June 2018. Shanghai.
Cruising down the Shanghai East-West Expressway, riding shotgun in my friend’s BMW M3. The car is silly Americana. Captain America decals adorn the exterior, while the interior is Iron Man red and gold. Several large stuffed animals crowd the back seat — Peppa Pig, Winnie the Pooh (both inexplicable, irreverent quasi anti-government memes in China). All the while, Black Panther and Darth Vader bobbleheads nod along atop the dashboard. For many in China, and Shanghai particularly, personal vehicles are the medium for coded expressions that would be too garish or sensitive if made more publicly.
(Pictured: The ideal yuppie bachelor car in Shanghai. You may not like it but this is what peak achievement looks like.)
Outside a hazy, spring night fog colors the city like something out of a Simon Stålenhag painting. The neon-lit Bladerunner tetris set of Shanghai office complexes blurs by just beyond the tinted glass as we cut lanes at speed. Kids See Ghosts blasts loudly on the sound system. We hit the Julu Road (巨鹿路) junction, where the city’s two main expressways meet in a loping tangle of concrete and asphalt. And like clockwork, all connections go out — cell, bluetooth, radio — the car goes silent.
This always happens at this spot. I ask my friend about this. He thinks the police are running a high-end signal jammer at this location to prevent people from flying drones over the junction - which he learned at the cost of one of his own high-end DJI models...Perhaps triggered by the state’s technical show of force, a serious change comes over him for a moment. He glances over, "It's all bullshit, you know," pointing up to the dark sky beyond the windshield, "They have to keep the lights on. They have to convince us that the control everything. If they fail, we will just eat them." “Let the ducks roast,” he says to himself after a contemplative pause, his eyes trailing off into the far distance.
But moment passes quickly. A few moments after we pass through the junction, all signals and service reappear, stronger than before. Kid Cudi’s blaring “I feel freeeeeeeeeeeeee” bursts onto the car’s speakers at full volume. Political talk ceases and the entire thing immediately becomes a long forgotten memory.
In any case, it’s Friday. The bars are open, the clubs are calling, and we’re coming in HOT. That’s what matters. Today was a good day in Shanghai.
An Introduction to Life On Mars
Where to start? Folks in the US who have only known me as a bitcoiner often ask, “But how could you live in China?” I always chuckle at this question. Not least because its usually almost visibility dipping with the asker's absurd and exaggerated fantasies about China as a cartoonish 1984-style brutalist dystopia. That said, it is a question that I have given much thought to myself, especially now as a bitcoiner with all the many ways bitcoin has changed my views on things.
And this brings me to a series of far deeper questions — What is authoritarianism, really? Can it ever be benevolent? And how does one become attenuated to it to such an extent as to no longer notice it, if they ever noticed it at all?
(What people picture when they ask me about China)
(This is the same location as the picture above. Today, most days the reality is more like this)
The best way to explore this is to just answer the very first question directly. I very much could live in China because it was RAAAD. I had a great time there and I enjoyed almost every minute of it. In many entirely non-dystopian ways being there was like living in the future or a vision of what it might be like if we (the US) hadn’t forgotten how to have nice things — High-speed rail available at every street corner! Bristling skyscrapers erected in mere days! Wifi bandwidth so cheap and abundant it jumps right out of the stream straight into your frying pan! Gold nuggets for everyone! Everything, now with 30% MORE BEEF!
The thing is, my life in China was good. At that time, the cold, collectivist CCP machinery was fully invested in delivering a jubilee of comforts and diversions to even the relative urban “haves.” Additionally, I came to China as a very well educated, very well paid American with an existing foundation in Mandarin, shuttled in under the wide auspices of a deeply connected global consulting firm. With such well-earned badges of globalist statism, I was afforded a ticket to freely mingle with China’s largely Western-educated, upwardly-mobile urban economic elite. In fact, this was a thing that was rather encouraged…
All this being the case, it is no surprise that I had such a “good” experience. It was always supposed to be that way. Irrespective of the deeper reality, nothing was ever actually supposed to feel authoritarian for me during my time in China. These conditions similarly held true for my particular class of Chinese friends (except that there were certain cultural obligations and political allegiances that it was understood could be called up in full at any moments’ notice).
