I’ll credit Robert Mariani for coining the incisive term dinergoth, but his essay in The New Atlantic, “American Diner Gothic” is too distracted by his personal aesthetic hangups to adequately theorize who dinergoths are, where they came from, and whether the Boomers are truly responsible.

Mariani can only describe the dinergoth in signifiers: sloppy winged eyeliner, extensive tattoos, unconventional piercings, BDSM-inflected clothing, fandom kit. But we can describe the dinergoth condition in simpler terms: it’s the prole drift of the 2010s internet. Do you remember GamerGate? What about NewGrounds? Is the word “SuperWhoLock” an MK Ultra wake word for your subconscious? Remember, much of the culture Mariani ascribes to dinergoths peaked between 2008 and 2017. Archive of Our Own launched in 2009. The first Pizzamas (courtesy Hank and John Green) was in 2012. Bladee’s debut mixtape Gluee released in 2014. Undertale released in 2015. Crunchyroll reached 1 million paid subscribers in 2017, and QAnon broke containment the same year. In my college days, I knew people with the very aesthetic Mariani describes as dinergoth, except they went to Bard College.

We are long past the novelty of the aesthetic signifiers now ascribed to the dinergoth. Among “elite” circles,1 it’s passé, a teenage affectation that has since been leavened into adult taste. But we have failed to realize that it’s been ten, twenty years. Twitter poasters have derided as teenage the White House’s recent propaganda video dressing up aerial strike footage as Call of Duty killstreaks. But Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was released in 2007. The men who grew up in CoD lobbies are in their thirties and forties. The foot soldiers of GamerGate—on both sides—are middle-aged parents in Natick, Massachusetts; Reston, Virginia; and San Mateo, California.

The terminally-online look—dyed hair, anime kitsch, gender non-conformity—took five, ten, fifteen years and a pandemic to filter into flyover country. That tracks. Nashville picked up on synthesizers about five-ish years after disco took off. That’s how culture works. I can understand Mariani’s distaste for anime, but wasn’t he online ten years ago? How else did he find Nick Land?

The Story Goes Like This

That’s right—Robert Mariani’s little narrative about the New Middle America is a riff on the opening of Nick Land’s 1994 essay “Meltdown,” an abstruse Nostradamus text of the AI age written thirty-plus years ahead of schedule, with prose that reads like a shrink-wrapped pallet of Neuromancer paperbacks fed into a hydraulic press. If you squint, you can see prophetic imagery of high-frequency trading, social media brainrot, AI psychosis, hyperpop, politics-by-kayfabe, Beijing’s embrace of technocapital, tent cities in the Tenderloin, and OSINT psyops. The primary factual error is that Land names Los Angeles as the host of the metrophage, when in fact San Francisco became the nexus. It’s a cool essay, but the drug cocktail that revealed this vision to Land failed to clarify the trajectory from 1994 to the post-COVID internet.

But we’re here now, and with hindsight we can trace our footsteps: it was, to a large extent, revealed preference. We largely liked our digital villages and scrolling feeds. We liked the slop, both big-budget and DIY. We preferred our digital friends and 2D lovers to our IRL communities. We concluded that internet life is way better than our real lives. The meatbags took what the invisible hand offered. Some of us (I included) concluded ten years ago that Robert Nozick’s experience machine kicked ass, at least for a while. And as we’re seeing in the backlash to AI slop, many of those meatbags (I included) are walking back those conclusions, seeking out experiences that cannot be experienced through a screen.

Around the same time that Mariani had his dalliance with a woman he’s still not over, I watched CJ the X’s video Bo Burnham vs. Jeff Bezos (2021), a polemic-documentary that better characterizes the lived experience of internet brainrot in a dying nation than Mariani’s essay. I had just been “canceled” for reasons that felt important at the time. And in repeating this video, the fever of my digital derangement broke. I started going outside. I got into road bikes and boutique espresso. I will forever bear the chemical burn scars of 2010s Twitter, but I got out. My soul no longer fits in 160 characters. The dinergoths can escape as well. Capital had its part, downward mobility had its part, but even the most addictive internet panopticons are ultimately products chosen by consumers.

Nick Land might explain how Bleach got to rural Wisconsin—Adult Swim was merely the conduit—but he can’t explain why people liked it.

Rust Belt Gothic

Night in the Woods (2017) ran with the phrase “Rust Belt Gothic” nearly a decade before Robert Mariani applied the term to people dressed like Mae Borowski, Bea Santello, Gregg Lee, and Angus Delaney. Possum Springs is a classically Rust-Belt town: a defunct coal mine, a moldering glass factory, a lingering poverty that a local cult believes can be lifted through live sacrifices to a chthonic entity. The core cast are Very Online precursors to the dinergoth legacy. Bea is a OG goth with an ankh symbol on her dress. Gregg rocks a leather jacket and has a pith helmet with an anarchy sticker on it. Angus’s hat and “annoyingly stident” atheism marks him as a Redditor. And main character Mae rolls around in faded dyed hair, knock-off Doc Martens, and a shopping list of mental illnesses—reminiscent of Mariani’s Portland fling, but in an even more remote corner of the United States. In the Possum Springs of 2017, these friends are anomalous—Mae is returning home from college, and everyone outside the friend group retains a prelapsarian (pre-QAnon, really) small-town demeanor. Mae could trade memes with her friends, but not with anyone else in Possum Springs.

If we want to describe the dinergoth vibe—the dyed hair, the therapy language, the queer identification, the anime fixation—as a mind-virus, Mae brought it to Possum Springs, potentially from her college. And if she didn’t pick up the bug from college, she might have gotten it from people like the McElroy Brothers. These three brothers—Justin, Travis, and Griffin—grew up in Huntington, West Virginia, and have been podcasting since 2010. The McElroys popularized the Dungeons & Dragons actual-play podcast with their show The Adventure Zone. Justin and Griffin co-founded the video game review site Polygon. Travis has become a celebrity among people who play tabletop roleplaying games, and he rolls around in dyed hair and eyeliner. And these sweet, sweet boys are proud Appalachians.

But notably, the McElroys (not to mention the writers of Night in the Woods) did not discover the internet before deindustrialization hollowed out their hometowns. The downward mobility was already baked in. The Boomers didn’t bring Dungeons & Dragons to Kansas City. Private equity didn’t make dyed hair cool.

People like me did—by making board games and Japanese media and deep-fried 808s cool in 2016. Maybe the apprentice electrician in Abilene can’t differentiate the artfully grotesque sexuality of Kill La Kill from the artlessly grotesque sexuality of Eiken. So what he has bad taste—that’s a matter of class.

The New Kitsch and Flash

I am morbidly impressed that Mariani wrote about alternative status games among the downwardly mobile without citing the O.G. analyst of American status, Paul Fussell. The anime stickers and catgirl headbands of the dinergoths are the new kitsch and flash, as W. David Marx framed it in Status and Culture (2022). They’re kitsch in that they have the trappings of high art (it’s Japanese!) without any of the substance of high art, and they’re flash in that they’re loud and obvious and shiny. And that’s fine, actually. Dragon Ball Z does not need to be high art. Not everyone needs good taste.

In fact, Fussell would describe American proletarian culture as a defiant absence of taste. When he wrote Class: A Guide Through the American Status System in 1983, the proles wore purple polyester suits, visible branding, and graphic tees that were sometimes too lewd for polite company. The obvious brands “possess a totemistic power to confer distinction on those who wear them.” The totemistic power of a branded article of clothing continues into the 2020s; only the brands themselves have changed. And now that no one wears suits, the inclinations for loud patterns and overt sexuality now look like purple hair, tattoos, fishnet stockings, and ahegao sweatshirts.

Mariani wants to ascribe this “Cambrian explosion” of melted-down queer, nerd, and goth culture to a collective failure to launch among people born after…let’s say the Berlin Wall. Specifically, Mariani wants to blame the Boomers for taking away our collective American dream to institute Sun Belt Welfare Communism for themselves. But those anime figurines are expensive. Tattoos are expensive. But so are guns and Ford Raptors, and those things sell like hotcakes. Fussell could have told you this—it is possible to be upwardly-mobile and low-class, in much the same way it is possible to be downwardly-mobile and high-class. There’s a correlation, of course, between class and income. But a nurse in Davidson County, Tennessee is better-paid than I am, even if, by my or Mariani’s standards, her art taste is abhorrent.

On Lasell College students in 2016, goth signifiers (and the associated counter-cultural beliefs) were explicit rebellions against pearl-clutching Boomer and Gen X parents. But in 2026, those same signifiers can be defamiliarized and played straight by people who have never heard of an “Anita Sarkeesian.” So what if it’s tacky? It’s fine to be disgusted by the septum piercing on the Buc-ee’s cashier, but twenty years ago, you would have said the same about ear gauges. It’s normal. And in twenty more years, they’ll probably keep the wolf cut—potentially the hair dye too.

Time Keeps Passing

In the same manner Mariani fails to cite Fussell on tacky clothes, he also fails to cite Jean Twenge on his insistence that the dinergoth aesthetic is an outward manifestation of people refusing to grow up. If Mariani wanted the numbers on Zoomers failing to launch, on being slower to pick up jobs and driver’s licenses, Twenge has enlisted herself in the Haidt-Lukianoff “Heterodox” posting pipeline.

And interestingly, some of the purported warning signs of a “woke mind virus” are receding. Queer identification is falling among young adults, per Twenge, and the public opinion on social media (driven in part by backlash against AI) is turning—slowly.

But should a backlash take hold among the dinergoths, we should not expect them to relinquish their hairdos or their hyperpop. People tend to keep the aesthetic signifiers of adolescence and young adulthood, particularly music taste and personal attire. Consider the classic Vsauce video about “retrospective aging” —the teenagers of the ‘80s look old because Gen Xers kept the same hairdos into their 50s. Photoshop a beard and some Warby Parkers onto Norm from Cheers, and he looks like a thirty-something again…to people in the 2020s. The hip slang of the young become the stodgy boomer-isms of the old. The edgy music of teenagers becomes dad-rock with time. Consider: my father got me into Slim Shady. And in time, my children will mock Charli XCX.

I wouldn’t consider the dinergoth look to be a sign of national decline. The poverty of her hometown is a problem, but in the 2020s, the GDP per capita of Mississippi outstrips that of the United Kingdom. The struggles of the towns we can lazily describe as Rust Belt Gothic—drug use, downward mobility, brain drain—are real and endemic. But furry conventions, agate pendants, and Discord fandoms are not proof the country is dying, simply because those aesthetic signifiers signaled wokeness ten years ago.

The forums are mostly gone. 4chan and Tumblr are husks of their old glories. Roosh V found God, Brianna Wu is a centrist now, and Richard Spencer voted for Kamala. The signifiers you remember mean different things now.

And listen—getting your heart broken by an unstable woman with dramatic eyes is a right of passage for a sensitive young man. But those stories are best shared with your closest male friends on a hike.

This writing reflects my views alone, and does not reflect the views of my current employer or previous employers. This is not investment advice.

I think the anonymous author of the essay “Possessed Machines” misread the end of the book—particularly, the essayist undersold how pathetic everyone is.

I’m going to spoil this 150-year-old book: Stavrogin kills himself. He skips town and sends Darya Pavlovna a secret letter saying that he has fled to Switzerland, and that Darya Pavlovna should not follow him (but also should follow him), and that he’ll never kill himself, never! But by the time that letter reaches her hand, Nikolay Vsevolodovich Stavrogin has already returned to his mother’s house and killed himself.

And Stavrogin is the least pathetic man1 in the ensemble.

The Dumbest Murder

Let’s piece together Shatov’s murder—expectation versus reality.

Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky wants Shatov dead because he’s a likely informant. Shatov used to be part of their revolutionary society, but during his travels in America, he came to the conclusion that God had chosen the Russian people (on God’s existence, he is less sure), and thus sought to leave the “common cause.” In an attempt at repentance, he sends a letter to the governor offering to sell out the rest of the cell—but only if he gets an immediate pardon and a pension. The governor, a man advised by his doctor not to think too hard, thinks it’s a joke.

But this letter, once in Verkhovensky’s hands, becomes a death warrant. Verkhovensky rounds up the local “group of five” to meet up with Shatov, make him identify the location of a hidden printing press, kill him, and dig up the press to publish inflammatory manifestoes. Verkhovensky thinks this is a two-birds-one-stone affair: not only will this murder eliminate a threat to the “common cause,” but it will also bind the revolutionaries together, preventing future denunciations.

The actual night is a farce. Virginsky gets cold feet and tries to call off the murder. Shigalyov proclaims this murder “stands in contradiction to [his] political programme” and leaves early. Once Shatov marks the hidden location of the printing press, three guys wrestle him to the ground so that Verkhovensky can shoot Shatov in the head. Lyamshin goes feral from the shock, and two other guys hog-tie and gag him to stop his screaming. Once the group disposes of the body, Verkhovensky skips town, figuring that Kirillov’s suicide note “confessing” to the murder will throw the authorities off the trail, and that none of the group of five will confess.

This does not happen. Virginsky immediately tells his wife2 out of guilt, who in turn is smart enough to say nothing and destroy the manifestoes in the house. Shatov’s wife3 immediately asks for her (now-dead) husband, finds Kirillov’s dead body, and puts two and two together, even in a manic delirium. The town authorities find Shatov’s body within the day. Lyamshin cracks, and tells the authorities everything. Virginsky gets arrested and immediately confesses. Two guys skip town, but get caught within two weeks. Shigalyov gets released early, because even the cops conclude he’s all talk and no action.

And they don’t even dig up the printing press.

These People Can’t Do Anything

Like the milieu of the Underground AI Researcher,4 the revolutionary cell (as it appears in Virginsky’s house) ascribes divergent interpretations to notionally common ideas like “socialism,” “the common cause,” or “artificial general intelligence.” Shigalyov has his whole manifesto that ultimately argues that 90% of people only deserve the rights of cattle; Lyamshin escalates by suggesting the extermination of that 90% (mostly as a joke); Verkhovensky later insists “I’m a scoundrel, actually, not a socialist,” simply animated by will-to-power; meanwhile, Kirillov has his own theology of self-will.

But for all my moral disagreements with San Franciscans writ large, they are more intelligent and hardworking than I. They may have bad art taste, poor understanding of the physical world, and none of the noblesse oblige one would ask of an elite, but Claude Code is damn good, and last week, OpenAI finally updated Deep Research with a modern model!

The revolutionaries in Demons do not remind me of AI researchers—they instead remind me of the leftists I hung out with in college. I’ve spent time in Virginsky’s house, complete with the pointless bickering about theory and the motion to actually start the meeting that everyone showed up for. These are not competent people. Shigalyov’s ten-part symposium is theoryslop.5 Kirillov’s theology is a divide-by-zero error that only he falls for.6 Stavrogin, despite his gentleman’s education, is described (twice!) as bad at writing Russian. And when shit gets real, they all prove chicken.

Dostoyevsky’s Red Pill

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, being a crotchety reactionary, frames the male characters as weak by showing them as subservient to the women in their lives—simps, in modern parlance. Count ‘em up:

• Virginsky’s wife Arina Prokhorovna, a local midwife, “retired” him after a year of marriage. She had a child with another man, who ended up moving in for a couple of weeks.

• Mavriky Nikolayevich spends the entire story following his betrothed Lizaveta Nikolayevna,7 despite Liza clearly preferring Stavrogin. After the doomed gala, Lizaveta Nikolayevna jumps into Stavrogin’s carriage and follows him into bed, while Mavriky Nikolayevich waits outside Stavrogin’s house in the rain.

• The governor cedes his political power (and ultimately sanity) to his wife Yulia Mikhaylovna’s ambitions to be the coolest, hippest liberal in Stowe, Vermont the town. As the doomed gala crashes into a town-wide fire, he is reduced to a babbling husk, claiming (correctly, but unhelpfully) that the real fire is in people’s minds.

• The day before Shatov is killed, his estranged wife Marya Ignatyevna arrives in his house, only to immediately enter labor. Marya Ignatyevna alternately berates him and orders him around, and ultimately cannot decide whether she needs him close or is disgusted by his presence. It is not immediately clear that Shatov, as he kisses his wife’s hands in abject devotion, knows that the child is Stavrogin’s. He dies believing he can finally make it work with his wife and baby son.

• And most importantly of all, the Big Man himself, Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, a self-described intellectual with no intellectual output, a quivering Francophile with regular attacks of the vapors, spends two decades in idle debauchery at the sole dependency of his friend (Lover? De facto wife?) Varvara Petrovna. At the start of the story, Varvara Petrovna pressures him into a (later aborted) marriage with her ward Darya Pavlovna, purportedly because she wanted some other woman to take care of him. Only on his deathbed, as he babbles about Christ with the same melodrama that he once opined about Russia’s follies, does he admit that he loved Varvara Petrovna, an admission that Varvara Petrovna swats away with an admonition to shut up.

Of the men with any feminine relationships, they are almost all “whipped,” hapless creatures browbeaten by the women in their lives. If these men, Dostoyevsky wants us to think, cannot stand up to their women, on what basis can they fight for Russia, or even for its demise?

The only man with active sexual magnetism is the human void Nikolay Vsevolodovich Stavrogin. Lizaveta Nikolayevna throws away her reputation for one night in his bed. Darya Pavlovna fawns over him as a “nurse,” convinced that when all this ends, he’ll come back to her. Marya Ignatyevna…well, she and Shatov both idolized Stavrogin in the past.

It’s a bit red-pill, but one must ask the flipside: why do these women stick around with such pathetic men? Varvara Petrovna, Arina Prokhorovna, and Yuliya Mikhaylovna are all independently wealthy, and even Marya Ignatyevna actively refuses Shatov’s pecuniary help. These are liberal women for 1870s Russia, if not outright socialists. They have neither material nor ideological need for any man in their lives, much less quivering weaklings begging on their knees.

And yet…

And Yet They Won

In fairness, Josef Vissarnionovich Stalin had more hair on his chest than Pyotr S. Verkhovensky, but ultimately, he won where Verkhovensky failed, as a scoundrel-socialist who leveraged national disorder into absolute power.

The revolutionaries orbiting Stavrogin and Verkhovensky, our guys наши, do not need to be unified in purpose, or strong in moral fiber, or even particularly competent to lay waste to this town. And as the chaos of the Great Terror suggests, the Bolsheviks didn’t need to be particularly competent at running things to seize (and hold) control of Russia. Although Dostoyevsky died in 1881, long before the demons in this book took national hold, he identified the nation as susceptible.

Take the Orthodox Church, represented by the bizarre holy man Semyon Yakovlevich, a babbling figure surrounded by supplicants, dispensing and withholding “blessings” at a whim, in one case heaping an absurd quantity of sugar (an expensive commodity in 1870s Russia) on one visitor in a perverse admonition to sweeten her heart. Or take the authorities, in the hapless governor whose most forceful rebuttal to a poem that advocates “Vengeance on all of those who seek / To keep up all the old world’s crimes, / Of marriage, church, and family lines!”8 is that the youths are going about things too quickly. Or take the literary establishment in Karmazinov,9 a self-possessed blowhard who has given up on being polite, given up on Russia, given up even on being a good writer as he contributes to the doomed gala with an agonizing reading of his last literary work, entitled—of course—Merci.

This is what remained, in Dostoyevsky’s view, of Russia: a feeble husk of a civilization that, were it not for his love of the land, he would not consider worth saving. The Church no longer held to moral standards, the authorities no longer had the courage to maintain order, the artistic scene cared more about Paris than about ordinary Russians, and the ordinary people were too drunk to ask for anything better.

The revolution didn’t need to be strong: the establishment had decayed so much that a cadre of soyboys could knock down every power center in a town by ruining one gala. All it took was one or two guys to herd these degenerates into a shambling attempt towards revolutionary violence.

I fear the United States in the 2020s is not that much stronger than the Russian Empire in the 1870s. Where have our moral standards gone, religious or secular? How competent have our institutions turned out? And how have our artistic products turned out since, say, Harambe?

I still remember visiting Virginsky’s house in college. Shigalyov was there, Kirillov, Liputin, although Lyamshin had already been expelled for some off-color joke. But no Stavrogin captured that house’s attention, no Verkhovensky whipped that group into real action. Everyone in that house remained harmless.

But that house only needed two guys to start the chain reaction. And the AI engineers that motivated “Possessed Machines” are much more competent conduits for national destruction than the group of five in Demons.

This writing reflects my views alone, and does not reflect the views of my current employer or previous employers. This is not investment advice.

Recently, I completed the necessary coursework for a Master’s in Business Administration. The diploma will presumably be mailed to me, but I haven’t checked.

Contrary to the clickbait title, I got exactly what I asked for: the “MBA Brain.”

An Aside: The Engineering Brain

I got my Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. Disuse has leached much of the material from my brain, particularly the underlying mathematics and physics. What remains is a mode of thinking I have described as the “Engineering Brain.” I’ve described this to interlocutors as two core lessons:

Lesson One: Significant Figures

In most engineering classes, 90 equals 100 equals 110. If a linear model introduces less than 10% variance versus the nonlinear model, use the linear model. To the extent that engineers employ complex mathematics, we do so to bypass yet more complex computation.

This is the principle between phasors—yes, it involves imaginary numbers, but it delivers us from staring sinusoidal functions in the face. Similarly, slide rules employ logarithms to convert multiplications into additions. Engineers of a prior age also relied on massive books of lookup tables: prix fixe calculations that we could convert into envelope math.

If it need more advanced calculation, we have computers for that. Formerly, this was a human’s job, as seen in the movie Hidden Figures (2016). Now, we have machines for that work.

Lesson Two: Systems Analysis

Particularly, modeling complicated things as black boxes made of black boxes. A black box is a thing where you don’t know (or don’t care about) its internal workings—all you have is a relation of inputs and outputs, commonly summarized in a spec sheet. Notionally, if you understand the spec sheets of a collection of components and connect them appropriately, then you can fully understand the behavior of your larger system.

Of course, the spec sheets only apply to a defined set of conditions. And if when your final system diverges from expectations, you can crack open one of your black box components and find that it, too, is made out of black boxes with their own spec sheets and divergent behaviors.

Within a computer, this principle can take you down to electron levels within a P-N junction, or up to a virtual machine operating on a compute cloud.

Leaving Room For Noise

Taken together, significant figures and systems analysis constitute an approach for understanding things that are simply too large to fit into a human brain: arithmetic logic units, mixture-of-experts language models, electric transmission networks, even human souls if you get the model right.

The approach works because real life is suffused with noise: current transients, dropped tokens, electrocuted squirrels, the fact of free will. A perfect model will never account for all noise, and thus a perfect model is a fool’s errand. Linearize the nonlinear, stick safety factors on your spec sheets, because your mental shortcuts won’t damage your designs more than reality.

This mode of thinking, this “Engineering Brain,” is my primary prize from my undergraduate education. And I started my part-time, asynchronous, online MBA program in 2023 seeking a new mode of thinking.

I got what I paid for.

I have an MBA Brain, too.

Lesson Alpha: The Time Value of Money

The most important (and counterintuitive) lesson of the MBA Brain is that a dollar isn’t really a dollar. There many kinds of money, and the value of each kind of money changes in divergent ways.

