Newsletter Dec 21, 2025 8 min read

No.384 —America’s post-apocalyptic maps ⊗ Trying to end the power suck ⊗ Africa’s largest off-grid solar-plus-storage project ⊗ Nerdy joy in 2025

Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash.

Contrary to most newsletters it seems, this is just a normal issue. Not a look back at 2025, a best of, or a review. It is, however, the last issue of the year, see you back here on January 11th!

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What if? AI in 2026 and beyond

Tim O’Reilly and Mike Loukides wrote one of the better reads of recent months on AI. It’s framed around observing signals of change, paying attention to the edges, and working with scenarios. The piece presents a clear-eyed view split between two futures: an “economic singularity” where AGI creates a civilization-level discontinuity that fundamentally reshapes work and capital, and a “normal technology” scenario where AI faces the same integration costs, organizational resistance, and implementation friction that every enterprise technology encounters. The authors track news and developments not as predictions but as vectors that illuminate which future might be taking shape.

The value lies in how they analyze specific moves by different players. Anthropic, for instance, talks about AGI but behaves like a normal technology company by focusing on a product-market fit. China focuses on low-cost, efficient AI and clear industrial applications rather than racing toward superintelligence. OpenAI’s massive infrastructure bets look like either visionary preparation or a fragile house of cards, depending on which scenario unfolds. The authors suggest that OpenAI’s potential failure to pay for its contracted data center capacity could pop the bubble, given how central the company is to the AGI narrative.

Their practical advice for businesses centers on robust strategies that work in either scenario: focus on efficiency and small models that run locally, diversify your architecture beyond today’s AI, prioritize unit economics over theoretical future capabilities, and build systems that augment workers rather than replace them. In their view, the key is creating defensible value through unique knowledge and context, maintaining compatibility with the global ecosystem including Chinese advances, and aligning success with both workers and customers. They emphasize watching patterns across multiple vectors over time rather than fixating on any single breakthrough or setback.

Although they spend time on both, they do seem to lean towards the “normal tech” scenario, as I do. I’d encourage you, for the last time of the year, to also read Jon Evans’ Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble. He’s broadly saying the same thing but presents his case on a spectrum instead of between two scenarios. I think O’Reilly and Loukides are also at Jon’s “1.5ish on the scale.” Lastly, I’ll also mention Helen Toner’s talk on jaggedness, shared in No.382, it’s useful context for a couple of spots in the above piece.

Ok, last thing for real. Can the market deflate a bubble slowly? Virtually everyone who’s been part of inflating it is now walking back some of the bluster. Can the coyote jump back on the cliff’s edge before gravity takes over?

At O’Reilly, we don’t believe in predicting the future. But we do believe you can see signs of the future in the present. Every day, news items land, and if you read them with a kind of soft focus, they slowly add up. Trends are vectors with both a magnitude and a direction, and by watching a series of data points light up those vectors, you can see possible futures taking shape. […]

What you’re watching for is not any single data point but the pattern across multiple vectors over time. Remember that the AGI versus normal technology framing is not the only or maybe even the most useful way to look at the future. […]

The point of scenario planning is not to predict any future but rather to stretch your imagination in the direction of radically different futures and then to identify “robust strategies” that can survive either outcome. […]

The economic singularity scenario depends on capabilities continuing to improve rapidly. The normal technology scenario is comfortable with limits rather than hyperscaled discontinuity. […]

Our bet for the most likely prick to pop the bubble is that Anthropic and Google’s success against OpenAI persuades investors that OpenAI will not be able to pay for the massive amount of data center capacity it has contracted for. Given the company’s centrality to the AGI singularity narrative, a failure of belief in OpenAI could bring down the whole web of interconnected data center bets, many of them financed by debt.

Inside bioregionalism’s tech-driven revival

The bioregionalism movement proposes reorganizing economic and social systems around natural ecosystem boundaries rather than political ones. Projects like BioFi (bioregional finance) attempt to direct capital toward ecosystem regeneration by making ecological health legible within existing financial infrastructure. I love the example of the Kwaxala Nation in British Columbia, they converted forestry extraction rights into regeneration rights, creating an asset whose value depends on preventing logging rather than enabling it. These rights are tokenized (as in crypto token) as “Centrees” and can be traded, turning conservation into a financial instrument within carbon credit markets.

There’s a tension in this approach that always bugs me. Advocates argue that finance and technology govern modern society, so meaningful change requires making ecosystems visible to these systems rather than abandoning them entirely. Critics, and this is also my first reaction, see this as commodifying nature. The movement’s solution—using markets, DAOs, and digital infrastructure to protect ecosystems—depends on the assumption that capitalism’s tools can be redirected to the advancement of ends which capitalism historically ignores. The strategy assumes that making nature “legible” to markets will protect it, which risks either failing to challenge extractive logic or succeeding in ways that transform ecosystems into tradable assets.

