It wouldn’t be news to the Central Committee that only the paranoid survive.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter

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It’s unfortunate that any show or movie made about Silicon Valley is full of awkward nerds; by contrast, Hollywood reliably finds attractive leads when it makes movies about Wall Street. So long as the tech world is talking about the Machine God and the Antichrist, so long as it declines to read more broadly, so long as it is mostly inward looking, it will continue to alienate big parts of the world.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter

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While I feel apprehensive about the US, I am much more gloomy about Europe. I have a hard time squaring the poor prospects of Europe over the next decade with the smugness that Europeans have for themselves. I spent most of the summer in Copenhagen. There’s no doubt that quality of life in most European cities is superb, especially for what I care about: food, opera, walkable streets, access to nature. But a decade of low economic growth is biting.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter

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One way that Silicon Valley and the Communist Party resemble each other is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed, completely humorless.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter

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The increasingly gerontocratic Communist Party is not so much hovering over them as existing on a slightly different plane, speaking in strange apocalyptic tongues. Over the long run, I bet that the exuberant and rollicking nature of Chinese society will outlive the lusterless political system.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter

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Elon has been a major figure for the past decade, and it’s likely that he’ll be important for still another. I feel like we have to grapple with him as a world-historical figure, but rather than reading Hegel to understand him, I reach for Philip K. Dick. He knows a thing or two about derangement.
~ Dan Wang via his 2023 letter

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I’m surprised at how Elon Musk has become so central to the culture. Elon is one half a manufacturing visionary, able to do things with rockets, automobiles, and satellites that no one previously imagined; his other half is a pure gremlin on the public consciousness, who uses his Internet following to drive the rest of society towards madness.
~ Dan Wang via his 2023 letter

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You can find pretty good food in America at fairly high prices, but you will never be able to find revelation for the cost of a few dollars — which is the default in Asia. Americans who have never been to Asia will never appreciate how one never needs to cook, because right outside will be a mom-and-pop shop that is preparing a meal that is one order of magnitude tastier and cheaper than one could make at home.
~ Dan Wang via his 2023 letter

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In Chiang Mai, I was reminded of the superb creativity of young Chinese. These kids can meme with the best of them. My favorite thing about the Chinese internet is the velocity of new words: rùn (to flee) and tangping (to lie flat) have attained mainstream prominence, but there are many others.
~ Dan Wang via his 2023 letter

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The commercial spirit of eastern and southern China may have withered, but even Maoist communism couldn’t suppress it totally. I bet that spirit will live on. Chinese have had 40 years to engage more with the rest of the world, and Xi is not a good enough storyteller to convince everyone to fully turn inwards once more.
~ Dan Wang via his 2023 letter

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