Supporters of Marcus Endicott’s Patreon can access weekly or monthly consultations on this topic.

Articles

This series by Marcus L. Endicott maps the rise of "digital humans" - AI-powered avatars - as a load-bearing layer of China's emerging techno-social order, tracing their deployment across an unusually wide span of domains rather than treating them as a single product category. Several installments examine cultural and ritual uses, from AI micro-dramas and museum guides to funerals where the dead are made to speak again, alongside the commercial machinery behind them: the executives, the industry's coming-of-age in the first half of 2026, and the "media brain" rendering a province's news as immersive worlds. The tourism stack gets its own arc, climbing from policy "days" and WeChat mini-programs to a 2.14-trillion-dollar smart-tourism market, while parallel pieces follow digital humans into classrooms (including cloned star professors), hospitals, mental-health services wired into social governance, and esports. Others pull back to infrastructure and strategy: the "red metaverse," the metaverse industrial map, patents pivoting from novelty to production, a 6G network built around avatars, the OpenClaw-era agent boom, and a broader labor essay on the end of work as the price of survival - with framing pieces on "cyber civilization" and "intelligent society" supplying the ideological scaffolding. The series closes by reading China's social rollout of digital humans as a rehearsal for humanoid robots, so its real subject is less a technology than a method: how one country is using avatars as connective tissue across culture, commerce, governance, and, finally, physical embodiment.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse