The Teenage Ninja Muskrats come to Washington

"This is a fine kettle of fish you've got me into" 

 

Elon Musk was aroused from his slumber so suddenly that he nearly fell off his leather couch. His Muskrat corps had set up a beachhead on the 5th floor of the Liberty Loan Federal Building, home of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service. Some 20 billion dollars in digits pass through BFS computers, coming and going. In his last tweet the night before, Musk had claimed to be saving the government nine of those zeros for every day his Muskrats stayed at their keyboards.

Musk knew that was not nearly fast enough—a billion dollars per day scratched from federal payments. At the rate they were going, they would need at least 1000 days to reach his trillion-dollar target—almost the Administration's entire second term. While Vance assured him he shouldn't worry about being stopped, he knew he didn't have that kind of time.

What had roused him was the loud cheer that went up when the Muskrats, pumped on pizza and Red Bull, breached the final encrypted padlock on the Treasury mainframe. A 19-year-old whose main claim to fame before this evening had been besting other gamers in a hackathon challenge sponsored by X-Prize was the night's hero. This might be just the accelerant they needed to take the DOGE team from $1 billion to $10 billion cuts per day. Their boisterous cheer was the pinball machine lighting up for a jackpot.

The following week, Musk made an unsolicited bid of $97.4 billion to buy Open-AI, the inventor of Chat GPT, whose current share value is an estimated $40 billion. Musk owns precisely the right dataset to train it on now—everyone's and every company’s personal data, gleaned from the BFS with his read-only privilege.

Maureen Dowd writes in the Sunday New York Times:

The Silicon Valley digerati don’t care about the old world in Washington, D.C., churning out meddlesome regulations, laws and taxes. They are cocky about creating a new world, shaped by a new species, A.I.

Donald and Elon are emotional time bombs, lashing out in the crudest and cruelest ways. Trump’s amoral, puerile, wrecking-ball style is now squared by Musk’s.

It’s rich that the world’s richest man is rooting around trying to wipe out vast numbers of government workers, saying, “Sorry, you can’t have your $85,000 a year job and your health insurance.”

“They don’t care if the government delivers food or comes in and rescues your town from a flood or teaches poor kids in the inner city because they don’t have to live through any of those things themselves,” said the Trump biographer Tim O’Brien.

One hundred days is doable, Musk thought. Barring Supreme Court intervention to cement the absolute power of a unitary president, lower courts would eventually catch up and rule that the executive orders DOGE was operating under were constitutional. That would take at least three months to go through a first appellate outing. Anything the courts undid could be redone by the 119th Congress and signed into law by the President before opponents could come up for air. This latest hack delivered all that and more.

The Honeymooners by Dzine A.I.

“Move fast and break things”

Posting to social media, Guido Palazzo, professor of business ethics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, put the coup at Treasury into historical context:

Civilizations … emerged in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China as a response to the increasing complexity of organizing large populations, managing resources, and maintaining social order. Writing systems were developed to record transactions, legal codes, property rights and state decrees.

A dysfunctional bureaucracy can lead to inefficiencies, corruption, and the inability to respond to crises, making a civilization vulnerable to collapse. If you want to kill a civilization, fuel the collapse of social order, and destroy its administrative power first.

Elon Musk is executing the program of Accelerationism – the libertarian ideology of Silicon Valley. For their techno-utopian vision of the future, liberal democracies are too weak and too slow. They are the enemy of a bright future that only the acceleration of technological progress can bring. "We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns. To ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever." Marc Andreessen writes this in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto. "Democracy and freedom are incompatible," Peter Thiel concurs.

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Schooled by Ray Kurzweil in the notion of a coming Singularity—a rapture event where AI achieves human intelligence, and then, in the blink of an eye (intelligence doublings being measured in nanoseconds), skyrockets to the dominant growth form in the Milky Way Galaxy and beyond.

Human survival, in the Kurweilian view, resides in transhumanism, beginning with Musk's Neurolink, graduating to something akin to a Borg android—half hardware, half wetware, but neuro-networked with the Hive Mind. And all of it—the entire delivered package (2030? 2040?)—powered by the data farms that Trump's half-trillion-dollar Stargate would build.

Power is no barrier because the Borg will master fusion. Biodiversity makes no difference because we can recreate wooly mammoths and situate them in Jurassic Parks on Mars. "We are as Gods," Stewart Brand said, "so we may as well get used to it." Palazzo continues:

Destruction is part of the program. Everything must be smashed so that the transhumanist society can flourish on the debris of liberal democracies.

