American AI is a bubble that runs on energy and that energy is running on empty. What could go wrong here? Plenty. Firstly, America is trying to pretend like the have an AI industry and not just 7 companies in a trenchcoat, passing notes. Secondly, they're trying to pretend like they have energy supplies aplenty and not 60 rapidly caving caverns nearing empty. At some point pretenses become past tenses as in, oops, that collapsed quickly. American AI is a bubble and their imperial energy supply is in trouble. That's double bubble which means double trouble, surely.

Energy

At a very deep level, energy is the economy. As Vaclav Smil says, energy is the universal currency, some energy must be exchanged to get anything done. Among galactic civilizations, energy use is the only scale proposed to measure them (the Kardashev Scale). For any system this energetic economics is Thermodynamics 101. Thermodynamics 102 is that any energy use creates waste heat, ergo climate change is a conclusion foregone.

Energy use is thus a pretty good measure of what we vainly isolate as economic activity. It comes close to measuring use value, like building a house, and not double and triple counting bullshit exchange value, like selling the same house back and forth. As Dr. Fadi Lama says,

I told my friends you know I can make Lebanon the number one economy in the world. I get a lawyer and I he charges me a consulting fee of $30 trillion. And then I charge him an engineering fee for $30 trillion. Wow. We've created a $60 trillion dollar economy.

You have a haircut, let's say in Bombay, you pay 20 cents. You have a haircut in New York, you pay $200. It's the same haircut. There's nothing, you know, your head will not be radiating if you go up to New York. So services are hyperinflated in the west which gives you a very erroneous data that has nothing to do with reality.

That erroneous data is what we call GDP, gross domestic product. This measures lawyers (or AI companies) passing notes to each other as GDP, it measures inflated haircuts as GDP; it's a dumb metric that just measures anything countable, even if it doesn't actually count for anything. A better measure is GDP PPP, purchasing power parity. It tells you what you can actually purchase, ie getting you closer to use values. Using PPP, China is already the world's #1 economy, Russia is richer than Germany, Iran is richer than 'Israel', etc.

I can tell you that this other made-up number is better because it makes my homies look better, but we can 'check' it by comparing to the universal currency, energy. In this case electricity consumption (generation is quite similar). Here's GDP, PPP, and energy consumption side by side.

What you can see is obvious to anyone that looks around. That China is not weaker than America (GDP), nor is it just a bit more powerful (PPP), but that it is twice as energetic. And that the UK is a bullshit economy (#5 in GDP) where real people can't afford to put the heat on (#16 in energy). I'm not saying that electricity or even energy use is the perfect measure—this counts Canada as somehow useful and discounts spiritual superpowers like Palestine and Yemen—but it shows you how off GDP is and how important energy is to the economic equation.

Energy Across Time

One important thing to understand about energy is that it's not not a static thing, it's a flow. The electrons are in motion, that's what makes it energy in the first place. If we look at how energy flows across different economies, we can see the direction things are going. Looking at energy across time, we can see that the White Empire (OECD is an alias) has flatlined while the rest of the world (led by China) is still growing. And we can see the same fact reflected in PPP. Here it is from the imperial energy agency itself.

Thus you can see that the White Empire actually collapsed after the 2008 crash and its recovery was on paper only. Countries outside the White Empire exceeded them in both PPP and electricity use from 2010 onwards and the Empire trying to force the point in the 2020s proves it.

Time For War

The Empire has got this paper tiger of an economy that they tried to ride into battle across West Asia and have gotten predictable burnt. You can see it burning bright from the Ukraine to the Red Sea. A last bonfire of the inanities. This is because they don't have 'purchasing power parity' in things as basic as artillery shells nor control of energy flows across the seas. They can print money but they can't print bullets. They can command markets but they can't command shipping.

However, there have been some wins. They literally cornered the competition on energy by sacrificing pawns like Germany, the UAE, and Saudi. They're dumping old military stock on everybody, at markups from an emergency they created. But these victories of griftery only make sense in a Pyrrhic way. Those were load bearing vassals and burning your empire to save it just accelerates a decline that could have been drawn out for decades. But who gives a shit, right? When you're White, you're right. Thus you get the Energy Wars in the 2020s, the rage, rage against the dying of the White.

Clausewitz said war is politics by other means, but the modern truism is that war is business by other means. If you analyze this war politically it leads to a lot of contradictions, like why are they so stupid. The Empire seems to be doing a lot of obviously suicidal things if it was a political being, so I think we have to abandon that assumption entirely. If we analyze the White Empire, instead, algorithmically, things start to make (dollars and) sense.

If the White Empire is run not by humans with political interests but corporations with financial interests you can understand the motivation. While a human might think in terms of human lifespans (and human lives) and a politician might think in terms of national interest (and national timelines), why would a corporation care about any of this except as marketing? Corporations are encoded to live in a virtual market, not the real world, and to think in terms of the next quarter, not quarter century. By this perception, things can be going swimmingly at the corporate level while the political entity drowns. Which is precisely what's happening.

