Die by Science, Die by Code

what is all this progress for, and who is it for?

I’ve been doing AI-assisted writing for a few weeks now and it’s been enjoyable. The below is a three-parter collaborative co-written essay on Progress titled “Die by Science, Die by Code”, sparked off by a prompt in Jacob Dreyer’s essay “China’s Soviet Shadow”.

What follows is a quick breakdown of the essay, followed by the three parts of the essay, and in the Appendix, a meta-reflection on the collaborative development of Die by Science, Die by Code — including its rhetorical framing, phases of composition, and the alternation of pedagogical roles between the AI and me.

h/t to Venkatesh Rao for inspiring this centaur approach.

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Quick breakdown of this version of Progress:

Part 1: Die by Science, Die by Code

Establishes the Industrial Party in China and the MAGA tech right in the U.S. as two faces of the same civilizational instinct: to control history through engineering.

Follows Dreyer, Galbraith, and Farrell to show how both systems pursue total optimization — through hardware scale (China) and software/AGI (America).

Ends on the tragic symmetry: China may win the future materially but sideline its people; America may live by code and fragment into incoherence.

Part 2: Soulcraft After Tech

Picks up where Part 1 leaves off — by asking the deeper question: what is all this progress for, and who is it for?

Brings in the fracture within the American right (Tech Futurists vs TradCaths), using recent Ezra Klein conversations and political shifts in 2025.

Argues that Christian nationalism (via Project 2025, J.D. Vance, Bannon, etc.) could reassert control once the tech elite overreaches.

Turns back to China to show how its identity is becoming procedural and universal (per Dreyer’s Who Gets to Be Chinese), offering a form of Confucian-modern soulcraft.

Concludes with a twist: the 21st century may not be ruled by science or code — but by civilizational moral ordersreasserting themselves in techno-clothing.

Part 3: Coda vs Canon

Moral Renewal in Post-Technocratic America and China

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Part 1 - Die by Science, Die by Code: China’s Industrial Party vs. America’s Tech-Right

Twin Techno-Nationalisms and the New Industrial Party

A strange mirror connects Beijing’s planners and Washington’s MAGA technocrats. In both China and the United States, a new ideology has taken root – one that worships technological power and seeks to remake society in its image – led by the Industrial Party, a transnational techno-nationalism that transcends the old left-right divide. In China, it emerges as a state-driven “industrial party” mentality pushing giant projects and algorithmic control. In America, it appears as a MAGA-aligned tech-far-right that wants to code its way out of political decay. They are two wings of the same movement, each claiming to be fiercely patriotic yet eerily similar in their worship of machines and engineering.

Both believe the future will be secured not by traditional politics or liberal democracy, but by bending technology to their will. Their obsession with “big, earth-moving devices” and grand systems is universal – a kind of boys-and-their-toys hubris writ large. And both share a disturbing endgame: a world where human individuals and institutions are sidelined by technical systems. In essence, China’s leaders and America’s techno-right are racing each other toward a singular destiny. They are locked in a “mimetic rivalry,” each converging on the same point to avoid being outdone by the other – that point is the Singularity, the arrival of AGI (artificial general intelligence). The irony is that this race to super-intelligence and total automation may lead both societies to a future in which ordinary people have little place. The twin thesis of this essay is that China could “live by science and die by science” – achieving triumphs of scale and science but erasing human purpose – and America could “live by code and die by code” – fragmenting under the illusion that software alone can hold a broken republic together.

China’s Quest – Triumph of Science, Tragedy of Purpose

In Beijing, the Industrial Party mindset builds on a Soviet-style legacy of grand engineering and centralized planning. President Xi Jinping’s China increasingly behaves like a “savvy entrepreneurial technocracy” that believes any ecological or economic problem can be engineered away. The Communist Party is reasserting command over the economy (what the Chinese call “国进⺠退” – the state advances, the people retreat) and reviving the spirit of the Soviet plan – but with Chinese characteristics. Advanced scientific initiatives and massive infrastructure projects are rolled out as top-down campaigns. From climate to agriculture, policy is guided by the ethos that technology and sheer scale can solve all challenges.

This ethos produces accomplishments that dazzle the world. China is erecting mega-dams and water diversion schemes so ambitious that they make the old Soviet attempts (like the disastrous Aral Sea project) look like child’s play. One Ozymandian water project after another – the Three Gorges Dam, a planned dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo, the South-North Water Transfer – are designed to bend nature to the national will, no matter how many towns must be submerged or people displaced. The mentality is clear: no river too wild to reroute, no climate too hostile to tame. “The Chinese government’s mentality is that ecological and economic problems can be engineered away”. It is an extraordinary hubris born of technocratic confidence.

Nowhere is this more evident than in China’s climate-scientific ascendancy. China leads the world in deploying renewable energy at scale – in 2024 alone, it was on track to install over half of all new solar power worldwide. Two-thirds of all wind and solar projects under construction globally are in China. Beijing is literally building a new Eurasia fueled by clean energy, linking deserts and grasslands to coastal megacities with ultra-high- voltage grids and fiber optic cables. The Party has found in the climate crisis a compelling new mandate: a common purpose that can rally the nation around scientific grandiosity and also project influence abroad. In effect, China is attempting to win the future through science – to prove that a state-led technocracy armed with AI, data, and engineering prowess can solve humanity’s problems better than pluralistic democracies.

Yet this triumph of science contains the seeds of tragedy. The more China succeeds at automating and optimizing its growth, the more it renders human labor and agency seemingly optional. Beijing’s strategists openly talk about dark factories run by robots and algorithms, about AI handling everything from traffic flow to legal decisions – an algorithmic governancethat minimizes messy human input. In the early days of the PRC, China’s vast population was considered an asset (“many hands make light work”); in the AI + Automation era, people start to look like a surplus. An economy that once needed hundreds of millions of workers to industrialize can now grow with far fewer hands, thanks to automation. If you don’t need people for growth, what, then, do you do with all those extra people? This is the dark question lurking beneath China’s technocratic optimism.