Closing USAID is also part of the program. Effective altruism – the philanthropic arm of the transhumanists – considers any help for the weak or any engagement with the problems of the present a waste of money. The focus must be on what promotes a far away bright future of humankind. The weak must die so that Homo Deus can live. The focus of investments must be on rockets and mind-machine fusion.

Conservative Christians in the USA love the destruction of liberal democracies as well – anything that looks like chaos will bring Jesus back faster. The disruption of Silicon Valley and the Rapture of those fundamentalist Christians are perfectly aligned.

Basically, it is just the new version of Hayek's good old neoliberalism: radically free markets (for tech companies in particular), weak governments, moral control via the Christian family values. You just add a secular paradise: The singularity moment, when man and machine fuse and we become immortal gods ourselves.

It looks like madness. It's a program.

It is a program. It is an algorithm.

Professor David Super at Georgetown Law School told the Washington Post:

So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of fascism and authoritarianism at New York University, said,

It is a coup. I'm a historian of coups, and I would also use that word. So we're in a real emergency situation for our democracy.

 

 The Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr, who coined the term “broligarchy” five months ago and appeared in the 2019 Netflix documentary, The Great Hack, writes:

What I’ve learned from investigating and reporting on Silicon Valley’s system-level hack of our democracy for eight long years and seeing up close the breathtaking impunity and entitlement of the men who control these companies is that they break laws and they get away with it.

***

Our intelligence agencies do understand the precipice we’re on but there’s no indication the government is paying any attention to them. The risks are profound. The international order as we know it is collapsing in real time.

 

Simpler Days

Before any of the chaos phase began, I had embarked upon a series of posts describing what I had come to see as a way out of the climate emergency—a way to pull us back from the brink at the last possible moment and return us to the comfortable Holocene in which humans evolved.

In that series, I described the various approaches to carbon dioxide removal and sunlight management. I was about to reach the controlling issue—human behavior—when the Muskrats captured all the bandwidth.

I see now I had been underestimating the countervailing effort by the technocracy to pursue its separate vision of the future, the one involving transhumanist android successors to homo sapiens whose atomic-powered silicon-based architectures might stand up to the lethal (to carbon-based human bodies) surface radiation of Mars and space travel more generally. With his billions, Musk could buy the world's most potent social media engine and weaponize its algorithms. Using still more billions, he had purchased an election, or several. The speed of the onslaught now seems dazzling, but it has been unfolding gradually over several years, gaining momentum.

They say they will enjoy a few more nice years on earth and know that there's no future. They are very cynical and somehow deeply sad.

—A hooker at the World Economic Forum in Davos, describing clients she meets there.

A demographic bell curve for geopolitical genius describes the ascent of Alexander, Caesar, Saladin, Genghis Kahn, Napolean or Stalin at different times and places. Statistically, if an Earth population of 1 billion produced one Einstein, there should be 7 of them living among us now, assuming they didn't all die in Subsaharan famines, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, Australian wildfires, or the like. Our superhero de jour is Elon Musk, whose coming was foretold in countless fairy tales, DC and Marvel comics, Saturday matinee serial reels, and cinematic extravaganzas that riveted our youth.

And yet, I am comforted by the knowledge that if the rule of law won't stop Musk, the laws of physics will. Einstein lives.

Empire as Pattern

There is a pattern to the rise and fall of empires. Living for years in the Mayan world, I am naturally inclined to compare that particular empire with its cycles of growth, peak, and decline across multiple city-states from 750 BCE to 950 CE. Cities like Tikal, Copán, and Calakmul alternately rose and fell through competition for resources, climate stress, and internal social pressures like wealth and class. This pattern mirrors cycles in other parts of the world described by writers such as Arnold Toynbee or Jared Diamond.

Internal conflicts over family rivalry, slavery, class, and the changing climate doomed the Maya. While their traditional territories span multiple modern nations (Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras), conquest fragmented the ancient political structure. It imposed colonial systems that persist today, dividing the Mayan population by borders, language, and culture.

The Mayan experience reflects a broader pattern where indigenous peoples, despite maintaining cultural identity and significant populations, lack political autonomy within modern nation-states. Lack of autonomy is not altogether a bad thing. Toynbee studied 21 major civilizations and argued that cycles aren't deterministic—societies could theoretically maintain growth by continuously generating creative responses to challenges. What matters is how a society coheres when it is stressed.

Two World Views

The technocrats have one perspective on creative responses, while Lyla June Johnson offers a different viewpoint in her masterwork, "Architects of Abundance.” From a bioregional perspective, polities typically arise where geographical features enable:

• Agricultural surplus in core regions and diverse resource zones—the vast Mississippi watershed fed port cities in Chicago, New Orleans, and (via the Erie Canal) New York; the California Central Valley extended from the breadbasket of Northwestern Mexico to the Willamette Valley. Today, Tennesseans eat apples from Michigan and oranges from Florida.