The most basic kind of money is cash: a US Dollar is a better store of value than a Bitcoin because I can go to a Starbucks, hand over five dollars, and leave with a latte. But in twenty years, that five dollar bill will buy me a lot less than a latte, because the value of that paper bill falls over time. This is inflation.

A briefcase of cash is a great way to transfer money, but it’s a terrible way to store money, because the value of that briefcase falls over time. This is—to defend the central banks—a good thing, actually. A baseline level of inflation incentivizes people and businesses not to hoard money in briefcases and mattresses, in favor of investing that money into something that appreciates in nominal currency value. That rate of appreciation is your rate of return.

You set your target rate of return for a given investment based on some baseline: the inflation rate, the “risk free” Federal Funds Rate, the interest rate on a savings account. The higher your target rate of return, the more you must pay, either in risk or in alpha, the finance-bro shorthand for privileged, advance, or otherwise non-obvious access or information. If you could have high returns without risk or alpha, then everyone else would have done it too, and now that investment is the new baseline.

So if a briefcase of cash is a bad way to store money, everything else with a rate of return (positive or negative) is also a way to store money: an asset. The easier and faster it is to convert into a briefcase of cash, the more liquid it is.

So far, so basic. But this concept of time-value is a Eldritch concept that destabilizes one’s conception of money, because it implies the value of an asset necessarily is relative and time-dependent. To assess the worth of anything, you must pick a baseline and a window of time. Maybe that baseline is the US Dollar, indexed at the year 2000. Maybe it’s the McDonald’s Big Mac. Maybe it’s Brent Crude, a fundamentally volatile financial fiction named after a type of oil that has not been extracted since 2021.

But it’s never just a dollar.

Lesson Beta: Strategy, Operations, and Tactics

Multiple disciplines of business, from HR to marketing to business organization, frame their concepts in the tripartite taxonomy of strategy, operations, and tactics. These terms, like “wealth” and “love,” are treated as obvious and universal concepts even though everyone uses them differently. Here are my definitions.

Tactics: The specialized knowledge and practices for doing something of value: engineering, construction, information-gathering, making, doing. This is ground-level. This is hourly work, weekly task lists, and monthly data logging. This is what most people do for their paychecks, but it is not the domain of management. An MBA assumes you’re familiar with tactical work, or else assumes you can figure it out at your consulting gig, or else allows you to be detached from the reality of how specific kinds of value are created.

Operations: The process for organizing, tracking, and accelerating the tactical work that creates fundamental value: logistics, procurement, management, payroll, “Do you have what you need to do your job?” This is 10,000-foot work. This is monthly data aggregation, quarterly metrics, annual reporting. This is the work of middle management and the domain of Commoncog management guides, and it requires people who understand the tactical work but refrain from meddling. An MBA should teach you this work, because a good manager can transform a struggling team towards immense success, and a bad manager can destroy what should be a rockstar cohort.

Strategy: The long-view frameworks for deciding what an organization should do, how and why it should do it, and what it should not do: forecasts, narratives, tradeoffs, “This is who we are and why you should give us money.” This is 30,000-foot work. This is annual reviews, five-year plans, generational legacy. This is the what senior managers must do and what investors must assess. These people make a lot of money because the stakes for being right (or wrong) is millions, if not billions of dollars. It requires wide knowledge, deep understanding, and underlying courage alchemized into minor clairvoyance.

These three levels of business interlink and overlap, but they involve different verbs, different skillsets. And they build on each other—operational work without tactical understanding returns mismanagement. Strategic work without operational and tactical understanding returns empty suits carrying glitzy slide decks that don’t make money. And conflating these levels returns weak performance at best and financial disaster at worst.

The Diploma Means Nothing

None of what I learned corresponds to the grades I have received in my MBA program. Between grade inflation and the proliferation of AI tools, the signaling value of a diploma and transcript has fallen to near-zero. My coursework—discussion board posts, multiple-choice exams, simple case studies—can easily be completed with large language models with reinforcement learning and web search. In fact, many of those qualitative assessments are so prescriptive that they disincentivize thinking. Some professors have docked points for bypassing prescriptive structures in favor of more nuanced analysis—but none of them have penalized Turing Test-failing slop.

None of my courses have required serious work either—neither difficult assignments nor heavy reading. I track my time for each course, and I’ve averaged 3-5 hours per week per course. This is presumably on the low end compared to my cohort, but the modal MBA student in my program has a job and children, so I suspect that a more challenging per-course workload would have motivated rebellion.

And much of the materials—particularly in the HR and finance classes—were actively outdated. Stock and bond pricing formulas explain very little in the hype-driven investment markets of the 2020s, in which the companies of today hype EBIDTA numbers to hide poor net profits and the companies of tomorrow apparently court private financing to sidestep the noise. Meanwhile, the HR courses straightforwardly taught the equity-minded “woke” approach so maligned in the 2020s, with no attempts to defend against critiques from the right or the left.

For these reasons, the nominal value of my MBA is functionally worthless. If you want to learn operational management principles, the Commoncog Starter Manager Guide will explain more information more clearly than any coursework. If you want to learn what money really is, take (or audit) an introductory accounting course—any will do. If you want to learn strategy, start by peppering notionally smart people with “why do you believe that” questions until they start stammering. Learn how many of these “smart” people are in fact full of shit. Seek mentorship from someone who isn’t—if you have lobbed enough challenging questions to make them dance, you have likely already earned their respect.

The most important lessons that an MBA cannot teach you are courage and discretion. Without the courage to enforce rules and the discretion to bypass them, your operational principles become feckless bureaucracy. Without the discretion to differentiate alpha from bullshit and the courage to take risk, your strategic knowledge will fail to generate returns on investment.

This writing reflects my views alone, and does not reflect the views of my current employer or previous employers. This is not investment advice.

When I was in middle and high school, I performatively hated Skrillex. I derided his music as cheap trash—slop, as we would call it now—while listening to (and making) music that owed its existence to him and his label OWSLA: Kill the Noise, KOAN Sound, The M Machine, Moody Good, Porter Robinson, Tennyson; music I consider integral to the shape of my soul. I would put The M Machine’s Metropolis (2012-2015) twin-EP in a museum. I consider KOAN Sound and Tennyson high watermarks for complexity and craft in music. But Skrillex was just bro music, so I claimed.

But Sonny Moore is pushing forty now. And I am now old enough to admit that yeah, Skrillex rocks. Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites (2011) was good. In fact, it still holds up. And on April Fool’s Day, 2025, Skrillex released an album/mixtape/DJ set entitled Fuck U Skrillex U Think Ur Andy Warhol but Ur Not!! <3 (2025). This album is simultaneously a bird-flip to Atlantic Records, an official release for many unfinished or live-only “secret tracks,” and an April Fool’s joke. But it also amounts to an exit interview for the decade of music that I will carry into my senescence.

The Aural Arms Race

In the late aughts, music production software got good enough to fit on consumer laptops: Ableton, Logic, Reason, and most famously cracked copies of FL Studio. This revolution in audio technology kicked off an arms race to generate the most insane sounds hitherto known to man. Now-famous artists like James Blake, SOPHIE, and Grimes got their start in this era, posting work on early platforms like MySpace, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp.

Moore was among that cohort. He was already a reasonably famous musician, as a lead singer on the mid-2000s emo band From First to Last. After two albums, he went solo under the name Skrillex. Calling his music “dubstep” oversells the influence from UK grime, drum and bass, and garage, music with a specific history and vibe associated with London raves and pirate radio. (That said, artists like Flux Pavilion and Skream were already moving towards this harder sound.) I think Moore’s previous work on Heroine (2006) is a better point of reference for his early electronic work like My Name is Skrillex (2010): the fast rhythms, heavy guitars, and running-makeup-teen-angst vibes of From First to Last simply translated into a new audio palette, as Moore discovered an toolset that allowed for harder sounds than any guitar could manage at the time.

When considered against its contemporaries at the time, the opening to Black Sabbath (1970) is The Hardest Shit You’ve Heard In Your Life. But compared to the first drop on Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites (2011), with its buzz-saw bass sounds, disco embellishments, and chopped-up, pitch-shifted vocal samples, Black Sabbath sounds like returning to Marlboro Reds after taking 12mg Zyn pouches. Skrillex’s first “real” EP appears fully-formed, but the style was immediately distilled and proliferated like aural moonshine as the ur-sound for Call of Duty headshot compilations. The sound was so extreme and risibly hypermasculine that it was almost immediately parodied, most famously by the Dubba Jonny UKF Dubstep Tutorials that I was too young to recognize as a love letter to a genre that didn’t entirely start with Skrillex.

The Sound of the Factory

As Skrillex has matured not only as a dubstep musician but also as a pop producer and label executive, his genre preferences (and features list) have expanded over time—in fact, Fuck U Skrillex ends with an individual shoutout to everyone featured on the album, including the unknown vandal who spray-painted a wall with what is now the album’s title. And that’s just the people in the studio. “ZEET NOISE” reminds me of Surgeon’s Manhattan soundtrack from Midnight Club: Street Racing (2000), a game I was too young to play competently at the time. “ANDY” riffs on defamiliarized ‘90s R&B for exactly sixteen bars before dropping into a riff on that 2013-15 window when rappers wanted to sound like dubstep. “MOMENTUM” brings out the deep-fried 808s I remember from 2016 Dylan Brady tapes, and the drop from “G2G” is straight deep-fried hyperpop. It took me several listens to recognize “THINGS I PROMISED” as a riff on the closer track from Bangarang (2011), Skrillex’s first full-length album, but one listen to nominate “BIGGY BAP” as the best fakeout drop in dubstep history, beating out Dubba Jonny’s “Not Another UKF Dubstep Tutorial.”

But the sound is predominantly 2010s dubstep, not as it was but as it I remembered it. Early dubstep was certainly more lushly produced than, say, Daft Punk’s Homework (1997) (which does not hold up), but classic tracks like Flux Pavilion’s “I Can’t Stop” (2010), Nero’s “Promises” (2011), and Knife Party’s “Destroy Them With Lazers” (2011) come from an era that had not considered that the second drop could sound different from the first drop. With fifteen years of advancement in workflow and style, the snares have more bite, the bass sounds have more texture, and the background flourishes fill the soundscape better.

I still think the early shit slaps, and I think EA was right to score their rebooted SSX (2012) almost entirely with then-state-of-the-art dubstep and drum & bass tracks. But with Fuck U Skrillex, I no longer have to explain the genre with music I must make excuses for.

Yet I still feel compelled to explain the genre. Why?

Why Do I Feel I Must Explain Myself?

As intimated by earlier pieces on this blog, I am single. And despite moderate (and formerly my best) efforts, I have been that way for some time. In those efforts, I have sought means of explaining myself to the women I have asked to like me. As a relapsed Twitter addict, I am good at condensing my first impressions into something impressive, but my fourth-date explanations of who I really am have always been theoretical exercises. However, upon the surprise release of this album, I found a neat encapsulation for a core part of my soul.

This era of 2010s SoundCloud music was my One Thing during adolescence. I didn’t have a personality before music. I developed things to say to people because of Bad Panda Records, Secret Songs, and PC Music. I got hooked early on music by SOPHIE, Lido, Mura Masa, Cashmere Cat, Umru, Danny L Harle, Dylan Brady, Alice Longyu Gao, Glaive, and most legibly to you Charli XCX. I was there for Vroom Vroom (2016) and Pop 2 (2017),1 and I take pride in that because this era of music formed the foundation of my personality. My hunt for The Hardest Shit on SoundCloud has informed my aesthetic taste writ large. I like Brutalist architecture for the same reason I like Noisia. I like Cy Twombly in the same way I like Arca. I have compared a Dorian Electra cover of Ariana Grande’s “Positions” to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917).

And throughout the 2010s, music was my introduction to the creative process. I started with a cheap Yamaha keyboard, a Shure SM58 plugged into a Macbook via a Blue Icicle, and GarageBand loops. From there, I branched into the chiptune tracker Sunvox, the iOS version of Nanoloop, and a Teenage Engineering OP-1 I still own ten years later. It’s all on my Bandcamp. Those years in The Lab taught me the beginner’s mindset, gave me the thrill of posting something that was at once rudimentary and the best I could manage, and proved that I was more than what was legible to my elders. At age fifteen, I could do something beyond the ability and comprehension of everyone around me, save for the one friend who explored this music with me. I’m still friends with him. And with Fuck U Skrillex U Think Ur Andy Warhol But Ur Not!! <3, I can condense these formative experiences into something that works as a 5K Race Day Playlist. Behold! This is my art taste. This is my sense of humor. This is my work ethic. And this is the kind of music my children will roll their eyes to as teenagers.

But even the hope that one artwork could explain me is delusion. Since my 2020 apotheosis of Twitter brainrot, I have tried very hard to fold nuance into my soul. My road bikes are not in this album, nor is my coffee habit, nor the books that have shaped my worldview. And even if my soul remained compressed enough for a Carrd page, it would be grandiose to ask an external mind to know me as well as I know myself.

But on the flipside, I have grown tired of titrating myself for public consumption, of crafting a bespoke face for every social circle and a tailored aux selection for every carpool. None of these people get Skrillex—only a refined aesthetic palette that I infrequently attribute to my decade-plus as a musician. Occasionally, people notice that I am more than what I reveal. A particular piece of attire, a long-shot reference, an offhand reference to a thing I did. I have come to enjoy the dopamine hit of people concluding that I’m cool.

They don’t know the half of it—primarily because I don’t tell them.

But in the kaleidoscope of bass drops in Fuck U Skrillex, I can explain the degree to which I got The Sauce. I can loop “REDLINE DASH” and in sixty seconds tell someone, “This is what I’m about.”

Contraband with a bag full of cash
Empty street for a redline dash

This writing reflects my views alone, and does not reflect the views of my current employer or previous employers. This is not investment advice.

Were it not for the sex and gore, the question “Explain the title of Parasite (2019)” would make a pretty good eighth-grade English exam. You think the poor Kim family are the parasites, as they lie and cheat their way into employment with the rich Park family, but maybe the rich Park family are the real parasites!

Easy. Done. Obvious. Just post the meme image of Kim Ki-taek driving the rich mother Choi Yeon-gyo:

I want to talk about the smell.

The younger son Park Da-song brings it up first, noticing that the father Kim Ki-taek, mother Chung-sook, and elder sister Ki-jung smell the same. But the rich father Park Dong-ik describes the smell in detail:

Maybe the smell of an old radish pickle? Or that smell when you’re washing a dirty rag?…It’s hard to explain. I smell it when I ride the subway sometimes.

Ki-jung knows the source: it’s from the basement apartment that the Kim family lives in. They can’t excise it without moving out.

The Act Two plot twist is that the Park family house has its own basement, this one a secret from its owners. It was installed as a bunker in case of a North Korean nuclear attack, but it has since been occupied by the former housekeeper Gook Moon-gwang and her husband Oh Geun-sae. Younger son Kim Ki-woo first walks into the hidden basement with his nose covered, suggesting that this basement also smells. For all the murderous antagonism between the Kim family and the old housekeeper, they’re all basement people. They all have the smell.

Remember that for the first half of the movie, Moon-gwang is framed as a well-groomed mainstay of the house. In fact, she has more history with the house than the Park family do, because she was the housekeeper for the architect who owned the house first. And the Kim family, despite living in cramped, dirty conditions, also manage to look well-groomed in the presence of their employers. The children Ki-jung and Ki-woo nail the blazer-over-tee look that became the look of 2010s tech VCs, and the father Ki-taek introduces himself to the patriarch Dong-ik in a well-fitted suit. Even after the Kim’s flat gets flooded, leaving the family in a disaster shelter, they manage to make it to work in presentable fashion.

But outside the view of the rich, the Kim family, as well as Moon-gwang and Geun-sae, all dress in worn, stretched-out, poor-people clothes. They’re all basement people. For all their experience with Benzes and art psychology and braised ribs, they can’t get the smell out of their clothes.

The Evergreen Value of Class (1983) by Paul Fussell

Of course, it’s not literally a smell. But as Paul Fussell could tell you, real class distinctions are just as intractable. Middle class neurotics (like me) can emulate the aesthetics of the upper classes: peep the logos on Instagram and take your pick between vintage, knockoff, and Klarna. But we cannot nail the upper-class vibe, as I am learning in my new job. In my case, the most glaring difference is that I don’t know what rules I can break.

To be upper-class is to buy hundred-dollar wines on company cards, to show up late without apology, to sign off emails with “k thanks bye.” It is to know the rules of power and status so well that you can flout them at will. It is to be a barbarian, indifferent to reality, because to you, that reality is mutable. Whether boom or bust, the Street will still reimburse your bar tab—because if this fund won’t, another fund will.

I could buy a fine suit. I could buy another watch. I have already bought the fragrance. But I cannot dispense of others’ opinions of me, because unlike the true upper class, I could still destroy myself by angering the wrong person once. And for that reason, I still smell middle-class.

The Fog of Class War

The Kim family marvel at how expediently they dupe the Parks into hiring the lot of them, and they wisely take the mother Yeon-gyo as their mark. Yeon-gyo is depicted as too naïve to live, and too pretty to let die. She cannot cook, cannot clean, takes every Kim ruse at face value, dotes on her son while completely oblivious to her daughter’s needs, and—going back to that meme—does not consider that the rainstorm that washed away her son’s camping trip was more than a “blessing in disguise” for…other people.

The father Dong-ik, meanwhile, does not question his wife’s hiring decisions, further enabling the con. Much of the Act Two hiding sequence hinges on the Parks not looking under beds and couches, of being too inattentive to notice the signs of bedlam in their living room. The father, too, doesn’t think about other people. Even when seeing his driver try to staunch a fatal knife wound in his son’s art teacher, his first thought is, “Mr. Kim! What are you doing?” Why aren’t you driving my son to the emergency room?

Only the son Da-song seems to pay attention. He calls out the basement smell first. He picks up on the Morse Code, intuiting that maybe the light sensor on the stairwell is not a light sensor. And he is the first in the family to see Oh Geun-see. A drawing of the man has been framed in the house the whole time.

But the film never explains where the Park family’s wealth comes from. The script suggests the father works all the time, but the film only gives one view into his office, with the brandmark “ANOTHER BRICK”1 and an inscrutable slide deck. The apparent wealth of the Park family is beyond the Kims’ understanding.

Parasite depicts a battle in the class war, but both sides clearly misunderstand the enemy. So it is in real life. The poor frame the machinations of the rich in the CSI-spinoff lore of QAnon, the middle class repost macroeconomic data on Twitter, and the truly rich ask what everyone’s problem is. There’s so much money to make. Why can’t you see it?

The Kim family don’t see it. They only see what they can hustle out of the people with real money. And at the end of the film, no one learns anything.

“I Will Make Money. A Lot of Money.”

This all starts because of a suseok 수석—a viewing stone, told to bring luck and money to the family. During the Act 2 flood that destroys the Kim family’s apartment, Ki-woo fishes that rock out of the sewer water. He clutches to it in the disaster shelter as his father tells him that, despite all the plans he has devised, the best plan remains no plan.

If you plan, something will always go wrong. That’s life…That’s why you should never plan. If you don’t have a plan, you can’t fail. You can’t do anything wrong. Doesn’t matter if you kill someone or commit fucking treason. Nothing fucking matters.

Ki-taek’s speech is cope. After the bloody birthday party that kills his daughter and nearly kills his son, he returns to his plan. Remembering that the basement is now unoccupied and still hidden, he moves in himself. Replicating the madness of the now-dead Geun-see, he writes a letter in Morse Code, (correctly) expecting his son to come looking and recognize the message. Ki-woo replies with his own plan:

I will make money. A lot of money. University degrees, a career, marriage…those are all great, but first, I’ll make money. When I have the money, I’ll buy that house. On the day we move in, Mom and I will be in the garden. Because the sunshine is so nice. All you’ll need to do is to walk up the stairs.

The film doesn’t end with the renunion. It ends in the same semi-basement apartment, now with snow outside the half window. Ki-woo stares, glassy-eyed, through the camera. There are, in theory, paths to immense wealth for a crafty-but-broke hustler like Kim Ki-woo. talks about them frequently.

But that’s cope too, because Ki-woo and the real young men like him misunderstand what “a lot of money” looks like. You don’t buy the Park’s house with a fat bank account. You don’t even buy it with a fat income. You buy it with equity. An LLC owns that house and depreciates it for the tax deduction. That S-Class is a perk covered by Dong-ik’s company. Do you think Patrick Bateman went to Dorsia with his own money? No! Business meals are tax-deductible.

You what the smell is in Parasite? It’s whether your measure of personal wealth keys off your cash flow statement, your income statement, or your balance sheet. If you think a paycheck is the most enticing compensation for a job, then you don’t have real wealth.

The miracle of the middle class is the capacity to amortize immense costs over long periods of time: 30-year mortgages, insurance policies, preventative care, boots that can last ten years. And as we are learning in the post-ZIRP hangover of the 2020s, that miracle can turn into its own prison.

But the truly wealthy have never thought that way about their own money.

A mortgage still implies that “you” are paying for it.

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This writing reflects my views alone, and does not reflect the views of my current employer or previous employers. This is not investment advice.

San Francisco disproportionately smells like shit. Literally; I stepped in some at one point.

I’ve lived exclusively in blue cities since COVID, so I’ve grown used to witnessing poverty and desperation on my walks around town. But San Francisco genuinely gives the sense that it’s coming apart at the seams. The Financial District feels dystopian despite the pleasant weather. Walking out of a $700/night hotel for a short run, I passed tents and trash only to glipse someone on a full-rigid commuter bicycle with the name MOOTS on the downtube. A ten-thousand-dollar bike, as a daily commuter, yet so stealthy as to fool a petty bike thief.

In fact, the whole city is—in a bizarre way—stealth-wealth. I look at the aging facades and taped-over car windows and inexplicably janky Clipper Card ticket system (New York and Boston solved this!!), and I think “Four-thousand-a-month one-beds.” I don’t know if that stealth is unintentional—do San Franciscans flush with wundertechnik money intentionally seek the effete shabbiness of true old money elitism, or has it not occurred to many AI researchers that they could spend their money on beautiful things?

The Tenderloin shows the widest contrast between wealth and poverty. It looks like there are some genuinely nice apartments and hotels in the area, but merely walking up Taylor Street is a concerning tableau. The Trans Pride colorations on the crosswalks deepen the irony: the paint is a good deal cheaper than making the streets safer for people half my weight. Apparently this is the improvement, too. I wonder how much of the anti-institutional bent of the SF tech scene—both the AI-pilled and the BTC-pilled—stems from seeing some of the worst municipal and state governance in the country win reëlection, despite (because?) of the immense capital generated by the residents and businesses they’re supposed to serve. If these are the shmucks running the world, why not obsolete them whole-cloth?

The advertisements are peak SF—only in San Francisco would startups pitch B2B AI-enabled products to other startups. I asked myself whether the TAM of San Fran Founders is high enough to justify wrapping a bus, but then I hung out with a guy who had recently been fired from his job. We went to a party on open-source software (neither of us were open-source programmers), and on his nametag, he listed his workplace as “Stealth.” Everyone is a founder here.

The Waymos are the best way to get around in San Francisco. The absence of a driver frees up the social energy I would have spent on even a quiet Uber ride, allowing me to let the “Chill Vibes” station play without prompting, catch up on my notifications, and zone out for twenty minutes. It’s cheaper than Ubers or Lyfts in Boston, and I’m never prompted to tip or rate a driver. The only technical problem is that Waymos struggle with finding elegant places to pull over. The primary social problem is that I learn a lot from talking to Uber and Lyft drivers.

