{"id":664398,"date":"2026-05-12T12:18:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T12:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/664398\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T12:18:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T12:18:08","slug":"opinion-the-shared-feeling-of-being-harvested-by-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/664398\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | The Shared Feeling of Being Harvested by the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

China\u2019s tech hubs are driven by a similar sense of urgency. In Beijing\u2019s Zhongguancun, known as China\u2019s 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\u2019s star engineers while freelance coders burn<\/a> through tens of thousands of Claude tokens to vibecode products. The start-up founders hunt for what they call the fengkou or \u201cwind vent\u201d \u2014 an opportunity that, if seized at the right moment, can propel an entrepreneur straight to fortune. They study translations of Peter Thiel\u2019s \u201cZero to One\u201d and lionize Elon Musk because, as one tech worker told me, \u201cHe moves quickly, his execution is crazy and he can really deliver stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

China\u2019s most recent wind vent was \u201craising lobsters\u201d \u2014 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\u2019s headquarters to install the software on their devices. Users claimed that OpenClaw could kick-start side hustles and double stock returns; parents bought \u201clobster installation services\u201d 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. \u201cThis is not \u2018embracing the future,\u2019\u201d one disillusioned user on RedNote described the OpenClaw craze. \u201cIt\u2019s \u2018being harvested by the future.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Farther south in Shenzhen, China\u2019s hardware capital, start-ups boast of operating at \u201cShenzhen speed<\/a>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a highly competitive environment right now,\u201d a Shenzhen software engineer told me. \u201cI feel like if I stop, I\u2019ll be left behind.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

A parallel set of memes has emerged to capture the sense of powerlessness. In the United States, the Silicon Valley tech elite identify as \u201chigh agency,\u201d while the rest of us are \u201cbots\u201d condemned to the \u201cpermanent underclass<\/a>.\u201d In China, ordinary workers describe themselves as shechu (\u201ccorporate cattle\u201d) and jiabangou (\u201covertime dogs.\u201d) These same workers have long used the viral term \u201cinvolution\u201d 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 \u201cNPC\u201d or \u201cnon-player character.\u201d They feel like the background role in someone else\u2019s video game, existing only to fill the world but not to shape it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"China\u2019s tech hubs are driven by a similar sense of urgency. In Beijing\u2019s Zhongguancun, known as China\u2019s Silicon…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":664399,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,95,9566,245306,13573,61],"class_list":["post-664398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-china","tag-computers-and-the-internet","tag-deepseek-artificial-intelligence-co-ltd","tag-international-relations","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664398\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/664399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}