The Avatar and the Entropy Dump: Why the 'Deep State' Needs a Mad King. Steven J. Newbury. Apr 14, 2026
If you listen to the world’s leading political scientists and macroeconomists right now—as I have been doing—you will hear a chorus of profound bewilderment. This isn’t the first time I’ve brought this up, but it bears repeating.
From John Mearsheimer describing the geopolitical landscape as a “Titanic heading for an iceberg”, to Jeffrey Sachs diagnosing the US Executive branch with “hyper-irrationality” and an utter collapse of institutional process, the consensus of the intelligentsia is clear: the United States has been captured by a delusional megalomaniac, the ‘Deep State’ has been sidelined, and the destruction of the global economy is the tragic result of a one-man show.
It is perhaps the most successful magic trick in Imperial history.
What these ‘Linguistic Thinkers’ fail to understand is that the chaos they are witnessing is not a failure of process. It is the process itself. The erratic, deeply personalised spectacle of the Executive branch is not a bug in the American geopolitical machine; in April 2026, it is its most vital feature.
To understand why the permanent bureaucracy—an entity that waged a relentless, four-year immune response against Donald Trump during his first term—has completely stood down during his second, we have to stop looking at the ‘software’ of diplomacy and political norms, and look at the ‘hardware’ of global thermodynamics.
The Resource Entropy Singularity
The global system has hit a biophysical wall. We have entered what can be called the Resource Entropy Singularity—the point of no return beyond which the forces driving resource depletion and environmental degradation become overwhelming and irreversible.
For decades, the American Empire maintained its hegemony through the ‘software’ of financialisation, printing fictitious capital to cover the massive physical Maintenance Power (Pmaint) required to run its aging, hyper-complex domestic infrastructure. But thermodynamic debt cannot be deferred forever. Today, the US faces an acute physical crisis: the terminal decline of its Light Tight Oil (LTO) miracle, and a severe refinery mismatch. The US produces light sweet crude, but its heavy industrial machine—its agricultural combines, its rail freight, its military logistics—runs on the heavy middle distillates refined from heavy sour crude.
To survive, the Imperial core must secure the remaining global pools of heavy exergy (specifically Canadian heavy crude) and eliminate international competition for diesel. It must execute a brutal, global triage.
The 15% ‘Triffin Tax’ and the Global Entropy Dump
This is the physical reality driving the 15% universal import tariff. Mainstream economists treat this tariff as ignorant protectionism. In reality, it is a ‘Triffin Tax’.
Historically, the Triffin Dilemma required the US to run trade deficits to supply the world with dollars. The 15% blanket tariff is the intentional, violent reversal of this mechanism. It acts as a mechanical pump, forcefully vacuuming Eurodollars from the international market back into the US core, creating a global funding crisis.
This isn’t trade policy; it is a global entropy dump.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates that you cannot locally reduce entropy (order your own system) without increasing it to a greater degree elsewhere. By combining the Triffin Tax with a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz—deliberately starving the Asian manufacturing bloc of energy—the US is attempting to lower its internal entropy by exporting chaos, bankruptcy, and energy starvation to the periphery.
The Avatar Function: Plausible Deniability for the Apocalypse
Herein lies the ultimate utility of the current President.
If a polite, rational, ‘Deep State’-approved technocrat sat in the Oval Office and executed this strategy—intentionally blockading global energy straits, starving allies and adversaries alike, and levying a 15% extraction fee on the entire planet to save the American core—it would destroy the ideological legitimacy of the American project forever. It would expose the ‘Strong Enlightenment’ narrative of universal liberal progress as a predatory lie.
The Institutional Mass requires a Linguistic Heat Shield. They need an ‘Avatar’ who draws all the fire.
This is why the Deep State hasn’t ‘fixed’ the Trump problem this time around. In his first term, the global system still technically functioned, and his erratic behaviour was a threat to the extraction machine. Today, the machine is broken, and his behaviour is the perfect camouflage for a controlled demolition.
Let me be explicit about what this does not mean. There is no secret committee of evil masterminds in a windowless room pulling the Avatar’s strings. The permanent bureaucracy is not omniscient, nor is it unified. The behaviour I am describing—the tolerance of chaos, the exploitation of unpredictability, the willingness to let the Avatar absorb the backlash—is emergent, not directed. It arises from the sum of countless local optimisations: a trade official calculating tariff revenue, a naval officer enforcing a blockade, a financial analyst hedging diesel futures. Each actor is rational within their own compartment. None sees the full thermodynamic picture. The system does not need villains to produce brutal outcomes. It needs only compartmentalised cognition and a shared Gr imperative to survive at any cost.
If there were evil masterminds, they would never have chosen such an extreme, self‑destructive strategy. A rational cabal would preserve the Asian supply chain—because they would know the US needs those microchips. The fact that the system is burning its own dependencies is the surest proof that no one is at the wheel.
Crucially, acknowledging this dynamic does not mean Trump is secretly a calculated genius playing 4D chess, nor does it absolve him of the “madness” his critics diagnose. If anything, the opposite is true. The Avatar function works best precisely because the madness is genuine. A rational actor pretending to be unhinged would eventually break character when faced with the sheer scale of the biophysical destruction they were unleashing.
A man who genuinely believes his own messianic AI-generated portraits, and who authentically views complex geopolitical blockades as personal real-estate negotiations, is incapable of breaking character. His “hyper-irrationality” isn’t an act; it is a naturally occurring resource that the Institutional Mass is currently exploiting to its absolute limit.
