bend over backwards to keep their disposessing plantations in production because meat was just one of many bottomless holes for shoveling the products of industrial plant production into.
Case in point, the US subsidized corn to the point where even industrial beef production wasn't able to keep pace, so they started turning it into ethanol, even though the economics of it made no sense given the fossil fuel requirements needed to produce conventional corn. If it's not propping up demand for livestock, it's propping up demand for oil.
It's just kinda funny because the presentation has an air of "Chinese cultural products aren't catering to western tastes and we don't even know about this collective fiction project that is probably pretty niche inside China. It's all over!"
Ma Qianzhu was unsatisfied with Chinese progress. An engineer at a large state-owned enterprise, he belonged to a generation that grew up believing engineering is destiny, that China’s future would be built, bolt by bolt, by people like him. Then Ma discovered something extraordinary: a wormhole to the late Ming Dynasty. With more than 500 peers, he commandeered a ship and traveled back in time 400 years, to a preindustrial China wracked by foreign invasion and internal decay. Their mission: trigger an industrial revolution in the past that would, in the future, make modern China great (again).
This, strictly speaking, did not happen. It’s the plot of The Morning Star of Lingao (临高启明), a sprawling, collectively written science-fiction web novel that has consumed a corner of the Chinese internet for nearly two decades. It now totals millions of words. It has never been translated into English. Almost no one in the West knows it exists.
China is taking over our culture by... writing fiction in Chinese and then not translating it?
Ultimately the plot boils down to the world being doomed by a couple of bourgeois assholes who are unable to see past their personal hangups. It's pretty relatable.
If you want detail beyond the responses here, the book More Everything Forever is a good resource.
Also, since the book doesn't point this out and because misery loves company, I'm gonna add that Eliezer's movement is a cult of personality that attracts a lot of impressionable young people, including ex-Christian/Evangelical and draws them into a libertine environment of drug fueled sex parties that have, unsurprisingly, generated a lot of allegations of assault. One of the prime movers in that particular sphere is a sex worker whose breakout into internet stardom was a photo album wherein she pretended to get SA'd by garden gnomes.
I feel like this doesn't make the point you want it to. The Aztec empire fell because the Mexica weren't exactly awesome neighbors and the arrival of Cortes served as a catalyst for the Tlaxcaltecs and the Mexica's tributaries to break free. Not that the subsequent Spanish rule was an improvement, but without the indigenous struggle against Aztec rule, Cortes and his little gang would've been slaughtered, guns or not.
It might already be a worm:
This method of wrapping the worm around a stick or gauze is speculated to be the source for the Rod of Asclepius, the symbol of medicine