The secure transport of light
(This piece is my year in review; I skipped a letter last year) One way that Silicon Valley and the Communist Party resemble each other is that both are serious, self-serious, and indeed, completely humorless. If the Bay Area once had an impish side, it has gone the way of most hardware tinkerers and hippie [ ] The post 2025 letter appeared first on Dan Wang .
(This piece is my book announcement; here s my letter from 2023) I didn’t write a letter last year. Rather, I wrote seven, all of which is new material. They make up my book BREAKNECK: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. It’s driven by a few simple ideas. That Americans and Chinese are fundamentally alike: restless, [ ] The post Breakneck: China s Quest to Engineer the Future appeared first on…
(This piece is my year in review; here’s my letter from 2022) I. Walking The trunk of an elephant might feel cool to the touch. Not what one expects, perhaps, from 200 pounds of writhing muscle, strong enough to uproot a tree, which tapers down to two “fingers,” giving it enough delicacy to detect the [ ] The post 2023 letter appeared first on Dan Wang .
My 2022 letter will probably be my last. Now I have to devise another use for this site. Since I’ve just spent a few days in Singapore, joining various roundtables to discuss China, I thought I would write up the notes I presented on. Most of my remarks focus on technology. But with China, one must [ ] The post China notes, July 23: on technological momentum appeared first on Dan Wang .
(This piece is my year in review, this year a bit late; here’s my letter from 2021) Mountains offer the best hiding places from the state. There were a lot of state controls to escape from in 2022. Two days before Shanghai locked down in April, I was on the final flight from the city [ ] The post 2022 letter appeared first on Dan Wang .
(This piece is my year in review; here’s my letter from 2020) I’ve by now lived in each of China’s main megaregions. It is time to make assessments. Everything that can go wrong in urban design has gone wrong in Beijing. The climate is arid and prone to northerly sandstorms. Its streets are unwalkable, but [ ] The post 2021 letter appeared first on Dan Wang .
(This piece is my year in review; here’s my letter from 2019) I. Inspiration It’s difficult to identify a great economic reason to explore space. There are easier ways to extract minerals, doing anything at all is terribly expensive, and Mars is a hard place to make a living. The benefits of space exploration are [ ] The post 2020 letter appeared first on Dan Wang .