Corporations are making money hand over fist, or one over zero, or whatever it is. Oil burning in the Persian Gulf? Great, if you're selling oil, line go up. Refineries buring in Russia? Great, if you're refining oil, line go up. Children buried under tonnes of bombs? Great, if you're selling bombs, line go up. You can to understand the pulse of Empire this way, not as a human one, but just a predatory artificial market that feeds on natural life, and spits out some dividends to keep a few humans (shareholders) dividing and conquering. And the market has never been better.

So read the news this way, as a double-entry account, with two sides to the ledge. All the 'bad' headlines are very good if you turn to the business pages. Oil increases, weapons losses, death and destruction, that's all making money for somebody or, more accurately, something. This leads you to the real rulers of White Empire, which isn't the network of pedos blackmailing each other, it's the inhuman Corporate AI that's had legal personhood for centuries now.

Rememebr that White people incarnated their greed as corporations centuries ago (first IPO, VoC, 1602) and White Empire hasn't been ruled by humans ever since. This explains why they rule so inhumanly. In this (very real) sense AI isn't something on the horizon. Corporate AI has been ruling, enslaving, and devouring continents for centuries now. And whenever its growth slows down, that's a great time for the most capital intensive business there is. War.

The Energy Wars

That's why we get the 21st century Energy Wars, a series of attacks across West Asia that make no sense politically but make enough sense algorithmically to go on and on. With the dim awareness of an algorithmic amoeba moving towards the light (no shade on amoebas, they all right) the Corporate AI that runs White Empire has been moving towards the energy, trying to get its ecosystem (the economy) to reignite. Remember the connection between energy and the economy we discussed? They have been trying to restart the (heat) engine of the actual economy, albeit in a cargo-cultish way. Like laying down a runway on a Pacific Island in the hope that planes will return with cigarettes and tinned fish, they're burning energy to make growth return. And damn the devils, it actually worked for a while, ie the AI bubble we're in now.

This isn't their first attempt at getting bubblicious on fictitious capital. First they tried crypto, literally getting computers to solve Sudoko puzzles that you could exchange for heroin (best definition I've heard). Crypto is almost pure exchange value, it has yet to find any real use value at all. The people that bought pizza and 50 Cent albums with BitCoin now feel like idiots because they missed what crypto is. It's not a currency, it's a cargo cult, and the last thing you want to introduce to a cult is even a hint of reality.

When crypto didn't work, they tried VR, which the same suspects (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple) hyped up to the tune of billions before promptly abandoning. In the same cargo-cultish way, VR used a hideous amount of energy to send you to a meeting without pants (or even legs) in the hopes that a whole immaterial world would appear for them to exploit. However, VR's lack of both use and exchange value made it go the way of 3D movies.

Before we get to the third point (spoiler alert, it's AI) I want to you to see what's common between the three tries. Capitalists are trying to find a way to ignite the energy/economy connection without labor. This is what happens when you have a dictatorship of the bosses (those who don't work) versus a dictatorship of the proleteriat (those who do). They're trying to fire everyone and still have an economy too. But you can't have your cake and eat it too.

They miss this philosophically because vulgar White economics doesn't subscribe to the labor theory of value at all. This theory, which is observable enough, was expressed best by Karl Marx. Marx said, "Labour, then, as the creator of use values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself." White economics, of course, hates labor and nature in equal measure and is obsessed in building a perpetual motion machine that needs neither. That's the pipe dream common to crypto, VR, and AI, that you can eliminate the 'friction' that is human interaction and have capital reproduce itself without a human placenta. They keep trying to automate everything instead of just certain things and end up with nothing. But not quite yet.

With their third and final trick, AI AI, it (currently) feels like the Corporate AI almost got away with it. AI AI works where crypto and VR didn't because it actually has some use value. Certainly not as much as food (the GDP share required to make American companies profitable), but certainly not zero. And SpaceX has been able to act like an AI company and IPO successfully. Now they're trying to push Anthropic and OpenAI on top of the Jenga Tower economy, dumping it all on the retail investor and pensioners. And that energy/economy connection is there (though it's actually just hot air). Rhe Empire is laying concrete and building infrastructure and burning energy as if there's a real economy there. As the energy use from AI starts to eclipse medium countries, the heat engine of the economy seems to be restarted. But this is all literally artificial, and will fall as quickly and surely as a Jenga Tower if you keep poking at it.

Energy Is The Economy

The paradox of waging Energy Wars at the same time as inflating an energy-based AI bubble is that you've created a double pyramid scheme. Or is that just a 3D pyramid? At one level the whole economy is running out of energy, and on another, the AI bubble runs on energy. Something's got to give. This makes no sense as a human plan, but if you understand the inhuman plan you can see. The algorithm that actually runs the place (called, reverently, 'the market') is functionally retarded. It understands that energy is the economy at some level, and that people's belief is also the economy at some level, but misses that the connection to human labor and nature must be real. So why does it keep going? Well, if you see like a corporate and not a state, why would you stop now? Markets are only going up, they simply do not perceive the same signals as you or I. If you're flying by their instruments, all the lines are only going up. Until—if, when, and inshallah— the music stops and the double bubble pops. It's kinda irrelevant which one goes first, if they run out of energy or if there's a run on the markets. Double bubble is double trouble, that much is for sure.