They built the machines to serve capital. Now the machines serve history. The empire that once automated the world for profit is trembling before a socialism that automates for survival.

By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information | October 16, 2025

“There Are No People”: Panic as Proof in a Dying Empire’s Mirror

The Panic of the West’s Mechanical Mirror

On October 14, 2025, Futurism published “Western Executives Shaken After Visiting China.” It reads like a colonial travel diary written in binary code—a group of Western industrialists go to China, stare into the future, and come back trembling. Victor Tangermann, the author, doesn’t so much report as he performs a ritual of fear, quoting CEOs who describe China’s robotic factories as “terrifying,” “dark,” and “soulless.” The whole article trembles with anxiety, like a dying empire haunted by the sight of its own reflection: machines that no longer work for it.

Tangermann writes from the nerve center of Western techno-journalism, where Silicon Valley’s press agents masquerade as reporters. His work for Futurism, Business Insider, and Inverse places him among that professional caste of narrators whose job is to spin every Western innovation into “progress” and every non-Western advancement into “threat.” The outlet itself, Futurism, is backed by venture capital and animated by the same ideology it pretends to observe: that the future belongs to private profit. When the story is about American engineers, the tone is triumphant. When it’s about Chinese engineers, it becomes apocalyptic. What Tangermann calls journalism is really civilizational mythology—faith disguised as reporting.

The cast of characters he quotes could have been lifted from a boardroom drama. Ford’s Jim Farley warns that “if we lose this, we have no future.” Andrew Forrest of Fortescue admits he gave up on his own project after seeing Chinese plants where “there are no people—everything is robotic.” Greg Jackson from Octopus Energy gushes about China’s “tremendous number of highly skilled, educated engineers,” unsure whether he’s witnessing genius or witchcraft. They sound less like captains of industry than priests in crisis—humbled by a revelation that their gods have failed them. Their terror isn’t really about robots; it’s about the loss of control. The West has been dethroned in the one domain it once ruled absolutely: production.

The propaganda in Tangermann’s piece doesn’t arrive in the form of lies—it’s woven into the structure of the story itself. It opens with panic and ends with prophecy. Fear becomes fact. The executives’ trembling replaces analysis; emotion becomes evidence. If the high priests of capital are afraid, then surely the faithful must be too. The reader is invited to share in their dread: a mechanized Orient rising in the night, lights off, machines humming, no humans in sight. The “dark factory” becomes a metaphor for a future where Western dominance no longer shines.

And yet the darkness Tangermann describes is only the shadow cast by omission. He writes as if China’s automation fell from the sky overnight, a mysterious leap into a post-human world. Gone is the history of Western corporations who offshored their factories to China in search of cheap labor and record profits. Gone are the decades of planning, policy, and experimentation that made Chinese robotics possible. In this amnesia, the West absolves itself. The same forces that built the “world’s factory” now call it a monster.

Even the language of morality creeps in. When China automates, it’s “soulless.” When the West automates, it’s “innovative.” The same machines are judged by different gods. This double standard is not new—it’s the same colonial habit that once called European conquests “civilizing missions” and Indigenous resistance “savagery.” Tangermann’s prose updates that prejudice for the digital age. China becomes the mechanical Other: efficient but inhuman, advanced but unnatural, capable but unfree.

Underneath the moral panic lies fatalism—the oldest trick in imperial storytelling. “If we lose this, we have no future,” says the Ford executive, as if history itself has betrayed them. The phrase turns decline into destiny, erasing all agency and responsibility. Western deindustrialization isn’t treated as the outcome of policy, greed, or class betrayal, but as an act of nature. The emotional tone prepares the audience for what comes next: new tariffs, new militarization, new Cold Wars, all justified in the name of survival.

And then there is the gaze—the colonial eye that still sees the world as something to be toured, surveyed, and reported on. These executives walking through Chinese factories are explorers returning from an unknown land, their words forming dispatches for a frightened metropole. They have discovered the “dark continent” of automation, and they describe it to us so that we may tremble, too. But the discovery cuts both ways. In peering into China’s robotic future, they are forced to confront their own past—the centuries of conquest, extraction, and exploitation that built their fortunes. The mirror has turned mechanical, and it reflects their obsolescence with perfect precision.

In the end, Tangermann’s piece is not about machines at all. It is about empire watching itself die and mistaking its own reflection for an enemy. The executives’ fear is a confession, their panic an unintended prophecy. What terrifies them is not the speed of Chinese robots, but the possibility that history no longer needs Western hands to keep it turning. That, more than anything, is the real “dark factory” in this story: an empire running out of light.

The Industrial Terrain Behind the Panic

The Futurism article tells us plenty about the emotional weather of Western boardrooms—but very little about the material conditions that produced it. Strip away the trembling tone, and we’re left with a handful of verifiable claims: China has more industrial robots than the United States, Germany, and the U.K. combined; Western executives witnessed “dark factories” operating without visible labor; and the Chinese state is pushing automation to offset demographic shifts and expand its manufacturing edge. All true enough on the surface. But truth, in propaganda, often hides in what is not said. The piece never asks how this transformation came to be, what social logic drives it, or why the men who built the old order now fear the machinery of a new one.

