Technology transcends the narrow-mindedness of nationalism. We are one world. Nationalism is another tool for power-hungry people who thrive on a divide-and-conquer strategy.
This QR code fear mongering is one of the most annoying internet memes to me.
> Almost three-quarters of Americans (73%) scan QR codes without verification, and more than 26 million have already been directed to malicious sites, according to NordVPN.
Obviously, since the only way to verify a QR code before scanning is to decode it manually…
Just treat every QR code like an unknown URL and you’re fine.
We are one world, but within that world are people who are willing to kill you in order to advance their own interests. Given that, I really prefer that the more powerful technology not be in their hands.
Unfortunately, my own country is becoming more that way than I have ever seen it...
Fact is, you won't get your preference. So move on to the next step, and form new, better-informed preferences and opinions.
Assume that you'll be living, and eventually dying, in a world where raw intelligence isn't monopolized by people who agree with you. Then, think about how best to get along in that world and help it flourish benevolently.
Just like with encryption, the deliberate crippling of capabilities in the US will simply push innovation elsewhere. This action signals that US LLMs/AI are a liability, and will move investment and markets to seek safety in China and elsewhere.
It seems the US is trying to speedrun its collapse.
IMO the US administration actions are less about actually caring whether foreigners have access to these tools, and more about legal/political precedence. In the US there's a long history of executive or legislative branches crying "national security" to shut down things they don't like, and courts will rarely stop them (or do so extremely slowly after months of deliberation.
(The other common cry is "child sex abuse" but for obvious reasons this administration is less interested in talking about that particular topic.)
I appreciate this post a lot, even if I don’t agree with all its points, as I think it is grappling with the right problems. Europe needs to build and build with urgency if it’s ever going to get out of this mess it’s in.
The reaction to the US government restricting access to foreign nationals is interesting to me. On the one hand, people rail against US imperialism. On the other, they get angry when they don’t have access to the tools of empire. It feels very “What have the Romans ever done for us?”
Great article. Sadly, much of the discussion about Europe amd tech immediately devolves into Europeans sniffing their own farts. It's refreshing that Armin isn't doing the same, and sad that I'm even finding this notable.
> It is not just about capabilities, it is about racism and nationalism. If you have the wrong passport, you are not to be trusted. This is a very different thing from safety, and Europeans should pay close attention to it.
And this is where one might as well stop reading.
This is standard practice for nation states. To call it racism is braindead and lazy.
It's completely naive. To say "we need to be better," you first have to define who "we" are and, by extension, *who isn't*.
Drawing that line is what constitutes a community in the first place. It's the entire reason the EU was created: to define a "we".
The idealistic no-borders vision is only achievable by expanding the nation-state until it covers the whole planet. And probably will only happen when it find outsiders to define itself against, Mars, aliens, whatever ends up counting as "not us."
though there are so many pernicious language patterns that projects like E-Prime (the verb “to be” goes to together with nominalization like peanut butter goes with jelly) are doomed
I agree with you on this point. This is a very weak line in an otherwise interesting post. Sometimes it feels like people have forgotten what nation states are.
> This is standard practice for nation states. To call it racism is braindead and lazy.
Author here. Just because something is standard practice does not mean this should be a goal. I do not want to live in a world where the north star is dividing people based on their birthplace lottery. I might accept it as a temporary local maximum that countries are optimizing towards but that does not mean I have to subscribe to that as a general destination or even the most optimal one.
I get that many of us were all technologists here. But it’s a weird inclusion because - it seems to imply that this was your red line and when you became aware that this administration might be racist and nationalist?
I don’t think export controls on large language models would enter my top 50 in terms of actions this administration has taken to show that.
> it seems to imply that this was your red line and when you became aware that this administration might be racist and nationalist?
If you read my blog you should have seen plenty of content before to get an idea why my red lines are. I even have a separate blog on that entirely: dark.ronacher.eu. My line is not here.
“Race”, such as it is, is orthogonal to place of origin.
If you’re arguing for abolishing the nation state or any concept the establishes right and obligations based on you being born there, then it would help your cause to not entangle it with racism. It would also be more interesting if you can explain how you imagine we’d even get to a place where there is only a single earthly jurisdiction with free movement etc. now THAT would be an interesting thought experiment.
