A peculiar mixture of omniscience and impotence ⊗ Electrostates & physics

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”
—Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut (hat tip)

A peculiar mixture of omniscience and impotence

Will Self uses the “Pentagon Pizza Index”—the folk observation that sudden surges in pizza deliveries near the Pentagon or CIA headquarters often precede major geopolitical events—as a lens for examining how historical perception has changed in the digital age (archived here). His argument runs through Baudrillard’s 1991 essay on the Gulf War, which claimed modern warfare had lost peripeteia, the decisive reversal that gives a narrative its tragic shape. Self suggests the world of 2026 complicates that diagnosis in two ways: the orbital asymmetry Baudrillard described has mutated into something distributed across cyber intrusions, sanctions, drone strikes, and algorithmic propaganda; and peripeteia itself has not vanished but fractured into innumerable tiny reversals, each too small to constitute history alone, yet collectively producing outcomes no one fully intended. We lowly citizens respond by scanning trivial data for hidden meaning, treating delivery patterns, Google Maps traffic, and shipping insurance rates as the auguries of a new geopolitical astrology.

The paradox Self identifies is that digital networks have democratised the tools of intelligence analysis and, with them, manufactured a feeling of involvement that has no matching power behind it. Everyone can track satellite imagery and monitor open-source signals, yet the systems producing those signals operate at speeds and scales beyond any individual’s influence. Participation becomes spectatorship disguised as agency; prediction markets transform uncertainty into tradable assets while substituting speculation for action. The result is what Self calls “orbital history,” events that descend from technological systems encircling the planet rather than emerging from human communities, leaving only “faint fingerprints on the mundane surfaces of everyday commerce.” We know more about the signals of history than any previous generation, and can act on almost none of it. The pizza box becomes a modern augur’s entrails: the oracle tells us something is happening somewhere beyond our reach, but confirms there’s nothing we can do about it.

More → Less central to the piece, there’s a bit on prediction markets, which also makes me think that in the midst of what he’s explaining, we also have the monetisation of everything, including betting on when conflicts start and missiles rain down. Bleak. Self also uses the expression “the swarm” a couple of times, as a descriptor of our times, which reminded me of The Churn in The Expanse, but that might be because I’m just finishing up a rewatch.

And because these events occur within the digital medium itself – within data flows, algorithms, and predictive markets – they are experienced primarily as signals: a spike in pizza orders, a sudden surge in shipping insurance premiums, a viral rumor about a dead prime minister. Each signal hints at catastrophe while simultaneously reducing it to a pattern in the data. […]

In the swarm, however, there is no singular protagonist. Decisions are dispersed across institutions, algorithms, and networks of actors. The consequences of those decisions propagate through systems too complex for any individual to control. […]

Events no longer emerge from the ground of human communities but descend from technological systems that encircle the planet: satellites, financial networks, algorithmic media. These systems operate at speeds and scales beyond ordinary human perception. Their effects appear sudden and inexplicable, like meteorological disturbances in the political atmosphere.

Electrostates & physics

A wide-ranging conversation between Paul Krugman and David Roberts, recorded against the background of an idiot-created oil crisis. Roberts’s central frame is that the US has chosen, more or less deliberately, to be the last petrostate, while China is building itself into the first electrostate—dominating batteries, EVs, critical minerals, and the full physical stack of an electrified economy. Emerging economies weighing a 50-year infrastructure bet are not going to choose LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) dependency when the learning curves on solar and storage keep doing what they have been doing. The Iran war, Roberts argues, is the most apt demonstration anyone could have scripted of what fossil fuel dependency actually costs.

Some of their discussion we’ve covered here before with other pieces, but the efficiency point Roberts makes is one I don’t think I’ve seen before, and he flags it as one of the most important things to understand about the transition: electrifying the economy delivers a 50 to 60% efficiency gain before anyone changes their behaviour or uses less of anything. The number comes from Saul Griffith, and it follows directly from the physics—combustion engines waste most of their input energy as heat, losing something like 60 to 66% of what goes in; electric motors convert around 80% into motion. “Same cold beer, same warm showers,” just electrified: that alone is the largest efficiency gain humanity has ever had access to. Roberts also argues that the case for clean energy is overdetermined, justified independently by climate, by particulate pollution, by AI competitiveness, by energy security, and that leaning on whichever rationale lands best in a given room is not a concession, it’s strategy.

On other topics, such as density and windmills (in the US); in his opinion, NIMBYism among wealthy liberals is no longer defensible: you cannot oppose wind farms or new housing density and call yourself a progressive, and he wants social sanction attached to trying. The right-wing effort to flood local planning meetings with anti-renewables propaganda is well-funded and effective; the asymmetry in how communities treat renewable and fossil fuel infrastructure is glaring. On autonomous vehicles, he’s worried that cheaper, more pleasant car travel means more car travel, and we will need to push for shared use and not individual ownership.

Roberts’s overall tone is somewhat optimistic. In the end, physics wins, and the world will probably figure the transition out even if the US chooses to be the stubborn holdout. He closes by telling young people not to go into finance or spend their lives getting burritos delivered five seconds faster, but instead to do something that matters.