When Trump attacks the Pope or demands “100% unconditional surrender” from foreign adversaries, he performs a DDOS attack on the analytical capacity of the global public. Intellectuals like Jeffrey Sachs take the bait perfectly. They spend hours dissecting the “narcissism” and “incompetence” of the man, utterly blind to the cold, mechanical extraction of global exergy taking place in the background.
When the European grid fails, and when the Global South bankrupts under the weight of the dollar vacuum, the permanent bureaucracy will simply point to the Oval Office and say, “We are so sorry. We tried to stop him. He was a madman.”
The Component Singularity
However, the ‘Deep State’ has made a fatal miscalculation. They believe they can manage this thermodynamic amputation using the ‘software’ of AI models and Executive narratives. They believe in the Imperial Noble Lie: “Short-term pain for long-term gain.”
But you cannot decouple the global routing table without triggering a Component Singularity. A modern John Deere combine harvester in the American Midwest is a rolling data centre, entirely reliant on microchips and sensors forged in the hyper-integrated Asian supply chains they are currently starving of diesel.
The political class believes they can fix the physical absence of these components with fiat subsidies and patriotic speeches. They are about to discover that while you can replace a geopolitical narrative with a new script, you cannot replace a blown Engine Control Unit with a Truth Social post.
The ‘mad king’ is playing his role perfectly. But when the tractors finally stop running, the hallucination will shatter, and the brutal laws of thermodynamics will be the only authority left on the board.
Sunday, April 19, 2026
Wednesday, April 15, 2026
Newbury: The Negentropy Trap
The Negentropy Trap: How to Co-opt the Laws of Physics. Steven J. Newbury. Apr 07, 2026
As is the established routine in these essays, I am utilising the variables from my SETE 2.0 model.
There is a moment in a recent interview with Warwick Powell, an adjunct professor discussing his new book on ‘thermoeconomics’, that perfectly exposes the psychological trap of modern economic thought.
While attempting to sound authoritative on the physical limits of the global economy, Powell is asked to define the First Law of Thermodynamics. He stumbles. He says: “Energy doesn’t get created or dissipate or disappear. It just changes form.”
Every high school physics student knows the actual definition: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
Why did an academic writing a book on thermoeconomics structurally refuse to say the word ‘destroy’? Because it was an act of subconscious, ideological self-preservation. In the orthodox economic worldview, capital and value are never truly ‘destroyed’; they are merely reallocated, depreciated, or transferred to another party on a perpetually balancing ledger. The system is taught as a closed loop of perpetual motion. If Powell allows the concept of permanent, irreversible physical destruction into his vocabulary, his entire geopolitical thesis falls apart. He cannot compute the death of the system, so his brain literally censors the word.
Currently, a dangerous new linguistic virus is spreading among dissident economists and analysts. As the global supply chain fractures, it has become impossible for serious commentators to ignore our limits. We often speak of the ‘paper barrel’ in oil markets, or simply the price of oil, but that is merely a symptom of a much deeper, systemic pathology.
The true deceit is that all modern markets have completely divorced themselves from biophysical flows, relying instead on the ‘price versus physical shortage’ fallacy. The orthodox mind assumes that the financial ledger accurately discovers physical scarcity: if energy is depleting, the price should theoretically rise smoothly until the market incentivises a substitute.
But this assumes the consumer’s ability to pay exists entirely independently of the energy being consumed. In biophysical reality, exergy is the ability to pay. As the global ERoEI plunges, the mounting thermodynamic cost of extraction cannibalises the Effective Circulating Power (Peff) of the broader economy. Long before the price of a barrel can reach the heights required to profitably extract the final, low-quality dregs of the earth, the economic engine stalls. Industrial demand is destroyed, the consumer goes bankrupt, and the price of oil violently crashes.
The financialisation (αf) apparatus looks at this collapsing price and hallucinates ‘abundance’ or ‘market equilibrium’, completely blind to the terrifying reality: the price fell precisely because the physical shortage just starved the host. Financialisation is not a physical reality; it is a linguistic and mathematical construct. It is an ideological hallucination that treats debt—an abstract ledger entry that can theoretically compound to infinity—as if it were physical exergy. When the sovereign bond market rolls over trillions of dollars, or when equities price in thirty years of unbroken future growth, the system is hallucinating. It is assuming that future generations will possess a larger surplus of physical exergy to pay back today’s borrowing.
Because this structural delusion is finally colliding with the physical wall of declining resources, the orthodox intelligentsia has co-opted our vocabulary. They use words like entropy, Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI), and the material substrate to accurately diagnose the collapse of the hyper-financialised American Empire.
But they simultaneously argue that rival powers—specifically the Eurasian bloc and China—are solving this crisis by deploying ‘negentropy’ to push back the chaos and achieve ‘Energy Sovereignty’.
They are wearing the skin of biophysical economics to camouflage the continued acceleration of the exact same expansionist algorithm. And it all hinges on their desperate need to believe that ‘negentropy’ can magically delete the entropic debt they are creating.
The Illusion of Negentropy vs. The Reality of Exergy
The trap rests entirely on the deliberate conflation of two concepts: Negentropy and Exergy.
