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Towards the New York City Network State?! Mamdani has still unfortunately declared himself the tribal enemy of many of my colleagues, but one has to be bullish on him as the future of the Democrats after this. He’s a live player who can jettison democratic socialists for venture capitalists in one week — and rise to power on abolishing the police while then very publicly embracing the police. Like Trump, the man is not really ideological. He can pivot, he’s smart. This is a real problem for the Republicans. Along with Xi overseas, Mamdani’s faction of immigrant strivers represents an IQ bailout for otherwise mathless American wokes. After all, it doesn’t actually matter how Mamdani’s check to a quantum lab is written. In order to overcome his party’s reflexive anti-tech, pro-state orientation he had to emphasize at least one part of this initiative, which was the statism. Talking up the (arguably real) benefits to the public thus blesses a quasi-venture-capitalist action as democratic socialism, a sort of Dengist maneuver in which communism becomes capitalism through sufficient legalism, lip service, and legerdemain. It’s similar to how Trump justifies state venture capitalism through nationalist rhetoric. MAGA has an understandable skepticism of the centralized state, but anything that invokes nationalism (or national security) can mollify that skepticism. And yeah, one can talk about price discovery, and who knows if this $30M investment was market or whatever. The point is that the most important Democrat in America is taking an action which is NOT anti-tech, and is indeed pro-tech. If this continues, only the most retrograde, reactionary Democrats will remain anti-tech. I mean, look…if one must pipe some NYC budget into quantum mechanics at NYU instead of syringe-distribution at NGOs in order to keep blues in the style to which they are accustomed, so be it. Basically, what Mamdani is doing here is very similar to Trump’s sovereign stake in Intel, or any sovereign fund’s for that matter. At a structural level, we’re seeing the network (meaning tech, meaning the Internet) fuse with the legacy state. Yes, Trump’s Intel stake represents a right-coded variant, while Mamdani’s stake in quantum computing is left-coded, but the outcome is the same: the network state. Blue cat, red cat, doesn’t matter if it advances tech.