In today’s Daily Planet, @nilsgilman.bsky.social argues that a new geopolitical split is emerging around energy: a Green Entente led by China that builds dominance through green tech, and an Axis of Petrostates (the U.S. under Trump, Russia, Gulf monarchies) that defends fossil-fuel power.

As I keep saying, while we are waiting to be turned into paperclips, pay some attention to the everyday dystopias being unleashed by AI.

Wars are bad for people, but they are bad for everyone else too. As today's link says:

Military AI is characterized by epistemic opacity. Unlike civilian AI, which is subject to public scrutiny and litigation when it fails, military systems are shielded by classification and state-secret privileges. This lack of transparency prevents external validation and makes it nearly impossible to correct for human biases or technical errors.

There’s an uber-dystopian version of AI where it either annihilates us or sucks out our souls while we believe we are in a matrix of plenty. Maybe one of those dystopias will come to pass, but a far more likely dystopia is one that’s coming into being as we speak.

Arthur Dove: Hand Sewing Machine

Michael Levin is an interesting thinker; a rare Platonist in Biology. This quote from a recent post of his makes me think of biological engineering, but not the kind where we force organisms to do our willing, but rather work with their agential capacity to produce forms that we need:

From Frederic Hanusch's "The Politics of Deep Time":

It's very hard to imagine oneself dead, and its even harder to imagine the absence of everyone like me. But that too shall come to pass: via Frederic Hanusch's "The Politics of Deep Time":

I have been reading Marcia Bjornerud's "Timefulness" and really enjoying it. The more woke we are, the more we are prone to possessing our experience as somehow uniquely our own, like "this is my reality, and you have no right to doubt it." But that personal reality is embedded in a much larger planetary reality that doesn't care about our I-Me-Myself experiences that much. As Bjornerud says when she visited Svalbard as a graduate student:

Much historical analysis is either about 'recorded time,' i.e., history as evidenced in texts and other inscriptions, or about 'end time,' e.g., Edenic beginnings or apocalyptic endings.

We barely remember what happened yesterday, so to expect us to take geological eras into consideration is a bit much. However, our lives are built on deep time - I wouldn't be writing these words if someone hadn't figured out how to turn solidified & liquified fossils into fuel.

The term "contradiction" has many meanings. In logic it means claiming a proposition and its negation are both true at once. In conversation it means asserting the opposite of what someone else is saying. There's the Marxist version where contradictions reveal the underlying instability of the capitalist system.

It's been a while since I wrote here, but I did promise the Daily Planet would restart before the end of February, and here we are. I am going to restart the Daily Planet with a long essay on Planetary Stewarship and switch to regular programming next week.

When UBTech robots walked onto the factory floor at Zeekr's electric vehicle plant in March 2025, they did something no humanoid robots had done before: they worked as a coordinated team, lifting boxes, assembling car parts, and performing quality checks - all without human supervision. Powered by DeepSeek's reasoning model, these machines represented more than a manufacturing curiosity. They embodied a fundamentally different vision of artificial intelligence, one that may reshape the global technology competition in ways Silicon Valley hasn't fully grasped.

And finally, any country that's rapidly becoming more technologically capable and dominant in some industries is going to get adverse attention. Are they trustworthy? Will they eat us alive? These are fair questions, and it's instructive to see how the official Chinese sources are responding to them. This is what they have to say:

Agentic AI is not the same as embodied AI, but the article linked in today's Daily Planet gives us some insight into how China is thinking about the former.

The race to develop humanoid robots is unfolding along two very different paths in China and the United States, reflecting contrasting philosophies about how robots should learn and improve. China is taking a bold, fast-paced approach by deploying large numbers of robots directly into real-world environments like factories, streets, and homes. This “learn-on-the-job” strategy allows robots to gather vast amounts of real-world data, which is then used to continuously improve their artificial intelligence. Companies such as Unitree and Agibot are leading this effort, with Agibot even offering an open-source operating system called Lingqu OS to encourage collaboration and innovation across the industry. By flooding the market with task-specific robots, China creates a massive, living laboratory that accelerates progress through collective learning and rapid iteration.

Embodied intelligence refers to intelligent agents that have a physical or virtual body and interact with their environment through continuous sensing, decision-making, and action. Unlike traditional AI that processes static data, embodied intelligence emphasizes the dynamic loop where perception guides action, and action changes what is perceived. This interaction involves three key components: intelligence (the computational brain), embodiment (the physical or simulated body), and environment (the external world with its objects and dynamics).

China is advancing its artificial intelligence (AI) efforts in a way that differs significantly from the United States. While the U.S. mainly focuses on developing large language models (LLMs) to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) - a future AI that can outperform humans in all cognitive tasks - China is taking a broader and more balanced approach. Instead of putting all its resources into one method, China is investing in multiple paths to AGI simultaneously.

