Notes on Si(g)nification
From La Becque, July 2025
The most profound of these temporal backrooms is that of Sergei Krikalev. Not quite a Russian like Ivanov, Krikalev was decorated cosmonaut and engineer who became known as the “last Soviet citizen”. He was on board the Mir Space Station when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, inaugurating a new world order but leaving Krikalev stranded above the Earth for months, because the place that sent him there no longer existed.
These slips in time and space reveal the stitches that hold the fabric of a world together. You are living out one story but trip unwittingly into another. ‘You can go home again’, writes Ursula LeGuin in The Dispossessed, ‘so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.’ Krikalev took off from the USSR but landed in independent Kazakhstan. Sometimes, just one person misses the memo, other times, the whole species wakes up to a new mise en scène.
Freud offered the notion of Copernican trauma to describe the jolt of misrecognition as humanity was dethroned from its traditional cosmologies by heliocentrism, natural selection, as well as the unconscious, which locked the subject out of its own house. At each turn, the history of technology disenchants whatever was once meant by being human. It took all the destructive techniques of industrial modernity to make a fragile and finite planet knowable. In building machine intelligence, we undo our own cognitive exceptionalism. Each identity contains the seeds of its own transcendence. Oftentimes, the only way out is through. Lean in until you fall over, and hope you can get back up again.
Copernican trauma is the unsettling process of discovering oneself not somewhere, but something else. But what if this misrecognition comes not from within, but from the other end of the world? Lately I’ve been trying to write about contemporary China, or rather, a world whose dominant narratives—technology, culture, ecology, ideology—find their footing in a new centre of gravity. East and West are imaginary figures, but they haunt our narratives all the same. This is a world in which China looks increasingly like the principle driver of history. It is inevitably also the story of the provincialisation of the West—the U.S. and its allies—in a world sliding towards multipolarity. There is the mania of main character syndrome that comes with hegemonic power, and there are the material facts shaping planetary life and political imagination in the mid-21st century, which issue from the consequences of contemporary China. Between them, reality falls out of phase.
How do you describe a historical slipstream while you’re in it? You can count it up in vertiginous statistics, or turn it into a spectacle of futuristic cityscapes, but the truth is both more mundane and more uncanny. Those who have lived and worked between China, Europe and the U.S. over the past decade or two know the feeling of code-switching, not just between languages but between different temporal modalities. One, in which the future is slowly cancelled—in spite of ourselves—and another, in which it is relentlessly and unevenly exerted—in spite of ourselves. The former symptoms we know too well, whereas time in China is more elusive: a product of hyper-compressed change within a single generation, a temporal thread knotting back on itself in space. Elderly subsistence farmers whose circumstances have hardly changed since the Cultural Revolution live alongside third-wave coffee culture run by disillusioned kids exiting the cruel optimism of the megalopolis. A manufacturing hub exporting Donald Trump merchandise offers an early insight into the U.S. election. Ghost cities built during the speculative housing boom await owners that have yet to arrive. Elsewhere, young couples await the completion of construction sites abandoned during the crash. All is connected by 5G signals and high-speed rail, while the surveillant eye of socialist technocracy watches over the most cut-throat marketplace in the world. To acknowledge these nodes and the countless threads between them as banal reality demands a different temporal register for how—and from where—the modern world comes together.
Temporal imagination shifted in the West, too. The deep, reactionary turn that took place in the long wake of the financial crisis was accompanied by various shades of ideological hunger, from wellness cultures to AI takeover to insurgent white supremacy. Cheap money from zero interest rate policies saw a gold rush for tech start-ups and an arms race for human attention. An oligarchy built on adverts and doomscrolling now turns its sights on military hard power. In the cultural sphere, mysticism, ecopoetics, non-Western perspectives, anti-technocracy, and even technocracy itself were mined as dwindling sources of available radicalism, attempts to eke out a pathway to dis-identification and exit from a permeating darkness. Anywhere but here, now, us. By the time of the Gaza genocide, Aimé Césaire’s imperial boomerang was in full backswing, as governments from the U.S. to the U.K. and Europe turned carceral state violence on their own citizens. As journalist Vincent Bevins observes in his book If We Burn, a historically unprecedented scale of revolt took place around the world since the 2010s, and resulted in scant progressive change. Protest itself had become a theatre of democracy without agency—and even this was being criminalised.
Between worlds, there is the crosshatch, where signals scramble and visions blur. In the superpositions of the crosshatch, China is at once a rival superpower and a developing nation, on the brink of collapse and an existential threat, a global south leader and the rising empire, and so on. The democratic leader of the free world is a reactionary petrostate, while an authoritarian regime leads the world’s climate transition, sending political compasses spinning. For now, a non-interventionist foreign policy allows China to assume the wilful innocence of an outsider hegemon, one which is materially remaking the world without being the author of its drama. Lately, Chinese researchers venture into Western theatres of global conflict collecting ethnographic notes like surveyors after a landslide, aware that Chinese infrastructure firms will likely be involved in the reconstruction of Syria, Gaza and Ukraine.
A remarkable information asymmetry persists such that China—like the rest of the developing world—knows a lot more about the West than vice versa. After all, the Chinese middle-class has aspired to American life for decades. Just as chinoiserie enchanted the European bourgeoisie, electric SUVs decked out like mobile karaoke lounges are a species of Chinese turbo-Americanism that the European mind can hardly fathom. At the same time, catalysed by social media, the U.S. is only slowly waking up to the possibility that their world is being made elsewhere. The TikTok ban saw thousands of “refugees” flood into the Chinese app Rednote, creating a brief but joyful crossover universe in which users discovered another lingua franca of memes and thirst traps. Then, the surprise of DeepSeek’s AI model wiped a trillion dollars off the market. In April, after Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs, Chinese factories went viral for dropshipping white-labelled Louis Vuitton bags at a fraction of the price. (Nothing was new here: luxury goods have been made by cheap Chinese labour—not least for wealthy Chinese consumers—for years, and any entrepreneurial importer knows how to shortcut the value chain.) At a time of U.S. chaos and disillusion, this “revelation” seemed to index a growing realisation that China was not just a faraway producer but more like an upstream reality, and perhaps a realer one at that—a backdoor out of the kayfabe.
I’ve always been unsure about “sinofuturism,” not because of its vulgar techno-orientalism (update Bladerunner or neo-Tokyo with Chongqing, Chinese workers as swarm-like automata, etc.) but because on a deeper level, China’s purported otherness might just turn out to be true. One can critique: the fearful construction of the racialised other reflects traumatic cracks in the self. One can take the critique: yes, I strain under the weight of unpayable colonial debts and shortsighted economic bargains. What then, to stop the involution while an alternative model emerges in one’s own distorted image?
To be sure, the orient is a self-fulfilling dialectic, but absent the conquest of Western liberalism (which has responded poorly when tested), China manifests a hyperfunctional alterity, one which is transforming the Earth while taking few ideological cues—albeit plenty of lessons—from the incumbent. A Confucian culture which holds both intensive capitalism and Maoist mass line politicisation together in living memory bears a basically different relationship to collectivity, the state and the good life. The frontier technology race, where Silicon Valley builds a machine god while China builds industrial AI, is indicative. Sinofuturism was always a diasporic art, part tongue-in-cheek ethnocultural caricature, part soul-searching for a East-West aesthetics adequate to uprooted identity. Actually-existing sinofuturism lay with the much less digestible fact of Chinese state capacity and productive force. China has become a worldmaking project, for better or worse, and an experiment in terraforming the Earth. About a third of the planet’s manufacturing, emissions, and renewable energy, and so on.
Diffuse and ambient, soft power remains the shadow of hard power. Those of us who were writing about the Chinese Internet a decade ago tended to emphasise its containment behind the Great Firewall, and how that exclusion conversely incubated an intensely innovative cyberspace of over a billion users. Lately, that system has broken containment, unravelling itself at pace on the planet at large, from telecoms infrastructure to recommendation algorithms to logistics platforms to AI slop, from Dubai to Bogotá. The primacy of export demand over ideology promises a technocratic, materialist blueprint for hegemony in a world at once multipolar and deeply interdependent.
Nowhere is this historical uncertainty more apparent than within Chinese society itself, which has changed dramatically in every decade of its modern existence. Vertigo is no less acute from up close, particularly under a one-party state: as a friend remarked, ‘There’s this contradiction. Politics is underdeveloped and suppressed, but everything else is making significant progress.’ The defining legacies of both Maoist revolution and explosive capitalistic growth become ever more distant as a source of the central government’s legitimacy. In its place, new spirits will be summoned to fill the void—a precarious prospect in the midst of hegemonic transition.
Perhaps it is better to think of China as less a nation than a historical genre, an infrastructural shift in the production of planetary time. People around the world woke up one day in the 20th century and found themselves quite a lot more American than they had ever imagined possible. The Copernican trauma of the 21st century might be captured in a viral tweet: I’m not asking you to become Chinese. I’m saying, when the time is right, you will look in the mirror and already be Chinese.
Like the piece. Is it supposed to repeat itself towards the end?