Dark Growth

From degrowth to dark growth.

We will not return to the Manhattan Project era, but we can do lunar punk moonshots. Dark growth is an alternative to both degrowth, and to what I would call a fragile growth that is highly concentrated and highly visible.

Dark growth means maximizing sovereignty, decentralization, opacity and speed of growth at the same time and thus avoiding mimetic competition.

It is connected to lunar punk, a concept that connects two ideas - an ability to escape detection via faster OODA loops than opponents (the “lunar” aspect) and a counter-cultural dominance (the “punk” aspect) that might win hearts and minds of your opponents as blue jeans and rock and roll won the sympathies of everyone, including the police and soldiers, behind the Iron Curtain. As Balaji Srinivasan says: “the orange coin is the new blue jeans” - bitcoin is the symbol of freedom and prosperity that the US once was.

Degrowth is a negative-sum (stupid) idea that creates a dog-eat-dog world where everyone wants to grab as much as possible from the shrinking pie. And a fragile growth has the Taleb’s Thanksgiving turkey problem. You can’t MAGA with four MAGA stocks dominating the performance of the S&P 500.

There were no true billionaires before bitcoin, says Balaji Srinivasan. Because the state can take your property rather quickly if it chooses to do so for any reason. You might wake up with your accounts frozen and your assets seized. With bitcoin you can take all your fortune with you in your head, but you can’t do the same with factories or houses.

The idea of dark growth is connected to Palmer Luckey’s idea that the subterranean domain will be the next frontier. This implies a proliferation of drones, dark factories and deurbanization. If you have a dark factory, you can put it underground, as no lights are needed. And even more profoundly, no cities are needed. No commute, no unions and housing for workers are needed, as only a bare minimum of humans are involved. This means you can shrink a blue city into a grey startup village.

Dark growth is an alternative to both Make America Great Again and Build Back Better. MAGA and BBB are relying on a past that no longer exists - an exceptional period after WWII, when America was the factory of the world and many countries had their industries completely destroyed during the war. When applied to innovation and startups, dark growth becomes dark dynamism with three priorities: drones, dark factories and deurbanization - or DDD in short.

We saw memes of “Dark MAGA” and “Dark Brandon” and they hint towards intelligence and cunning as a dominant trait - instead of the Nietzschean “will to power” from the industrial age, in the network age we get the “will to intelligence”, says Alexander Bard. And dark growth is the next frontier - not exactly getting to Mars, but on a trajectory to that goal. It’s more like getting to a startup village, or a special innovation zone, that might get us (free and open AI, Crypto and Social) technologies that will be useful on Mars.

We can see Germany pursuing degrowth clearly - first shutting down its nuclear plants, now shutting down VW factories that are unable to compete with Chinese EVs. Sadly it’s a broader trend in the West, where Brussels’ bureacrats meet California politics.

Following examples can illustrate a direction towards dark growth in our adversaries that are very different from Japan in the 1980s whose growth the US was able to crush through the Plaza Accord, because, unlike China, Japan is a satellite of the West and doesn’t have the levels of sovereignty to do things described below and to keep the West in dark. Actually there are only very few countries with high levels of sovereignty - China and India come to mind.

Huawei unveiled Mate 60 in August 2023, right during a visit of the US Secretary of Commerce, Gina Raimondo, to China. The phone features a 7nm chip designed and produced in mainland China, and the launch was an important proof point that China can advance its tech despite sanctions on semiconductors.

In July 2024, Xiaomi unveiled its dark factory for smartphones - a humanless, fully automated and self-improving factory able to produce 10 million phones annually. And in May 2024, Unitree unveiled its G1 humanoid robot for 16,000 dollars.

BRICS countries are seeking alternatives to the dollar system and the dollar technology to avoid sanctions and increase sovereignty (and I would add opacity). They don’t want to replace the dollar, but in words of Balaji Srinivasan, they want to unbundle the dollar.

Gold, or maybe soon bitcoin, are becoming the store of value and means of final settlement. BRICS countries are also engaging in what Kathleen Tyson calls multicurrency mercantilism, like opening bilateral swap lines. They use dollars for trade, but increasingly outside Western banks, also in a form of stablecoins like tether. Combined with the fact that every bank activity is a state secret in China, this leads to dark growth tendencies in countries that flipped the West in terms of the world’s GDP share.

The e/acc movement should strive for dark growth to avoid mimetic competition. Dark growth is also what I call an opaque renaissance - mixing the ideas of AI black boxes with one-boxing in Newcomb's Paradox (a kind of predisposition for “valley-crossing” to find a new local optimum that is at heart of Puritan ethics and the American experiment). A startup village is a related Balaji's idea to bootstrap network states.

Imagine a small family farm house in the countryside that has a dark factory beneath it and a vertical farm beside it. A dark factory is a fully automated factory that requires no lights to operate.

We are experiencing a political realignment from red and blue to green and orange, says Balaji Srinivasan. Green is the color of the dollar and ESG, while orange is the color of bitcoin and Mars. Degrowth versus techno-optimism is the defining political axis of our moment.

AI, robotics and digital fabrication with dark factories can save the West in the medium term - because they can be put underground and therefore could require much less regulation, in terms of ESG, labor laws and DEI. (Almost) no humans, (almost) no problems.

Network states are nuke-proof because of their geographically distributed nature. Dark growth as a concept adds the vertical, subterranean dimension and the focus on deurbanization (alongside drones and dark factories). It shares with network states the focus on opacity and sovereignty.