China is making a major push into embodied AI, which means creating smart robots and AI-powered machines that can sense, understand, and interact with the physical world. Unlike many Western countries that focus mainly on digital AI like large language models, China aims to combine its strengths in AI software with advanced robotics hardware. This approach is part of a national strategy to boost the economy, address social challenges like an aging population, strengthen the military, and gain a global technological edge.

When Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva arrived at the COP30 climate summit in Belém this November, he stepped out of a Chevrolet - the lone American vehicle in a fleet of Chinese electric and hybrid cars assembled to shuttle world leaders through the Amazonian city. The symbolism was unmistakable. As delegates gathered to negotiate emissions reductions, Chinese EVs from BYD and Great Wall Motor hummed quietly through streets once choked with exhaust, while the United States, for the first time in three decades, sent no senior representative to the talks. The world's clean energy transition is accelerating, but it is increasingly being conducted in Chinese.

Chinese electric vehicle (EV) companies have invested a massive $143 billion between 2014 and 2025 to establish global dominance in the EV industry. Leading firms like CATL and BYD have focused on building a worldwide supply chain that covers everything from raw materials to finished vehicles. This global expansion is part of a deliberate strategy to secure resources and production capabilities amid rising geopolitical tensions and trade barriers.

It's clear that renewables will not lead to a common human goal of addressing climate change; in fact, renewables might be a better hedge against foreign sources of energy than for climate action. In this world, China is both a supplier of energy technologies and an adversary worth hedging against.

China is the world's largest consumer of coal, burning nearly half of the global total in 2024. This massive use is driven by its huge economy, high electricity demand, and abundant domestic coal resources. China generates about a third of the world's electricity, with coal as the dominant source. Despite rapid growth in renewable energy, China's increasing electricity needs mean it is not on track to meet its carbon intensity targets set for 2030.

At the recent U.N. Climate Change Conference held in Belém, Brazil, Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) played a prominent role by transporting many world leaders, signaling Brazil’s growing reliance on China for its transportation and economic transformation. While Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva arrived in a Chevrolet, most other dignitaries were chauffeured in Chinese electric and hybrid cars, highlighting China’s strong presence in Brazil’s EV market.

A mercurial American president who treats Europe with distrust, if not outright enmity is making Europe closer to China when it comes to climate action.

A decade after the Paris climate accord was signed, political support in the West is weakening, with the U.S. having withdrawn again under President Trump and Europe and Canada hesitating due to the costs and political challenges of climate policies. Despite this, the global transition to clean energy is accelerating, largely propelled by China's emergence as a clean-tech powerhouse. China's massive investments in manufacturing solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles have dramatically lowered the costs of these technologies, making clean energy competitive with fossil fuels in many markets without heavy subsidies.

The world is undergoing a transformation whose outlines we are only beginning to discern. For five centuries, the West has imagined itself as both the author and subject of history, as the arbiter of what constitutes progress and modernity. That story has outlived its usefulness. China's rise-or more precisely, China's arrival - represents not merely the emergence of another great power, but a fundamental challenge to assumptions long embedded in Western thought about development, governance, and civilizational achievement itself.

"China Against China" by Jonathan Czinn explores the complex and often contradictory perceptions of Xi Jinping's leadership in China, particularly from the perspective of U.S. observers. Thirteen years into Xi's rule, opinions remain divided: some view him as a powerful authoritarian akin to Mao, while others see his grip on power as fragile. The article highlights how Xi has identified critical weaknesses in China's development - such as corruption, economic dependence on foreign countries, and the vulnerabilities created by decades of reform and opening - and has embarked on a counterreform agenda to strengthen China's resilience.

China's approach to artificial intelligence (AI) is distinctively shaped by its strengths in manufacturing, infrastructure, and governance, setting it apart from the U.S., which excels in cloud computing and software development. While the U.S. focuses on abstract, cloud-based AI such as large language models, China prioritizes "embodied AI" - systems that interact with the physical world through sensors and actuators. This emphasis reflects China's long-standing belief in leveraging technology to solve governance challenges and its need to integrate AI with its vast physical infrastructure.

China is rapidly emerging as the world's renewable-energy superpower, driven by a massive expansion in solar and wind power capacity. The country is on track to achieve an ambitious goal of 3,600 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity by 2035, more than doubling its current 1,700 gigawatts. This scale of deployment is unmatched globally, with China supplying 60-80% of the world's solar panels, wind turbines, and lithium batteries. The green technology sector has become a major pillar of China's economy, accounting for 10% of GDP and 26% of GDP growth, surpassing traditional industries like property.

The economic relationship between the US and China has undergone a fundamental transformation, driven by geopolitics, security concerns, and the need for supply chain resilience. While globalization and comparative advantage remain important, companies can no longer rely solely on cost efficiency and just-in-time production.

