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Data States

Just returned from a sojourn to Silicon Valley where you can be party to many conversations about or tangential to Artificial Everything, or you can just party. Both of these I will mark as complete.

The biggest flaw thus far in the advent of AE is not chat-bot psychosis, though sufferers should seek medical attention (this is not investment advice), but local resistance to data center construction. Although, it seems that Utah did not receive the memo:

A plan to create one of the world’s largest datacenters, a gargantuan project spanning an area more than twice the size of Manhattan, has provoked a furious public backlash in Utah amid concerns over its vast energy use and impact upon the state’s stressed water supplies.

The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.

Last week, the project was approved by the county’s commissioners, despite thousands of objections lodged by Utah residents. Environmentalists have warned that Stratos could imperil the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, including a critical migratory bird habitat, which is already under severe stress.

Pretty sure that on my way out to SV, we flew over this area or nearish-by. I can attest that from my window seat (not engineering advice) there is sufficient spatial accommodation for this project. But as the fine people of the area point out with their signs and yelling, there does not seem to be sufficient anything else.

Sacrificing water and energy that a state does not have at a scale that it does, will not a data center make. You can siphon a watershed for ‘other purposes’ but not without hastening a collapse of the ecosystem and all that it temporarily supports.

The numbers of people who pushed back on this plan to no avail is at least worth noting.

Image: Cumberland Island, for context of scale, about the same size as Manhattan but with 6 million less people.

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Knife Fighting Advice

Two people find each other in a bar, have words, and are told to take it outside. One has a knife, the other does not.

Political Advice

The need to find a name for everything, especially in the midst of context collapse – government that relies on its own impunity, media beholden to access and corrupted beyond its ability to notice – finds its gloomy audience. The cynicism of artificial everything takes the degradation of beauty as license for further spoils. People who profess faith in a universe governed by a monarchy do not care about the state of democracy. Capitalist buzzards scavenge the carrion so much begins to resemble.

Slow down.

The rush constitutes a critical element in the systemic failures, which while calculated and tangible only accelerate via failures of imagination. The first thing to go, assumed to be light, harmless, perhaps fun but inessential and so left unguarded while the currencies get blast-proof doors and laser alarm matrices. But crushing the capacity for imagination has always been priority. Note the uncomfortable complicity in putting away childish things at our peril.

Consider how little attention has been paid. How much agency remains? Where to start with such a disfigured capacity to imagine? No wonder. Little wonder. Disordered priorities. Go back. Name a recent wonder. A glimpse, a moment handed over to wonder. Everything is there.

The subconscious renders, speaks beyond language, as much older than language, flickers with light, premises lightness, joy, love.

Own the lapses, welcome fears. Correct them. Re-order indicates a new, different hierarchy that understands exact necessity. Smells of earth and wild garden fragrance always near the top.

Oh, and always bring a knife just in case.

Image: Fifth Avenue skyscraper blocking the view of the Empire State Building.

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Building the bridge

Ponte Vecchio Sunset, Florence, Italy

The metaphor that is also a method of crossing a divide, transporting the physical from one state to the next. Once side to the next – across the Arno, over the Hudson, spanning the Seine, connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan.

How many do you recall by name? Some for their beauty, others merely wondrous, the metaphor as well as the physical transference also apply to technology. The way we move improves, the power sources change, because they are forced to; we choose the worst methods first, to soothe our primitive ease, pressure and ideas allow conveyance to get better. Then a Roebling appears. Several Roeblings, a Strauss, and maybe an Eiffel.*

Lithium-ion batteries are the default chemistry used in EVs, personal devices, and even stationary storage systems on the grid today. But in a tough environment in some markets like the US, there’s a growing interest in cheaper alternatives. Automakers right now largely care just about batteries’ cost, regardless of performance improvements, says Kara Rodby, a technical principal at Volta Energy Technologies, a venture capital firm that focuses on energy storage technology.

Sodium-ion cells have long been held up as a potentially less expensive alternative to lithium. The batteries are limited in their energy density, so they deliver a shorter range than lithium-ion. But sodium is also more abundant, so they could be cheaper.

Lithium-ion batteries have crowded out competitors like sodium-ion, but even these represent only the tip of the spear of the battery iceberg. There are a few others, a list that will expand and contract as ultimately the tech chases simpler as price, ease, waste, and availability dictate a new race to the other side.

