We’re all living in the “Mirror World” now ⊗ The AI boom is a polycrisis

We’re all living in the “Mirror World” now

Are two Kleins better than one? In this excellent conversation between Ezra and Naomi, the answer is a resounding yes (video and transcript at the NYT). They cover a lot of ground: starting with Naomi Klein’s book Doppelganger, including the concept of the “mirror world.” The pandemic as a fork in the road, the Epstein files as a real-world echo of QAnon’s structure, diagonalism and the wellness-to-far-right pipeline, the Mamdani campaign in New York, and the question of what a more welcoming left might look like. It’s wide-ranging and sometimes meandering, as these interviews tend to be.

There are some specific sections that had me shaking my head in agreement more vigourously. The mirror world: when people are ejected from liberal institutions, through public shaming, through cancellation, through the mute button, they land in a parallel world with replica platforms, replica publishing, replica narratives. The liberal instinct to block and shun meant these structures grew in private, invisible to the people who created the conditions for them, until they “exploded into dominance” after the 2024 US election. Her framing of contemporary fascism as “a pathology of injured power” feels like it’s on the money, literally. These aren’t powerless people revolting. These are elites, tech oligarchs, billionaires, men exposed by #MeToo, who experienced the mildest forms of accountability and responded as if they were under siege. Marc Andreessen described basic crypto regulation as “terror.” The Epstein files reveal powerful men seeking advice on how to survive a reckoning they knew was coming. Klein reads the Trump administration as, in part, a tech revolt against AI regulation; oligarchs who were told they were gods in the 1990s and are furious that anyone might now tell them otherwise.

The spiritual dimension is quieter but, I believe, just as important. Klein argues that technocratic liberalism has become arid; it knows how to offer a tax credit but not how to speak to the feeling that something is lost in modernity. RFK Jr.’s appeal, she suggests, comes partly from his ability to talk poetically about the natural world, a register that mainstream politics has almost entirely abandoned. Climate discourse became “carbon trading,” the drabbest way to talk about something alive. The interview closes on what Klein calls “the irreplaceable”: art, the canonical version of universities, nature, human connection, the things tech oligarchs seem willing to replace with AI without pausing to ask whether anyone wants that. She sees the emerging movements (data centre resistance, neighbourism in Minneapolis, the Mamdani campaign) as rooted in a shared impulse: people cherishing where they live, learning their difficult histories, and refusing to let economic logic colonise every remaining corner of life.

A few weeks ago, I shared how Nate Hagens responded to Dario Amodei’s essay on AI risk. A key point was asking who picked this direction for AI and the economy? Even if we make it past the Amodei risk period, why? Why are “we” rushing in that direction? While coming at it from a different direction, the Kleins are pondering much the same thing, where the pandemic showed us a glimpse of a slower world, we must imagine and push towards one we’d get to pick, instead of being virused into it.

In doppelganger literature and film, the storyline is usually you’ve got a protagonist and then somebody comes along who’s a double of them, and they’re so good at performing you, so much better at performing you, that they eventually overtake you. At the end of Dostoevsky’s The Double, the protagonist gets carted away and sent to an asylum while the double just takes over. I think that’s kind of happened in our culture. The doppelganger is at the wheel. […]

Mark Andreessen sees the most mild accountability as an existential attack. The way he talks about basic regulation for crypto or AI as terror. These are men who came up in the 1990s, when Mark Andreessen was on a throne on the cover of Time magazine. I think that may have gone to their heads. I think we did that as a culture just because people were rich. And I think they’re angry that they no longer get treated like gods. And that feels like being terrorised to Mark Andreessen. […]

These are technologies that exist because they fed off of the accumulation of all of human knowledge and output. I believe we own them already. […]

There is a fundamental failure to appreciate that which is irreplaceable. And that failure seems to me to be very connected with the willingness to just replace art with AI, replace universities with AI. Shouldn’t we have a conversation about whether or not we want to get rid of that whole concept?

The AI boom is a polycrisis

In this piece, Matteo Wong and Charlie Warzel explain how the AI industry has become a single point of failure for the global economy. Trillions in investment have created a supply chain that runs through a handful of chokepoints: advanced chips made by two South Korean and one Taiwanese company, fuelled by Persian Gulf energy and helium, financed in part by Gulf petrostates. The war in Iran has functionally closed the Strait of Hormuz, sending oil, gas, and helium prices surging, and earlier this month Iran bombed Amazon data centres in the UAE. Hyperscalers collectively spent nearly $700 billion on AI last year, much of it financed through private-equity firms that are themselves leveraged against institutional investors, pensions, and insurance funds.

The underlying business model compounds the risk. Chips depreciate rapidly as new generations arrive, so the physical assets backing all this debt lose value on a schedule. Token pricing, the main revenue mechanism, is deflationary; as models improve, each unit of output costs less, creating what one analyst calls “a death spiral to zero.” Even the optimistic scenario, where AI revenues keep growing, implies years before profitability and millions of job losses along the way. The authors argue that speed has been prioritised over supply-chain redundancy, energy independence, and financial resilience, while the administration that encouraged the “let it rip” ethos has simultaneously destabilised the geopolitical conditions the industry depends on.

