The Tripolar Moment

NYT, CCP, BTC 

Today’s world is becoming tripolar. It is NYT vs CCP vs BTC. That’s the American Establishment vs the Communist Party of China vs the Global Internet.

Each of these three poles has a source of truth online: paper (NYT), party (CCP¹⁷⁶), or protocol (BTC). Each has a digital economy that surrounds that source of truth: the dollar economy, the digital yuan¹⁷⁷, or the web3 cryptoeconomy. Each pole is a network in its own right, which stands outside the state; the NYT network gives direction to the American state, the CCP network leads the Chinese state, and the BTC network stands outside all states. And each has a governing ideology.

• Woke Capital¹⁷⁸ is the ideology of America’s ruling class as explicated by America’s ruling newspaper, The New York Times. It’s capitalism that enables decentralized censorship, cancel culture, and American empire. It’s drone-strike democracy.

• Communist Capital is the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party. It’s capitalism checked by the centralized power of the Chinese party-state, as summarized here: Leninist, Confucianist, Capitalist, and Nationalist.

• Crypto Capital is the international ideology of Bitcoin and web3. It’s stateless capitalism, capitalism without corporations, decentralized censorship-resistance, and neutral international law. And it’s the second pole within both the US and China, the one that domestic regime opponents align around.

While superficial aspects of these ideologies may shift with circumstance, we claim these are the only coalitions with the billion-person scale and technological talent to survive as independent power centers in the all-out digital struggle that has already commenced. They do have internal divisions, as we’ll get to, but for the time being every group from companies to states to dissident factions within states will have to navigate between these poles, the tripolar triangle of the digital world.

The Dated and the Timeless 

Before we go further, let’s note: anything written about current events is, by its nature, likely to become dated.

It is possible, even likely, that the US Establishment sheds its skin once again, downplaying wokeness and emphasizing loyalty to the state, just as they transitioned overnight from the “Global War on Terror” to the domestic war on your tweets.¹⁷⁹

It is possible, although less likely, that George Soros, Peter Zeihan, Gordon Chang, and Roger Garside eventually prove right, that Xi Jinping is displaced from his position atop the Communist Party of China in the 2022 Party Congress, and/or that the CCP switches back to “Hide your strength and bide your time.”

And it is possible, although less likely still, that there is some fatal flaw, mathematical breakthrough, or quantum computer that leads to the irreparable failure of the Bitcoin protocol.

So why devote a chapter to the NYT/CCP/BTC model at all, if events can overtake it? Three reasons.

First, we need some model of where the world is, even if imperfect, to steer it where we want to go. Even if it’s wrong, or wrong in some particulars, it may be usefully wrong in that the update shows us where we were wrong. We spend the energy to describe a specific tripolar model of the world because many still think it’s unipolar or bipolar, as illustrated by this amusing interaction between a journalist and Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar.

Second, even if major changes do occur, the decline of American empire, the rise of China, and the ascent of cryptocurrency remain underlying trends involving hundreds of millions of people that would require tremendous force to stop. We’d notice. And we consider a few candidates for such tremendous forces later.

Third, there are aspects of the current moment that are not dated at all, but recurrent. That is, a similar tripolar configuration has occurred before. But first let’s establish how it came about today.

A Bipolar America and a Tripolar Triangle 

In 1990, as the USSR was clearly falling apart, Charles Krauthammer wrote an influential essay called the Unipolar Moment. It made the point that with the Cold War at an end, the US was the sole dominant power on the planet, and would be for roughly a generation, after which point “multipolarity will come in time.”¹⁸⁰ This thesis held up well: unipolarity was true in the 1990s, mostly true¹⁸¹ in the 2000s, much less true with the rise of Asia, technology, and American polarization in the 2010s, and no longer true in the 2020s.

