News from the Collective

Insatiable. Technology had become a sun around which all life orbited, pulling everyone into its gravitational field. The draw towards scrolling became all too strong.

While computation was once thought of as something separate, confined to discrete machines and local networks, it had since metastasized into the stack.  This totalizing planetary infrastructure stretched from buried fiber optic cables to mobile apps and orbital satellites, embedding itself into every facet of human existence. For those in power, each new server added was a step toward humanity’s great leap into an era of unlimited potential. A world of interconnected minds, ideas, and systems, all functioning as a singular brain. This was the age of Accelerated Techno-Optimism. In the 21st century, a deplorable cabal of tech magnates rose, led by figures like Thiel, Musk and Zuck, who had turned data into the lifeblood of modern civilization. With greed induced optimism, they proclaimed the coming of a “Singularity,” a utopia of artificial intelligence and infinite computation. Projects like AI-driven megacities, space colonies and cybernetic brain implants became the hallmarks of their era, promising to eradicate inefficiency and elevate human potential. 

The number of data centres grew exponentially and the temperatures in the Cloud rose. The hunger of the centres began to rival the needs of nations. Rivers were drained, forests cleared, and the air thickened with heat as data centers devoured the planet’s resources. 

The first tremor of collapse came in the form of the Microsoft meltdown of 2024. Eight and a half million systems went dark. A financial toll of $10 billion, as screens across the globe turned a haunting Pantone 2995 C – “blue screens of death.” It was like a looming tsunami. Panic erupted, most notably at airports, where employees, now cut off from the digital lifeblood, had to revert to pen and paper to issue tickets. The failure attacked the very architecture of a society built on seamless, automated systems. 

The second tremor was political. The U.S. government’s TikTok ban, set for January 19, 2025, sent users into a hysteria. In the days leading up to it, they scrambled to preserve their lives – archiving favorite videos, rallying in protest, and, when resistance proved futile, saying their final goodbyes. When the ban finally hit, millions were uprooted, giving rise to a wave of “TikTok refugees.” Meanwhile, outside the U.S., opportunists seized the moment. Hours of scrolling footage were sold at outrageous prices and black-market phones preloaded with TikTok clips became luxury items. It was “our age’s Prohibition”. Though the ban was driven more by fears of Chinese espionage than any genuine desire to save humanity (and despite lasting only a few hours), it proved something important: escaping the platform was possible and there was, in fact, an alternative. A world beyond the scroll. 

The backlash began as murmurs of dissent. Activists and environmentalists were dismissed as “neo-Luddites,” unwilling to embrace progress. Yet, as droughts intensified, oceans surged and technofeudalism tightened its grip, dissent grew into rebellion. Sloptimism had turned to carnage as our overindulgence imploded. In the shadow of these collapses, humanity turned against the digital monoliths. Screens, once the omnipresent windows into life itself, became symbols of oppression. The data centres were torn down, “relics of innovation” smashed and burned in uprisings that swept across continents. The tech oligarchs, once worshipped as visionaries, were cast as villains in the new narrative. Stripped of their utopian promises, they were left scrambling for refuge: Musk went for the stars; Zuck clutched his Meta Quest VR headset and escaped to his million dollar doomsday bunker in Hawaii; Thiel retreated into his cryonics chamber ; Sam Altman, using the last computing power of the 21st century, asked ChatGPT “How to survive the apocalypse?” But they all learned too late that no prompt could undo the damage, no algorithm could outthink collapse, and no amount of wealth could buy a way back to the world they had helped destroy. Sanctuary was found in the total eradication of that which had led to this collapse. The urge to scroll, however, remained…  

As the ashes of the digital age settled, civilization regressed into an austere primitivism, rejecting technology in all its forms. Digital memories were erased, and screens were dismantled. Yet, amid this purge, a secretive group of archivists risked everything to preserve fragments of what had been. Inspired by an instinctual belief that future generations might one day understand and learn from the past, they undertook an unlikely mission: to preserve TikToks. To evade the watchful eyes of the new regime, they transcribed them into biblesque books, condensing the infinite sprawl of shitposting into pages bound in ink and paper. The Codices carried within them the spirit of the digital epoch, capturing its absurdity, its beauty, and its excess. 