The metaphor of a “race” between the United States and China in artificial intelligence is misleading, as it suggests a clear finish line and defined boundaries, which do not exist in this complex and evolving competition. Instead, the relationship resembles two ships navigating uncharted waters toward an uncertain destination. Both countries are engaged in a multifaceted technological, scientific, and economic contest without a clear endpoint, driven by different strategies that reflect their unique strengths.

I can't believe the Daily Planet has been going for 100 days already (and this isn't counting the Weekly Planets, of which there have been 16 so far). I'm giving myself a pat in the back for keeping it going ✊🏾.

With AI, the financial bubble is easy to see: hyperscaler capex, a handful of firms carrying indices, and a narrative that capital has finally found a new frontier. The technical bubble is visible too: scaling laws, benchmark fever, and a faith that more compute will wash away old limitations. The cultural bubble is subtler. It’s not only hype or fear; it’s the sense that AI is about to rewire our shared life - the way we imagine, create, argue, govern, and even who “we” includes.

And to round out this series on the AI Bubble, I am going to share one of my own pieces from a few years ago, from when I was speculating about the Interverse. It's now clear to me that the Interverse is the human-nature mesh of culture we should be creating, and the technical obstacles to doing so are going to disappear sooner rather than later.

Culture has always been global, for stories, religious and philosophical beliefs, music and trinkets have traveled the globe for a millennia. However, print culture dramatically accelerated the spread of culture, and novels, radio and movies brought distant people into our lives.

Last week, I talked about the contrast between prediction and production as two paths to AGI. We can ask the same question about AI's impact on culture: if ubiquitous prediction is the A16Z bet, what does ubiquitous production look like?

Prediction's rise as a theory of everything isn't restricted to culture alone; it's also the most widely accepted theory of how minds work as well. The canonical reference on the Predictive Mind is Hohwy's book on the topic, but that's not layperson friendly. Instead, I am posting a link to a Quanta article on predictive processing.

OK, we know Andreesen-Horowitz are not objective participants in the AI tournament, but I liked this piece on "prediction" becoming the core idea animating our culture. Not sure about it being postmodernism's successor, only because I have a different image of postmodernism in my head, but read it for its take on prediction, not its take on prediction's predecessor.

We are now into the last week of covering the AI Bubble; this week I am going to focus on its impacts on culture at large. I will start with an article by Shalizi and Farrell on AI being the latest in a long line of Shoggoths such as bureaucracies, corporations and markets, i.e., institutions that aggregate and compress human knowledge and then control our lives by doing so.

Artificial intelligence has captured today’s technological imagination. Models improve, benchmarks fall, and claims about superhuman reasoning arrive with weekly regularity. Depending on who is speaking, AI heralds a productivity revolution, a labor upheaval, or a step toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) - as a recent definition put it: ‘systems with the cognitive versatility and proficiency of a well-educated adult.’ Skeptics counter that expectations outrun evidence.

I want to end this week's deliberations on AGI with a gesture towards next week's discussion of AI's impact on our general culture.

I think about Jevons' paradox a lot when it comes to AGI. Once intelligence becomes a commodity, so that capability at the 90th percentile of current knowledge worker competence in all current knowledge worker categories (think: doctor, lawyer, accountant, analyst, scientist) is available on tap. What will that world look like?

Let me start today's #DailyPlanet with a stupid lexical game: what's the difference between AGI and AI?

AGI pilling seems like a uniquely American thing, perhaps even a Silicon Valley thing. Sitting in Boston, I don't hear as much about AGI nearby in comparison to Bay Area Substack. Not to lean too hard on anecdotal evidence, but it sure feels like AGI fervor decreases linearly with distance from Palo Alto.

AGI may arrive tomorrow or in the next century, but it's amazing to see progress on a case by case basis. Frontier Math is a well known obstacle course on which solid progress is being made, but it's not just in abstract disciplines such as math or programming. Consider this quote from today's Daily Planet:

We are now into week 3 of the AI bubble, a week I have been dreading because I have to say something intelligent about AGI. I don't work for a frontier AI lab or an academic organization that has insight into the frontier labs. From a distance, I have no way of knowing whether AGI is two days away, two decades away or two centuries away. If that wasn't bad enough, I find AGI doomerism - a la Gary Marcus - uninteresting and I find AGI eschatology (both of the singularity and the end of days kind) uninteresting.

Artificial intelligence is the latest and greatest buzzword of our technological moment (remember when Facebook changed its name to Meta because the Metaverse was the thing?) - every week brings a new model, a new benchmark, a new claim about the future of cognition and work. There is excitement; there is fear; and there is uncertainty.

Finally, for day 6 of this week, a history lesson on bubbles as seen through a rear-view mirror. The current surge in artificial intelligence (A.I.) investment on Wall Street has sparked both excitement and concern, drawing parallels to the infamous stock-market crash of 1929. That historic crash was not a sudden event but the beginning of a prolonged decline lasting nearly three years, culminating in the Great Depression. It was fueled by speculative frenzy, excessive borrowing, and a widespread disregard for traditional valuation measures, leading to catastrophic wealth destruction and human suffering. Today’s A.I. boom shares many of these hallmarks: soaring stock valuations, speculative enthusiasm, and complex financing schemes that some experts fear could mask deeper risks.