New battery chemistry already feeds a breeding ground for competitors. The bridge builders are all over, chasing opportunity like the oilmen and the 49ers before them. No one will be accused of excessive optimism at the current moment. However, the fossil fuel-powered economy is living up to its name – a wonder of reverse marketing – done and dusted, as we scatter ourselves across the several states of realizing it. Nothing about it is salvageable. I trust that’s not our calling card.

It’s the meanwhile that deserves attention. The bridge can’t get built while you’re standing on it – and then you notice you’re suspended out over thin air, just as we’ve always been.

* I’m endeared of the story, perhaps apocryphal, that as the Tour rose of Paris in the late 1880s, the artists of the time considered it as sign marking the end of civilization, perhaps the world.

 

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Not complicated

Complexity abounds. Our current politics, however, are dumbed down for their intended audience of us. Even then, we don’t seem to get the clarity staring us in the face: the country is being spoken for and to by a demented lunatic. There is no plan, only impulse, neediness, and corruption. We don’t want to reckon with this, but the sooner we realize that we must, that we don’t know how it ends, the sooner begins the work – and work it will surely be.

All signs point in the same direction. Despite all of the conversational satire to which we have grown accustomed, the hubris of a powerful society has done its work.

But here’s your bedtime story: the amount of lost oil supply is already equal to the reduction in oil consumption during the covid pandemic.

The world has lost over $50 billion ​worth of crude oil that has not been produced since the Iran war began nearly 50 days ago and ‌the . aftershock of the crisis will be felt for months and even years to come, according to analysts and Reuters calculations.

Since the crisis began at the end of February, more than 500 million ​barrels of crude and condensate have been knocked out of the global market, according to Kpler data – the ⁠largest energy supply disruption in modern history.
Put differently, 500 million barrels of oil lost to the market is equivalent to:
  • Curtailing aviation demand ​globally for 10 weeks; no road travel by any vehicle globally for 11 days; or no oil for the global economy for five days, ​said Iain Mowat, principal analyst at Wood Mackenzie.
  • Nearly a month of oil demand in the United States, or more than a month of oil for all of Europe, according to Reuters estimates.
  • Roughly six years of fuel consumption for the U.S. military, based on annual usage of about 80 million barrels from fiscal ​year 2021.

The Reuters piece concludes with a short section under the subhead FULL RESTORATION COULD TAKE YEARS.

About this restoration… what if we don’t go back – and choose to move forward instead? It’s an outrageous proposition but, knowing now full well what do, having destroyed what we have – facilities, lives, and relationships, alliances – the accidental test case for moving beyond oil is no longer a test.

The seemingly scariest part of this (scary to the world’s most frightened populace of rich and coddled) is already underway for seemingly unrelated reasons [not at all unrelated]. Auditions are over. Thank you all for coming. We’ve found our man.

Image: Nemesis by Albrecht Dürer (1501-1502); Albrecht Dürer, via Wikimedia Commons

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Always headed here

With a president suffering from main character syndrome coupled with a steadily deteriorating mental state,  so much ‘seems’ to be going on that keeping up with it in whole much less in part can itself feel maddening.

Two days ago, he gives a televised exposition of just how adrift he is, boxed in by an ill-considered military fiasco and hand-picked, grossly incompetent and corrupt underlings. Ardent, patriotic citizens try to keep up but mostly what’s on offer is the unwillingness to describe a massive, practically unimaginable strategic defeat.

In pondering what are we still wondering about, some well-framed context about some things we already know clicks a light bulb in a closet blocked behind an old armoire. It’s not reassuring but it is forward, and perhaps desperately needed correction against meaningless reassurances:

For more than a century, the political and moral imagination in much of the Persian ecumene was shaped by an urgent quest for alternatives to the pitilessly exploitative regimes of capitalist imperialism. For Gandhi, a historical experience that began in the late nineteenth century in South Africa made him see fascism and imperialism as inevitable features of capitalist states overdependent on violence—disguised and softened at home, extreme and explicit abroad. It was the fate of a later observer like Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, the twentieth-century novelist and essayist, to endure, while still analyzing, the insidiousness of neoimperialism: economic modernization under Western auspices that condemned postcolonial states to perpetual underdevelopment.