Yet the Codices were not mere replicas of the original TikToks. Where the digital videos had been ephemeral, algorithmically curated, and infinitely scrollable, the Flipbooks were static, tactile, and finite. Gone were the predatory loops of engagement, doomscroll, the chaos of comment sections. In their place: sequences frozen in time, dances flattened to ink strokes, viral trends fossilized like insects in amber. They transformed disposable content into something ritualized, intentional, even sacred. 

Millennia later, long after the screenless societies had forgotten the techno-obsession of the past, the Flipbook Codices were unearthed. To the discoverers, they were baffling artifacts. A dance of images moving in alien ways. As they studied these relics, they pieced together the fragments of what they were seeing, rekindling questions of what humanity had gained and lost in the name of progress. A secret obsession began. Replication and ritualization followed, the books becoming the foundation for new rites and iconography. They became canonized as the Testament of the Flickering Scrolls.

“Testament of the Flickering Scrolls” is a TikTok archiving project by Maja Mikulsa, Meabh O’Halloran and August Sundgaard. Framed within a speculative post-apocalyptic scenario where civilization has rejected contemporary technology, we position ourselves as monastics, preserving remnants of the past (now present) civilization by transcribing TikToks into flipbooks. Through this process, the project seeks to reflect on contemporary knowledge production, the materiality of the virtual, and the question: what went wrong?

1 Bratton, Benjamin H. The stack: On software and sovereignty. MIT press, 2016.

2 Andreessen, Marc. 2023. “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). October 16, 2023. https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/.

3 “Technological Singularity,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

4 “How Saudi Arabia’s AI-Powered NEOM Megacity Will Actually Be Built.” WIRED Middle East. April 21, 2021. https://wired.me/technology/how-saudi-arabias-ai-powered-neom-megacity-will-actually-be-built/.

5 “SpaceX Mars Colonization Program,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Mars_colonization_program

6 “Neuralink,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuralink. 

7 2024 CrowdStrike-related IT outages.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed February 8, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_outages.

8 Yilek, Caitlin. “Preloaded Phones with TikTok Are Being Sold Online, Despite Potential U.S. Ban, Trump’s Opposition.” CBS News. April 25, 2024. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-ban-phones-devices-preloaded-ebay-trump/.

9“Neo-Luddism.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified [date of last modification]. Accessed February 8, 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Luddism. 

10 Varoufakis, Y. (2024). Technofeudalism: What killed capitalism. Melville House. 

11 Swinhoe, Dan. “Data Center in Columbus, Ohio Evacuated After Bomb Scare Hoax.” Data Center Dynamics. October 19, 2021. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/data-center-in-columbus-ohio-evacuated-after-bomb-scare-hoax/.

12 Scrimgeour, Guthrie. “Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Top-Secret Hawaii Compound.” WIRED, December 13, 2023. https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-inside-hawaii-compound/. 

13 Mollman, Steve. “Peter Thiel’s Quest for Immortality: Inside the Billionaire’s Pursuit of Anti-Aging Technology.” Fortune, May 4, 2023. https://fortune.com/2023/05/04/peter-thiel-cryonics-cryogenically-frozen-death-anti-aging-health/. 

Los Angeles, March 24, 2025

Dear Geert,

Greetings from the Formerly United States of America. It’s almost impossible to understand what’s going on day to day here, and to explain it to old friends in Europe harder still, but I’ll try. We are not even ten weeks in, but Trump’s resurgent administration has drawn from on-again off-again advisor (and convicted & pardoned felon) Steve Bannon’s experience as a keyboard warrior, and flooded the zone with so much shit that the opening months of version 2.0 staggered even those of us who fully expected the worst. Much has been made of the right wing game plan that is Project 2025, but almost no one discusses it as an augur not for the 21^st century, but rather as a reflection on the 20th. Which is to say, Project 2025 wants to return the US to 1925.

