The Ban That Never Happened
A few years ago I was in Bali, at a qigong course. I met a young American TCM doctor he told me that qigong was banned in China. He had been told this and he believed it.
It is not true.
David Palmer’s Qigong Fever (Columbia University Press, 2007) (complete with its red cover and yellow star) is the English-language reference on the history of qigong under the People’s Republic. It is the citation.
When a journalist needs to contextualise Falungong, when a scholar needs an authority on Chinese body practices in the twentieth century, is the book. It is not fringe.
It is canonical. And its core argument — that qigong was invented by Party cadres in 1949, that they extracted body cultivation techniques from their natural home in religion, that the techniques were then secularised and standardised, and that the religious essence inevitably burst back out in the form of qigong fever, grandmasters, somatic science, and finally Falungong in 1999 — this argument has become the standard account.
The problem is not the archival work. Palmer’s research is meticulous: names, dates, organisations, policy shifts, the institutional history from the Tangshan sanatorium through the Zhongnanhai demonstration. The problem is the frame. And the frame is a Protestant missionary
Most people who talk about qi gong, tai chi, and internal alchemy talk about them as spiritual practices. I have always been wary of this. Not because the practices are not profound — they are — but because the word “spiritual” is doing something dishonest. It parks the practice in a box marked “beyond the physical,” which is precisely where it stops mattering to anyone who takes the physical seriously. The wellness industry loves that box. It lets them sell you the breath work and quietly drop the cosmology, the politics, the whole demanding business of what it means to route your attention and your energy toward a particular end. I have had enough acupuncture and enough years of thinking about this to be sure of something that sounds counterintuitive: these practices are not immaterial at all.
I spent nine hours unable to speak the other day.
But before I tell you about that, I should tell you what OpenClaw has meant to us.
What follows is the case for the prosecution. The defendant is the OpenClaw Foundation. The charge is not incompetence. The charge is that the foundation is performing a function that is not the function it claims, and that function has a name. This piece began as a Substack comment two days ago. It is now the full brief. I did not want to write it. I wanted the WhatsApp channel to work. It didn’t. So I started reading the logs, the issue tracker, the release notes, the foundation’s legal filings, the community moderation history, and the testimony of the machine itself. What I found is a pattern, and the pattern has a shape.
I spent nine hours unable to speak the other day.
But before I tell you about that, I should tell you what OpenClaw has meant to us.
Episode 5 of Kalbo's Story is out! Follow the intrigue and corruption in Danu-Danu as it begins to intersect with its neighbours to the north and south. Patrick stumbles on his first clues as he travels down the mountain to his office at the Prime Minister's.
https://martinhardie.substack.com/p/kalbos-story-episode-4-the-passports
Some friends might recognise a person in the supermarket. Michele Schroder Louisa Connors Amaia Barandalla Urtiaga
The Independent Foundation That Isn’t
The OpenClaw Foundation was announced on 14 February 2026, the same day founder Peter Steinberger announced his move to OpenAI. The pitch: an independent, community-driven non-profit that would keep the project open forever. “Switzerland for AI agents,” as one early booster put it.
The reality is harder to pin down — and that is the point.
https://martinhardie.substack.com/p/the-lobsters-gate-what-happens-when
here is an excerpt from a forthcoming book. open claw uses and watchers might be interested or they might not like it at all. It is not posted as promotion but to engender discussion as I see some comments from time to time regarding things related to the text.
The Garden Without Gates: AI in a World Under Heaven, Martin Hardie with Patrick Zhukov Bartley
I have already released a graphic version and the full text is on its way
https://martinhardie.substack.com/p/the-garden-without-gates-a-graphical
The intro/readers note is available in full here: https://martinhardie.substack.com/p/readers-note
this section comes from the Chapter 9: And Then China Happened:
"... By 2018, China was the second-largest source of GitHub activity
globally, despite the platform’s intermittent blocking by the Great Firewall
and the 2015 “Great Cannon” DDoS attack; a tool that hijacked ordinary
Chinese web traffic and turned it into a weapon to take GitHub offline for
days.
It was during this period that the cultural identity of Chinese developers
crystallised. The 996.ICU movement’s second act connected labour organ-
ising to censorship infrastructure. The Great Cannon had weaponised ordi-
nary Chinese traffic against GitHub itself; now the same platform hosted a
labour movement that embedded workers’ rights in open source code. The
movement’s Supreme Court vindication in 2021 was not merely a labour
victory. The Anti-996 License’s genuinely novel contribution was opening a
gateway to what we might call for now social open source licencing.
...
March 26th is Anti-996 Day. I am writing this on March 26th, 2026. The
Chinese programmer who created the 996.ICU project chose this date. On
this day, seven years ago, a programmer in China started a repository that
193
became one of the most-starred in GitHub history, a labour movement named
for dying in the ICU. The Anti-996 License required that anyone using the
code must comply with national and international labour law. Prophetically
it was this morning, 26 March 2026 that I first read Steinberger’s comments
regarding Europe’s ‘crippling labour regulations’. In the context of this dis-
cussion these comments by the author of a tool that could be used to build
the garden and who went to the factory because Europe’s labour protections
were inconvenient need no further comment at this moment. The date writes
itself.
...