Given the religion-capitalism pairing that has defined the very essence of the American experiment since its inception (ask any Republican candidate for any office), it’s fair to ask whether we’ve always been headed here. Not karmically, though there is that; but just as a natural effect of the causes as they have hatched. Every other country and alliance has already figured out that dependence on the US is toxic to their national interests, while we try to make sense of the nonsensical. It feels sped-up, fast-forwarded, still a bit out front of our ability to conceive, believe. He is referred to as the American id. Maybe that’s it and this is all of the accumulated skullduggery, laid bare.

But I did learn a new word.

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Of straits and traps

A mental ill patient in a straight jacket and strapped into a chair. Photograph after a wood engraving by E. Tritschler, 1908.

What if war isn’t viable? And rather than being merely hopeful or any nod to a peacenik Shangri-La at last, what would remain in the balance – TBD comme on dit – is somehow assuring that the entire globe doesn’t become a failed state. That we don’t default to a Hobbesian existence on a planetary scale – yes, very much including our bumblionaires who have so sagely guided marked the territory to this place. But as [this] war increasingly results in an escalation trap, can we must become dissuaded of ts benefits:

Once started, a major regional war with Iran was always likely to be something of a ‘trap,’ – not in the sense of an ambush laid by Iran – but in the sense of a situation that, once entered, cannot be easily left or reversed.

The trap, of course, is the Strait of Hormuz and the broader Persian Gulf. The issue is that an enormous proportion of the world’s shipping, particularly energy (oil, liquid natural gas) and fertilizer components (urea) passes through this body of water. The Gulf is narrow along its whole length, extremely narrow in the Strait and bordered by Iran on its northern shore along its entire length. Iran can thus threaten the whole thing and can do so with cheap, easy to conceal, easy to manufacture systems.

…

So once the strait was closed, the United States could not leave until it was reopened, or at least there was some prospect of doing so.

The result is a fairly classic escalation trap: once the conflict starts, it is extremely costlyfor either side to ever back down, which ensures that the conflict continues long past it being in the interests of either party. Every day this war goes on make both the United States and Iran weaker, poorer and less secure but it is very hard for either side to back down because there are huge costs connected to being the party that backs down. So both sides ‘escalate to de-escalate’ (this phrase is generally as foolish as it sounds), intensifying the conflict in an effort to hit hard enough to force the other guy to blink first. But since neither party can back down unilaterally and survive politically, there’s practically no amount of pain that can force them to do so.

I’ve mentioned multiple times how the brakes on the carbon-based economy have been located – No! Not that way! – and the screeching we hear is actually the metal backing plate contacting the metal rotor, recommending immediate inspection and repair.

A dumb, so very dumb war presents this metaphor for appraisal.

Image via Wellcome Collection..

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Preventive Incantation

It doesn’t matter how one feels* about AI as a technological problem. It is much more of a financial problem, a threat similar to others that preceded it but special in its own special way. Purveyors already know the limits of the technology but dangle the potential profits as unlimited.

Because all the convenient confusion can be difficult to parse, a cultural interpretation of the crisis requires urgent attention. And thanks to Short Attention Span Theater – the single, unwavering truism threading society together – it needs to be brief and concise. Enter The Great Crash, 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith into evidence:

…there is deep faith in the power of incantation. When the market fell many Wall Street citizens immediately sensed the real danger, which was that income and employment – prosperity in general – would be adversely affected. This had to be prevented. Preventive incantation required that as many important people as possible repeat as firmly as they could that it wouldn’t happen.  This they did. They explained how the stock market was merely the froth and that the real substance of economic life rested in production , employment, and spending, all of which would remain unaffected. No one knew for sure this was so. As an instrument of economic policy, incantation does not permit of minor doubts or scruples.

To the mighty extent that AI hype runs riot, our savvy age turns the power of incantation into cynicism verging on a new art form. Machine learning is so deeply ingrained into every sector that it simply must work and cannot fail, to coin a phrase. It must be powerful if important people are warning that it might take over.

Meanwhile, circularity: Tech giants investing in each other’s AI products and projects, driving valuation and demand for power, water, chips, and data centers, and inflating the perception of market consensus. We love the miasma of mortgage-backed securities in the morning.

Circularity > singularity.

Image: Screenshot from Bloomberg March 20, 2026

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War o’clock

reverse osmosis. Desalination. The pressure water molecules seep through the semi-permeable membrane.

Stumbled is the word you’re looking for.

Don’t be shy about calling the administration incompetent, early and often. In point of barely disputed facts, calling them inept is being generous. Again, I remain in awe of just how much Trump is determined to cut carbon emissions. Inspiring if it wasn’t so deadly stupid. Rather than an entertainment show, government is boring and highly complex. Hire accordingly.