Vertical integration works for high-tech production, part 2: what works for Google in AI (and Apple for Phones) has also worked for BYD when it comes to EVs.

Switching it up from grand theory to the nitty-gritty of business models, once you're committed to spending eye-watering amounts of money like the hyperscalers are, it makes sense to think of efficiencies that can reduce your spend.

If cognitive capitalism became the engine of American prosperity after deindustrialization and the neoliberal turn, McKenzie Wark helps us see why this shift wasn’t merely a change in industrial organization — it was a transformation in the deep logic of value creation.

We can't make sense of the massive investment in data centers by the “Magnificent Seven” and other AI firms without understanding two things. First, there's the millenarian belief in artificial general intelligence - a quasi-religious conviction that AGI is imminent and inevitable. Second, there's their clear understanding of the sources of their own economic success.

We are now into the second week of the AI bubble. I am going to devote each week to one of three bubble forms I talked about in yesterday's Weekly Planet: the Financial Bubble, the Technical Bubble and the Cultural Bubble.

When Sam Altman admits we're in an AI bubble while simultaneously promising to invest a trillion dollars in data centers, something stranger than usual financial excess is happening. When Geoff Hinton meets with the Pope to discuss whether artificial intelligence threatens human dignity, we've wandered far from the territory of normal market speculation. The question "Is AI a bubble?" turns out to be too simple.

And to round out this week, an article by Peter Wildeford that gives a thoughtful defense of the non-bubblic character of AI today.

The AI Bubble, such as it is, is also keeping another bubble going - the fossil fuel bubble. The energy needs of hyperscalers is ramping up so quickly that the demand for gas turbines is shooting up in response. And like everything else these days, gas based power also plays into today's geopolitics, for gas turbine tech is one that China doesn't control.

AGI/ASI fever hasn't spread through Chinese AI communities in the way it has done so within Silicon Valley. Afra Wang's piece on the China Tech Canon walks us through the way Chinese AI entrepreneurs think about the singularity - or the lack of it.

As I had mentioned yesterday, at least some of the hype around AI is due to predictions about the imminent arrival of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Is it around the corner? Is it just a matter of pouring more money into existing tech and building out more data centers?

Bubbles burst when supply for the previously hot commodity runs ahead of demand, whether those be tulips or internet bandwidth or derivatives based on subprime loans. We are not there yet when it comes to AI:

Is it a Bubble?

This week, I am back to metabolic sovereignty after a deepish dive into energy and compute sovereignty in the previous two weeks. My main goal is to show that the Anthropocene is:

I am going to end this series on Metabolic Sovereignty not with an essay on Energy or Information, but on the greatest disruption to global metabolism ever: the COVID pandemic. It severely challenged our ideas of sovereignty - for example, wealthy countries were able to commandeer medical resources that should have ideally gone to poorer countries and yet no one thought of it as a war. We are still dealing with the political consequences of that pandemic across the world.

One of the great hopes of climate action is that of an "energy transition," where we replace fossil fuel sources with renewable sources and we don't emit carbon into the atmosphere anymore. But as we saw in yesterday's Daily Planet, the country that has made the most progress in creating a renewable energy system, i.e., China, has 400 GW of coal powered energy on the way, despite also having well over a Terawatt (1000GW) of renewable energy on the way too.

When Xi Jinping assumed leadership of China's Communist Party in 2012, he quickly recognized the country's heavy reliance on foreign energy as a critical national security vulnerability. This dependence on imported oil and coal exposed China to geopolitical risks, especially amid rising tensions with the United States and trade conflicts. Determined to reduce this vulnerability, Xi launched a sweeping energy revolution aimed at transforming China into the world's first "electrostate," where electricity and clean technologies would power the economy and enhance energy security.

In today's Daily Planet, I discuss Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential theses on "The Climate of History."

One of the key achievements of industrial and post-industrial society has been the unlocking of concentrated energy sources that go well beyond the biopowered systems of the past - whether slaves, horses or trees. All the ills of the anthropocene are downstream from this unlocking, but it's also true that modern health and prosperity depend on the widespread availability of concentrated energy: no hospital or supermarket can work without abundant energy supplies.

This week, I am back to metabolic sovereignty after a deepish dive into energy and compute sovereignty in the previous two weeks. My main goal is to show that the Anthropocene is:

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly central to economic innovation and national security, control over computing resources is emerging as a new pillar of geopolitical power . Compute sovereignty describe a nation’s (or any other sovereign’s) ability to maintain autonomous control over the computing infrastructure – data centers, cloud platforms, and semiconductor chips – that underpins modern AI. In a world where a few tech corporations and countries command most of the world’s AI computing power, many governments are asking how they can secure their “fair share” of compute and avoid dependency on foreign powers. This essay explores the core ideas behind compute sovereignty, why it matters, and how different regions are pursuing it, drawing on recent research and policy developments.

