(Note: this needs fact checking.)
I can see you, RobCartman24730. You’re sitting in a Delta Sky Club near gate T23 as you await early boarding for your monthly flight to Cincinnati on business. On an article about DeepSeek on fox.com, you wrote that LLMs are not to be trusted because Nancy Pelosi, a communist, sold NVIDIA stock before the rise of DeepSeek from China, who are communists, and they’re all in cahoots. You learned about a different and skewed China in grade school, but that hardly matters now, because those preconceptions still exist in your head and in those of your fellow commenters. You think of yourself as a good businessman with your two LLCs that you primarily got for tax deductions, which is why you voted for Trump. It’s obvious which party is worse, which is why you voted for Trump. It’s obvious which party is associated with the communists, which is why you voted for Trump.
Oh, Rob. You could probably school me on setting up a 501(c)(3) or on how to file jointly and then, two kids later, separately. But if only you knew. If only someone showed you the other side of the world that you’ve only heard about. Your head would spin as your worldview realizes it needs an update, and your eyes would glaze over as the subconscious part of you scrambles to explain how this doesn’t make you wrong about the state of the world.
If only you knew that China today is probably more capitalistic authoritarian than it is communist (with the given that communism definitely doesn’t mean what you think it means). That this socialist authoritarianism has improved China on a crap ton of metrics to such a degree that we Americans have only glimpsed in our dreams, at the expense of some others that we’ve (so far!) only experienced in our nightmares.
RobCartman24730 doesn’t actually exist, except in my imagination, but the people I based him off of on that DeepSeek article I read this morning are definitely real, and definitely Un-Woke. However, I grew up around a lot of RobCartman24730s back home in Georgia, so I’d say I have a slightly better imagination about him than I would if I had lived in the city. Rob is not a bad guy, and is certainly not my enemy. Like the rest of us, he simply has no mechanism to tell him about the world as it is, because of all the stories in his head.
I’ve been obsessed with storytelling lately. I’m not sure where I read it from initially, but the concept that humans only process the world through stories has really struck a chord with me. I’ve been really pensive in the new year—about hanging out in social settings, about working in a startup, and about elections. All have these have something in common, which is that you are dealing with people, and if you want to succeed in any of these, you have to be good at telling stories.
If you know me, you’d know that while sometimes I can be funny, a lot of times when I talk about something that happened it’s really hard to follow what I’m saying, which kind of ruins the whole thing. That’s right, I know about this flaw of mine that y’all never tell me. I can see it in the way you start listening and then kind of stop, the way that your eyes quickly dart back to me after I finally look up from the floor. Well, new year, new me—I want to get better at this talking thing. Some of it I’m sure I can learn from a blog post through a quick Google Search, and anything else I can probably grasp from ChatGPT or DeepSeek, whose data inevitably contains numerous blog posts accessible via a quick Google Search. Or, even better, we can call and you can tell me yourself.
As a founding engineer in a startup, I struggle a lot with figuring out how to convince people to buy our product, but I’m starting to think it’s less about the product and more about the vision. According to the book on startups that I’m reading, to successfully sell, you can’t start with a catchy tagline and work your way down. You have to tell a hero’s journey where your customer, not you, is the hero. Your customer is saving the world, and that every purchase they make and every friend they refer is a noble step in a grand cause. Only then will your customers stay customers and do the work of marketing for you. You want the evangelicals. You want, dare I say, the MAGAs.
To help me cope with the changing of the tides these next few years, I’m looking to read some ancient philosophies to remind myself that despite having new technologies, many of today’s problems and themes are as ancient as people are. As I’m Chinese, I find myself gravitating towards Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism as I can probably more easily grok the concepts and appreciate the beauty of the concise and artfulness the Chinese language offers. Take this, for example: Confucius once wrote, “三人行，必有我师焉。择其善者而从之，其不善者而改之”, which means “Among three people walking, there must exist one who can be my teacher. Take that which is good and follow it, and that which is bad and correct it.” 8 years on, I can’t help but really respect Trump. The man famously was handed a silver spoon, but not every man handed a silver spoon became Trump. As a business magnate, as a TV personality, and now as the most authoritarian president of our time, he’s always cared deeply about image, and little else. He and his team understood the importance of image and what drove attention and engagement. And with just a tiny little sprinkle of serious, major lack of empathy, look where it got him. On Inauguration Day, he was more upset about the optics of a lowered flag than the death that the lowered flag represented. I’m not sure how my fellow Georgians feel about that, but I feel sadness and a strange bicolored sense of awe: that he felt this way, but also that the man that would feel this way might have a good reason to do so.
I’m in awe really at the relentless pursuit of the conservative movement in the past few decades on all fronts. Where’s our MAGA? Our Federalist Society? Our Heritage Foundation? Every day in the past four years we woke up thinking our one vote meant that someone else could take care of the country for us, while deifiers of Trump woke up believing that they were part of something real and great. I want to be part of something real, and to write a new American story that includes instead of excludes. Because maybe the popularity of All Lives Matter—while tone-deaf and often racist and in bad faith—was trying to tell us something about our movement: that despite “White America, you’re an oppressor” being as real and as true as it is, maybe if we had said something like “White America, we need your help, nobody is free until all of us are free,” we would’ve gotten more metrics improved than Number of Master Bedrooms Renamed to Primary Bedrooms. Maybe something in the place of “Defund the Police” at a time when Americans (erroneously, that is!) perceived the country as high in crime could have funneled money to better institutions as was desired instead of, well, increasing the budgets of police departments around the country.
Yes, obviously, it’s not like MAGA is the poster child of inclusivity, but it put nationalism front and center and told its followers to be heros and to, well, MAGA. For those not turned off by its misguided platform and premises, it did feel inclusive and feel right or at least tolerable, at the expense of minorities and some imaginary enemies. I just want to know: is there a way we can create liberal movements that gain traction and really last and include all of America, even the Robs and the Worse-Than-Robs?
Maybe not, and maybe all of this was inevitable. But this year, I want to learn and try and know for sure.