The Industry

Visiting a city hits different when you have a Rolodex and a corporate bar tab. SF gets a lot more exciting within offices, business lunches, and invite-only parties. As a New Englander and thus a bear, I’m frequently flummoxed by the confidence of people starting businesses with two quarters’ worth of funding and utter faith that AI growth will stay exponential. San Franciscans disproportionately believe in utopia: in Bitcoin replacing the USD as ground-truth monetary value, in artificial intelligence surpassing human output by 2030,1 in the United States outpacing Chinese development, and in all these outcomes being unalloyed goods.

I, meanwhile, put equivalent odds on unabated AI growth through 2030 and on straight-up losing all semiconductor manufacuturing beyond 12nm (REMOTE 1-5%). I can scoff and doubt as much as I like, but they make fuck-off money and I’m a humble wagie. Thiel is right; if I was right and they were wrong, I would have the insane equity portfolio.

This trip reminded me of the manhwa Tower of God. In this world, people who successfully climb the Tower are deemed Rankers. These Rankers are repeatedly shown to be orders of magnitude faster, stronger, and smarter than the Regulars still on the climb. Even the protagonist, with his uncommon strength, fails to rate. I am now a Regular in the San Francisco Technology Nexus. I am of value, at least in a monetary sense. Although I feel deeply out-of-touch, I am clearly smarter (and better-dressed) than many in the SF Tech World. But there are Rankers in this town. They have the smarts to outclass me, the resources to crush me, and the foresight to do so before I realize what’s happening.

Right now, I’m beneath the notice of the Rankers. It won’t stay that way for long.

The Other San Francisco

As it turns out, the negative vibes of San Francisco dissipate with altitude. Even the decay and chaos of the Tenderloin vanishes north of Bush Street, as if the climb to Nob Hill were in fact a seawall against the rising tide of human dysfunction. As I ventured north and west, towards Alamo Hill, Haight-Asbury, and Golden Gate Park, the city felt more amenable: trees, dogs, children, well-dressed people, and the implication of parties that have better gender splits than Tinder. I could see myself riding my bike through Golden Gate Park on quiet early mornings, going to the John Fluevog branch to repair my now-battered shoes, falling in love, and maybe even raising a family.

My primary reason for loving New England is that it allows me to unify my identities as a civil servant, an outdoor athlete, and an artist. Sure, my neighbors are fundamentally unambitious people who look upon the future with fear and disgust, but I have found my place among the autumn leaves and country stores, with enough money to fund my road bikes and boutique espresso. And I could replicate that unity in San Francisco: stake out an apartment west of Van Ness, test my legs on Presidio back roads, make friends among the Haight-Ashbury bohemians, and plunge to sea level to advance the future of the human species.

But at what cost? The rent is in fact the easiest hurdle to jump—not only is my compensation on track to spike, I may soon access the equity and connections that constitute real money. But what of my social circle? After eighteen months in my current town, I’ve become a regular. I’m known and welcomed and invited to parties. In a way I haven’t been since early college days, I am asked-for at scale. And this is the second time I’ve built a social circle after an uprooting move; am I ready to ditch my bike club and art world connections and loose-tie friendships, to try a third time? I’ve gotten good at making friends, and now I have contacts in multiple major cities. But contacts are not friends, and I have no reason to believe that the larger dating pools of San Francisco (or New York or DC) will return me better outcomes. I didn’t get much traction in Boston, so I doubt scale is my issue.

I Don’t Want to Be Like These People

My greatest social skill is shaping myself to fit into a crowd. I can have equally exuberant conversations in art galleries, dive bars, and dissident group chats, and I know enough about enough things to fit in like an insider, wherever I go. But that shapeshifting is not totally plastic: I can be a lot of things to a lot of people, but the inner architecture of my soul still changes to reflect the people I spend my time with.

Sometimes, that’s a good thing. I am made more virtuous by the influence of my dearest friends, and I have grown bolder in the presence of the Substacker cohort I have joined. But will San Francisco make me a better person? Do I want to be in the presence of people who say “NPC” without irony? Do I want to be friends with vice-signalers, with people skimming margin off the burning of Rome? I, for one, have deep sympathy for the permanent underclass. And I fear that if I took Waymos everywhere, and Doordashed Cava all the time, and only hung out with the AGI-pilled, I would lose my capacity to empathize with airline pilots and nurses, truck drivers and air hostesses.

I can recognize my phone as demonic presence, and to that end I try to keep it out of my bedroom.2 But I felt a similar malevolence in much of San Francisco. A spiritual corruption has taken hold in the city, and it has instilled a delusional sense of personal agency and moral entitlement in many. And my soul is poisoned enough to be vulnerable. I could turn monstrous quite quickly.

Remember, my loyalty is to the mission of electric service. AI is simply the driver. For this reason, I am happy to visit San Francisco and advise the people motivating capital expenditure into the institutional goals I care about.

But I don’t want to be friends with SF tech people.
I don’t want to become one of them.
And I fear the transformation has already occurred.

But I don’t have to decide today. I have until January to renew my lease, and in the world of AI, that may as well be a year. I put roughly equivalent odds on:

1. Lapsing my lease and moving to San Francisco by June 2026

2. Lapsing my lease, crashing out, and re-starting my life from my parents’ basement in that same timeframe.

(HIGHLY IMPROBABLE 5-20%)

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This writing reflects my views alone, and does not reflect the views of my current employer or previous employers. This is not investment advice.

A few weeks ago, I went to Montreal with some buddies. The trip amounted to an eating tour with breaks to do tourist things, and it was a valuable reminder of the joy in saying the most shit in the company of other men. We went to Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts at my behest, but it turned out to be a highlight for the whole group, courtesy the current headliner exhibition by Kent Monkman.

Miss Chief Eagle Testickle in the House

The most recurring motif in Monkman’s exhibition, is his:

Gender-fluid alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, [who] often appears in his work as a time-traveling, shape-shifting, supernatural being who reverses the colonial gaze to challenge perceived notions of history and Indigenous peoples.

I got a chuckle at a Boomer tour guide struggling to explain this to similar-aged attendees, but I hope you can recognize a drag persona when you see one.

Miss Chief finds a place in many of Monkman’s pieces, sometimes as a primary subject, sometimes as a face in the crowd, sometimes as a distant observer, and in the case of the flagship piece, History is Painted by the Victors, a voyeur. In this piece, which grants its name to the exhibition at large, Monkman replicates Albert Bierstadt’s painting of Mount Corcoran but includes a mockingly idyllic scene of General Custer’s men bathing, as if these soldiers were nubile savages in their own right. And on the shore, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle stands before an easel, wearing nothing but knee-high red stiletto boots, evidently invisible to lithe pale figures around her.

Miss Chief is depicted in luxuriant detail, perpetually in artful undress, often cradled in flowing red fabric, almost always in Christian Loubotin heels: the expensive, the red bottoms, the bloody shoes. She’s hot, both in the man way and in the woman way.1

In 2025, queer androgyny often looks like an abdication of embodied gender, of rejecting masculinity and femininity in favor of a becoming a mushroom or cute bug. It’s a spiritual dodge away from the tricky questions of sex and desire—not only does evasive androgyny minimize one’s attack surface against misogyny and resentment of men; but it also removes oneself from the accusation of sexual threat. Remember, it is still acceptable to be beautiful in the 2020s, but it is not acceptable to be horny. By abandoning a willful identification to any human gender, the uwu-enby can exempt themselves from the clingy desperation of feminine attachment and the predatory hunger of masculine want, in favor of platonic cuddling and the occasional smooch.2

This works great for a lot of people. But as a gay Cree man, Monkman does not have this option. Instead, he embraces a maximalist androgyny, posing a sculpted masculine physique like a pinup girl, and depicting the figure in thousand-dollar heels that are not sold in that size.3

In text, such a concept calls to mind the twee, underwhelming “queer art” I put up with as a leftist college student, art that was only noteworthy in that it was gay, as described by an exegesis on the adjacent placard in fourteen-point serif. But in practice, it works, because Monkman is—for all his sincere focus about Indigenous self-authorship—a fan and student of French Romantic art. His approach to color, silhouette, and composition reflect that lineage: big skies, dramatic facial expressions, beautiful bodies. The subject matter has a political agenda, but the politics never impede the eroticism.

Influences on One’s Sleeve

Kent Monkman names as an influence Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), who in turn took influence from Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), who in turn never painted the same after witnessing the works of the Venetian Renaissance. Venice didn’t have the greats you remember: da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Botticelli were all Florentine. Those artists do live up to the hype (I must return to Florence), but they focused on technical perfection: clean lines, precise imagery, deep lore on all those dudes around baby Jesus. The Venetians didn’t care about lines—soft shapes and wonky figures were forgivable as long as that ultramarine blue went hard.

Rubens was, on a technical level, a more advanced painter than his Venetian forebears. But his post-1600s works don’t seek perfect legibility. There’s a lot going on in paintings like Perseus Liberating Andromeda (1639-40) and The Feast of Venus (1635-1636), and Rubens lets subject and background blend into each other. But the vibes still hit, in part because because Rubens is good at painting hot people, in part because his red fabrics consistently pop.

Delacroix took this ethos into the industrial age, re-emphasizing color and movement over form, in contravension of both Neoclassical painting and the then-rising technology of photography. Instead of perfection, Delacroix sought the sublime in his artwork, in the hopes that if you painted a hot enough woman, the resulting artwork really might become a portal to God. Don’t laugh too hard—the moral of Pygmalion’s Statue is that sufficiently beautiful art does court the attention of the Divine. To that end, Delacroix painted not only hot women but also chaotic scenes of battle and shipwreck that—like Rubens’s old works—don’t seek perfect legibility but instead luxuriate in spectacle and color.

Monkman can pull this ethos even further. With the aid of high-resolution photography, he can stage a painting with real-life models, even letting those models improvise a bit during the shoot. This enables paintings as lifelike as he chooses without trading off visual spectacle. However, the intervening two centuries since French Romanticism have brought new advancements in artistic abstraction. Now, painters can access a language of abstraction in which wonky figures and muddled lines are not mere technical failures but instead careful references to prior artistic movements. Remember: Kent Monkman can paint a painting that looks like a photograph, so every deviation from that style is on purpose. As an example, consider—in my opinion—the coolest painting in the exhibition:

Like Rubens’s and Delacroix’s paintings, Seeing Red does not seek total legibility. But instead of only prioritizing loud colors,4 Monkman throws bizarre imagery at the viewer, in a manner you have also seen in Childish Gambino’s music video for “This is America”. Why is there a Spanish bullfight in the suburbs of Winnipeg? Why is the bull painted in a Cubist manner? Is that a war dance in the background? Is that why the police helicopter is here? But why is Hermes chilling in the painting, with his divine winged Adidas dangling from the power lines? The density and discontinuity of symbolism in the piece calls to mind a riot. And the invocation of a riot motivates the viewer to ask why Kent Monkman, a Cree Indian who thinks a great deal about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s role in the genocide of his people, wants a viewer to think about rioting.

Political Art Doesn’t Have to Suck

The line between political art and propaganda is thin and fundamentally impossible to articulate outside the Potter Stewart test of knowing it when one sees it. Monkman’s work straddles that dividing line, particularly in his paintings of the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline.

I’ve developed a reflexive distaste for leftist propaganda, largely because most of it fails as art. The symbols are blunted out of fear of misuse, the eroticism is bowdlerized into affirmation, and the memes buckle under the weight of their own asterisks. Contemporary leftist art frequently doesn’t have The Sauce, in part because there is no greater danger to a leftist artist than another leftist artist.

Monkman’s paintings are nearly as blunt—these paintings hit the viewer over the head with “I’m GAY, I’m CREE, and I’m MAD,” and even Miss Chief Eagle Testickle treads into twee platitudes about caring for each other in the apocalypse, or whatever. But Monkman’s Romanticism redeems the art. The queer, Indigenous, and anticolonial subject matter do not interfere with the color and composition that puts Monkman in dialogue with the Old Masters that are just as much his ancestors as his Cree forbears. The symbolism is given room to speak, the jokes are allowed to land, Miss Chief is allowed to be horny for a Mountie, and Monkman refused to apologize for his drag persona’s $1,000 heels. Art can advance political goals without sacrificing underlying quality.

It just has to be good art.

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TThis writing reflects my views alone, and does not reflect the views of my current employer or previous employers. This is not investment advice.

They were called grotesques because to the elites of the late 19th century, they were. No serifs. No italics. No adornment. Just bigass block characters meant for disturbing new typographical use cases: advertisements, printed tickets, industrial signage. The steampunk machine god that slew Victorian propriety and differentiation issued its edicts in Akzidenz-Grotesk: “Commercial-Use Grotesque.”

Max Miedinger took that ethos seriously when, more than half a century later, he developed the typeface that became Helvetica. He was among the International Typographic Style—the Swiss Style, commonly. These people were capital-M Modernists. The believed in technological utopia and the value of using modern technology for aesthetic purposes. But unlike the 1920s counterculturalists of Constructivism, de Stijl, and Bauhaus, the Swiss typographers tried to be mainstream. They believed in grids, in geometric design, in the new artform of photography, in form following function, but they weren’t ideologues about it. The pure-Bauhaus typeface Futura lives and dies by its geometry, even at the cost of readability. It’s a pain to use as body text.

Helvetica, by contrast, never fights with its users, by design. Max Miedinger specifically wanted a readable, usable typeface suitable for commercial use. Clean. Flexible. Neutral.

How to Become the Default

Very few typefaces work well as both heading and body text—the typographical details that make small text readable in paragraphs look washed out in big letters atop distracting graphics. The flourishes that can stand up to such heavy-duty eyeball capture become overwhelming in fine print. Helvetica is special in that it does everything—narrow, wide, large, small, street sign, computer screen. It rarely looks exciting or high concept—I personally only like Helvetica’s look when it’s stretched to its extremes—but it never looks bad. I can write this essay on my phone, without my glasses, in Helvetica, without straining my eyes.

This flexibility of use enabled Helvetica to be used on anything, not just the ads, tickets, and signage of its grotesque forebears. As the typeface for the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority, it blends into the mud-smeared color-coding of daily commutes. As the base for corporate wordmarks, it can change association through mere changes in color. And because it works well enough as body text, you don’t need to break your brain and budget trying to license two typefaces that somehow present a unified front for your brand identity.

This flexibility of form applied to licensing, too. Linotype licensed Helvetica to IBM, Adobe, Xerox, and Apple in the ‘70s and ‘80s, before people really believed this “personal computer” thing would catch on. And designers found that Helvetica worked just as well on printer paper and CRT screens as it did on every other commercial application. Because it was clean, flexible, and neutral.

It was a perfect default typeface.

The Image of Max Miedinger

Of course, Helvetica’s influence stretches beyond itself. Venerable Arial is a clone of Helvetica, but such a statement understates both the impressiveness of the clone and the additional functionality layered on top. Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders designed Arial to have the same per-character dimensions as Helvetica, meaning that switching from Helvetica to Arial, from Macintosh to Windows, from Linotype-Hell AG to the Monotype Corporation, is utterly seamless. Try it: nothing moves. No line breaks change. Your typographical switching costs are zero. Sure, Arial looks less sharp, less clean, more lame, but in return, it’s more durable against degradation.

Arial remains readable at low resolution, on compressed-to-pieces rasterizations, when resized to the wrong aspect ratio. And it proved cheap. It was packaged on every Windows machine from its inception and set as default on nearly every computer application and webpage. It became the Starter Font for every amateur project, rush job, and C-tier software that couldn’t bother to change it. Arial carries its mandate as the digital default into 2025, serving as the flagship typeface for Google Workspace, the lowest-common denominator productivity suite for Gen Z, now that Microsoft 365 has locked its Office Suite behind a frustrating paywall.

More than most typefaces, Arial remains functional even when deep-fried. It’s clean enough to shoulder digital compression, flexible enough to survive misuse, and aesthetically neutral like the typeface it clones. If anything, Arial looks wrong on the high-resolution graphics and clean signage favored by its antecedent. And for this reason, it deserves its mantle as the digital default: the typeface for people who hate typography.

New Helveticas

Few digital typefaces truly die once sunk into default libraries, but the original Helvetica is increasingly outmoded in favor of newer iterations. The straightforward replacement is Helvetica Neue, a nip-and-tuck that yet widens the flexibility of this typeface. The ultralight and extra black Helveticas that I like are really features of this v2.0 product.

But the more interesting replacement is San Francisco, the default “Sans Serif” typeface for Apple products. Unlike Arial, it does not explicitly match Helvetica, beat-for-beat. Instead, it morphs. It changes its spacing, character choice, and even fundamental outlines depending on context. It does so because unlike the Helvetica typeface it still emulates, it is fundamentally unmoored from the physical realities of typesetting, printing, and even displays. No mortal eyes see San Francisco: its true form is a library of vectors, each character parameterized to respond to digital inputs, its true name redacted in iOS system settings. It is clean, flexible, and neutral enough to bury the whimsy of Jony Ive’s design legacy.

The Wrong Typeface for Reindustrialization

This history underpins my disgust at the use of Helvetica and other Swiss-style neo-grotesque typefaces in the visual language of the Thiel-pilled, Tech-Right, The Gundo-based, #Reindustrialize movement. This cohort of founders, engineers, and policy analysts—a cohort I have sought political coalition with—has adopted a unified aesthetic language of Silicon Valley flat design kitbashed with pops of PCB-etched monospace, military-earth-tone colors, 1940s industrial propaganda, and anime kitsch. The most cohesive demonstrations of the aesthetic are the advertisements for nouvelle-défense startup Anduril, which merge low-cost minimalist vector graphics with aesthetic brainstems forged in the multiplayer lobbies of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

Yet Anduril’s typeface of choice is Helvetica. Palantir uses the contemporary rival Univers. The Institute for Progress uses Söhne, a riff on Akzidenz-Grotesk like Helvetica was. A review of these based and pilled “hardtech” companies reveals a panoply of neo-grotesque riffs on Max Miedinger’s work—a bit softer here, a bit more geometric there, all with the flat Modernist design language that has been the Look of the Future since the Swiss Style was born. On a superficial level, the underlying design brief of Helvetica matches the ethos of this nascent-yet-ascendant cohort. Form following function. New graphics techniques embedded in grid formats. Mathematical precision balanced against commercial necessity. Faith in the techno-utopia.

But the original designers of the International Typographical Style were true-believing liberal internationalists. The new right, by contrast, are not neutral. They are not internationalist. And their aesthetic tastes are not clean. The prevailing vibe is garish shirts, greentext, and mecha anime; redeemed into gilded Christianity, grotesque masculinity, and a reverence for the gross incandescence of a blast furnace.

Despite this mismatch, the #Reindustrialize cohort chose Helvetica. They chose Helvetica because it was the default typeface of the modern world. They chose Helvetica because it was so default that even the new defaults look like the old default. And if they didn’t choose Helvetica, it was because they wanted a Swiss-style neo-grotesque like Helvetica.

Short of , there are almost no artists or art critics among the current right. They do not know art, nor art history. As a result, their artistic influences are borrowed and scarcely transformed, with little mind paid to where those influences came from. The result is bland corporatism when they shop out their design, and kitchy Midjourney slop when they don’t. They don’t know how to make art, so they deride it as gay, and woke, and perhaps mere vibes enabling style-over-substance grifters. They do not know of a style of art that loves both high technology and masculine nationalism.

Yet such an art style exists.

They could have embraced Futurism this whole time.

A Neo-Futurist Typography

We have forgotten how immensely quickly technology changed at the dawn of the 20th century, before the World Wars. Within mere decades, the world saw the mass proliferation of telephones, phonographs, automobiles, aircraft, ocean liners, moving pictures, and mass-media newspapers. Our current sociopolitical convulsions in the wake of AI are—if anything—less extreme than what the world saw between 1900 and 1920. To the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, existing approaches to art, politics, and language itself were insufficient for representing reality. To this era, he and his artist buddies invoked the name Futurism. The Futurists declared war on the past and its institutional gatekeepers. In its place, the Futurists sought danger, passion, technology, warfare, and above all speed.

Marinetti focused on the literary, describing a poetic style he called words-in-freedom. Imagine: a friend of yours—bright, eloquent, high-agency—finds himself in a zone of maximum human experience: a war, a natural disaster, a thirty-six hour product launch. He’s telling you how it’s going. How would he talk?

He will begin by brutally destroying the syntax of his speech. He wastes no time in building sentences. Punctuation and the right adjectives will mean nothing to him. He will despise subtleties and nuances of language. Breathlessly he will assault your nerves with visual, auditory, olfactory sensations, just as they come to him. The rush of steam-emotion will burst the sentence’s steampipe, the valves of punctuation, and the adjectival clamp. Fistfuls of essential words in no conventional order. Sole preoccupation of the narrator, to render every vibration of his being.1

He’s locked in. He got heat in his repo. He’s on his seventh Zyn this morning. Let’s fucking go.

To Marinetti, syntax is a hindrance. Why bother with the “right” word if the “wrong” word is more direct? Why not describe a drone swarm as an orchestra, or call a rifle your waifu? Why waste time writing a sentence when a meme can condense a book and your impressions of it into a 20 kB GIF? Why speak in words at all if you can speak in tokens instead?

The painters of Italian Futurism made this ethos explicit: sharp lines, garish colors, paintings of cars and trains and heavy machinery, all portrayed as if the subject was screaming by at Mach 3, as if the heat from the exhausts could warp reality itself. The Futurists would have seen the eroticism of a GMLRS rocket battery. That feeling would have made it onto canvas.

And Marinetti had ideas for translating that feeling into typography:

My revolution is aimed at the so-called typographical harmony of the page, which is contrary to the flux and reflux, the leaps and bursts of style that run through the page. On the same page, therefore, we will use three or four colours of ink, or even twenty different typefaces if necessary. For example: italics for a series of similar or swift sensations, boldface for the violent onomatopoeias, and so on. With this typographical revolution and this multicolored variety in the letters I mean to redouble the expressive force of words. [Emphasis original]2

Typographical harmony is fundamental to Helvetica, a typeface specifically designed to get out of the way of both typesetter and reader. Apple’s San Francisco typeface seeks even greater harmony, towards a truly seamless digital interface. Marinetti would have the Tech Right veer in the opposite direction, to appropriate the digital tools that enable a maximally bouba typeface, and instead implement an equal and opposite drive toward the loud, the overbearing, the willfully ugly, the maximally kiki.

Of course, Marinetti was not only an Italian Futurist—he was an Italian Fascist, too. His enemies were not merely the Old Guard and its retrograde gatekeepers; he also named feminism, pacifism, and moralism as foes. I don’t necessarily consider this a reason to reject Futurism—in fact, the militaristic, authori-curious, lǎo dēng 老登 flavor of Futurism fits well with this new right. I personally find Futurism inherently exciting, and if nothing else, I resent seeking political coalition with people who have wack taste in art. I insist on better typography out of personal honor.