As an African American, I must admit that in more than a few ways it was possible for me to feel much freer in China than in the United States. I certainly didn’t ever have to worry about being shot in the back by some speed-freak neighborhood watchman or unhinged police officer. And I slowly adjusted to not having to keep my head on a swivel if I heard loud popping sounds in a mall or crowded venue.
No, the Chinese police never bothered me. No, no shadowy state security agents ever interrogated me for my “suspicious” Americanism. No, women didn’t clutch their purse when I walked by (in the States I’ve had this happen midday, while I was wearing full business attire…). People were either ambivalent or genuinely curious to speak with me. In essence, I experienced the joys of simply being left alone by the system. Something like what I image most White Americans experience in the US. So reader, you might already know this, but I can confirm, it was GREAT!
(NGL, China had me out here feeling like this for a hot minute)
Super-Capitalism Is That You?
And beyond my direct personal experience, there were other observations that may seem counterintuitive. For instance, at street level, there was a kind of vivacious, raw free market-ism unlike anything you can find in the West. An ever changing flurry of ramshackle stalls and street vendors. Don’t like the sweet cherries this shop has or the owner has a bad attitude? Then leave! There’s literally 7 other sellers of the same thing on this block alone. And it was like that for most food and daily household consumer products. I could observe market price discovery for goods fluctuating daily, in real-time, sometimes even by the hour.
When I lived above a particularly boisterous commercial street I once saw someone lease a storefront for six days, fill it with heavy traditional Chinese household furniture which I was told “had gotten lost from the factory.” They blew through the inventory starting with signs advertising 20% off on day one, which progressed to 95% off in their final 12 hours of operation. They sold everything so thoroughly that I suspect they probably even sold some stuff that didn’t belong to them like the fixtures that were already in the space when they moved in.
And then, not even two weeks later, 11 days later, the exact same location was reopened as a hotpot restaurant — everything, and I mean everything, had been redone, the floors, the walls, the installation of restaurant equipment, everything. The food was delicious, but I struggled to believe that the health or fire safety inspector had approved any of it, nor that they had real permits for anything they were doing.
Were there laws and regulations on the books ostensibly to control such wildcat commercial activity? Sure, but 天高皇帝远 heaven is high and the emperor is far away, as they say. Now understand that, at street level at least, this was happening everywhere across a city of 26 million people, and then again everywhere across a country of 1.4 billion people.
(Chinese street vendors: a nigh uncontrollable wild force)
By all indications, both felt and seen, people appeared to be fully free to do business and make money while wading in the warm waters of technological modernity. Perhaps they didn’t talk about politics, but that hardly seemed to matter and no one really seemed to care.
It was easy for me to come away feeling that China was a nation of laws rather than enforcement. Maoist austerity might be signaled outwardly but inside its an open, high-octane laissez-faire free-for-all. Conversely, my own cultural history in the US suggested a place of enforcement over law. Signaling egalitarian and meritocratic piety but running on an engine of apartheid justice system, state asset forfeiture, imminent domain, and mass poisoning from Iran-Contra to Seed Oils and OxyContin.
Irrespective of the deeper reality, nothing was ever actually supposed to feel authoritarian for me during my time in China.
So what of it then? Am I here to suggest that China is some Garden of Earthly Delights while Western ideals are a brazen sham? Not so, not so. Rather, my experience brings the realization that in an authoritarian system, it all depends on who you are. And further, that such divisions are central to the maintenance of authoritarian power. I find deep relevance in this, particularly in enabling us to more fully recognize authoritarianism wherever it exists — in China, in the US, or anywhere else. Let me share another story to illustrate.
September 2018. Xinjiang Provence.