We already see hints of an answer. If growth and social order can be maintained through high-tech state enterprises and AI planning, the PRC shoggoth doesn’t need the dynamism or creativity of hundreds of millions of citizens. It lives by science. It may “die by science” – not in literal collapse, but in a spiritual sense. The machine might run smoothly at colossal scale, but human beings would be reduced to cogs, or even bystanders, in a grand apparatus. Chinese strategists are keen students of the Soviet Union’s fate, noting the gap between the plan and the people eventually caused the Soviet Union machinery to break. The irony is by avoiding one way the machinery can break, they may risk repeating that hubris on an even grander scale: achieving miraculous control over nature and data yet suffocating the very human purpose that development is supposed to serve. Growth would continue, but it would no longer need people in the loop – a literal triumph of the organs of the human will over nature turned into a twilight of redundant humanity.

America’s Code Delusion – Utopian Software and a Fractured Republic

Meanwhile, across the Pacific, the United States faces a very different kind of techno-political upheaval. The traditional conservative establishment has been increasingly overtaken by a tech-accelerationist wing of the right, one that eschews Burke and Reagan in favor of Musk and Altman.

These are the MAGA techno-nationalists, the self-styled engineer-kings of a new America. Unimpressed by the old institutions of liberal democracy, they propose to reboot the republic operating system with code and AI. A “contempt for power structures which follow a verbal logic: the rule of law, a free press… designed by ‘wordcels”. In their view, the lawyers, journalists, and career bureaucrats – the talkers and paper-pushers – are obsolete. “The lawyers are out, and the engineers are in”. This faction believes that Silicon Valley’s methods can replace Washington’s sclerosis.

Nowhere is this mindset clearer than in DOGE’s approach to automate and streamline federal agencies. Henry Farrell describes this as a kind of digital coup: Musk-aligned operatives infiltrating agencies, firing tens of thousands of staff, and attempting to run government on an AI autopilot. The logic behind DOGE is pure Industrial Party thinking. As one insider let on when asked whether gutting human decision-makers might harm America’s capability, the response was: “So what? We’ll have AGI by late 2026.”

In other words, a near-future superintelligence will render human bureaucrats unnecessary. DOGE’s ambition (as revealed in a recent report) is to pour all of the government’s data into a giant AI model that could advise or even execute across agencies. This is a radical bet that code can do better than the complex web of human institutions built up over centuries.

Such AGI-prepper thinking makes traditional governance seem like a wasteful relic. If one truly believes AI will soon be “smarter than Nobel Prize winners” in every field, able to design weapons or cure diseases in days, then why fund universities or national labs? Why have a National Science Foundation or NIH when a “country of geniuses” housed in data centers can solve problems on demand? From that perspective, “most human- based institutions are obsolescing assets that need to be ripped out”. This is exactly what the tech wing of the American right is attempting: ripping out the old wiring of the state in the faith that AI and market forces will self-organize a superior system. It is hubris of a different flavor – not the hubris of mastering nature (as in China), but the hubris of believing a society can run on code without a shared social contract.

The danger in America’s path is fragmentation and loss of coherence – the republic “dying by code” as it were. Unlike China’s top-down unity, the U.S. is already fracturing along cultural, economic, and geographic lines. The techno-utopians often underestimate this fragility. They assume that if you remove the “inefficient” human element (regulations, deliberation, public accountability), the technological network will naturally hold everything together. But in reality, digital technology has often accelerated America’s fragmentation. The liberal democratic order depends on a certain social fabric – “a network of discrete individuals with private lives” – which the internet has largely dissolved. In its place we have a “constantly pulsing hive-mind on X (Twitter)” that erodes the distinction between truth and rumor, individual and crowd. The medium has become the message, and that message is chaos. By unleashing disruptive technology upon itself, America finds its own society disrupted. No amount of clever code can substitute for the basic trust and consensus that allow a nation to act as one.

This crisis of coherence is especially evident in the outlook of Generation Z, the first generation raised fully amidst digital saturation and institutional decay. Young Americans today face a “double disruption”: rapid AI-driven technological change on one hand, and instability of institutions on the other. They have little faith in the old promises of steady careers and reliable institutions. Americans in their teens and twenties aren’t just worried about finding a job – they worry “whether ‘careers’ as we know them will exist in 5 years”. The narrative of predictable progress that guided previous generations has unraveled. Instead, Gen Z is adopting a kind of barbell strategy for an unpredictable era: either retreating to pragmatic choices (learning a trade, avoiding debt, seeking local stability) or going all-in on speculative tech realms (trying to become viral creators, crypto traders, AI startup founders). The middle path of gradual upward mobility is increasingly blurry. If “institutions promise stability they can’t deliver, algorithms offer opportunity without security”, and the nature of work and worth is being utterly redefined, this messes up identity and community → many young people feel unmoored from any collective story, left to navigate a world where neither the traditional institutions nor the new digital platforms can provide a stable sense of self.

This generational shift feeds the American tech-right’s narrative in two ways. On one hand, disillusionment with institutions creates openness to the idea that maybe a handful of genius innovators should just take over – that the “democracy” and its red tape are indeed only holding us back. If nothing makes sense, why not let tech CEOs and AI models run things? On the other hand, the same instability fuels reactionary nostalgia and localist impulses in others, leading to a fractured public that shares no common vision. The techno-futurists mistakenly think they can satisfy both impulses by replacing old institutions with apps and AI, pleasing the frustrated by “delivering results.” But this is likely a fantasy. Removing human institutions in favor of code doesn’t resolve social contradictions – it heightens them by removing the forums where compromise and understanding might occur. The result could be an America that drifts into high-tech anarchy: pockets of algorithmic order (gated by firewalls and paywalls) amid a wider loss of national unity. The country might function in the narrow sense – transactions happen, drones deliver, AI chatbots manage public services – but the Republic as an idea could evaporate. It would be a society run by and for code, with little room for the messy, empathetic, negotiated human values that once held the Union together. This is how America could “die by code”: not in one dramatic crash, but by a million little disconnections, as software replaces the social and the nation becomes a glorified cloud server with no center.

