China’s tech hubs are driven by a similar sense of urgency. In Beijing’s Zhongguancun, known as China’s Silicon Valley, office towers stay lit deep into the night as A.I. lab employees hustle to beat their rivals across the road. Companies poach one another’s star engineers while freelance coders burn through tens of thousands of Claude tokens to vibecode products. The start-up founders hunt for what they call the fengkou or “wind vent” — an opportunity that, if seized at the right moment, can propel an entrepreneur straight to fortune. They study translations of Peter Thiel’s “Zero to One” and lionize Elon Musk because, as one tech worker told me, “He moves quickly, his execution is crazy and he can really deliver stuff.”
China’s most recent wind vent was “raising lobsters” — a shorthand for training the free, open-source A.I. agent OpenClaw. Nearly 1,000 people, from amateur coders to housewives, lined up outside the tech giant Tencent’s headquarters to install the software on their devices. Users claimed that OpenClaw could kick-start side hustles and double stock returns; parents bought “lobster installation services” for their grade school children to keep up with their peers. Tech companies raced to monetize this anxiety, charging users for cloud servers and software access. “This is not ‘embracing the future,’” one disillusioned user on RedNote described the OpenClaw craze. “It’s ‘being harvested by the future.’”
Farther south in Shenzhen, China’s hardware capital, start-ups boast of operating at “Shenzhen speed” and have been embedding A.I. into everything from coffee makers to construction cranes. At a high-tech fair in the city, hosted in 20 halls the size of airport hangars, I walked by stalls advertising A.I. pianos, A.I. beef noodle makers, A.I. holographic tour guides and A.I. English tutors. I sat down in front of an A.I.-powered traditional Chinese medicine doctor that scanned my tongue and delivered a diagnosis. A crowd gathered around a boxing ring, cheering on a pair of sparring humanoids made by the robotics giant Unitree.
“It’s a highly competitive environment right now,” a Shenzhen software engineer told me. “I feel like if I stop, I’ll be left behind.” His anxiety is not new. Unstable work situations and economic insecurity long predate the current A.I. boom. But A.I. has supercharged those anxieties and made them much harder to contest.
A parallel set of memes has emerged to capture the sense of powerlessness. In the United States, the Silicon Valley tech elite identify as “high agency,” while the rest of us are “bots” condemned to the “permanent underclass.” In China, ordinary workers describe themselves as shechu (“corporate cattle”) and jiabangou (“overtime dogs.”) These same workers have long used the viral term “involution” to capture the feeling of being trapped in a cycle of meaningless competition. In both countries, those disaffected by A.I. identify with the gaming meme of the “NPC” or “non-player character.” They feel like the background role in someone else’s video game, existing only to fill the world but not to shape it.