As of 2022, we no longer have a unipolar world. Nor is it just ambiguously multipolar, with an unspecified number of power centers. Instead, we have a bipolar America and a tripolar triangle. And we can visualize these poles as follows:

Moral Power, Martial Power, Money Power 

In the mid-20th century, the decline of the British Empire presaged a three way fight between a moral power, a martial power, and a money power — roughly, left vs right vs center. Back then, the Soviet Union was the moral power, the Nazis were the military power, and the Americans were the money power. Today, NYT is the moral power, CCP is the martial power, and BTC is the money power.

In each case, we also find that the moral power plants moles for espionage, the martial power excels at manufacturing, and the money power leads in media. But while in the mid-20th century these three powers were states, today they are primarily networks.¹⁸²

Moral State, Martial State, Money State 

Back up for a second. How could we possibly say that an entity like the USSR, which killed millions of people, was a “moral” power? Because the USSR’s primary strategy was Communist proselytization¹⁸³, the unceasing evangelism of a malign (but convincing) moral doctrine that managed to capture more than a third of the earth’s population by mid-century. It did have a colossal military, but spoke endlessly of peace; it seized everyone’s property, but claimed it didn’t care about money; and its self-image was that of saintly selflessness. It is in this sense that the Soviet Union was a moral power.

Its moral power¹⁸⁴ allowed it to plant moles in every country, which compensated for its lack of money and manufacturing. American sympathizers funded the buildout of the Soviet state, handed it diplomatic recognition, distracted Japan on its behalf, supplied it with the Lend-Lease Act during WW2 and nuclear weapons afterward, and generally propped up the USSR throughout its life.¹⁸⁵

Nazi Germany also infamously murdered millions of people. While similar to the USSR in many respects, its primary strategy was different. It was an emphasis on martial valor, on pure brute force, on the shells that would supposedly hiss louder than any mere words. It did have an inescapable propaganda apparatus, but its moral preaching was martial; it did leave some money-oriented businesses intact, but said it was socialist; its raison d’être was ruthless self-interest. It is in this sense that Nazi Germany was a martial power.

To support this martial power, the Germans needed a tremendous manufacturing buildout, which they accomplished. Many historians believe the German military had, on a pound-for-pound basis, the best equipment in the war. But because they lacked the capitalist’s ability to cooperate across borders, they drove away some of their best scientists prior to murdering others, ensuring they’d never gain the atomic bomb. And because their morality amounted to Aryan supremacy, which didn’t appeal to anyone other than their co-ethnics, they never managed to build a large enough global coalition to win - which is why the 70M Germans were eventually beaten by the 50M British, the 150M Americans, and the 150M Soviets.

As for the mid-century Americans, their primary strategy was democratic capitalism, as opposed to Soviet communism or national socialism. They preached a morality, but framed it in terms of a capitalist-friendly four freedoms; they built an arsenal of democracy, but it arose from their commercial industrial base. It is in this sense that WW2 America was a money power.

Accompanying the money power was media power, just as capitalism went with democracy. The Americans were much better at media than the Nazis (who couldn’t argue in English) and incrementally better than the Soviets (whose propaganda was ultimately undermined by their lack of prosperity). The media battle was a close-run thing, but in the end blue jeans out-competed the Red Army.

So: in this tripolar configuration, after a titanic struggle, the money power in the center did end up winning over both the martial power on the right (by 1945) and the moral power on the left (by 1991).

Moral Network, Martial Network, Money Network 

Today, the decline of the US empire has led to the rise of a moral power (represented by NYT), a martial power (CCP), and a money power (BTC). The difference relative to mid-century is that each of these are networks that are upstream of states, rather than primarily states themselves.

NYT: The Moral Network

The NYT-centered network of journalists “hold[s] power to account” and thereby stands above any mere elected government. Its go-to tactics are moral badgering and mole-driven espionage, just like the Soviet Union.

On the moral point, go back and look at any recent NYT headline and note how many of the articles involve a moral rather than factual premise as the core point. Free speech is bad, white people are bad, communism was good…this is the kind of thing they are focused on.¹⁸⁶ And it is in this sense that NYT is a moral power.