Kashgar, Xinjiang Province. Dust and white heat. I am on a corporate boondoggle in the desert. A plus-one at a rival consulting firm’s Greater China Summit. Like Neo-liberal Wise Men, we galavant around on silk-laden camel-back, we visit the Potemkin village to congratulate ourselves on how well the local ethnics are living, we enjoy a Khan’s Kurultai of exotic roasted meats, red carpets in the sands, Oxbridge 30-under-30 Bedouins on the dunes — you could all but see the Harkonnen spice harvesters out in the distance…
And the whole time, we are all participating in a collective act of not-seeing the obvious police state all around us. Heavy roll gates, tire spikes, ID checks, mirrored undercarriage sweeps, and vehicle searches for the locals at every nexus of critical infrastructure — gas stations, hospitals, hotels, shopping centers. High-tech police convoys, armed foot patrols, and absurdities like bamboo-thin teenage paramilitary security guards in loose-fitting fatigues and fake Yeezys disinterestedly half-watching the public square while scrolling TikTok (called Douyin 抖音 there) on counterfeit iPhones behind their riot shields.
Out on the sands, I overhear a firm partner, a Westerner, marveling at the scale of the event wondering at what location could outdo this next year. I interject to suggest Pyongyang. He is not amused, but I certainly am. Later, just when I’m thinking I might be the only one noticing any of this, a tall Indian firm partner, a man built like rugby player, sensing that I was a company outsider (and therefor could potentially give honest answers) asks me what I think of “all of this” in a tone that immediately betrays his meaning.
“In China, I assume that wherever you can most see and feel the hand, is wherever the grip is also most tenuous,” I say. He nods in furrowed-browed approval and we leave it at that. A few months later, perhaps, the New York Times would chronicle this wild corporate exhibitionism in an absolute tear-down piece deeply critical of that firm’s (and all consulting firms) aiding and abetting of authoritarian regimes around the world...
In any case, the lamb roast is firing up and the evening’s next round of festivities are about begin. That’s what matters. Today was a good day in Kashgar
⚠️TRADE OFFER⚠️
This is how the machine works. Nothing is free. There was a near explicit trade being made. Those of us from the favored classes would ignore overhanded oppression of the disfavored out-groups and the sharper appendages of machine would ignore us in return.
Nestled snuggly in the pleasure garden of this CCP-approved social, economic, and educational elitism, wealthy Chinese and visiting Western globalists are supposed to come away believing that what others decry as harsh authoritarianism is in fact, quite benevolent, benign, enjoyable even. From there, it requires only the tiniest of logical jumps for them to assume that their experience is most representative of the greater whole in China, because surely this must be so, right?
From such a vantage then, it becomes all befuddled monocle popping, trembly-handed tea spilling, and frazzled, indigent top-hat ruffling while looking out on any dissenting and oppressed people and wondering “Why are they so loud?”
Incentivized by the plush velour “benefits of membership” in Chinese statism, it is easy to come to view protesting voices, those struggling for justice and freedom, as dunce-hat complainers, salty haters, red-faced and tear-strewn Wojaks, or simply spiteful, back-bitting losers whose problems with the system would evaporate in short order if they just learned to follow the rules, better themselves, and fix their aberrant cultures...
And well done then! This is what the authoritarian system wants, fundamentally NEEDS— to estrange you, through a compromise of comforts, from moral rightness and to replace that with the false rightness of naked self-interest on one hand, and the threat to absolute violence on the other. O, what machines we have made!
In China, those close enough to the system to experience it as a warm embrace rather than an icy dagger are supposed to understand that it is the Uyghurs struggling against mass detention and cultural erasure who are in the wrong. Similarly, for those thusly appointed in the US, it is supposed to be all but self-evident that the same goes for African Americans struggling against mass incarceration and open-air summary executions by uniformed agents of the state.
To the authoritarian all such trouble-making peoples need to be corralled, controlled, and if required, crushed — but in the short run, they need your help to do it. It will always be done in the name of some manner of “social harmony” their doublespeak for the ossification of the status quo and the authoritarian’s power along with it.
