Intensely curious about the future of cities and the planetary era. Focused on emergent cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Co-building Utopia.
San Francisco, CA
Joined May 2009
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"Breakneck begins with a bike ride I took from Guiyang to Chongqing in 2021. China’s fourth-poorest province, I was delighted to find, has much better infrastructure than California or New York, both wealthier by orders of magnitude."
danwang.co
This will transform the Majority World.
The Western ruling class considers China's technological development to be a threat because it undermines a core tenet of the imperial arrangement.
Here's how it works. The states and firms of the imperial core actively seek to prevent sovereign technological development in the global South, while establishing monopoly control over necessary technologies (capital goods, medicines, computers, etc, etc).
This forces the South into a position of dependency, such that they are compelled to export large quantities of (cheapened) industrial and agricultural goods to the core in order to pay for necessary imports.
The result is a massive net flow of material wealth from periphery to core that sustains high levels of material consumption in places like the US and Europe, overwhelmingly to the benefit of their ruling classes. And the core's technology firms enjoy monopoly profits.
But China's technological development is beginning to break Western monopolies, and may give developing countries alternative suppliers for necessary goods at more affordable prices. This poses a fundamental challenge to the imperial arrangement, and the net flow of goods - and profits - that the core enjoys.
The core states will not let this happen easily. All the US saber-rattling against China's development is *not* because China poses a military threat to the territorial United States (it does not), but because it poses a threat to imperial capital.
“Our civilization is cruel and savage.”
The west is a dystopian wasteland of moral degeneracy.
Usually when you hear a white person talk about moral decay it's some wingnut denouncing LGBTQ rights or women's reproductive rights or whatever, but that's not what I mean. I'm talking about real things here.
The real moral decay of our society is illustrated in the way all mainstream political candidates can openly support war crimes currently being inflicted on people in the global south without being immediately removed from power. The way monstrous war criminals of past administrations can endorse a liberal candidate without causing self-proclaimed progressives to recoil from that candidate in horror. The way you can have the two viable candidates for the world's most powerful elected position both pledge to continue an active genocide without instantly sparking a revolution.
The moral degeneracy of this civilization looks like living lives of relative comfort built on the backs of workers in the global south whose labor and resources are extracted from their nations at profoundly exploitative rates, while raining military explosives on impoverished populations who dare to disobey the dictates of our government, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, and acting like this is all fine and normal.
Being born into western civilization is like waking up in the middle of a massive lynch mob. Something terrible is happening, and everyone's going along with it and telling you it's fine and it's normal, and even if you're able to figure out that what they're doing is wrong in all the chaos and confusion you find yourself powerless to stop them, because the whole thing has so much momentum already and there are far too many people blindly caught up in the frenzy of bloodlust for you to make everyone change course. Even just continuing to live among them makes you complicit in their actions in many ways, but you have nowhere else to go besides this lynch mob town you were born into. So you just move to the fringes of the mob and share your objections with the few people who will listen to you.
Our civilization is cruel and savage, but we compartmentalize away from its cruelty and savagery and laugh at our sitcoms and vapid comedians and make believe the worst things happening politically in our society are the mainstream culture war wedge issues that pundits and politicians prefer to keep us talking about. We live out our lives sedated by entertainment and social media and food and pharmaceuticals while genocide, nuclear brinkmanship and ecocide unfold all around us, thinking ourselves good and virtuous if we are kind to our pets and hold the correct opinions about racial justice and vaccines.
If we as a society were actually good, none of this would be happening. Moral clarity would find all this intolerable, and would reject it and eject it by any means necessary. Which is why the powerful pour so much energy into keeping us all sedated and confused. A lot of power and wealth rides on our lack of moral clarity.
There is much wealth to be gained by exploiting labor and extracting resources around the world. There is much power to be secured by murdering, starving and terrorizing any population which refuses to bow to the interests of the western empire. This is why the western empire has the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever devised: because so much wealth and power depends on ensuring the west remains in a state of moral degeneracy, and that westerners do not regard the citizenry of the global south as fully human.