• Natural transportation corridors—the Union Pacific railroad, transatlantic steamships, the Panama Canal, and the interstate highway system.

• Defensible boundaries—a continent surrounded by ocean; peaceful neighbors to share that continent with.

Abundance ensues from harmonizing with these features. Decline correlates with compromising these natural assets or overstepping boundaries—failing to prepare for climate shifts, weather extremes, or viral outbreaks; losing critical ecological transition zones; losing defensible borders by unwise expansion (Vietnam; Iraq; Taiwan; Ukraine; and Greenland) while provoking neighbors and hostile powers; and most importantly, losing social cohesion—the destruction of which can be engineered to profit a few—outrage sells ads—or a rival foreign power.

The Roman Empire united a vast Mediterranean bioregion but overstepped when it ventured far afield to the German and Slavic hinterlands. Napolean reconquered the Mediterranean as far as Egypt but lost his army and empire by a disastrous overreach to Moscow.

The Aztecs and Incas gained control of multiple ecological zones, retaining local customs and allegiances, but found themselves no match for unanticipated foreign powers and their diseases. Those people did not disappear. They merely reverted their economies to local watersheds and accepted colonial rule. They bioregionalized.

Empires often fragment along natural boundaries. Certain regions repeatedly generate complex economic centers while others naturally remain peripheral to such centers.

In my view, what lies ahead for the United States and the world is not a singularity of cyborg transhumans toiling on rockets to Andromeda but many smaller societies living within the means provided by the new climate paradigm—kelp foresters on the ocean coasts, Azolla biochar producers at lakeshores, sorghum millers firing biochar kilns to make sweet syrup. They exist by reversing the carbon cycle and thriving in the process. They mitigate while they adapt. What they create are empires of a different stripe—populated less by the two-leggeds and more by those with paws, wings, scales, stingers and roots in the ground.

 

Face substitutions by Dzine A.I.

If you are hearing the current scene in Washington referred to as a “clown show,” the analogy is apt. It is very much like a Keystone cops reel where nine mustachioed bobbies, clinging to the running boards of a Model T sedan, roll up to a raging fire and try to put it out with buckets of kerosene.

PierreSelim - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18195893

Absolutely convinced that the federal deficit is caused by Woke Antifa ideologues trying to foist diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) through USAID grants to transgender musicals in Ireland and Colombia and comic books in Peru, the Teenage Ninja Muskrats are busily hacking through Treasury payment ledgers with their digital sharpies and uploading purloined personal data to SPACE-X servers. After all, “Information wants to be free.”

Writes CNN commentator Maria Cassano:

Research shows that Donald Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level. He uses short words and short sentences, repeating them over and over again. As a result, those who never followed politics before suddenly feel as though they can ‘understand’ it. It explains how he won by a 14-point margin among voters without college degrees and in almost all of America’s most uneducated states.

Trump claimed that Obama’s and Biden’s diversity initiatives hired FAA controllers and pilots with “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism.” It’s statistically more likely that all of the pilots and controllers involved in the spate of recent air accidents were English-only white males. The pool from which qualified candidates can rise to the top and be selected had been narrowed to that specific demographic due to bias. Cassano says,

At the root of DEI opposition is the belief that no one could possibly be more qualified than a white dude, and if a queer, non-white, or female person manages to find themselves in a leadership role, it’s because of tokenism — not talent or training.

Suspension Bridge redesigned by the Muskrats

The anti-DEI brass section is populated by “coddled mediocre white guys,” says Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX). Under Obama and Biden, USAID grants were directed to undo racism and sexism and restore merit selection, not only in the United States but globally.

Film producer Justine Bateman complains:

These tech bros are always in high sales mode. Pitching, pitching, demanding money, telling you that you have no choice, telling you this will replace you and there is no other way, and that they’re “making a god” and this is “spiritual.”

This is truly a naked attempt to convince us to incorporate a type of “antichrist” into our lives. Think it though and you’ll agree. Hear how they talk about it and insist we all capitulate to it.

It makes me laugh. These tech bros are complete jokes, obsessed with money, and willing to destroy everything to get it.

***

However, you can wormhole through this into the true future; the future that will continue to exist after these snake oil salesmen burn everything down, because they will.

You always have a choice. I choose the magical route of my own human life, where there is no use for generative AI. That’s the only way into the future.

