Author | Vitalik
Translated | Aki Chen Wu Blockchain
Original link:
https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/03/29/treering.html
According to Vitalik's article, people believed that "China is a country that values closure and control, and US technology is generally more inclined towards open source" compared to Chinese technology. However, it now seems they were completely wrong. This is because it is difficult to change a culture's approach to existing things and attitudes that have already been solidified. The appeal of the crypto space is that it provides an independent technological and cultural foundation to do new things without being overly burdened by existing status quo biases.
This article will bring Vitalik's proposed "tree ring model of culture and politics" and his profound analysis of the current global AI and technology regulatory landscape.
Core logic: A culture's attitude towards new things is shaped by the social atmosphere at the time of formation, while its attitude towards old things is determined by inherent inertia. Once these "cultural tree rings" are formed, they become extremely difficult to change.
Increasing Regulatory Reality Under the Name of Neoliberalism
During my growth, something often puzzled me: people repeatedly claimed that we live in a "deeply neoliberal society" that highly advocates "deregulation". However, what confuses me is that despite some people advocating for neoliberalism and deregulation, the actual regulatory policies implemented by the government are far from these ideals. The total number of federal regulatory regulations has not decreased but increased, with increasingly strict regulations such as KYC, copyright laws, and airport security measures. Additionally, since World War II, the proportion of federal tax to GDP in the United States has remained relatively stable.
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1) Intuition Meets Reality: The "Tree Ring Model" Reveals the Reversal of China-US AI Landscape
If you told someone in 2020 that five years later, one country between the US and China would lead in open-source AI while the other would dominate closed-source AI, and asked them who would lead in which domain, they might stare at you suspecting a trick question. Because the US has always been an open country, while China tends to be more closed and controlled. From the overall technological trend, US tech companies seem far more inclined towards open-source models! However, it turns out this intuition was completely wrong.
What exactly happened? In this article, I will propose a simple explanation method, which I call the "tree ring model of politics and culture":
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The specific content of the model is as follows:
- A culture's approach to new things depends on the prevailing attitudes and incentive mechanisms within that culture at a specific time.
- A culture's approach to old things is primarily driven by the inertia of maintaining the status quo (i.e., "status quo bias").
Each era carves a new "tree ring" on the tree of culture, and when this new ring forms, society also produces a series of concepts about emerging things. However, once these concepts form, they quickly become fixed and deeply rooted, difficult to shake. Subsequently, a new ring continues to be superimposed on this basis, driving society to shape the next wave of cultural attitudes and responses to new topics.
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