{"id":85373,"date":"2026-05-16T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-16T06:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/?p=85373"},"modified":"2026-05-15T20:02:31","modified_gmt":"2026-05-16T02:02:31","slug":"the-shared-feeling-of-being-harvested-by-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.opinionpublica.tv\/portada\/the-shared-feeling-of-being-harvested-by-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"The shared feeling of being harvested by the future"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"The<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This essay has been updated to reflect news developments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within an hour of landing in Shanghai, I was sitting in the back of a Didi cab while the driver pleaded with me to game the company\u2019s algorithm. Didi is called the Uber of China and has a ubiquitous footprint in the country, dispatching tens of millions of rides per day. Could I cancel the ride and pay him directly through WeChat?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was an oversupply of drivers competing for too few fares, he explained. After dropping me off, he would be sent straight back to the airport, where he would have to wait for hours for another pickup. If I canceled, he could take a place near the front of the line. \u201cI hope you understand,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve got an older and a younger generation to support.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The driver\u2019s plight reminded me of the DoorDash workers in the United States whose earnings are controlled by optimized dispatch systems or the Amazon Flex workers who compete for scarce delivery blocks, never certain when the next job will come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

President Trump\u2019s visit to China a few days ago provides a moment of comparison. I have spent years reporting and living in the United States and China and wrote a book chronicling the history and evolution of the Chinese internet. Moving between the two countries, I\u2019ve been struck by how they have come to mirror and resemble each other. There is a shared sense of precarity that lies beneath the envy and distrust: The technological future is taking shape at vertiginous speed, yet its promise is not shared by all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The growth of artificial intelligence has been presented as a rivalry between two fundamentally different systems. America commands capital and chips, while China marshals engineering talent and manufacturing prowess. America holds an edge in building software \u2014 enterprise tools and cloud platforms. China leads in hardware \u2014 humanoids and autonomous vehicles. America pushes ahead with frontier models, with its artificial intelligence labs making moonshot bets to build a superintelligence. China focuses on scale and diffusion, with its tech firms embedding A.I. as quickly as possible in every sector of society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019ve been told that the ultimate prize in A.I. is the achievement of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. The country that figures this out, the theory holds, will establish world dominance through turbocharged economic and military power. In podcasts and political speeches \u2014 shaped by Silicon Valley executives and Washington policy wonks \u2014 the United States and China are almost always battling or competing or are locked in this race. China is years behind, no, months behind; it\u2019s pulling ahead; it\u2019s winning; it\u2019s losing; it\u2019s racing toward A.G.I.; it\u2019s not racing toward A.G.I.; it\u2019s racing on a different track.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of the race blew up last year after the introduction of DeepSeek R1, a Chinese open-source model that reportedly rivaled U.S. frontier models at a small fraction of the cost. A wave of China envy overtook U.S. tech leaders, who marveled at China\u2019s speed in building bridges, high-speed trains and advanced prototypes. Marc Andreessen warned that the United States must reindustrialize or fall behind a world of \u201cChinese robots.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The leftist influencer Hasan Piker traveled to China in 2025, a copy of Mao Zedong\u2019s quotations in hand, to see what America might \u201cadopt and emulate.\u201d The popular YouTuber Darren Watkins, known as IShowSpeed, streamed his trip to Shenzhen, where he danced with humanoids and ordered KFC by drone. Just as Chinese people were once transfixed by American consumer abundance \u2014 its shopping malls and sprawling suburbs \u2014 Americans have become obsessed with China\u2019s robots and manufacturing power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But looking past the headlines and the highlight reels, you can see the sharp divide in both countries brought on by A.I. Those who build and bankroll the technology speak of the future as a promise to be profited from, an opportunity to be exploited. In Silicon Valley, college dropouts talk of A.I. tackling climate change and curing disease. Researchers are courted with nine-figure salaries like N.B.A. stars, and roadside billboards call on residents to \u201cSupercharge your A.I.\u201d and \u201cStop hiring humans.\u201d Tech workers have earnestly adopted China\u2019s infamous 996 work schedule: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. They are hustling hard and locking in to ensure that they emerge as the rich and powerful victors of the A.I. gold rush.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

