t want. And then…they’re done. China already has the social and technical infrastructure for centralized control. AI fakes won’t be that big a problem for them. However, for a variety of obvious reasons, the Chinese system will be hard to export globally without encountering enormous resistance. So rather than top-down communist control, the alternative to the billion-person super state may end up being a thousand million-person network states, where everyone has chosen to be there, democratically chosen the government, and voted for that community with their feet, ballot, and wallet. And those are the two poles we can see emerging on the horizon, after the postwar order breaks down and the post-Internet order boots up. Centralization vs decentralization. Top-down vs bottom-up. Scaled up vs startup. Homogeneity vs variety. Nationalism vs internationalism. Communism vs capitalism. Physical vs digital. China vs the Internet.