Creating An Anti-Helvetica

Helvetica was not conceived in a vacuum. It was originally named Neue Haas Grotesk—a “neo-grotesque” that explicitly riffed on the blocky, commercially-minded typefaces that were among the immense cultural shifts preceding Futurism. In such a fashion, a Neo-Futurist typeface can and should adapt ideas from prior typographical styles towards the new tools and use cases available to us in the age of artificial intelligence, autonomy-enabled warfare, and meme-driven politics.

From this new right’s technological underpinnings we find a deep love for software engineering—its luminaries from Peter Thiel to Marc Andreesen to Elon Musk all got their starts as software engineers, and the primary question of the day is artificial intelligence. Software programming has seen an evolution of digital typography largely parallel from digital graphic design. The monospace typefaces of computer terminals—Courier, Monaco, Lucida Console—draw initial guidance from the same twin mandates as typewriters: per-character readability within strict physical constraints. For typewriters, the uniform shape of each key forced every character, from “l” to “m,” to fit in the same character width. For software engineering, this comes from the mandate for lines of software to match perfectly from row to row—because unlike normal text, software code must be scanned up-and-down, line-to-line, not merely read like prose.

And from this new right’s 2010s heart we find the stylistic flourishes of meme culture—digital compression, pastiche media, greentext atop pink backgrounds, a neo-Dada aesthetic core that Julius Evola would have recognized from his own youth, that the Marquis de Sade would have wanted more from. As much as the ideological package of the Tech Right, of #Reindustrialize, rests on a canon of midcentury science fiction and counter-MBA business books, the emotional flame that brought Donald J. Trump to the Presidency comes from SomethingAwful and 4chan, from violent video games and YouTube Poops, from the barbaric glee of Elon Musk carrying a sink into Twitter headquarters in reference to a deep-fried meme.

In the same manner as Apple’s San Francisco typeface, a Neo-Futurist typeface need not care about the physical realities of type. It is allowed to be fully digital, to shift and twist, to embrace dynamic italics for similar or swift sensations, to take on boldface for violent onomatopoeias, to deep-fry itself so that it can redouble the expressive force of words.

A Neo-Futurist art style would better match the Zyn-popping, heavy-lifting, 996-ing, agent-maxxing, hypermasculinity of the new right-wing, China-hawk, hardtech-shipping, Silicon Valley culture.

Political Movements Should Care About Art

I pitched this idea to some guys in a group chat, and they weren’t convinced. They were skeptical about the value of aesthetics in crystallizing Donald Trump’s ethos into a full-fledged ideological package that answers their purported challenges of deglobalization, mass immigration, falling birth rates, and industrial decay. They worried that a greater focus on aesthetics was in fact a focus on vibes, and that the introduction of vibes to national projects was an opening for grifters to enter the fray. That worry has history—consider the prominence on anti-fashion choices in Silicon Valley, like Marc Zuckerberg’s initial insistence on grey hoodies or Palmer Luckey’s continued insistence on Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops.

But this new right is not merely selling software—they’re building a new vision of The Nation. Their diagnosis of failures in the American project includes an assessment of moral and cultural decay, for which they blame feminists, LGBT activists, and miscellaneous intellectual traditions. If the culture was better, they claim, then the streets would be safer, the country more unified, and the children better raised. And as a hater of slop, I have sympathy for that claim. But in failing to make and fund better art, this Tech Right has accepted aesthetics scarcely modified from the B2B-SaaS-running, BAYC-purchasing, “tech bros” that the left accuses them of being. In failing to field aesthetic alternatives—in rejecting aesthetic escalation as vibesification bordering on deceit—they invite the accusation that for all their criticisms of the status quo, they lack better ideas.

Why don’t I hear about the DailyWire+ movie collection, even from conservatives? Why is there no contemporary music associated with Dimes Square? Why can The Menswear Guy throw around dunks on basically every right-wing influencer and politician except Michael Anton? Why is it just Passage Press selling interesting books (both classic and modern!) with beautiful covers? Why is it just Neil Panchal carrying the torch of cool typography for modern American Industrialism? Where are the poets, the painters, the musicians? Where are the people making the forward-looking, pro-American, pro-masculinity art that I’m told is missing? The answer, of course, is that there is almost no art in the ascending right, short of Ghiblification filters, Norman Rockwell memes, and borrowed glamor from Orthodox and Catholic art. But even the Catholic Church has a deep collection of increasingly conceptual contemporary art, including a room of Matisse pieces and a ragged abstract tapestry of the Crucifixion (in the Francesco Messina room) that’s so haunting and affecting that it appropriately prepared me for St. Peter’s Basilica.

Art is important. It is a vanguard for culture, a distillation of otherwise-formless human experience, a means of describing why one would pray, go to war, fall in love, or create something new. To forsake interest in beauty suggests a disinterest in culture, in language, in the erotic and the transformative. That is bad enough. But to bemoan cultural degeneration without offering a generative response is an insult to people with experiences and aspirations that cannot fit on a spreadsheet. It suggests that the ascendant right is merely a coalition of foul-smelling trolls and swagless Philistines. Even ascetics and barbarians seek beauty. That this based and pilled right is so careless with their aesthetic choices that their websites look identical to those of the ancien régime they seek to destroy does damage to the claim that they believe in a better culture, a better nation, or even God Himself.

I am in political coalition with these people because I seek the power to fix things in this country, and no one else is trying. But is an insult that they cannot produce better art about their politics than I can on a drunken Saturday night with my iPad. I must ask and his ilk: is the right is lying to me about having a vision for a revived West, in the same way the left has lied to me about seeking the power to fix anything?

If not, why is Man’s World alone in the cultural sphere?

This writing reflects my views alone, and does not reflect the views of my current employer or previous employers. This is not investment advice.

I was in DC some time ago. I was considering a career change, and I had to case the joint. While I was there, I joined a salon conversation at someone’s house. The topic was—among other things—what a post-liberal, right-wing, nationalist conservative view of “America” might look like.

One man—we were almost all men—suggested a threefold account:

1. This new right believes that political power must be seized and wielded for the Good.

2. It is skeptical of secular, liberal, international institutions—instead it argues that sovereign nation states should govern in accordance with their national interests.

3. This new right rejects that the United States is a propositional nation based on ideas—instead, it posits that the United States is built on a culture, a land, and a heritage.

That’s the word—heritage.

The conversation segued to what kinds of allies the United States must seek out, should we reject liberalism. The group agreed that such civilizational allies would—at least—try to perpetuate themselves, instead of decaying from low birthrates and unconstrained immigration.

One guy said, “I don’t actually care if Western allies look like liberal American democracies.”

Another responded. “I don’t actually care if America stays a democracy.”

I am ambivalent about this ideological package. I’ve shared my face; you can look at it again and reasonably deduce why I may feel this way. But this account of Heritage Americans is internally coherent. It is plainly clear that the Founding Fathers were of a particular ethnic stock, religious foundation, and intellectual tradition. It is also plainly clear (if you have met me) that I do not share their ethnic, religious, or intellectual origins. The lazy accusation is to frame nationalist conservatives as white supremacists, but American white supremacists are remarkably ethnically syncretic. The proponents of heritage-based nationalism are more specific: they recognize that race is too broad a brush to paint on people, so instead they focus on ethnicities. And the core of their argument against the propositional nation is the assertion of an American ethnicity: the Heritage American.

There is, of course, a rather straightforward account of what it means to be a Heritage American: do you see your family in Albion’s Seed (1989), by David Hackett Fischer?

Four British Folkways in America

The subtitle suggests the thesis. Fischer’s history claims that describing the heritage of these the United States as White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant misses important details about who settled the original American land, why they did so, and how different these cultures really were. I’m sure you’ve heard the pitch—many accounts of Vice President J.D. Vance invoke a degraded echo of this book. Up north arrived the Puritans: stuffy, over-educated, in each others’ business, an austere people who thought black was too dramatic a color for commoners to wear and who in some cases returned to England to support the Republicans in the English Civil War. In the war’s wake, a cadre of second-son Cavaliers, loyal to the Crown, traveled to Virginia to replicate the gentlemanly life of the Old Country: cards, horse-racing, loud fashions, and a trickle-down dispersion of repression and violence. In between lived the Quakers, genuinely radical pacifist egalitarians who earnestly sought a pluralistic society of Mennonites, Anabaptists, Pietists, and even friendly Indians…as long as the Friends married one another after gauntlets of committee approvals for each match. And out in the country were the Borderers, the Backcountry men, the Scots-Irish barbarians who migrated from one frontier hill country to another, doing battle with the native peoples with a bourbon in one hand and a rifle in the other.

Each of these cultures, in Fischer’s account, were distinct peoples. Their vernacular architectures were different; their marriage and death rituals were different; their attitudes to work and time were different; their approaches to the English language were barely intelligible to one another. I suspect that many revolutionary Yankees scarcely considered their Appalachian countrymen human, much less English. Yet they all, through national, martial, cultural, and genetic agglomeration, became a single people: Americans. That cohort had some fundamental contradictions—the American Civil War brought some of them to light—but even that conflict failed to completely rend apart the nation. And to this day, Vermont, South Carolina, Ohio, and Texas fly the same flag—even if some of the stripes have been recolored.

This is a clean account of the American ethnicity: heterogenous, but unified. Spiritually pluralist, but Christian. British by birth, but distinct from Yookay mores. There are, of course, unfortunate redactions from this account: particularly, anyone whose American stories started among the tired, the poor, the huddled masses landing on Ellis Island. Many of these people’s descendants checked “White” on their 2020 Census forms, but if you are a nationalist conservative, you have to draw a line somewhere. And even in 1900, about 60% of this Nation of Immigrants could trace their lineage to Britain. The decline of British ancestry in the American population and cultural hegemony is rather new: it started with the New Deal.

Again, building an account of the Heritage American off Albion’s Seed is entirely coherent—and if it disqualifies some nationalist conservatives from the ethnicity they champion, that’s their L to hold.

But There Are Two Problems

The first is a quirk of the immigrants. As Fischer relays, the immigrants did not merely assimilate: they assimilated into the folkways of the cultures they moved into. Fischer provides as examples Walter Fauntroy Jr., a black politician with the airs (and name) of a Virginia gentleman; and Barry Goldwater, a Jewish man who took up the square-jawed grit of a backcountry Westerner. I’m an example, too. I am not, will never be, and do not seek to be an East Anglian Congregationalist. But I grew up a Yankee. I, too, value education, hard work, and inconvenient snobbery. I, too, seek to “improve the time” and thus find lassitude grating. The old Yankee WASPs are mostly gone, and the torchbearers of the Puritans’ prudish, nosy, Matthew 5:14-16 moralism are…the woke. Ignore how they dress: the greatest pearl-clutchers of the modern age are the Miku Binder Jefferson tenderqueers. And their utopia is as stifling and as prone to six-hour sermons in the cold as anything John Winthrop dreamed of. I was there for it.

I, too, recognized my people in Fisher’s history.

The second problem is deeper: the endpoint of Albion’s Seed argues that the United States is built not on one proposition but on four: a bespoke account of freedom for each of the four core British roots of America. From New England came an “Ordered Liberty” in which a properly functioning society enabled greater latitude for each to better see God. From Virginia came a “Hegemonic Liberty,” a right to rule himself and those below him, as a gentleman in his castle. From the Delaware Valley came a “Reciprocal Liberty” built on taking Matthew 7:12 to its ultimate conclusions. And from Appalachia came a “Natural Liberty” to live your own life on your own terms, and to point a shotgun at anyone who dares intrude.

You are welcome to question Fischer’s account. Contemporary reviews of Albion’s Seed argue that his thesis of American heritage is too clever by half and underbaked in some respects. But I cannot shake the argument that the only thing that united these states in the first place is the agreement that they would no longer allow a transatlantic Crown to impose its will upon them.

To the Founding Fathers, it really was about freedom.

The United States as a Promise

Geopolitical analyst, intrepid backpacker, and occasional ex ano commentator Peter Zeihan offers another valuable but too-clever-by-half account of the American culture as it relates to the land. To Zeihan, the American culture was born of the Mississippi River system. Between the Louisiana Purchase and…let’s say the construction of the Lincoln Highway, Americans trickled into the deep interior of the United States, finding some of the best farmland on the planet, situated within the greatest river network on the planet, for low (if not Homestead-Act-subsidized) land prices. In such a bountiful heartland, a national ethos formed: that God really does have a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America. That in America, you don’t need connections, or rank, or status, or even a strong state to protect your family and wealth. You simply need to work hard. Such a mythos has its limits, of course, but compare the Mississippi to the Yellow River, a near-mudslide of a waterway held in place by ever-rising dikes and irrigation systems, threatening to kill millions unless managed with a budget only a great king could afford. Hard work has historically not been enough on the North China Plain.1

I suspect that the emotional core of nationalist conservatism is the impression that in the United States of 2025, hard work is no longer enough. The jobs worth having have been walled off by insufferable HR departments, earmarked in part for H1B immigrants. The streets are no longer safe, the women are no longer interested, and the video games that provided solace in 2014 have proven hollow. A lot of these men found salvation in God, in blood, and in the soil. And good for them! But I know the depths of despair whence their conversions started—I know a chan meme when I see one. And I get it. It was hard getting a job in the 2010s, and it’s only gotten worse in the 2020s. The straight-and-narrow path is long gone.

But I’m Fundamentally Unsympathetic

My emotional response to the above grievances is “skill issue.”

Consider how I got my most recent job: posting about the electric utility industry, as a zero-revenue “side hustle.” Nearly six months in, I had sixty subscribers. But I was providing a service with more demand than supply, and the market responded. This is a book review Substack now.

Listen, I’m a leftist by training. Yet even I could literally bootstrap a career pivot. Hard work—carpal-tunneling, sleep-robbing, despair-granting, brain-melting hard work—was all I needed. And I’m not alone: the United States is uniquely replete with stories of people doing thankless work for poor pay and leveraging that into real wealth. I’ve seen it done. I agree with the nationalist conservatives that the United States isn’t defined by a philosophical underpinning: I didn’t need to read Publius to feel like an American. And I’m happy to seek coalition with them: I, too, want to seize and wield power for the Good, and I broadly like their industrial policy. This new right need not consider me a “real” American—I’m too useful to deport, and enough people know it.

But the American Dream is real.

Hard work is enough.

Because this country is so free, you can choose your favorite kind of freedom from a list of four.

This writing reflects my views alone, and does not reflect the views of my current employer or previous employers. This is not investment advice.

I’m still thinking about Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis (2021).

Last May, I relayed the brainworms this book gave me in a doomed essay to exorcise the affliction. I could not survive more than 11 of the book’s 22 chapters, but an online summary suggested I missed important details about the side character Tom Benton.

Tom is an oncology researcher at Harvard University and—so the plot twists—a friend of rom-com deuteragonist Adam Carlsen. He had been in professional contact with protagonist Olive Smith prior to Olive’s fake-dating bargain with Adam. He had already been impressed with Olive’s work prior to recognizing their mutual connection, and he encourages Olive to consider working in his lab in Boston. In one notable scene, he asks, genuinely, why Olive cares so much about pancreatic cancer. But in Chapter 14, at a conference in Boston, Tom turns. He corners Olive for a predatory advance, insinuating that despite all implications to the contrary, he had only encouraged Olive to come to Boston because she had great legs.

This vignette, to me, reads strangely. Even if we grant Tom an indifference to feminine interiorities, he is framed as an impressive scientist with an appropriately large budget. Olive herself is—by Tom’s own account—a researcher far more motivated and original than one would expect of a third-year Ph.D. student. Making a graceless sexual advance jeopardizes his chance to furnish her novel line of research with real budget. Are sexual favors worth the loss to science? And even if we grant Tom a sociopathic entitlement to women’s bodies, this is a Bro Code violation. You don’t go after your buddy’s girl.

This B-plot to the novel reveals, to me, a troubling view of Men Writ Large. Any man, the account suggests, no matter how he behaves in public, could turn monstrous if he believes he can get away with it. Not all men are monsters, caveats, caveats. But you, a young woman in the 2020s, have no way to identify such a monster until his teeth find your neck. This account is reflected in the polemic “Why Are Men Still So Dangerous?” by rhetoric professor and writer of The Burned Haystack Dating Method .1 Young’s proposed answers are:

1. Because they want to be.

2. Because they’re allowed to be.

This account of the male psyche does not resemble a human—instead, it resembles Sudden Monster Tom Benton. And for all the “men can be dangerous” discourse I have consumed, neither Jennie Young nor Chelsea Fagan nor Rayne Fisher-Quann have a cogent means of differentiating a Normal Man from a monster beyond checking for fangs when your dinner date laughs.

Now, I don’t have a good account of why men do monstrous things to the women in their lives. I, for one, have better things to do than enact needless violence. But I am looking for an account of male individuation compatible with the feminist principles I took to heart in college. Unfortunately, the people shouting loudest about the moral failures of Men Writ Large have little to offer towards a positive moral philosophy. Jean Shinoda Bolen and bell hooks recommend I seek healing, but healing my psyche has not made pretty girls text me back any faster.

I was mad about this, and a friend recommended the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice as a better point of reference.

Misreading Faces

The BBC adaptation hinges on the nuanced and subtle expressions of the actors—knowing smirks, evasive glances, scarcely-perceptible raises of an eyebrow. This mindfulness of presentation allows a running theme of misreading men’s faces. Darcy misreads Bingley’s countenance with Jane—nervously wide-eyed as always—as indifference. The broader society misreads Darcy’s discomfort with social interaction as haughtiness. Mr. Bennett lets everyone misread him, such that he can roast people to their face and only let Lizzie in on the joke. The core plot rests on Lizzie looking past Darcy’s demeanor, but she never pieces together why Darcy is Like That—only that underneath that “prideful” face is a truly good man. This misreading is excused by the plot—but the misreading of Wickham is not.

If I had not perused the Wikipedia article first, I don’t think I would have figured out Wickham’s deal either. He’s warm and charming, and his only warning sign is a slight evasiveness when asked pointed questions. The impression he gives in the first half of the show, as he points his attention towards Lizzie, does not indicate that he is the kind of man to convince a girl to elope with him against her best interests. In fact, the elder Bennetts get little indication of Wickham’s character until it’s too late. Caroline Bingley gives advance warning, but she is clearly no ally to the Bennetts. Darcy gives his side of the story in writing, but his account is not trusted until Lydia leaves a giddy note of her intentions to become Mrs. George Wickham.

However, only this tragedy allows Darcy to show the goodness beneath his tense countenance. He finds Lizzie mere moments after she learns of Lydia’s disappearance and gives condolences so stiff that Lizzie fears she’ll never see him again. But because Darcy alone holds himself responsible for letting this happen, he tracks down his wayward friend, pays his miscellaneous debts, and presses Wickham into a shotgun marriage with a giggling bride who innocently asks where all the guests are. Darcy, for his part, insists that Lydia and Lizzie’s uncle take credit for this arrangement in his stead. Only Lydia’s loose lips reveal Darcy’s involvement, solidifying Lizzie’s ultimate love.

A Moral Revolution for One

Moral philosopher Cheshire Calhoun might describe Darcy’s insistence of responsibility for Wickham’s behavior as an abnormal moral context:

Abnormal moral contexts occur when some segment of a society produces advances in moral knowledge that outrun the social mechanisms for disseminating and normalizing that knowledge in the society as a whole. In that case, a gap opens between what “everyone knows” is right and what from a (presumably) advantaged [epistemic] position is viewed as the right thing to do.2

No one asked Darcy to bail out his deadbeat ex-friend for the benefit of a silly girl with a middling fortune. In fact, it’s a breach of norms for him to bother. There’s a gap between what Darcy thinks is right and what everyone else considers appropriate for his station.

Granted, Calhoun has greater moral ambitions than Darcy. Her account of abnormal moral contexts focuses on living based on feminist principles. In such a case, a moral revolutionary has an obligation not only to live according to their morals but also to propagate those morals, to convince others of those morals, to bear the consequences of resisting a society wracked by the wrong morals.

But what if an abnormal moral context applied only to one person? Then, it would look like a personal moral code. I, for example, have an annoying commitment to quality coffee. It is a personal moral failing for me to drink cheap swill when I can drink stuff that tastes good without milk or sugar. As a consequence, I brought an AeroPress to work even though my office had free coffee. If you call me a snob for this insistence (you may), then my commitment to quality coffee is morally illegible, in Calhoun’s terminology. And Calhoun would argue that I should at least attempt to promote my commitment towards quality coffee:

Moral rules are not designed for individuals. They are designed instead for the social worlds that individuals inhabit. Similarly, even though individuals are to cultivate virtues, the point of virtue is not just to make our individual lives good but to make our common lives good. The shared cultivation of virtue enables us to count on others to do the things that need doing.3

But my personal commitment to quality is supererogatory: it is beyond what is morally necessary. I cannot expect normal people to insist on high-quality chocolate in their mocha lattes, nor spend for better bearings in road bike components, nor take the time to understand the complexities of a “cost-reflective” hourly electric rate (if it was just about the coffee, it would simply be a hobby). Instead, I deliberately hold myself to a higher standard than I do other people with respect to demanding quality, because in this specific regard, I cannot count on others to do the things that need doing—and considering the revenue on signifier without substance,4 things need doing. So I must do so myself, for my own behalf if not also for others.

By now you should have an intuition about how I comport myself:

“Ichiro is a fop of a dandy of a snob.”

“Ichiro likes spending money on expensive trinkets.”

“Ichiro will not buy, gift, nor endorse slop.”

Like with the Bro Code, my commitment to quality is a matter of honor. It’s why I roll up to the function with a thoughtfully-chosen bottle of sake, and why I make single-origin artisanal memes for this blog. Of course, I still aspire to make my personal abnormal moral context—my honor—legible. I want you to know I take fundamental underlying quality seriously, even if I don’t expect you to learn specialist knowledge in advance of a decision. And I also hope that my time-intensive, expensive, and self-imposed insistence to check the supply chains for the stuff I buy can guide your intuitions about whether I’d accuse someone of incompetence without a stack of printouts suffused with red ink. On the record, before God and : F. Ichiro Gifford does the reading.

Why Men Are Still So Dangerous

What concerns me is that even the feminist writers most sympathetic to the male psyche fail to speak about honor. Jean Shinoda Bolen does not speak about honor in Gods in Everyman. bell hooks does not speak about honor in The Will to Change. But self-described “medic in the Gender Wars” and man Terrence Real gestures towards honor when he relays a Maasai account of what it means to be a great warrior:

When the moment calls for fierceness, nobody f—s with you. And when the moment calls for tenderness, you are not tender; you are very, very tender. And a great [warrior] knows which is which.

When Real gave this talk in 1997, he emphasized the importance of tenderness, reflecting his contemporaries Bolen and hooks. But in 2025, this account from Maasai elders provides an answer to Jennie Young: men are still so dangerous because sometimes we need to be.

I am no exception. I still need, as Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette describe in King, Warrior Magician, Lover (1990), to be “energetic, decisive, courageous, enduring, persevering, and loyal to some greater good beyond [my] personal gain.” One could reframe that loyalty to a greater good beyond one’s personal gain as an abnormal moral context demanding supererogatory action: in a word, honor. In order to fix the ailments of the American electric grid, I will need to make enemies, end careers, and seize power for myself. But when I take that power, I will prove immensely dangerous should I turn monstrous the day I can get away with it. My honor would be the first defense against my abuse of power.

