Zombie Musknukonomics

"Just look behind that bank of servers. Somewhere there is a plug going into a socket in the wall" 

 

The problem with Silicon Valley drinking its own Kool Aid is that, beneath the gargantuan market caps, many of its highest-profile players remain unprofitable, while others have achieved profitability through forms of rentierism (such as Amazon Web Services) as well as heavy reliance on government contracts and subsidies that conflict with the industry’s ethos of rugged entrepreneurialism. The ongoing push from various Big Tech figures to deregulate cryptocurrencies and online payment platforms suggests that they regard the most promising frontier of profitability not in world-transforming technologies, but in new forms of financial speculation.

In other words, Silicon Valley may see itself as the engine of American growth, but it’s been running on fumes for some time. The tech gold rush of the 2010s was downstream from the Fed’s zero interest rate policy. The current AI boom looks set to go bust sooner or later, especially if more DeepSeek-style humiliations materialize—as seems likely, given the spectacular advances of China’s tech sector.

The MAGA anti-clerical coalition formed because leading figures in tech convinced themselves that what was getting in the way of their futurist dreams were the combined machinations of woke middle managers, antitrust regulators, tech journalists, and other hostile elements of the clerical caste. But with all those forces in retreat, it remains unlikely the industry will rediscover enough dynamism to deliver on its promises. Its leaders, ever unwilling to face the contradictions of their own position, will instead seek other scapegoats.

—Geoff Shullenberger

 

Of course, we also have fever-red left-hand drive. Why do you ask?

I have often written in these posts about the flawed thinking and outright fraud surrounding the health effects of ionizing radiation, a classic neglected externality of Cold War secrecy. Left unchecked, it will make Earth as uninhabitable as Mars.

Given the abysmal industry-wide safety record revealed at Three Mile Island (TMI), Chernobyl, and Fukushima, nukes are a threat that only multiplies, not subtracts, as they proliferate, age and decay. The cost to build TMI-1 in 1977 was $1 billion to Pennsylvania ratepayers. The cost to bring it to cold shutdown in 1980 was over $5 billion to US taxpayers. The cost to clean it up remains incalculable, as is the case for each of the many “accidents.”

One might have thought peak uranium, now passed, would act as a deterrent to nuclear intoxication, but the Tech Bros have a response to that, which can be found in the Executive Order from the Oval Office, issued last month, after POTUS declared a National Energy Emergency:

In conjunction with domestic fuel production, nuclear energy can liberate America from dependence on geopolitical rivals.

By “domestic fuel production,” the EO means making fuel from waste, ie, plutonium “mixed oxide” spent reactor fuel or thorium from mining wastes.

The U.S. had started construction on a reprocessing plant in the 1970s, but then-President Jimmy Carter shut it down as a sacrifice at the altar of non-proliferation. Around that time, India became the first country to get the bomb since the signing of the global Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The infrastructure for extracting fuel from waste mirrors what’s needed to enrich radioactive materials to weapons-grade levels. To show Washington was serious about limiting production of new warheads, Carter banned reprocessing. Former President Ronald Reagan lifted the ban a few years later. But between the billions of dollars the developer lost on the project and the federal government promising to take responsibility for nuclear waste, it was no longer worthwhile for an investor to pump money into a commercial reprocessing facility.

—Bloomberg Green

The Tech “solution” to the energy deficit is to throw the doors wide to nuclear weapons proliferation. But a nuclear reactor is more than just an H-bomb provider to those reprocessing its spent fuel. It is also a suicide vest. Each is a potent radiation bomb. One reactor, one city. One error, one reactor. What, in the history of human inventions, has ever been error-free?

Bloomberg’s Alexander C. Kaufman reported:

 A nuclear executive, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, called the press conference “hard to watch.”

“Feels like mostly stock pumping for Oklo, Nano and NuScale,” the executive told me, referring to a trio of publicly-traded U.S. small modular reactor startups.

