The Tripolar Moment

Chapter 3

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 (CCP¹¹¹), or protocol (BTC). Each has a digital economy that surrounds that source of truth: the dollar economy, the digital yuan¹¹², 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 Capital¹¹³ 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.