China\u2019s tech hubs are driven by a similar sense of urgency. In Beijing\u2019s Zhongguancun, known as China\u2019s Silicon Valley, office towers stay lit deep into the night as A.I. lab employees hustle to beat their rivals across the road. Companies poach one another\u2019s star engineers, and freelance coders burn through tens of thousands of Claude tokens to vibecode products. The start-up founders hunt for what they call the fengkou, or \u201cwind vent,\u201d an opportunity that if seized at the right moment can propel an entrepreneur straight to fortune. They study translations of Peter Thiel\u2019s \u201cZero to One\u201d and lionize Elon Musk because, as one tech worker told me, \u201cHe moves quickly, his execution is crazy, and he can really deliver stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

China\u2019s most recent wind vent was \u201craising lobsters\u201d \u2014 shorthand for training the free open-source A.I. agent OpenClaw. Nearly 1,000 people, from amateur coders to housewives, lined up outside the tech giant Tencent\u2019s headquarters to install the software on their devices. Users claimed that OpenClaw could kick-start side hustles and double stock returns; parents bought lobster installation services for their grade school children to keep up with their peers. Tech companies raced to monetize this anxiety, charging users for cloud servers and software access. \u201cThis is not \u2018embracing the future,\u2019\u201d one disillusioned user on RedNote described the OpenClaw craze. \u201cIt\u2019s \u2018being harvested by the future.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Farther south in Shenzhen, China\u2019s hardware capital, start-ups boast of operating at Shenzhen speed and have been embedding A.I. into everything from coffee makers to construction cranes. At a high-tech fair in the city, hosted in 20 halls the size of airport hangars, I walked by stalls advertising A.I. pianos, A.I. beef noodle makers, A.I. holographic tour guides and A.I. English tutors. I sat down in front of an A.I.-powered traditional Chinese medicine doctor that scanned my tongue and delivered a diagnosis. A crowd gathered around a boxing ring, cheering on a pair of sparring humanoids made by the robotics giant Unitree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a highly competitive environment right now,\u201d a Shenzhen software engineer told me. \u201cI feel like if I stop, I\u2019ll be left behind.\u201d His anxiety is not new. Unstable work situations and economic insecurity long predate the current A.I. boom. But A.I. has supercharged those anxieties and made them much harder to contest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A parallel set of memes has emerged to capture the sense of powerlessness. In the United States, Silicon Valley tech elites identify as high agency, while the rest of us are bots condemned to the permanent underclass. In China, ordinary workers describe themselves as shechu (\u201ccorporate cattle\u201d) and jiabangou (\u201covertime dogs\u201d). These workers have long used the viral term \u201cinvolution\u201d to capture the feeling of being trapped in a cycle of meaningless competition. In both countries, those disaffected by A.I. identify with the gaming meme of the NPC, or nonplayer character. They feel like the background role in someone else\u2019s video game, existing only to fill the world, not to shape it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2025 a group of A.I. researchers from the United States, Canada and Europe coined the term \u201cgradual disempowerment\u201d to describe a future in which ever more capable A.I. would quietly erode human agency. The technology would steer our core institutions with little regard for human values. Though framed as a future risk, to someone who has been observing the United States and China closely, it already felt like a diagnosis of the present day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The knowledge workers of both countries feel the surveillance presence of the technology. A.I. is now used in decisions to hire and fire employees. It tracks attendance at work, predicts an employee\u2019s growth potential, flags idle hours and enforces discipline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outside the office, both Chinese people and Americans have become enamored with A.I. as a source of frictionless companionship and emotional validation, with companies now monetizing emotional intimacy at scale. Over 70 percent of American teenagers report using chatbots as companions, nearly one in eight for mental health support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, in China, one survey found that nearly half of young Chinese people had used an A.I. chatbot to discuss their mental health. In a country where living alone is quickly becoming the norm \u2014 with single-person households expected to possibly reach 200 million by 2030 \u2014 A.I. companions have emerged as a quick fix to a growing loneliness epidemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This year the app Are You Dead? \u2014 which alerts a contact if a user fails to check in \u2014 has been wildly popular. (Its Chinese name, Sileme, is a morbid play on the name of the popular food delivery app Ele.me, meaning \u201cAre you hungry?