Since the mid-20th century, economists and sociologists have bastardised the concept of ‘negentropy’ (negative entropy), treating it as a quantifiable, order-generating force. They treat it as a substance that technology, human ingenuity, or ‘information processing’ can manufacture to run the Second Law of Thermodynamics in reverse. If you build a hyper-efficient solar grid, forge a seamless AI logistics network, or write a more elegant piece of code, the orthodox mind believes you have created ‘negentropy’, effectively deleting the physical chaos of the universe.
But in biophysical reality, the metric that dictates civilisational survival is Exergy—the actual, physical capacity of a system to do useful work.
The iron law of exergy is that in every real-world process, it is strictly and irrevocably destroyed. If you burn a gallon of diesel to transport a ton of grain, the energy hasn’t disappeared, but its utility has been permanently annihilated. You cannot collect the exhaust heat from the atmosphere, compress the scattered carbon molecules, and use them to power the truck tomorrow. You cannot delete the resulting entropy; you merely degrade high-quality, dense energy (like middle distillates) into low-grade waste heat and material disorder.
By leaning on the linguistic loophole of ‘negentropy’, the orthodox mind avoids acknowledging the terrifying truth: every ‘solution’ they build permanently depletes the finite reservoir of available work on this planet. Powell couldn’t say ‘destroy’ because if exergy is permanently destroyed in every transaction, you cannot out-innovate a plunging ERoEI. You cannot print ‘negentropy’ on a central bank ledger to offset the loss of heavy sour crude.
The Boundary Problem: There is No ‘Outside’
This brings us to the fatal flaw in the ‘Multipolar’ thermoeconomic narrative.
To create local order—to build a gleaming high-tech city, a complex financial ledger, or a massive fleet of electric vehicles—you must export a colossal amount of high entropy ‘outside’ your local system boundary.
The throughput-maximisation (Gr) political economy survives solely by drawing artificial lines on a map. It builds its ordered, wealthy core and dumps the massive thermodynamic cost into the periphery. Historically, the Global South has functioned as this invisible entropy sink, absorbing the toxic tailings from lithium mines, the atmospheric carbon, and the ecological devastation required to keep the Imperial core pristine. This is the shared DNA of the Strong Enlightenment twins. Historically, both Stalinism and Neoliberalism operated on this exact anthropocentric, mechanistic assumption: that the biosphere was an infinite sink for their externalised entropy.
China’s current state-directed model is doing the exact same thing on an even more accelerated industrial scale. But in physical reality, the Earth is a closed thermodynamic capsule. There is no ‘outside’. You cannot externalise a cost in a single, closed system; you are simply polluting the life-support system you rely on to breathe. The concept of ‘negentropy’ blinds these analysts to the fact that they are just bailing water from the stern of the ship and pouring it into the bow to keep their feet dry.
The False Dawn of the ‘Multipolar Saviour’
Because they believe ‘negentropy’ can offset physical limits, dissident economists point to the BRICS nations and the rise of the ‘Petroyuan’ as our salvation. They argue that by forcing oil to be traded in Chinese currency, the American Imperial wealth siphon (α) will be broken, ushering in a fairer, multipolar world.
This is a textbook case of Metabolic Decoherence. It is the delusion of attempting to solve a biophysical famine by rearranging the banking architecture.
These analysts ignore the structural mechanics of global trade, specifically the Triffin Dilemma. To operate the world’s reserve currency, a nation must flood the globe with its own liquidity by running massive, permanent trade deficits—buying far more from the world than it sells.
China’s entire political economy is fundamentally incapable of doing this. It is a Gr engine entirely dependent on suppressing domestic consumption to subsidise a colossal, export-driven industrial base. The Chinese Communist Party relies on this export dominance to maintain peak employment and Institutional Mass (MI). For China to supply the world with the trillions in Yuan needed to buy global oil, it would have to dismantle its own export machine, deliberately deindustrialise, and become a massive consumer of foreign goods. Doing so would instantly annihilate its domestic stability. The ‘Petroyuan’ is a macroeconomic impossibility; it attempts to move the Triffin parasite to a host biologically incapable of surviving it.
It would make far more sense to create a non-national currency for this purpose, as was originally proposed by John Maynard Keynes at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. Keynes understood the Triffin trap and proposed the ‘Bancor’—a supranational unit of account—specifically to prevent any single nation from acquiring the imperial siphon that the US eventually corrupted the system to secure. Today, the smartest architects within the BRICS network understand this history. While Western media hyperventilates about the Yuan, BRICS engineers are quietly attempting to build distributed, non-national settlement ledgers tied to commodities to avoid recreating the American dilemma in Beijing.
But here is where the thermodynamic reality crashes the multipolar party: even if they successfully build a digital Bancor, it is still just a ledger. Changing the denomination of global trade from Dollars to a fairer, non-national architecture does not conjure a single extra barrel of heavy sour crude out of the ground. It does not reconnect the financial markets to the biophysical flows. The capital-intensive ‘Green Transition’ they champion is not a thermodynamic cure; it is a massive, final pulse of exergy consumption. Building parallel renewable energy grids requires staggering upfront injections of high-density fossil fuels. It mathematically accelerates our trajectory toward the Resource Entropy Singularity—the point of no return where depletion becomes overwhelming and irreversible.
The ‘Dimensional Leap’ Hallucination
If the Eurasian ‘Multipolar Saviour’ narrative is a thermodynamic illusion, the American counter-strategy is an even more spectacular hallucination.