The United States in the 1920s had survived a terrible global pandemic (known here as the Spanish influenza), and was run by Republicans like Calvin Coolidge and Warren Harding. Both were both avid protectionists in favor of tariffs and isolationism, both were staunch in their opposition to taxes and to regulations. The automobile tycoon and world- famous entrepreneur Henry Ford purchased The Dearborn Independent newspaper to spread his theories of capitalism and antisemitism to as many fellow citizens as he could. The Johnson-Reed Act established a national origins quota system based on the census of 1890 and barred almost all immigration from Asia (the act and its restrictions stood for forty years). 1925 was the year of the Scopes trial (made famous by the play, Inherit the Wind) and was emblematic of the attack on educators for teaching unpopular theories. In 1925, it was not critical race theory, but instead the theory of evolution that challenged prevailing orthodoxies. Historical parallelism is interesting but not always productive, and the fact that the 1920s ended in a world-wide depression that led to the first truly global conflict may mean less than the fact that the present crisis is driven by opposition to the solution the 1930s offered to the 1920s, the New Deal, which moved America closer to a social safety net and real regulation of “survival of the fittest” capitalism (the only Darwinian theory that the right seems to fully embrace).

But back to the present: the last few weeks have overwhelmed people’s capacities for empathy, much less understanding: for a week one expresses a deep concern about the defunding of science; this is followed by grief over the abandonment of Ukraine amidst a sense that 80 years of US alliances was being abandoned for…what?; no time to think about that anymore, as the anguish about the unlawful deportations of immigrants to hellish Salvadorian prisons morphs into dread that the administration’s defiance of court orders will bring on a full-blown constitutional crisis. Then, as an academic, I feel existential anxiety about the attack on American higher education—an attack that can literally strip billions in funding from what just a few weeks ago was considered one of the country’s bulwarks of excellence.

All of this has been happening with, and been supported by, a staggering explosion of meanness. Rage and fury are one thing, but this pervasive meanness embodies a smallness of spirit that circles around spite and acts of petty retribution. A full third of the American people are coming across as not just angry, but “nasty,” to reclaim one of the words Trump uses to define his enemies. Politicos, the chattering classes, intellectuals, assorted liberals, left-wingers and anyone else who opposes what’s happening right now have got to accept that Trump is not stupid. He may have no interest in history, politics, or aesthetics (to name just three realms of knowledge), but he does have a genius for ferreting out what will keep him in the spotlight and how to translate that attention into support and thereby power. He intuits rather than cogitates, but in this he exhibits what Aldous Huxley identified decades ago as post-verbal knowing. His MAGA movement runs on the “feels.” It’s hard to tell how much this aspect of the American experience right now is exceptional, but in this country celebrity has replaced charisma as the central magic of totalitarianism. It’s not that Max Weber and Hannah Arendt were wrong about Mussolini, Hitler and Mao, so much that charisma means less in an era of spectacle triumphant, when the endless scroll of social media rewards only attention.

This evolution from charisma to celebrity began in the televisual era. John F. Kennedy looked like a movie star, and the truth was he was simply better on camera during the 1960 televised debate than the sweating, pinched-faced Richard Nixon. Nixon’s grit and grind, combined with a considerable intellect and a will to power, eventually got him to the Oval Office, and his ruthlessness was an inspiration to Trump from a young age, but the celebrity aspect of American power really accelerated in the 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan, our first actor-president. Reagan had spent decades honing his message to meld seamlessly with his public presentation, and he was able to create a disjunction between his folksy demeanor and the plutocratic policies he enacted. He was also expert at deploying his own celebrity to usher back into political discourse ways of dealing with race that Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society initiatives of the 1960s were to have relegated to the dustbin of history. Reagan started his campaign in the heart of Dixie, at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, only a few miles from where three civil rights workers had been brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan only 16 years earlier. Reagan told his almost all-white audience that, “I believe in states’ rights” (long a Confederate and then segregationist dog whistle) and made it though he whole speech without once mentioning the Klan’s three victims. His deployment of the so-called “Southern strategy,” which was predicated upon breaking off the white working class from the Democratic party, continued through his endlessly repeated—and frankly false—anecdotes about a “welfare queen” (always a code for Black women) and a “strapping young buck” (another dog whistle phrase, this time to conjure predatory Black “thugs”) buying “T-bone steaks” while “you were buying hamburger.” The use of “you” as a marker of race and gender is something that Trump turned up to 11 in his extremely successful trans-baiting 2024 campaign ad, which ended with the words,“Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”