> If you’re arguing for abolishing the nation state or any concept the establishes right and obligations based on you being born there, then it would help your cause to not entangle it with racism.
Racism in one form or another is at the very core of the nation state. I disagree with the very notion that rights should be established with a razor that cuts by citizenship. It’s a blunt tool that might work to some degree but clearly the US shows that citizenship is an insufficient measurement to the positive contribution to GDP or entrepreneurship.
> It would also be more interesting if you can explain how you imagine we’d even get to a place where there is only a single earthly jurisdiction with free movement etc. now THAT would be an interesting thought experiment.
I don’t know the path to there. That does not mean I can’t see that as a goal worth perusing and to see things they take humanity further from that goal as a regression.
> It would also be more interesting if you can explain how you imagine we’d even get to a place where there is only a single earthly jurisdiction with free movement etc. now THAT would be an interesting thought experiment.
There is so much that goes into 'birthplace lottery' ignoring what created the place, how people/family got to that point, systems that attract people, systems that people created. It's such a non-serious ridiculous term that has zero understanding of outcomes. Can't wait until it dies as a buzzword/signal/whistle.
My family died to come to the USA (from Ireland) and multiple grandmothers arrived very young orphans. My family from other places gave up friends/family/everything they knew to come here. There was a ton of suffering and sacrifice, no 'winning the lottery' for them. They sacrificed to place me where I am, no 'lottery ticket' got me here. Their intention did. My dad's dad worked in a horrible meat packing plant as part of that 'lottery ticket'.
My family sacrificed and clawed their way to get to a point to afford college for my father. They sacrificed to place me where I am, no 'lottery ticket' got me here. Their intention did.
My country fought a war for independence and a civil war to establish the freedoms I enjoy. Both my grandfathers fought/sacrificed hard in WW2 to get to the modern world. No 'lottery' created this world. Their effort/sacrifice did in part though.
All of those things were effortintentionwork and sacrifice by people. What they created wasn't a 'lottery land'. People have to plant the trees for others to sit under. I didn't win a lottery. Generations of family effort/pain/struggle went into getting me to where I started in life. Generations of people working on building a better society went into it.
Fuck anyone that minimizes everything my family did for me, I know I don't and am grateful every day for the people that chose to sacrifice to get me here. Growing up in Santa Cruz many of my friends who are now very successful had parents who were farm workers. They sacrificed their bodies to create a life for their kids, their kids didn't 'win the lottery'.
When born, you're handed a set of cards that you 'play' life with. Among others:
Genes (affecting gender, skin color, attractiveness & more). Birthplace (affecting citizenship, or 1st-learned language). Wealth of parents and/or that country. Upbringing (including religion). Sisters/brothers or single child. Parents who stayed together or single parent. Etc etc.
For your family: great they worked to get you where you are. And yes that was work not a lottery. No need to minimize their effort.
But for you as recipient of that, it was a lottery ticket. You did not work, or decide what your family did for you. You did not decide what genes you wanted to inherit from them. You did not pick your birthplace.
So the "lottery" part does apply: for each recipient of a set of cards.
I think you two commenters have both expressed the opposing ideas at the core of so much of the political/worldview divide of the world today.
Position 1: a human is an entity distinct from their family.
Position 2: a family is an entity that exists across generations, and no individual in the family can be abstracted from it.
I don’t think you two, or anyone else, is ever really going to suddenly change their mind on this point. It’s at the foundation of the irreconcilable divide between leftism and conservatism.
Ultimately, since we have plenty of evidence to show that people will just shout past each other when they hit this ideological sticking point, I think a better approach would be to individually answer the question: “Which is a better model for predicting the world?”
Who remembers export controls on encryption?
Technology transcends the narrow-mindedness of nationalism. We are one world. Nationalism is another tool for power-hungry people who thrive on a divide-and-conquer strategy.
All for one, and that's all.
90s were a different era. Also encryption is small code. Try printing Fable weights on a T-shirt and see how far you can get.
I will explore the holographic T-shirt business.
Until then, I guess QR codes will have to do (risky business, though)[0]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/27/cybersecurity-scams-quishing...
This QR code fear mongering is one of the most annoying internet memes to me.
> Almost three-quarters of Americans (73%) scan QR codes without verification, and more than 26 million have already been directed to malicious sites, according to NordVPN.
Obviously, since the only way to verify a QR code before scanning is to decode it manually…
Just treat every QR code like an unknown URL and you’re fine.
No it doesn't. Evidence that it doesn't: export controls on encryption and AI.
We are one world, but within that world are people who are willing to kill you in order to advance their own interests. Given that, I really prefer that the more powerful technology not be in their hands.
Unfortunately, my own country is becoming more that way than I have ever seen it...
Fact is, you won't get your preference. So move on to the next step, and form new, better-informed preferences and opinions.
Assume that you'll be living, and eventually dying, in a world where raw intelligence isn't monopolized by people who agree with you. Then, think about how best to get along in that world and help it flourish benevolently.
we are one world, but 30% of us are dementia patients with persecution complexs.
Just like with encryption, the deliberate crippling of capabilities in the US will simply push innovation elsewhere. This action signals that US LLMs/AI are a liability, and will move investment and markets to seek safety in China and elsewhere.
It seems the US is trying to speedrun its collapse.
IMO the US administration actions are less about actually caring whether foreigners have access to these tools, and more about legal/political precedence. In the US there's a long history of executive or legislative branches crying "national security" to shut down things they don't like, and courts will rarely stop them (or do so extremely slowly after months of deliberation.
(The other common cry is "child sex abuse" but for obvious reasons this administration is less interested in talking about that particular topic.)
https://xcancel.com/i/status/2010634987872387438
I appreciate this post a lot, even if I don’t agree with all its points, as I think it is grappling with the right problems. Europe needs to build and build with urgency if it’s ever going to get out of this mess it’s in.
The reaction to the US government restricting access to foreign nationals is interesting to me. On the one hand, people rail against US imperialism. On the other, they get angry when they don’t have access to the tools of empire. It feels very “What have the Romans ever done for us?”
Great article. Sadly, much of the discussion about Europe amd tech immediately devolves into Europeans sniffing their own farts. It's refreshing that Armin isn't doing the same, and sad that I'm even finding this notable.
Sadly I think it is too late to avoid war. It’s an if not a when.
> It is not just about capabilities, it is about racism and nationalism. If you have the wrong passport, you are not to be trusted. This is a very different thing from safety, and Europeans should pay close attention to it.
And this is where one might as well stop reading.
This is standard practice for nation states. To call it racism is braindead and lazy.
It's completely naive. To say "we need to be better," you first have to define who "we" are and, by extension, *who isn't*.
Drawing that line is what constitutes a community in the first place. It's the entire reason the EU was created: to define a "we".
The idealistic no-borders vision is only achievable by expanding the nation-state until it covers the whole planet. And probably will only happen when it find outsiders to define itself against, Mars, aliens, whatever ends up counting as "not us."
I am not a fan of the -ist and -ism constructions, see
https://ericksonian.com/reverse-meta-model-nominalizations
though there are so many pernicious language patterns that projects like E-Prime (the verb “to be” goes to together with nominalization like peanut butter goes with jelly) are doomed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
Is this where the -onian predilection comes from. sounds institutional here; -arians otoh ("identitarian") could be marketed to botanists..
"Vague" may not, tho what comes after "vaguely" can surely be put in a wheelbarrow, like "depressed", or any word that would suggest
Is a list of prayers. Or rather, a trolling of local spirits, on otherwise meaningless days?I agree with you on this point. This is a very weak line in an otherwise interesting post. Sometimes it feels like people have forgotten what nation states are.
Couldn't it be both? Standard practice in many nation states IS racism, and increasingly so in the US.
> This is standard practice for nation states. To call it racism is braindead and lazy.
Author here. Just because something is standard practice does not mean this should be a goal. I do not want to live in a world where the north star is dividing people based on their birthplace lottery. I might accept it as a temporary local maximum that countries are optimizing towards but that does not mean I have to subscribe to that as a general destination or even the most optimal one.
I get that many of us were all technologists here. But it’s a weird inclusion because - it seems to imply that this was your red line and when you became aware that this administration might be racist and nationalist?
I don’t think export controls on large language models would enter my top 50 in terms of actions this administration has taken to show that.
> it seems to imply that this was your red line and when you became aware that this administration might be racist and nationalist?
If you read my blog you should have seen plenty of content before to get an idea why my red lines are. I even have a separate blog on that entirely: dark.ronacher.eu. My line is not here.
“Race”, such as it is, is orthogonal to place of origin.