The Third Digital Revolution – Digital Hardware (and China Owns It)

Underlying these two paths is a broader technological shift in the next decade that favours China’s strengths over America’s. We are now entering third era of digitization, aka digital manufacturing, embodied AI, AI + robots etc. In earlier eras, computing and the internet digitized information and connected people – value was created through distribution network effects (the more users on a platform, the more value it generated). Silicon Valley excelled at this, building software and platforms that scaled globally with relatively little physical infrastructure. But the new era – driven by AI, smart devices, and clean energy tech – is hardware-intensive. It’s about embedding intelligence in the physical world, from microchips to electric vehicles to smart cities. In business terms, the locus of value is shifting upstream: instead of software being expensive to develop and cheap to run, AI has made software cheap to create but expensive to run, because it demands huge computing power and energy. AI turns software itself into a constantly learning network, guzzling data and electricity – so the real competitive advantages now come from control of data centers, semiconductor fabs, battery supply chains, robots and factories. In short, the production network effects matter more than pure digital network effects. This is a world where scaling up means manufacturing at immense scale and optimizing hardware as much as code.

And here, China owns the board. Decades of investment in industrial capacity have made China the manufacturing center of the world. [Insert your favourite gaboom chart of charts] “China owns a majority of the manufacturing of everything” in the new economy – from EV batteries and solar panels to smartphones and networking gear. Even where China doesn’t lead in design (say, cutting-edge chip lithography), it dominates in production volume. This dominance is not just an economic fact; it’s a strategic reality that is proving irreversible in the short term. The entire global supply chain has reoriented around China and its neighbors. Factories in Shenzhen to Chengdu churn out the hardware that powers cloud computing in California; rare earth minerals from Chinese-controlled mines are essential for electric motors and missile guidance systems alike. In the 20th century, oil was the lifeblood of geopolitics (and the U.S.-led order controlled the oil supply). In the 21st, data and energy hardware are the new lifeblood – and China has positioned itself as the indispensable supplier of both the raw materials and the finished tech goods in this realm.

This means that China’s “Industrial Party” bet on science and infrastructure has a firm material foundation, whereas America’s bet on software and finance faces a material reckoning. You cannot run an AI on ideology alone – you need GPUs, power grids, cooling systems, and sensors. By owning the hardware layer, China can increasingly set the terms of the next technological epoch. For example, if Beijing achieves breakthroughs in quantum computing, it has the factories ready to mass-produce them at scale and flood the world with affordable units. The hardware-network effects (economies of scale, supply chain lock-in) will amplify its lead. The West, meanwhile, struggles to rebuild even a fraction of this manufacturing prowess, after decades of offshoring and complacency. As for the software-network effects (zero marginal cost, network lock-in), they vanish when China makes software free or open source (think DeepSeek vs OpenAI, BYD free self-drive vs Tesla’s subscription), undermining the US software sector.

This shift flips the script on economic power: in the AI era, value flows upstream to those who control chips and energy, not downstream to those who control apps. America’s strength in software gave it dominance in the internet era, but now software is becoming commoditized – an AI can write code, after all – while the means to run that code (the server farms, the specialized hardware, the skilled labor to assemble devices) are concentrated in East Asia. In plainer terms, China owns the foundries and factories; the U.S. increasingly just owns the algorithms. This is a precarious position for America. It’s as if one side owns the chessboard and the pieces, while the other side is very good at coming up with new chess strategies – but without control of the board, those strategies can be stymied.

So, when the American tech-right dreams of leapfrogging China via some software or AI miracle, they may be indulging in magical thinking. Even if Silicon Valley creates a superior AI, implementing its benefits at scale (from smart appliances to autonomous vehicles to national defense systems) will depend on physical production. And China can choke or accelerate that production at will, given its dominance. The new economic order, forged by decades of globalization, cannot simply be reversed by coding faster or deregulating markets. The Industrial Party in China understands this viscerally: they talk of “hard tech” and celebrate their thousands of engineers in concrete and steel, not just lines of code. The American Industrial Party, by contrast, risks building castles in the cloud – glorifying software while the physical foundations of prosperity erode. If the third digital revolution indeed crowns the masters of hardware, then China’s model will stand vindicated. The hubris of America’s code-does-it-all approach could be exposed by the iron law of material reality: you cannot download a new battery or 3D-print a nationwide power grid overnight.

Hubris, Humanity, and the Future We Are Building

Ultimately, the stories of China and America’s techno-futures are cautionary tales about hubris – and about what becomes of human society when hubris runs its course. In both East and West, powerful actors are summoning immense forces: Science to conquer nature, and Code to rewire society. Both are achieving stunning successes, yet both risk tragic outcomes where the very notion of a meaningful human life is cast aside.

Beijing’s techno-hubris may well deliver material triumph. It may solve the climate puzzle, keep economic growth alive, and achieve global scientific leadership. But China could lose sight of why it pursued development in the first place. A future where growth no longer needs people is a future where people have no stake. The Chinese term “内卷 ” (involution) has gained popularity to describe the feeling of being stuck in a hyper-competitive system that yields diminishing returns to individuals. One can imagine a highly involuted China: a perfectly managed machine state, endlessly optimizing, where citizens are provided for physically but starved of agency and spirit. The tragedy would not be collapse, but perpetual redundancy – 1.4 billion souls living in the shadow of a vast technostructure that claims to know best. This is “dying by science”: humanity subdued by the very tools it forged to secure prosperity.