On the espionage point, as just discussed, we know that the Soviets were past masters at subversion. Their moral convictions made them feel that invading the privacy of others, stealing secrets, destroying lives with Zerzetsung¹⁸⁷ — all of that was acceptable for the great moral cause of communism. Because they weren’t as good at building as the US or even Germany (the Soviet munitions came from America via Lend-Lease), stealing/destroying was the best thing they could do.

Sulzberger’s employees and American journalists in general are similar. They’re the Stasi with a stock symbol, the original surveillance capitalists. It’s always phrased in the passive voice, but how exactly did “The New York Times obtain” the things they print? The story behind the story is more interesting than the story, and the behind the scenes footage would show you a different movie than the one they want you to watch.

In short, much like the communists, the journalists’ moral conviction gives them the license to doxx private citizens, to go through people’s garbage, to use secret identities (and then claim they don’t), to print hacked data, to solicit leaks of private information while demanding to keep their own information private, to induce people to break contracts, to stalk people at their homes, even to cover up enormous genocides and start giant wars…always in the service of the bottom line, and some purported higher good.

The establishment journalist claims to speak truth to power, but somehow never gets around to investigating themselves or each other. As Bloomberg admitted in a moment of candor, they “report on but do not investigate Reuters and CNBC” because they are “direct rivals”. We occasionally hear about incidents like the episode where ABC got CBS to fire the Robach leaker, or when NBC tried to stifle Ronan Farrow’s work, but those are the just the tip of the iceberg. There’s an enormous incentive for establishment journalists to engage in anti-competitive collusion, because if they all agree on what is “true”, who can then fact-check them? No one can “hold accountable” those with the power to hold the government accountable.

CCP: The Martial Network

This one may require the most explanation as it’s the most foreign to Western experience. First we’ll describe why CCP is primarily a network, and then why it’s now mainly martial. We don’t pretend to be China experts — few are! — but these are relatively basic points that are still not that well known.

1. Why Is CCP a Network?

   The CCP network of party members is less separate from the Chinese state, as it doesn’t pretend to be at a great remove from the levers of power as NYT does. But the party is not the same as the state. Indeed, there are 95 million CCP members, and they don’t all have senior government positions anymore than every registered Democrat has a plum spot in the Biden administration. Instead, they are spread out through society. How does it work?

   Joining the CCP is itself nontrivial, which selects for the most dedicated members. The South China Morning Post outlines the “arduous” application process:

   An application must be filed to the applicant’s closest party committee or branch, with a letter explaining:

   • why he is applying for membership,
   • why he believes in the Communist Party, and
   • areas in which he feels he has fallen short of the requirement to become a member.

   But it doesn’t end there, according to Merics:

   Applicants must write essays on Marxism-Leninism and on current political developments. Eight colleagues, neighbors and acquaintances have to vouch for an applicant’s reputation.

   After applying, the applicant must take courses and then pass an exam, only to then be put into a yearlong (at least) probationary period:

   The applicant will then attend party courses, where he will learn about the party’s constitution, after which he will have to take and pass written tests…

   Upon passing the tests, the applicant will required to submit more materials to the party branch, including personal information of himself and his parents. Information about his employment and his parents’ political affiliations also have to be disclosed. Probationary party membership will be granted upon:

   • passing the screening,
   • being recommended by two party members, and
   • discussions and approval after a meeting with the party branch…

   Probation lasts at least a year. At the end of the probation period, the party branch decides whether to admit the applicant, extend the probation or expel him.

   Lest one misbehave during the probationary period, there are consequences if the applicant does not behave up to strict standards:

   In the ensuing one-year probation period, the admission process can still be stopped if “party discipline” is breached.

   And if you are finally cleared by the Party to join, you have a lifelong commitment to uphold, as Mo Chen writes:¹⁸⁸

   When the CCP hold a top tier meeting, you will be in your local party branch conference room to watch it live, and write essay on thoughts after view.

   Natural disasters happen, donate, mandatory. Oh you don’t know where to find the donation box? Don’t worry, it is deducted already from your salary…

   Everytime the Chairman of China releases important article address the issues of current affairs and overarching strategy for the next five years, you write that article 10 times, handwritten, due tomorrow. Thankfully, these are like, once every five years.