Recently, a highly sophisticated observer of my work articulated this agenda brilliantly. He argued that Washington’s current extraction of global liquidity and apparent self-cannibalisation is not the thrashing of a dying beast, but a deliberate ‘Dimensional Leap’. Realising that the biophysical manufacturing base is depleted, the Empire is deliberately abandoning it. They are taking the rotting Snowpiercer of the old industrial economy, uncoupling the passenger cabins, and burning them as firewood to provide launch thrust for a ‘Silicon Spacecraft’1 strapped to its roof.
The strategy is to transition from a heavy, physical empire into a pure digital ‘Admin’—an AI-led network federation that monopolises bits (compute, open protocols, evolutionary speed) while leaving the exhausting friction of atoms to the BRICS.
He is absolutely correct that this is Washington’s agenda. His error is believing the laws of physics will allow it to succeed. This is the absolute pinnacle of the Negentropy Trap. It is the ultimate Strong Enlightenment dualism: the fatal belief that the mind (information) can be severed from the body (thermodynamics).
Bits are made of atoms. You cannot measure a cloud-based operating system without measuring the exergy required to run it. The ‘cloud’ is not a mist floating above the earth; it is the most exergy-dense, physically heavy infrastructure humanity has ever attempted to build. It is a hyper-industrial complex of reinforced concrete, cooling towers, and silicon foundries. A single gigawatt-scale AI data centre consumes the total output of a nuclear reactor. It requires billions of litres of fresh water, mountains of mined copper, ultra-complex ASML lithography machines, and a massive, unyielding physical baseload just to keep the servers from melting.
Furthermore, in biology, metamorphosis requires a highly stable chrysalis and a massive surplus of stored energy. The organism seals itself off and uses its accumulated fat reserves to reorganise its cellular structure. The Empire does not have a surplus; its Maintenance Power (Pmaint) is failing under the weight of a plunging ERoEI. Burning the passenger cabins to fuel the rocket doesn’t launch the rocket—it just burns the train down before the launch sequence is complete.
Crucially, if you surrender the atomic layer, you cannot rule the digital layer. You cannot upload an Empire’s consciousness to the cloud if your geopolitical rival controls the diesel, the copper, and the raw exergy required to forge the silicon and run the backup generators.
This is where the observer’s thesis accurately captures China’s tactical advantage. By monopolising the atomic friction, Beijing ensures they hold the physical kill-switch to America’s digital ‘cloud’. This strategy of hyper-industrial consolidation will undoubtedly work for China in the near term. It grants them the immediate geopolitical upper hand. But it only works until it doesn’t. Consolidating the world’s remaining exergy into a hyper-efficient manufacturing engine does not reverse the global plunge in ERoEI; it merely builds a more efficient engine to drive into the exact same Resource Entropy Singularity.
The Thrashing of the Beast
Because the system cannot execute this impossible quantum tunneling through the physical wall, it thrashes. Inflationary pressures tear through the biophysical flows of the economy as the global baseload of exergy drops.
We see this acutely with the recent implementation of the US 15% universal import tariff. As I outlined in The Dollar Vacuum and followed up in The Imperial Noble Lie, this is not standard trade policy; it is a desperate, structural vacuum. The American core is utilising this tariff to violently suck eurodollars out of the international market to fund the staggering roll-over of US Treasuries—the bare minimum required to maintain its Institutional Mass. When the imperial core demands this tribute, it strips developing nations of the capital needed to import their own fuel, fertilizer, and food. This creates a catastrophic dollar shortage, jacks up global funding costs, and effectively strip-mines the global periphery just to keep the lights on in Washington.
And how do the subordinate nodes react? Look at Westminster. Despite possessing the capacity to implement defensive, reciprocal measures to protect their own metabolic baseline, the UK political establishment remains entirely timid. Out of deep ideological subordination to the US, they voluntarily allow the UK’s remaining financial and physical surplus to be siphoned across the Atlantic. They actively facilitate the destruction of their own Effective Circulating Power (Peff) rather than defy the hallucinated ledger.
Tactical Decoupling: Hiding in the Entropic Shadows
The Empire has updated its Information Siphon. It no longer relies solely on assassins; it uses algorithms. It encourages its academic class to use the language of thermodynamics, provided they strip it of its fatal conclusions.
If you threaten the throughput-maximisation algorithm today by implementing carrying-capacity-aware (GK) protocols, you are targeted for ‘economic sabotage’ or starved of credit by the global banking architecture. Capital structurally flees from physical boundaries, punishing any node that prioritises biophysical survival over exponential yield.
How, then, do we build the GK lifeboats while the Stitched Beast violently thrashes in its death throes?
We must achieve thermodynamic invisibility. A lifeboat cannot directly fight a starving Gr giant; doing so simply draws kinetic and financial attention. We must operate in the ‘entropic shadows’—the physical and economic spaces that the central authority no longer has the exergy to police or exploit.
This requires deliberate metabolic decoupling. It means establishing localised, closed-loop exergy flows that do not register on the Empire’s financial ledger. It means prioritising direct trade in use-value rather than exchange-value, utilising mutual credit systems, and building resilient bioregional food and energy networks. It means implementing physical rationing protocols before the central authority attempts to seize local resources to feed the core.