Meanwhile and on the subject of incompetence, massive industrial build out coupled with an extended drought has ‘leaders’ on the Texas coast hoping for a hurricane:

The imminent depletion of water supplies in Corpus Christi threatens to cut off the flow of jet fuel to Texas airports and other oil exports from one of the nation’s largest petroleum ports, triggering potential shockwaves through energy markets in Texas and beyond.

Without significant rainfall, Corpus Christi is headed for a “water emergency” within months and total depletion of the system next year, according to the city’s website. “The impacts are going to be felt tremendously through the state, if not internationally,” said Sean Strawbridge, former CEO of the Port of Corpus Christi Authority, the nation’s top port for crude oil exports, in a 40-minute interview Thursday. “This should be no surprise to anybody. We were talking about this over a decade ago.”

If using municipal water supplies for refineries and industry sounds familiar, it should. Take note, data and detention center targets. Everyone will get pulled is already engaged in these conflicts, some may not realize it yet. We definitely need more Texas Tribunes. What happened to newspapers, anyway?

Image: diagram for how desalination process. Not pictured – waste produced.

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Artificial Everything

[Too] many conversations about encroaching technology and artificial everything – we should just call it that, as we have no real definition for intelligence, much less understand what it means – compel further examination. Let’s go in.

First off, let’s acknowledge a basic premise.

We’re edging along a process of abdicating our personal sovereignty by our own choosing. I can’t tell you not to install a front door camera and spy on your neighbors or not to let slopGPT be your therapist. But let’s at least acknowledge how much we submit to all of this voluntarily. It’s not the illusion of choice, but still actual choices that we make continually. All the while creeps a sort of helplessness about what is being done to us. It is imperative to maintain our wits at such a time – such as a time as may come, such a time as now.

It is necessary to demonstrate how modern imagination is captured – and defended. Among the multitude of familiar arguments on which to draw, public and private liberties, civic duty and overwhelming loss of self esteem among our fellow citizens compel a checklist on the rescue mission should one be required.

There is extraordinarily powerful hype and propaganda supporting the inevitability of artificial everything. The laziness of corporate media has made this so much easier; excellent at completing PR circles, not so very good or interested in explaining things, rewarded for the combination with diminished honor and loss of prestige. Though a quite visible slight of hand, effort to acknowledge this process reminds us that we remain far from powerless. The sheer vastness of all we’re not thinking about and discussing enough also require some work on our part, to investigate, to understand, but first just to care about. When we get to the place where this work is not optional – and hey, we like work. It’s one our fears about AE, that it will take work away from us –  we’ll be well on our way to better places. If you’re already there, congratulations. You’ve got plenty of work to do.

Image: Author photo of work on a wall.

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The moral element

There are so many issues on which people can be or become confused about whether their choice stance is political, economic, or moral. The problem with the third in this sequence is that it makes the choice/stance much clearer on the first two than may be desirable or convenient.

Further, confusion about the rights of others that allows for a seeming choice where none exists creates space for degeneracy – bigotry, victimization, persecution, false equivalence – which turn into their own rationales for unfortunately familiar behavior. It’s sadly too easy to see why attacks on vulnerable people are wrong, so the convolution helps cover otherwise indefensible actions and positions, from anti-trans attacks all the way up to capitalism itself.

The fear that capitalism would be so much less forceful and thus successful with limits on its rapacious character is so embedded as to be dogma. It must always be fully unleashed to exist at all. We equate force with success, which inures to all the resulting destruction. Collateral damage hardly makes a dent as a concept anymore and it remains unclear whether that manifests from the inability to see outside of one’s own interests or the casual acceptance of casualties, whatever their nature. Either way, it’s quite the evolution. We have yet to grapple with the actual consequences of zero-sum, much less the reality that ‘externalities’ get less and less external the further on with this we go.

The concept of ‘easy solutions’ feeds misdirection from guardians of the status quo, no matter their futurist garb. Positive-sum deflates fascism and environmental catastrophe with great collaboration and distribution, and its tools sit idle, though ready. One of the new tricks taught by every old dog is that opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.

One need not be a philosopher or a socialist to recognize the moral character of our actions. No special training or knowledge is required, only courage.

Image: Symbol for the chemical element Beryllium; elements are amoral but Be is a divalent element that occurs naturally only in combination with other elements to form minerals. Just sayin’.