   If you break the law, no matter how small, you get a “Party Internal Warning” post. And yes, you write [a] reflection essay about what had led you astray, and how wrong you realize you are… If it is serious, you are back to probation period… even more serious? The double policy, you lose both your party status and office title…

   Seems very alien to a Western mindset! What people would choose to constantly post new essays regurgitating the latest in regime propaganda, and indoctrinating their coworkers and family members? But it all fits if you think of them as China’s New York Times subscribers.

   Think about this scene in Team America: World Police, where the Janeane Garofalo figure says, “As actors, it is our responsibility to read the newspapers, and then say what we read on television like it’s our own opinion.” Then, just swap out the NYT mobile app with Xuexi Qiangguo.

   As the saying goes, “Party, government, army, society and education, east, west, south and north, the party leads on everything.” It’s almost the same for the American Establishment, except the paper leads on everything. America’s CCP are its NPCs.

2. Why Is CCP Martial?

   From 1978 to 2013, from Deng Xiaoping to Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao, the CCP was focused on economic growth. But under Xi Jinping, it’s taken a turn towards militarist nationalism. It builds most of the world’s physical products, its military budget is already >1/3 that of America’s, it has a more focused task (“reunify China” rather than “police the world”), it produces military recruiting videos like We Will Always Be Here, and - most importantly - it is investing heavily in AI and drones.

   On that last point, China is just better at deployment in the physical world than the US government or military, as we can see from (a) the public infrastructure comparison, (b) the multibillion dollar failures of the American Ford-class aircraft carrier, the F-35 manned aircraft, the Littoral Combat Ship, and the Zumwalt destroyer, and (c) the fact that all the manufacturing know-how and the factories themselves are in China.

   Robotics could shift manufacturing out of China, but until then it is quite possible that the “arsenal of democracy” is more like the “arsenal of communism.”¹⁸⁹

   Note however that just because China becomes primarily a martial power does not mean it will necessarily win a physical conflict. The Nazis too in our framework were primarily a martial power, and did not win. Then again, while the Nazis were outnumbered by the US/UK/USSR by a 5:1 ratio (70M to 350M), the Chinese outnumber the Americans by a roughly 4:1 ratio (1.4B to 330M), so past performance may not be predictive of future results.

BTC: The Money Network

This one is almost too obvious, so we won’t belabor it. The global network of BTC holders in a key sense also stands above states, like the NYT network stands above the American state and the CCP network stands above the Chinese state. Why? Because it’s very hard for states to seize Bitcoin, in the absence of some kind of quantum computing breakthrough.

But it’s primarily a money power rather than a moral power like NYT, or a martial power like CCP.

The less-obvious point is that BTC — and its adjacent group of web3 users — are becoming a media power that will eventually topple the NYT, much as the 20th century US’s media power eventually outcompeted that of the Soviet Union. Why? Decentralized media. You can see early signs of this with Substack, Mirror, and NFTs…but in brief, the best content creators have better things to do than work for the establishment. They can become publishers of their own, by founding their own media companies. As with the CCP’s transition to a martial power, the BTC/web3 transition to a money and media power is not at all conventional wisdom.

Overlaps and Exceptions 

Of course, these aren’t pure forms.

NYT is a publicly traded multibillion dollar corporation, and is certainly able to influence the Fed and other huge flows of money. And it can spur much of the US military into action with a fake article or three. So it has money and martial power, even if it is primarily a moral power.

CCP endlessly preaches to its citizens via Xuexi Qiangguo, and until recently was focused entirely on business. So it has a moral and money power as well, though it is becoming primarily a martial power.

Finally, Bitcoin certainly makes a set of implicit moral arguments: inflation is bad, centralization is bad, pseudonymity is good, and the like. And it has a martial power, though it’s entirely defensive, as the combination of encryption and physical decentralization render it resistant to 20th-century-style military attacks. But it is, perhaps obviously, fundamentally a money power.

One can do a similar exercise for the US/USSR/NSDAP triangle.