We cannot allow the vocabulary of our survival to be hijacked by the architects of our collapse. The lifeboats will not be built by inventing new mathematical epicycles like ‘negentropy’ to justify infinite growth, nor by hallucinating a digital escape velocity. They will be built by accepting the hard physical boundaries of our closed system, and stepping off the expansionist ledger before it drags us over the edge.
As is the established routine in these essays, I am utilising the variables from my SETE 2.0 model.
There is a moment in a recent interview with Warwick Powell, an adjunct professor discussing his new book on ‘thermoeconomics’, that perfectly exposes the psychological trap of modern economic thought.
While attempting to sound authoritative on the physical limits of the global economy, Powell is asked to define the First Law of Thermodynamics. He stumbles. He says: “Energy doesn’t get created or dissipate or disappear. It just changes form.”
Every high school physics student knows the actual definition: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
Why did an academic writing a book on thermoeconomics structurally refuse to say the word ‘destroy’? Because it was an act of subconscious, ideological self-preservation. In the orthodox economic worldview, capital and value are never truly ‘destroyed’; they are merely reallocated, depreciated, or transferred to another party on a perpetually balancing ledger. The system is taught as a closed loop of perpetual motion. If Powell allows the concept of permanent, irreversible physical destruction into his vocabulary, his entire geopolitical thesis falls apart. He cannot compute the death of the system, so his brain literally censors the word.
Currently, a dangerous new linguistic virus is spreading among dissident economists and analysts. As the global supply chain fractures, it has become impossible for serious commentators to ignore our limits. We often speak of the ‘paper barrel’ in oil markets, or simply the price of oil, but that is merely a symptom of a much deeper, systemic pathology.
The true deceit is that all modern markets have completely divorced themselves from biophysical flows, relying instead on the ‘price versus physical shortage’ fallacy. The orthodox mind assumes that the financial ledger accurately discovers physical scarcity: if energy is depleting, the price should theoretically rise smoothly until the market incentivises a substitute.
But this assumes the consumer’s ability to pay exists entirely independently of the energy being consumed. In biophysical reality, exergy is the ability to pay. As the global ERoEI plunges, the mounting thermodynamic cost of extraction cannibalises the Effective Circulating Power (Peff) of the broader economy. Long before the price of a barrel can reach the heights required to profitably extract the final, low-quality dregs of the earth, the economic engine stalls. Industrial demand is destroyed, the consumer goes bankrupt, and the price of oil violently crashes.
The financialisation (αf) apparatus looks at this collapsing price and hallucinates ‘abundance’ or ‘market equilibrium’, completely blind to the terrifying reality: the price fell precisely because the physical shortage just starved the host. Financialisation is not a physical reality; it is a linguistic and mathematical construct. It is an ideological hallucination that treats debt—an abstract ledger entry that can theoretically compound to infinity—as if it were physical exergy. When the sovereign bond market rolls over trillions of dollars, or when equities price in thirty years of unbroken future growth, the system is hallucinating. It is assuming that future generations will possess a larger surplus of physical exergy to pay back today’s borrowing.
Because this structural delusion is finally colliding with the physical wall of declining resources, the orthodox intelligentsia has co-opted our vocabulary. They use words like entropy, Energy Return on Energy Invested (ERoEI), and the material substrate to accurately diagnose the collapse of the hyper-financialised American Empire.
But they simultaneously argue that rival powers—specifically the Eurasian bloc and China—are solving this crisis by deploying ‘negentropy’ to push back the chaos and achieve ‘Energy Sovereignty’.
They are wearing the skin of biophysical economics to camouflage the continued acceleration of the exact same expansionist algorithm. And it all hinges on their desperate need to believe that ‘negentropy’ can magically delete the entropic debt they are creating.
The Illusion of Negentropy vs. The Reality of Exergy
The trap rests entirely on the deliberate conflation of two concepts: Negentropy and Exergy.
Since the mid-20th century, economists and sociologists have bastardised the concept of ‘negentropy’ (negative entropy), treating it as a quantifiable, order-generating force. They treat it as a substance that technology, human ingenuity, or ‘information processing’ can manufacture to run the Second Law of Thermodynamics in reverse. If you build a hyper-efficient solar grid, forge a seamless AI logistics network, or write a more elegant piece of code, the orthodox mind believes you have created ‘negentropy’, effectively deleting the physical chaos of the universe.
But in biophysical reality, the metric that dictates civilisational survival is Exergy—the actual, physical capacity of a system to do useful work.
The iron law of exergy is that in every real-world process, it is strictly and irrevocably destroyed. If you burn a gallon of diesel to transport a ton of grain, the energy hasn’t disappeared, but its utility has been permanently annihilated. You cannot collect the exhaust heat from the atmosphere, compress the scattered carbon molecules, and use them to power the truck tomorrow. You cannot delete the resulting entropy; you merely degrade high-quality, dense energy (like middle distillates) into low-grade waste heat and material disorder.
By leaning on the linguistic loophole of ‘negentropy’, the orthodox mind avoids acknowledging the terrifying truth: every ‘solution’ they build permanently depletes the finite reservoir of available work on this planet. Powell couldn’t say ‘destroy’ because if exergy is permanently destroyed in every transaction, you cannot out-innovate a plunging ERoEI. You cannot print ‘negentropy’ on a central bank ledger to offset the loss of heavy sour crude.
The Boundary Problem: There is No ‘Outside’
This brings us to the fatal flaw in the ‘Multipolar’ thermoeconomic narrative.