The Tech Bros like to think of micro-reactors (SMRs) as akin to a home furnace. Every home should have one. The Executive Order directs the federal watchdog NRC to “facilitate the expansion of American nuclear energy capacity from approximately 100 GW in 2024 to 400 GW by 2050.” To assist with that, the order directs the Commission to work with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to “undertake reductions in force in conjunction with this reorganization” and to “revise the Reactor Oversight Process and reactor security rules and requirements to reduce unnecessary burdens and be responsive to credible risks.” The administration (Project 2025) orders the NRC to regulate the untested so-called Generation IV designs as if they were research or medical reactors, which would dramatically reduce the time it takes to license them.

Says Kaufman:

Whether that’s possible with a staff that’s cut by as much as 60% remains to be seen.

A group of nuclear scientists writing an opinion for the Washington Post last week, warned:

The total power of the warheads in the nine nuclear-armed states is an inconceivable destructive force: equivalent to more than 4.8 trillion pounds of TNT — or more than 145,000 Hiroshima bombs. A single U.S. strategic submarine can carry enough warheads to destroy any country, and detonation of a few hundred weapons could propel enough dust and soot into the air to block sunshine, cool the atmosphere and halt crops from growing — “nuclear winter.” Such a sequence of events would lead to worldwide famine.

***

Each of the nine countries’ leaders and the systems they use to control nuclear weapons will have to get every decision right every time. Deterrence theory relies on the assumption that decision-makers are rational actors. In recent years, we’ve seen leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un increasingly willing to use the manipulation of nuclear risk as a tool of coercion — an unsettling departure from the past. And in 2021, Trump’s own chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, intervened to guard against any effort by Trump to use nuclear weapons in the waning days of his first term. Can we trust that leaders won’t make decisions based purely on emotion or instinct? And can we trust that these leaders, many of whom operate in authoritarian contexts surrounded by yes men, are receiving accurate information that they can use to make reasoned and deliberate decisions?

“But this is not just a three-body problem. It’s a nine-body problem, and it defies simple explanation or solutions.”

Statements by the U.S. and China to keep a “human in the loop” are designed to reassure, but AI is already being used in conventional military planning and nuclear-related early warning and detection. No one knows how this new technology will ultimately affect nuclear strategy.

***

The era of nuclear reductions is over. Every nuclear country is improving its weapons systems, while some are growing their arsenals. Others are doing both. This is how an arms race starts. Each state takes action it deems necessary to address a weakness, while others view those moves with suspicion or fear, triggering their own action.

-- Jon Wolfsthal, Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda, Washington Post, June 4, 2025

Thinking Superlinearly

Yuval Harari: This is an amazing exchange that Trump repeatedly tells Zelinskyy "You don't have the cards." And Zelinskyy says, "But I'm not playing cards, I'm fighting to protect my country. I’m not playing cards." But Trump's vision of the world is of a card game in which there are no universal values. There are no international laws or norms, no institutions, only cards. And you know, every prime minister and every president on the planet watched this interaction and thought to herself or to himself, “I could be in that chair in a year or two. I need cards. Nothing will protect me anymore except cards. And what are cards? Weapons and armies and nuclear weapons. You now hear countries like Germany and Japan talking about ‘we need nuclear weapons, we need cards,’ because, again, all the assurances of the post-1945 order, you know, the biggest taboo of the international system for decades, was that you cannot just invade and conquer another country just because you have more cards—just because you are stronger now. We are seeing it in more and more places—in the Russian invasion of Ukraine; what Israel is doing in Gaza; and elsewhere. I mean, if we are going to a world in which the only thing that matters is cards, then all countries have to get a lot more cards in their hands, which means that money that should go to healthcare, education, and welfare would instead be diverted to building armies and nuclear weapons. Because this will be the only thing that counts when you're sitting in that room playing cards with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and these kinds of people.

