Dark Dynamism

DDD - drones, dark factories, deurbanization.

Both red MAGA and its blue BBB version of “Build Back Better” suffer from, what Peter Thiel would call, indefinite optimism or pessimism. The grey tribe of techno-optimists and tech founders should come up with a definite optimistic vision that would bootstrap the desired future.

I propose DDD, or drones, dark factories and deurbanization. Drones include all AI, automation and robotics. Dark factories require no lightning, as they are fully automated, and can be put underground or in remote places. Deurbanization is a bet at reversing the population collapse we witness across cultures and continents. With drones and dark factories we can shrink sad blue cities into happy red and grey startup villages.

I call this DDD vision Dark Dynamism, in a sense of an opaque renaissance. The opaqueness is driven by the rise of AIs, that are black boxes in particular, and by AI, Crypto and Social tech in general. It’s driven by BRICS that operate outside Western banks, by the return to gold as a neutral reserve asset, by rising decentralization and retribalization of the world. By multicurrency mercantilism and by tech startups, like Palantir, Anduril, DeepSeek or Unitree, that seem to rise out of nowhere with ambitions to dominate whole industries.

And the opaqueness is driven also by very strong mimesis that leads to preference falsification, especially among blue tribe’s pundits and blue institutions that are perfectly synchronized and very wrong on many issues, and unable to predict or articulate the future. For example, a China that is innovative and competitive across industries is news to them.

The opaqueness of a black box has a meaning also in the context of Newcomb’s paradox and one-boxing as an abstract metaphor for Puritan ethics and Weber’s paradox of reconciling the Protestant work ethics with predestination. To put it shortly, “one-boxing” the opaque box is a way to do “valley-crossing” from a local optimum to a higher optimum, and a way to lead a morally innovative and consistent life.

We can’t return to the 1950s of peak centralization driven by the printing press, radio and TV news. We can’t return to the Manhattan Project’s era when the US was running as a startup and attracted top engineering talent that had nowhere else to go, as the frontier was closed and titans of industry were crushed by FDR. We can’t return to the era of the Marshall Plan when half of the world was bombed out and the US was the world’s factory.

The blue tribe was all about “getting to Denmark”, an effective fusion of social democracy and globally competitive commerce. Think Højskole and Maersk. But today, the blue tribe is all about getting to Venezuela - about chaos, degrowth and anarcho-tyranny.

The opposite of anarcho-tyranny is a smart regulator with very low rates of false positives and false negatives, says Balaji Srinivasan. The opposite of a blue anarcho-tyranny is an effective fusion between the red tribe of pro-business conservatives and the grey tribe of techno-optimists. The old establishment versus masses and new counter-elites.

I argue that, instead of blue degrowth, this red-grey fusion is about dark growth. Instead of getting to Denmark - a universalistic dream - it is about many dreams. Like getting to Dubai. But not just Dubai, it’s about getting to Miami, El Salvador, Singapore and hopefully many more places soon.

Dark Dynamism is a somewhat similar idea to Bryan Johnson’s Don’t Die startup society with Blueprint protocol for longevity. But aimed at improving the longevity of a sovereign collective. Be it a tribe, a state, a network state or a civilization state.

Drones in a broad sense of AI, automation and robots provide symbiotic intelligence for human transportation, protection, learning, work and family life. It’s not just the emerging low-altitude economy, it’s also all the EVs with autonomous driving and humanoid robots. We need a new uniparty to compete with Unitree.

Dark factories in a broad sense, from cloud kitchens to autonomous mines, asteroid mining and orbital manufacturing reopen new frontiers on the vertical axis - from the subterranean domain to space. “No human, no lights” - except for vertical farms that use LED lights to grow food. Also in terms of alignment and agent-principal problems: the less humans in the loop, the less problems, and the faster, better, cheaper the outcome.

Deurbanization as the third D in the DDD of Dark Dynamism is made feasible by the other two Ds - drones and dark factories. By shrinking a sad blue city into a happy red/grey startup village with lots of kids and robots. Historians like Rudyard Lynch argue that people haven’t learnt how to live in cities yet. Therefore we see population declines and collapses throughout history and are currently experiencing them across cultures - from Japan or South Korea to Eastern Europe to Parsis in India.

In 2023 I wrote that I am a big fan of American Dynamism but I thought post-American dynamism is more likely. In 2025 I am not so sure. I think that Trump 2.0 is akin to FDR 2.0, but in reverse (dismantling the administrative state) and that we have experienced a Velvet Revolution 2.0 - with AI, Crypto and Social tech being set free.

Instead of great power competition we might get a smart power competition and more of a “WAGMI world” - where the rising tide and faster (dark) growth, with less mimetic competition, “lifts all the boats” and puts more products and services on the TV price curve.

The three key technologies of AI, Crypto and Social are upstream of many social changes - after decades of centralizing technologies of the printing press, radio and television we got decentralizing technologies. Like mobile phones, social networks, crypto, drones and now (open source) AI with step function changes, like DeepSeek R1 with 30x cost reduction that destroyed the decel “AI safety” plan to centralize and control AI among a few Big Tech players under the (US, UK, EU) state control.

Companies like Palantir and Anduril have started the American Dynamism trend by unlocking defense industry for tech startups. And if the US was the only place of such zero-to-one innovation, Dark Dynamism as a concept would be less relevant (even though the concept of opaqueness and DDD applies to these two companies as well).

But DeepSeek R1 made it clear for the normies that China can innovate and use Western values of freedom and openness embedded in the open source movement for its own means.

This embarrassed the West that in the last decade copied China with half-measures and slipped into digital authoritarianism, with censorship and debanking of political opponents of the blue tribe.

Dark Dynamism is compatible with both the network state and civilization state concepts. It stresses a vertical dimension (from subterranean domain to space) compared to network states that focus on horizontal decentralization and nuke-proofing digitally-native crypto nations that will compete with legacy fiat nations.

At the same time, Dark Dynamism pushes a horizontal dimension of network states further by stressing deurbanization - moving from sad blue cities to happy red/grey startup villages. It also stresses an orthogonal dimension of opaqueness and “valley-crossing” embedded in the metaphor of a black box in Newcomb's paradox.

Without open source AIs like Llama or R1 the proprietary versions would remain black boxes. But an arrival of R1, seemingly out of nowhere, is emblematic of a dark growth and zero-to-one innovation coming outside Silicon Valley.

Tech founders are definite optimists, while venture capitalists are indefinite optimists - investing in many startups with opposite hypotheses. Dark Dynamism with drones, dark factories and deurbanization adds a definite optimistic dimension to VC investing and connects it to sovereign wealth fund type of investing - like terraforming deserts in the Middle East using desalination plants. Think unlocking trillions through special innovation zones, as successors of special economic zones.

Ultimately Dark Dynamism can support a rise of a new civilization state, consisting of many network states, through a fusion of grey and red tribes, that avoids creating a universalistic monoculture. Balaji says that the continuation of Western values are the internet values - of free speech and free and open technologies.

We might not see another Manhattan or Apollo projects done by the US government anytime soon, but we might see a new Trump 2.0 administration supportive of “lunarpunk moonshots” - contra Mariana Mazzucato, the future is entrepreneurial network states instead of The Entrepreneurial State.

We are simply reversing to the mean from a very strange and ahistorical 20th century of peak centralization. There be dragons. Or rather drones, dark factories and deurbanization.