On: Trump frames unregulated AI as a way to keep ahead of China - but in fact, it...

The argument arrives already polished: leave the machines unchained, or the rival overtakes us. Notice that it needs no defence. That polish is the tell. Someone built it.

Follow the layers down. First, deregulation dressed as patriotism. Second, the patriotism belongs to firms that drafted the talking points and passed them to the state. Third, the state repeats them with a straight face, and the economists and columnists - honest men in their own estimation - repeat the repetition until it hardens into bedrock. No conspiracy. They were schooled into a framework where “regulation strangles innovation” sounds like arithmetic rather than opinion.

Then the irony the analysts note: the unchained sector, following its appetites, hands the rival its finest tools - open weights, poached talent, published research. The argument devours itself on its own terms. But the deeper wound is not strategic. It is that a premise has been installed. Once the citizen accepts that a sprint exists and must be won, every sacrifice the sprint demands becomes self-evident: his water, his electricity, his attention, his consent. He will defend the arrangement himself, unprompted, at the kitchen table. No decree could buy that.

One order has exhausted its authority; the successor has not yet learned to govern; between them, strange formations multiply. Today’s specimen: nationalism serving as the marketing department for a licence to extract, the flag as wrapping paper.

Where to fight? Not the street, not yet. The hearing rooms, the engineering faculties, the business pages - wherever “obviously we must move fast” is manufactured. Unmake it there, patiently, or it will stand for a generation. I write this knowing how patient work is punished. Write it anyway.