To create local order—to build a gleaming high-tech city, a complex financial ledger, or a massive fleet of electric vehicles—you must export a colossal amount of high entropy ‘outside’ your local system boundary.
The throughput-maximisation (Gr) political economy survives solely by drawing artificial lines on a map. It builds its ordered, wealthy core and dumps the massive thermodynamic cost into the periphery. Historically, the Global South has functioned as this invisible entropy sink, absorbing the toxic tailings from lithium mines, the atmospheric carbon, and the ecological devastation required to keep the Imperial core pristine. This is the shared DNA of the Strong Enlightenment twins. Historically, both Stalinism and Neoliberalism operated on this exact anthropocentric, mechanistic assumption: that the biosphere was an infinite sink for their externalised entropy.
China’s current state-directed model is doing the exact same thing on an even more accelerated industrial scale. But in physical reality, the Earth is a closed thermodynamic capsule. There is no ‘outside’. You cannot externalise a cost in a single, closed system; you are simply polluting the life-support system you rely on to breathe. The concept of ‘negentropy’ blinds these analysts to the fact that they are just bailing water from the stern of the ship and pouring it into the bow to keep their feet dry.
The False Dawn of the ‘Multipolar Saviour’
Because they believe ‘negentropy’ can offset physical limits, dissident economists point to the BRICS nations and the rise of the ‘Petroyuan’ as our salvation. They argue that by forcing oil to be traded in Chinese currency, the American Imperial wealth siphon (α) will be broken, ushering in a fairer, multipolar world.
This is a textbook case of Metabolic Decoherence. It is the delusion of attempting to solve a biophysical famine by rearranging the banking architecture.
These analysts ignore the structural mechanics of global trade, specifically the Triffin Dilemma. To operate the world’s reserve currency, a nation must flood the globe with its own liquidity by running massive, permanent trade deficits—buying far more from the world than it sells.
China’s entire political economy is fundamentally incapable of doing this. It is a Gr engine entirely dependent on suppressing domestic consumption to subsidise a colossal, export-driven industrial base. The Chinese Communist Party relies on this export dominance to maintain peak employment and Institutional Mass (MI). For China to supply the world with the trillions in Yuan needed to buy global oil, it would have to dismantle its own export machine, deliberately deindustrialise, and become a massive consumer of foreign goods. Doing so would instantly annihilate its domestic stability. The ‘Petroyuan’ is a macroeconomic impossibility; it attempts to move the Triffin parasite to a host biologically incapable of surviving it.
It would make far more sense to create a non-national currency for this purpose, as was originally proposed by John Maynard Keynes at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. Keynes understood the Triffin trap and proposed the ‘Bancor’—a supranational unit of account—specifically to prevent any single nation from acquiring the imperial siphon that the US eventually corrupted the system to secure. Today, the smartest architects within the BRICS network understand this history. While Western media hyperventilates about the Yuan, BRICS engineers are quietly attempting to build distributed, non-national settlement ledgers tied to commodities to avoid recreating the American dilemma in Beijing.
But here is where the thermodynamic reality crashes the multipolar party: even if they successfully build a digital Bancor, it is still just a ledger. Changing the denomination of global trade from Dollars to a fairer, non-national architecture does not conjure a single extra barrel of heavy sour crude out of the ground. It does not reconnect the financial markets to the biophysical flows. The capital-intensive ‘Green Transition’ they champion is not a thermodynamic cure; it is a massive, final pulse of exergy consumption. Building parallel renewable energy grids requires staggering upfront injections of high-density fossil fuels. It mathematically accelerates our trajectory toward the Resource Entropy Singularity—the point of no return where depletion becomes overwhelming and irreversible.
The ‘Dimensional Leap’ Hallucination
If the Eurasian ‘Multipolar Saviour’ narrative is a thermodynamic illusion, the American counter-strategy is an even more spectacular hallucination.
Recently, a highly sophisticated observer of my work articulated this agenda brilliantly. He argued that Washington’s current extraction of global liquidity and apparent self-cannibalisation is not the thrashing of a dying beast, but a deliberate ‘Dimensional Leap’. Realising that the biophysical manufacturing base is depleted, the Empire is deliberately abandoning it. They are taking the rotting Snowpiercer of the old industrial economy, uncoupling the passenger cabins, and burning them as firewood to provide launch thrust for a ‘Silicon Spacecraft’1 strapped to its roof.
The strategy is to transition from a heavy, physical empire into a pure digital ‘Admin’—an AI-led network federation that monopolises bits (compute, open protocols, evolutionary speed) while leaving the exhausting friction of atoms to the BRICS.
He is absolutely correct that this is Washington’s agenda. His error is believing the laws of physics will allow it to succeed. This is the absolute pinnacle of the Negentropy Trap. It is the ultimate Strong Enlightenment dualism: the fatal belief that the mind (information) can be severed from the body (thermodynamics).
Bits are made of atoms. You cannot measure a cloud-based operating system without measuring the exergy required to run it. The ‘cloud’ is not a mist floating above the earth; it is the most exergy-dense, physically heavy infrastructure humanity has ever attempted to build. It is a hyper-industrial complex of reinforced concrete, cooling towers, and silicon foundries. A single gigawatt-scale AI data centre consumes the total output of a nuclear reactor. It requires billions of litres of fresh water, mountains of mined copper, ultra-complex ASML lithography machines, and a massive, unyielding physical baseload just to keep the servers from melting.