I submit a test for a man’s honor: Assess what he’ll pay—in money, status, dopamine, etc.—for a principle he claims. Don’t take him at his word; see it for yourself or corroborate his stories. If his honor is cheap to buy, or unmoored entirely, then he cannot be trusted with power. But an alternative to honor is a credible threat of violent enforcement.

Wickham took Lydia as his wife out of fear of Fitzwilliam Darcy.

It’s Not Enough for the Apps

None of this is of value to the readers of the Burned Haystack Dating Method. I am neither Carol Gilligan nor Eva Kittay nor Nancy Folbre, so I cannot offer cogent feminist moral philosophy, much less a surefire method of ascertaining whether a man is a monster. Worse, I fear it may not be possible to differentiate monsters from men with the limited data provided by a dating app. The Bennetts had much better information on Wickham than the sloppy Hinge profile he would have made, and that man still would have taken Lydia for a situationship from Hell, were it not for Darcy’s intervention.5

But I think any functional account of What To Do About Men must consider honor. Dragons must be slain. Obelisks must be built. Principles must be stuck to, at dire cost. The people who take such tasks must be dangerous, or else they will fail. And dangerous people must first be restrained by themselves.

What matters to me is that Jane Austen insists that intelligent, upstanding women like when men do that.

This writing reflects my views alone, and does not reflect the views of my current employer or previous employers. This is not investment advice.

’s Substack State Capacitance is a treasure trove of historical management literature based on a core premise: The United States Government managed itself better in the 1940s than it does today. As a finer point:

Incredibly, politicians had better dashboards in the era of punch cards than we have in the era of AI. The decline in government competence runs deeper than our inability to match the speed and economy of New Deal construction: even their accounting was better.

The difference is in process—I don’t think bureaucrats of the ‘30s, ‘40s, and ‘50s were smarter, better-trained, or less-corrupt than modern bureaucrats, and they certainly had fewer tools at their disposal. Instead, Hawickhorst argues (convincingly) that staff were managed better.

Case in point: consider the Work Simplification program. This was a Bureau of Budget project starting in 1942, which turned into a consulting-style circuit of management-training workshops, complete with a handy-dandy pamphlet and a set of posters in an art style we now recognize as “the Fallout look.” If you ping Hawickhorst, he’ll email you a copy!

In this post, I want to apply one of the Work Simplification programs, the Work Distribution Chart, to a common problem I’ve seen in municipal electric utilities.

Operational Process, Briefly

One of my core lessons from my MBA program is the differentiation between strategic, operational, and tactical concerns. Strategic planning is the big-picture, 3-5-year, what-are-we-doing-and-why consideration that (should) occupy executives’ time. Tactical tasks are the ground-level, shop-talking, in-the-weeds analytical and hands-on work that ultimately are what an organization does. Operational process is in the middle—figuring out who does what, how things are tracked, and how bills and paychecks are fulfilled. Ultimately, operational excellence counteracts the entropic cruft and chaos that all organizations trend towards.

Middle managers are supposed to handle operational process. MBA programs are supposed to teach people how to do it. This is why I’m getting classes on reading (not writing) accounting and financial materials, building and managing teams, and talking about products to staff and customers alike. These operational skills are useful regardless of what your organization actually does.1 This blog, Energy Crystals Dot Eye Oh, primarily focuses on operational concerns, which is why I care so much about staffing, market design, and how much things cost.

The Work Simplification program is designed for these middle managers—or “first-line” supervisors, as the pamphlet calls them:

The “first-line” supervisor is the one man who is constantly face-to-face with the realities of running a government office. Most of the paperwork problems revolve around his desk. He knows both the work requirements and the problems first-hand. He does the job [of management]—and the one who does the job is the one who is in the best position to do the job better. [Emphasis original]

This does not describe my job as a utility energy analyst—this describes my boss’s job.

The Work Distribution Chart

The Work Distribution Chart is the first of three pieces to Work Simplification,2 answering the straightforward-but-prickly questions of:

• What does your office unit do, actually?

• Who in your office unit does what?

The pamphlet recommends managers follow the below steps:

1. The manager asks every staffer in the office unit (presumably a staff of 3-6, plus the manager) to write out their tasks, with an estimate of how many hours each task takes. This reverse-engineers everyone’s job descriptions.

2. Separately, the manager writes down a list of activities the office unit does. Each activity is a category of task. This reverse-engineers the responsibilities of the office unit—hopefully it reflects what the staffers say they do!

3. The manager combines these tasks into the Work Distribution Chart—the X axis corresponds to each employee, the Y axis corresponds to each activity, and each cell holds tasks and respective time expenditures.

Simple Enough, Right?

Of course not.

Let’s pull together an example based on an office unit that I’ve seen before: an electric utility’s energy services division. This is a catchall division that covers anything that isn’t customer service, finance, or engineering. Every utility handles it differently—some call it the integrated resources division instead—but an example office might include the following activities, measured in hours of time per week (hrs/wk).

Note: This is a super-scaled down office. Most utilities have way more people working on this kind of stuff, but we gotta work with toy examples.

Rebate Processing

• Heat pump rebate processing: 40 hrs/wk

• EV rebate processing: 10 hrs/wk

• Solar rebate processing: 5 hrs/wk

• Other residential rebate processing: 10 hrs/wk

• Commercial & industrial (C&I) rebate processing: 10 hrs/wk

• Rebates review: 10 hrs/wk

Customer Service

• Key account management: 20 hrs/wk

• Rebate customer service: 30 hrs/wk

Power Supply

• Portfolio management: 30 hrs/wk

• Supply & load forecasting: 20 hrs/wk

• Power supply review: 10 hrs/wk

• Grid asset management: 10 hrs/wk

• Regulatory interface: 15 hrs/wk

Management

• Personnel management: 2 hrs/wk per direct report

• Inter-Division Coordination: 15 hrs/wk

If we split this out into a model office unit, we might get something like this:

Wait, Something’s Wrong Here

Based on this chart, the pamphlet recommends asking the following questions:

• What activities take the most time?

• Is there any misdirected effort?

• Are special skills being put to use?

• Are employees doing too many unrelated tasks?

• Are tasks spread too thinly?

• Is work distributed evenly?

These are good and important questions, but the example I gave above has other problems:

The Director Can’t Manage Anyone

The example work distribution chart suggests that almost everyone in the office is a little bit overloaded.3 But the Director of Energy Services is overloaded before they get to managing their four direct reports. This setup is a recipe for absentee management: fifteen-minute one-on-ones, double-booked meetings, emails lost in inboxes, year-end performance reviews in April.

The particular issue here is that the manager is doing analyst-level work—power supply portfolio management—as a manager. This might be because they’re the only one qualified to do it, or because they like the meetings and number-crunching, or simply because they’re too busy to hire and train up another analyst to make it happen, because…

There’s No Time for Process Improvement

Notice what isn’t on this task list: hiring, process improvement, new program ideas, documenting anything, all-hands meetings, staff training, staff onboarding. The team isn’t simply overloaded; they’re so overloaded that they don’t have the time to address the reasons why they are overloaded.

And while handling this quagmire, the team might get new projects from on-high. “Hey, we’re looking at implementing a distributed energy resource management system (DERMS), and how about a financing option for the heat pump rebate, and oh, is anyone keeping tabs on this Clean Heat Standard thing?”

Also, Why is the General Manager Involved?

I’ve heard that in one small electric utility, the General Manager reviews every rebate. In another, the Director of Finance does grant writing and reporting paperwork for federal grants. Every time a General Manager (or similar category of Principal or Director or C-suite) dips into tactical-level work, it’s automatically a problem. For one, the senior leadership should have better things to do. But more importantly, this dive to ground level steps on the toes of their direct reports: operational-scale middle managers.

I’ve frequently gotten requests direct from the “Boss’s Boss.” It routinely confuses the chain of command, because now I don’t know where the buck stops for a particular decision. Whose approval do I need? Who needs to be CC’d on this email? Should I be waiting for so-and-so’s approval, too? Will someone kill this idea from a thousand clicks at the last second?

Ex-Analyst Syndrome

The core challenge here is that pretty much every manager in the electric utility industry started out doing tactical work: former line engineers, former power supply analysts, and in some cases former consultants or political aides. A lot of the top leadership have MBAs, but what about the middle managers? I doubt many pick up training in how to manage a staff, much less how to operate a Work Distribution Chart.

And yes, this is a subset of the Peter Principle, but there’s more to Ex-Analyst Syndrome than mere incompetence. Out of the seven managers I’ve had in my 5-7 years of work experience,4 all of them seemingly preferred to do my job instead of theirs. This meant annoying spurts of micromanagement, hoarding tasks instead of delegating them to ground staff, sitting on decisions for weeks, and most pressingly one-on-one check-ins in which my boss clearly needed to be elsewhere right now, so could you please make this conversation quick?

This is a recipe for sloppy management: understaffing, short-term thinking, prioritizing problems by urgency instead of importance, frontline staff turnover, and ultimately not getting things done. The strategic thinking is done out loud in front of the Board of Commissioners, the tactical work is done whenever and however by whomever, and no one thinks seriously about how to improve duplicative, poorly documented, hurry-up-and-wait processes.

And as dire as this problem is in the electric utility industry, this lack of effective management has even more dire implications for the United States Armed Forces, as “Tiger Boyd” describes for DARC.

This frustrates me, because effective management does not appear to be rocket science—pay attention to your staff, document where everything is, update that documentation quarterly, and maintain the guts to stand by decisions, eat downside risks, and let direct reports screw up on your watch.5 And sure, managers are busy; everyone is busy, but operational process and staff management are the job of management, not willfully taking up tasks that could have gone to the tactical staff you hired to, uh, do those specific tasks.

This post and the information presented are intended for informational purposes only. The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of their current or previous employers or any elected officials. The author makes no recommendations toward any electric utility, regulatory body, or other organization. While certain information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, the author has not independently verified this information, and its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to, and no reliance should be placed on, the fairness, accuracy, timeliness or completeness of this information. The author assumes no liability for this information and no obligation to update the information or analysis contained herein in the future.

2

I wrote about another tool, Process Charts, here:

State Capacitance

How Process Charts Kept the Lights On

Editor’s note: State Capacitance is pleased to present How Process Charts Kept the Lights On, by a guest contributor who goes by the name F. Ichiro Gifford and maintains the blog Energy Crystals. He recounts how he applied Work Simplification to his municipal utility. The piece offers a model of how Work Si…

Read more

9 months ago · 13 likes · Kevin Hawickhorst and F. Ichiro Gifford

I wish Dan Wang talked more about his bike.

This is, partially, a personal request. Wang’s bike tour across Guizhou sounds awesome, and I would love to learn more about how to replicate it, although I worry I’m not physically ready for the climbs.1 But more than my personal interests, I think the Chinese bike industry is a valuable microcosm of the difference between the engineering state and the lawyerly society.

Much of the development in modern road bike technology is shaped by regulations—on one end, the racing regulations of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), and on the other end, patent regulations as the Big Three component manufacturers of Shimano, SRAM, and Campagnolo jockey around each other’s designs. Western brands still dominate the market (and racing pelotons), but their products are increasingly expensive, inaccessible, and…manufactured in China.

Particularly, in Xiamen. And in the throes of COVID, many of those Xiamen upstarts chose to expand from manufacturing Western products to building their own, typically selling them on AliExpress. These brands have increasingly filtered into Western consciousness through YouTube channels like Trace Velo, China Cycling, Hambini, and to a growing extent David Arthur and Francis Cade. These Chinese brands—Elves, Yoeleo, Elitewheels, 9Velo, L-TWOO, Sensah—have developed reputations for meeting the performance of Western bike components, typically at a fraction of the price.2 However, that reputation has also included spotty customer service, odd jank in final finishing and reliability, websites and naming structures that feel unmoored from customer experiences, and a looming specter of catastrophic failure because do you really think these products are safe?

Now, if you know what you’re looking for, you can find products that are not only safe, but even better at quality control than Western brands. And trust in some of these brands is growing, in part because some of them are chasing lawyerly acceptance—approval with the UCI.

The Lawyer and the Engineer

Wang’s core premise in Breakneck is nice and memeable: China is an engineering state, and the United States is a lawyerly society. Now, Wang isn’t the first person to make this observation—Wang Huning describes the United States as a “regulatory society” in America Against America (1991)—but the differentiation between engineering and law allows us readers to bypass unhelpful conversations about capitalism vs. communism and East vs. West.

Xi Jinping’s ChemE degree from Tsinghua is the cheap line. I’m more interested Song Jian 宋健. Song’s “main” job was ballistic missile guidance, for which he was more or less the best in China. His work on feedback control systems was world-renowned, and it was the second most impactful thing he did in China. See, Song was a rationalist before all of you chumps were. He got really into cybernetics in ‘50s Moscow, asking, among other things, what would happen if you applied the same principles of feedback control to an entire nation. To this end, Song was talking existential risk in the ‘70s, although his driver of p(doom) was population growth beyond the ecological carrying capacity of China—”too many people” 人口过多. Song’s solution was to reduce births through government action: the One-Child Policy. Why one child? Because that was easier to track—it turned maternity into true/false boolean.

Dan Wang stresses that Song’s “calculations” were bunk—Song assumed linear population growth and fixed productivity on arable land, in part because he really did believe you could model a nation on a spreadsheet. Now, I know you know that the One-Child Policy was misguided, and that it had pernicious unforeseen (to the Politburo) consequences. But Wang takes pains to clarify how brutal it was for the women—specifically the women—who lived through it.

Wang argues that only Communist China, only an engineering state, would even begin to give a dude like Song Jian influence over policy, but…Elon Musk had real political sway in Washington for a few months. The software engineers of Silicon Valley are ascendant in the government. Many in the rising tech right speak of total fertility rate (TFR), measured in the engineer-brained unit of births per woman, an incredibly cold unit that reduces women to mothers, mothers to wombs, and wombs to a macroeconomic denominator. Wang’s chapter on the One Child policy convinced me that any discussion about birth rates is dangerously incomplete without folding women at scale into the conversation. (It isn’t happening right now.) At “best” we get Chinese women’s response to the new Three-Child policy: *maybe if the birth rate hits zero, they’ll do something about the spy cameras in changing rooms.* At worst, we muscle into a “pro-birth” policy as brutal as One-Child.

As I slog through compliance paperwork on Excel sheets with broken macros, I find sympathy toward bringing engineer-brained approaches to American governance. It would be nice for the United States to embrace quick-and-dirty, brute-force, 5%-error-is-fine, fail-fast, ship-it-now policy. My most cruel fantasies involve baseball bats introduced to the knees standing against new infrastructure. But we proponents of state capacity must mind the risk of overcorrection. Guardrails remain important, despite their current overreach.

We must refrain from concluding that Song Jian was based.

The State and the Society

While living in China, Dan Wang particularly missed the books. He apparently could not buy physical books in China—instead, he asked people to send him forty-pound boxes of books from overseas, without a clear sense of what would and would not be confiscated by customs on the way over. This seems to be, in part, because the bookstores that a man of letters would want have already been chased out of China. Wang particularly names Nowhere Books 飛地書店, a Chinese-language bookstore with locations in Taipei and (at least for a time) Chiang Mai—but not in China. There are others—One-Way Space 单向空间 has kept a foothold in Beijing, but they’ve expanded into Tokyo as…insurance. And if you want good Chinese-language comedy, it has fled to New York now. describes these émigrés as minjian 民間 intellectuals. Grassroots. Wang hangs on a more popular term: to rùn 润.

There are, of course, options for where to rùn. If you can get an Anglophone visa, you do. If you want to build a startup but get maybe ninety days’ notice before Beijing bonks your company, you go to Singapore.3 If you have money (and taste), you go to Japan. And if you just want to chill, you go to Chiang Mai, deep in the Zomian highlands that James C. Scott described as a laboratory of social measures for defying state control. But if you’re dissatisfied with the grind of working 996 hours (actually it’s 007 now) and burning your salary on rent and fandom trinkets, or if you’re trying to hold to a serious moral code that isn’t Xi Jinping thought, you have decreasing leeway for living a life on your own terms in China. If you want to build a “parallel polis”, per Václav Benda, you increasingly must do so outside the reach of the Chinese government.4 Or at least, that’s how it looks on my side of the screen.

Wang’s Sino-American distinction isn’t merely between engineers and lawyers; it’s between state and society. Are artists and writers and booksellers merely broke, or are they persecuted? Are political agitators opposition or dissidents? How much of your life can you live without thinking about the government?

I, of course, can’t relate to the Chinese experience here. I live in New England, which is sooner sliding into cultural irrelevance than transforming to reflect the rising Trump coalition. But that might change, because the tech right people I follow are down on culture and interested in crushing it. The art is woke, they say. The music is too gay. We must RETVRN to AI-generated riffs on Florentine Renaissance painting, or else build atop the graphic design of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. We must reject the museum curators and English professors and critical theorists whole cloth, shove them into lockers where they belong, and replace them with…uh….

This frustrates me, because I’m an artist, not just a utility analyst. I’ve made my own literary fiction, photography, and electronic music, and I’m genuinely enthralled by the work of artists like Cy Twombly5 and Marcel Duchamp.

And…I gotta be real with you, many of the tech right and abundance left people I’m in political coalition with have no art taste. insists to me that art is right-wing iff it’s good, but where are the art boys in the Trump world? Why do the intellectuals in this space reach for flat emulations of Greco-Roman design, or AI-generated kitsch and flash, when the Italian Futurists dropped so much heat? What music has come out of Dimes Square? What’s the typeface of the New Right? I could tell you about and the U.S. Graphics Company and that Amen Break in an Anduril promo video, but I am deeply concerned that the people proposing a return to engineering in the United States almost universally have wack taste in art.

It’s all state capacity, and no societal development.

And that society is important, largely because a state is too mechanized to be fully flexible, but too human-operated and fundamentally janky to be fully predictable. There needs to be distance between the state and one’s life, no matter how competent that state may be. Remember, the Chinese government is our model for effective operational governance, and it still promoted the architect of Shanghai’s generationally traumatic lockdowns to premier.

How Much Engineering State Do We Really Want?

I didn’t read about China in this book about China—I read about the United States. And that’s on me. To a decent extent, I already knew about Beijing’s capacity to run operationally effective governance. I’m already Deng-pilled. I’m already in coalition with the people who seek to transform the United States into an engineering state again.

But I didn’t know about the utter brutality of the One Child Policy, or about the absolute chaos possible when a state as immense as China’s acts without a plan. I’ve been thinking about rùn since Wang wrote about it in his 2023 letter. But now I will also think about Song Jian: the original state cybernetician, the ur-rationalist, the first guy to build a digital twin of a nation and suggest policy from those calculations. Elon wishes.

I’ll keep referencing this book. I’m sad Wang couldn’t stuff the back third with his opinions on opera again. I would love to join a bike trip through China. I worry that—even if I improve my watts, even if I figure out WeChat, even if I go there with a friend who knows what’s up—the writing on this blog will cause me problems at the border.

In the meantime, I live around some excellent cycling routes. If Wang is interested, I have an excellent 40-mile loop that hits a country store and a brewery.

This post and the information presented are intended for informational purposes only. The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of their current or previous employers or any elected officials. The author makes no recommendations toward any electric utility, regulatory body, or other organization. While certain information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, the author has not independently verified this information, and its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to, and no reliance should be placed on, the fairness, accuracy, timeliness or completeness of this information. The author assumes no liability for this information and no obligation to update the information or analysis contained herein in the future.

Two Fridays ago, , fresh off a stint at the White House, returned to with a banger. In his recent post, “Out of Thin Air,” he proposed a valuable approach for improving electric grid capacity towards the development of AI infrastructure, complete with a draft Executive Order on demand response.

The draft EO proposes the interconnection category of Controllable Load Interconnection Services (CLIS). The CLIS structure would enable Large Flexible Loads (LFLs) (read: compute) to receive priority interconnection pathways conditional on meeting certain standards for curtailing load at the behest of broader grid conditions. Because grid generation fleets and transmission networks are sized (and financed) for the highest-load 100 hours of the year (and thus under-utilized for the other 8,660 hours of the year), LFLs that draw demand for hours except these high-load peak hours don’t require as meaningful a grid investment as the breathless thinkpieces and anti-AI YouTube video essays suggest.

In particular, the draft EO proposes measures like:

• Establishing a “fast-lane” interconnection study track for LFLs: “If you can prove your ability to curtail load (based on a TBD metric), then you can interconnect faster.”

• Authorize provisional interconnections: “You can interconnect now, but you’ll need to curtail load for 18 months while we build out infrastructure around you.”

• Allow LFLs with on-site energy storage or generation to integrate as a single generation-plus-load interconnection node.

I have some nitpicks about definitions, and I think the draft EO could name-drop FERC Orders 2222 and 2023 for clarity. Redlines here:

AI Demand Response EO Redline FIG

79.1KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

But this is—in my estimation—a slam dunk. Great job, Dean.

The problem is that running demand response programs to pull electric capacity out of thin air is actually quite hard. I would know, because I’ve tried to build such programs in my career.

Problem 1: Commercial Buildings Are Crumbling Chimeras

Commercial buildings are deeply complicated electrical systems—lighting, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning), process loads, subpanels, HVAC, backup generators, rooftop solar, and particularly HVAC. For these loads to run demand response, they must be wired to a building management system (BMS) that can coordinate digital fan controllers, HVAC compressors, lighting controllers, and so on from a “single pane of glass” dashboard on the facility manager’s computer screen. AI datacenters don’t have the most complicated electrical systems, but they’re up there, as this SemiAnalysis explainer demonstrates.

The problem is that these BMS tools degrade over time. Fan controllers burn out, sensors come loose, things get replaced, on-the-ground staff program hacks into their local thermostats, and building upgrades and extensions are half-installed in the BMS proper. Datacenters are new enough that they’re early into chimeric transformation, but a BMS can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars to install, much less maintain. Even connecting an extant BMS to utility controls can cost $10-20k. This isn’t crazy money for a datacenter, but it is a headache for the facilities manager.

However, datacenters are likely uniquely good at demand response. Normally, the loads attached to a commercial demand response program are lighting and HVAC. If the building has LEDs, then the lighting controls barely make a difference. And remember that peak load times for the electric grid are evenings in a heat wave and mornings in a cold snap. Do you want your HVAC to turn off during these times? By contrast, my understanding is that AI workloads, particularly inference and training, don’t require absolute 99.99% runtime, which would enable datacenters running such workloads to pause operation (and attendant HVAC operation) at the say-so of broader grid conditions…if the BMS can translate demand response signals from the electric utility into control signals for the internal building systems. Bold strategy, Cotton.

Problem 2: Telemetry and Baselining Are Not Exact Sciences

The $10,000/mo question is “How do you track and incentivize demand response?” And unfortunately, those questions are not settled. The typical structure of a commercial demand response event is:

• <24 hours before the event: The utility identifies that tomorrow is likely a peak day. The utility informs the customer—sometimes via email, sometimes via phone call, less frequently via automated control signal. Yeah, not even the utility gets better notice than this. Blame the weather.

• <12 hours before the event: The utility identifies the specific peak window, usually a 4-hour window like HE 18-HE 21.1 The utility informs the customer.

• During the event: The customer curtails load. But not as much as load control software vendors promise.

• After the event: The utility estimates the customer’s load curtailment based on output meter data.

