Afra Wang
writer, journalist, builder · California and London
I write about technological modernity through a humanistic lens, across China and Silicon Valley in the age of AI.
My essays have appeared in Noema, WIRED, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Asterisk, ChinaTalk, Le Grand Continent (in French), and The Ideas Letter, and in the book L'Ennemi qui nous désigne (Gallimard, in French). My work has been quoted or cited in The New York Times, The Guardian, the BBC, and NBC News, and in Patrick McGee's bestselling book Apple in China.
I write the newsletter Concurrent. With three of my best friends, I also co-host CyberPink 疲惫娇娃 (previously known as Loud Murmurs), a Mandarin-language podcast on popular culture, movies, and anything zeitgeisty, now past ninety episodes.
I'm a recipient of Emergent Ventures, and I was a Winter Fellow at GovAI researching the history of open source in China's tech world, and a fellow at the Roots of Progress Institute.
Before writing full-time, I spent six years inside Silicon Valley, running growth for AI news apps and building hacker houses in crypto. I grew up in China until eighteen, then lived in California, New York, and London. I studied the history of technology, international history, and media studies at Columbia, LSE, and UC Irvine. The internet is my actual hometown.
Currently
Reporting on AI and the tech industry in Silicon Valley and China.
Things I've made
I love vibe coding on the side. Exhibits A and B: a NOKIA·3310 Pomodoro timer, and the Chinese Founder Atlas.
Otherwise
Off the page, I paint in oil, soft pastel, acrylic, and Chinese ink, and fall down rabbit holes about Nam June Paik, Xu Bing, and Cao Fei. Museums give me highs; mountains keep me honest, whether I'm snowboarding, mountain biking, or hiking. I cook with a beautiful steel wok that I'm unreasonably proud of (yes, you need one too). I read everything, but especially neuroscience, history, and art, and given half a chance I will book-pill you. In return, I'm always taking film recommendations.
Odd facts
- I was an inaugural resident of Zuzalu, Vitalik Buterin's pop-up network state, which meant two months in Montenegro learning from the smartest and weirdest people ever (I met the love of my life there).
- At the height of my obsession, I spent a stupid amount of money hoarding NFTs I liked. Yes, I also own meme coins.
- My QQ number has eight digits. If you know, you know.
- The Ethereum community turned me into a true believer in decentralized technology, d/acc, privacy, and open source.
- I angel invest in my friends' companies.
Write to me: afrazhaowang@gmail.com · @afrazhaowang
writing
Essays & features
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Noema · Sep 2026
A New Kind of Creative Poverty
How the Simplified Chinese internet's regime of reward and punishment prefigures the post-training of large language models, and what Baudelaire offers against it.
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Le Grand Continent · May 2026
Les coulisses du plan IA de Xi pour transformer la Chine
Inside the labs building China's AI future. (In French)
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Book · Gallimard · 2026
L'Ennemi qui nous désigne. Apprendre à résister aux prédateurs
Contributor to Le Grand Continent, vol. 5. (In French)
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WIRED · Jan 2026
You've Never Heard of China's Greatest Sci-Fi Novel
The Morning Star of Lingao, a crowdsourced epic about time travelers who bootstrap an industrial revolution in Ming-dynasty Hainan, and the "Industrial Party" it spawned.
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Los Angeles Review of Books · Jan 2026
Learn to Love Engineers
Dan Wang, Hu Anyan, and what the US–China contest over engineering looks like from the ground.
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Asterisk
The China Tech Canon
Chinese founders absorbed the Silicon Valley reading list with almost devotional intensity. What that list reveals.
- The Ideas Letter The Center and the Periphery
- The Ideas Letter Another Reckoning (with China)
- ChinaTalk · 2025 DeepSeek and Destiny: A National Vibe Shift
- ChinaTalk · 2025 Alibaba Gets AGI-pilled
- Sixth Tone · 2025 Decoding the Chinese Computer
- Reboot · 2025 On Typing Chinese
- Reboot · 2025 Genes for Memes
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Big Think · Nov 2025
Physical Dynamism and the Immigrant's Edge
At the foundation of America's progress movement are immigrants who still believe this country can build.
From Concurrent: most read
From Concurrent: my favorites (read these instead)
I also write in Chinese, which I think of as community service: a more unfiltered, soulful version of me, running parallel to the English. Earlier Chinese-language work appeared in the New York Times Chinese edition, the Financial Times Chinese, Initium Media, and Sixth Tone.
talks & press
Seen elsewhere
Places my work has been quoted, cited, or recommended.
- "Was wirklich hinter Chinas Tech-Optimismus steckt", Nora Schwartz, Krautreporter (in German)
- "Chartbook 464: The 'China squeeze'", Adam Tooze, Chartbook, which ends on my essay about China's industrial counterfactualists (his post)
- "Will the Real Jia Zhangke Please Stand Up?", Michael Berry, Los Angeles Review of Books
- "Where Are China's A.I. Doomers?", The New York Times
- "Is this a 'very Chinese time in your life'?", BBC
- "Is China really ready for AI to hit its workers?", The Times
- "China lags behind US at AI frontier but could quickly catch up, say experts", The Guardian
- Best of Further Reading, FT Alphaville
- "China's AI Agents Arrive", The Wire China
- "Silicon Valley Has China Envy, and That Reveals a Lot About America", The New York Times
- "China is starting to talk about AI superintelligence", NBC News
- "Baseus wants to be No. 1 in Europe", Nikkei Asia
- "Demon-child movie wows China", The Guardian
Also cited in Patrick McGee's bestselling book Apple in China. Linked by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution (twice, actually), and recommended by Noahpinion, ChinAI, jasmi.news, The Browser, and personal canon.
Talks & panels
- Panelist, SAIS conference "Getting Tech Right: U.S. China Policy for a New Era," session on shared precarity and prosperity in labor and society
- Talk, Oxford China Policy Lab: "Is China Techno-optimistic?"
- Talk, SAIS ACF Conference, Honolulu, on the mental models that shape US China policy on AI
- Moderator, Asia Society book talk with Yi-Ling Liu on The Wall Dancers
- Panelist, "Seeing the Other China: AI in China Beyond Chips and DeepSeek", Asia Society, with Yi-Ling Liu, Jessica Batke, and Barclay Bram
- Speaker, "Open Models in China," workshop hosted by Stanford's Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance and DigiChina
- Panelist, "China's AI Ecosystem," National Committee on U.S.–China Relations with the Schwarzman Scholars Program
- Talk, "Secondhand Liberalism: A Story of Microdosing Internet Freedom", DevCon
- Moderator, "From Western Liberalism to World Liberalism" with Vitalik Buterin and Bruno Maçães, DevCon
Podcasts
- ChinaTalk: "Chinamaxxing", on American fascination with Chinese short-form content
- Sinica, with Kaiser Kuo: The Morning Star of Lingao and the rise and reckoning of China's "Industrial Party"
- Overfit (ChinaTalk): AI lovers, Chinese model takeover, vice signalling, the Hefei model
- Sinocism Live: "Dispatches from China"
- 不明白 Bumingbai, with Li Yuan: "Silicon Valley Embraces 996 Work Culture" (in Chinese)
- Zero Shot (The Ken): "China built AI differently than the US. Can India do the same?"
Earlier: MC and moderator at ETH Shanghai 2022 and 2023; guest on Mandarin-language shows including 新新人类 Pixel Perfect, 美轮美换 The American Roulette, and 硅谷早知道.
work
Research & fellowships
Researching the history of open source in China's tech world.
Writing on the history and philosophy of technological progress.
Media
Newsletter on AI, China, and Silicon Valley.
Mandarin-language podcast on popular culture, movies, and anything zeitgeisty, 90+ episodes, co-hosted with three of my best friends. Previously known as Loud Murmurs, it was reported by Politico, featured in the University of Toronto course "Reading Chinese and English: China from the Inside Out."
Tech
Six years inside Silicon Valley, building products and the developer communities around them.
Zero-knowledge infrastructure company on Ethereum. Wrote the go-to-market plan for its ZK proof aggregation product UPA, and built Proof Pass, a ZK ticketing product on NEBRA's stack. Ran our social presence and ecosystem partnerships.
Led the "Proof Day" event series in Brussels, SF, NYC, Denver, and Istanbul: technical days for cryptographers and developers working on zero-knowledge proofs, open-source infrastructure, and privacy tech. Went through a16z's CSX in London and presented at demo day.
Worked on the next-gen social internet: decentralized social protocols, decentralized identity (DIDs), and public goods. Founding growth manager for Firefly, a social app that brings Farcaster, Lens Protocol, and X/Twitter into one feed. Started and hosted the bilingual podcast Web3 Revolution (since shut down).
Built and ran developer communities in person: hacker houses, hackathons, and builder gatherings where people actually ship. ZuSocial, a two-week hacker house; Social Oneness Day and Hackathon; Web3 Social House at ETHDenver 2023; Thinking Beyond the Twitter Box at Zuzalu; DAO Montenegro; Decentralized Social Day at SXSW; The Future of Human Connection at DevCon; and ETH Shanghai 2022 and 2023, including a fireside chat with Jaan Tallinn.
AI-driven news app. Worked with lead product managers and ML engineers in a 24/7 newsroom, at the seam between editorial judgment and the recommendation algorithm, alongside former journalists bringing their expertise to tech.
AI-powered local news app. Helped build and grow the product with the Silicon Valley growth playbook: growth hacking, retention strategy, push notification engagement, newsletter growth, and user studies. Worked closely with engineers on news ranking and recommendation algorithms, and built local content and election coverage features.
commonplace book
Read like a butterfly, write like a bee. This is where I keep the nectar.
It is both privilege and curse of the diaspora that they can treat their homeland as an academic abstraction and interrogate it without reservation.
Having lived nearly half of my life far from my birth country, I describe my Chineseness as a linguistic belonging.
I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Computing and new media depend upon flesh-and-bone metabolism. Our "virtual worlds" are made possible by battalions of human beings.
Infrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter. Their peculiar ontology lies in the facts that they are things and also the relation between things. As things they are present to the senses, yet they are also displaced in the focus on the matter they move around. We often see computers not cables, light not electricity, taps and water but not pipes and sewers.
In its collective sense, technology is not merely a catalog of individual parts. It is a metabolic chemistry, an almost limitless collective of entities that interact to produce new entities—and further needs.
A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.
Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.
Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.
People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we've lived; they're the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments.
When you light a candle, you also cast a shadow.
Where am I to find strength and hope in this world? In my work, in trying to write well. What's a writer's calling, now or at any time? To write, to try to write well. What work will make a difference? Well-made work, honest work, writing well written.
I have stolen ideas from every book I've ever read. My principle for researching a novel is 'Read like a butterfly, write like a bee,' and if this story contains any honey, it is because of the quality of the nectar I have found in the work of better writers.
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.