Furthermore, in biology, metamorphosis requires a highly stable chrysalis and a massive surplus of stored energy. The organism seals itself off and uses its accumulated fat reserves to reorganise its cellular structure. The Empire does not have a surplus; its Maintenance Power (Pmaint) is failing under the weight of a plunging ERoEI. Burning the passenger cabins to fuel the rocket doesn’t launch the rocket—it just burns the train down before the launch sequence is complete.
Crucially, if you surrender the atomic layer, you cannot rule the digital layer. You cannot upload an Empire’s consciousness to the cloud if your geopolitical rival controls the diesel, the copper, and the raw exergy required to forge the silicon and run the backup generators.
This is where the observer’s thesis accurately captures China’s tactical advantage. By monopolising the atomic friction, Beijing ensures they hold the physical kill-switch to America’s digital ‘cloud’. This strategy of hyper-industrial consolidation will undoubtedly work for China in the near term. It grants them the immediate geopolitical upper hand. But it only works until it doesn’t. Consolidating the world’s remaining exergy into a hyper-efficient manufacturing engine does not reverse the global plunge in ERoEI; it merely builds a more efficient engine to drive into the exact same Resource Entropy Singularity.
The Thrashing of the Beast
Because the system cannot execute this impossible quantum tunneling through the physical wall, it thrashes. Inflationary pressures tear through the biophysical flows of the economy as the global baseload of exergy drops.
We see this acutely with the recent implementation of the US 15% universal import tariff. As I outlined in The Dollar Vacuum and followed up in The Imperial Noble Lie, this is not standard trade policy; it is a desperate, structural vacuum. The American core is utilising this tariff to violently suck eurodollars out of the international market to fund the staggering roll-over of US Treasuries—the bare minimum required to maintain its Institutional Mass. When the imperial core demands this tribute, it strips developing nations of the capital needed to import their own fuel, fertilizer, and food. This creates a catastrophic dollar shortage, jacks up global funding costs, and effectively strip-mines the global periphery just to keep the lights on in Washington.
And how do the subordinate nodes react? Look at Westminster. Despite possessing the capacity to implement defensive, reciprocal measures to protect their own metabolic baseline, the UK political establishment remains entirely timid. Out of deep ideological subordination to the US, they voluntarily allow the UK’s remaining financial and physical surplus to be siphoned across the Atlantic. They actively facilitate the destruction of their own Effective Circulating Power (Peff) rather than defy the hallucinated ledger.
Tactical Decoupling: Hiding in the Entropic Shadows
The Empire has updated its Information Siphon. It no longer relies solely on assassins; it uses algorithms. It encourages its academic class to use the language of thermodynamics, provided they strip it of its fatal conclusions.
If you threaten the throughput-maximisation algorithm today by implementing carrying-capacity-aware (GK) protocols, you are targeted for ‘economic sabotage’ or starved of credit by the global banking architecture. Capital structurally flees from physical boundaries, punishing any node that prioritises biophysical survival over exponential yield.
How, then, do we build the GK lifeboats while the Stitched Beast violently thrashes in its death throes?
We must achieve thermodynamic invisibility. A lifeboat cannot directly fight a starving Gr giant; doing so simply draws kinetic and financial attention. We must operate in the ‘entropic shadows’—the physical and economic spaces that the central authority no longer has the exergy to police or exploit.
This requires deliberate metabolic decoupling. It means establishing localised, closed-loop exergy flows that do not register on the Empire’s financial ledger. It means prioritising direct trade in use-value rather than exchange-value, utilising mutual credit systems, and building resilient bioregional food and energy networks. It means implementing physical rationing protocols before the central authority attempts to seize local resources to feed the core.
We cannot allow the vocabulary of our survival to be hijacked by the architects of our collapse. The lifeboats will not be built by inventing new mathematical epicycles like ‘negentropy’ to justify infinite growth, nor by hallucinating a digital escape velocity. They will be built by accepting the hard physical boundaries of our closed system, and stepping off the expansionist ledger before it drags us over the edge.
Sunday, April 5, 2026
Radagast: Deus ex machina
Deus ex machina. Rintrah by Radagast. Apr 4, 2026.
I think the best argument the “technology is going to bail us out” bro’s have, is that there isn’t really a realistic alternative anymore. We can laugh of course when Mr. Musk says we’ll have a city on Mars, or when Aubrey de Grey says we’re going to live for centuries.
But I think the reality is that you need a kind of collective mythos, to motivate people to get out of bed in the morning. If you think things are bad now, wait until most people have nothing left to motivate them to get out of bed in the morning. In the past people did things for their community, their church, maybe their nation. Those things are all dead and something needs to fill the void.
Why do anything at all, in a world where everything has already been done? Most people don’t have it in them to be great artists or prophets, they need to derive a sense of purpose from something bigger than themselves.
There is of course the deep green narrative, that our lives serve a purpose because we strive to keep the planet habitable for non-human species. But this is not really a narrative you can build your life around, due to the dead grandfather principle. You know who never eats meat or wastes water? Your dead grandfather in his grave.
Humans naturally need more to give their lives purpose than the quest to avoid being a burden on the non-human world. Humans want to transform the world, they want to leave their mark on it. The reality is that the limits to growth narrative just doesn’t work to unify people.
Alexander King wrote: “In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill.”
