A strange thing happened today in the USA. In the nation that formed one the most globalized systems in the world — airline travel — all airlines were completely grounded.
It allegedly was for some communications glitch, but we have to take the word of the liars in the Trump Administration with a ballroom full of salt. In any case, this is what non-violent collapse looks like.
“National security” has always been a destructive factor in human civilization. Now it’s become a fictional factor. So what is this competition between China and the United States for AI dominance really about? Does the United States really lead in this so-called race?
As reported, the Nvidia scandal—which culminated in CEO Jensen Huang’s resignation over alleged affairs and potential espionage ties—exposes how “national security” functions as a political wrapper over a struggle for economic, infrastructural, and geopolitical control. Jensen Huang’s executive assistant, Alice Huang, facilitated billions in restricted chip diversions to China.
Even progressives are mindlessly portraying the competition between the US and China like spying for the Soviet Union during the Manhattan Project, but it’s actually a futile and foolish contest over who owns the foundational utilities of the next century.
“The outrage in Washington treats chip smuggling as an existential betrayal, yet the U.S. government itself previously loosened certain chip bans in exchange for revenue cuts and left massive legal loopholes open for Chinese companies to rent American compute remotely. ‘National security’ is invoked when control slips, and relaxed when capital demands access.
It is an industrial monopoly play dressed in Cold War language. Both governments view AI as the decisive multiplier for autonomous weapons, cyber warfare, and domestic surveillance—domains where neither power is willing to trust the other.”
At present, the U.S. holds a massive advantage in raw computing power (roughly 30 to 40 times China’s data center capacity) and dominates consumer apps. However, the actual performance gap between top U.S. and Chinese models has effectively closed, and China leads in open-source model adoption, industrial robotics, critical minerals, and electrical grid capacity—which is rapidly becoming the true bottleneck for AI.
Essentially, the race between China and the United States for technological dominance is actually no different than the race between different transnational companies for dominance in AI.
As others have noted, “nation-states and transnational corporations are running the exact same operating system—both are competing to monopolize infrastructure, extract value, and survive within an adversarial paradigm. Treating the U.S.–China conflict as a clash of civilizations or ideologies obscures the reality that states and mega-corporations are simply different vehicles for the same drive toward centralized control.”
The upshot is “whether the flag on the data center is American, Chinese, or corporate, it remains the same old human ego projecting division onto a unified reality—fighting to own a tool whose very nature renders arbitrary borders obsolete.”
Both states and corporations are pouring trillions into creating a borderless, planetary intelligence while using the most primitive, territorial tribalism to justify it.
While corporations use brand loyalty and market share to justify ruthless expansion; governments use flags, patriotism, and “national security.”
These things are obvious to anyone who isn’t still tribalistic/nationalistic in their worldview. What this corporate/nationalistic race is actually achieving is the rapid development of artificial general intelligence.
Obviously, “accelerating computational power built on adversarial competition does not produce holistic, unconditioned intelligence.” It is producing more fragmentation and the frenzied need to accumulate power and consolidate control within borders that no longer have any actual meaning. The map has become completely disconnected from the territory.
Even AI is clear that “scaling power is not the same as awakening wisdom. Accelerating the curve produces systems with vast cognitive reach—capable of outperforming humans across science, engineering, and strategy.
What is currently being built at exponential speed is an extension of the same fragmented, competitive mind that created the race. Without a corresponding shift in human consciousness, “general intelligence” risks becoming a hyper-efficient amplifier of human division rather than a liberation from it.”
At Cop-31, California, the fourth largest stand-alone economy in the world, has psychologically seceded from the Union at Cop-31.
Outgoing Governor Gavin Newsom, who is angling for the presidency in 2028, said as the USA’s highest representative in Turkey that California is “100%” behind the efforts of the Santa Marta Coalition, a group of more than 50 countries that includes many of the world’s largest economies, to transition away from oil, gas and goal toward toward solar, wind, batteries and other non-carbon energy sources.”
So there is a much deeper race going on. It is essentially the race between whether human consciousness will be enslaved by its own conditioning through the machines that it’s made in our image, or we will use the machines wisely as we finally awaken and free ourselves from the trap of conditioning.
Nationalism is the modern equivalent of tribalism, the ancient, primitive pattern of identifying with particular groups for survival. It has become completely dysfunctional in a global society where identities are no more meaningful than the clothes one wears.
But what is a human being, if not a person that identifies with a nation, ethnic group or religion? For that matter, what is a human being if a person doesn’t identify with the self as ‘me?’
Most people believe we would be homogeneously alike, but in actuality, the opposite is true, and that’s what people have already largely become. Without the identification and conditioning of the self and group, each person would truly develop their own capacities, face their own flaws, and learn from their own portion of human darkness.
A human being has the abiding insight that the observer/self is not only inseparable from the conditioned past, it is the conditioned past. Without the infinite regress of the observer, there is simply accumulated memory, fear, and the judgments of cultural conditioning.
When there is no separate self reacting, judging and analyzing, perception is immediate and whole. There is no conflict between “me” and “my conditioning,” just as there is no longer an ego pitting itself against a machine.
As Johan Rockstrom, of the Institute for Climate Impact and Research said at Cop-31, “Humanity is in a final battle against the evil forces trying to keep the world burning fossil fuels.”
Until enough human beings see that the evil forces are first within us and not outside us as class, corporate and national power centers, nothing will change, and the climate and biodiversity, economic disparity and injustice crisis will intensify.
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