Compute Sovereignty may not have much to do with art at first glance. But a new technology, especially an inscription technology such as AI, will most certainly spawn new art forms that also help us imagine a world in which computation reigns supreme.

I have to say, I don't know how to place AGI and ASI in the grand scheme of things. There's a sociological puzzle: do the people running AI (the Altman's of the world) actually believe AGI is around the corner? Are they making business decisions based on this impending event? What about military and industrial planners? Is this for real?

Is Sovereign AI a real thing or a boondoggle to get nervous national decision makers to buy a lot of chips (or models or what have you)? You be the judge.

You can't have a doomsday device without planning for doomsday, can you? That's what MAIM aims to achieve.

Everyone knows the importance of Silicon Valley in the annals of computation. If you have been listening more closely, you might have also heard of London or Tel-Aviv or Bangalore or Shanghai. But how did Hangzhou - home of Deepseek as well as Alibaba - become a tech hub? There's a story behind its rise, and gives other cities that want to rise up the computational ladder a (long and winding) road to the top.

If energy sovereignty is the struggle to control the bloodstream of civilization, compute sovereignty concerns the nervous system - the flows of perception, calculation, and command through which societies sense, decide, and act. The two are inseparable: every datacenter consumes rivers of electricity, and every smart grid depends on computation to balance itself.

We ended our earlier exploration of metabolic sovereignty with a simple provocation: if sovereignty today is really about governing the flows that let life continue—food, water, energy, information—then power is migrating from palaces and parliaments into pipes, wires, and datacenters. Energy, among those flows, is the tempo-maker. It sets the pace at which factories and cars hum; it choreographs the rhythms of farms, trains, and networks; it determines, in a very literal sense, whose “ordinary life” can be maintained when the extraordinary happens. To ask what energy sovereignty means is to ask who controls life under modern conditions, and on what terms.

Today's Daily Planet is the second of two on the great chronicler of Energy politics: Daniel Yergin. Today, we cover his book on the new energy landscape. Already dated though because of China's rapid expansion.

Today's Daily Planet is the first of two on the great chronicler of Energy politics: Daniel Yergin. First up, his book on oil.

Humans can't survive without water. We are mostly water. So it's not surprising that control over water is both a sign of sovereignty as well as ways in which one sovereign can undermine another.

Metabolic rivalry - along both the energy and the information axes - is creating a more active role for politics in economics - it's one of the main reasons why the neoliberal era is ending.

I don't buy the petro vs electro theory of the metabolic wars (I think it's compute versus electric), but we nevertheless have to take that formulation seriously.

This week's Daily Planets are all on Energy Sovereignty - to be followed by Compute Sovereignty next week.

Of late, many thinkers have commented that the new cold war - and its attendant geopolitics - is not going to be ideological as much as metabolic, with competing energy stacks driving competition and conflict. In this scheme, there’s a Petrostate nexus led by the US competing with an Electrostate nexus led by China.

In yesterday's Daily Planet, I raised the possibility that metabolic exceptions are bound to happen sooner or later. If and when that happens, we might proceed along (at least) one of two paths:

The main task of the Sovereign - so far - has been to maintain political order, but in the future the (Metabolic) Sovereign will surely be asked to maintain metabolic order. What is climate change if not metabolic disorder, or perhaps even a metabolic emergency?

As far as I can tell, there isn't a theory of Metabolic Sovereignty floating around, but Mann and Wainwright's account of the Climate Leviathan is a precursor, i.e., it describes a sovereign with coercive capacity who forces other political actors into acting on climate. They were worried that the US would turn into such a Leviathan.

"The Coming Second Copernican Revolution" explores a profound transformation in humanity's understanding of its place in the cosmos, akin to the seismic shift initiated by Copernicus five centuries ago. This new revolution is driven by astrobiology, a science revealing that nearly every star hosts planets, many potentially harboring life. This discovery reframes Earth not as a unique center but as one among billions of habitable worlds, inviting a planetary perspective that integrates life, planets, and their co-evolution.

Niklas Luhmann’s concept of autopoiesis, adapted from the biological concept of the same name due to Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, offers a profound framework for understanding society as a self-producing and self-referential system. Autopoiesis, meaning self-creation, originally described living cells’ ability to reproduce and organize themselves.

Of late, many thinkers have commented that the new cold war - and its attendant geopolitics - is not going to be ideological as much as metabolic, with competing energy stacks driving competition and conflict. In this scheme, there's a Petrostate nexus led by the US competing with an Electrostate nexus led by China.

