In 2024, the House Committee on Homeland Security and the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party released a joint investigation finding that Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries, a Chinese state-owned enterprise, accounts for nearly 80 percent of the ship-to-shore cranes used at American ports.

The investigation documented cellular modems on cranes at certain US ports that fell outside existing contracts and, in some cases, had not been requested by port operators. Earlier that year, the Coast Guard had issued a Maritime Security Directive requiring cyber risk management measures for ship-to-shore cranes manufactured by Chinese companies.

Coverage of the finding reached national outlets as well as security policy publications and infrastructure trade press. Port infrastructure tends to enter broader public discussion most visibly during acute disruption events, such as the container ship backlogs at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in 2021 and 2022, and to recede when the immediate disruption resolves.

The pattern extends across most systems that determine American material outcomes. These systems operate continuously, are described in policy documents and industry publications rather than mass media, and are understood in detail by relatively small professional communities. The population of people who could produce a comprehensive account of any single such system is limited. The population who could produce accounts of several is smaller.

The Distribution of Sustained American Institutional Analysis


  • In 2024, a joint House investigation documented that Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries, a Chinese state-owned enterprise, accounts for nearly 80 percent of the ship-to-shore cranes used at American ports and identified unauthorized cellular modems on some U.S.-bound or operational cranes.
  • American-studies institutions abroad, foreign public investors, central banks, and international professional-services firms all have direct incentives to maintain explicit models of American institutional systems.
  • Proximity to a system can reduce the need to model it explicitly; distance can increase it. Embedded participants can substitute tacit knowledge for a coherent model of the whole system, while external actors often cannot.
  • Searchable public records, machine translation, and machine-assisted synthesis have made it easier to investigate unfamiliar institutions from a distance, but turning those materials into a coherent picture still requires sustained attention.
  • Research on passive news consumption and short-form video use illustrates a broader gap between exposure to information and the sustained attention required to turn it into structural understanding.
  • The scarce resource in a mature information economy may increasingly be neither information nor expertise alone but the willingness and sustained attention required to assemble information into an explanatory structure.

Who Understands the Machinery


Operational knowledge of American port systems is distributed among specific commercial populations. Terminal operating system vendors maintain internal models of the software that routes containers through terminals. Customs brokers and freight forwarders hold operational knowledge of clearance processes. Foreign equipment manufacturers maintain knowledge of the American systems their equipment supports.

Analytical work that treats American port infrastructure as a system rather than as a set of local operational problems is distributed unevenly. Long-standing American studies institutions exist across Asia and Europe and produce work on American political, economic, legal, and cultural systems.

Foreign central banks, sovereign investment funds, and other state investment institutions employ research teams with direct reasons to track US monetary, regulatory, and market structures in detail. International consulting and legal firms routinely produce analysis of American markets that circulates within client relationships rather than into public discussion.

The corresponding domestic apparatus is fragmented. American federal analytical capacity is distributed across agencies and institutions with different statutory mandates and jurisdictions. Academic economics and political science often organize analysis around disciplinary questions rather than operational maps of whole systems.

Investigative journalism can expose specific problems in depth but is less often structured to maintain persistent public models of the systems that generate them.

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The View from Outside


A meaningful share of serious system-level analysis of American institutional machinery is produced outside the United States, often by actors whose analytical position sits outside the machinery itself. International American studies institutions date to the early postwar period and now span national and multinational associations.

What has expanded more clearly is the volume and accessibility of source material available to analysts outside the country.

The port infrastructure case makes the asymmetry unusually visible because the manufacturers of critical equipment are foreign firms with operational knowledge of the American systems their equipment supports. Similar incentives exist in other domains where external commercial and analytical actors have direct reasons to build detailed models of American institutional operation, including semiconductor supply chains, pharmaceutical manufacturing inputs, and cross-border financial market structures.

Proximity and the Cost of Model-Building


A participant embedded within an American market, regulatory environment, or professional community can often function through tacit knowledge and locally distributed expertise. They know whom to call, which requirements are binding, and what treatment particular counterparties expect.

External actors lack that familiarity. To operate effectively, they often have to make the system explicit: who has authority, which rules matter, where decisions are made, and how institutions interact. Distance can therefore create stronger incentives to build a coherent model of the system.

Tocqueville's Democracy in America, published in two parts in 1835 and 1840, remains an archetypal external description of American democratic institutions. Twentieth-century area studies and strategic-analysis programs likewise demonstrated how geopolitical distance can create incentives for sustained institutional study under specific strategic conditions.