In this world, the in-group, the favored classes, whoever they may be, by whatever lines such distinctions are drawn — class, race, sex, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation — are led to believe they are safe as the authoritarian’s well-loved and much needed allies. But in the end, in the long run, it is the biggest rugpull of all. In such a system, all are Santiago’s sheep, to be meat for the slaughter in times of need.
So how does it feel, Western Anon? What people does our system eat to ensure that you may be comfortably overfed?
And so we become attenuated to such things in so much as we are benefiting from them. Or least, we believe that we are benefiting from them. In our age of the hungry ghost nation-state, it is so very easy to look past the true nature of the thing, or even to buy into it and to project it, when it is not YOU being targeted.
But understand. This is no benevolence. That you are not being targeted — for now, today — is an active, calculated, and entirely self-interested decision on the part of the authoritarian power structure. It is nothing that can be counted on. And whether you realize it or not, it is a decision that is reassessed at every interaction. If nothing else, the pandemic has shown us all this in the starkest relief.
If you are allowed to persist in a state where you may believe that all is well, that the thing is benevolent and here to help you, it is only because it is more useful to the animal for you to remain asleep. Understand this, and ask your self — why?
And what is authoritarianism then? Fundamentally, I’ve come to understand authoritarianism as something like the grand political end-point of force. The might-equals-right heuristic at civilization scale. It is the ever-present implicit threat that going against some Big Man’s arbitrary diktat will result in violence, be its physical, economic, social or otherwise, being levied against you to bring you to heel. It is that mindless power which flows from the barrel of a gun…when you have the gun and others do not. It is the system of rulers unbounded from rules.
What We Must Fight
As bitcoiners, this is what we fight. In all its forms, wherever it exists. We must recognize that ALL authoritarian systems and their operators, irrespective of any apparent, surface level ideological conflicts, are in fact like brothers, arms interlocked, in the maintenance of global authoritarianism itself. The principle struggle of the new century is the people against their own governments the world over, rather than the peoples of one nation or group against those of another nation or group. Though do not put it past our current political helmsmen (and women!) to try to steer us all in that dismal direction as a means for distraction that serves their self-preservation.
Bitcoin provides a potentially very powerful tool to the people in this epochal struggle. Bitcoin enshrines a new self-evident and inalienable right — the right of every individual to be an economic actor on a fair monetary protocol. At scale, this moderates the state’s capacity to perpetrate financial violence against both the individual and the collective. With bitcoin, no one is illegal. The protocol imposes no requirements and demands no allegiances, all may transact freely, always.
Value, once obtained in bitcoin, if held securely, cannot be seized. Nor can it be stolen through the occult dark arts of currency debasement. With bitcoin the individual is empowered — able to passively opt out of a predatory financial system, able to move their wealth across borders without restriction, able to actively resist an unjust government free from the threat of total definancialization — and all are welcome.
But bitcoin is just a tool, and just one of many. Fundamentally, the people are the movement and the movement is the change. We must never forget this. We must be both active and steadfast in building the futures we want to live in. Bitcoin is just a tool, but if we use it, perhaps we can one day have freedom — without anyone's authoritarian "characteristics" this time, but perhaps still with 30% more beef.
~Moon
As always thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed! In case you missed them, be sure to check out Journey Into Bitcoin 01, 02, and 03. Always more to come soon!
Follow me on twitter: Michaelyouknow
Postscript
In the spirit of inter/multi-disciplinary bitconery, here are a few top notch recommendations that to me are related to elements in this piece.
Music: Something In The Way of Things (In Town), The Roots; Bulls on Parade, Rage Against the Machine; Who Will Survive in America, Kanye West
Movies: Four Hours in My Lai (1989)
Readings: City of Silence, Ma Boyang; Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret, The New Yorker
Use The Tools
Liberate your education:
libgen.is — Most books today exist on the internet, for free
Archive Today — Information wants to be free. Too much of it today sits behind absurdly extractive paywalls. (Bitcoin lightning payments can resolve this for both content users and producers)
Liberate you food: The Beef Initiative — Trade real, honest money for real, honest food
Liberate your security: DEFCAD— May you never need them but always know what tools are there