—The Beat with Ari Melber, The Beat Jun 3, 2025

It gets worse. The EO threw out long-held radiation protection standards based on a linear, no-threshold model for exposure or the “as low as reasonably achievable” (ALARA) standard, and substituted allowable exposure, or euphemistically, “determinate radiation limits.” The linear model, used since the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, assumes that there is no threshold below which cellular and genetic damage cannot occur from any radiation exposure. Since the 1970s, health physicists have known that the dose-response curve is not linear, but superlinear; that damages below the level that can kill cells can damage their genetic material while allowing them to survive and reproduce. Hence, more cancers and mutations occur at lower doses than at higher doses. Science deniers and nuclear boosters argue, devoid of evidence, that the curve is instead sublinear—that there is an exposure threshold below which damage is negligible. Until last month, they had no takers. Applying the precautionary principle, for the past 85 years a “zero threshold” protection system has operated worldwide.

That has now ended.

Brittle Power

In his study for the Pentagon released in 1982 as a book, Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security, Amory Lovins argued that the U.S. energy infrastructure—especially nuclear electricity but also oil pipelines and the power grid—is "brittle" due to its centralized, complex, and interdependent nature. A single failure or targeted attack augurs widespread disruptions and cascading collapse. Examples abound. That’s what happened in the Northeast blackout of 2003, the Great Texas Freeze of 2021 and in the Fukushima triple meltdown in March 2011. By May 2012, all 54 of Japan’s commercial nuclear reactors were offline, either due to damage, maintenance, or government order. It marked the first time since 1970 that Japan was not generating any electricity from nuclear power.

Great civilizations fall less from overreach than from overcomplexity. As Joseph Tainter, William Catton and others have explained by meticulous studies of history, as hierarchical structures centralize, they require ever more intricate means of maintaining control by nodes and vassals. Complexity is itself brittle. If you imagine complexity to now be made infinitely expansive by A.I, just look behind that bank of servers. Somewhere there is a plug going into a socket in the wall.

It is worse than that. Imagine one of those basement nukes in Silicon Valley or in the hill country of Texas blowing its lid or being dynamited by a street gang and wiping out an entire city. How long do you think it would be before the AI data centers start falling offline, starved of electrons to charge their circuits, either by the cascading collapse of intersecting grids or by government order? By then, how much infrastructure had become utterly reliant upon them to function? Think of the control tower at Newark. Now imagine the power grid going dark from the Atlantic to the Pacific, taking away not only the control of planes in the air, but stopping every chemical and fuel refinery, gas station, and district heating or cooling facility. That is brittle power.

I find it oddly reassuring that artificial intelligence is capable of great destruction, but, like Elon Musk, it is only a matter of time before someone or something pulls the plug.

Elon Musk came to Washington with a chainsaw and left with a black eye…. Musk brought the Silicon Valley mantra “Move fast and break things” to D.C. But the main thing he broke was his own reputation.

—Maureen Dowd

Curiously, one of Musk’s primary targets was diversity programs, which he saw as lowering standards of excellence, when in actuality, they raise the bar by widening the pool being drawn from. Paul Shepard wrote in Man in the Landscape, “Without diversity, the mind tends to create autonomous and hallucinatory experience.” Insulated from the world, reality morphs. Just look at X or Truth Social.

As the cricket’s soft hum is to us, so are we to the trees, as are they to the rocks and the hills.

—Gary Snyder

I think white people are so afraid of the world they created that they don’t want to see, feel, smell, or hear it. The feeling of rain and snow on your face, being numbed by an icy wind and thawing out before a smoking fire... these things make you feel alive, but you don’t want them anymore. Living in boxes which shut out the heat of summer and chill of winter... that’s your way. It’s no good.

— John Fire Lame Deer, Lakota

The problem with the Tech Bro mindset is not its expansive vision of sending us to the stars but rather its blinders. It might try stepping outside once in a while to listen to the cricket’s soft hum, but all it really yearns to do is to put on a VR headset and play video games.

 

Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to cease the war in Ukraine immediately. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years. It will continue to do so with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). Thank you for your support.

And speaking of resettling refugees, did you know? A study by Poland’s National Development Bank found that the influx of Ukrainians added between 0.5% and 2.5% to GDP growth and paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.

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#RestorationGeneration.

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. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature 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.