The operative word is estimate. The standard means of calculating the effect of demand response is to compare the actual meter data (typically hourly, hopefully 15-minute) during the peak event versus a “baseline” estimate of what the customer load would have been without the peak event.

There is, of course, no standard practice here. Some baseline calculations are rolling averages with weekends, holidays, and prior peak days redacted. Some baseline calculations fold in a correction for outdoor temperature, important for HVAC-driven loads. Some calculations are straight-up machine-learning algorithms, which are great until your local public utilities commission asks for an auditable formula.2 Oh, and meter data is often slow-to-update and prone to holes. If you want those problems fixed, you’re more than welcome to pay Itron extra money for a tech support staff who will actually return your phone calls, because “real customer service” is an optional extra.

Problem 3: The Incentives Are Fundamentally Small

There are three different metrics for electricity demand. All can be measured with the unit kilowatt-month (kW-mo), although these “equivalent” units are not interchangeable.

1. Non-coincident monthly demand: A customer’s maximum demand during a billing cycle month, regardless of when it is. If your shop mostly runs 100 kW of load all day, but your production machinery pulls a lights-dimming 300 kW on startup at 9AM every third Monday, then your utility will bill you at 300 kW. Sometimes, there’s an inter-month or seasonal ratchet in there, so if your startup process spikes to 500 kW on a hot day, surprise! Your utility might bill you at that 500 kW (or some abstruse fraction of 500 kW) for the rest of the summer, even if you shut down your entire line for July and August.3 For New England municipal electric utilities, the charge for non-coincident monthly demand is $10-20/kW-mo. Demand response programs are likely to worsen this charge as HVAC systems “rebound” after a peak event.

2. Coincident monthly transmission demand: The regional transmission grid’s maximum demand during a month, regardless of the specific utility service territory. Electric utilities—not customers—are charged based on their substation-metered electric demand at the registered peak hour for the month. The proceeds are divvied up to pay for transmission capex and opex. In New England, the timing of these transmission peaks is driven by the weather in Boston and New Haven, even for electric utilities in Maine, and ISO-NE typically does not confirm regional monthly transmission demand until the second week of the next month. Per the NEPOOL Transmission Committee, the monthly charge for transmission demand is $15.44/kW-mo for CY2025.

3. Coincident annual capacity demand: The regional transmission grid’s maximum demand for the entire year. Electric utilities are charged based on their substation-metered electric demand at the registered peak hour for the year. The proceeds are divvied up to pay for the capacity costs of the generation fleet, and in New England, the prices are set by capacity markets. That annual peak is usually set during a summer heat wave,4 so the system peak load for 2024 was only confirmed in October 2024. The demand figures each utility posted during that July evening determines the billed demand we pay from 1 June 2025 to 31 May 2026, at a rate of $2.531-2.639/kW-mo.5

Demand response incentives key off monthly transmission demand costs and maybe annual capacity demand costs paid by the utility. Remember that utilities must also pay internal software and staff costs to administer demand response programs, and that we cannot bank either on correctly predicting peaks or on customers curtailing load when we ask. For this reason, expect to see demand response incentives on the order of $5-8/kW-mo of load reduction, determined from meter data compared against a baseline, usually paid out two billing cycles after the fact, at the cost of 3-5 peak events called per month. At this incentive rate, a datacenter curtailing an impressive 10-15 MW of demand during peak events can expect to see a cost savings of $50-120k per month on their monthly electric bill.

The monthly electric bill for that 100MW datacenter is closer to $4-5M per month.

Problem 4: The Utility Toolsets for Demand Response Are Bad

I need to name some names.

Tangent Energy Solutions sells a demand response platform tailored towards grid-scale assets (peaker plants, MW-scale battery energy storage) and large load demand response platforms. Their secret sauce is that they staff their own North American control center for managing customer assets. Their AMP platform is a front-runner candidate for utilities seeking to implement demand response programs for AI datacenter loads.

And it’s not good.

I mean, it works, but it’s clunky. Forecasting tools are graphed in a way that looks Advanced™️ on screencaps but is hard to read and manipulate. Running peak dispatch events require opening up the switchboard from that Pixar short about alien abductors. Output telemetry is displayed in a manner so obtuse that you might as well export it to Excel and build your own PivotTable. And that telemetry doesn’t necessary talk to your billing system, meaning the data transfer is based on a flat file (read: CSV). The control room is pretty helpful for troubleshooting, though. At one gig, they provided a quote for replicating this service that would have cost $3-5/kW-mo on its own, before upfront costs and customer incentives.

These platforms suck. Tangent sucks, Itron sucks, I doubt Siemens or Schneider are any better, and all these vendors make big promises off vague buzzwords with mind-boggling SaaS fees. I stare at these glowing slide decks atop janky-looking screenshots, and I remind myself of the value chain: burn cash and serotonin to make these systems work, for an 80% chance (and falling) that we predict monthly peaks appropriately, for a 30-50% response (optimistically) from enrolled customers, to mail out incents that zero-out our internal benefit and barely rate on customers’ electric bills.

…Or I can post an RFP for a battery in my substation that will run on my command, at (mostly) promised output, every day if I like.

But It’s Different if the Alternative is No Interconnection

I need to clarify that none of these issues are the fault of Dean Ball nor something the White House can or needs to fix.

I’m at a relatively small electric utility, comparing large load demand response to a battery. If I’m at a utility with millions of customers, and the alternative to large load demand response is no large load, then the calculus shifts for both me and the customer. If the customer needs a Controllable Load Interconnection Service agreement simply to break ground, then the $5-8/kW-mo I would have spent on incentives can instead go towards transmission upgrades or a SaaS company’s accounts receivable. And if my counterfactual to large load demand response is losing the $20M/year account entirely (or facing a capacity shortage crisis), then the immense costs of implementing demand response with existing building management systems and utility software tools starts to pencil again.

Should our President sign this Executive Order, that revised calculus becomes a possibility.

This post and the information presented are intended for informational purposes only. The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of their current or previous employers or any elected officials. The author makes no recommendations toward any electric utility, regulatory body, or other organization. While certain information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, the author has not independently verified this information, and its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to, and no reliance should be placed on, the fairness, accuracy, timeliness or completeness of this information. The author assumes no liability for this information and no obligation to update the information or analysis contained herein in the future.

Every state in New England—even New Hampshire—has laws requiring electric utilities in their respective states to source some percentage of their electricity from renewable energy. Each state has their own metrics for what does and doesn’t count as renewable energy, but there’s a bigger problem.

Once the electrons are in the wires, you can’t track where they came from.

So if you want to figure out how much renewable electricity is generated and who paid for it, you need to track renewable generation at the generators and electric load at the utility substations, and connect A with B. And to make sure the right people get credit (and maybe money) for the renewable energy, you need a way to track who “earned” that credit too.

Enter the Generation Information System (GIS), stewarded by the New England Power Pool (NEPOOL), and built and maintained by software company APX.

The NEPOOL GIS is a central clearing house for all Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) that are generated, transferred, and submitted for state renewable energy portfolio standards. It hoovers up generation, load, and emissions data, tags each megawatt-hour with its own serial number and compliance tags, and chops them into a digital thingymajig that’s worth cash money. Because if you don’t have enough RECs, you’re required to pay Alternative Compliance Payments (ACPs) to your state as punishment.

I once explained this structure to an attractive woman at a run club. She had asked what I did for work and then asked follow-up questions, which I mistook as honest interest.1 She found the reality of REC-trading vile and morally bankrupt. But the underlying software is so much worse.

DISCLAIMER: The below screenshots are heavily redacted to remove all identifying and confidential information.

Where Are My RECs?

RECs are only real insofar as they exist in the GIS. It follows that one should know how to find them. To that end, let’s open up the main dashboard for the GIS.

On the 15th of January, April, July, and October, a new set of RECs are “minted” for the quarter before last. For example, the Q1 RECs for the current year are “minted” on 15 July. For the next sixty days those RECs can be settled, transferred, or banked for settlement or transfer in the next quarter. If you don’t address a REC for this quarter, it vanishes. If you don’t address all your RECs for the year by the final deadline of 15 June of the next year, they vanish. If they vanish, they cannot be recovered.

So where are those RECs, you ask? Well, if you looked in one of those dropdown menus, you’re wrong.

You have to scroll to this “Account Status” panel near the bottom of the webpage. The below screenshot needed to be shrunk to 90% magnification to fit on a 1440p monitor.

That green thing that looks like a button is not. You can’t look at the data for other quarters. The blue numbers that look like hyperlinks are hyperlinks. The blue headings that are nearly the same color are not. The generation RECs you have are split between “Transferable,” “Reserved,” “Banked,” and “In Subaccounts.” Each one of those respective hyperlinks will send you a table that looks like this:

Those tabs up top do work. There is no hyperlink for “View All Certificates.” You have to click a different hyperlink, go to that tab on this very page, and then click the “View All Certificates” tab. There are several pages of this table. You can keep scrolling to the right. It’ll tell you each REC’s applicability to:

• Six Connecticut REC categories

• Eleven Massachusetts REC categories

• Seven Maine REC categories

• Two Rhode Island REC categories

• Six New Hampshire REC categories

• Two Vermont REC categories

• Green-E certification

• Low-Impact Hydro Institute certification

Yes, the text wraps annoyingly. Yes, the best way to view this is a CSV export. No, you can’t get a normal Excel export. But you can print it! It comes out to 5-point font on an 8.5”x11” page. It’ll give you a print date and time, but the timestamp is off by four hours.

But there are your RECs! Look at them!

Transferring RECs

The core impetus of RECs is that they can be bought and sold, with a price that typically tracks the Alternative Compliance Payment for a given REC category. My attractive run club interlocutor found the imposition of capitalism repulsive, but the $35-39/MWh that MA I and CT I RECs receive on the open market go a long way toward making solar and wind projects pencil in New England. The cash values of RECs are the incentive to build renewable. They are among the subsidies that rails so fervently against.

The GIS doesn’t track the money. The sales are solicited, negotiated, and invoiced through emails and phone calls. If you want a sense of going prices, you need to pay a broker and play blackjack off their intel. But the transfers do happen in the GIS. Let’s say they’re incoming. Can you find them?

If they’re a simple transfer, they’re in that “Inbox” panel. Instead of a zero under “Certificate,” you’ll get a number, in the same blue hyperlink color as everything else. The GIS does not email you. Your email alert will instead be an invoice from your REC seller saying that it’s been two days, and where’s my money, Ichiro?

If it’s an automatic forward transfer, because you purchased the RECs as part of a larger power purchase agreement that includes electricity, then you won’t see those incoming RECs in your inbox. It’s in the “Forward Certificate Transfer Inbox” panel at the very bottom of the webpage!

Either way, you click on the hyperlink, you get sent to a REC acceptance page, and you accept the incoming RECs. Fine, whatever.

Let’s say, instead, you want to transfer RECs to someone else, because you’re the REC seller now. In that case, click the “Transfer” drop-down at the top of the webpage, select “Certificates,” and land on this page:

Depending on your selection for “Transfer Type” at the top left, you’ll get different “batch criteria.”2 If you’re transferring to another account holder, you get a dropdown that includes every account registered in the NEPOOL GIS: solar developers, electric utilities, power trading companies (one entry for each subsidiary), random commercial properties, everyone, listed alphabetically, including regional subsidiaries and d/b/a names with no filter options. Once you filter your REC criteria, you need to click “View Certificates,” or else the main view panel doesn’t refresh. You’ll notice that the main panel has a vertical scroll and multiple pages. You can change the page size. You cannot make the page size infinite, despite the presence of a vertical scroll. You can select RECs one at a time per line item. Each row can hold anywhere from 1 REC to tens of thousands of RECs. The “Select All” and “Clear All” buttons affect the current page, not the other pages. You cannot make the page size infinite.

But eventually you collect a bundle of RECs to transfer to another account, for money that will be invoiced and tracked outside the GIS. You’ll see a big green number at the bottom showing the number of RECs you have selected. That’s your only check before clicking the transfer button. There’s no “Are you sure?” prompt before transferring RECs worth tens of thousands if not millions of dollars. Much lower-stakes actions in the GIS do get such a prompt, but not the highest-stakes action. If you fat-finger the “Transfer” button, your only recourse is that your counterparty does not blindly accept the new RECs in their inbox…except they will absolutely blindly accept the new RECs in their inbox, because it’s free money!

The Reports

You want to see a report? Let’s look at one. Here’s “My Certificates Disposition.”

This is not, as you might think, a report of what RECs you have. It’s an output log of what all your RECs were doing at the end of each quarter you select. Was a REC banked in Q2 for Q3? That’s logged here. Was that same REC banked for a second time in Q3 for Q4? That’s logged here as well. Did you settle that REC in Q4? That’s the third row in this report for that same REC. By the way, this report only looks at end-of-quarter inventories. Clear out your settlements in Q4? None of that shows up until the Q4 trading period ends on 15 June. Sell a bunch of RECs? That doesn’t get recorded here at all!

At least these reports are all SQL queries into APX’s server, so you can export them as an Excel!

There Are More Problems

Because I’m not Tantacrul, this isn’t even an exhaustive list!

• If you’re making multiple REC transfers in a row, the best practice is to return to the homepage to “reset” the system before your next transfer. Otherwise, the next transfer might glitch out.

• As a market participant, you can have multiple logins to the same account. You can’t individualize permissions on those logins. If you have a power plant operator entering emissions in the GIS, they can accidentally transfer millions of dollars in RECs if they snoop too recklessly.

• The web documentation is a Zendesk wiki that hasn’t been meaningfully updated in 4-6 years.

• That web documentation is written by one person. From what I hear, they’re the only software engineer of competence working on the GIS. There was no replacement during their parental leave.

• The PDF documentation is undated but was written before a visual redesign of the GIS.

• GIS doesn’t properly track retiring RECs for compliance purposes. To retire a REC, you allocate some number of RECs into a subaccount that’s named whatever you like. Then, you allocate your “obligation” credits into the same subaccount. Then you export a CSV of that subaccount and hand that to the regulatory authorities checking your renewable compliance.

• Actually, you can’t generate a CSV export of which subaccounts your obligation credits went to. No one checks, anyway. The obligation credits are totally vestigial.

• The GIS lags, hard, everywhere.

• Did I mention that it doesn’t track price data?

• As I have mentioned before, if an error invalidates any RECs, APX will throw up their hands and claim they don’t make the rules. If you take it up with your regulatory authority, they might also throw up their hands and claim they don’t make the rules!

• The “banking” function in the GIS is only between quarters. You can’t bank this year’s RECs for next year. If your state allows you to use this year’s RECs to cover future years’ requirements (I think they all do), the GIS never got that update. You need to retire your current-year RECs wholesale, export that report to Excel, and track what was and wasn’t used for this year’s compliance on an Excel in your own SharePoint, which you reference for next year’s REC compliance filings. If you lose that Excel, that’s millions of dollars wasted.

• I suspect (ABOUT EVEN 45%-55%) that New England utility regulators don’t have accounts in the GIS, which means they may have no way of checking REC fraud.

This is the state of renewables tracking in New England. It will not get fixed. APX’s hourly development rate is $180/hour (low for software development), and as of April 2025, they had already burned the 500 development hours budgeted for the year. Vermont wants tweaks to their Tier II REC eligibility. States are ruminating on hourly RECs instead of monthly RECs. All of this will require me to spend more time interfacing with this janky piece-of-shit software suite that doesn’t do even half of what it needs to do as a compliance tool.

This is the State of Regulatory Software

A few months ago, I went on a tirade about the absolute state of New England PUC docket viewers:

And at the end, I made an open call to any cracked software engineers about a startup idea. I ended up talking with a friend of mine and writing a whiteboard model of a software architecture. My buddy agreed that building a better PUC docket viewer would amount to a hobby project’s worth of work.

But when I looked at who would pay for such a tool, even my initial ARR projection of $100k proved too ambitious. The revenue is too tight to support full-time engineers, much less cracked engineers, much less a sales team robust enough to field an RFP response. And the people who would pay for such a tool—regulators, NEPOOL participants, utility general counsels—might not know what good software looks like.

I’m trying to talk myself out of a business model for some “New England Regulatory Software Solutions” that drops into digital travesties like the NEPOOL GIS, clears out the old with thermite and prejudice, and builds something better from first principles. I’m failing.

I might need to talk to Alex Karp.

This post and the information presented are intended for informational purposes only. The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of their current or previous employers or any elected officials. The author makes no recommendations toward any electric utility, regulatory body, or other organization. While certain information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, the author has not independently verified this information, and its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to, and no reliance should be placed on, the fairness, accuracy, timeliness or completeness of this information. The author assumes no liability for this information and no obligation to update the information or analysis contained herein in the future.

This is prima facie reasonable. This money will go towards:

• An additional 25 FTEs of staff

  • 10 FTEs for IT, cybersecurity, and software testing

  • 7 FTEs in transmission system planning: modeling, forecasting, and identifying what needs to be upgraded. NERC and NPCC have been asking more of these staffers lately.

  • 2 FTEs for improving stakeholder engagement for the Capacity Auction Reforms. ISO-NE has a lot riding on the Prompt and Deactivation reforms, and a lot of people are complaining about ISO-NE staff not responding fast enough.

  • 2 FTE for developing better tools for modeling inverter-based resources (wind, solar, batteries) and building market clearing tools for the Capacity Auction Reforms.

  • 2 FTE for program management.

  • 1 FTE for real-time system and market management to keep a better handle on inverter-based resources throwing wrenches into everything.

  • 1 FTE to help reshuffle staff in the C-suite.

• 4% increase to the budget for merit raises

• 1.5% increase to the budget for promotion raises

ISO-NE’s Staffing Faces “Competitive Challenges.”

These adjustments to internal pay scales come out of a recently-completed salary survey from consulting firm Mercer. This survey includes approximately 100 utility companies among its respondents, which offers ISO-NE real points of reference, even for its niche technical staff. This survey work has revealed some “competitive challenges” to hiring and retention, like:

• 19% of the ISO-NE workforce is retirement-eligible

• Everyone and their dog is trying to hire transmission engineers, because all the new generator and datacenter interconnections require engineers who can analyze their impacts. This has increased pay expectations dramatically.

• About 1/3 of ISO-NE’s workforce has software and cybersecurity skills, which means they could get paid Big Tech dollars if they asked.1

• ISO-NE has finally realized that the talent they want is in short supply and high demand, and that the problem will only get worse.

• ISO-NE’s pay for “many specialized roles” lags behind the market median. I don’t think they have great data for some of their more unique roles, but it seems like they’re trading notes with the other ISOs, which are hiring even more furiously than ISO-NE is.

• I need to say it again: One fifth of the ISO-NE workforce is retirement-age.

ISO-NE helpfully summarizes their conclusions like so:

For all of these reasons, it is essential that we maintain competitive compensation; doing so is a cost-effective measure that will help prevent additional turnover and ensure the Company does not experience vacancies that will hinder implementation of major initiatives or impact efficient operation of its systems and markets. [Emphasis mine.]

That word “additional” is a tell, in my opinion.

How Bad is that Pay, Really?

I mean, it’s not terrible.

This suggests a pretty linear distribution of salaries. Year-over-year, we’re looking at approximately 5% annual increases in pay for the overall staff and 6% annual increases in overall headcount. This is partially noticeable in the number of staff paid under $80k—an insult of a paystub imo—but particularly noticeable for staff paid above $160k. The number of people paid over $200k doubled over two years!

There are two potential stories in this graph:

1. ISO-NE realized a lot of their old-timers were too important to let retire. They scrambled to hire underqualified Zoomers and Millennials and then gave these old-timers hefty raises to stay on for 3-5 more years to train the new staff. 2

2. ISO-NE hired a bunch of geniuses at the top of their field, and then realized after the fact that they paid top dollar for people who were about to retire.

For everyone’s sake, I hope the first story is closer to the truth.

But let’s say you have the quantitative PhD and/or 7 years of AWS experience ISO-NE asks for some of their positions. You could be an individual contributor at Meta, or an energy trader at ICF, and those “my quantitative” positions pay a decent sum better than the offers implied by the above chart, even if ISO-NE sweetens the deal with hybrid work in Western Massachusetts.

I admit that recommending ISO-NE to increase their pay is motivated reasoning on my part. But the staff they want are thin on the ground. And even rubes like me, with our niche skillsets and mission-driven acceptance of pay cuts, are now flight risks.

I would know.

This post and the information presented are intended for informational purposes only. The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of their current or previous employers or any elected officials. The author makes no recommendations toward any electric utility, regulatory body, or other organization. While certain information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, the author has not independently verified this information, and its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to, and no reliance should be placed on, the fairness, accuracy, timeliness or completeness of this information. The author assumes no liability for this information and no obligation to update the information or analysis contained herein in the future.

Last week, we talked about “spot price anarchy,” a ideological future for the electric grid that centered on letting real-time markets run wild with energy costs—the idea being that such an arrangement would solidify the business model for solar-storage systems and semi-grid-tied microgrids at the specific expense of traditional electric utilities.

Near the end of that post, I noted that New England has seen a retail electric rate that is, in DER Holy Warrior ’s words, “purely cost-reflective.” It was a pilot rate instituted in 2023 by New Hampshire Electric Coöperative called the Transactive Energy Rate (TER).

And it was pretty freaking sweet.

The Man Behind the Plan

The Transactive Energy Rate was the brainchild of a Brian Callnan. His LinkedIn suggests a career very similar to mine. He started as a utility resource planner—which is what I do—working up the ranks in public power, neck deep in ISO-NE filings, renewable energy technologies, and long-shot forecasts. And he managed to reach a Director-level position at the Vermont Public Power Supply Authority (VPPSA) by his mid-thirties!

From VPPSA, he joined NHEC do to similar power supply work. From Campbell’s perspective, this is guy most qualified to write a purely cost-reflective rate, specifically because power supply analysts track and manage the majority of a utility’s cost structure.

And in 2023, Callnan broke out the trumpets for a cool new electric rate, piloted in collaboration with a utility software company called Bellawatt.

A New Use for Electric Cars

A slide deck presented for the Institute for Local Self-Reliance leads with a 2020 quote by some Volkswagen exec:

By 2025 we will have 350 gigawatt hours worth of energy storage at our disposal through our electric car fleet. Between 2025 and 2030 this will grow to 1 terawatt hours worth of storage. That’s more energy than is currently generated by all the hydroelectric power stations in the world. We can guarantee that energy will be used and stored and this will be a new area of business.

Did this happen? Probably not. But it’s the single largest promise electric vehicles pose to grid analysts like me. Normally, grid-scale batteries are this expensive asset that requires immense sums of capex that we don’t have. But back in 2019, it seemed like electric vehicles were really taking off! And if people were going to buy grid-connected, internet-connected lithium battery in 70-100kWh increments, would it not make sense to utilize those resources instead? Instead of paying upfront to install and depreciate a MW-scale battery, utilities could pay credits to use people’s cars—at a discount, even, because regular consumers don’t know about depreciation and won’t notice their car batteries wear out from grid-motivated power cycling until it’s too late.