Using AI is just a lazy circling the drain of a regurgitated past, that indicates you gave up. Using AI is the equivalent of your brain wearing sweats and watching mindless TV on the couch forever.

You have to ask yourself what you think life is for if you’re willing to capitulate the majority of your decisions to an AI program someone else controls.

I say, “Fuck that.”

 

Maureen Dowd concluded:

When Trump turns 80, as a birthday present, Elon and the lost boys could create an A.I.-fueled Trump bot, a real-time video head trained on his news conferences and everything he has ever tweeted.

Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, slyly says that Trump would be “an unusually easy person to plausibly fake.”

They need not create a Max Headroom simulacrum. By 2028, Musk may have perfected Neurolink to the point where he can simply implant a link directly into the Trump cortex, an AI engine schooled on every Trump utterance and mannerism. Then, for as long as doctors can keep the wetware running, the tech bros can stay in power.

And they’ll go to the Supreme Court and say, ‘We know that the president can only have two terms, but this isn’t really the president. This is the Trump bot and A.I.s are people, too.’ Essentially allowing a continuation of the same administration into a third term.”

References

Brand, S. (2008). The clock of the long now: Time and responsibility. Basic Books.

Brand, S. (1995). We owe it all to the hippies. Time Magazine, 145(12), 1.

Cadwalladr, C. (2017). Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media. The Guardian, 26, 2017.

Cadwalladr, C., & Graham-Harrison, E. (2018). Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach. The guardian, 17(1), 22.

Cadwalladr, C. (2019). Cambridge Analytica a year on:‘a lesson in institutional failure’. The Guardian, 17.

Diamond, J. M. (1998). Guns, germs and steel: a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years. Random House.

Diamond, J. (2011). Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed: revised edition. Penguin.

Ford, A., & Nigh, R. (2016). The Maya forest garden: Eight millennia of sustainable cultivation of the tropical woodlands (Vol. 6). Routledge.

Ford, A. (2024). The Enduring Forest Gardens of the Ancient Maya. American Scientist, 112(5), 286-293.

Hawken, P. (2021). Regeneration: Ending the climate crisis in one generation. Penguin.

Hill, K. X., Johnston, L. J., Blue, M. R., Probst, J., Staecker, M., & Jennings, L. L. (2024). Rematriation and climate justice: Intersections of indigenous health and place. The Journal of Climate Change and Health, 18, 100314.

Himanen, P. (2004). 19. The hacker ethic as the culture of the information age. The Network Society, 420.

Horn, S., Tran, J., & Ford, A. (2023). Quantitative analyses of wealth inequality at Classic period El Pilar: The Gini index and labor investment. Ancient Mesoamerica, 34(3), e6.

Johnston, L. J. (2022). Architects of abundance: Indigenous regenerative food and land management systems and the excavation of hidden history (Doctoral dissertation, University of Alaska Fairbanks).

Johnston, L. J. Native American regenerative food and land management systems. In Regenerative Farming and Sustainable Diets (pp. 270-275). Routledge.

Khullar, D. (2025) Can the Human Body Endure a Voyage to Mars?, Annals of Medicine, The New Yorker (Feb 10, 2025)

Kurzweil, R. (2001). The law of accelerating returns. In Alan Turing: Life and legacy of a great thinker (pp. 381-416). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Kurzweil, R. (2005). The singularity is near. In Ethics and emerging technologies (pp. 393-406). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Lyons, Chief Oren, Thomas Berry, Thich Nhat Hanh, Chief Tamale Bwoya, John Stanley, David Robert Loy, Mary Evelyn Tucker et al. Spiritual ecology: The cry of the earth. The Golden Sufi Center, 2016.

Maccone, C. (2017). Kurzweil's Singularity as a part of Evo-SETI Theory. Acta Astronautica, 132, 312-325.

Mezrich, B., Church, G. M., & Brand, S. (2017). Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures. Simon and Schuster.

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Turner, F. (2010). From counterculture to cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism. University of Chicago Press.

Wearne, S., Hubbard, E., Jónás, K., & Wilke, M. (2023). A learning journey into contemporary bioregionalism. People and Nature, 5(6), 2124-2140.

Yaqub, F. (2015). Space travel: medicine in extremes. The Lancet Respiratory Medicine, 3(1), 20-21.

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當人類被關在籠内，地球持續美好，所以，給我們的教訓是:
人類毫不重要，空氣，土壤，天空和流水没有你們依然美好。
所以當你們走出籠子的時候，請記得你們是地球的客人，不是主人。

When humans are locked in a cage, the Earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. It is not too late. All of these great works are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.