Ever since Trump rode down his golden escalator a decade ago, the dog whistles have become megaphones: immigrants from Mexico are criminals and rapists, Black-majority countries are “shitholes,” COVID-19 is the “China virus” and “kung flu,” trans members of the military are incapable of leading an “honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle,” the list goes on. Yet in the 21^st century media economy that Trump “feels” so expertly, the fact that the meanness never ends is a feature not a bug. The meanness leads to outrage, and the outrage brings attention, not just from the news but even more importantly from social media. The meanness keeps the light burning brightly on Trump and his actions (to call them policies is to fall into the trap of trying to intellectualize instinct).

Trump’s four years out of power had the same effect on him and his supporters as we’ve seen with other autocrats like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump honed his mean streak and expanded its appeal via the now separate channels by which Americans are algorithmically fed what we once called news, but which now must simply be seen as content.  Trump has mastered triangulation in our infinitely fractured mediascape. A legendary misogynist, Trump garnered the votes of white women with threats of rapists of color and gay and trans groomers. To men of color, especially the young ones, this out-and-out racist was able to play up their dislike of female bosses, and to caricature his opponent as an avatar of the officious Human Resources professional. To the immigrants he was demonizing one moment, he would pivot to present himself as the only strong man capable of channeling their aggrievement at changing notions of masculinity. To his white base, dispossessed by economic upheavals, he was always able to blame a distant other, from cultural elites who despised them to foreign globalists who ripped them off. His richest supporters, who had benefitted the most from the policies that hollowed out MAGA country, knew that however he retriangulated, he would in deliver tax cuts in 2.0 as he had in 1.0, and that was more than enough.

Trump was defeated in his 2020 reelection campaign because of COVID, but in many ways his successful 2024 return to power depended on the sublimated grief and rage that the pandemic generated in the United States. To understand what’s happening in the first quarter of 2025, it’s vital to think though the intersections of the viral outbreak, the public health response, the racial reckoning after George Floyd’s murder, and the white backlash to all of the above. There was a huge segment of the population that didn’t just chafe at the restrictions imposed by public health professionals and government officials, but saw them as a fundamental attack on freedom itself. The individualism that most Americans see as their core ethos (whether they live by it or not) was fundamentally out of sync with the communitarian impulse to sacrifice to protect others, especially others they didn’t know and who didn’t look like them. A new “feels” emerged about the pandemic—the only people who were actually dying were poor, fat people, which in the MAGA imaginary  translates as Black and/or immigrant. Ignore, for the moment, that almost three-quarters of the American population is categorized as overweight or obese, and that whites accounted for sixty percent of all deaths. What stuck in MAGA’s head was that Indigenous, Black and Latino people were dying at a faster rate than white people, especially when adjusted for age. For a subset of people who were already incensed by the civil unrest that followed in the wake of Floyd’s murder, this was just more grist for a racial assessment of the events of 2020. This reaction is just so mean: to assume that the poor and the dispossessed were responsible for their own deaths in the midst of a global pandemic. Dying in a country simultaneously famous for its wealth and the impossibility of accessing healthcare if you are poor was victim-blaming at its most vicious.

The economy was central to Trump’s comeback after the seditions of January 6^th and the convictions in court, but this election was a game of inches, to use a metaphor football-crazy politicians love, and every grievance stoked, every hatred enflamed, and every blame shifted was going to be important. It was here where Trump’s feral understanding mattered, and he is continuing to ferret out ways to keep these temperatures high as he governs by edict alone. Celebrities exist in the spotlight, and though they have writers, directors, crews and co-stars, their singularity is their appeal. It’s no wonder Trump has shown no interest in the legislative process this time round. Even in aggregate, the whole of the Republican-controlled House and Senate can’t hold a candle watt to Trump’s blinding luminescence. Why shouldn’t the rest of the Republican party fall in line? They are now his Greek chorus, but stripped of tragic sensibility, reduced to fans waiting to take selfies with the star.

The attack on a professional civil service that keeps planes in the air, national forests from lighting on fire, social security payments on time, and nuclear weapons safely stored doesn’t make any rational sense. In a seven trillion-dollar budget, there will be some waste, fraud and abuse, but over decades, the right wing has never been able to identify enough to even make a dent in the US’s two-trillion dollar deficit. But the feels and the meanness explain the gleeful destruction wrought by Elon Musk and his boy army at DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency, which isn’t a department, and is only using efficiency as a cover). The reality is that government jobs are one of the only sectors of the American economy that really did diversify and become more inclusive over the past half-century, at the very same time that the civil service was a hold-out of unionism and generous pensions. To MAGA, the response to having less secure jobs in right-to-work states (a rebranding of anti-unionism) is not to organize for better wages and worker solidarity, but instead to strip “those people” of their jobs. How dare “they” have it better than “us?” Here the meanness translates as a constriction of ambition, an inability to see the gains of others as anything but a loss for the self in the zero-sum game that is life in MAGA world.

Of course, the Pax Americana that Trump 2.0 is dismantling was not a zero-sum game. For any and all of the myriad problems of extractive capitalism, the period after the Second World War saw the largest reduction in poverty that the world had ever witnessed, and the greatest beneficiaries of all were the American people. Yes, conditions have changed and new sources of inspiration and innovation are required, but to destroy the world order, such as it is, without cogent and thorough planning for what is to replace it, is to substitute feels for thinking, a process that Trump and MAGA drive via a meanness of spirit and inchoate longings for revenge.

I am, of course, writing all of this as a tenured academic at a major research university. This means I am literally despised by the MAGA movement. I’d never felt what has been called town/gown tensions, in part because I live in a metropolitan metropolis, but also because I had enough experience in other jobs before academia to be able to talk to strangers about aspects of what I do, even if the idea of being a “media philosopher” seems beyond esoteric to most (including family, to be honest). But like the majority of people in “the profession,” I’ve been caught off-guard by the meanness that’s emerged around the very idea of higher education. In the comments section of nominally center or even vaguely left legacy media like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and New York magazine, it can seem like a third or more of the posts are cheering on attempts to end tenure, defund academic research, expel student protesters, and denigrate the search for knowledge. Social media is, naturally, even more vituperative in its support for the gutting of campus life. Higher ed has a public relations debacle on its hands, and no discussion about how universities and research labs are where cures for chronic diseases and the Internet came from seems to make a dent in the desire to bring the sector down a peg or ten. In 2024, for the first time, the least informed voters went for Republicans, not Democrats. The Democratic pollster David Schor sees the 2024 election as the new normal, a time in which, “the lower your political engagement, education level or socioeconomic status, the less engaged you are in politics, the more Trumpy you are.” I might add in mean here as well, but without Schor’s analytics to back me up.

As I was concluding this long letter, I found out that my own alma mater, Columbia University, capitulated fully to Trump’s threat to strip it of almost half a billion dollars of funding. At this writing, there’s no way for me to know if this submission will actually yield anything positive for the institution, but things don’t look good for the rest of the sector in the coming months. My institution is under investigation for exactly the same things that Columbia was accused of, mostly having to do with the handling of Gaza-related protests and statements, as well as DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives. Universities, particularly the much maligned “studies” departments, are the very origin places for the language and conceptual apparatus needed to analyze and fight this confluence of celebrity-driven meanness. It’s no wonder we’re under mortal attack.

The only solution I can see is solidarity, direct action, and strikes. If the only content we see are feels spotlighted by celebrity, all else will wither into nothingness.

Yours—

Peter

—

Peter Lunenfeld lives in California. His most recent book is City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined. He is a professor the Design Media Arts department at UCLA.

COPIUM

A week after I finished writing the first blog posting You Were Farming Rice, Now You’re Farming Clicks,  discussing the incoming C-wave and China’s growing influence, Biden signed a law effectively banning TikTok in the U.S. What followed became the biggest clutch of my creative career, securing a seat in the based department just before everyone else. I’m writing this follow-up as I cope with losing my edginess as a Western Xiaohongshu user, while also bragging that I was China-pilled before it was cool.