In 2025, a handful of technology companies are engaged in what may be the most ambitious infrastructure buildout in human history. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Oracle, IBM, and xAI - collectively known as "hyperscalers" - are investing approximately $400 billion this year in data center infrastructure to power artificial intelligence. To put this in perspective, this single year of spending exceeds the inflation-adjusted cost of the entire Apollo program that put humans on the moon. The question hanging over this unprecedented capital deployment is whether it represents visionary investment in a transformative technology or the inflation of history's most expensive bubble.

And finally, in the last Daily Planet on hyperscaling: a podcast on whether we are in a bubble. Before we get into the substance of the podcast, let's first ask:

And now we come to the really hard question: is hyperscaling a bubble? Will it make money? The Economist has this to say about the question:

We saw yesterday that Musk is financing his hyperscaling by making deals with folks in the Middle East. I will talk about this another time, but sovereigns are an untapped new market for hyperscalar infrastructure providers such as NVidia.

Hyperscaling combines scale and speed and xAI (not surprising for an Elon Musk owned company) is pushing the limits of both. I am not a fan of the muskman but his operational chops have to be acknowledged.

Hyperscalers are massive data centers that provide vast computing resources through elastic cloud platforms, enabling organizations to deploy and manage large-scale applications and services efficiently.

The winner of the planetarity stakes this week is 'Hyperscaler.' It's used today to describe the four or five companies rapidly building out data center infrastructure for AI. Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, xAI (and perhaps a couple more). They are investing eye-watering amounts of money ~ $400 billion this year. Which, after you account for inflation, is more than the cost of the entire Apollo mission, but spent in one year.

The Electrostate is ascendant but it’s precursor isn’t going away anytime soon. I’ve been reading and writing about the petrostate for the past week, and I want to bring those pieces together into one story. When I started digging into the idea, I thought of it as a label for a certain kind of country—oil-rich, powerful in OPEC meetings, often authoritarian, sometimes flashy, always swimming in petroleum money. But the deeper I went, the more it became clear that the petrostate is less a type of country than a syndrome, a way of organizing politics and economics around a single commodity that distorts everything else.

And to round out this week, we will end with a brief on the latest Petrostate, i.e., the United States. I am being tongue in cheek, for the U.S. Economy is too diversified to be a Petrostate, but it sure looks like it's a bimodal economy - a high value knowledge economy centered on Wall Street and Silicon Valley and a commodity economy centered around oil, natural gas and agricultural commodities.

I am no economist, but in many ways, Petrostates feel like planned economies, not market economies. The production of one commodity dominates their revenues and if that's done - as it often is - through one nationalized company such as Saudi Aramco, then running the company (which is a planned economy, as all companies are) is the most important function of running the state.

The Daily Planet #43: The Petrostate, Part 4

There was a time in the 90's and 00's when Hugo Chavez's Venezuela was a leftist icon throughout the world. There's no doubt that his successor, Nicolas Maduro's regime is being targeted by the US, but there's equally no doubt that it's a thuggish regime that's turning Venezuela into a failed state.

There was a time when people thought Trump was gone for ever - it still seems incredible that he's back in power after trying to abet an insurrection, but that's the least of our worries these days.

We explored the Electrostate in some depth last week, which is a take on the Petrostate, an earlier merger of energy with politics. According to Wikipedia:

It's been five plus weeks since I started these weekly planet updates and I'm now reasonably confident that I can keep them going for a while. So far I've jumped between topics - AI, energy geopolitics, even animal vocalizations - all in one week.

Electrostates represent nations positioned at the forefront of what many call the "third industrial revolution" — a transformation where economic growth becomes less dependent on carbon intensity and more reliant on clean technology expertise, innovation, and supply chain mastery.

The trajectory of modernization has been inextricably linked to the mastery of high-intensity forms of energy. Just as the age of coal powered the first industrial revolution and petroleum fueled the rise of twentieth-century superpowers, we now stand at the threshold of a new epoch. The emergence of electrostates represents a fundamental shift in how nations build power, prosperity, and influence—marking not merely an energy transition, but an entirely new stage in the history of modernization itself.

China has developed a complex network of overlapping tech-industrial ecosystems that reinforce and accelerate each other’s growth. Rather than focusing on isolated industries, China’s strategy integrates sectors such as smartphones, lithium batteries, electric vehicles (EVs), solar energy, and advanced sensors into a tightly interwoven system.

Electrification is good for climate even when it's based on fossil fuels - the efficiency of electricity when consumed is higher than that of burning fossil fuels by the end consumer. Sequestration will also be easier if you have to do it at one source than at millions of targets.

The term "electrostate" carries two distinct meanings: a country that leads in producing clean energy technologies, like China, and a country that consumes a high share of electricity in its final energy use. China exemplifies both, dominating clean-tech manufacturing and rapidly increasing electricity consumption.