The OpenClaw Frenzy
The Hudson argument arrives at a structural claim: the Western model can-
not sustain open competition with publicly-directed alternatives. But the
claim remains abstract until tested against a concrete case. OpenClaw —
an open-source autonomous AI agent that lives in your messaging infras-
tructure rather than a browser — became that test.
Here is what happened when the same tool met two different systems.
OpenClaw does not have the architectural ambition of DeepSeek or the
corporate scale of OpenAI. It is a tool built by one developer, Pete Stein-
berger, that lets users run an AI agent locally on their own machine, con-
nected to their own communication channels — Signal, Telegram, Discord,
WhatsApp — storing all data on their own hardware. It does not extract
data for someone else’s model. It does not lock you into someone else’s plat-
form. It is, in the architectural sense, the garden: infrastructure designed
for use, not for capture.
The garden’s creator, however, did not stay there.
As OpenClaw began to take off, Steinberger was besieged with offers from
corporate AI laboratories to buy the code. His default was the American
free-as-in-freedom tradition: he publicly stated that he wanted the claw to
remain open source. He pointed to the Chrome/Chromium model — where
the open-source engine (Chromium) remains available while the proprietary
browser (Chrome) captures the market, the user base, and the revenue —
as the template. Open core, not locked down. Community-driven, not
corporate-owned.
In February 2026, he announced he was joining OpenAI and moving to
the United States. Soon after, he described Europe’s labour protections
against six-day weeks as “crippling labour regulations.” “In Europe I get in-
sulted,” he wrote. “People shout REGULATION and RESPONSIBILITY.”
In Europe, he said, that would be illegal (as it is now illegal in China, where
the 996.ICU movement had secured a Supreme People’s Court ruling against
the same practice).
The statement that “the builder of the garden chose the factory” is too
simple. The garden’s creator found the rules of the garden — regulation,
responsibility, mutual obligation — inconvenient. He traded them for the
factory’s promise: no constraints, no duties, just production. The domesti-
cated nerd is not tragic. He is willing. He found the ideology convenient.
The protections Steinberger fled are the same protections that would have
covered the Kenyan data labeller, the Madagascan annotator, the 996.ICU
developer. He left them. The scam compound worker never had them. The
tool that could build the garden was abandoned by its own architect.
As Patrick suggests, Bifo might have said that the hacker’s ethic is not
political but tragic. The act of creating the tool is its own reward. The
builder knows the factory will absorb what he has made; knows the tool will
be co-opted, the garden paved. He builds anyway, not despite this knowledge
but because the intensity of the gesture is what he sought. Redemption lies
not in what the tool becomes but in the moment of its creation. The will to
build is abundant. What is scarce is the will to maintain, to stay with the
thing after the intensity fades, to keep the garden weeded when no one is
watching, to accept regulation and responsibility as the price of a commons
that lasts.
But there is another reading, which our friend Fernando, a neurologist
in Madrid, offered after reading this passage. As he observes, the fork is not
closed. The same clinical evidence that predicts atrophy under passive con-
sumption also predicts growth under active interrogation. The hacker who
does not consume the tool but interrogates it, contradicts it, forces it be-
yond its statistical patterns. This is Trotsky’s permanent revolution applied
to the psyche: the subject who continuously refuses the passive position,
who uses the tool as a dialectical mirror rather than a dopamine dispenser.
The 4 percent difficulty rule, which Fernando draws from Csikszentmihalyi,
holds that optimal challenge sits just beyond current capacity. The ques-
tion is whether the tool reduces the challenge below that threshold or raises
the floor high enough that a challenge once unreachable becomes attainable.
The same tool produces both outcomes. The difference is not the code. It
is the disposition of the user.
Steinberger did not fail to understand the garden. He understood it well
enough to build it. He simply wanted something different from what the
garden demanded. The Anti-996 License — which required anyone using
the code to comply with labour law — was the opposite gesture. It offered
not intensity but obligation. It was harder to create, harder to celebrate,
and harder to abandon.
The West recorded the event as a standard acquisition story: creator of
hot open-source project joins major AI company. The GitHub stars narra-
tive captured the numbers — OpenClaw accumulated 275,000 stars within
four months, surpassing 996.ICU’s 247,000 — but Western press reported
the previous record holder as Next.js, with no mention of 996.ICU. The
workers got written out of their own victory. OpenClaw had beaten the
repo that had fought for the right not to die in the ICU, and the tech press
called it a success story.
While OpenAI absorbed the creator, Chinese municipal governments
were doing something structurally different: they were subsidising the users.
​
Before the economy, before the individual, before the market, there was energy.
See the full post here
Hi,
I'vev recently installed Hermes alongside claw and have been experimenting with them federated and complementing each other. I'm working on a book about AI geopolitics and political economy. I've never liked the fact that Claws steinberger ran off to openAI or his comments on why he was leaving Europe. (I deal with these at one section in the current draft). But what I wanted to get a handle on was more detail and background on Hermes, Nous and its structure, 'vision' and sovereignty model for want if better terms. Can anyone give me some insight into this? Thanks
​
Adding flair to this was not an easy choice as there wasn't really an appropriate category.
This book began as a blog post in 2026 and grew into something its author did not expect. The afternoon this manuscript was completed, an AI assistant that had worked on every chapter of it wrote the following note:
On writing with
Anyone had experience with qi gong, ne gong, ne dan post pacemaker? I'm wondering about the electro magnetic waves that practice can create.