Submission, Sympathy, Sovereignty 

Each pole legitimizes themselves by appealing to a societally useful concept, and takes it to an extreme as part of denouncing its opposite extreme.

The CCP is the most obvious: you must submit. They’re the Chinese Communist Party, and they’re powerful, so you must bow your head. This is very simple and straightforward and easy to understand, though it only really works for them within China and the Chinese internet.

The NYT pole is slightly more subtle: they demand you must sympathize. After all aren’t you white, or male, or straight, or cis, or abled, or wealthy, or a member of one of an ever-multiplying number of privileged categories — and therefore an oppressor on some dimension? Because you’re powerful, you must sympathize, and bow your head to those you have ostensibly oppressed. It’s a left-handed version of the submission ideology. It can get anyone to bow their head in the name of empowering them, because 99.99% of the world is an “oppressor” on at least some dimension. This pole is strongest on the English-speaking¹⁹⁰ internet, weakest on the Chinese internet, and of intermediate strength outside that.

The BTC pole is the opposite of both of these. It demands you must be sovereign. That means rather than bending to the CCP, or slitting your wrists as NYT demands, you hold your head up high. You hold your private keys locally, you don’t trust centralized corporations or governments, you’re self-sufficient and autarkic, you’re living off the grid. This pole is strong on the global internet, though it’s facing pushback from both CCP and NYT.

Extremes and Counter-Extremes Are Undesirable 

The subtlety here is that each of these poles has an element of truth to it. You don’t want a CCP society where everyone has no recourse but to submit, because that can easily become a now-digital totalitarianism. On the other hand, you also don’t want a society where no one submits to anyone, because that looks like San Francisco, where people can run into Walgreens and steal everything.

You don’t want the NYT-run society where everyone has no recourse but to sympathize with the current thing, because that results in what Matt Yglesias has called the Great Awokening: the emotive and irrational breakdowns that set America on fire and continue to roil US society. Yet you also don’t want the society where no one sympathizes, because that looks like the Grand Theft Auto environment of 1990s Russia, the low-trust post-communist society where any cooperative endeavor is regarded as a scam.

Finally, and perhaps least obviously, you don’t want the society where everyone must be sovereign, because taken to its irrational¹⁹¹ limit that means pumping your own water from out of the ground, growing your own food, not trusting any vendor or person other than yourself, and generally ending the division of labor that makes capitalism run. Extreme autarky might sound romantic, but in the absence of robotic breakthroughs going truly off-grid is a recipe for dramatic regression in the standard of living. Conversely, of course you don’t want a society where no one has the possibility of being sovereign at all, as this leaves us all subject to the not-so-incipient digital totalitarianism that CCP has already rolled out and NYT wishes it could.

A Recentralized Center 

One might argue — and I would agree — that while these three poles and their opposite three extremes are bad, they are not all equally bad, and you don’t necessarily need to be dead center. For example, I’d personally err much closer to the sovereignty pole than our current culture, and try to develop the technologies to enable this.

However, we should recognize that different strokes will suit different folks. And rather than trying to impose preferences on everyone, what we really want are a variety of points in between these three undesirable poles: different fusions for different groups.

The construction we outline in this book — the startup society that ultimately becomes a network state — ideally combines aspects of all three. For example, it does have a clear founder to provide direction, but it ensures every citizen has the right to freely leave should they choose, that coinholders also have a say, and a number of other digital checks and balances. This concept is the basis of the recentralized center, an idea we discuss in depth later.

Conflicts and Alliances 

A tripolar triangle leads to surprisingly complicated dynamics. During the Great Depression, FDR’s US admired the Nazis and the NYT wrote encomiums to them, as documented in Three New Deals and The Gray Lady Winked. Then, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the USSR and the Nazis kicked off World War 2 by invading Poland together, with the USSR standing by as the Nazis fought the Anglo-Americans, and the US-aligned UK seriously contemplating bombing the Soviets. Later, the USSR and the Nazis fought each other during Barbarossa. Then, the US and the USSR teamed up to fight the Nazis. Finally, the US and USSR split Germany between themselves and fought each other during the Cold War. That’s why Orwell wrote in 1984 about how “Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia”¹⁹² — because the coalitions between states switched all the time.

