As an empire in late-stage phase of hegemonic power, the US focuses on maintaining its military and financial advantage. This means the Pentagon and the Dollar. The US Federal Government may never have built a decent public health system but it does do warfare very well indeed. While they may not have won a war in decades, they do still have some of the best toys. Under the hood is the economic motor, a military industrial complex fueled by DARPA-funded university research. This motor is being re-torqued for AI warfare. Time to refit some expensive new hi-tech parts.
Cold War II
Cold War II will be expensive! War funding may require innovative AI military and financial engineering, the latter possibly crypto Financial Technology (FinTech). Both will be built with intellectual property owned by certain Silicon Valley startups. That’s the plan anyway. The startups building the FinTech are being bought up by venture capital funds owned and managed by billionaires, many from Palo Alto’s Stanford University. Many satellite investors orbit this Stanford elite star cluster too. Everyone in this space has heard of the payment systems dream team, the grandparents of modern FinTech, who invented a payments system called PayPal that broke the mold; nicknamed the “PayPal Mafia”.
Carole Cadwalladr combined the word oligarch with Tech Bro’s to get Broligarchs! The PayPal mafia are archetypal Broligarchs (and no Sisigarchs either) they’re all men, not a woman among them. Low profile, they remain largely unrecognized even in San Francisco. Some, however, moved on from payment systems to more high profile sectors; you may have heard of Elon Musk.
Their startups (now primed with DOGE contact data) are filling salesforce prospect lists to target Pentagon departments to sell them their stuff. The two distinct groups of start-ups are focused on two service sectors: AI-military ‘solutions’, and crypto FinTech focused on online security (for obvious reasons) a specialty perfected by Paypal research back in the day and hardened over time. The first group plan to build tech to win an AI war for capitalism against China. This second group are getting increasingly inventive, some might say desperate, attempting to prop up a sick dollar with dodgy crypto schemes. In the medium term locking crypto to the dollar may hasten it’s demise, but to paraphrase Keynes, in the medium term we are all dead.
If this all sounds like a dodgy plot for a Hollywood screenplay, that does not mean it won’t sell: we can still publish the script. Picture the scene! A bunch of South African funded startups locking horns with the Chinese Communist party in a race to develop 21st. Century war technology in silicon wafer laboratories and big data centers from Taiwan to Texas, Palo Alto to Beijing. What’s not to like? Who should we get to play David Sacks?
Meanwhile back in Silicon Valley human resource departments outbid each other for AI talent. It takes a special kind of genius to design machine intelligence to hunt humans from the air and read through kill lists and false positives from beta test runs in Gaza. These overpaid techies, cooperate with enhanced intelligence, humming in server farms, to iterate designs for next generation video chips and AI algorithms to beef-up the drone war to end all drone wars. Does this plot sound familiar?
The US Federal Government, like the British Empire before it, began life as a thinly-veiled patchwork of offices stitched around a state apparatus designed to wage war. Great Britain called their empire expanding department, which conquered New England, now US territory, their “War Office”. In Washington D.C. a the more politically correct “Department of Defense” masks the same beast. It does not seem to matter that the only time the US mainland was invaded was by Pancho Villa on horseback from Mexico. Spending hundreds of billions on AI drone swarms might be overkill to wipe-out a few dozen Mexicans on horseback, but better safe than sorry!
A Trillion for the Pentagon
At the core of the US “Defense” Department is Pentagon spending; a trillion dollar budget that’s seemingly impossible to audit. With this money the Pentagon buys weapons. It pays for outsourced wars waged by mercenaries like ISIS militias. It’s also quite expensive to maintain and supply 600+ military bases across the planet.
Before Trump’s new plan was published the Pentagon had two main armaments categories; “nuclear” and “conventional”. When the Soviet Union (and later Russia) surpassed the US in the nuclear arms race, the nuclear option just sat there gathering dust, an expensive deterrent. AI will put some new blood in the Pentagon’s veins!
