Burning Man Comes to Washington
The Renegade Order and the New American Hustle
The Trump administration is guerrilla theater.
He has embraced an anarchist style of executive management of a $30 trillion/year business. This is a whole new magnitude of “disruption” in which big power and big market change flow directly from a single leader, creating opportunities for deals — at personal, business and industry-reshaping scale — that drive official decisions. Trump is a dynamic electricity, a sort of alternating current that changes on an almost hourly basis the comfortable standard model upon which political and economic processes had been sitting comfortably for generations.
For the desperately-seeking stability and strategic fit, Brand Trump delivers a siege of heat and nerves and migraines and money worries across a broad arc, the kind that sets the teeth on edge. The citadels of convention are crumbling at a furious, neck-snapping rate. Where many leaders and workers and job-seekers are left head-scratching and hand-wringing and hoping — or just handing in their resignations before being asked to resign — Jensen Huang grasps intuitively what needs to be done to grow the enterprise.
Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices are expected to pay the United States 15 percent of the money they take in from selling artificial intelligence chips to China, as part of a “highly unusual” financial agreement with the Trump administration. The Financial Times was the first to report on the Big Business Deal, the Wall Street Journal describes it as a “watershed moment”, but here’s how the New York Times assessed the weirdness from the week:
While the Trump administration publicly said a month ago that it was giving the green light to Nvidia to sell an A.I. chip called H20 to China, it did not actually issue the licenses making those sales possible.
On Wednesday, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, met with President Trump at the White House and agreed to give the federal government its 15 percent cut, essentially making the federal government a partner in Nvidia’s business in China, said the people familiar with the deal. The Commerce Department began granting licenses for A.I. chip sales two days later, these people said.
Though Mr. Huang has led negotiations with the White House, Nvidia isn’t the only company that sells A.I. chips to China. AMD has an A.I. chip called the MI308 and in April the Trump administration also banned sales of it to the Chinese.
There are few precedents for the Commerce Department agreeing to grant licenses for exports in exchange for a share of revenue. But the unorthodox payments are consistent with Mr. Trump’s increasingly interventionist role in international business deals involving American companies.
Up until Trump, the shape and texture of identity, the conventional narrative we were conventionally educated and trained to believe about who we are and what we do and why we do it, reflected a linear and fragmented view. Things were ‘out there’ and operated in their own separate domain. Competition between economic systems took the form of competition between markets within those systems, not between the systems themselves. The actions of government and the foundations for law, built over centuries, reseeded the grass for this playing field, and the teams who played on the turf were assumed to know the rules. When it came to government, the role of policy was not to participate in the game, but to manage it, to make sure the parts are prevented from destabilizing the whole, and the whole is prevented from destabilizing the parts.
But the world according to Trump poses something new entirely. Greg Ip, Chief Economics Commentator for the Wall Street Journal (The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics):
A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s. Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China.
This isn’t socialism, in which the state owns the means of production. It is more like state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.
China calls its hybrid “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The U.S. hasn’t gone as far as China or even milder practitioners of state capitalism such as Russia, Brazil and, at times, France. So call this variant “state capitalism with American characteristics.” It is still a sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.
Trump, like China, is a master systems thinker. And systems thinking is high-leverage thinking. If you can see and sell at a system-level, you can understand why burning all the boundaries makes sense.
Trump is intentionally positioning “government” not as something separate from “the market”, but as a part of it, at the center of constructing new economic systems (“ecosystems”). He is changing how public and private organizations — the market and the government — interrelate and interfect new domains. And if you can get over your reasonable rage and think with a cool head, move past the anxiety from the loss of identity, you’ll see this is a time to lead big market-shaping moves, not shy away from them.
And the way you do that is by telling unique stories.
Story is a Deal
Since the First World War Americans have been leading a double life, wrote Norman Mailer in Superman Comes to the Supermarket, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics which is concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull if not for the consequences of the actions of some of these men; and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation.