Much as in the piece above, or the Hagens response I mentioned, or Shapiro’s The Next Great Transformation shared another week earlier, it’s one more perspective from which we can see how much the economy is not going in a direction that serves society’s purpose. In large part because society doesn’t really get to chose right now. “As Polanyi put it in his most succinct formulation, ‘instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.’” We need to flip this and re-orient. Planet, life, humanity, society, economy. And there’s probably another few things to insert in there before the last one.

More → I found the piece in a LinkedIn post by Matthieu Dugal [fr] where he referred to Olivier Hamant’s robustness [pdf], whom you should check out. He’s not very present in English so I don’t think I’ve written about him here. Although I did in French here, and it’s a fascinating framework. But I’m also thinking about brittleness, as in Jamais Cascio’s BANI framework. In either case, the situation depicted in the featured piece is very worrying.

The fear is that too much money is coming in too fast and that generative-AI companies still have not offered anything close to a viable business model. If growth were to stall or the technology were to be seen as failing to deliver on its promises, the bubble might burst, triggering a chain reaction across the financial system. Everyone—big banks, private-equity firms, people who have no idea what’s mixed into their 401(k)—would be hit by the AI crash. […]

The hyperscalers are spending far more, but investors have started to notice that they are not generating anything near the revenue they need to. The data-center boom’s top players—Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, and Oracle—have all lost 8 to 27 percent of their value since the start of the year, making them a huge drag on the overall stock market. […]

At every step of the way, AI firms have appeared to prioritize speed above the physical security of data centers, supply-chain redundancy, energy efficiency and independence, political stability, even financial returns. And in that quest for unbridled growth, the AI industry has wrested ungodly amounts of capital from investors all looking for the next big thing, ensnaring the entire economy.

§ Tough week for Zuck. Ain’t that just a damn shame? LoL. Meta and YouTube werefound negligent in a landmark social media addiction and Meta hit with $375M verdict in New Mexico child safety case.

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Learning in Motion. “What is mobile? And how will we learn? These two guiding questions served us on our journey into the future. First, we imagined a training program that would have participants fully mobile, traveling in a bus along a designated route. Before making this a reality, we need to unpack possible futures regarding how learning and mobility will unfold and intersect.”
• The Pocket Box™. “Gunnar Anderson’s story explores a mysterious new discovery that breaks the bounds of physics as we once understood them. But quickly, scientific awe morphs into commercial prospecting—with little regulation and horrifying consequences.”
• In 2035, nothing is natural any more. And that’s good news.. “In 2035, the most trusted products are not the ones grown in undisturbed soil. They are the ones you can trace, verify, edit, and regenerate.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• From Chile to the Philippines, meet the people pushing back on AI. “Individuals and communities are resisting the demands and practices of Big Tech’s AI infrastructure — such as data centers and digital labor — due to their environmental and social costs.”
• Sora: OpenAI closes AI video app and cancels $1bn Disney deal. Good riddance!! “The platform struggled to prevent the creation of non-consensual imagery and realistic misinformation, not to mention major copyright infringement.” “Struggled,” wasn’t that your whole arsehole point for the app!?
• Nevada utility to Lake Tahoe: Find electricity elsewhere. “Lake Tahoe’s longtime power supplier, NV Energy, will cut off the region next year. It has said data centers are driving ‘unprecedented’ demand.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• A wind-powered tumbleweed that heals the desert as it rolls. “The result is a biomimetic seeding device built entirely on the principles of passive robotics. No batteries, no circuits, no external power source required. Lightweight biodegradable support rods form a tensile, hollow spherical structure that mirrors the tumbleweed’s own elastic form. The outer skin is made from a moisture-responsive biodegradable composite, and seeds are housed within it.”
• What happens to obsolete oil rigs in a green future? “Recycling the copper and steel of old oil rigs into wind and solar infrastructure could cut billions of tons of emissions—and save $11 trillion.”
• Trump administration to pay $1 billion to energy giant to cancel wind farms. “In exchange, the French company TotalEnergies would invest in oil and natural gas projects in Texas and elsewhere.”

Asides

• Books, plants and playgrounds: Montreal creates a place to come together. I have, I’m ashamed to admit, not visited yet. “But this is a public place: Sanaaq Centre in downtown Montreal, which upends the conventions of North American public space. Rather than offering a single function, the 57,000-square-foot space on downtown’s western edge contains multitudes. It combines a public library, a black-box theatre, a media lab, a social services hub, urban agriculture and the café under one roof.”
• Dani Guindo’s dramatic aerial photos reveal the ghostly outline of an Icelandic glacier. “His latest series, Terminus, captures a glacier’s many rivulets amid a rocky landscape, along with a ghostly, rounded outline revealing evidence of the glacier’s earlier phases.”
• The Curious 100 2026. “A celebration of one hundred courageous leaders and creative minds across the US who are harnessing the transformative power of curiosity to address today’s most pressing problems and shape the cultural conversations that define our moment—whether it’s redesigning democracy to include everyone, advocating for school-supported agriculture, or editing groundbreaking music videos.”