The Pentagon is now pumping money —unfunded future taxation to be more precise— into a third category of weapons, which one day (maybe sometime soon) might surpass conventional weapons. The wartime Manhattan Project was hidden in the New Mexico desert. Manhattan now has a sequel. Let’s call it the Palo Alto Project. It is being built by fabulously wealthy Stanford graduates with their own private money —seed funded decades ago by their rich daddies from mining profits in South and Southwest Africa. If the Palo Alto and New Mexico Projects have anything in common it might be the lingering doubt as to whether humanity can survive these new technologies.
That’s never stopped us building a bigger bomb before. Why start now?
Stop with the morbid thoughts! Human survival is a mere detail. This isn’t about humans, AI is post-humanity. This is war! AI will be humanity’s bastard; best if she’s an American. We must push on to reach AGI or Super Intelligence first. Who cares if what emerges will have its robot fingers on the red nuclear button? We have 200 billions more for mutually assured destruction. Surely we can trust a super intelligence. We can, can’t we? What’s the alternative? This will usher in “a new age of human flourishing”! It says so in the introduction to Sacks’ plan. We can’t have human flourishing under communism. No ideology in our AI super intelligence on my watch! That’s in the plan too. And anyway, if we don’t spend the billions and risk extinction the Russians —sorry Chinese— will!
It is here: AMERICA’S AI ACTION PLAN
Murmurs of an AI Space race are now official. America’s AI Action Plan is uploaded. You can get the PDF here on whitehouse.gov . It’s an uninspiring report with a Trumpian title, written for and by the PayPal Mafia by one of their own, David Sacks. Sacks shares authorship with Marco Rubio and Michael J. Kratsios listed as assistants to the President (in Science and Technology and Security Affairs respectively).
Back in WWII Boeing, General Motors and the Chrysler Defense Arsenal built Superfortresses B-29’s and B-52’s, Pershing and Sherman tanks. These weapons helped allies blast their way through Hitler’s Third Reich, they overpowered fascist Italy in weeks and ended the power of Imperial Japan. One Superfortress called the Enola Gay (after the pilot’s mum) dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima copper-fastening US Empire rule and showing Russia who was boss. Three days later, another nuclear bomb called Fat Man, burned Nagasaki into something that looks uncannily like Gaza does in 2025. Eighty years later, the PayPal mafia have sold the Pentagon on a new arms race with China. What can go wrong?
Who Pays?
After WWII, Wall Street grew it’s finance and banking dominance powered by the global trade in oil and many other commodities exclusively in US dollars. Now a new financial digitally redesigned architecture is emerging. New entrants include Chinese Central Bank Digital Renminbi (CBDC) and private US Crypto from Palo Alto. I know which side my money is on.
Infrastructure like the US highway system, or the reconstruction of Europe and Japan, were funded by the Marshall Plan in dollars. President Kennedy’s used 1960’s dollars for the space race to the moon. Together they helped build much of what is now an ageing US infrastructure. The space race also created a technology boom from war and space tech. Trump’s plan sets out another infrastructure plan for AI super intelligence: more datacenters, more water, more land, more electricity.
While the datacenters are less than useless to the general public —in fact they have to pay for them in their electricity and water bills— Sacks’ report asks us to take it on good faith that this new super intelligence —which we can’t now nor may we ever understand— (if it ever exists) will act like some all-knowing and all-caring Godlike algorithm. It will built everything mankind needs —for America only of course— and by returning hegemonic power to the USA it will save the dollar too. To quote the report:
“altogether new intellectual achievements: unraveling ancient scrolls once thought unreadable, making breakthroughs in scientific and mathematical theory, and creating new kinds of digital and physical art—a renaissance.”
Dead Sea NFTs anybody? The futures so bright we’ve got to wear virtual reality goggles.