I personally reject religion, not because I'm some fedora-wearing wanker who makes fun of people for believing in God, but because I reject all aspects of the profoundly sick culture I was born into. Because I don't resonate with religion I often feel myself pulling away from religious-sounding jargon framing the actions of the western empire as "demonic" or calling the US "the great Satan" — but at the same time I completely understand it. When I see the inside of a child's skull for the hundredth time next to video footage of IDF soldiers mockingly dressed in the clothes of dead or displaced Palestinian women and playing with the toys of dead or displaced children while western podium pontiffs pretend to believe the military they're arming has done nothing wrong, I do struggle to find adjectives strong enough to describe what I am looking at. Maybe "demonic" is as close as you can get, even if you don't believe in actual biblical demons.
That's what I'm talking about when I say the west is a wasteland of moral degeneracy. The type of civilization which would allow its government to do things like this necessarily has a collective conscience that has been so warped and twisted by propaganda and self-interest that it's the same as not having a conscience at all. If you can't regard the vast majority of the population of this planet as fully human and equal to yourself, then morally speaking you're no better than the perpetrators of slavery and genocide we've been taught to judge negatively in history class.
And that's the norm here. It's what we were born into. It's what we spend all our lives being trained to accept as normal.
Jonathan Hursh retweeted
The Orwellian language of calling "humanitarian" a pause to vaccinate kids against polio in Gaza when they'll resume killing and displacing them in their sick version of Hunger Games immediately afterwards...
"While Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income."
This fascinating Nature study (link in the bottom) by @jasonhickel and others should destroy for ever the myth that workers in the Global South "steal jobs" at the expense of the Global North.
They find an astonishing metric that "while Southern workers contribute 90% of the labour that powers the world economy, they receive only 21% of global income."
Meaning of course that the lifestyle of the North is subsidized by the work of the South: if we lived in a fair world, those contributing 90% of the labor should theoretically receive 90% of the income, not 21%... Concretely, the study calculates that "an extra 826 billion hours of Southern labour [the equivalent to 369 million workers] is effectively appended to Northern economies as invisible “ghost workers”, [which is] more than the total workforce of the United States and the European Union combined".
And before I hear you say "yes but it's all low skilled labor", that's not true at all. As per the study, "the South contributed the majority of labour across all skill levels: 76% of all high-skilled labour, 91% of medium-skilled labour and 96% of low-skilled labour". In fact, astonishingly: "the South now contributes more high-skilled labour to the world economy than all the high-, medium- and low-skilled labour contributions of the global North combined."
You could also say "yes but it's just a temporary situation: as global South countries develop they'll progressively become like the North", but that's precisely what this study shows is impossible because "the North’s development model relies on appropriation from elsewhere".
This implies two things: 1) the North has no incentive for the South to develop because their very model depends on appropriation from the South and 2) the South can't develop like the North because they have no South of their own to exploit. They need to find their own model that doesn't rely on exploitation, akin to China who developed with their own workers (and is progressively using more and more robots as its workforce gains in skills).
Also, the South catching up with the North is not the direction at all, except for some rare exceptions. The studies shows that, on average, "wages of Southern workers are 83–98% lower for work of equal skill within the same sector" and these wage gaps "have increased substantially over time, across all skill levels and all sectors, indicating a steady increase in absolute North–South income inequality".
So what's the solution? The study concludes that "development and poverty eradication, and any plausible trajectory for reducing global inequality, requires a shift in the balance of power between North and South, such that the latter is able to reclaim its productive capacities to meet human needs. Toward this end, international wage floors and minimum resource prices could help reduce price inequalities and limit value transfers. Ending unequal exchange will also require ending structural adjustment conditions on finance, and democratising the institutions of global economic governance, so that global South governments are free to use industrial, fiscal and monetary policy to pursue sovereign development and reduce their dependency on Northern capital. Such reforms are unlikely to be handed down from above, however. It will require a political struggle for national self-determination and economic sovereignty similar in scope to the anti-colonial movement of the 20th century."
