In social media posts, podcasts, interviews and newsletters, the elites of the American tech sector are marveling at China’s speed in building infrastructure, its manufacturing might and the ingenuity of the A.I. company DeepSeek. At the same time, they are lamenting aging infrastructure and cumbersome regulations in the United States, and an economy that can’t seem to make screws or drones, or the machines that manufacture them.
Suddenly, Chinese firms once dismissed as copycats are being studied for lessons on efficiency and scale. China’s top-down, state-led system is being reframed not as a political liability but as a model of efficiency and execution.
The thing is, the world doesnt actually need this much manufacturing capacity. We dont need AI and we dont need drones if we stop starting pointless wars…
Bridges being slow to build is not a problem, because we dont need more cars, we need less cars. If you divert all the labor spent on useless shit towards actual things that people need then there is no need for a 996 work style.
But then who will make more money for the shareholders?
Thing is, I am starting to think this has been true for the entirety of recorded history. You know we solved scarcity when we started having time to write shit down.
All of our recorded story as a species is just us hurting each other until we figure that out. The moral arc of history is indeed long.