In Washington and Silicon Valley, the techno-hubris takes the form of near-religious faith in the algorithm. America’s new technocrats are so enthralled by the power of code that they treat society as a software problem – something to debug or refactor, with messy human elements to be factored out. This has led to bold, even wild experiments (from crypto currencies to AI chatbots governing communities) and now to the spectacle of an attempted algorithmic governance via DOGE. They may succeed in dismantling large parts of the “administrative state.” They may prove, in pockets, that AI can replace white-collar labor and that digital currencies can bypass central banks. Yet, in doing so, they risk undermining the invisible glue that prevents anarchy. An America that “dies by code” would be one where the rule of law and the habits of democracy decay, replaced by platform terms-of-service and the edicts of unelected tech CEOs. It would be a republic in name but an algorithmic oligarchy in practice, prone to ever-more violent swings as code amplifies conflicts instead of resolving them. The ultimate illusion of this path is the belie that software can substitute for solidarity. It cannot. No line of code can inculcate trust between strangers or impart meaning to a generation adrift. If that human groundwork is not revitalized, America could win the race for AGI and still lose its nation’s soul.

Thus, both superpowers are, in their own ways, haunted by hubris – and by a profound anxiety about human irrelevance. China’s leaders fear stagnation and weakness, so they double down on scientific mastery, unable to admit that their people need more than material plenty and engineered stability. American technologists fear decline and chaos, so they leap toward an AI deus ex machina, refusing to confront the arduous task of rebuilding common purpose in a diverse society. Each seeks a sort of technological deliverance, and each may get exactly what they wished for – only to discover it isn’t what they wanted.

We stand at the threshold of a world that might run very well without us. The third era of digitization promises self-driving supply chains and self- managing systems; the Industrial Party promises nations that are well-run machines. But a well-run machine is cold comfort if you are merely a spectator. The medium has remade the message: we introduced disruptive technologies believing they would liberate us, and now we are the ones being disrupted and reshaped. The final irony is that neither China nor America may “fall” in the dramatic sense – no apocalyptic war or clear collapse may mark the end of their dominance. Instead, their very success at harnessing science and code could usher in a subtle, slow-motion tragedy: a future in which humans survive, even prosper materially, but have no say and have no center.

If that sounds dystopian, it’s because it is. Yet dystopia rarely arrives with a bang; it creeps in on cat’s feet, under the guise of progress. The green grids stretching across Eurasia, the AI systems quietly taking over government tasks – these are triumphs of ingenuity, and in many ways, the world needs them. The question is whether we can achieve such progress without sacrificing the human spirit on the altar of efficiency and control.

Can China reinvent its model to value individual purpose and not just collective material power? Can America renew a shared civic life so that technology augments a republic instead of atomizing it? These are, fundamentally, questions of wisdom and governance that neither advanced science nor clever code can answer for us. They require the one ingredient the Industrial Party tends to neglect: the humanistic insight that societies are not machines, and people are not replaceable parts.

Both China and America are building towering edifices of a new civilization – one of steel and silicon, data and algorithms. Each edifice is impressive in its own way. But we must ask: who are these edifices for? A future that has no space for ordinary people is not a future worthy of the name. The real measure of progress will be whether the grand designs of East and West can rediscover a role for the human person – not as a statistic or a user or a cog, but as the very point of it all. Without that, the 21st century could indeed witness the twin fates of “die by science” and “die by code.” The lights will still glow in Shenzhen’s and Silicon Valley’s campuses, but inside, the hollowing out of the human story will be complete. The ultimate victory of the Industrial Party would be a Pyrrhic one: a world run to perfection, in which we ourselves become superfluous.

In the end, then, the sharpest contrast between China’s technocratic dragon and America’s code cowboy may not matter, because both paths converge on a similar end-state. The medium is the message, and the message is a question: Will we have the courage to put human values at the center of our technological future, or will we live long enough to see ourselves engineered and optimized into oblivion? The answer will determine whether these two great civilizations write a story of renewal – or simply annotate the footnotes of their own obituaries in lines of code and equations of science.

Part 2 - Techno-Futurism vs. Soulcraft: The Fracturing Right and China’s New Identity

The Fracturing of the American Right

America’s conservative coalition is increasingly divided between two strange bedfellows: a rising cohort of techno-optimist MAGA futurists and the entrenched forces of Christian nationalism. Under Donald Trump’s “big tent,” this uneasy alliance of Silicon Valley billionaires and the religious right powered the 2024 campaign to victory – one might even say the tech-far-right hijacked the hard-far-right and vaulted into power, for now. Opposing the tech-far-right is an ascendant religious right wing: traditionalist Catholics, evangelical nationalists and “post-liberal” conservatives who view America not just as an economy or playground for tech, but as “a people with a common history” and faith. These are the champions of Christian nationalism and the TradCath movement – a slang term not restricted to Catholics but including those who yearn to restore an imagined Christian order after decades of liberal and technocratic overreach. Many draw on Catholic integralist thought, which seeks to infuse government with explicitly Christian moral aims. Trump’s own vice president, J.D. Vance, is a recent Catholic convert tied to integralism, signaling that this “distinctively Catholic brand of Christian nationalism” now has a platform at the highest levels.) Their intellectual lodestars are writers like Patrick Deneen – who argues that post-Reagan “market fundamentalism” was never truly conservative, as it “undermined the stability of the very social institutions that conservatives claimed to prize”– and the young Catholic scholar Jonathan Askonas, who pointedly noted that the right lost the culture not merely to left-wing ideas, but to the disruptive force of technology itself. In a widely read essay, Askonas wrote that many cherished traditions disintegrated “not because of progressivism or socialism but because of the new environment and political economy generated by technology”. This faction looks at Silicon Valley’s libertarian futurism with deep skepticism, seeing it as a new tower of Babel that erodes the soul of the nation.

