The past year has been traumatic for many of the volunteer tech warriors of what was once called the United States Digital Service (USDS). The team’s former coders, designers, and UX experts have watched in horror as Donald Trump rebranded the service as DOGE, effectively forced out its staff, and employed a strike force of young and reckless engineers to dismantle government agencies under the guise of eliminating fraud. But one aspect of the Trump initiative triggered envy in tech reformers: the Trump administration’s fearlessness in upending generations of cruft and inertia in government services. What if government leaders actually used that decisiveness and clout in service of the people instead of following the murky agendas of Donald Trump or DOGE maestro Elon Musk?

A small though influential team is proposing to answer that exact question, working on a solution they hope to deploy during the next Democratic administration. The initiative is called Tech Viaduct, and its goal is to create a complete plan to reboot how the US delivers services to citizens. The Viaduct cadre of experienced federal tech officials is in the process of cooking up specifics on how to remake the government, aiming to produce initial recommendations by the spring. By 2029, if a Democrat wins, it hopes to have its plan adopted by the White House.

Tech Viaduct’s advisory panel includes former Obama chief of staff and Biden’s secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough; Biden’s deputy CTO Alexander Macgillivray; Marina Nitze, former CTO of the VA; and Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook. But most attention-grabbing is its senior adviser and spiritual leader, Mikey Dickerson, the crusty former Google engineer who was the first leader of USDS. His hands-on ethic and unfiltered distaste for bureaucracy embodied the spirit of Obama’s tech surge. No one is more familiar with how government tech services fail American citizens than Dickerson. And no one is more disgusted with the various ways they have fallen short.

Dickerson himself unwittingly put the Viaduct project in motion last April. He was packing up the contents of his DC-area condo to move as far away as possible from the political scrum (to an abandoned sky observatory in a remote corner of Arizona) when McDonough suggested he meet with Mook. When the two got together, they bemoaned the DOGE initiative but agreed that the impulse to shred the dysfunctional system and start over was a good one. “The basic idea is that it’s too hard to get things done,” says Dickerson. “They’re not wrong about that.” He admits that Democrats had blown a big opportunity “For 10 years we’ve had tiny wins here and there but never terraformed the whole ecosystem,” Dickerson says. “What would that look like?”

Dickerson was surprised a few months later when Mook called him to say he found funding from Searchlight Institute, a liberal think tank devoted to novel policy initiatives, to get the idea off the ground. (A Searchlight spokesperson says that the think tank is budgeting $1 million for the project.) Dickerson, like Al Pacino in Godfather III, was pulled back in. Ironically, it was Trump’s reckless-abandon approach to government that convinced him that change was possible. “When I was there, we were severely outgunned, 200 people running around trying to improve websites,” he says. “Trump has knocked over all the beehives—the beltway bandits, the contractor industrial complex, the union industrial complex.”

Tech Viaduct has two aims. The first is to produce a master plan to remake government services—establishing an unbiased procurement process, creating a merit-based hiring process, and assuring oversight to make sure things don’t go awry. (Welcome back, inspector generals!) The idea is to design signature-ready executive orders and legislative drafts that will guide the recruiting strategy for a revitalized civil service. In the next few months, the group plans to devise and test a framework that could be executed immediately in 2029, without any momentum-killing consensus building. In Viaduct’s vision that consensus will be achieved before the election. “Thinking up bright ideas is going to be the easy part,“ Dickerson says. “As hard as we’re going to work in the next three to six months, we’re going to have to spend another two to three years, through a primary season and through an election, advocating as if we were a lobbying group.”

In case you didn’t get the memo, everyone is feeling very Chinese these days. Across social media, people are proclaiming that “You met me at a very Chinese time of my life,” while performing stereotypically Chinese-coded activities like eating dim sum or wearing the viral Adidas Chinese jacket. The trend blew up so much in recent weeks that celebrities like comedian Jimmy O Yang and influencer Hasan Piker even got in on it. It has now evolved into variations like “Chinamaxxing” (acting increasingly more Chinese) and “u will turn Chinese tomorrow” (a kind of affirmation or blessing).

It’s hard to quantify a zeitgeist, but here at WIRED, chronically online people like us have been noticing a distinct vibe shift when it comes to China over the past year. Despite all of the tariffs, export controls, and anti-China rhetoric, many people in the United States, especially younger generations, have fallen in love with Chinese technology, Chinese brands, Chinese cities, and are overall consuming more Chinese-made products than ever before. In a sense the only logical thing left to do was to literally become Chinese.

