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The deep point is: the Internet is not the same as America. Every graph shows that the Internet is economically competitive. But America minus the Internet is not. All the green shoots, all the remaining optimism really comes from the Internet. It’s AI, robotics, drones. It’s people building things and working together and doing well. Unfortunately, much of the non-Internet US economy is not like that. Since the 2008 financial crisis, many non-Internet companies have gradually become zombies, dependent on Fed printing and state intervention both directly and indirectly. The Internet is as American as America was British. America started out British but became 10X bigger. Similarly, the Internet started out American but is now 10X bigger. So, it is version 3.0. A scion that exceeds even the achievement of its august progenitor. As you go from British common law to the American constitution to Internet encryption, you get stronger protections on freedom of speech. And the actual battle over freedom of speech over the last decade wasn’t actually waged over the First Amendment (whose text remained unchanged) but over how Internet services would in practice moderate the speech of billions, most of whom were not American. That was really a struggle at the level of the international network, as opposed to the nation state. The Internet is indeed ideologically descended from American libertarianism (and progressivism). But demographically, it has very heavy influence from Asian Americans as well as Asia in general. And from all the other demographics that preponderate in tech, from Persians to Eastern Europeans. From your list: Russians (Yandex, Vkontakt, Telegram) and Chinese (both diasporic and PRC) have had an enormous influence on the Internet, arguably more than the British in recent years. The Dutch did via ASML but not Internet services. That is exactly it. The Internet is a cloud continent. It’s comparable to the discovery of the New World in its impact on the Old World, as it reopens the frontier. I talk about this in https://t.co/u3tYzMxbzh. https://t.co/rLO8jhVyVS