🔮 Degrowth sceptics; Tech progress; US fintech; The Book of 2021 & in utero dreaming ++ #333

Hi, I’m Azeem Azhar. I convene Exponential View to help us understand how our societies and political economy will change under the force of rapidly accelerating technologies.

Dept of Near Future

What is progress?

🌎 By seemingly dismantling critical parts of its technology sector, China is redefining what progress means. That’s the central argument Noah Smith puts forward in a persuasive post this week. It’s impossible to navigate the complex relationships between business and the Chinese state but on the outside it looks like China is “smashing” its tech sector. Why would it do such a thing? According to Smith, Beijing might have determined that too many resources were being poured into consumer-facing tech so the decision was made to pivot those resources back into military technology. That argument might be a bit narrow (not everything is about war). For a broader analysis, read Dan Wang in Foreign Policy whose excellent essay argues that the lens here should be self-sufficiency, in …