“It has occurred to me that a lot of you guys have not come to terms with your newfound Chinese identity,” the influencer Chao Ban joked in a TikTok video that has racked up over 340,000 likes. “Let me just ask you this: Aren’t you scrolling on this Chinese app, probably on a Chinese made phone, wearing clothes that are made in China, collecting dolls that are from China?”

Everything Is China

As is often the case with Western narratives about China, these memes are not really meant to paint an accurate picture of life in the country. Instead, they function as a projection of “all of the undesirable aspects of American life—or the decay of the American dream,” says Tianyu Fang, a PhD researcher at Harvard who studies science and technology in China.

At a moment when America’s infrastructure is crumbling and once-unthinkable forms of state violence are being normalized, China is starting to look pretty good in contrast. “When people say it’s the Chinese century, part of that is this ironic defeat,” says Fang.

As the Trump administration remade the US government in its own image and smashed long-standing democratic norms, people started yearning for an alternative role model, and they found a pretty good one in China. With its awe-inspiring skylines and abundant high-speed trains, the country serves as a symbol of the earnest and urgent desire among many Americans for something completely different from their own realities.

Critics frequently point to China’s massive clean energy investments to highlight America’s climate policy failures, or they point to its urban infrastructure development to shame the US housing shortage. These narratives tend to emphasize China’s strengths while sidelining the uglier facets of its development—but that selectivity is the point. China is being used less as a real place than as an abstraction, a way of exposing America’s own shortcomings. As writer Minh Tran observed in a recent Substack post, “In the twilight of the American empire, our Orientalism is not a patronizing one, but an aspirational one.”

Part of why China is on everyone’s mind is that it’s become totally unavoidable. No matter where you live in the world, you are likely going to be surrounded by things made in China. Here at WIRED, we’ve been documenting that exhaustively: Your phone or laptop or robot vacuum is made in China; your favorite AI slop joke is made in China; Labubu, the world’s most coveted toy, is made in China; the solar panels powering the Global South are made in China; the world’s best-selling EV brand, which officially overtook Tesla last year, is made in China. Even the most-talked about open-source AI model is from China. All of these examples are why this newsletter is called Made in China.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has unveiled a London taskforce on artificial intelligence (AI) and the future of work, during his annual Mansion House speech.

Recognising the need for urgent action to prevent mass unemployment in London, he also announced free AI training for Londoners.

Khan warned that unless urgent action is taken, the advent of AI would cause immense damage to the capital. He called for a collaborative effort to shape the AI revolution and harness the potential positives to ensure it benefits rather than damages society.

A poll by City Hall found that over half of London workers expect AI to impact their job in some way in the next 12 months.

“It feels as though the ground beneath our feet is shifting,” said Khan. “Artificial intelligence is beginning to cause tectonic movements in our markets, industries and workplaces. We can hear the low rumbling of a new technological revolution, but we don’t yet know what course it will take.”

Mirroring the government’s view on the opportunity AI presents for the UK, he said it could transform public services, turbocharge productivity, and tackle complex challenges such as cancer care and the climate crisis.

However, Khan warned: “Used recklessly, it could usher in a new era of mass unemployment, accelerated inequality and an unprecedented concentration of wealth and power. Neither is an inevitability, but one thing’s for sure: we mustn’t drift, absentmindedly, into a future we didn’t ask for and don’t want. We need to wake up and make a choice: seize the potential of AI and use it as a superpower for positive transformation and creation, or surrender to it, and sit back and watch as it becomes a weapon of mass destruction of jobs.”

LinkedIn’s Work change report, which looks at the impact of AI in the workplace, says that by 2030, 70% of the skills used in most jobs will change, with AI emerging as a catalyst. The report’s authors note that there has been a 140% increase in the pace at which LinkedIn members add new skills to their profiles since 2022. This includes an uptick in technical skills and a rise in uniquely human skills such as communication and leadership.

LinkedIn’s headline figures from the report shows that over half of CEOs expect a 10% uptick in their organisation’s performance thanks to the use of generative AI technology.

Khan wrote on X: “The impact of AI on London’s jobs market will be seismic. Some of our biggest sectors (e.g. creative, financial) rank among the most likely to be affected.”

He said the taskforce seeks to understand the impact AI will have on jobs in London, and identify the skills Londoners need to move into future roles and how London can stay competitive in a global job market.

Khan also said political leaders have a responsibility to protect people against the dangers of new technology. He added that policymakers need to learn from the mistakes that have been made in failing to shape and regulate the digital revolution.

“Our new AI skills course will be available to any Londoner who’d like to learn AI skills, and it’ll be completely free – because everyone should be able to share in the benefits of this technology,” said Khan. “It’s up to us to make sure AI delivers the brighter future we all want to see.”