Well, it hasn’t worked. We’ve tried for over thirty years to get some sense of unity around the threats we face during the 21st century, but there is nothing good that came forth out of it. This is what Europe wants, to live within natural limits. The rest of the world just doesn’t want it.
“Have one child, don’t fly, don’t eat meat, don’t drive a car and do this for the next 100 years or so until we are living within planetary boundaries again” is just not a message that people get excited about. It’s the Greta Thunberg narrative, the little child prophetess who had her hand kissed by Juncker, but note how even Thunberg has now stopped preaching it.
People want to see how far we can take this progress thing. The American elite peddle the God from a Machine narrative. And like I said, nobody really has an alternative anymore. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, believes the God from a Machine will solve climate change for us. He thinks we should just abandon the climate goals altogether, because we’re not unified enough to achieve them.
When it comes to AI, you can still believe what you want to believe. There’s always a chart you can find that lets you believe what you want to believe. And sometimes, you can even use the same chart as your opponents! AI can now do tasks that take humans a week! If you’re alright with 50% success that is. If you need 80% success, we’re stuck at five minutes. So which one is it? Nothingburger or God from the machine?
Personally, I can’t really believe the nothingburger narrative anymore. I’ve toyed around with it enough to say that this is something meaningful. But American techies are not yet content with what they have given birth to so far. They want the God in the machine that solves all our problems for us, something far smarter than any of us.
But I have to ask: If we pull off their wildest dreams, is it going to be enough? Imagine you’re sitting in an airplane and the engines stop working because you ran out of fuel. There’s no force on Earth that’s going to save your life. Your money means nothing. It no longer matters how smart you are. You are now just a powerless subject to the laws of physics.
And I fear the same thing will happen with the AI project. You can build something far smarter than us humans. But what is it going to say to us? Well, I asked Claude today what we can do about climate change. Read it for yourself if you want. It’s not a very hopeful message. I doubt a smarter AI has a more hopeful message to offer.
I think the sort of people excited about AI as a solution, are the sort of people who have spent their whole lives living in situations where intelligence was a solution. But if you went to school in the ghetto, intelligence probably wasn’t a solution to your problems. It was something you had to hide.
I think there are just problems that can’t be solved through intelligence. The overshoot problem is probably one of them. Some problems require a fundamental value transformation. But that value transformation has failed, it hasn’t happened, you don’t have eight billion little Greta’s today.
For what it’s worth, the biological Deus ex Machina, the virus that brings a sudden halt to the modern developed way of life, hasn’t emerged either. The monkeypox epidemic has been declared over in Congo, the bird flu went nowhere, SARS-COV-2 isn’t doing anything too interesting either. Excess mortality in most of the developed world has returned to normal, although my own country is a strange outlier.
But I fear that I’m wrong, that nature is in fact powerless to reign in human greed after all. The last orangutans will end up grounded to a pulp as palm oil in your peanut butter, the last rhino will be mercilessly hunted down by impotent Chinese businessmen for its horn, the Amazon forest will go up in smoke. And there won’t be anything that grinds it to a halt.
For generations, people watched their children die and wondered: Why is God indifferent to my suffering? Why do the innocent have to suffer, without having done anything wrong? And I think that is my error too. I expected there must be justice in an indifferent universe. But there is none. And we’re not going to be saved from ourselves either.
When everything else has failed, you might as well put your faith in the God from the Machine. I’m not sure though, how the God from the Machine is going to give Mars an atmosphere, or restart its dead core, or allow you to travel faster than the speed of light to some other solar system.
No, I think even with the God from the Machine, you’re going to be stuck here on this rock. I would be more optimistic, if I saw the prerequisite steps emerge. Before you expect a city on Mars, you would first expect to see floating cities here on Earth, along with cities on Antarctica and cities on the ocean floor. The costs are much lower, the rewards are much higher (think of the minerals to be found on the ocean floor). But none of these stepping stones seem viable yet and there’s no reason to expect we’re just going to jump over them.
This is not what people want to hear. “You have the mentality of a loser” Zero HP Lovecraft sneered at me. I think I am just realistic. You’re going to have to solve your problems here on Earth, whether you like it or not. And if the only solution to your problems is something nobody wants, then what is the God from the Machine supposed to offer you?
High tech totalitarianism. This seems to be the only way this thing can now end. You’re forgiven for thinking “they” are just going to kill us all, if that’s what you expect. Yuval Harari gets up there on stage at the World Economic Forum, lamenting the birth of a “useless class” of people, whose existence serves no purpose to him and other high status white males, as they are no longer employable due to AI. At some point, when the resources grow scarce, the people who own everything will increasingly start to wonder why they have to keep the rest of us around.
I always hoped for a plot twist. “It can’t just be this.” I thought to myself. I mean, can you blame me? When you look at someone like Mark Zuckerberg, who sets up some website in college and ends up running the globe, can you really accept that this is just how things work, that a handful of people who lucked out once get to keep accumulating more wealth?
He’s really not that smart, the Metaverse proves it. But it seems like these people, these handful of American tech moguls, can no longer lose. And the rest of us, can no longer win. It’s a giant game of Monopoly that is dragging on for too long. But no, they insist we have to keep playing: “You have to see this, I am about to unlock the God in a Machine!”
Well, I say, bring it on. I don’t fear the machine anymore. No, now I want to see how far they can push this. I expect your God in a Machine will have this message for you: No brain is big enough to land an airplane that’s out of fuel.
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