@ranganaut.bsky.social
Thinkerer, Tinkerer
Today’s #DailyPlanet is on Xi Jinping’s contribution to China’s increasing influence as the world’s Electrostate
07.11.2025 01:36 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Can someone please explain to me why Dick Cheney is being mourned by the liberal intelligentsia, such as it is?
Just because he discovered an antipathy for Trump late in the game?
There are very few people who have caused more harm than Dick Cheney; and yet, now he is a hero?
In today's #DailyPlanet, I discuss Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential theses on "The Climate of History."
05.11.2025 13:53 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Energy intensity matters - and industrial modernity unlocked high-intensity fuels, including fossil fuels. All the ills of the anthropocene are downstream from this unlocking, but it's also true that modern health and prosperity depend on concentrated energy. More in today's #DailyPlanet
Back to metabolic sovereignty this week after a deepish dive into energy and compute sovereignty. #DailyPlanet
03.11.2025 20:55 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Today's #WeeklyPlanet sums up my emerging understanding of compute sovereignty, i.e., a nation’s ability to maintain autonomous control over the computing infrastructure – data centers, cloud platforms, and semiconductor chips – that underpins modern AI.
02.11.2025 12:22 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Compute Sovereignty may not have much to do with art at first glance. But a new technology, especially an inscription technology such as AI, will most certainly spawn new art forms that also help us imagine a world in which computation reigns supreme. Essay by Ken Liu in today's #DailyPlanet
01.11.2025 14:44 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Do the people running AI (the Altmans and Musks) actually believe AGI is around the corner? Are they making business decisions based on this impending event? The Curve conference had much to say about these questions. Covered in today's #DailyPlanet
31.10.2025 13:58 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Is Sovereign AI a real thing or a boondoggle to get nervous national decision makers to buy a lot of chips (or models or what have you)? You be the judge in today’s #DailyPlanet
30.10.2025 18:31 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Ent that the truth
29.10.2025 17:43 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction - is an infamous notion from the Cold War. With AI replacing nuclear weapons as our doomsday device of choice, we have a new acronym: MAIM, Mutually Assured AI Malfunction. More in today’s #DailyPlanet
29.10.2025 14:28 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Everyone knows Silicon Valley. If you have been listening closely, you might have also heard of London or Tel-Aviv or Bangalore or Shanghai as tech hubs. But how did Hangzhou - home of Deepseek as well as Alibaba - become a tech hub? The story behind its rise is covered in today's #DailyPlanet
28.10.2025 12:06 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Yeah. I would love to embed existing posts into future ones and have them be read them left to right - would make it easier to write something like a booklet or even a book
27.10.2025 14:59 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
If energy sovereignty is the bloodstream of civilization, compute sovereignty is the nervous system - flows of calculation through which societies decide & act. They are inseparable: datacenters consume electricity & smart grids depends on computation. Yet they are not identical. #DailyPlanet
27.10.2025 12:54 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
If sovereignty today is about governing the flows of food, water, energy, information, then power is migrating from palaces and parliaments into pipes and datacenters. Energy is the tempo-maker & energy sovereignty is about who controls life under modern conditions, and on what terms. #WeeklyPlanet
26.10.2025 21:12 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0It would be nice to be able to embed existing pages from a publication as a sub-page - from what I can tell, we can only create new pages as sub-pages. That would essentially replicate wiki-syntax (except as an embed), where [[XYZ]] either creates a new page or links to an existing one.
25.10.2025 18:17 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Today's #DailyPlanet is the second of two on the great chronicler of Energy politics: Daniel Yergin. Today, we cover his book on the new energy landscape. Already dated though because of China's rapid expansion.
25.10.2025 14:23 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Today's #DailyPlanet is the first of two on the great chronicler of Energy politics: Daniel Yergin. First up, his book on oil in which Yergin offers a deep (and entertaining!) exploration of oil's pivotal role in shaping modern history, politics, and economics.
24.10.2025 12:37 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Humans can't survive without water. We are mostly water. So it's not surprising that control over water is both a sign of sovereignty as well as ways in which one sovereign can undermine another. More in today's #DailyPlanet
23.10.2025 13:12 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Metabolic rivalry, along both the energy and the information axes, is creating a more active role for politics in economics. That rivalry is one of the main reasons why the neoliberal era is ending. More about #Geoeconomics in today's #DailyPlanet
22.10.2025 13:59 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Petro vs Electro: the world is entering a new energy-tech Cold War, defined by a stark divide between electrification, led by China, and hydrocarbons, championed by the US, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. That's the main claim of today's #DailyPlanet
21.10.2025 15:25 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Week 10 of the #DailyPlanet is on Energy Sovereignty, starting with today's coverage of the Electrotech Revolution.
20.10.2025 18:59 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Metabolic sovereignty is the power to organize and regulate the flows of energy and information that make life possible. It fuses two forms of control and autonomy - energy sovereignty and compute sovereignty - into a single architecture of power.
More in today's #WeeklyPlanet.
In yesterday's #DailyPlanet, I raised the possibility that metabolic exceptions are bound to happen sooner or later.
Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Ministry for the Future" is a fictional exploration of metabolic exceptions, of which there are going to be many in the future.
What is climate change if not metabolic disorder, or perhaps even a metabolic emergency? And what might a metabolic exception be? Reading Schmitt and Agamben with a metabolic hat in today's #DailyPlanet
17.10.2025 17:15 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Mann and Wainwright's "Climate Leviathan" is a sovereign with coercive capacity who forces other political actors into acting on climate. They were worried that the US would turn into such a Leviathan. We know how that turned out. M and W have a book too, but today's article is enough for most.
16.10.2025 12:28 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
"The Coming Second Copernican Revolution" explores a profound transformation in humanity's understanding of its place in the cosmos. This new revolution is driven by astrobiology, a science revealing that nearly every star hosts planets, many potentially harboring life. #DailyPlanet
15.10.2025 12:47 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Continuing our exploration of Metabolic Sovereignty, Niklas Luhmann’s concept of autopoiesis, adapted from the biological concept of the same name due to Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, offers a profound framework for understanding society as a self-producing and self-referential system.
14.10.2025 19:52 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Some say the new cold war - and its attendant geopolitics - is not going to be ideological as much as metabolic, with competing energy stacks driving competition and conflict.
I am throwing my hat into the ring too. First #DailyPlanet in an extended meditation on Metabolic Sovereignty.
In 2025, a handful of technology companies are engaged in what may be the most ambitious infrastructure buildout in human history. The hyperscalers are investing approximately $400 billion this year in data center infrastructure to power artificial intelligence.
More in today's #WeeklyPlanet