As a thought experiment however, it’s intriguing to wonder. Crypto ended up being used most prominently as a speculative financial tool. What if it’s true potential is not in being better money than money, but in being a better representation of more varied forms of value? I’m (very) far from being sold, but there’s something I like in the idea of building something better on top of capitalism instead of hoping it crumbles and dies. (That being said, we’re definitely trending more towards vectorialists and technofeodalism than some crypto-enabled solarpunk future. Sorry, happy holidays y’all!)

“In our theory of change, we really believe that people living in relationship to place — who know that place, are paying attention to the ecological changes of that place, are connected to the culture of that place — these are the people that are best positioned to implement regenerative programs.” […]

Since securing these rights, Kwaxala has worked with the provincial government to designate the region as a special forest management conservation area, and has converted the license from a right to extraction to a right to regeneration. Held by a recognized, Indigenous land title holder, it is effectively an asset whose value is pinned to the prevention of extraction. […]

“By seeing it, you can’t ignore it, and you make it a necessary part of the balance sheet in a way,” Smith said. “So legibility is a kind of core question around how might we make our socio-technical systems — law, economics, technology, politics — work in service to not just us, but an expanded definition of the so-called social, which might include animals, forests or even waterways, lakes, rivers.” […]

The basic reasoning is this: Modern society is governed and organized through systems of technology and finance. However, neither meaningfully prioritizes the well-being of the living world, and so the choice is between renouncing such systems or finding ways of making the living world legible to them.

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Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Futures Lab byStudents. “Developed as a non-formal learning program outside traditional learning institutions, the initiative responds to the growing need for competencies to navigate the challenges young people face today. Futures Lab offers a space where students learn to challenge assumptions, explore emerging futures, and transform insights into concepts and action.”
• America’s post-apocalyptic maps reveal eerily familiar fault lines. “It’s a fertile genre, with plenty of maps to illustrate its dismal point. That point is not the future, but the present. Like other strands of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic fiction projects onto tomorrow the anxieties of today. And these maps of a catastrophic future are present-day America’s long, hard look in the mirror.”
• Regenerative Futures 2050: A planetary symposium report. “The symposium surfaced several dreams of a regenerative world characterized by deep relationality between humans, nature, and place; cultural continuity and ancestral wisdom as a compass for collective decision-making; democratized foresight through participatory art practices; and healing-centered communities where trauma becomes a resource for resilience.”

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• Senators investigate role of AI data centers in rising electricity costs. “The lawmakers said the energy needs of data centers used for artificial intelligence were forcing utilities to spend billions of dollars to upgrade the power grid. Energy companies typically recoup the money they invest in equipment through the rates they charge all users of electricity.”
• Trying to end the power suck. “The new coalition — including Food & Water Watch, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and local groups in 35 states — says the number of U.S. data centers will triple by 2030, consuming enough energy to power 28 million households, with 56% of that power coming from fossil fuels.”
• World Socialist Web Site to launch Socialism AI. “The vast pedagogical potential of artificial, or, one might say augmented intelligence, combined with the revolutionary perspectives of scientific socialism, open unprecedented possibilities. The consciousness of the working class, the understanding of the objective conditions of capitalist crisis, the clarification of the path to working class power—all of this can be spread on a scale that previous generations could scarcely have imagined.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Africa’s largest off-grid solar-plus-storage project comes online in Angola. “Cazombo Photovoltaic Park has been designed to rely on solar in the day and its battery bank for night-time supply, ensuring no fossil fuels are consumed. The project is set to benefit more than 136,000 people living in the Angolan municipality of Cazombo, the capital of the Moxico Leste province in the east of the country.”
• We mapped the world’s hottest data centers. “Across the world, countries with hot climates are investing millions of dollars in building data centers to meet the growing demand for generative artificial intelligence while also storing data within their own borders. That’s why data centers are peppered around the world, rather than being concentrated only in cooler countries like Norway or Sweden.”
• Batteries now cheap enough to make dispatchable solar economically feasible. “A new analysis from energy think tank Ember shows that the cost of storing electricity with utility-scale batteries has fallen to just $65/MWh as of October 2025 outside China and the US, making it economically feasible to deliver solar power when it is needed.”

Asides

• A few things that brought us nerdy joy in 2025. “These are our favorite moments from the best entertainment of the year, books we couldn’t get enough of, and gaming experiences that made us feel alive. From witches to musicians, mind melds to heart-wrenching phone calls, lady knights to derpy tigers—here are the sparks that made light in the darkness.”
• The fascinating map of fungi. “In this map of fungi we learn everything we can about fungi in about 20 minutes. They are hugely underappreciated as they are an entire kingdom of life, as rich as plants and animals, and we use them so much in our day to day lives beyond eating their mushrooms. They are really important for medicine (antibiotics, statins and many more) and nearly all plants on Earth rely on fungi to live.”
• Football stadium turned community garden. “As part of a city-wide urban greening program, Taipei turned an abandoned football stadium into a community garden. Here’s an overview of the terraced garden that’s taken over Zhongshan Soccer Stadium.”

**“Ambitious, thoughtful, constructive, and dissimilar to most others. ** I get a lot of value from Sentiers.”

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