The problem is that car manufacturers, electric utilities, and electric utility vendors are are god-awful at writing, maintaining, and using software tools. The standard approach is to use a distributed energy resource management system (DERMS) to mediate the handshake between grid analyst and electric vehicle, usually through some dangly list of API calls, usually for an exorbitant fee to the electric utility, usually for some pathetic cookie of an incentive to the customer. The control signal is almost always manual, too—the utility must forecast a high-cost peak time, press the SHED LOAD button, and give all the relevant loads 8-24 hours of notice to react or refuse.

The Transactive Energy Rate, by contrast, doesn’t bother with API links or manual dispatch. Instead, the rate is built on custom software that downloads an hourly electric price curve, beams it direct to electric vehicle chargers, and lets those chargers do the math on the most optimal charging schedule for the next day.

There’s a lot going on—let’s go step by step, starting with the software vendor: Bellawatt.

A New Kind of Electric Software

Bellawatt does not sell you a product—they sell you the service of custom-baked software. The “products” listed on their website are actually case studies: an electrification marketplace for PG&E, a sales platform for Scale Microgrids (hey, that name sounds familiar!), and the Transactive Energy Rate for NHEC.

They’re the kind of company that will barge into a request for proposals (RFP) for some anodyne utility software with a, “We don’t have a specific product for you, but we can build you a to-spec software in six months!” From a 30,000-foot view, this feels very Palantir, in that the core business model is, “We’re here to solve your problem, not to sell you a specific software.” The tradeoff is that you lose economies of scale. You’re also beholden to that company, because a Bellawatt software system is not modular and cannot be hot-swapped like, say, generic customer information systems (CIS) or meter fleets. In practice, swapping between those generic vendors still takes two years and ruinous invoices, so Bellawatt’s buy-in isn’t egregious.

And on the flipside, you get to work with modern software engineers, instead of the bumbling rubes at Itron, Sprypoint, Oracle, and so on. The case study looks pretty rosy on Bellawatt’s webpage, and it helpfully obscures the fact that as of 1 April 2025, you can’t sign up for the Transactive Energy Rate..

A New Formula for Power Supply Charges

The Transactive Energy Rate was in development from 2020 to 2022, launching Q1 2023. Customers signed up by linking distributed energy resources (DERs) like:

• Home batteries

  • Only Generac PWRcell batteries eligible

• Standard electric vehicle chargers

  • Only Chevy Bolts and Volts eligible

  • Chevy Silverados and Ford F-150 Lightnings incoming

• Two-way vehicle-to-grid (V2G) electric vehicle chargers

  • Only Nissan Leafs with compatible Fermata Energy chargers eligible

• Solar and solar-storage systems

The core structure was that:

1. NHEC would generate a “day-ahead” price curve for the coming day, based on day-ahead price curves settled at the ISO-NE wholesale energy market and a prediction of monthly transmission peaks. This price-setting tool was built in-house, not by Bellawatt.

2. That day-ahead price curve would get sent to compatible DERs via a Bellawatt-written OpenADR tunnel

3. Those DERs would adjust charging and discharging patterns to minimize net cost to the customer

4. Those DERs would beam back telemetry via the same OpenADR tunnel

5. Those DERs would be metered separately from the rest of the house based on a vector-multipled power supply charge

It’s easier to explain with a table:

In this example, we’re looking at a home battery—it charges low (2 AM-4 AM) and discharges high (4 PM-6 PM). The next bill the customer sees for their battery’s power supply charge would have a vector dot product, each hour’s energy use multiplied by that hour’s electric rate:

In the above example, that formula would look like:

With this software stack, you could truly get a real-time electric rate, which allowed compatible distributed energy resources to do real automated energy arbitrage. Standard electric vehicles were projected to see annual savings of $1,800, V2G electric vehicles annual savings of $3,350, and home batteries annual credits of $1,200. Those are solid savings numbers for electric vehicles, and pretty much break-even credits for the battery…assuming a near-zero discount rate.

The core challenge was compatibility. At the time of the 2023 rollout, only the Nissan Leaf could handle bidirectional power flow, and even then only with a dedicated charger by a company that nearly died and got acquired by a competitor for less than the price of a single new Ferrari SF90. Tesla PowerWalls and electric vehicles weren’t eligible, probably because Tesla wouldn’t pick up the phone for a piddly 500-customer pilot program that they couldn’t commandeer for themselves.

But that was fixable with time and further development. I remember hearing about this rate as it was being piloted. I asked Callnan himself for a PDF of the sample bill. I wanted to adapt its core technology for my employer.

What wasn’t fixable was Callnan’s departure from NHEC.

A Classic Death of a Good Idea

Callnan had good reason to leave NHEC: he was offered the CEO seat at the Community Power Coalition of New Hampshire (CPCNH). This organization is a power supply aggregator, a dedicated energy trader that supplants the default power supply provided by existing New Hampshire utilities, for anyone that signs up to their plan. CPCNH is the kind of organization spot price anarchists like Campbell would advocate for—additional customer choice, room for innovation in power supply, a focus on developing local energy resources. This is notionally good for New Hampshire customers—particular customers that want to pay for renewable energy.

But for the world’s Transactive Energy fan, this was a heartbreaking death knell for a program I wanted to steal for my own purposes. Without Callnan, the pilot lost its champion, and it sunk out of use. Bellawatt probably still has the code, but someone would have to ask them to revive it. And who—besides Brian Callnan and me—remembers this rate? Would they not start from the same piddly pilot scale, but now in a worse economy with deeper skepticism about electric vehicles?

The Lesson: Is Leadership On Board?

More recently, I heard another account of why the Transactive Energy Rate died—new management. Late into the rate’s multi-year development, NHEC got a new CEO. I know very little about this new figure, but I did hear “not interested in new ideas.” For such a leader, a first-in-the-country-type idea like the Transactive Energy Rate must sound like a waste of budget and effort.

“Who asked for this?“

“Will customers even like this?”

“It looks slapped together! Why do this when we can do something that works?”

This kind of leadership does not automatically kill innovative projects. But it does threaten budgets, slow-walk approvals, and prevent project managers from driving to conferences to share their notes. And speaking from experience, learning your boss thinks your labor of love is a waste tends to sour your motivation. It makes you seek new employment.

For outside companies, this poses a core challenge for working with electric utilities. To make a novel project work, you need:

1. An engaged project manager to champion the project

2. A upper leadership that at least is amenable to the project

3. …for at least three years.

If the champion isn’t available, the utility does nothing. If the leadership doesn’t care about the project, it will stagnate in procurement or regulatory approval while the champion harangues their boss to look at the contract that’s been sitting in limbo for three months. And if the champion gets a new job, or the leadership above them changes, the project has a strong chance of collapsing right there.

This makes startups understandably skittish to work with electric utilities. I think it’s also why so many energy startups instead see utilities as an enemy to circumvent. I think the can attest to that.

This post and the information presented are intended for informational purposes only. The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of their current or previous employers or any elected officials. The author makes no recommendations toward any electric utility, regulatory body, or other organization. While certain information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, the author has not independently verified this information, and its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to, and no reliance should be placed on, the fairness, accuracy, timeliness or completeness of this information. The author assumes no liability for this information and no obligation to update the information or analysis contained herein in the future.

My most comprehensive piece for Energy Crystals is a “soil-chart” rundown of the different futures of the electric grid, balancing the tripartite priorities of maintaining reliability, mitigating costs, and enabling decarbonization. It’s pretty good!

In the middle of that chart, I named an ideology I glibly called spot price anarchy:1

For electric utilities, the price of electricity is a mercurial figure that changes on a five-minute basis. And if you’re a regular customer, there could be an angle to simply wiring your meter to that same market and playing same game I play for my day job…A smart buyer can exploit this structure: buy a backup generator or solar-storage system, and if spot prices rise above a certain threshold, discharge electricity into the grid and get paid at that spot price. Charge low (or with on-site solar), discharge high. At minimum, you can autonomously cut your grid connection if the spot price hits, say, $9,000/MWh.

I gave the ideology under 500 words of thought, but a recent2 tweet by Duncan Campbell gave a sharper, bolder account that warrants a more serious post:

7 June 2025, 2:30 PM
The market framework that will reveal the optimal power system:
1) no capacity market
2) full strength energy pricing, no [price] cap
3) a new product for inertia-type services
4) retail choice
5) delivery rate design that is purely cost-reflective
6) flexible [interconnection] for load and supply

This is a clear-eyed account of spot price anarchy, from someone who 1) believes in it and 2) knows what a wholesale electricity market is. Campbell is—unlike a lot of people poasting about energy—a professional. We even have LinkedIn mutuals! He deserves a professional rebuttal.

But First, Some Ad-Hominem Comments

Duncan Campbell is the VP of Project Analysis and interim VP of Project Development at Scale Microgrids. This company will sell you, well, a microgrid: a full-stack energy network that includes some combination of solar panels, battery energy storage, electric vehicle charge management, and fossil backup generation. The secret sauce to a microgrid is the controls software, which would integrate grid reliability and market data, local solar production and energy storage, and on-premises energy needs into a single dashboard that your Director of Facilities can harrumph at. These microgrids are great for campus complexes—colleges, yes, but also research parks, industrial facilities, and municipal EMS building networks. These things are probably single-digit millions of dollars in capital expenditure for a decent-size install, because they’re fundamentally Cadillac energy systems—solar and batteries and gensets and building management systems (BMS) and that all-important unification software. If you were happy with your electric service, you wouldn’t bother with any of this business. If you just wanted to save money, you’d get a solar system subsidized by a grant and/or a tax credit. If you were paranoid, you’d keep a diesel genset or two on retainer. But installing everything is a stiff expense unless 1) you need to keep online until FEMA shows up or 2) you want to tell your electric utility to kick rocks.

Campbell also co-founded a DER Task Force that’s poasting about the glory of distributed energy resources (DERs)3 in service of an energy future with more market-pilling and decentralization. The DERTF seems like a cool crew. I might even attend a meetup someday!

All this is to say that Campbell has a financial interest in his ideology. I think the ideology came first—and if so, there’s honor in staking your career on your beliefs. But the business viability of Scale Microgrids—and the health of Duncan Campbell’s BD pipeline—is linearly proportional to the degree that the general public endorses spot price anarchy, or “Retail Choice 2.0,” or an electric utility death spiral.

Okay. Let’s talk substance.

Energy Markets Without Guardrails

Campbell’s proposals to 1) remove capacity markets and 2) remove price caps on wholesale electric costs seek to push electricity companies away from their habit of hedging on everything. Capacity markets hedge against the risk of insufficient supply by paying for generators to sit idle for 99% of the year. That way, those generators can be ready for the 20-90 hours of the year that the grid really needs them. The benefit is that the grid doesn’t see brownouts that force grid operators to decide who doesn’t get electricity for a few hours at a time. The cost is paid up-front, typically to fossil-fuel generators, frequently to the oldest and most polluting derelicts in the generation fleet.

Similarly, price caps on wholesale energy limit the upside potential for electricity generators who do run during nightmare supply shortages. Right now, those price caps are still pretty high: $5,000/MWh in ERCOT, $2,000/MWh (for day-ahead bids) in ISO-NE, compared to normal wholesale prices between $20-50/MWh. But if a 5MW/20MWh battery could discharge 15 MWh of electricity in an environment when electricity prices reach, say, $13,000/MWh, that resulting $200k payout would be enough to cover annual O&M costs for the battery. Alternately, if you have a Scale Microgrids™️ full-stack energy solution on your commercial campus (purchased at $0 down), the savings you get from relying on that microgrid during the above nightmare supply shortage might singlehandedly flip the economics of that project from red to black. Heck, you don’t even need the lifeline! Just get whacked by that shortage so hard that you sign on the dotted line out of fear that it happens again.

Of course, even if you didn’t purchase a microgrid for your home or business, you can always cut your electric meter during such price spikes.

This position isn’t entirely sinister.4 If you truly, unequivocally, believe in the power of a market to adequately price risk, then letting the Magic Line go crazy is ideologically consistent. If the price of electricity is too high, then disconnect your meter above a certain price threshold. If the value of 99.9% or 99.99% uptime is really that high for you (whether you’re a data center or a grandma with an oxygen tank), then you can buy a battery and hedge your risk for yourself, at the risk profile you like, instead of letting the House (utility resource planners like me) decide how much risk you can handle.

My glib issue with this approach is that I’m a bear. I’m short AI, I’m short solar-storage, I’m short Trump 2.0, I’m short my risk of personal injury, I’m short America.5 I like capacity markets, and price caps, and putting bears like me in charge of power supply purchases for normie electricity consumers.

My real issue…I’ll get to at the end.

Ancillary Services & Flexible Interconnection

Back in May, I talked about FERC Order 904, which banned grid operators like ISO-NE from paying for reactive power balancing:

Campbell would recommend bringing that back, and in fact putting more money into reactive power (voltage) and frequency regulation. He brings up inertia in specific, but I’d argue that large-scale batteries are also a great option for maintaining power quality. There are some nuances about voltage regulation versus frequency regulation, but broadly I’m in agreement with Campbell here.

That said, he didn’t use the term of art “ancillary services.” I worry that he, like the grid-future researchers a nearby university, has never spoken to or read documentation from an ISO or RTO.

As for flexible interconnection, there are a few different things Campbell could mean by this: anything from cluster-study interconnection (which is already FERC doctrine) to asking grid operators to accept rowdier risk profiles, to setting interconnection agreements that assume a load might be shut off during some extent of peak time. Please correct me here.

Retail Choice 2.0

When I hear retail choice, I think about the junk mail I get about “buying renewable energy” through my electric bill. Retail choice enables the power supply equivalent of investment funds, which often contract with Massachusetts municipalities instead of individual customers. I’ve heard mixed-to-negative-to-astroturfed reviews about the policy.

When Campbell says retail choice, he likely refers to Allison Bates Wannop’s “Retail Choice 2.0,” which pitches a suite of business models allowing for customers to pay for more complex rate models, from British Octopus Energy’s “Smart Tariffs” and wind farm “fan clubs” to gimmicky sales tactics like comping beers for customers who do demand response. Frankly, I think the gimmicks are nice—a free beer would honestly be a better incentive for demand response than a five-dollar bill credit. But I don’t trust the companies that would play in this space. Specifically, Wannop’s examples disproportionately come from British power suppliers, and I do not see the United Kingdom as a functional model for energy policy. If Whitehall likes it, it’s an automatic red flag in my book.

Cost-Reflective Electric Rates

Campbell’s recommendation of a “delivery rate design that is purely cost-reflective” harbors an accusation: that electric utilities lie to customers about how much electricity costs.

Guilty as charged. We do lie.

A normal (New England) residential electric bill has two components:

• A monthly “flat” charge of $5-12

• A volumetric charge of $0.15-0.30/kWh, split out into a bunch of line items that confuse customers

This does not reflect our cost model. The idea of a “retail cost per kilowatt-hour” is a Dr. Seuss fairytale held in place by papercraft assumptions about whom our residential customers are. If I wanted to design a truly cost-reflective residential electric rate, it might look like:

• A monthly “flat” charge of $40

• A non-coincident demand peak of $3/kW-month, measured at monthly customer meter peaks

• A coincident demand peak of $13/kW-month, measured at monthly ISO-NE system peaks

• An annual demand peak of $4/kW-month, measured at the annual ISO-NE system peak and amortized over the next 12 months

• A fuel charge that dot-product vector-multiples hourly customer use with hourly wholesale spot prices, into a net charge of $0.03-0.05/kWh

I used to work utility customer service. I often took calls like “I just got an electric vehicle. How much will it increase my electric bill?”

The customer is asking for a number. In US Dollars per month. From a human being. Now. Any deviation from a friendly voice on the phone saying “about fifty bucks a month” will be interpreted as:

Hi. I’m your electric utility. I think you’re dumb. In fact, I hate you, personally. I’m going to take your money, burn it in Vegas, laugh at you by name, and raise your rates again.

Alternately, read ’s piece on “Pricing the Future” and tell me he wouldn’t see spot price anarchy as another brick in the wall:

But in practice, modern dynamic pricing—especially when deployed in concert with search and surveillance—is often explicitly hostile to consumers, steering them toward more expensive options and throwing out highball quotes.

It’s also, in all cases, implicitly hostile to consumers, obligating a much higher level of attention and involvement to the simple act of buying something--or, as with airline tickets, extracting a “tax” on anyone without the time and inclination to do so.

…

The transformation of relatively stable prices into individualized, tech-driven moving targets pushes us even further into the realm of speculation and wagers. Attaching volatile, up-to-the-minute surveillance-driven prices to any good or service is a good way to put it in the same basket as securities, crypto tokens, wagers, and online reputations. What happens when buying anything at all requires the same level of attentiveness, care, and planning with regard to prices that most of us bring to flying commercial, buying concert tickets, or speculating on securities? A life spent trying to predict when bread and eggs are going to be the cheapest, and which family member’s credit score will earn them the best deal. [Emphasis mine.]

Of course, I’m being glib again. Every utility rate consultant I have spoken to has advocated increasing monthly “flat” charges to reflect real “first kWh” plant costs—about $40 per residential customer per month. Those non-coincident demand peaks are standard billing practice for commercial customers (although many small business owners get bamboozled by them anyway). And that vector-multiplied “real time rate” has been tried in New England. The New Hampshire Electric Cooperative (NHEC) called it a Transactive Energy Rate.

It deserves a piece of its own.

Stupid People are Electric Customers Too

The reëmergence of Donald Trump unlocked a flurry of IQ-posting, including the meme I stole above from someone who probably would have found GamerGate memes repulsive. I think much of the appeal is in the glee of calling someone biologically, intractably stupid, but let’s take that frame seriously: stupid people are electric customers too.

Every January and July, utility customer service desks get inundated by high bill complaints that follow the cadence of:

CUSTOMER: “Did you raise my rates?”
HELP DESK: “Sir/Ma’am, do you see the number on your bill that says ‘kWh?’”
CUSTOMER: “Yeah, it says 1,200 kWh.”
HELP DESK: “That is your electric usage. Last month, that number was 800. Our electric rate did not change, but that number did. That’s why your electric bill went up.”
CUSTOMER: “Oh.”

Stupid people are electric customers too.

Many electric utility customers lack the intellectual horsepower to grok what a kilowatt-hour is. Many more lack the time and breathing room to figure out what a kilowatt-hour is. I literally work for an electric utility, in the part of the office that sets electric rates, and it’s an active hassle to figure out a utility’s cost-per-800-kWh without a sample bill in front of me. If I can’t figure out an electric rate without a half-hour of billable focus, who can do so at all? Do we want to throw demand charges and real-time rates on top of that?

Electric utilities must serve Nissan Altima drivers. We must serve the functionally illiterate. We must serve people who spend five seconds looking at their electric bills and resent the expectation that these bills need more thought. One of the responsibilities of being a regulated natural monopoly is that we are not allowed to turn away a customer because they’re too dim to read three pages. And although regulators may not ask, we have an obligation to treat these customers with respect. Campbell may cheer on an electric utility death spiral in which customers who can get a microgrid do, but I know the likely profile of the last people trapped in that death spiral.

Stupid people are electric customers too.

The says it well:

The thing about us people on the port side of the bell curve is that, the dumber you are, the scarier life is. You know there are people much smarter than you, but you lack the imaginative faculties to really comprehend what that means. If your IQ is 85, someone who’s a 100 sounds pretty much like someone who’s 120, and so on. You don’t think about the details. You just know that there are a bunch of people who wear ties and work jobs where people care what they think, and they have an outsize influence on your life, one you can’t really fully grasp…People on that level—my people—live in a world where everyone is trying to get over on them. The dumb are on the receiving end of every scam possible: payday loans, rent-to-own furniture, OnlyFans, seed oils, etc. They know their fellow idiots are out to get them, and that’s bad enough. But they also know that the smart folks want their money and energy, and unlike with their peers, clever schemers are both unpredictable and unfathomable.

The Librarian is talking about me. And he’s talking about Duncan Campbell.

My job as a utility energy analyst is to serve everyone. Even the stupid people, because—say it with me—stupid people are electric customers too.

And stupid people deserve electric rates that make it damn clear that I’m not out to get them. Itemized line items are counterproductive. Beautiful quantitative models read like threats. But having spoken to these customers, they do respond well to:

I’m listening to you. I know what these numbers mean. You don’t have to. I know it’s a lot of money. I’m working on it. I’m on your side.

This post and the information presented are intended for informational purposes only.The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of their current or previous employers or any elected officials. The author makes no recommendations toward any electric utility, regulatory body, or other organization. While certain information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, the author has not independently verified this information, and its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to, and no reliance should be placed on, the fairness, accuracy, timeliness or completeness of this information. The author assumes no liability for this information and no obligation to update the information or analysis contained herein in the future.

The Spring and Autumn period wasn’t necessarily a bad time to live in China—but it wasn’t the best time. For this 250-300-year period, the Eastern Zhou dynasty lived in a state of slow decay. The Western Zhou capital had been razed, and petty lords increasingly did things their way instead of deferring to the Zhou court, but…China wasn’t at the Warring States period yet. Twenty-seven centuries later, historian Hu Wenhui would describe this period as a “garbage time” for the Zhou Dynasty. The sky was not actively falling, but it was known that The Way was lost, that the Zhou Dynasty was cooked. The timelines are compressed in the American context, but the vibe…feels familiar.1

Confucius wasn’t the only Great Thinker reckoning with the poor vibes of this era. Lao Tzu was a Zhou archivist during this era, reportedly churning out the Tao Te Ching in one manic session before noping out of his day job and becoming a hermit. Sun Tzu, meanwhile, wrote2 an Art of War that sometimes reads as exasperated tutorializing:

Attack him where he is unprepared; appear where you are not expected.

If the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.

In war then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns.3

Confucius, meanwhile, was a pretty baseline civil servant for a convulsing Lu government, until those convulsions forced him into an early retirement at age 53. For the next fourteen years, Confucius wandered the many states of the Eastern Zhou looking for work and finding…nothing. The rulers of Wei, Song, Chen, Cai, and Wei (again) were not interested in a highly-competent late-career civil servant, because who wants to effectively run a state when there’s money to make, parties to throw, and crises to manage? Or something like that. During his exile, Confucius built a reputation for wisdom and collected a flock of disciples—and only his immense victory in the Chinese Marketplace of Ideas could secure him a sinecure job in government…at the age of seventy.

子曰吾十有五而志于学三十而立四十而不惑五十而知天命六十而耳顺七十而从心所欲不逾矩 [2.4]

The Master said: At fifteen, I set my heart on learning. At thirty, I established my standing in the world. At forty, I was no longer confused. At fifty, I understood my calling. At sixty, I could hear the truth. At seventy, I could follow my heart’s desire without straying from the path.4

When I was in high school, I started writing and making art to impose upon myself the challenges I could not get in school. Now that I’m approaching thirty, I can feel my standing coalescing—at least on Substack if not on Hinge.5 But I’m still deeply confused, and I doubt that I could identify the truth even if it shouted in my ear. I suspect Master Kong would suggest patience—it’s not like he figured it out at my age.

No One’s Hiring for Lǐ 礼

I am, in a Confucian sense, a shì 士. I’m an educated man, a civil servant, a young professional aspiring to knowledge and virtue, a man trained in How The World Works. And in the spiritual sense, I’m a model of a neurotic Confucian disciple—I want to be useful to my country, but no one’s hiring experts in lǐ 礼—“the rites,” ritual and propriety, operational effectiveness, the tie I should wear to work versus the New Balances I wear instead.