If you’re arguing for abolishing the nation state or any concept the establishes right and obligations based on you being born there, then it would help your cause to not entangle it with racism. It would also be more interesting if you can explain how you imagine we’d even get to a place where there is only a single earthly jurisdiction with free movement etc. now THAT would be an interesting thought experiment.
> If you’re arguing for abolishing the nation state or any concept the establishes right and obligations based on you being born there, then it would help your cause to not entangle it with racism.
Racism in one form or another is at the very core of the nation state. I disagree with the very notion that rights should be established with a razor that cuts by citizenship. It’s a blunt tool that might work to some degree but clearly the US shows that citizenship is an insufficient measurement to the positive contribution to GDP or entrepreneurship.
> It would also be more interesting if you can explain how you imagine we’d even get to a place where there is only a single earthly jurisdiction with free movement etc. now THAT would be an interesting thought experiment.
I don’t know the path to there. That does not mean I can’t see that as a goal worth perusing and to see things they take humanity further from that goal as a regression.
> It would also be more interesting if you can explain how you imagine we’d even get to a place where there is only a single earthly jurisdiction with free movement etc. now THAT would be an interesting thought experiment.
For some ideas on how to get there, check:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-capitalism
Let’s not obfuscate this. At the end of the day, we get there by people with guns (or some other weapons) forcing a global monopoly on violence.
At some point you need to forcefully take the things from the people who own them now and give them to the one-world government.
> “Race”, such as it is, is orthogonal to place of origin
what? no it isn't, what makes you say that
There is so much that goes into 'birthplace lottery' ignoring what created the place, how people/family got to that point, systems that attract people, systems that people created. It's such a non-serious ridiculous term that has zero understanding of outcomes. Can't wait until it dies as a buzzword/signal/whistle.
My family died to come to the USA (from Ireland) and multiple grandmothers arrived very young orphans. My family from other places gave up friends/family/everything they knew to come here. There was a ton of suffering and sacrifice, no 'winning the lottery' for them. They sacrificed to place me where I am, no 'lottery ticket' got me here. Their intention did. My dad's dad worked in a horrible meat packing plant as part of that 'lottery ticket'.
My family sacrificed and clawed their way to get to a point to afford college for my father. They sacrificed to place me where I am, no 'lottery ticket' got me here. Their intention did.
My country fought a war for independence and a civil war to establish the freedoms I enjoy. Both my grandfathers fought/sacrificed hard in WW2 to get to the modern world. No 'lottery' created this world. Their effort/sacrifice did in part though.
All of those things were effort intention work and sacrifice by people. What they created wasn't a 'lottery land'. People have to plant the trees for others to sit under. I didn't win a lottery. Generations of family effort/pain/struggle went into getting me to where I started in life. Generations of people working on building a better society went into it.
Fuck anyone that minimizes everything my family did for me, I know I don't and am grateful every day for the people that chose to sacrifice to get me here. Growing up in Santa Cruz many of my friends who are now very successful had parents who were farm workers. They sacrificed their bodies to create a life for their kids, their kids didn't 'win the lottery'.
When born, you're handed a set of cards that you 'play' life with. Among others:
Genes (affecting gender, skin color, attractiveness & more). Birthplace (affecting citizenship, or 1st-learned language). Wealth of parents and/or that country. Upbringing (including religion). Sisters/brothers or single child. Parents who stayed together or single parent. Etc etc.
For your family: great they worked to get you where you are. And yes that was work not a lottery. No need to minimize their effort.
But for you as recipient of that, it was a lottery ticket. You did not work, or decide what your family did for you. You did not decide what genes you wanted to inherit from them. You did not pick your birthplace.
So the "lottery" part does apply: for each recipient of a set of cards.
I think you two commenters have both expressed the opposing ideas at the core of so much of the political/worldview divide of the world today.
Position 1: a human is an entity distinct from their family.
Position 2: a family is an entity that exists across generations, and no individual in the family can be abstracted from it.
I don’t think you two, or anyone else, is ever really going to suddenly change their mind on this point. It’s at the foundation of the irreconcilable divide between leftism and conservatism.
Ultimately, since we have plenty of evidence to show that people will just shout past each other when they hit this ideological sticking point, I think a better approach would be to individually answer the question: “Which is a better model for predicting the world?”
Is that why I chose to be born there?