Tech Titans vs. TradCaths: MAGA’s Internal Clash

The conflict between these two camps burst into the open even before Trump’s inauguration. What had been papered over during the campaign – a gap in worldviews between techno-utiopians and cultural traditionalists – rapidly became the greatest challenge for the new administration. In late December, a seemingly wonky dispute over high-skilled immigration turned into a proxy war for the soul of MAGA. At issue was the H-1B visa program, which Elon Musk defended as vital for attracting top engineering talent, even vowing to go “to war” to expand it. But Musk’s pro-immigration tech worldview triggered fury from MAGA populists: almost overnight, thousands of grassroots Trump supporters flooded Musk’s platform (X) with vitriol, denouncing him as a globalist traitor who cared more about profit than the nation’s demographic destiny. Trumpist influencers accused the Silicon Valley cohort of trying to swap out “heritage Americans” for foreign coders. As one observer noted, by early January it looked like an “epochal battle” within America’s new ruling coalition.

Steve Bannon – Trumpist ideologue and self-proclaimed champion of the nationalist-populist core – seized the moment to openly confront the Tech Right. In an interview translated from Italian press, Bannon declared war on Musk and the whole clique of tech barons in Trump’s orbit, calling Musk a truly evil guy whose transhumanist visions are anathema to the natural human order. What others murmured privately, Bannon shouted publicly: he sees the Tech Right as an existential threat, outlining a rogue’s gallery of enemies that included Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, and crypto-guru Balaji Srinivasan. In Bannon’s view, these figures promote a dystopian technofeudalism that bends human life into unnatural shapes, powered by a very well thought-through philosophy of radical enhancement and AI governance. He argues that only a righteous populist-nationalist movement can break Silicon Valley’s grip on the right before it’s too late.

Bannon’s offensive may be extreme, but it encapsulates the broader dynamic: after a period in which the tech lords had free rein to define the agenda, the religious and nationalist wing of the American right is poised to reassert itself. Even some within Trump’s team acknowledge the coalition might well collapse if one side or the other gets too much of what it wants, driving the other away. Trump himself remains aloof, playing the king above the fray; Vice President Vance is uniquely positioned as a bridge between the factions – a foot in both camps – given his background as a Silicon Valley investor who reinvented himself as a devout, populist firebrand. If anyone can broker peace between the Stanford crowd and the Strafford (Bible Belt) crowd, it might be Vance, who insiders say “hangs out with Indians and techies” even as he talks like a Midwest preacher.

Still, the fundamental schism remains. the Tech-Far-Right and the MAGA-far-right ultimately have different dreams for America’s future. The tech faction imagines America as an expanding empire, conquering new frontiers (even planets) through superior engineering and global talent – a hyper-rational meritocracy on a cosmic scale. The nationalist faction longs for a resurgent republic, spiritually renewed and rooted in heritage – a return to “pre-1960s” cultural values and a strong sense of Christian moral order. In this divergence lie echoes of an older question: What – and who – is progress for? Is technological progress an end in itself, or must it serve a vision of the good life defined by faith and tradition?

China’s Civilizational Identity: From Blood to Infrastructure

While the U.S. right grapples with dueling visions of progress, China has been undergoing its own profound ideological shift – one that redefines what it means to be “Chinese” in the 21st century. For generations, the People’s Republic grounded its legitimacy first in race and ancestry and then in economic transformation; but today, Beijing’s thinkers are reframing Chinese identity in terms of systems, processes and universalizable models that transcend blood or race. In other words, to “be Chinese” is increasingly about living within Chinese-built infrastructure and intellectual frameworks, not just sharing Chinese ancestry.

This shift has deep historical roots. Chairman Mao himself warned against Han chauvinism, insisting that the Chinese nation must be multiethnic and bound by ideology, not biology. Under his vision, a China that was just a family of Han would be a China that decided to limit itself, whereas “a China that was an ideology could encompass people all across the world”. The Communist revolution thus positioned “Chineseness”as a set of ideas (Marxism-Leninism with Chinese characteristics) that anyone might adopt, rather than a genetic pedigree. Of course, there are big differences in practice between the Han majority heartlands and the periphery regions in the past decades.

Yet as China’s global ambitions have expanded, its self-conception has subtly evolved. Beijing’s leaders now speak of China as a civilizational state, defined by a distinctive social model and cultural heritage that can, in theory, be shared. The unofficial ideology of Huaxia nationalism holds that all who participate in Chinese language, culture, or systems belong in some sense to the Chinese civilizational family. Notably, the term Han itself has become malleable, often connoting civilized more than any ethnic phenotype. A century ago, Chinese reformers contrasted a spiritually rich “yellow race” with a materialist “white race”; today, that dichotomy is recast as China representing a holistic, values-driven modernity against a West seen as individualist and soulless. In concrete terms, China is exporting its standards and infrastructure worldwide – from 5G networks and high-speed rail to AI open source systems and educational institutes – thereby inducting other societies into its technological-cultural ecosystem. A citizen of Nairobi or Kuala Lumpur who uses Huawei phones, studies Mandarin on XiaoHongShu, or relies on DeepSeek is, in a small way, living within Chinese systems. You could say they are becoming a bit “Chinese” in practice, if not in name. This is the essence of Beijing’s new proposition: China as a framework open to all, rather than an ethno-nation closed to outsiders.

This reimagined Chinese identity goes hand-in-hand with a deliberate turn from pure statecraft to soulcraft on the part of the regime. Having achieved astonishing material growth, the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping now emphasizes spiritual and moral guidance as central to its mission. Xi has explicitly unveiled a new model of modernization aimed at enriching the people’s spiritual world, not just their wallets. In practice, this means the state is doubling down on Confucian-Communist values education, which extols virtues like filial piety, diligence and harmony – a clear echo of Confucian social ethics.