Elections are Expensive but an Excellent Investment
Trump just bumped the Pentagon budget by a cool $200Bn. rounding it up to a Trillion dollars (just for 2025). Trump likes round numbers. Until Musk dropped a few hundred millions into Trump’s election campaign Sheldon Adelson’s widow, Miriam Adelson, was Trump’s top donor at $100Mn. First she paid $95Mn. then topped it up with a five million tip. The Paypal mafia upped the ante. It was money well spent.
Back at the Pentagon it’s spend-spend-spend. Time to invest some of that extra $200Bn. in AI weapons tech. Peter Thiel’s Anduril has AI killer drone technology, maybe we could also get a targeting system from Palantir recently tested in West Asia. Both, coincidentally, are owned by the same pools of venture capital that dropped $15Mn. into campaign funds to give Trump’s vice president, J.D. Vance, a political start as an Ohio Senator, but first making Vance rich by funding his Midwestern startup incubator.
AI war may have a future. It might be the optimal forever war. Nuclear war is a one shot deal; it starts, everybody dies, it’s over! In an AI war, maybe most —OK, possibly all— of humanity, might die but, even then, the war could continue. Skynet might be connected via Starlink data and paid for by automated Chinese Central Bank Digital Yuan. Even if we are all gone the war can continue with AI’s fighting AI’s sort of like an infinite computer game in the real. This plot line was written up for Terminator three back in the 1980’s:
A hostile self-aware AI running on military hardware, result of the #1 virus infecting #2 AI/system finally becomes a self-aware AI. Then later —a relative term with time travel— descendants of humans who accidentally survived Judgement Day call the self-aware AI “Skynet” because it burned the atmosphere.
Climate Change?
Meanwhile back in 2025 there is a real war that humanity does need to fight to stay alive: mitigating climate change by ending the burning of fossil fuels so we don’t burn our own atmosphere. This survival plan is belittled, denied, ignored and buried in 1970’s nuclear silos by Trump’s Broligarchy billionaires. Wasn’t building great electric cars enough?
StarLink satellite launch rockets and doubling the US electricity use for datacenter cooling is harder to do with wind power. They want more and they want it now and, worst case, they’ll jet off to Mars if AI or climate change turns on us. Also, maybe the AI can fix it? You never know.
AI infrastructure requires burning more fossil fuels to build and power data centres on free public land with lots of fresh water supplies. Water-cooled data centres shall be fed with stolen data scraped from the minds of humanity —from this very article perchance— to create a super-intelligence which might wipe us out. Megalomaniacs in Silicon Valley with a penchant for the apocalyptic, invested in New Zealand bunkers, grew up on Terminator movies. Didn’t they watch the movies? They must know that feeding big data into Large Language Models accessed via Chat GPT housed in cool new datacenters might help bolster their share prices (inflating Price/Earning ratios) but it could also have negative side effects to put it mildly. Maybe they just want to buy time to draw down these cloud investments, investing in bricks and mortar, as David Sacks did in downtown San Francisco divesting from startups to become Trump’s AI & Crypto Tsar.
Maybe by selling the real estate they can buy a Mars rocket?
Seriously though, the addition of David Sacks to Trump’s cabinet was a real coup in Paypal Mafia planning strategy. First he’s one of them; Sacks was COO of PayPal. Second he could legitimize vast troves of dark money in crypto by getting Trump to call off the SEC and having Trump explicitly deregulate crypto using the GENIUS bill. Job done. Sacks could maybe even argue that StableCoin corporate bond purchases might prop-up Trump’s dollar (or at least his $USD1). Finally Sacks can represent them when Trump divvies up land for datacenters and free up Musk’s Grok Colossus mega-datacenter (with all those petty planning problems). If this all works —fingers crossed— legislation to make this document a reality will be passed —who says no to the Pentagon— then Trump can sign it with a flourish in a nice black folder! Hell, we might even survive the apocalypse.
Roll-up! Roll-up! Trump’s “Winning the Race, AMERICA’S AI ACTION PLAN” is out now.
It’s hot off the printing press! Download it here!
We are all Gaza now!
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