Two Chinas, Two Americas

China test-fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile into the Pacific this week. Long-range. A demonstration of nuclear delivery capability across an ocean.

The Chinese people didn’t do that.

There are two Chinas. There is the China of the military, the party apparatus, the defense industry, the strategic planners running war games in conference rooms. And there is the China of the people — the factory workers, the shopkeepers, the families in Shanghai and Chengdu and Wuhan who want what people everywhere want: a business that works, a family that’s fed, a little enjoyment before it’s over. Those people did not launch a missile this week. They went to work.

There are also two Americas. There is the America of the defense contractors, the generals, the Congressional districts whose entire economy runs on the next weapons contract. And there is the America of the people — who want exactly what the Chinese people want, and who are about to watch their tax dollars fund a response to a missile test that the Chinese people didn’t ask for either.

Black Sabbath Wrote This Already

Generals gathered in their masses / Just like witches at black masses

Iommi wrote War Pigs in 1970. He was writing about Vietnam — about the distance between the people who make the decision to go to war and the people who die in it. Fifty-six years later, the lyric fits a submarine missile launch in the Pacific with no adjustment required. The generals gather. The masses pay.

The military industrial complex is not an American invention and it is not an American problem. It is a bilateral condition. China has one. The US has one. They need each other. An arms race requires two sides, and both sets of defense contractors, both sets of generals, both sets of politicians with weapons plants in their districts share a common interest in the race continuing. The missile test is a business development activity as much as a military one.

The people on both sides of the Pacific are not consulted.

What This Has to Do With AI

Here is the thing the surplus slideshow is really about: the technology that is coming — AI, robotics, the combination of cognitive automation and physical capability — is the first development in human history capable of producing genuine, broad-based surplus. Not productivity gains captured by shareholders. Not efficiency improvements that show up as executive compensation. Actual surplus: enough for everyone to have a better life, the machines handling the margin of survival, human beings freed to do what they’re actually for.

That surplus has to go somewhere. It will either be distributed — the post-scarcity door — or it will be consumed. And the most efficient surplus-consumption machine ever invented is the military industrial complex. It will consume every dollar of AI-generated productivity that isn’t explicitly directed elsewhere. New weapons systems. New capabilities. New threats that justify new spending. The Chinese missile test is the opening move in a bidding war that will happily absorb every efficiency gain AI delivers if the people on both sides let it.

The two doors from the slideshow — post-scarcity or neo-feudalism — look abstract until you understand the mechanism. Neo-feudalism doesn’t require malice. It only requires that the surplus gets captured before it reaches people. The defense budget is one of the primary capture mechanisms. It’s bipartisan. It’s bilateral. It operates at scale.

The People Who Just Want to Live

The Chinese factory worker assembling the consumer electronics that will end up in American living rooms has the same relationship to the missile test that the American warehouse worker has to the F-35 program: none, except as the person who pays for it.

The tragedy the arms race obscures is the latent alliance between ordinary people on both sides. They have more in common with each other than with the generals and contractors who speak for them. They want to do business. They want their children to be safe. They want to enjoy their lives. These are not controversial ambitions. They are not strategically incompatible. They are the normal human condition, which the military industrial complex on both sides is organized to exploit rather than serve.

This isn’t naivete about real threats. China’s government is genuinely authoritarian. It does things that matter and should be opposed. But the missile test is not a message to the Chinese people’s neighbors — it is a message to the Chinese people’s generals’ counterparts, in a conversation the people of neither country are part of.

The Question the Technology Forces

AI changes the calculus because it makes the stakes legible in a new way. The surplus coming is real. The question of what happens to it is urgent. And the answer to that question is being decided right now, in defense budgets and procurement decisions and arms race mathematics, by the same machine that has been deciding it since 1970.

The window to wire accountability into the architecture — to build systems where the surplus actually reaches people rather than getting captured by the complex — is the same window we’re discussing for AI governance. It’s not a metaphor. The people writing the policy, the people building the systems, the people deciding what the technology is for: that’s the choice.

Two Chinas. Two Americas. One machine that serves neither.

Satan laughing spreads his wings.

— J.P. Howlett

Related: You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet — the tidal wave that’s coming, the two doors, and why the window to choose is open now.

Related: Tehran Takes Flight — what it looks like when the people and the military industrial complex want entirely different things.

Related: Nobody Profits from Peace — the same machine, the European theater: Ukraine running out of interceptors while the summit host sells to both sides.