The Paperwork Is the Product

People keep asking me about the AI Act.

The AI Act is just the one with a name people recognise. Under it sits the rest of the pile. New reporting. New due diligence. New packaging rules. Cyber rules that overlap the last cyber rules. Sustainability templates that need a consultant so the next template can be filled in.

Some of that started with decent intentions. I can accept the intention. What I cannot accept is what the week turns into. The political system’s main output, from where I sit, is paper. And paper has started to stand in for building.

I have sat in rooms where the work was not a product, not a customer, not a factory problem in Dongguan. It was a form. A mapping exercise. A policy written so we can prove we have a policy. Then the next regulation arrives before the last one has a home in the company.

This summer it was a cancel form.

Someone decided an e-commerce site now needs a dedicated page where a customer can cancel or return an order. For twenty-five years that problem did not exist. People changed their mind, replied to the order confirmation, and wrote: cancel this, here is the order number. Customer service took it off. Our ticket system already reads the wording, pulls the order number, and puts the shipment on hold in the warehouse. Automatically. With the same models Brussels cannot stop talking about.

So we built the form. There is a link in the footer. A handful of people have used it. Call it 0.001 percent of orders. Everyone else still replies to the confirmation email, the way they have done since webshops showed up in the nineties.

The form does not cancel orders better. It does not protect the customer better. It gives us a URL to point at if someone asks whether we complied.

If you have not run an operating business through this, “overregulation” sounds like a slogan from someone with a podcast. From the inside it is quieter. It is calendar time. People you hired to make things, spending Thursday proving the things were made correctly, according to a rule written by someone who will never see the warehouse.

Brussels now talks about simplification. Omnibus packages. Burden-reduction targets. That admission is useful. When you need fresh law to apologise for the last law, something is already wrong. Simplification is still a process. Process is still paper.

AI does not create this problem. It shows it.

A model is hungry. It wants power, capital, engineers who ship, and a country that can stand an ugly miss without opening a four-year inquiry. Cheap energy is not a side effect of AI. It is an input. No cheap power, no serious training run, no serious inference at scale.

Europe has spent a long time making those inputs expensive or embarrassing: speed, risk, scale, energy, concentrated capital, failure, and the habit of launching before the twelfth committee has finished the recitals.

Then they want a stamp on the work.

From August the models are supposed to mark what they touch. Machine-readable watermarks in text, images, audio, video. Official EU icons, even. Translate a product text into German and it can come out flagged as written by AI. Ask the model to tighten a paragraph you already wrote, same flag. Run “make this image pop” in Photoshop, and someone in a compliance meeting will ask whether the packshot now needs a label.

They wrote the rule as if AI were a separate author in the next room. It is not. It is the spellcheck, the translator, the retoucher, the warehouse clerk who reads the cancel email. Look at Photoshop this year. You do not dodge and burn for twenty minutes. You type what you want. Should that file now say Made by AI? If yes, half the catalogue on a European webshop becomes a disclaimer. If no, the rule only works on people too honest or too large to ignore it.

The Act pretends there is a clean line between “assistive editing” and “generated content.” There is not. Everything that ships will have been improved by a model in some small way. A mark that means everything means nothing. A mark that tries to mean something will turn into another form in the footer, used by nobody, kept because a lawyer said we had to keep it.

The US will build a lot of the models. China will build a lot of the power, the plants, the hardware around them. The Gulf will fund what it wants funded. Smaller countries will move because they still treat technology as something you put on the market, then police. The EU will write impact assessments.

That would be harmless if the rest of the world needed to buy impact assessments. It does not. They are overhead. AI eats overhead: admin, legal review, the analyst layer, the compliance department that exists to feed the next compliance department. A lot of Europe stored its economic weight in those rooms.

Europe can spend the next ten years doing what it already does well: writing rules for industries that end up living somewhere else.

This is not only about models.

I source in China. I run businesses that have to survive freight, suppliers, and a customer who wants the goods on Tuesday. Talk in Europe about competitiveness still sounds like a seminar. The talk around Shenzhen, for all its faults, still sounds like a factory.

Energy is a cost.

Capital is whether you can take a swing.

Time is whether the other guy already shipped.

I do not need Europe to become sloppy. I need it to stop mixing caution with virtue. Caution is a method. Used long enough, it is just slowness with better letterhead.

If nothing sharp changes, I do not see much of a future here for people who want to build something ambitious. You can live well. You can be comfortable. A country can be rich, decent, and slowly less relevant at the same time.

I do not usually put family plans on a website. This one is simple.

After my son finishes school I want him at university in the United States or Hong Kong. I will push Hong Kong. If he goes, we go with him.

Part of that is work. We already buy a lot out of Shenzhen and Dongguan. Being closer is an operating choice, not a tantrum. Part of it is tempo. I want him in a city that still talks about building as if that were a normal way to spend a decade.

Yes, China censors. Yes, Hong Kong is politically complicated. I am not selling a postcard, and I have no interest in dressing up a one-party state.

What I will not do is let that list end the conversation. Europe likes to call itself the opposite system. Day to day it is building another kind of watchfulness: legal, moral, wrapped in safety and “trust.” Chat scanning comes back under a new label. Platforms get asked to watch. More data is kept just in case. It is not Beijing. The wish to see everything is not as foreign as the speeches suggest.

I would rather he spend his twenties near the part of the world where our supply chain actually lives. Hong Kong is expensive and messy. It is also next to the work.

Brussels does not need to vanish. Safety does not need to go in the bin. Some rules exist because companies cut corners.

The volume is the policy. A place that writes rules faster than it builds companies should not look surprised when people start checking flight times.

If Europe wants to keep them, the main work of a week has to be the work again, not the proof of the work.

Until that happens I will operate here when I have to, and plan as if the centre of gravity has already moved.