Link to the study: nature.com/articles/s41467-0…
"I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war — it was annihilation" latimes.com/opinion/story/20…
Niamey has a small population of 1.5 million today. By the end of the century, it will become the world's seventh largest city with 56 million people.
The median age in Niger today is 14.9 years.
Jonathan Hursh retweeted
I wrote about the genocide in Palestine, and how tech has been silent and complicit.
blog.paulbiggar.com/i-cant-s…
We might look back at this as the moment when the world finally broke free from the entrancement to the Eurocentric system that’s dominated us the last 400 years — a system that’s been woefully limited but has told us it’s everything.
Jonathan Hursh retweeted
Very important thread by Graham Allison - the legendary Harvard professor who coined the "Thucydides trap" - where he lambasts "the current demonization of China".
He says he is "convinced that the current demonization of China confuses more than it clarifies" because the result is that "Americans [do not] understand our competitor as it is".
He gives as an illustration of this demonization effort the recent utterly ridiculous - and anonymous! - Politico piece (politico.eu/article/chinas-p…) that claims that "China’s Xi goes full Stalin with purge", which is filled with demonstrable falsehoods and fear-mongering fabulations (some of which Allison lists in his thread).
I've myself written on this very topic dozens of times: there is an absolutely IMMENSE gap between the China depicted in the media and the reality, so much so that most people outside China have almost zero understanding of the country. The China they have in their mind is a mirage that bears almost no ressemblance to reality.
Why? Why do we systematically see coverage like this Politico piece on China? Why here on Twitter are accounts like @songpinganq, @WallStreetSilv or @jenniferzeng97 that systematically peddle fake news on China so popular? Or Serpentza and Laowhy86 on Youtube?
I think a lot of it has to do with human nature, we kind of need a "bad place" to feel reassured we live in the "good place". So we're naturally attracted to stories that confirm this. And given the fact that China is so unknown to people to begin with, they have no intellectual baggage that enables them to understand they're fed nonsense. And if you add racism bias on top of it - the infamous "yellow peril" - it makes it even easier for people to believe the wildest stuff.
Also, it has to be said, there's a whole industry out there of people paid to write negative stuff on China. You have your anti-communist organizations (like the "Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation"), your think tanks funded by the US State Department and the weapons industry (like ASPI), your various separatist and dissident movements funded by Washington to try to destabilize China, your "human rights" organizations that have been so weaponized they actually harm human rights, and so on and so forth. And all their content - each for their own purpose - participates to this great demonization effort.
But I think it's also much deeper than this. For literally thousands of years proselytism - the notion that we have such superior values and beliefs that we need to convert others to them - has been foundational to our culture. We're programmed to absolutely loath difference, so much so that we need to erase it. We're led to believe we "celebrate difference" but we only celebrate the very artificial differences within our societies, differences between people who essentially buy into common beliefs and values. As soon as we encounter actual meaningful difference - which in the case of China is extremely profound - we find it absolutely intolerable.
Which by the way is quite unique to our culture: to my knowledge, no culture in Asia thinks this way for instance. In fact the very notion that a foreigner could be converted to become Chinese, Japanese, or Vietnamese is not even comprehensible in these countries. To them foreigners aren't inferior or superior, but they're different, and that's ok... there's no need to go around the world to try and convert them to adopt "socialism with Chinese characteristics" or start celebrating the Moon festival. To us it's very much not ok: if someone doesn't buy into whatever our set of beliefs and values is at a given time (it used to be Christianism, now it's liberalism) they ARE inferior, deemed "oppressed" and in need of "liberation"...
