Compute, Money, & Energy Blasphemies

"Participatory democracy postulates low-energy technology. Only participatory democracy creates the conditions for rational technology." – Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity, 1973

I’ve been slowly working two longer pieces on energy and money, looking at both in regards to information. However, my screen keeps incessantly being filled with previously verboten or ignored realities, blasphemies one could even call them, so here’s a few short takes.

First, lets look at compute and the latest generation marketed as AI. In the last couple years, I reconnected with a number of politicos from my past. All people I like, all Democrats, most I worked with on the 2004 Dean campaign, a campaign, though not a candidate, that deserved much better.

The vast majority of these folks were younger than me, Trippi, an exception. They created the “first internet campaign.” One way you can understand what was accomplished is every email ask for money you get these days. That was one of the Dean campaign’s innovations. It's impacted a lot of elections since, starting with helping Obama get passed Hillary, whatever you think the value of that.

Last summer, reconnecting with many, I said to them all, “AI/Data Centers will be the biggest issue of next year’s mid-terms.” Yesterday, the NYT blared, “The Data Center Backlash Bursts Into the Midterms . “Bursts,” that’s so funny.

Not surprising, the Reps are acting faster, relatively. Really, the Reps have been the most dynamic party force in American politics for the last thirty years, say electorally beginning in '94, when they took the Congress for the first time in 40 years. Mr. Bill, such a political genius. Though really, Rep electoral dynamism goes back to Reagan in ‘80 and the death of the New Deal Coalition. Granted the Reps have been entirely reactionary, but compared to unending Dem atrophy as it sinks in its own decay and filth, well...

The second issue is money. I started learning about money on my first campaign in 1980 when inflation was Issue #1. For many years, I wrote a lot about money, especially for a few years around 08, when I thought the financial mess would allow some real thought, discussion, and change. I discounted how broken American politics were, instead we got smiling Barry, bank restitution, and now, today’s mess.

“How much a mess is it really Joe,” you ask? Well enough that, again turning to the NYT, and the only reason to read the NYT is if you want to understand what America’s financial and political establishment is thinking, but the NYT writes,

“The ancient world understood something about our monetary system we have mostly forgotten: Money is an invented social construct. It isn’t real, not in the way a tree or a stone is real. The system of money and credit is a thing humans made up. It’s a record-keeping device for distributing resources. And since money is a human creation, we can alter it when needed.”

In the NYT? Money just created! Ay carumba!

I learned this existential money axiom long ago reading Bill Greider’s Secrets of the Temple, about the creation of the Fed and the institutionalization of the present bank-debt money system. That money is simply created is the Temple’s greatest secret. That the banks were given monopoly control of dollar creation was another. I remember a number of years later telling Greider he had taught me money was just created. He laughed replying, “It’s like telling people there’s no god.”

This has been the most amusing aspect of the last decade's rampant crypto-idiocy, “We can all create our own money, we can all be rich.” Unfortunately, our libertarian, second life, screen financiers, and now the Trump family, never understood money is and always will be a social construct, there in lies the rub.

The NYT's other money blasphemy is the piece calls for a politics of debt destruction. I’ve called for and written about this for twenty years. Ancient societies such as the Sumerian's practiced this, but such “jubilees” never impacted the power structure. Today, a real and necessary politics of debt destruction requires part and parcel a reform and evolution of our established power structures, luckily, this all goes hand in hand dealing with the issues of compute, but then money is just an ancient technology.

Talking about technology, you’re talking about energy and sisters and brothers, besides wildlife conservation, the energy issue I’ve followed, studied, thought, and acted upon when possible, longer than all others. The FT headlines,

Oil major Eni bets on nuclear fusion becoming its ‘next refinery’

Deja vu all over again. After the 70s Oil Shocks, impressionable events in your friend and humble narrator’s young life, some of the oil companies started referring to themselves as "energy" companies. For example, a few acted like they were going to bring solar forward, which would have been a good thing. However, for an unregulated industry that for a century printed money, investing the money necessary to make solar happen plus going up against utilities with government sanctioned monopolies to install it, well, that was a bridge too far for the oil industry. It would take another thirty years and the Chinese to invest the money necessary for solar to get off the ground.

In the last twenty years, the oil companies dropped all pretense being about anything than oil, and well, natural gas. Though now, it seems, they’re going back to being energy companies, but instead of capturing the energy released from the sun’s fusion, they’re going to bring fusion onto the planet. Don’t worry, it’s just ten or twenty years away, as it's been for the last 75 years.

I'll say one thing from my old man position, this whole nuke renaissance of last five years has been nuts. I do remember telling many energy people 25 years ago that though the nukes were down at that time, they were in no way out. Absolutely nothing had been done to reshape our infrastructure or American lives to make them less energy intensive, while we doubled down on the idea energy waste is wealth.

That resurrected nukes, once "too cheap to meter," have been primarily pushed by compute is no surprise. Compute was initially and largely developed as an American project over the second half of the 20th century. The industry was completely infatuated with the American mindset that unlimited and uninterrupted energy was always available. This latest generation of compute requires a massive increase in energy generation. It’s not going to happen and that they’re pushing fusion as a new energy fetish only insures its won’t.

Finally, the FT has a piece titled, “Are America’s vast Gulf bases worth rebuilding?” The article continues, “This has accelerated longstanding calls to reduce the size of the US footprint in the Gulf — long the military embodiment of what began as an oil-for-security arrangement between Washington and its regional allies.”

Any good American would ask, “What Bases? Why do they need to be rebuilt?” After all, it’s been verboten to connect US military activities in the Gulf with oil since Carter’s 1980 State of the Union, where he stated plainly the US was going to militarily secure the remaining oil supplies of the Persian Gulf. However, since then, all American military moves around the Gulf have officially been about terrorism, freedom, Israel, goodwill, whatever you want to claim, but never-ever about oil.

I avoided, and smartly so, writing much about the impact Trump’s war would have on oil. Let’s just say, I, like all others, have learned some things. One thing not surprising, as Javier Blas, who used to write about oil for the FT but is now at Bloomberg, wrote a couple weeks ago, “The impact of the American Shale revolution remains one of the most underappreciated geo-economic events of the last 25 years.”

Underappreciated is not the right word for what continues to be a global shaping event almost completely ignored and little understood except by a handful of oilies. Trump's war would have never been possible without, but then we'd probably did something just as stupid sooner. And well, the war's not over.

There you go, compute, energy, and money, all at the top of the news in blasphemous ways, a new politics yet to form.