What has changed is the cost of doing that work from a distance. Searchable public records, cheap cross-border communications, machine translation, and machine-assisted synthesis allow researchers and investors to reconstruct parts of unfamiliar American industries without the physical access or specialized intermediaries once required.

Proximity still provides local context and practical knowledge that remote analysis cannot fully reproduce. But outsiders can now compensate for some of that disadvantage more easily than before. The remaining difficulty is not finding information so much as assembling it into a coherent understanding.

The Domestic Information Environment


American consumers are not short of information. The more relevant distinction is between information about events and information about the systems that produce them. Research on expanding media choice has long shown, in the political domain, that greater access can widen rather than eliminate differences in knowledge.

Prices move, companies report earnings, products launch, workers are laid off, elections are decided, and scandals break. Each can arrive as a discrete item in a feed. Understanding the authority relationships, incentives, financial structures, and decision processes behind such events requires something different: assembling many pieces of information into a working model. Event information can arrive passively. Structural understanding generally cannot.

Passive News Consumption


Research on what political communication scholars call the "news-finds-me" perception illustrates part of that distinction. The concept describes people who believe they can remain informed without actively seeking news because important information will reach them through general media use and social networks.

US panel studies led by Homero Gil de Zúñiga have associated this perception with lower use of traditional news sources and lower political knowledge over time. The underlying distinction extends beyond politics. A discrete news item can be delivered passively, but a working model of mortgage underwriting, insurance pricing, supply chains, or municipal finance must be actively constructed.

Recent research has examined associations between heavy short-form video consumption and measures of attentional control. A 2025 Psychological Bulletin meta-analysis covering 71 studies and 98,299 participants found greater short-form video use associated with poorer cognitive performance, with the strongest associations in attention and inhibitory control across adult and youth samples.

Most included studies were correlational, and causal claims about degradation of higher-order reasoning exceed what current evidence supports. The contemporary information environment systematically rewards fragmented, low-effort consumption while providing few structural incentives for the sustained cognitive expenditure that model-building requires.

Skepticism Without Inquiry


Rejection of conventional news coverage is often reasonable rather than negligent. News avoidance is widespread and can reflect fatigue, overload, or dissatisfaction with coverage. Much daily political and economic commentary is performative, agenda-driven, or shaped by commercial incentives that do not necessarily align with the reader's informational needs. Another cycle of campaign coverage may offer limited marginal value.

The failure mode arises when skepticism toward that information environment becomes a substitute for inquiry into systems with more direct material consequences. Avoiding political commentary does not explain how credit is allocated, insurance is priced, procurement decisions are made, or other institutional mechanisms shape economic life.

Outside Models and Inside Knowledge


Neither outside analysis nor embedded practical knowledge is universally better. An outside analyst may see how the pieces fit together but miss local details that insiders take for granted. An embedded participant often has the opposite advantage: deep practical knowledge of one part of the system without a clear view of the whole.

Today's information environment makes it easier for outsiders to close part of that gap. They can gather and connect information that once depended more heavily on proximity. That does not replace firsthand knowledge, but it makes a useful outside model easier to build. At the same time, insiders increasingly operate in systems complex enough that local familiarity alone may not be sufficient.

The Remaining Scarcity


Democratizing access to information does not automatically democratize structural understanding. Access to the pieces and possession of a model are categorically different achievements. The scarce resource in the current information environment may increasingly be neither information nor formal expertise alone.

The scarce resource is the willingness and sustained attention required to assemble information into an explanatory structure, and strategic incentives may determine who undertakes that work as much as formal access to information does.

The distinction between explicit models and tacit familiarity has consequences at the individual scale as well as the institutional. A professional or entrepreneur who develops a broader understanding of a specific American institutional domain can make decisions with more actionable context than local familiarity alone provides.

That understanding can deepen over time, because an explicit model can reveal patterns, constraints, and possibilities that tacit familiarity alone may leave obscured.

The ships continue to arrive. The cranes continue to discharge. The systems that constitute the American material environment operate on their own schedules.

The people who understand how those systems work in detail are distributed across domestic and external institutions. Their workings are increasingly accessible from anywhere. The remaining question is how many people living within them will choose to understand them for themselves.

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Portrait of Michael LeSane
Michael LeSane
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