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The Spectacle of "Building"
What’s really at stake is not some tired “hard tech versus soft tech” or “state versus market” dichotomy, but the way both systems turn collective delusion into fuel.
There’s a kind of surgical coordination when HQ says “build hard tech,” whole industries reorient, capital sluices into “priority sectors.” Careers rise or fall on how precisely you color inside the prescribed lines. Recent calls to redirect university funding toward trade schools and manufacturing may overlook the fact that the problem isn't that we've too much theoretical work, but that we've lost the conditions for genuine discovery in both theory and practice. The real lesson from both the Chinese VC's confession and America's current "building" moment is that breakthrough innovation requires defending the weird, the ambiguous, the half-finished spaces where genuine surprise can emerge.
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