It's been five weeks since I started these Daily Planets and I'm now reasonably confident that I can keep them going for a while. So far I have been quite scattered in how I cover topics of planetary interest; one day artificial intelligence, next day energy geopolitics, and then animal vocalizations on day five. I'll still perform that kind of scatterbrained coverage but I also want to cover certain key concepts in depth.

We're living through a moment where the fundamental metabolism of civilization, i.e., how we convert energy into motion, heat, light, and computation, is being rewired at planetary scale. This week's Daily Planets have been circling the central truth of future geopolitics: the next century won't be determined by oil fields or coal mines, but by who controls the Electric Stack and the renewable energy systems that power it as well as the Intelligence Stack and the compute that underlies it.

The Electric Slide explores the transformative Electric Stack - comprising lithium-ion batteries, magnets, electric motors, power electronics, and embedded compute - that is reshaping the modern world by enabling efficient electrification of products. China dominates this stack, producing 75% of the world's lithium-ion batteries and 90% of neodymium magnets, crucial for electric motors. This dominance stems from strategic foresight, industrial policy, and control over rare earth materials, allowing China to lead in electric vehicles, drones, and robots.

If I had to boil our planetary condition to two enabling transformations, they would be: compute and energy, or what I call bits and volts. Both the US and China have a take on both. We have seen in other Daily Planets that China is doubling down on renewable energy abundance.

Planetary Risk implies Planetary Insurance, but how are we going to price that insurance? "Insurance in the Polycrisis" by Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay explores the profound challenges climate change poses to the insurance industry and, by extension, the broader economy. As extreme weather events like floods, wildfires, and storms increase in frequency and severity, entire regions become uninsurable, threatening the value of homes and assets. This creates a dangerous feedback loop: rising risks lead insurers to raise premiums or withdraw coverage, making properties unfinanceable and destabilizing housing markets, which in turn impacts the wider economy.

The green energy transition is reshaping global geopolitics by driving economic opportunity, energy security, and technological innovation. Unlike past energy systems reliant on fossil fuels, which concentrated power in a few oil- and gas-producing countries, renewable technologies like solar and wind offer widespread access and lower costs, enabling more nations to pursue energy independence. This shift has sparked intense international competition, with countries such as China, Turkey, and Pakistan rapidly deploying clean technologies to secure economic and geopolitical advantages. The transition also exposes vulnerabilities in global supply chains, prompting efforts to diversify and localize production of critical minerals and clean energy components.

Energy is at the heart of civilization, and every shift in energy production leads to shifts in power. The shift from Coal to Oil went hand in hand with hegemony moving from Britain to the United States, and that didn't happen 'naturally,' but rather because people in power in the US saw how they could build their system of power on top of a new energy system. The shift to renewables will be similar. Renewables have many advantages:

We live in a moment where every attempt at planetary thinking reveals both possibility and paralysis. This week’s Daily Planets have been circling around a central tension: the collision between our belief-driven politics and the material realities of a planet that doesn’t care about our stories. From Intel’s chips to coyote killings and the healing hum of bees, we’re witnessing the breakdown of the very categories that organized the modern world—and perhaps, just perhaps, the emergence of something else.

Existential risk is an evergreen topic here at the Daily Planet - and one that's haunted the post-war era. Not surprising since nuclear weapons as well as climate change are widely considered extinction level risks.

Even committed ecologists don't experience other species as belonging to a world - not a niche, but a world which has its own sensory landscape. But rhythm and sound are endemic to the natural world, which suggests we should engage with other species as artists in residence.

It's always nice to see that planetary thinking precedes climate change awareness and will hopefully continue even if we solve climate change. The concept of "Planetary Realism" was first articulated by Jerry Brown in 1976 during his presidential campaign as he sought a new foreign policy perspective. Brown envisioned a worldview that combined the hard-nosed practicality of traditional realism with a humanistic and romantic appreciation for the interconnectedness of all nations. Influenced by the early environmental movement and events like the 1972 Stockholm Conference, he emphasized the need to transcend narrow nationalism and recognize shared global vulnerabilities, such as nuclear war, environmental degradation, and later, climate change and pandemics. Brown's planetary realism calls for leaders to adopt science-informed, pragmatic approaches that acknowledge common interests beyond borders.

It's both incredible and utterly predictable that our views about wolves and coyotes come bundled as Democrat or Republican, with wolves having a better chance of a good life in California than in Idaho. We should hope that planetarity will help us shed our partisan identities, but perhaps it will be the exact opposite: there will be a Red Planet and a Blue Planet.

A.O. Hirschman is one of my favorite eclectic thinkers, but that's not the only reason why he's starring in the Daily Planet.

Polycrisis has been the term-du-jour for a few years now, ever since Adam Tooze reintroduced it into the global lexicon. I have critiqued it on many an occasion, claiming our condition is more of Polyconflict (just think how the US, China, Russia and India are mutual frenemies these days!) than of Polycrisis.

