In https://www.postapathy.com/p/long-americana, Mr. Soldo examines how Europe has become entirely subjugated by the current American elite, who are able to mask themselves with the assistance of Brussels, and in https://www.postapathy.com/p/long-americana, Mr. Askary notes that it is easier to see the increasing dominance of american culture outside the borders of the US. Within the US, the crumbling infrastructure and continued decay of the social fabric are very unnerving to residents, but outside, the rest of the imperial subjects are subject to the same psychological manipulation produced by Silicon Valley. Since it is Big Tech that is responsible for the rapid delivery of the hegemonic narrative it is also the foundation for the other forms of control whether military, political or socio-cultural. All warfare is ultimately psychological.
Related discussions started in >>143 and >>1169. We are confronted with an hegemonic power that is immanently incompatible with life, but power flows to it in the absence of a competent alternative. I think that we really need to understand this thing more deeply, and would appreciate your suggestions.
Brief observation: power is not a scalar. It's more like a multi-dimensional vector. It's totally possible for it to be high in some dimensions and decaying in others. Likewise, it's not exercised by some unitary agent. There are many agents in the U.S. regime, not to mention regional elites in Europe. This is why simple predictions about the advance or retreat of hegemony are unreliable.
>We are confronted with an hegemonic power that is immanently incompatible with life, but power flows to it in the absence of a competent alternative.
A significant portion of the world has come to resent this hegemon. The US will likely lose AT LEAST half of the globe within our lifetime.
In terms of foreign policy, we are already there. Industrially, we are already there. Financially, de-dollarization is happening much quicker than anyone expected. Technologically, the pieces are in place to be moved.
Culturally might be the most difficult break, given that the US is more culturally and linguistically similar to most of the Earth than China is. Not sure how that will play out but maybe China will find their equivalent of anime, which allowed culturally unique Japan to spread itself across the globe.
I would argue that the author is mixing up two distinct situations.
There is American political and corporate influence at work in nations where it can be exercised. American politics echo in Brazilian, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, etc. affairs as a result of direct engagement by the American state in those places, historically, or, at the very least, manipulation of the local elite. That's one relic of the Cold War that won't remain constant forever.
And then I think he makes the error of identifying in a globalized culture things that are familiar, or which are only superficially American, or which resemble the administration of soft power at the height of the Cold War. I mean that Pakistani influencers showing off SKIMS hauls on Instagram is not quite the same as Soviets coveting blue jeans and trading Blue Cheer bootlegs.
Nation states lost the soft power war. America lost the soft power war. That is the tragedy. There is no Americana to export.
I'll keep going, and I hope I can tie these things together with the story of a young woman I know that lives in Vientiane. When I knew her, she went regularly to seminars at the American Center. She could lecture with some fluency about how local politics lacked the values of honesty and trust that she saw in American democracy. She had fantasies of American wealth and being taken in the arms of sturdy white men. She converted to Christianity. She was a product of one of many institutions, now outmoded, now mostly hollowed out, now given over to entrepreneurship boot camps and pride events, that the United States deployed around the Third World to cultivate a local anticommunist, pliable elite.
She had no hope of going to the United States, however. It's hard to immigrate to America, apparently. Her father was a merchant, so she had no hope of getting a position in the bureaucracy. She dreamed of settling in Tokyo, since she had previously studied there on a scholarship funded by the Japanese government. That never worked out, so she resigned herself to going to work for a Chinese company that paid well. She teased me by saying that she was going to give in to the advances of the Chinese playboys that she saw driving supercars up to her friends' parties.
The argument, though, might be that I spoke to this young woman in English, that she could pick up references to Virgil Abloh and Lana Del Rey, that she was impressed when I said I lived for a month in Los Angeles, and so on... None of this counts as Americanization, in a real sense. It is not anything worth being proud of, or hopeful about, that a twentysomething-year-old in Laos is as American as most people living in America.
The Chinese suffer from this same delusion, officially. At least they don't fool themselves into thinking exporting Shein and TikTok and Genshin Impact count as soft power victories. They realize that the Chinese run Cambodia and Laos in spite of the fact that they are hated and envied. So, they still think it is necessary to invest tens of millions of dollars in promoting to Arab and African youth the more clearly traditional elements of Chinese culture, in translating books into languages that nobody reads, in hosting screenings of the worst products of the state-run studio system at distant embassies. It provides employment to young graduates. It offers sinecures to people that need to be rewarded. It's probably harmless.
Samo Burja often emphasizes that the PRC is a highly Westernized regime. There's a reason why Xi is always seen in a Western business suit, not in distinctively Chinese dress. The main lines of thought pursued by the CCP are Western ideas, even if developed in a somewhat different direction from Western "democracies."
None of which stops the PRC from competing with the West.
The point being, we should not confuse influence with power. For example, the Romans were tremendously influenced by the Greeks, and yet crushed them.
There is such a thing as soft power, but it must actually be exercised as power. It's not just the same as influence.
>>1398 >There is such a thing as soft power, but it must actually be exercised as power. It's not just the same as influence.
Agreed, for us the question is probably to develop a fine-grained perspective on these different kinds of power and how to apply the perspective to our needs.
>>1390 >America lost the soft power war. That is the tragedy. There is no Americana to export. I think it's fair to say that the mechanism has changed since the Cold War. Up until roughly 2007 there was an exporting of brand-based American consumer culture (Disney, Coca-Cola, etc.) globally, which allowed American corporations to accrue economic value from consumers around the world. Of course, it wasn't just American corporations who did this kind of cultural exporting, there was (and still is) significant exporting of Japanese pop culture and French and Italian luxury exports, for instance.
After the invention of the smartphone, Mr. Askary argues that brands and other such institutions are no longer the dominant method of exporting American consumer culture. The control of what information gets delivered via the smartphone allows for a more *veiled* approach towards maintaining control over what gets consumed. Under the star-spangled banner the illusion of a free internet is more convincing. It appears to be clearly much freer compared to being behind the PRC's Great Firewall, among others. Regardless of what gets consumed, producers of other products pay a fee to make use of these advertising channels, which are controlled, and whose administrators answer to judges of the advertising channels. It's in this sense that Americana is being exported, since these channels, administered by Alphabet, Meta, account for the bulk of digital advertising revenue globally. I would guess that a significant amount of the consumer demand for industrially-produced products produced in China (and elsewhere) exists downstream of the demand created by advertising, so the tendency for global merchant elite interests to align towards US interests remains strong. Influence is not the same as power, but in my view it is a result of its exercise. The Romans were influenced by Greek culture after conquering Greece because they were interested to emulate that particular mode of living. By emulating aspects of that culture resources would have flowed to those who had that knowledge, i.e. the Greeks, while influence would flow in reverse.