XIAOHONGSHU

While 170 million internet users scramble to find an alternative to TikTok, many are choosing to explore new platforms instead of fleeing to familiar ones. This behavior could be driven by several factors: reluctance to compete with established creators on Western platforms, Meta’s suppression of leftist content, or simply the desire for a fresh start. One app in particular, Xiaohongshu (or RedNote, as Americans call it), has seen a massive influx of self-proclaimed ‘TikTok refugees.’ It occupies a unique position as a well-established alternative that is globally available on app stores, does not require a Chinese VPN, and lacks competition from established English-speaking creators.

Initially, Westerners were not welcomed with open arms. Some Chinese netizens criticized them for bringing “American slop content” to the platform. Many explained that Xiaohongshu is valued for its high-quality, aesthetic, and informative content, in contrast to the sensationalist and loud videos posted by incoming TikTokers. Others, however, saw an opportunity to grow their audience and began adding auto-generated English translations to their posts. As American content flooded the platform, many users were upset that their carefully curated for you pages had been disrupted.

Given this, we must reconsider the term ‘TikTok refugees.’ In light of the native user base’s response, their arrival resembles a colonial invasion more than a search for refuge. Much like traditional colonizers, Western creators are drawn to the promises of a ‘new land,’ exploring unfamiliar algorithms, enjoying newfound freedoms, and stepping into a blank slate with little to no regard for its existing occupants. One user wrote “native English speakers already enjoy enough privileges, no need to add another one and change ourselves to make them feel more comfortable.”

In my early speculations on how the app’s developers might respond, possible scenarios included launching a separate Western-oriented version (similar to the Douyin–TikTok split), pulling Xiaohongshu from Western app stores, geo-blocking foreign users, or requiring Chinese ID or phone number verification for sign-ups, as some competitors do. However, given that Xiaohongshu is still young and only saw its rise in Asian markets in late 2023, the West became an attractive target for expansion instead. The app has since rebranded itself on Western app stores as RedNote, adopting its Americanized nickname. Another notable change was the swift introduction of a translation feature to facilitate communication between users. I was waiting for Americans to lose their minds over the app’s name literally translating to Little Red Book, a reference to Mao’s Little Red Book, but everyone was too invested in the LARP to care.

Two days after the big wave, many Chinese netizens began cautiously welcoming Western users to the platform, while urging them not to turn it into another TikTok.  Americans (for once) have also recognized the existence of other people and made efforts to encourage respect for the native user base. In agreement with Chinese netizens, many foreign users embraced a culture of bilingual posts, recognizing that most Chinese users either don’t speak English or aren’t comfortable using it. This helped ease the initial sense of exclusion within the community. However, the trend faded with the introduction of instant translations by the platform’s developers. All things considered, there still is an elevated sense of toxicity and hate, something the community hadn’t experienced before the mass migration.

After the initial shock within the community, the event has facilitated many interesting cultural exchanges, with both parties expressing genuine curiosity about each other’s cultures. The influx of TikTokers, although problematic, has also sparked valuable learning experiences and cultural exchanges that I have long advocated for. Users from both sides of the globe are posting questions about internet censorship, LGBTQ+ rights, personal freedoms, social media trends, memes, and more. If the dissonance among users is alleviated, the situation could provide long-term benefits for everyone involved. Americans (and, by extension, the rest of the Western world) could gain a much-needed understanding of Chinese culture, a country so notoriously misrepresented by Western media. Furthermore, this newfound awareness among younger Americans could prove highly beneficial in strengthening local anti-establishment movements. On the other hand, Chinese users could gain exposure to topics often omitted from mainstream discourse, such as queerness.

With ‘Westoids’ already experiencing early signs of the ‘Place, Japan’ effect in its redefined, Sinic rendition, a Chinese app like Xiaohongshu becoming the new meta in America could seriously claim lives in the Department of Homeland Security. For now, the ban has been delayed by the Trump administration. If 2024 taught us anything, it’s that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. On January 13th, Xiaohongshu stood as the #1 app on the U.S. App Store, proudly giving legislators the middle finger. Once again, yet another unpredictable turn of events, exposing the rhizomatic nature of internet-era politics and opening up new perspectives. As the Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tzu famously said: “All warfare is based […]”

EVERYONE IS GETTING MORE CHINESE

On January 27th, 2025, we witnessed yet another instance of Xi Jinping’s aura-farming. A shocking advancement in Chinese AI, DeepSeek, sent U.S. stocks plunging. Contrary to Sam Altman’s appeals to the government, this competitive model was developed with only a fraction of OpenAI’s claimed budget. Outperforming GPT-4 in response time, DeepSeek has challenged America’s narrative, which seeks to downplay China’s technological successes. Judging from the US’s reaction, apparently the free market is not always good.