All this didn't harm us much when we were superior technologically and economically because we could afford to not understand others. In fact it was even helpful: it provided an ideological basis for our subjugation of the rest of the world. We didn't do it to exploit them for our selfish interests or to appropriate their resources but to "liberate" them...
But today, as Allison rightly points out, this kind of thinking actively harms the West. We cannot anymore subjugate countries like China, they've become our peers in all respects: technologically, economically, militarily, etc. So to coexist and compete it is now vital that we "understand them as they are" to take Allison's formulation. Because they certainly do: hundreds of thousands of Chinese students have gone to study in the West every year for decades whereas the US estimates there are currently only 211 American students in China (scmp.com/news/china/article/…), which is insane! This places China at an immense competitive advantage: they understand the West intimately whereas we don't understand China, at all.
Very concretely it means that whenever we make a decision that relates to China, our decision is likely to be completely inappropriate because informed by a miraged notion of China and made by people who just don't get the country. Examples abound: the recent semiconductors sanctions is a good one. Made for the purpose of stifling China's technological development it has resulted in giving it an unprecedented boost.
This transition to humbleness, accepting others and their difference, stop vilifying and demonizing them but instead seek to understand them will be exceedingly hard. Frankly, I think that it's all so deeply rooted that we're incapable of it. But it is nonetheless absolutely vital, because if we persevere we will isolate and eventually destroy ourselves.
Jonathan Hursh retweeted
Almost 42% of children. Again: almost 42% of children!!!
If that doesn't revulse you and convince you this has to stop NOW and forever, you have COMPLETELY lost the plot. It's unjustifiable and undefendable.
Eternal shame on those who attempt to defend, enable or support this.
Jonathan Hursh retweeted
Some much-needed incredibly good news: telegraph.co.uk/business/202…
"China’s carbon emissions have either peaked already or will do this winter, 7 years ahead of schedule... The country’s target of net zero by 2060 is likely to be achieved a decade earlier than previously assumed, and perhaps earlier than in Europe."
Xi has committed to transform China into an "ecological civilization" and he's delivering like no other country on earth. As the article points out, "he was green long before it became fashionable" (reminding that he was already advocating for green transition 20 years ago) and China is transforming on a "scale [that] is staggering": "China accounts for 60% of all new solar and wind power being installed across the world this year". Just in solar the country will add 210 GW of capacity this year alone, which is "twice the entire solar capacity installed in the US to date" 🤯
You'd have been laughed out of the room for saying this even 10 years ago but it's now crystal clear that China is leading the world in our common fight against climate change. Which frankly actually worries me because I wouldn't be surprised if China's position of leadership led to increasing climate change denialism by petty populists in the West, with arguments of the type "this climate change thing is a Chinese hoax to make us dependent on them"... when the truth is simply that we're much less competent and slower in leading the necessary transition...
Jonathan Hursh retweeted
Fifteen things you should never have to say to a country:
1. Stop bombing children.
2. Don't kill journalists.
3. Don't bomb hospitals.
4. Don't shoot patients through their hospital window.
5. Don't drive bulldozers over dead bodies.
6. Don't bomb ambulances.
7. Don't do ethnic cleansing.
8. Don't call humans animals.
9. Don't starve people.
10. Don't cut off people's water.
11. Don't cut off the electricity at hospitals, killing their ICU and NICU patients.
12. Don't bomb doctors.
13. Don't bomb UN staff.
14. Don't do apartheid.
15. Stop lying constantly.
Jonathan Hursh retweeted
How is ending a massacre of Palestinians even subject to a debate? What kind of sick world have we become?
"The market value of the biggest US weapons manufacturers increased by over 23 billion $ after the 7th of October."
In less than 2 minutes, the representative for the State of Palestine at the UN, eviscerates the entire myth of Western "civilization" under the US Military Industrial Complex. This should be mandatory viewing in schools and universities throughout the Western world, if we do want to learn about upholding human rights, before we even begin to preach them to others.