One of the recurring errors made by people who build things is the assumption that everyone else is engaged in the same basic enterprise. The engineer sees a defective system and asks how it can be repaired; the activist often sees the same defect and asks what moral significance can be extracted from it, who…
Month: October 2026
Competing with China
The most useful way to think about American competition with China is not through the language of moral theater, which is how almost every domestic political question is now presented, but through the older and less flattering language of power. Civilizations rise because they accumulate capacity, and they decline because they lose it. Capacity means…
Let the Tech Giants Be Gnawed
There is a certain justice in watching the American technology industry discover that the creatures it fed are not house pets. For years, the great platforms imagined themselves extraordinarily sophisticated political actors. They possessed money, data, distribution, prestige, and direct access to the nervous system of public life. They could decide which arguments traveled at…