Tag Archives: charlie stross

October 2025 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The evidence for an increasing worldwide collapse in insect diversity and abundance continues to mount. What’s that you say, you don’t actually like bugs? Well, they are the base of the food chain (after plants) and generally indicators of biodiversity and healthy ecosystems more broadly. That’s right, the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” may have actually been a cockroach. There was also news this month that another “planetary boundary” has been breached. The biodiversity one that would cover insect collapse was already breached a long time ago, and this new one has to do with ocean acidification. Only two more to go for a perfect score of 9/9!

Most hopeful story: The seems to be some mixed evidence, tainted with industry and government propaganda in my opinion, but overall there are some hopeful signs that the global transition to renewable energy is real. It may be too slow and too late to avoid consequences, but it may also avoid the worst possible consequences.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I mused about what it was like to be a child in the distant past of novels I have read, during my own youth, for my own children today, and for young adults I have interacted recently. We hear children are “anxious” and experiencing various crises, and I am not denying there is hard evidence of this, but with my own eyes I also see kids being somewhat safer, kinder, and gentler to each other than in the past. I hope it is possible to mitigate some of the negative effects of technology and other negative influences on kids today while also building on the positive trends.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/830502.It

Charlie Stross continues to rant about renewable energy and fascism

Yes, Charlie Stross continues to rant, enjoyably and correctly, in my view. I’ll share a brief quote and then encourage you to read his long post. And I’m still bothered by the idea that he is 61 and “never expected to get to be this old”. That is not that old, dude! Possibly I feel that way because it is not all that much older than I am! And I am not yet ready to concede that I am old.

The EU also hit a landmark in 2025, with more than 50% of its electricity coming from renewables by late summer. It was going to happen sooner or later, but Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022 sped everything up: Europe had been relying on Russian exports of natural gas via the Nordstream 1 and 2 pipelines, but Russia—which is primarily a natural resource extraction economy—suddenly turned out to be an actively hostile neighbour. (Secondary lesson of this war: nations run by a dictator are subject to erratic foreign policy turns—nobody mention Donald Trump, okay?) Nobody west of Ukraine wanted to be vulnerable to energy price warfare as a prelude to actual fighting, and PV cells are now so cheap that it’s cheaper to install them than it is to continue mining coal to feed into existing coal-fired power stations.

The idea of fossil fuels as “stranded assets” has faded from the US press, but he is surer than ever. And I think he is right, and it is industry and political propaganda (which are, of course, one thing at the moment, or maybe always one thing but different industries get the upper hand depending on the politics) that is hiding this fact from us here in the United States, which is rapidly downshifting to developing country status relative to the world’s most advanced countries.

Charlie Stross on renewable energy

I always enjoy Charlie Stross‘s take on things. He’s a fiction writer, sure, but he seems to have his finger on the pulse of politics and technology, and from an international perspective. He says he is writing more escape fiction now because his past near-future dystopian writings have come true, and that is too depressing to write any more. I still love the Laundry Files and Merchant Princes series though. Anyway, his ideas below are consistent with some recent thoughts I’ve expressed that market incentives have actually shifted to favor renewable energy and electrification, but in the U.S. at least a massive onslaught of oil and gas industry propaganda is successfully keeping us from realizing what we are missing…

Renewables have definitively won: last year it became cheaper to buy and add new photovoltaic panels to the grid in India than it was to mine coal from existing mines to burn in existing power stations. China, with its pivot to electric vehicles, is decarbonizing fast enough to have already passed its net zero goals for 2030: we have probably already passed peak demand for oil. PV panels are not only dirt cheap by the recent standards of 2015: they’re still getting cheaper and they can be rolled out everywhere…

The oil and coal industries have tens of trillions of dollars of assets stranded underground, in the shape of fossil fuel deposits that are slightly too expensive to exploit commercially at this time. The historic bet was that these assets could be dug up and burned later, given that demand appeared to be a permanent feature of our industrial landscape. But demand is now falling, and sooner or late their owners are going to have to write off those assets because they’ve been overtaken by renewables.

Politics and propaganda can’t buck economic forces forever (because economic forces are ultimately, eventually constrained by our real physical universe). The question is how long these trends can take to play out. Charlie says he doesn’t expect to see it, and this is sad to me. I am one decade younger, and that makes my odds only a little bit better. Unlike Charlie, I am not an extremely talented writer making a gift of the contents of my brain to the entire world. Lately it has been making me sad when I learn that the author of a book or series I have enjoyed is dead. I find myself looking up what age they died and what they died from, and wondering what is going to come for me and when. Sad, I know. Such is the existential dread of late middle age.