Sunday Times bestselling author Will Storr is a story guru. His substack You Are a Storyis where he publishes essays spanning personal memoir and useful how-to guides, where he explains: How can we use storytelling to become better and more persuasive communicators?
From his new book, Story is a Deal:
Humans live in two worlds at once. The first a realm of pure survival. This is the material space in which we interact with objects, natural forces and sources of fuel. We eat, we drink, we seek shelter and the endurance of ourselves and our kin. In this mode of existence, we’re no different to countless other species of animal, manipulating the physical world to get what we need.
But humans also live in a magical second realm. It is not a material space. Instead, it’s made out of the collective imagination. Our brains are programmed to connect with other brands and turn reality into a shared narrative. Unless we’re unwell or seriously deprived, it’s our adventures in the story-world that mostly occupy our thoughts. The character we play in the narrative realm — our identity — is not a physical being. It exists only as an idea in our mind, and in the minds of those with whom we’re connected. But it’s of existential importance to use. Humans will surrender untold blood and treasure to defend and build their identity.
The game has clearly mutated.
And for the mass of people not only in America, but in the rest of the world, be prepared for a forced march into a new jungle of emotion and search for identity. The surprises, the failures, and the dangers in the jungle will terrify as Trump has struck some nerve of awareness in the power and the mass, bringing up from underground a different orientation, a unique form. To anyone who can see or adjust their vision, the excessive hysteria of his Red wave is no preparation to face a new enemy, a terror of the self.
Trump tells stories that stick.
He isn’t boring. He is a storytelling animal. His content and creativity is not the stuff of ectoplasmic generality (like nearly all of healthcare, like nearly all the “tough economic headwinds” on nearly all earnings calls nowadays), but provocative, delivering innovation shocks that get your attention. He understands how to ride “the subterranean river” better than nearly anyone.
Trump intuitively understands something that many forget: power and story-telling are two sides of the same coin.
Any sort of conversation or consternation or critical concern with the psychic disintegration happening in real-time is, for a modern strategy story, beside the point. Is it right or wrong? Is it purely transactional? Is it nothing more than pay-to-play? These questions are incidental, if not completely irrelevant. When it comes to facing reality, there’s the way it ought to be. And then there’s the way it is.
Burning Man Comes to Washington
Burning Man started in 1986 as a small, impulsive gathering on Baker Beach in San Francisco. It wasn’t originally a “festival” so much as it was an artistic act of letting go, a radical form of self-expression inspired by a breakup, wrote Larry Harvey, Burning Man co-founder and Chief Philosophic Officer. From his guest lecture, La Vie Boheme: A History of Burning Man, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis February 24, 2000:
“Uniquely expressive acts get transformed and elaborated into social rites, and through participation they accrue a breadth and depth of meaning which can only be produced in a communal setting. It is the primal process by which culture is created.”
It has since grown into one of the most famous countercultural festivals in the world.
At its core, Burning Man is less about watching something and more about makingsomething, where the normal line between “audience” and “artist” blurs completely. It’s part art festival, part social experiment, part spiritual pilgrimage, and part temporary anarchist city. People either see it as a transformative, life-affirming creative utopia… or as a dusty, exhausting, over-commercialized paradox.
The same could be said about Brand Trump.
“To call this unusual or unprecedented would be a staggering understatement,” said Stephen Olson, a former US trade negotiator now with the Singapore-based ISEA — Yusof Ishak Institute. “What we are seeing is in effect the monetization of US trade policy in which US companies must pay the US government for permission to export. If that’s the case, we’ve entered into a new and dangerous world.”
Which misses the point.
In related news, Nvidia’s stock is pushing its market capitalization further above the record $4 trillion mark.
/ jgs
John G. Singer is Executive Director of Blue Spoon, the global leader in positioning strategy at a system level. Blue Spoon specializes in constructing new industry narratives