When People Can Afford to Be Particular
Field notes on abundance, new organisations, and the things people actually want.
Culture
The Cutting Floor.
Notes, fragments, and signals from a world entering maintenance.
Recent essays
30 of 86Industrial parks for companies of one
12 November 2026 — China is building industrial parks for companies of one
When the Future Becomes a Subculture
A heuristic I’m testing.
What the Pastry Maker Chose to Pass On
In August, Lu Xiaoxing explained to a Shanghai reporter how to tell when a machine has spoiled a rice cake.
What can still be brought into the world before the doors close?
An extraordinary day in Venice.
The Gulf Outside the Gulf
When a country can earn beyond its territory, what must it keep faith with at home?
The Antichrist Has a Balance Sheet
Peter Thiel fears the universal machinery of control. He has helped build some of its most important components.
The Right to Be Wrong
Every successful revolution eventually meets the people it has taught to disobey.
The bargain behind industrial power
Why industrial strength does not automatically produce a regional order
What Chinese lives are emerging?
Posting a raw clip from my morning brain exercise with Kazu.
当中国本身成为一个世界
Chinese version of when China becomes a world with a slightly different take
When China Becomes a World
Wang Gungwu once identified two decisions as among the most consequential in modern Chinese history.
The Builders Are Thinking
I began with what seemed like a generous formulation.
China, the Lossy Republic
Two signals crossed this morning.
A Republic Capable of Betrayal
Development creates a class the next development must betray
KILL YOUR DARLINGS
A migration between old and new civilisations
The Race After AGI
Two machine republics—and everyone else
What Became of the Asian Century?
How China Changed the Price of Modernity
Our oldest technologies
New intelligence may not require entirely new wisdom.
A Wallet Is Not Sovereignty. Continuity Is.
The machine economy is acquiring metabolism, memory and kill switches before we have decided what kind of actors its machines are.
Who Owns What China Builds?
Old China Borrowed From the Household
Something to Lose
The machine may acquire an outside before it acquires an inside
When the Ladders Start Building One Another
Why do some economies suddenly seem to become good at many things at once?
The Petro-Compute Dollar
America may lose the rent and keep the currency
China Outside China
Who gets to build the Chinese world after the rise?
When Failure Becomes a Business Model
Who owns what replaces government?
Does the sea know my name?
Five imagined rounds with Ross Douthat, David Zindell, Kazu and Zhuangzi
How Civilizations Digest the Future
Homer, Buddhism, Japan, and the strange forms born from cheap intelligence
The Machine Answered Too Easily
A savage dialogue before the Second Axial Age
The human does not disappear
The Second Axial Age could therefore be post-anthropocentric without being anti-human.