More → On solar and energy, he’s broadly aligned with what Azeem Azhar was saying in The case for radical solar optimism, which I shared in No.395.

I’m interested in the social and political and economic implications and basically, the implications are we need to decarbonize as fast as possible. That’s all I need to know from climate change science. So let’s get on with it, let’s do that, let’s decarbonize. I don’t dwell on the science itself anymore. […]

If the learning curve just keeps doing what it’s doing for ten more years, clean energy is going to be wildly, trivially cheap. I think we’re not that far from a situation where we’re going to have during sunny days, a surge of solar energy so big that the new policy problem is going to be, “what do we do with all this energy?” […]

We could theoretically be the first species ever to be in a state of energy abundance, of having all the energy we want or need, we have no idea what that could lead to. […]

There’s a reason China has grabbed and dominated the physical substrate of the electrotech economy. The minerals, the batteries, the magnets, all that stuff. We’re trying to dominate AI with just the top froth and they are trying to dominate AI by owning the whole stack all the way down to the electrons, you need clean electrons to run your AI. So they are building with that in mind.

§ Mo Bitar on YouTube is my absolute favourite YouTuber of the last couple of weeks, I had to share. Think The Daily Show but only about LLMs, more scathing, and from a coder who knows his stuff. Hilarious and on point.

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• We ran a business LARP. People went deep. Scott Smith’s write-up of a workshop Changeist ran. “It was not a lecture about futures methods. It was not a strategy session. It was something closer to a case investigation: participants arrived as independent panel members convened to review six fictional regional organisations, looking back seven years from 2035.” And Paul Graham Raven also interviewed Smith and Susan Cox-Smith about the same LARPy workshop.
• FF x RCA March 2026. “On the 26th of March, [Future Friends] held a special evening in collaboration with RCA Design Futures. 11 speakers graced the stage—all varied and wonderfully vibrant. Sarah Owen sparked the “333” format: 3 slides, 3 signals, 3 minutes. Here is your invitation to peek into their thinking and get to know them better.”
• Science fiction and innovation: A literature analysis on science fiction-related methods mapped into the innovation process. “This study investigates the literature in search of science fiction-related methods able to support the development of innovations. With around 60.000 publications considered based on a high-level search, a refined search combined with a manual search led to 17 science fiction-related methods to support the development of innovations.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• The enterprise AI playbook: Lessons from 51 successful developments. “We set out to build something empirical. To document real-world use cases that have actually delivered business value. To map the practices of organizations that are not just experimenting with AI but successfully deploying it at scale. We wanted depth.”
• How to make AI serve the public. “A democratic agenda for AI governance. The problem is structural. The solution has to be too. No small group deserves the power to direct a technology this consequential. Not even the best-intentioned CEOs, nation-states, or AIs. Anything short of democratic governance is a priesthood or oligarchy.”
• Making Sense of Slow AI: A zine about slow AI imaginaries by AIxDESIGN & internet teapot. “What if AI didn’t run on Silicon Valley logic? Making Sense of Slow AI, compiles 40 pages of eclectic stories on Small, Esoteric, and Ancestral AI – inviting you to think small, make it magical, and plan for the past.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Solar power in Africa is heating up — thanks in part to chili peppers. “Another challenge was that the Malawian government pays JCM in Malawian kwachas, which is volatile compared to other currencies and can devalue quickly. JCM Power’s solution was to invest the kwachas into community farming of African bird’s eye chili peppers in and around the solar panels. These, in turn, are sold in U.S. dollars, largely to Nando’s Peri-Peri, a chain of chicken restaurants (there are locations in Canada) with a signature hot sauce.”
• How Montana tribes are using sovereignty to restore their waterways. “After a decade of negotiations, however, one of the most significant tribal settlements in U.S. history created the 2015 Confederated Salish and Kootenai-Montana Compact Water Rights Compact. … The combination of Indigenous-led restoration, shared management structures and targeted funding may help the tribe recover the rivers and the lifeways inextricably intertwined with them.”
• Trump administration orders dismantling of the US Forest Service. That f/cker will leave nothing standing. “The headquarters is going to Utah. Every regional office is being shuttered. The research program is being destroyed.”

Asides

• Skeleton of Three Musketeers hero d’Artagnan may have been found. “Workers repairing a church in the Dutch city of Maastricht have discovered a skeleton that could belong to the 17th-century Gascon nobleman Charles de Batz-Castelmore – better known as d’Artagnan – whose exploits led Dumas to make him the hero of the Three Musketeers.”
• Why so many control rooms were seafoam green. “What caught my eye as a designer, as with most industrial plants and control rooms of that time, besides the knobs, levers, and buttons, was the use of a very specific seafoam green, seen here on the reactor’s walls and in the control panel room.” In turn this caught my eye, having just assembled a Tintin Moon Rocket, which itself has a seaform green control room. (Via Kottke)
• The Deep Sea. A loooooooooong fascinating scroll by Neal Agarwal.