The Tangerine Shitgibbon

Charlie Stross has a vivid imagination. Take the genocidal American police state in the last three novels of his Merchant Princes series. I don’t want to ruin the plot for you – let’s just say that in the last three (written in 2017-2021) of the nine-novel series the U.S. is an authoritarian state run by a genocidal maniac and using advanced surveillance technology based on cell phone tracking and facial recognition. You have to commit to reading thousands of pages to get to this point, but I highly recommend it. But it’s just fiction, right?

Now here is Stross’s blog post from April 7, 2025.

The same face recognition and IMSI tracking tech that allowed the Biden administration’s Department of Justice to track down a few thousand January 6 rioters is now better-developed, and when the generative AI bubble collapses (as seems to be already happening) there is going to be a lot of surplus data center capacity that the emergent dictatorship can deploy for crunching on that data set to identify protesters. There won’t be many trials (except possibly a handful of show trials and executions as red meat for the base if they run true to form for a dictatorship): the rule of law in the United States is already being undermined as rapidly as happened in the Third Reich, and rather than overloading the prison system they’ll just dig mass graves. (If you’re really lucky the response will be more restrained—but those marchers won’t be getting any social security checks or medicare, will be blacklisted by employers with government contracts, harassed by the police,and so on.) …

One final note: on April 20th (entirely coincidentally, the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth) a point Department of Defense and Homeland Security report is due to recommend whether the 1807 Insurrection Act can be invoked, allowing the use of the Army and National Guard to crack down on “insurrectionists”, whoever they may be—effectively a declaration of martial law…Upshot: I think I was wrong as little as a week ago. The USA may very well be moving into a pre-revolutionary crisis within the next month, with an authoritarian administration seizing emergency powers and preparing to execute an increasingly violent crackdown on the public.

If you are a US citizen or resident you should be very cautious about what you say in the comments on this blog entry.

Well, if he is right I don’t need to get myself in trouble on his blog, I am probably already in plenty of trouble right here on this one so why not dig the hole a bit deeper right now?

Imaginatively paranoid or prescient, time will tell. The technological tools of tyranny have been here since the Russian czar/Nazis/Stalin/Stasi/J. Edgar Hoover started using file cabinets at least, and probably back to the Inquisition or earlier. We are seeing the surveillance take a sinister turn though with the tracking and scoring of people in Xinjiang, Palestine, Libya, and Syria recently. Why would we think the New Management in the U.S. would not be tracking and scoring people? This is basically just marketing technology, and was probably invented here. You can build a statistical model of every American and give score them based on how many dollars you think they are likely to spend on whatever widget you are selling. Then you can target the top 20%, 50%, or 80% with ads. Or, you can use the same logic and the same technology and start dropping bombs on these individuals and their extended families. So the technology has existed, although it seems to be getting more sinister and more accessible all the time. It is our liberal democratic institutions that are supposed to prevent the tools from being used for tyranny.

Charlie Stross: “actual international Neo-Nazi conspiracy to destroy democracy globally”

Dearest readers, I have been dealing with a family emergency here on top of a plate that was already full before the family emergency. I am trying to be somewhat kind to myself and acknowledge that I have very real physical and mental limits. Which is a way of getting to my point that I might be doing some short posts for a little while. I would rather do short frequent posts than long, infrequent ones.

I am not as smart or entertaining and awesome a writer as Charlie Stross, obviously, but here is Charlie Stross acknowledging that he is somewhat overwhelmed by events and might be doing some short posts for awhile.

it’s really hard to write a good carpet-chewing rant by an evil wannabe galactic overlord against a background of an actual international Neo-Nazi conspiracy to destroy democracy globally, and another international conspiracy of billionaires trying to immanetize the AI eschaton and enslave everyone else, and … and … fuck, even Space Opera isn’t safe from the maniacs these days!

You can make fun of people who are serious but somewhat bumbling (think of George Bush or, gulp, Joe Biden) but it is hard to make fun of evil clowns. Clowns can be funny, but only when they are not evil.

Donald Trump causes evil clown panic to worsen

Okay, put an evil clown in a diaper and it’s at least a little bit funny…until they come for you or someone you care about.