All of this reflects what scholar Alexandre Lefebvre calls a resurgence of perfectionism – the idea that the state should actively mold the character of its citizens to fit an ideal of the good life.

In China’s case, that ideal is a blend of Confucian virtue and socialist devotion. As Bruno Maçães observes, China behaves “more [like] a civilization than a state,” assuming as its paramount task the protection of a specific cultural tradition and way of life. The CCP sees itself not merely winning hearts and minds but crafting them from cradle to grave in the service of a civilizational mission. This is soulcraft on a grand scale.

And crucially, it is not meant to stop at China’s borders. By presenting its model as universally applicable – a formula for order, prosperity and social harmony – Beijing extends an invitation (implicitly at least) to others: you too can “be Chinese” in the sense of joining our world-system, no matter your ethnic or national origin.

Conclusion: From Industrial Party to Spiritual Renewal

In both the United States and China, there is a palpable shift in the air – a sense that the age of unbridled technocratic ambition is giving way to a new focus on soulcraft. The tensions on the American right and the evolutions in Chinese identity both circle back to a fundamental question: What is all this progress for? Who is it for?

For years, the prophets of Silicon Valley (and their champions in politics) answered that progress was its own purpose – build fast and break things, innovate or die, let the market and technology lead and society will benefit eventually. This ethos, turbocharged in the Trump-era GOP by an alliance of convenience, reached its zenith with the rise of an “Industrial Party” mentality in both Washington and Beijing. In America, that meant tech billionaires entering the political arena in force, imagining a futurist MAGA that could “roll back the New Deal” and deregulate its way to Mars.

In China, it meant decades of state-driven hypergrowth and infrastructure extravaganzas – “managing society like a machine,” and for a while it looked like prosperity is sufficient to legitimate one-party rule. Both visions treated people a bit like cogs in a great technosystem: to the Silicon Valley libertarians, citizens were users to be optimized; to the engineers of the soul, they were numbers to be lifted into the middle class.

But now the pendulum is swinging. The Industrial Party’s triumph contained the seeds of a backlash. As we’ve seen, American social conservatives are increasingly asking what all the dazzling apps, AI and rockets avail us, if the social fabric is torn and the moral compass lost. They look at communities wracked by despair, families fragmenting, a younger generation untethered from faith – and they blame a culture of secular technopoly as much as any left-wing agenda. In their eyes, Big Tech’s promise of a frictionless future rang hollow; “progress” delivered gadget addictions and spiritual emptiness. Hence the call to put Christian soulcraft back at the center: to use political power to restore an explicit vision of the good (one nation under God), even if that means checking the powers of the tech titans. As one post-liberal writer argues, the state must “guide citizens toward the goods of piety and prayer”, not just unleash them to chase wealth. That intellectual stance, once fringe and cringe, now inspires figures like J.D. Vance at the highest levels of government. Should the MAGA traditionalists gain the upper hand, we could see the GOP pivot from techno-libertarian rhetoric to a politics of cultural restoration – more Moses, less Musk.

China, for its part, is already well down the path of redefining progress in civilizational terms. Xi Jinping’s government speaks less about GDP targets these days and more about “common prosperity” and “core values.” The implicit admission is that decades of breakneck development created a society that is richer but restless, technologically advanced but morally adrift (think of the notorious “involution” and low birth rates plaguing East Asia). So Beijing is turning toward what might be called a Confucian soulcraft – doubling down on tradition, discipline and national story to bind the nation together. Where the Industrial Party ethos sought to awe the world with skyscrapers and spacecraft, the new aim is to inspire with cultural confidence and virtuous citizenry. In effect, the Chinese Communist Party is dressing its techno-structure in the robes of a sage: promoting filial piety campaigns, lionizing model citizens, exhorting Chinese people to higher moral standards. Internationally, this translates into China defining its global leadership not just by the height of its high-speed rail or the reach of its 5G, but by the appeal of its systems of order – an efficient governance model, an alternative set of values to liberal individualism. To many in the developing world, that package can be attractive: it offers a vision of modernity that promises material advancement and a restoration of social cohesion and identity. In that sense, China’s project isn’t only about Chinese people; it’s about offering Chineseness (as a civilizational package) to a world weary of chaos.

Thus, on both sides of the Pacific, we discern a common trend: a reaction against the idea that technology and growth are ends in themselves.

The new contenders for dominance – be it a Bible-toting “NatCon” in America or a Lenin-and-Confucius-quoting party theorist in China – are essentially asking, Progress for what? They suggest that without a guiding spirit or higher purpose, progress is a void. The answer they propose is to reprioritize soulcraft: to infuse politics with moral and metaphysical meaning, whether drawn from the Book of Genesis or the Analects of Confucius. This doesn’t mean the engineers and financiers will disappear from the stage. But it does mean they may no longer set the terms of debate. The MAGA-tech alliance already shows signs of faltering under this pressure, as the religious right asserts its primacy in defining the nation’s telos. And in Beijing, the technocrats now march in lockstep with engineers of the soul who speak the language of culture and destiny, not just output and efficiency.

It would be ironic, to say the least, if the 21st century – so far dominated by narratives of digital revolution and late capitalist acceleration – ends up being shaped by a return to old pillars of faith and tradition. Yet in a fractured America and a resurgent China, we can glimpse that possibility.

The Industrial Party may have won many battles, but the war for the soul of these great powers is far from over. In the United States, the cross may yet conquer the microchip; in China, the Way may yet gentle the robot. Both societies are groping toward a future beyond mere material supremacy – a future in which progress is measured by purpose and meaning, not only by innovation metrics or GDP graphs. Whether one finds that prospect heartening or troubling likely depends on one’s view of whose “vision of the good life” will prevail.

But one thing is certain: the question of “What is it all for? Who it is all for?” can no longer be avoided. The stage is set for a new age of soulcraft, Christian and Chinese alike, to vie for humanity’s allegiance in answer.