\u201d) But Are You Dead? addresses a serious need: the growing number of people who are living solo, far away from family, deprived of social support and afraid of disappearing without being noticed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The people of both countries are turning toward the spiritual for solace and agency in a world accelerating out of their control. The 20-somethings of America check astrology apps like Co-Star, part of a $3 billion industry. Some in Gen Z are rediscovering Christianity, and religious conservatism has re-entered public life. In China, fortunetelling bars have popped up in cities, astrology apps like Cece are going viral, and young people are consulting DeepSeek to predict their futures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last fall in Beijing, I found myself at a dinner with a group of women in their 20s and 30s whose conversation circled familiar anxieties: shrinking job prospects (and recruitment horror stories), disenchantment with dating (none of them wanted to get married or have children) and a growing fascination with bazi, tarot and the occult. When I asked one guest about tarot\u2019s rising appeal, she answered simply, \u201cNo one turns to tarot when times are good.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the future loses its promise, the past becomes a refuge. Both societies have seen a surge of nostalgia, a longing for a time remembered as simpler and more stable. Many Chinese idolize rural vloggers such as the YouTuber Li Ziqi, who rose to fame during the pandemic by sharing videos of her self-sufficient, pastoral life in the Sichuan countryside. You can see the same dynamics in the popularity of the tradwife Instagrammer known as Ballerina Farm, who documents her Utah homestead, milking cows and making doughnuts from scratch for her nine children. Both of those women live off the grid and embody an imagined idyll where chatbots and corporations do not exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nostalgia also has a dark side, encouraging the rise of once fringe, illiberal ideas into the mainstream. This has been underway in China for years, with its influencers and ideologues rejecting liberal ideas and drifting toward a conservative centralized authority. In the United States we see the growing influence of pundits like Curtis Yarvin, who argues that liberal democracy should be dismantled in favor of a chief-executive-led monarchy and whose ideas have found an audience among America\u2019s tech and political elites, from Thiel to JD Vance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we\u2019re faced with such a system, the simplest response is to surrender: accept one\u2019s fate, sink into the apathy of inevitable decline and, in the words of Chinese netizens, let it rot. It\u2019s easy to flee the friction of the real world for the comfort of our feeds and to confide in chatbots rather than friends. In doing so, we enable our leaders to leverage our fears and displace our anxieties onto the meme version of a foreign country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of addressing A.I.\u2019s challenges in isolation, why not bring together people from all sectors of society to reclaim agency over our lives? We can pursue collaboration, as scientists and policymakers have already begun to do. On the sidelines of the World A.I. Conference in Shanghai last summer, scientists from across the world met to address critical A.I. risks, calling for international cooperation to ensure that advanced A.I. systems remain aligned with human values.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Workers can band together to resist toxic work cultures at big tech companies that sacrifice human dignity for profit and competition. It was only in 2019 that Chinese programmers began the 996.ICU campaign on GitHub to protest grueling work hours. They drew support from U.S. tech workers and hundreds of tech employees worldwide \u2014 one of the largest online mobilizations of tech workers in history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the summit this past week between Mr. Trump and President Xi Jinping, the two countries agreed on future A.I. discussions, including establishing important guardrails. But it\u2019s unclear when these talks will take place. The Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, said he was comfortable with cooperating with China because \u201cthe Chinese are substantially behind us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once you step back, it\u2019s easy to see the warping effect of the U.S.-China race. It\u2019s a story that has been used to justify sprinting ahead without constraints, in the name of beating the other. By focusing on our rivalry, we have become blind to our vulnerability. Instead of fixating on who crosses the finish line first, we must work together to lift up the people both countries have left behind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n