We're Are All Wall Dancers Now

A new show with , , and just dropped on the podcast feed about CHINAMAXXING. Have a listen here.

Also below we’re featuring an interview Afra did with Yi-Ling Liu.

GovAI was founded ten years ago on the belief that AI would end up transforming our world. Ten years later, the organization is at the forefront of trying to help decision-makers in government and industry navigate the transition to advanced AI.

GovAI is now hiring for its next cohort of Research Scholars and Research Fellows. Scholars are one-year positions that provide an intellectual home for ambitious researchers and policy professionals looking to advance their careers or transition into AI policy. Fellows are longer-term positions for experienced researchers with an established track-record looking for a place that supports their most impactful work.

Both roles offer significant freedom to pursue policy research, advise decision-makers, or launch new initiatives.

Applications close 15 February 2026. Learn more and apply at https://www.governance.ai/opportunities.

If there’s any book I’ve been anticipating for years, it would be this one: The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet, written by Yi-Ling Liu, a friend and a role model. She writes about a Chinese entrepreneur who runs the world’s largest gay dating app and once shook hands with Premier Li Keqiang (now deceased). She writes about how GitHub became an information haven during COVID censorship. She writes about the hyper-growth and malaise of TikTok: a global company both blessed by realized ambition and cursed by geopolitics.

If there’s a converging theme, Yi-Ling’s work always returns to technology and political participation in China, a place long portrayed by familiar discourse as internet’s aberration; Chinese internet is a prison, not the free, equal, and luminous internet we were promised! Yet by 2026, that discourse had aged poorly. The internet and tech world we now inhabit increasingly resembles China’s in its inner logic and ultimate purpose, not the other way around. Look at how US-owned TikTok censors content, a familiar playbook for Chinese internet natives.

The West lost its innocence toward technology some time ago, only to realize belatedly that it must learn a few lessons from Chinese netizens: how to seek freedom and connection within tech plutocracy, in an algorithmic age. This book arrives precisely when we need it.

The following discussion is between Yi-Ling Liu and Afra about her upcoming ...