Part 3 - Code and Canon: Moral Renewal in Post-Technocratic America and China

Demolition: Tech Libertarians Clearing Ground for Christian Nationalism

The cosmic irony upon reflection is how the MAGA tech-far-right inadvertently lays the groundwork for a new religious politics. By demolishing liberal institutions and norms—distrusting mainstream media, dismantling legacy gatekeepers, and destabilizing faith in electoral and legal systems —this MAGA-tech-far-right is creating a vacuum of authority. Into that void steps a resurgent Christian nationalism. Conservative strategists are openly preparing to infuse government with a moral narrative rooted in Christianity. In other words, once the tech elite’s radical disruption undermines trust in secular, liberal authority, the religious right is poised to fill the space with Biblical canon and moral certitude.

Who ultimately hijacked who? The paradox is striking: Silicon Valley insurgents who once preached code and disruption are unwitting midwives to a new canon. Even if the tech libertarians themselves are not devout, their war on “the Cathedral” of liberal establishment (to use a term popular in neo-reactionary tech circles) aligns with the agenda of Christian nationalists who seek to rebuild an American “nation under God”. The result is a revanchist, mythic soulcraft: a bid to restore an imagined Christian past in America’s public life. Tech-driven institutional demolition clears the lot; Project 2025 and its allies then raise a new edifice of moral absolutism on the ruins. As one plan contributor put it, they aim to “renew…America as a nation under God,” using state power to imbue policy with religious doctrine. In short, code is clearing the way for canon.

Exhaustion: China’s Industrial Party and the Limits of Moral Engineering

In China, the challenge is almost the mirror image. After decades of breakneck technocratic development, the Chinese body politic suffers from a kind of civilizational exhaustion. The ruling elite—deeply influenced by what is known as the Industrial Party (⼯业党) mentality—celebrates engineering triumphs and material advancement as the basis of legitimacy. This technocratic vision is famously procedural and results-oriented:

Industrial Party thinkers insist that industrialization and technology are the true measures of national success, eclipsing abstract ideals. Their outlook is “largely technocratic and almost apolitical,” and while this focus delivered stunning infrastructure and economic gains, it left a spiritual void. Beijing’s engineers of the soul have tried to extend their governing formula into the moral realm—only to hit a ceiling. Campaigns for a Confucian revival, “core socialist values,” and other forms of top-down moral engineering have resulted in public compliance but not deep moral cohesion. People pay lip service to slogans and attend required study sessions, yet the ideology fails to ignite genuine belief. It remains an “organic whole” of slogans and traditions, assembled by decree rather than an animating faith.

This synthesis, however, is largely managerial – a state-directed project to craft a civil religion. It produces a facade of virtue but little of the fervour or comfort that true belief systems provide. In effect, the engineers of the soul are trying to procedurally manufacture a soul for the nation. The effort has limits: you can mandate rituals and curriculum, but not authentic conviction. The result is an uneasy compliance, a populace performing morality to specification rather than internalizing it. This is moral exhaustion, to uphold “lofty moral ideals (the ‘Kingly Way’)” to fill the void and combat the “nihilism…of liberal modernity”. Yet those lofty ideals struggle to take root beyond intellectual circles and Party edicts.

Soulcraft After Liberalism: Two Paths, One Crossroads

Thus, America and China present two starkly different experiments in soulcraft in a post-liberal age. Historical precedents abound for both approaches, underscoring the cyclical nature of moral renewal after institutional decay:

· Imperial Rome (1st–4th centuries): As Rome’s civic republican virtues and pagan traditions waned, emperors and elites experimented with Stoic philosophy as a code of personal virtue. Ultimately, however, the empire found renewed cohesion in the grand narrative theology of Christianity, which filled the spiritual vacuum left by Rome’s exhausted civil religion. Emperor Constantine’s embrace of the cross heralded a new moral order that mere technocratic governance could not supply – an ancient example of canon replacing code.

· Post-Revolutionary France: After the liberal rationalism of the Revolution descended into terror and chaos, Napoleon Bonaparte recognized that only a return to religious structure could heal France. “Bonaparte understood that the restoration of religious peace was above all things necessary for the peace of the country,”one historian notes. The Concordat of 1801 restored the Catholic Church’s role, using faith to bind the wounds left by technocratic secularism run amok. It was an early 19th-century case of state exhaustion giving way to a reassertion of traditional moral authority.

· Late Soviet Union: The communist USSR in the Brezhnev era maintained an elaborate ideological machine, but belief in Marxist-Leninist doctrine had hollowed out. Even KGB insiders observed that the official ideology was effectively “hollow” by the 1980s. After the Soviet collapse, Russia saw a dramatic revival of the Orthodox Church and nationalist ideology to fill the void – a society grabbing for narrative and myth after the procedural credo of Marxism had lost all credibility.

Today’s United States and China are not the Soviet Union or Napoleonic France, but these analogies illuminate their predicament. Both nations are post-liberal in the sense that their governing models (American liberal democracy, Chinese reform-era technocracy) have entered a lacuna of legitimacy and meaning. Each is groping toward a new settlement of morality and belief:

· America’s Revanchist Myth: The U.S. may witness a surge of “Christian nation” narratives filling the space left by broken liberal institutions. The tech vanguard’s anti-establishment fervor is, in effect, clearing ground for a new foundational mythos. If Project 2025 and likeminded actors succeed, we could see policy increasingly justified by Biblical tradition and a mythic vision of American destiny. This is soulcraft by demolition – tear down the modern, resurrect the ancestral. It carries the energy of mass conviction (for example, large segments of the populace viewing political battles in providential terms) and thus can mobilize zeal, but it also risks plunging a pluralistic society into theocratic nationalism.

