Farce (from Lat. sagina, fattening; fig. a short, comical play): A dramatic work of a grotesque, ridiculous, and exaggerated nature that seeks easy laughter through the caricature of its characters. A noisy staging, characterized by feigned solemnity but lacking substance, typically used to disguise the clumsiness or lack of arguments of its protagonists.
They say history doesn’t repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes with a touching lack of imagination. In the latest chapter of Washington’s geopolitical farce, President Donald Trump’s administration has decided that the great enemy to defeat on the national security frontier is not hypersonic missiles or invisible cyberattacks, but… robotic dogs and Chinese androids that have lately flooded TikTok serving boba tea, cleaning the house, or preparing dinner for the dog of some eccentric millionaire in Dubai.
Through a maneuver by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) loaded with bureaucratic solemnity, the White House banned the importation and certification of new models of humanoid and quadruped robots originating from China—the very ones shipped by the thousands from the port of Shanghai. The argument: they are silicon Trojans ready to spy. The reality: it is the desperate resource of the mediocre who, finding themselves unable to win the technological race on an open track, decide to change the rules of the game and decree that running slowly is the new official policy.
The Myth of “Designed in California” and Dismembered Acceleration
Theorists of reshoring and technological sovereignty love to sell the fantasy of the industrial unicorn: an ideal world where the Global North designs with a pristine mind and the South/East executes with a submissive hand. It is colonial nostalgia repackaged in a microchip key. However, when attempting to translate the Cupertino myth to embodied AI, the joke tells itself.
Byung-Chul Han (2015), in The Transparency Society, posits that contemporary capitalism has mutated into a regime where effectiveness depends on hyper-transparency, fluidity, and the elimination of all friction in processes. For Han, value no longer resides in the static possession of a good or the rigid storage of patents, but in the speed of circulation and operational immediacy.
The American model, focused on financial speculation and pure intellectual property, hits an impassable wall here: robotics is a material discipline. Software cannot be accelerated if hardware does not iterate at the same pace.
It is in this rift where the mismatch becomes evident.
While in Silicon Valley a prototype for an articulation or harmonic reducer for a humanoid takes ten weeks to move from 3D render to the workshop due to supply chain fragmentation, in the Pearl River Delta—that gigantic mechatronic hive between Shenzhen and Dongguan—an engineer redesigns a motor at nine in the morning and tests the machined component at five in the afternoon.
In Han’s terms, China has built an ecosystem “transparent” to physical innovation: without the transoceanic logistical frictions or the patent bureaucracy that suffocates the West, allowing the speed of the process to devour static accumulation.
This gap widens when analyzing what Bernard Stiegler (2015) conceptualizes as the “proletarianization” of the hyper-industrial society.
In The Misery of Symbols, Stiegler contends that proletarianization is not merely wage exploitation, but the systematic loss of know-how (savoir-faire) when it is extracted from the worker and delegated entirely to machines or externalized outside the cultural and productive matrix.
By offshoring advanced manufacturing for over four decades to inflate Wall Street profits, the United States did not just export smokestacks and assembly jobs; it gave away the species’ technical memory. Mechatronic know-how—the tacit knowledge of how to cast light alloys, calibrate torque sensors in mass production, or adjust micron tolerances in a servomotor—no longer resides in Detroit or Massachusetts. It lives in Asia.
Attempting to recover that know-how overnight through decrees or by banning Chinese robots is the equivalent of trying to learn classical guitar by banning Spanish guitars from entering the country: a childish denial of the learning curve.
The “Boomerang Effect”: Surveillance Capitalism and Enclosure Devices
Economic history is unforgiving toward tariff hubris. We already saw it with solar panels and electric vehicles: imposing exorbitant tariffs and regulatory barriers to curb the Asian tide did not save the local industry; it made it indolent, expensive, and inefficient. Detroit automakers continued producing $50,000 gas-powered SUVs while the rest of the planet learned to move in $12,000 Chinese electric cars. With robotics, the pathetic comedy repeats itself step by step.
By blocking cutting-edge, cost-efficient manufacturers such as Unitree Robotics, DEEP-Robotics, or UBTECH—Chinese firms that today command between 70% and 80% of the global market for mass-produced commercial quadrupeds and androids—the U.S. administration is not stifling Beijing’s innovation; it is condemning its own universities, AI labs, and SMEs to pay triple for less evolved hardware.
Here lies the relevance of Shoshana Zuboff’s (2020) thesis in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Zuboff describes how the continuous extraction and mining of behavioral data have become the dominant logic of modern economic power.
The irony is how Washington distorts this thesis for its own ends: invoking the ghost of “data extraction” by a rival to justify authoritarian state intervention in its own market.
In its eagerness to prevent a Chinese robot dog from mapping the floor of an American factory, the protectionist state establishes a regime of surveillance and censorship over its own citizens, companies, and universities. Zuboff warns that surveillance capitalism not only strips user autonomy but subordinates innovation to the logic of anticipation and control.
By banning open, affordable platforms that dominate nearly the entire global market, the White House is not protecting its people’s privacy; it is depriving its scientific community of the basic raw material for research, forcing it to submit to the prices of protected local monopolies.
For his part, Achille Mbembe (2011), in his reflections on Necropolitics and border governance, analyzes how declining empires obsessively resort to creating “enclosure zones” and institutional walls when they lose the capacity to project their hegemony organically.
For Mbembe, modern borders have ceased to be mere geographical limits and have become mobile separation devices attempting to freeze time and contain global flows that the empire itself can no longer master.
The ban on androids and quadrupeds is not a demonstration of imperial strength, but the regulatory staging of an enclosure. It is the erection of a bionic wall attempting to halt the physics of international trade. But while Washington fortifies its normative border, the economic reality of the rest of the planet moves forward.
True to its logic, the Chinese industry prevented from selling its latest iterations on American soil will not sit back and weep. It will redirect its commercial firepower toward Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East, offering its platforms at even more aggressive prices.
While a warehouse in Ohio spends a decade trying to amortize an $80,000 local robot that can barely walk smoothly, a logistics plant in Brazil, Germany, or Vietnam will automate its operations with $15,000 Asian technology capable of running, dodging obstacles, and working three consecutive shifts.
Sentence for a Fortified Empire
Walls have never stopped the wind; they only create a stagnant microclimate within them.
The Trump administration, trapped in the illusion that the world still responds to the hegemony of the big stick and the patent, has just signed a sentence that history will record with sarcasm.
At the end of this farce of vetoes, paranoia, and regulatory chauvinism, the power that raised the wall under the triumphant banner of sovereignty and security will discover an uncomfortable truth: it did not isolate its rival from the global market; it isolated itself from the frontier of global efficiency. And when it decides to peer over its costly and useless bionic wall, it will realize that the rest of the planet no longer speaks its language, no longer uses its prices, and, above all, walks at a pace its protected robots will never be able to match.
References
* Han, B.-C. (2015). The Transparency Society. Stanford University Press.
* Mbembe, A. (2011). Necropolitics. Duke University Press.
* Stiegler, B. (2015). The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism. Bloomsbury Academic.
* Zuboff, S. (2020). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.
