excerpt regarding openclaw and chinese AI from forthcoming book The Garden Without Gates
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.