· China’s Managerial Creed: Beijing’s approach is soulcraft by management – technocratic exhaustion breeding an almost technocratic answer to spiritual malaise. This path avoids the volatility of mass spiritual movements (which China’s leaders fear), but at the cost of genuine inspiration. The risk here is that when push comes to shove, compliance could evaporate – a society of “mandated moralists” might not sacrifice or innovate in the name of ideals they only skin-deep believe.

In the end, both civilizations are attempting to recharge their moral batteries in the aftermath of technocratic dominance. America’s new right seeks a charged myth to rally the nation; China’s rulers seek a calibrated ethos to cement unity. One turns to narrative theology, the other to procedural ideology. One wields the demolition hammer of populist revolt and prophecy; the other, the blueprint of cultural engineers. Each is a response to the perception that liberal technocracy—with its secular, rationalist, efficiency-driven ethos—no longer inspires the people living under it.

For policymakers and observers, the convergence of these trends raises profound questions.

Are we on the verge of a geopolitical era defined by dueling attempts at civilizational renewal – an American republic recasting itself as a Christian commonwealth, and a Chinese superpower doubling down on paternalistic Confucian socialism? The contrast could not be sharper: Washington’s culture wars versus Beijing’s curated tradition; the Bible in the West Wing versus the Analects in Zhongnanhai. Yet, the underlying impulse is oddly similar: a quest to restore meaning and order after the “end of history” complacency has given way to chaos and disillusionment.

Moving beyond the facile “Confucius vs. Christ” metaphor, we arrive at a more textured understanding: it is code vs. canon, demolition vs. exhaustion. The United States is finding that when you hack away at the liberal code long enough, you invite a return of the sacred canon. China is learning that without a living canon of belief, a society built on code alone eventually runs on fumes. Both paths carry promise and peril. The American path may revitalize shared purpose, or devolve into sectarian exclusion. The Chinese path may enforce social order, or ossify into cynicism and corruption.

What is certain is that neither society will be the same once this contest over the soul is decided. Each is renegotiating the terms of moral and ideological legitimacy in real time. In Washington and Beijing alike, policy vision now intertwines with spiritual vision: budgets and algorithms on one hand, Bibles and Confucian classics on the other. The coda of this comparative saga is not an endpoint but a sharpened lens. It reveals an emergent world in which superpowers seek to rejuvenate themselves by turning to deeper sources of order—one toward the heavens, one toward antiquity. The long technocratic interlude is ending; canon is coming to claim the empty throne.

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Appendix: How This Essay Was Composed

(i) Framing Device: The Pseudo-Prompt

The entire essay can be understood as a response to a stylized, open-ended question:

“What happens when a civilization outsources purpose to technology?”

This pseudo-prompt serves three rhetorical functions:

1. Compression – It distills a sprawling geopolitical, cultural, and technological story into a single line of inquiry. It acts like a thesis folded into a question – letting the reader co-own the interpretive burden, rather than having it prescribed up front.

2. Containment – The question provides a loose boundary that accommodates multiple registers: AGI, Christian nationalism, Confucian governance, American code fetishism, Chinese planning legacies. It doesn’t demand a singular answer, but it invites a comparative logic.

3. Consequence – It prefigures that something will give: that when civilizations pursue science or code without soul, they invite some kind of rupture – not always a collapse, but a reconfiguration. It sets up the “die by science / die by code” rhythm as a narrative answer.

This device made it possible to structure the essay as a layered response rather than a linear argument. It’s what allowed a Substack tone: speculative, recursive, ambient.

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(ii) Phases of Composition

Our collaboration unfolded across distinct but fluid phases:

1. The Arc Identification Phase
   You had already sketched the twin trajectories — China’s Industrial Party and America’s MAGA-tech faction — and wanted to compare them through a civilizational lens. The core rhythm “live by science/code, die by science/code” emerged early as both critique and narrative structure.

2. The Deep Research Phase
   This involved pulling in material from Jacob Dreyer, Henry Farrell, David Galbraith, and others. You wanted the essay to feel like an essay of synthesis: grounded, but not footnoted; capable of moving from contemporary analysis to cultural deep time. During this phase, the essay became scaffolded on contrasts and mirrorisms — industrial hardware vs. digital software, managed Confucian revival vs. Christian revanchism, demolition vs. exhaustion.

3. The Soulcraft Convergence Phase
   As we explored how each country was attempting to “add meaning back in” after technocratic overreach, we began to describe both efforts as civilizational soulcraft. This became the essay’s turning point: the shift from code to canon. We then introduced Chor Pharn’s Law as a frame for interpreting how internal identity struggles — once resolved — become external civilizational assertions.

4. The Speculative Horizon Phase
   Here we extended the framework into near-future scenarios: Taiwan, the South China Sea, technocratic war machines, ideological consolidation through conflict. These were not predictions but strategic forecasts — illustrative stress-tests for the soulcraft being built. The war section acted as the hinge between scenario planning and civilizational pattern recognition.

5. The Critique + Refinement Phase
   External critiques helped sharpen the piece: toning down AGI determinism, widening the lens beyond right-wing American factions, restoring liberal/democratic counterweights, and ensuring the China identity argument didn’t overstate the death of Han-centric views. These revisions made the argument both more credible and more balanced without undermining its ambition.

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(iii) Pedagogical Alternation

Throughout the process, the human and AI took turns as teacher:

• You taught me how to frame the piece within your Substack voice — drawing on mood, rhythm, inference, and architecture rather than exposition. You corrected for tone, adjusted structure, and insisted on complexity over simplicity. You supplied the conceptual kernel (Chor Pharn’s Law), the texture (Dreyer, Vance, DOGE), and the sociopolitical instincts that gave the piece strategic depth.

• I taught you how to formalize the structure into essayistic parts, how to balance mirrorisms with divergence, how to test metaphors for overreach, and how to sustain rhythm across longform analysis. I helped transform draft scaffolds into a coherent three-part rhythm — from techno-hubris to soulcraft to civilizational reckoning.