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In February 2026, in New Delhi, someone asked Sam Altman about how much energy his systems burn. He said the comparison wasn’t fair: training a human costs energy too. Twenty years of life. All that food. And behind every person, the evolution of the hundred billion who lived before, and whatever else…
That same week, at some climate-activism forum, someone was presenting figures on per-capita carbon footprint and concluded that the core problem of the climate crisis is the existence of too many humans consuming too many resources. The solution nobody states but everyone understands: fewer humans. Smaller families. Ideally none. Not being born as an act of ecological responsibility.
The AI CEO and the climate activist sit on different panels. They probably nod to each other in the hallways. They share a class, the same cities, the same restaurants, the same platforms, and the same premise in completely different vocabularies: the concrete human — bodily, tribal, dependent on others to survive — is the problem. One wants to transcend him technically. The other wants him to stop reproducing.
Baizuo — 白左. White left. A term that surfaced in Chinese popular culture to describe the Western progressive elite — the type who flies private to the climate forum to talk emissions, who defends Indigenous communities without having spoken to a single one, who calls moral signaling with no material cost to any real life “social justice.” China built infrastructure, pulled 800 million people out of poverty, has its own tradition of materialist leftism. From there it looks at the Davos panel and says: that isn’t the left. It’s a social class using the language of justice to hold its position.
At five in the morning, a woman milks a cow somewhere in the Andes, or the Carpathians, or the Alps. She does it because her mother did, because the cow needs milking, because it keeps her family fed.
A man sows the land his grandfather sowed. He knows things about that soil no manual contains — when to plant by how the air smells, where the rains drain, what happens in that one corner when the frost comes late.
A child learns to kill an animal. Learns that it feeds him. Learns that it has consequences. Life and death are right there, unmediated, no screen between them.
Agriculture. From the Latin ager — field — and cultura — care, tending. Culture as the act of caring for the land, working it, standing in relation to it. Giorgia Meloni said as much in a speech. She’s right. The reader who despises her has to grant it. There is something real in the European right when it speaks of rootedness, of land, of organic community, of bonds you don’t choose but inherit.
The Indigenous peoples the Western left defends as guardians of nature carry deep patriarchal hierarchies, structures of authority no one questions, a conservatism about family and roles that would make any urban progressive blush.
When they speak about how their society actually works — not the university anthropologist’s summary — they say things the same left would call fascism in the mouth of a white European. The left defends them, elevates them, uses them as a symbol. And when they speak, they say what no one on the panel wants to hear. Fanon saw it seventy years ago: the colonized doesn’t want to be the colonizer’s noble savage. He wants to be himself.
The European facscist and the man we still call an Indian, five centuries after the wrong guess, would say nearly the same thing about family and land. Which is why the urbane left won’t listen to either of them.
In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Futurist Manifesto. He declared a racing car more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace. That speed purifies. That the old world had to be destroyed for something better to be born. That war was the world’s only hygiene.
Marinetti ended up signing the Fascist manifesto with Mussolini in 1919.
Silicon Valley accelerationism is twentieth-century Italian Futurism wearing this century’s clothes. The same aesthetic gesture — what’s coming is superior to the human that exists. The same contempt for whatever doesn’t scale, for whatever insists on being slow and local and dependent on others. Fascism loves its own with a ferocity that, from far enough away, can be mistaken for beauty. What it hates is the other — the one outside the tribe. Accelerationism runs on a more universal disdain: every human burns too much energy before turning productive. Marinetti wanted one tribe to rule the rest. Altman wants a world without the inefficiencies of any tribe at all, his own included.
The question no one asks: what if, instead of fighting over who has the right to the land and the bonds, we used that truth to build something that requires hating no one?
Tim Metz keeps six Claude sessions open at once. He uses AI eight hours a day, asks it about marriage and parenting, photographs the fruit at the supermarket to know if it’s ripe. Recently he uploaded photos of a large tree near his house, Claude suggested he sleep elsewhere, and Metz and his family spent the night at a friend’s. The tree didn’t fall. He told the story without embarrassment, the way you’d describe a sensible precaution.
A child raised entirely through language models learns to consult where he used to learn to orient himself. GPS atrophied the sense of direction in millions of people. The LLM is doing the same to judgment, to the tolerance of uncertainty, to the ability to read one’s own surroundings. The real community corrects you, and the correction has consequences. The model just hands you the next most probable word.
Some have tried to build the outside. Worth looking at how it went for them.
Enric Duran borrowed 500,000 euros from 68 Spanish banks with no intention of paying it back, and used the money to build the Catalan Integral Cooperative and later FairCoin, a cooperative currency. It worked from 2014 to 2018. It collapsed when it came out that he’d been propping up the price from behind the curtain — a system resting on one person’s good faith is charismatic, and charismatic systems don’t survive transparency.
The Spanish anarchists of 1936 collectivized Catalonia and Aragon. It worked for two years, in the middle of a war. No design flaw killed it. Franco and Stalin did.
Mondragón outlived Franco with eighty thousand worker-owners, its own cooperative bank, a university, a health system. It faltered when it went to compete globally. The worker in Mondragón owned his factory and voted in the assembly. The worker at the subsidiary in Kunshan turned out the same part, on the same lathe, and owned nothing. What held the Basque model together was that people knew one another; that doesn’t travel on an org chart. In 2013 Fagor went bankrupt.
It works when people genuinely know each other and bear real consequences between them. It breaks when that disappears behind scale.
Robin Dunbar measured the limit: the human brain can hold genuine relationships with roughly 150 people; past that, the relationships turn abstract and trust degrades. A federation of tribes — human scale within, verifiable coordination without.
What was missing from all those experiments was a coordination system smart enough to settle supply and demand between nodes with neither market nor central plan. The market aggregates information but concentrates capital. Central planning distributed but lost the information. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel in Economics in 2009 for finding something in between. She spent decades watching communities that managed a shared resource without state or boss — the irrigators of Valencia have spent a thousand years dividing the water and settling their disputes in a court that convenes on Thursdays in front of a cathedral. What she found wasn’t folklore: it was an architecture. Rules the members wrote themselves, neighbors who watched one another, penalties that started light. That architecture can be built today with agentic systems and open source. Not so it scales on its own — the opposite: so that it stops working if no one tends it.
Or so I tell myself at three in the morning. The graveyard behind me says otherwise.
If the agents do the productive work, what does the human do?
Accelerationism has its answer: he’s displaced. And whatever else.
There’s another. The work no agent can do is to govern — to decide what gets produced, how it’s shared, what values the system holds, what it accepts and what it refuses, what the community wants to become. The assembly as production. A system whose value lives in distributed governance can’t be sold: there’s no cap table, no founder holding shares to betray anyone with. The value is participation itself, and that can’t be transferred without being destroyed.
In the age of agents, human labor is sovereignty.
Except sovereignty is also the first thing people hand over when offered comfort. Tim Metz didn’t lose his judgment: he surrendered it, gladly, and slept at a friend’s.
I have no proof it can be done. I have the graveyard of those who tried and the tool they never had.
This doesn’t get fixed by regulating the technology or redistributing the money. It gets fixed by putting concrete life back at the center — or it doesn’t get fixed.
I’ve been turning this over for fifteen years. I’ve talked it through with half the world, started a story I never finished. Tomorrow I’m meeting a friend to dream up a plan.
Will I ever quit the raving and actually do something? How do you turn the motor over?