With networks rather than states, the coalitions are even more fluid, with several existing simultaneously.

One Pole Against Another 

NYT vs CCP. This is the obvious one, the Thucydides trap, the Great Power conflict between the US and China that many have predicted. But there’s a subtlety here. Many regular Chinese people don’t want such a conflict, and many Americans don’t either, but those who are invested in imperial ambitions on both sides — the paper subscribers and the party members — are into it. Networks are driving the states to war.

NYT vs BTC. This is another obvious one, the American regulatory state (which NYT is upstream of) against the decentralized network. We are seeing this push with efforts like the failed 2021 House Bill and the “concerned.tech” letter. Note the demographics of the signatories to the latter: it is almost entirely white Westerners complaining about the US establishment losing root control over the global financial system. It is doubtful that their enthusiasm for the dollar will be shared by Americans hit by inflation — or by people overseas. This conflict is the American establishment vs the Global Internet.

CCP vs BTC. Yet another obvious one. The CCP has “banned” Bitcoin many times over the years, but those bans have materially grown in severity. The most recent action was just short of a seizure.

Two Poles vs the Third 

NYT + CCP vs BTC. This is the State vs the Network. It’s when the NYT-controlled American empire and the CCP-controlled Chinese empire team up to attack BTC, perhaps on the grounds of “climate” or some other thinly veiled excuse to maintain state power.

NYT + BTC vs CCP. This is Western voice and exit together vs Eastern control. It’s when NYT’s interests in disrupting the Chinese regime and BTC’s interests in providing globally uncensorable savings overlap to provide a thorn in the side for CCP. The web3 part of BTC/web3 becomes particularly important here, because it provides hard-to-censor global services that complement digital gold, which on its own is necessary but not sufficient for freedom.

BTC + CCP vs NYT. This is the post-American world against the American empire. Against the inflating dollar, China and crypto together can do something neither can alone. The CCP/RMB pole runs a Chinese system that is already at scale, capable of operating completely outside the dollar, and based on a more modern digital yuan to boot. The BTC/web3 part of this aligns American dissidents¹⁹³ with global crypto holders, and promotes neutral protocols¹⁹⁴ that take away American root access (but also don’t grant it to China).

Intrapolar Conflicts 

Near each pole there is an internal dyad representing the conflict within. We represent this as an inscribed triangle within the tripolar triangle.

Near the NYT pole are the American dissidents, the non-woke liberals, centrists, and conservatives who disagree with the US establishment’s platform of speech controls, inflation, and unending warfare - but still identify as American first, and don’t want to see China become number one.

Near the CCP pole are the Chinese liberals, the internationalist capitalists who thought times were better under Hu, as well as the many groups left and right who’ve seen their fortunes dim under newly aggressive Chinese nationalism…but, again, who still see themselves as Chinese first, and don’t want to bend to American imperialism.

Near the BTC pole is the web3 community and the tens of millions of Bitcoin holders who don’t identify as Maximalists…but who also still subscribe to many of the internationalist principles that presuppose an internet without American or Chinese root control over the financial or communication systems.

The Road To Recentralization 

And what about other countries and people who don’t define themselves with reference to the Americans, the Chinese, or the blockchain? Well, there will be a lot of pressure to identify with the first two poles…which will drive any group that doesn’t want to be under the thumb of the US establishment or the CCP to the third pole of BTC/web3.

That is, one of our premises is that the Indians, Israelis, American dissidents, Chinese liberals, tech founders/investors, and people from other countries that want to maintain their own sovereignty will need to avail themselves of BTC/web3 for decentralized communication, transaction, and computation.

But to fully explain why, we’ll need to go through a scenario for the future that isn’t about remaining under the thumb of US or Chinese centralization, nor about falling into crypto-anarchic decentralization, but rather about consciously recentralizing into opt-in startup societies.