Politics
Politics, a word devoid of meaning these days. At best, here in these United States, thought of politics immediately turns to Republicans and Democrats, yet, neither the Declaration or Constitution says anything about parties. Parties are the invention of representative republicanism, one of many modern political innovations brought about with the establishment of these United States.
Today, in the US, parties don’t really exist. What’s called Democratic and Republican doesn’t represent much, it's simply a matter of control. What's considered a party is comprised overwhelmingly of a small group of elected officials, professional marketers and advertisers, and money people. Any talk about politics today is usually devoid of issues, instead we say Democratic or Republican as if it means something. Sometimes liberal and conservative are substituted, but these terms are less used these days. Recently, an old political term has been resurrected, socialist, a term as meaningless, maybe more so, than Republican and Democrat. From what I can decipher, in it's new incarnation socialist means, “I’m not a Republican, but I don’t really like the Democrats either.” Our political imagination is stagnant.
Across recorded history, politics was defined and controlled by a handful of people, mostly for their benefit. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the Europeans clinging to one coast of the North American continent declared, “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” This thought was completely antithetical to every government then in existence, most of which still rested their authority on one god or other, going back centuries, if not millennia. With the US founding, a new republican, and yes, despite all protestations then and since, a new democratic politics was reintroduced into the world. Despite all its faults and violence, wherever violence starts democracy ends, it's had a pretty good run.
It is, or certainly should be, obvious to all the republican institutions established two and half centuries ago are archaic and dysfunctional. The greatest cause for this is technology, yet we act like technology isn’t politics. In fact, it’s the only real politics today. It's not coincidental today’s politics is once again completely in the hands of a few, overwhelmingly for their benefit. Nothing represents this better then the latest generation of compute marketed as AI.
In regards to this, last week, the Department of Energy (DOE), released an order allowing utilities in the PJM Interconnection transmission area to ignore environmental rules and burn full throttle. PJM contains the biggest concentration of data centers in the country. The heat wave had DOE concerned with keeping the juice flowing.
PJM is a century old, expanding over time from its Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland roots to now stretch all the way west to Illinois and south to DC. It incorporates 187,000 megawatts of generation, that’d be a lot, more than most countries, comprised of natural gas, coal, even oil still, nukes, hydro, and a little solar and wind. The DOE Order waved regulations for 82 plants of various size. Here’s a great DOE document listing the plants, their locations, size and what regs were waved, including restrictions on emissions of SOx, NOx, and CO, emissions that create things like Acid rain and smog. For a few decades, we considered it important enough to cut such emissions and we're quite successful, including helping save the remaining forests and lakes of the Northeast.
The growth of PJM is a story of the politics of technology. Electric utilities are only a century old. With their creation, political concepts like “natural monopolies” – there is no such thing – were created. The idea was used to help regulate the utilities, which for decades was almost exclusively done at local and state levels. But in the 90s, electricity "reform" placed more power at the federal level. Funnily enough, the practice of political reform in American history has almost exclusively been taking previously distributed power and centralizing it, thus making it less democratic.
In regards to utility reform, instead of reforming local democratic regulation and the utilities themselves, everyone was sold the idea markets would regulate. Without going into detail about how electric grids work, putting “markets” into them, well, let’s just say it needed a lot better thinking than what we got. One thing that did result is the formerly dumb grid now supplies all sorts of real time information from the placing of thousands of electronic measuring devises (nodes) across the grid. These nodes send “price signals.” Unfortunately, to this point, it’s done little more than add another layer of centralized rentierism to the grid, but as money is USA Inc.’s only value call it a success.
PJM hasn’t been the only centralized growth of utility control. The last decades of utility “reform” also created massive consolidation of the once local industry across city, county, and state lines, placing more and more control in DC. Just as importantly, the great energy sink that is the data center architecture of this next generation of compute marketed as AI simultaneously seeks to completely centralize control of compute and information, not good for anything that can possibly be conceived of as democracy.
Nonetheless, regarding data centers, a growing political wave develops across the land, big as anything I’ve seen in my life. Americans are rediscovering, or most discovering for the first time, local governments such as townships and counties, and using them to talk face to face about land, water, energy, and information issues. One could hope from this can come actual new political thinking (here's an example from Chatham County, NC) and result in action concerning the need for government reform in the 21st century. It begins, just like two and half centuries ago, with an understanding of power and the architecture of control. If you want democratic control, technology requires distributed control and participation, a revitalizing of politics in America.
And finally, like any good American tonight, we support the Mexicans, Viva!