How Tech Adoption Works Outside The US: They Let Evel Knivel Make the Jump First

I walked into a BYD showroom a few months back and understood, somewhere between the second and third car, that the EV war is already over and we lost it. Not losing. Lost. The stuff on that floor was better built, better priced, and further along than anything I'd been told to be excited about back home, and the salespeople had the calm confidence of people who already know the score. We're still holding press conferences about the future of electric vehicles. The future showed up, parked itself, and started selling for the price of a used Camry.

That showroom has stuck with me because it's a small version of a much bigger tell. America has developed a strange talent for proclaiming its own dominance from the highest peak while quietly burying its head in the deepest tomb. We are loud and we are certain and, on a growing list of things that actually matter, we are behind. The confidence is the tell. Loud confidence, eyes shut.

The rest of the world is patient. We are not.

Travel a little and the contrast gets embarrassing. I've watched people in India and Brunei and Indonesia typing away, perfectly happy, on iPhone 5s and 6s, doing everything they need to do on hardware we'd throw in a drawer out of shame. There's no anxiety about it. The phone works, so they use the phone. Meanwhile back home the entire economy is organized around the conviction that whatever you bought eighteen months ago is now an embarrassment, and the newest thing must be acquired immediately, at any price, before anyone's had the chance to find out whether it's any good.

And it isn't poverty making them patient. It's a relationship with technology that treats the thing as a tool instead of a personality. The phone is for doing things, and once it does the things, the transaction is complete. There's no restless hunger for the upgrade, no status anxiety wired into the purchase, none of the manufactured dissatisfaction that we've somehow decided is the engine of a healthy economy. They got off that treadmill, or more likely never got on it, and they're doing just fine.

That impatience is the American disease. We are the country that watches Evel Knievel line up the jump, engine screaming, and throws tens of billions of dollars into the air before we know whether he clears the canyon or folds up at the bottom of it. Everyone else has learned to wait. Let the American light himself on fire figuring out if the new technology works, let him eat the cost of the crashes, and then walk in afterward, patient and unhurried, and adopt the version that survived. It's a smart strategy. It's the strategy we used to run on other people. Now it's being run on us.

Europe just builds the thing

Living in Europe recut how I see this, because the answer here is almost boringly consistent. You take the tried and true technology, the stuff that already works, you make it a state priority with real capitalist teeth (competitive bidding, modular contracts, actual consequences for the firm that overpromises), and then you do the one thing Americans have somehow forgotten how to do. You build. You build, and build, and build.

Look at Deutsche Bahn retooling and upgrading practically its entire network. It's fashionable to mock the trains for running late, but step back and see what's actually happening. That's not an accident or a crisis, it's a plan, executed on purpose, and when it's finished the whole country gets a better railroad and every business on it gets a tailwind. The wonders I see going up over here, the engineering and the architecture and the sheer commercial competence of it, routinely land at a fifth of the number an American contractor would've quoted for something worse. A fifth. That's not a rounding error, that's a different civilization's relationship with getting things done.

We tell ourselves the gap is regulation, or unions, or some other convenient villain. The less flattering read is that somewhere along the way we stopped building and started financializing, and a country that would rather engineer a tax structure than a train eventually gets exactly the infrastructure it deserves.

Ukraine is out-innovating DARPA, and that should terrify you

If you want the sharpest version of all this, look at what existential threat does to a country that can't afford to be precious about it. In the aftermath of the strikes on Iran and the long grind in Ukraine, the uncomfortable truth is that a besieged country improvising drones out of necessity is now operating further out on the bleeding edge than DARPA. Ukraine is iterating in weeks on hardware that our procurement system would spend a decade and a defense budget failing to ship. Crazy what an existential threat does for a person's motivation to build something that actually works.

And the recent exchange of volleys made something plain that a lot of people would rather not look at. When the American kit got tested for real, the story wasn't a wily foreign adversary outfoxing us. The story was that we'd been fleeced and hobbled from the inside, by our own defense contractors, who long ago figured out that the real weapons system is the invoice. We didn't get beaten so much as we got billed. As Rumsfeld used to say, and no, I'm no fan, but the man had a working brain, sometimes the enemy is from within. Or without. Both, in our case, and the one within has better lawyers.

The weapon nobody's pricing in

Which brings me to the last piece, the one that doesn't fit neatly on a balance sheet, because you can't buy your way out of it and you can't out-innovate it. There's no shortage of state actors who've figured out an old weapon works better than ever in a networked world, and it costs almost nothing to deploy. The troll. Not the amateur in his basement, the industrial kind, run at scale, aimed with intent.

Here's what makes the troll such an elegant weapon of psychological war. It doesn't matter how strong your conviction is, or how airtight your argument, or how much evidence you pile up. The troll will, by definition, never be on your side. That's the whole design. You cannot win the exchange because winning was never on the table, the exchange itself is the point, the endless draining of your attention and your certainty into a hole with no bottom. You bring facts to a fight that was never about facts. And while you're down there wrestling, exhausted and sure you're about to make the point that finally lands, the actual work goes undone, the trains don't get built, and the BYD showroom quietly opens another location down the street.

We keep waiting for the dramatic loss, the single moment we can point to and say that's when it slipped. It doesn't come like that. It comes as a series of small, patient decisions made by everyone else while we're busy being loud, being certain, and being sure the jump is going to clear the canyon this time. The rest of the world isn't in a hurry. That should worry us a lot more than it does.

Disclaimer/Full Disclosure (You made it!): This blog post was generated with the assistance of AI, with N&L human oversight ensuring accuracy and insight. The thoughts and opinions expressed are our own.