At this point, the frequency of China’s wins has caught everyone’s attention. Newly established online exchanges between users from the opposing superpowers have sparked a wave of pro-China sentiment among younger generations. ‘China-posting’ — the practice of sharing memetic images that depict the country in a positive light — was already circulating in less-frequented corners of the internet, but the state’s recent media presence has pushed it onto mainstream feeds. Trending memes, such as an image of the U.S. stock market crash remade into a Chinese flag (see above), reflect the frustration of young Western users who feel misled by their governments’ portrayal of China as a totalitarian, poverty-ridden ‘third-world’ country. While undeniably authoritarian and still grappling with poverty and human rights issues, the civilization-state boasts state-of-the-art infrastructure, high-speed rail networks, and ambitious housing initiatives—luxuries that many Americans can only dream of.

With this newfound resentment toward Western neoliberalism, users began engaging in a practice of weaponized data sharing. Many signed up for multiple Chinese-run platforms and apps, proudly flaunting their willingness to share data with the CCP. This shift wasn’t just about rebellion, it was about seeking alternatives. Disillusioned by Western platforms’ data privacy scandals, censorship, and corporate greed, many users found a strange sense of agency in embracing China’s digital ecosystem. The argument was simple: if all tech giants collect data, why not choose the one that isn’t aligned with the Western status quo?

Freed from Western propaganda, a new perception of China is emerging on social media, perhaps driven by young people searching for signs of hope for the world’s future. As Generation Beta is born into the most uncertain decade since World War II, they may be the first generation to see China as the world’s leading power. While it’s crucial not to blindly praise an imperialist state, we can ask ourselves a question: who’s imperialism would you rather have? With hatred towards the U.S., often driven by personal experience, many young people would pick China. Gen Z and younger are often referred to as ‘digital natives,’ will the first generation rid of resentment towards China be the Gen Xi?

MADE IN CHINA

Trump’s foreign policy is becoming increasingly hostile — whether through his executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico, talk of annexing Canada and Greenland, claims to the Panama Canal, or the ‘final solution’ in Palestine. Beginning with remarks about the EU being “too woke,” the administration has even threatened to impose sanctions on European countries. Taking many by surprise, it’s hard to imagine the once-inseparable NATO partners having their trade relationships severed by economic warfare.

China’s growing dominance in international trade is primarily reflected in its exports to South American, African, and Asian markets. While the country’s exports to the EU have grown substantially, existing systems still prioritize trade partnerships with the U.S. over China. However, recent exceptions have been made, most notably for the sale of Chinese EVs, which outperform the competition in safety, efficiency, and affordability. If the U.S. imposes tariffs on European countries, it could push the EU to strengthen ties with China, further cementing its status as a rising economic leader. Such newly formed trade partnerships could help shift the fear mongering narratives, helping form new channels for exporting cultural products.

China is already dominating foreign gaming markets, with Tencent owning Riot, 40% shares in Epic Games, and many popular titles like Final Fantasy, Genshin Impact etc. As of now, the country’s cultural exports differ greatly from those of Korea or Japan. Two major examples that come to mind — K-pop and anime — are often products carefully crafted to fit both local and Western markets, with Japan’s government even aiming to artificially boost new anime productions for export. Series like My Deer Friend Nokotan are getting injected with Western references, K-pop distributors have entire business plans centered around the U.S. market and there is a growing dissonance between Japan’s pop culture for the local and global market. On the other hand, China is less interested in tailoring their output to a global audience, and when they do, it’s made more culturally-universal by stripping any semblance of local cultures (e.g. gaming industry). Conversely, China’s culture is inconspicuously leaking through online channels, like aesthetic trends, brainrot or other social media phenomena, as I discussed earlier in You Were Farming Rice, Now You’re Farming Clicks.