If Metabolism is the big picture of planetary politics, chips and cables are the two core commodities. Chips cuz AI and cables cuz electrification. China is doubling down on cables and the US on chips (not that either will entirely neglect the other commodity). Ben Thompson's defence of the US taking a 10% stake in Intel should be read against this background:

This week’s Daily Planets have mostly been about the metabolic competition reshaping our world—by “metabolic,” I mean the energy, information and materials systems that power computation, industry, and life. I've been tracking interconnected stories about chip sanctions, viral ecologies, urban sustainability, and the emerging ecological Cold War, all of which is pointing to a fundamental reorganization of planetary politics around the question of what powers civilization.

Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie write an amazing newsletter on the Polycrisis. In today's Daily Planet, they are on a podcast with Paris Marx where they talk about the geopolitical competition between the US and China.

Gilman writes frequently about planetary politics, including a book about which I will talk about sometime. Today's Daily Planet is from his Substack.

I keep saying whenever I get a chance:

Sometimes people say the Internet was invented by felines to turn us into cat video addicts. I am more of a dog person, so I will pretend I never heard that story of the web's origins. Humans have had cats by their bedside (and deathside) for millennia, but Microbes are another story. We didn't even know they existed until a couple of centuries ago, and until recently infectious diseases were the largest killers of humanity.

I am sure Elon is serious about Mars, but I also wonder what the commercial exploration (really exploitation) of space is going to add to our politics on earth. International relations are already fraught with chaos - it's the aspect of politics that's most obviously of the “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” (attributed to Thucydides BTW) type, and space politics is even more likely to be so.

I have a hard time empathizing with those who worry about their competitors developing a doomsday weapon faster than you, but it's increasingly clear that AGI is driving such fears. At an extreme, decision makers in US (or China) might say to one another:

This week traces a dark arc through our planetary condition, from the unspeakable cruelty of factory farming to the looming space race, from the technosphere's grip on human agency to the twilight of Western hegemony. Yet threading through these seemingly disparate topics is a single, uncomfortable truth: we have constructed a planetary machine that treats life—all life—as mere fuel for its operation.

Evelyne Alcide (b. 1969, Port-au-Prince, Haiti) Séisme (Earthquake), 2010 Beads, fabric Fowler Museum at UCLA, X2010.17.4; Museum Purchase, the Jerome L. Joss Endowment Fund

Two specters haunt the Anthropocene, both to do with finite resources and endless needs. One specter criticizes the growth part of the story, like this quote from Edward Abbey:

I don't need to say much because he says it so well himself. A couple of quotes to whet your appetite:

Let me start this update with a quote from Arthur Burks' Technical Report on

Today's Daily Planet has two links, not one. They are to articles in Ars Technica by Eric Berger about the Space Race between the US and China.

We have all heard about petrostates, but have you heard of electrostates? And that China might be the first electrostate?

The biggest shift in my thinking over the last year has been from treating “climate” as a standalone policy problem to treating Earth’s coupled bio-geo-tech systems as the primary unit of analysis and that means analyzing carbon alongside nitrogen, biodiversity, water, materials, supply chains, finance, and compute as one interdependent system.

There's little more cruel than how we treat chickens. About seventy five billion (!!) of them are slaughtered every year, almost every single one of them living short, miserable lives. They are bred to burst out of their biological confines, suffering from torn ligaments and broken bones as a result. Not that the lack of mobility matters much, since they are confined to a cage that's too small for them to turn around, let alone walk or fly. This is most obvious in the massive factory farms in the West and China, but you see pretty much the same thing in the stacks of chicken in cages lining the road across India.

Yesterday's Daily Planet was on Peter Haff's idea of the Technosphere. Today's link is a discussion of Peter Haff's ideas between Gabrielle Hecht and Paul Edwards.

It's come to my notice that we are living in a new age, the human age, the Anthropocene. I am sure it strokes our ego to be the measure of all things, but we wouldn't be in the position without all the technologies we have brought into the world.

The planetary is not just about trees and coral reefs, but also about chips and rare earth minerals and economic sanctions. Social scientists - and physicists in their own way - keep reminding us that all information is material: a data center is a physical entity after all.

I want to understand how China is (if?) becoming an Ecological Civilization and what the rest of us can learn from that transformation. BTW, this doesn't have to give us warm fuzzy feelings because:

Daily Planet #4

This third edition of the Daily Planet might feel very unplanetary, but to the extent that China will be a/the Climate Leviathan of the future, Wang Huning's thinking about political ecology will determine our planetary condition.

I am generally not a catastrophist, though I have embraced climate catastrophist positions on occasion. Catastrophe or not, 3 degrees feels like a lot; growing up in Delhi, I can say that playing cricket in 37 degree weather is a lot different from playing it in 40 degree weather.

I often go to Noema for my planetary readings, and this article is also a planetary reading with a twist. For it starts with the claim: