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cloud vs land code vs kings internet vs china memes vs genes network vs state mobile vs sessile digital vs physical founder vs emperor technology vs politics individual vs collective capitalism vs socialism bottom-up vs top-down decentralized vs centralized internationalism vs nationalism The Origins of Political Order by @FukuyamaFrancis talks about the difference between the Chinese and Indian traditions. To oversimplify, China was state above law and India was law above state. (1) The Chinese took the pragmatic attitude that the emperor was all powerful, so no written law would limit him. But the mountains were high, and the emperor was far away, so he faced practical constraints rather than legal constraints. (2) The Indians took the opposite stance. The princes of the subcontinent believed they wouldn’t get reincarnated if they violated dharmic law. The Western equivalent would be the god-fearing man. (3) So in India, the law was above the state. And in China, the state was above the law. These traditions had their faults, but they were comparably successful in one key regard: they built and maintained the earth’s two largest populations over thousands of years. (4) And we see these two traditions echoed today as we contrast China and the Internet. In today’s China, there are seemingly no legal limits on what the state can do. Your chair can turn into a party officer, like Agent Smith from the Matrix, if the state wills it. And thanks to AI, there are no longer many practical limits either. For a Chinese citizen, the mountains are never too high and the emperor is never far away. This total centralized control makes China formidable in the physical world. They are perhaps the most physically formidable power to ever exist, with one billion people coordinated via a nation-state-network metaorganism that just cranks out the cars, ships, phones, and drones by the million. (5) But digital power matters too. And that lies with the global Internet, which is the one thing that has economic scale comparable to China. If modern China is state above law, then the Internet is a law above states. Its code-based order constrains any prince. For example, Bukele respects Bitcoin, and abides by its laws. Smart contracts irrevocably bind both signatories. Digital identity becomes primary. And cryptography becomes the law above you and me. (6) So in a deep sense, China vs the Internet is CCP vs BTC. It is the all-powerful state vs the unbreakable law. It is a different version of last century’s conflict between communism and capitalism, though one observes it is once again a conflict between Eurasian communists and Anglospheric capitalists. Will the state be stronger than the law, or the law stronger than the state?