The rise of China’s automated manufacturing did not happen by magic—it’s the direct offspring of globalization itself, the system Western corporations designed and profited from. For more than four decades, U.S. and European capital flowed into Chinese industry, chasing cheap labor and looser environmental regulations while hollowing out their own industrial base in the process. Western firms built the supply chains, transferred the know-how, and helped train the engineers who would master advanced manufacturing. What Wall Street once hailed as “efficiency” has now been recast as “threat.” The executives who toured those Chinese factories were merely confronting the grown child of their own greed—now independent, disciplined, and unwilling to serve its old masters.

China’s present wave of automation is driven by deliberate state planning. Programs like Made in China 2025 and the more recent push for “new quality productive forces”—a policy frame for innovation-led industrial upgrading—are part of a national strategy to upgrade industry, secure supply chains, and reduce dependence on foreign technology. Robotics, artificial intelligence, and renewable energy are treated as strategic infrastructure under coordinated industrial policy, with initiatives to integrate AI and manufacturing at scale. In this context, automation functions as industrial policy, not merely a corporate cost-cutting device.

The workers have not vanished either. Many are being retrained through state-funded programs to operate, maintain, and design automated systems. In provinces like Guangdong, the government has committed billions of yuan to reskill industrial labor and upgrade factory workforces as automation expands. Others are entering emerging sectors tied to the country’s energy transition: China’s renewable energy industries now employ over 7.4 million people, nearly half of the world’s total clean energy workforce. Nationwide initiatives are also underway to expand vocational training in manufacturing, services, and emerging digital sectors. The goal, articulated through these programs, is to raise productivity and manage technological change through planning rather than chaos. That social dimension—the conscious effort to adapt technology to human needs—is entirely absent from Tangermann’s framing. To Western observers, a factory without visible laborers appears dystopian because in their economies the disappearance of workers usually means the disappearance of wages, rights, and purpose. In China, it signals something different: a transition guided, however unevenly, by the logic of development rather than the logic of profit.

The timing of this panic also reveals its class roots. Western manufacturing didn’t collapse because robots arrived—it collapsed because finance capital took over. The economies that once built cars, ships, and infrastructure have been hollowed out by a system that rewards speculation over production. In the United States, manufacturing employment has fallen to its lowest levels in years, while the share of GDP derived from finance and debt trading continues to climb. Factories didn’t close because workers forgot how to make things—they closed because short-term profit became more lucrative than long-term investment. The same elites who dismantled their own industrial base now point fingers eastward, crying “unfair competition” at a socialist state that still believes in production. What they can’t stomach is the irony: that a system organized around social planning and public investment is outperforming the market logic they once claimed was destiny.

Tariffs and bans on Chinese electric vehicles are sold as defensive measures, but they often function as acts of protectionism wrapped in moral language. In May 2024, the U.S. raised tariffs on Chinese-made EVs from 25% to 100% under the guise of “unfair trade practices” and “economic security.”These trade restrictions are justified in the name of national defense or market fairness, but their logic is clear: Western powers are trying to contain a rival that beat them at their own industrial game. Automation isn’t the real target—sovereignty is. What terrifies executives is not that Chinese robots work harder, but that they answer to a different master—a state structured around national development rather than private extractive profit.

So the “dark factories” of Tangermann’s imagination are not evidence of dystopia. They are proof that the geography of production has shifted, that the long era of Western industrial monopoly is ending. The panic we read in his article is the echo of that tectonic movement—the sound of an empire realizing that the world it built for exploitation now manufactures without it. Beneath the headlines about robots, that is the true story hiding in plain sight.

Automation and Empire: When the Machine Outruns Its Master

The Futurism article reads like a ghost story, but the ghost isn’t a robot—it’s the memory of Western power. Behind every tremor in the text lies a deeper historical contradiction: the long arc of imperial capitalism meeting the limits of its own design. For centuries, empire thrived by controlling the tools of production and the people who used them. From steam to silicon, technological power meant geopolitical dominance. What those “shaken” executives saw in China wasn’t a trick of machinery; it was a glimpse of a world that no longer needs them to make it run. That fear—disguised as concern for “competition” or “economic security”—is the sound of a ruling class discovering that history has moved on without them.

The roots of this shift reach back to the late twentieth century, when Western capital abandoned its own workers for cheaper labor abroad. Globalization, they called it—a polite word for imperial outsourcing. Factories shuttered across Detroit, Sheffield, and Marseille while production boomed in Shenzhen and Guangzhou. Western corporations extracted profit, China built capacity. Now that same capacity has evolved into a self-sustaining industrial ecosystem—automated, planned, and directed by the state rather than by transnational capital. It is not a rebellion of machines but a rebellion of history, the moment when the periphery internalizes the core’s productive logic and turns it outward.

That’s what makes the executives tremble: they’re witnessing the inversion of empire’s value chain. For centuries, technological innovation flowed from the metropole to the colony. Today it flows the other way. China has not only mastered automation; it has woven it into a national development strategy that fuses scientific advancement with social planning. This is not the “state capitalism” the West pretends to see—it’s a hybrid socialist modernity where robotics and artificial intelligence serve coordinated, long-term goals: lifting productivity, reducing dependence on Western systems, and sustaining livelihoods in an aging society. The fear, therefore, is not of machines replacing people but of socialism outperforming capitalism on capitalism’s own terrain.

Western propaganda calls this “authoritarian efficiency,” but that phrase masks the real authoritarianism at play—the dictatorship of finance capital that gutted its own industrial heartlands in pursuit of speculative returns. Automation under that regime is weaponized against labor, producing layoffs and precarity. In China’s hands, automation functions as insulation: a shield against imperial sanctions, a means to preserve social stability, and a tool for industrial sovereignty. The difference lies not in the circuitry, but in who holds power over the switch. Capital treats technology as an instrument of domination; socialism, at its best, treats it as an extension of collective planning.

This contradiction—the same machines serving opposing systems—defines the current epoch. The “dark factories” that haunt Western imagination are, in reality, bright markers of transition from an imperial to a multipolar order. They signal a new configuration of world production where technological capability is no longer monopolized by the old core. The U.S. and its allies respond with tariffs, sanctions, and hysteria because they know that their global command rested not on moral superiority but on control over production. When that control slips, the whole ideology of civilization versus barbarism collapses with it.

Viewed dialectically, the story of automation is the story of empire losing its monopoly on the future. Machines, once the instruments of capitalist conquest, are now tools in the hands of those who were conquered. The ruling class calls this a crisis; the working class might one day call it liberation. What Tangermann’s executives saw in those Chinese factories was not a dystopia—they saw the end of a world order that had taken centuries to build. Their panic is the birth cry of something new: the global redistribution of productive power, a tectonic shift that exposes how fragile the empire of capital really is when its machines begin to serve another master.

From Fear to Frontline: Reclaiming the Future of Production

If Section I exposed the panic and Section II mapped the terrain, what follows is the task before us: to turn fear into clarity and clarity into motion. The contradictions laid bare by the Futurism article are not distant abstractions—they live inside every factory closed, every job automated without social protection, every tariff passed in the name of “security.” The ruling class is reorganizing itself around those contradictions, using technological anxiety to build consent for protectionism, militarization, and digital surveillance. The working class, the colonized, and the revolutionary movements of the multipolar world must respond on the same terrain—with organization, solidarity, and purpose.

Across the Global South, that response is already material. The expansion of BRICS+ industrial cooperation and the Digital Silk Road marks a refusal to let Silicon Valley and NATO dictate the terms of technological life. In Latin America, the ALBA-TCP bloc is experimenting with regional technology sharing and green manufacturing. African and Asian states are negotiating new supply chains that trade knowledge instead of debt. What Western pundits call “deglobalization” is, from below, a project of decolonization—a collective effort to reclaim production from finance and place it under the command of society. Every robotic arm on a Chinese assembly line, every satellite launched by a multipolar alliance, chips away at the empire’s monopoly over the future.

Within the imperial core, the battle is ideological before it is industrial. Workers in Detroit, Liverpool, and Marseille are told to fear Chinese machines instead of the bankers who dismantled their industries. The antidote to that poison is consciousness: an understanding that the problem is not where a factory stands, but who it serves. Reindustrialization under monopoly capital means little more than rebuilding the plantation with robots instead of slaves. The demand must be for a new kind of industry—socially owned, ecologically sustainable, and globally cooperative. That means defending public research, building international worker alliances in tech sectors, and supporting the movements that are already doing this work under the radar.

We can see outlines of such resistance taking shape. European dockworkers refusing to handle weapons bound for Gaza. Indian farmers demanding sovereignty over agritech and seed patents. Software collectives in Brazil, Kenya, and Vietnam building open-source alternatives to Western surveillance platforms. Each of these struggles chips at the same wall that Tangermann’s article tries to reinforce: the idea that technology belongs to empire. The new reality, visible to anyone not blinded by ideology, is that technology belongs to those who make and use it together.

Our task in the Global North is not charity but alignment. The same system that exploits labor abroad is eroding life at home. The same elites who panic at China’s factories automate our workplaces, gut our cities, and militarize our streets. To resist that process is to join the global fight for productive sovereignty—through organizing unions in tech and logistics, supporting South-South cooperation campaigns, exposing the propaganda that divides workers by nation, and demanding that public resources serve people, not monopolies.

The empire trembles because its mirror shows a future where the machine no longer obeys it. Our job is to make that reflection real—to turn panic into praxis, fear into coordination, and automation into liberation. The world’s working classes and oppressed nations are already building the scaffolding of that future. It is time for those of us inside the belly of the beast to start building with them.