It’s a hard economy—not necessarily because there isn’t money to be made, but because there isn’t money to be made in service to your nation. When I went to DC earlier this summer, it struck me how many people apparently worked multiple jobs. Then someone pointed me to a gig at a think tank, and the compensation figure at the bottom answered my questions. It’s hard to make a living from the lǐ in 2025. Per , the money is in attention farming. And on a more personal level, my own industry is afflicted with sclerotic (or delusional) leadership, so there’s little demand for fresh ideas, hard compromises, and sober implementation. I only consider myself qualified to speak on energy policy because the bar for expertise is so low. But I’m on the bottom of this org chart, Master Kong. I don’t have a budget; I don’t have a deep network; and this blog has already put my career at risk. What if I get fired?

子曰不患无位患所以立不患莫己知求为可知也 [4.14]

The Master said, “Do not worry that you have no official position. Are you qualified to earn that position? Do not worry that others do not know you. Are you worthy of being known?”

Confucius Doesn’t Care That I Can’t Afford A House

I don’t think Confucius was ever destitute, but you don’t make money roadtripping during a centuries-long recession. His disciples clearly complained constantly about money, because Confucius keeps talking about staying the path even if the pay is crap.

子曰士志于道而耻恶衣恶食者未足与议也 [4.9]

The Master said, “It is not worth speaking to a civil servant who sets his heart on the Way but who is ashamed of poor clothing and poor food.”

子曰富与贵是人之所欲也不以其道得之不处也贫与贱是人之所恶也不以其道得之不去也君子去仁恶乎成名君子无终食之间违仁造次必于是颠沛必于是 [4.5]

The Master said, “People desire wealth and status. But if you cannot achieve them through honorable means, you should not accept them. People despise poverty and abasement. But if you cannot avoid them through honorable means, you should not reject them. If the gentleman 君子 forsakes humaneness 仁, how can he be worthy of the name of gentleman? He does not abandon humaneness even for an hour. He holds on to it even in a hurry, even in a crisis.”

Annping Chin translates rén 仁 as humaneness, but like any spiritually-weighted word, there’s more to it: benevolence, moral equanimity, a recognition that you’re a professional, and that you’ll damn well act it. To be a jūnzǐ 君子 is to embody that, to be the moral-spiritual Chad to the soyjak xiǎo rén 小人. And in Confucius’s account, being a jūnzǐ has nothing to do with whether you can afford a house. If being an honorable man means taking a pay cut, you take the pay cut. If your job forces you to contradict your morals, you quit on the spot. To a truly virtuous civil servant, it shouldn’t be a hard dilemma.

To be clear, Confucius is not anti-wealth—if you can get rich through honorable means, you should. I don’t think he would have a problem with my road bikes and boutique espresso. But he has no sympathy for my complaint that DC think tanks pay terribly.

The Master said, “A petty man 小人 complains about the rent. A gentleman 君子 eats Top Ramen and Soylent if he has to.”

No excuses.

It’s Just Cope, Isn’t It?

Of course, it doesn’t work out for Confucius:

王孙贾问曰与其媚于奥宁媚于灶何谓也子曰然获罪于天无所祷也 [3.13]

Wang-sun Jia asked, “What about the saying ‘Better to curry favor with the kitchen stove than to the shrine in the corner?’” The Master replied, “Not so. Once you incur the wrath of Heaven, there’s no one to pray to.”

Wang-sun is mocking Confucius: “I know you’re trying to get the Duke to ‘see reason’ or whatever, but have you considered making some dough instead?” Confucius rebukes Wang-sun for the suggestion, but Wang-sun was right. The Zhou dynasty continued to decay beyond Confucius’s death—he failed even to save the kingdom, much less get rich off it.

In that context, aren’t all these admonitions to forsake wealth in the name of virtue mere cope for an old man yelling at clouds? When I complain about the lack of leadership in my industry, in the crap economy, in the low pay for civil servants, am I not asking Master Kong for validation?

Maybe Wang-sun is mocking me as well. I say I want a house; I complain about my career going nowhere; I keep saying I do this for the road bikes and boutique espresso. But between my day job, grad school, this blog, and the side hustles I picked up because of this blog…I work 50-60 hours per week. I overwork myself. Yet I could stop: I already have the civil service job Confucius couldn’t land. I could simply abandon this blog and coast for the next thirty years:

But I can’t. Someone is wrong on the internet. People are wrong in my industry. And in my frustration, I picked up a pseudonym and started blogging about my work, outside of my work. And because I’m still frustrated, I’m reaching out to Master Kong for some career advice.

I’m only at Book Five—he’s got a lot more to say to me.

This post and the information presented are intended for informational purposes only.The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of their current or previous employers or any elected officials. The author makes no recommendations toward any electric utility, regulatory body, or other organization. While certain information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, the author has not independently verified this information, and its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to, and no reliance should be placed on, the fairness, accuracy, timeliness or completeness of this information. The author assumes no liability for this information and no obligation to update the information or analysis contained herein in the future.

On 28 April 2025, at 12:33:30, the Iberian electric grid collapsed.

Immediately, the takes started flying—renewables did this; there wasn’t enough inertia; the grid operators didn’t use renewables right; this is why their ideology is bad and my ideology is good. But at the time, the correct answer to both “What happened?” and “How can we prevent this?” was “We don’t know yet.”

On 18 June 2025, we got real analysis from a pair of reports: one from Spanish transmission grid operator Red Eléctrica de España (REE), and one from the Spanish government. To this day, I have not found a graceful translation of the government report, so see attached the Claude translation I ran last month:

I remain disappointed by the immense alpha available in simply reading technical primary sources.

Let’s start with a timeline.

Special thanks to for sanity-checking the engineering and Spanish in this post.

What The Hell Happened?

The day started normally enough: it was a typical low-load “duck curve” day. Temperate weather reduced air conditioning load, and behind-the-meter solar generation zeroed out much of the remaining electric demand. In Spain’s wholesale electricity market, the day-ahead prices cleared at zero-to-negative between hour-ending1 11 AM and hour-ending 7 PM, because electric supply (driven by solar) completely washed out electric demand. This is normal.

What was not normal was the relative deficiency in voltage control resources. On 28 April, twelve resources were slated for dynamic voltage control—low, but workable. But the day before, one of those resources had a sudden outage, leaving only 4 nuclear, 1 coal, and 6 gas turbines online to manage voltage across Spain.

In the morning, the transmission system registered some voltage oscillations: mostly at 0.2 Hz, but a few at 0.6 Hz. The 0.2 Hz oscillations are known—they’re endemic to the European grid because of generators at the periphery (Spain, Turkey, the Southern Balkans) oscillating against the core. The 0.6 Hz oscillation was…new. In hindsight, it aligned with the output of a solar farm in Badajoz,2 but…photovoltaic (PV) resources typically do not oscillate like that. And even if they do, those oscillations shouldn’t reverberate into France and Germany, as this one did.

These oscillations ultimately aren’t crazy. The first few dissipated after a few minutes each, but system operators decided to nip them in the bud by connecting a few 400 kV circuits, which increases system damping. But then two new oscillations came: a big one at 12:03, and a bigger one at 12:19. These needed more serious measures:

1. Reducing (PV-driven) power export from Spain to France: first from 2,300 MW to 1,500 MW, then down to 1,000 MW.

2. Switching the Spain-France high-voltage DC (HVDC) interconnection from an “AC emulation” mode to a DC mode, mitigating the capacity for these oscillations to bounce around the entire European grid.

3. Closing a few more 400 kV circuits for local damping.

4. Asking Portuguese grid operators to reduce power flow from Spain to Portugal from 2,500 MW to 2,000 MW. The Portuguese said they would get to it by 1 PM, but were badgered into making it happen by 12:27 PM.

5. Calling up another conventional power plant to shore up dynamic voltage control. The quickest respondent said they could be online by 2 PM.

Things Are “Fine” at 12:30

Let’s take stock of the Spanish grid at 12:30:

• The weird oscillations on the transmission network have all been damped.

• Voltage through the system is a bit high (410-420 kV vs 400 kV nominal), but within operating limits.

• AC frequency throughout the system is normal.

• Further damping potential is low—the damping measures used are finite, and at this point, grid operators had already spent most of them.

• Electric demand was pretty low, as expected from a mild Monday lunch hour.

• The generation mix was 82% renewables.

• There were eleven power plants dispatched for voltage control, as well as some pumped hydroelectric facilities that could chip in.

• System inertia was at 2.3 seconds—above the 2 second guideline.

• There was plenty of reserve—3,000 MW of pumped hydroelectric load that could shed in seconds, and 7,000 MW of reserve generation that could spin up in 15 minutes.

At this point, the electric grid was entirely within parameters. It was an eventful morning, but things looked okay. Exports were under control, oscillations were under control, and once that twelfth voltage control plant came online, grid operators could start unwinding their damping measures. By 2 PM, things would be fine—a stressful day, but not a crisis.

Things Go Wrong at 12:32

At 12:32 PM, systemwide voltage starts to climb. The report isn’t clear on why, but it might be related to falling power exports from Spain to France. I don’t think the frequency oscillations from the morning caused this, but grid operators did reduce exports to damp those oscillations. And all over the Spanish system, generators start clicking offline.

The problem is something called reactive power, measured in volt-amperes reactive (VARs). As voltage in transmission lines climb up, those power lines act like giant capacitors, desynchronizing the oscillations of current and voltage. Engineers describe this as “generating VARs.” As reactive power builds up in the transmission system, voltage ticks upward. Generators—even generators that don’t do active voltage control—absorb those VARs, which keeps voltage in control.

But as generators click offline, that VAR absorption falls away, letting voltage climb higher and higher, leading to a feedback loop in which:

Voltage rises
→ Generators trip from over-voltage
→ The transmission network loses VAR absorption
→ Voltage rises more

It only takes a minute for voltage to reach critical levels. Then, at 12:33:18 PM, the system spirals out of control, posting terrifyingly high voltage numbers, until system frequency falls off a cliff, crashing the entire Iberian Peninsula into zero voltage at 12:33:30 PM.

A Lot of Things Look Weird in Hindsight

I can’t tell you what went wrong, or who’s at fault. I’m not a transmission engineer, and even these investigatory reports are incomplete. The Spanish government report particularly notes that the underlying data is messy and piecemeal—and a lot of the government report is redacted for the public, anyway.

But as I read these twin reports, I kept a log of “weirdnesses” in the whole fiasco:

• Renewables in the Spanish system are required to hold a fixed power factor—balanced between generating and absorbing reactive power. Modern inverter-based renewable resources can adjust their power factor based on a set point, meaning they could be dispatched for dynamic voltage control. But they’re required not to. These reports suggest that there were plans to adjust this operating procedure, allowing renewables to participate in dynamic voltage control, but that didn’t happen in time.

• On 28 April 2025, the following generation capacity was straight-up offline, not for economic reasons but for repair, inspection, maintenance, or nuclear fuel recharging:

  • 50% of all coal generation

  • 30% of all combined-cycle gas generation

  • 43% of all nuclear generation

  • 42% of all pumped hydroelectric storage

• The fastest dynamic voltage control resource that grid operators could find needed 90 minutes to fire up. And that power plant was already hot. Aeroderivative3 power plants in the 10-50MW range can fire up from cold in ten minutes. Can none of those do voltage control?

• A 0.6 Hz oscillation from a single solar farm in the far west of Spain echoed into the core of the European grid.

• At 12:19 PM, exports from Spain to France were set to 1,000 MW. But by 12:32 PM, exports were back up to 1,500 MW. And one line exported power without interruption right up to zero voltage.

• The 11 power plants tapped to provide dynamic voltage control…mostly did not. A few actually generated reactive power, meaning they worsened the problem they were dispatched to mitigate. The reports are reluctant to tattle, but it seems like these deficiencies were not new.

• Prior to the blackout, Spain had plans to decommission all nuclear power plants in the country—four by 2030, the last three by 2035. One plant, the ailing Almaraz plant, is slated for decommissioning in 2027.

• Many renewable resources—particular the lower-output ones—also didn’t meet their reactive power requirements.

• A bunch of generators tripped prematurely—they are supposed to survive 440 kV over-voltages for 60 minutes, but many did not.

• One of the first generators to trip did so because of an over-voltage downstream of the core transmission system—meaning the initial sparks of the cascade failure started from over-voltages that central grid operators literally could not see.

• In fact, the reports suggest (but don’t have enough hard data to confirm) that the first few generators to trip offline are distributed renewables—small generations out of easy reach of transmission grid operators.

• More inertia would not have helped.

• Emergency demand shedding might have made it worse.

• The Spanish electric grid was within normal operating conditions three minutes before it collapsed.

No One Thought This Would Happen

This cascade electric failure clearly caught everyone off-guard. As late as 12:15 PM, Portuguese grid operators were back-talking about export interfaces, apparently asking “Can’t this wait 45 minutes?” And they probably thought it could.

And for all I can tell, the oscillation damping didn’t even cause the cascade failure—maybe cutting exports to damp those oscillations led to runaway over-voltage? But then why did some generators trip early? Why couldn’t existing voltage control measures catch that? Did no one think to check if the voltage regulation measures worked? The answer, clearly, is no. Otherwise, someone would have caught the deficiencies earlier.

And even if Spanish grid operators could catch those deficiencies, what could they have done on short notice? The transmission network went from systems-green to zero-voltage in ninety seconds. Aeroderivative power plants can’t move fast enough to catch that. For that matter, no human-in-the-loop (HITL) operating procedure could move fast enough.

The 28 April Iberian Blackout isn’t merely a story of “renewables bad” or “Red Eléctrica dumb”—this voltage runaway is a new problem that overwhelmed existing operating procedures, market structures, physical infrastructure, and technical staff. You wouldn’t have seen this coming, either.

But now we have seen it. We now know that an electric grid the size of, say, the ERCOT system can go from normal conditions to total blackout in ninety seconds. We now know that dynamic voltage control needs to catch over-voltage conditions in less than fifteen seconds. We have yet again been reminded that we have not reckoned with the promise and the danger of distributed, intermittent, inverter-based electric resources.

And if the internet discourse is any indication, we’re still not ready to have that conversation.

This post and the information presented are intended for informational purposes only. The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of their current or previous employers or any elected officials. The author makes no recommendations toward any electric utility, regulatory body, or other organization. While certain information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, the author has not independently verified this information, and its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to, and no reliance should be placed on, the fairness, accuracy, timeliness or completeness of this information. The author assumes no liability for this information and no obligation to update the information or analysis contained herein in the future.

Among American-led discussions about China, one question looms over the rest: Will China Invade Taiwan? Any post, podcast, or YouTube video essay about semiconductors, AI, TikTok, shipbuilding, energy production, global diplomacy, demographics, or Sino-American vibes has an asterisk imposed on its title, because the Internet Hivemind has decided that a naval confrontation in the Taiwan Strait is one of the few ways to convince a brainrotted readership to read a thing that cites books.

Sources are divided. On the pro side, intelligence analyst flatly says an invasion is likely in 2027, and I was convinced after a woman I went on a date with said her defense-contractor employer was also preparing for 2027. On the con side, writer and business analyst argues that China has no political ambitions in the West—just commercial interests. (Those jets pointed at Taiwan? NERF ordnance.) Out in left field, we have Peter Zeihan arguing that future historians will see 2030 as the point at which the Mao Dynasty fell and plunged the Middle Kingdom back into darkness. And everyone else is scrambling to find a synthesis to the dialectic of “China Seeks to Invade Taiwan” and “Why the Hell Would Beijing Do That?”

Now, I’m no China expert—not only have I never played Go, but I also found Henry Kissinger’s On China quite informative. But I have read a good chunk of writing by Western China watchers, watched several reviews of the Chinese brands taking market share in the road bike industry, and found Capper win ground on my 2025 Most Listened list on Apple Music. This—technically—makes me more informed about China than many ideological energy advocates are about energy.

So, let’s try to square the circle.

What Does China Actually Want?

The true-but-useless answer is “There are multiple stakeholders within Chinese business and politics who have conflicting aims and ideological motivations, so ascertaining a clear strategic goal is a doomed project.” Such talking points deserve the bullying they get.

The Chinese Communist Party want a China that is prosperous, but they prefer a China they control. Don’t laugh; this is how the Democratic and Republican Parties treat the country they each claim to represent. Xi in particular seems worried that young Chinese don’t have the virile hustle of the post-50s and post-60s cadres who got a taste for bitterness growing up. This is different from American Boomers complaining about lazy Zoomers, because the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution simply hit different.

The young post-90s and post-00s cohorts in China, by contrast, want that "boom-era" look, Maseratis and bottles of Macallan, and advancement in a country that saw meteoric growth until very recently. They’re broadly finding advancement challenging between stressful work cultures, ballooning real estate prices, and persistent bad vibes. So, they’re settling for fandom, poasting, and wasting their lives on Honor of Kings. Don’t laugh; has a similar story about American Zoomers.

Chinese business interests, meanwhile, want to make a buck. Obviously. But that looks surprisingly hard in China. Look at the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) Composite Index: near-flat since 2009. Or consider Local Government Financing Vehicles (LGFVs): 5% money, chasing 1% returns. So where do you invest your money? I guess you could simply out-do your competitors so that when the economy seizes, you’ll buy their assets in bankruptcy. But your competitors had the same idea—that’s why Chinese product got so good so quickly.

What do any of these people get out of taking Taiwan?

Taking Taiwan is a Lot of Pain for Little Gain

Take American confrontation out of the picture and look at this topographical map of Taiwan:

You already know it’s a 130km swim at best. The east is jungle and mountain. The west is urban. It’s malaria country, too. If you want to imagine what taking the high ground might look like, merge Afghanistan with Okinawa. If you want to imagine a Battle of Taipei, recall how the Gaza war is going and imagine if Hamas had air power and three artillery commands.

Taiwan would be a difficult invasion target if you had unlimited manpower, deep pockets, and durable supply chains. China has a rapidly-aging demography, a looming debt crisis, and domestic oil production that covered a net 26% of demand in 2023. And well…look at the kids you’d send over the Taiwan Strait. The initial surge are probably good soldiers, but what about the backup still doomscrolling on Weibo? What are the odds they won’t simply lie flat in Bali, too?

And say you take Taipei—what then? Will the Nationalists take that L better than Chiang Kai-shek did? Could SMIC rev up those extreme ultraviolet lithography rigs in the shattered remains of Hsinchu Science Park? Is it not cheaper to buy what you can, smuggle what you can’t, and encourage homegrown innovation in the process?

Yes, Taipei is a thorn in Beijing’s side. But the cure is worse than the affliction. The 1992 Consensus is awkward, but it enables the mainland and the island to do business. Everyone gets to make a buck.

The Axis of Resistance is Good Business

But if China relies so much global trade, why are they pushing so hard against the international (Western) order that props it up?

Well, I am a rube, not a Pekingologist. I have neither finished my Annping Chin translation of the Analects nor gotten appropriately blitzed off Moutai, and the CCP’s Counter-Pekingology is—as attests—quite advanced. However, I am studying for an MBA, and my coursework has emboldened me just enough to claim that “arbitrage” translates quite well into Hokkien.

Imagine you’re Xiamen Chen, CEO of Xiamen Middle-Tier Carbon Fiber Manufacturing Co., Ltd. You produce carbon fiber components for the burgeoning Chinese road bike industry, as is the style in town. You, like all your competitors, cut your teeth as an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) for Western bike brands. Your manufacturing is pretty good, but in the vicious competitive environment of Chinese industry, you can’t keep up. Your competitors got wise to direct-to-consumer sales and spun out their own brands—Winspace, LightCarbon, Yoeleo—that have now broken out of the Chinese market. Western journalists are singing their praises. Yoeleo even got their own-brand bikes into the Tour de France!

Now, you’re no genius—you’re just Xiamen Chen. But you grew up in the wake of the Cultural Revolution: you’re a hustler. And you realize that road bikes aren’t the only industry that needs carbon fiber components. Russian drones could use carbon fiber, too. You can’t keep up with LightCarbon’s quality control (QC), or Yoeleo’s branding chops, so you’re losing Western business anyway. But the Russians don’t need exquisite QC or good branding—your middle-tier carbon fiber manufacturing works just fine! And because the West-facing big boys care too much about sanctions to parley with those frosty northerners, you get the market all to yourself.

What does this have to China’s strategic goals? Nothing. Beijing is a three-hour flight away, and…okay, let’s do some geographic determinism. This is a topographical map of Xiamen:

Ocean to the east, jungle and mountain to the west, sticky heat in the middle. Ask yourself: is this the hometown of a docile people who listen to a centralized state authority, or has this been a redoubt for two millennia worth of raiders, traders, and barbarians who don’t like being told what to do?

Chinese business interests don’t need to care about geopolitics to economically integrate with an “Axis of Resistance” to the West. They need only see a global market that Western competitors refuse to touch and a local financial environment where stocks get no returns and municipal development bonds are an obvious time bomb—for the creditors. Your industrial assets might not be worth the loans on your head, but there is always value in moving product. And if your Russian and Iranian customers will pay you in gold, oil, or USD, all the better.

Whom Else Would China Fight but Americans?

But Xiamen Chen isn’t building ships with ramps on them—the kind of ships you basically only need for an amphibious invasion of a well-defended island. What gives? Well, as little as I know about Pekingology, I know even less about military procurement. But I’ve watched Perun for a year now, and that makes me more qualified than many OSINT Twitter accounts.

And to steal a Perun line, military strategy is built strategy. Designing a modern “exquisite” platform takes a decade-plus. So designing such a platform requires defense planners to guess—ahead of time—whom it would shoot at. Even if shooting at those folks is imprudent. Even if the vicissitudes of geopolitics mean those targets never get painted. It’s better to prepare countermeasures you never use than to buy a pack of cigarettes after the crisis arrives.

So, if you’re a defense planner in China, you ask yourself—whom might China fight in fifteen years? The Russian border is stretched then, but Outer Manchuria might not be worth a nuclear exchange. The Indians treat everyone like frenemies, but how much war can you really do atop the Himalayas? The only threat that would pose a serious future conventional military threat are the Americans. The United States has no good reason to fight China…today. But think like a Communist: would you trust the Americans? Sure, their people like making a buck as much as your people do, so there’s business on that front. But what happens when someone makes an American feel weak? Are you going to tell Hangzhou to stop innovating? Liang Wenfeng would build a mixture-of-experts model in a cave, with a box of scraps!

2027 is the Least Bad Time to Act

The hardware and the training are building at an impressive pace. But Chinese military planners must wrangle with some unfortunate downward trendlines. At the macro scale, mass retirements, shrinking youth populations, and simmering debt bubbles threaten to strangle the Chinese economic miracle. And in Zhongnanhai, another clock ticks. Dig this 2022 chart of the 20th Party Congress:

That’s a lot of men in their late 60s and early 70s. Maybe these guys still have The Sauce. But Biden didn’t. Brezhnev didn’t either, at this age. And again, I’m no Pekingologist: I have only read The Art of War once, as a YouTube audiobook, drunk. By contrast, Beijing elites know how to manipulate information. But I have found, both in the politics I have witnessed and the organizations I have worked in, that gerontocratic leadership corps forget to hire their replacements. Xi will be 74 in the fall of 2027. He will build the 21st Party Congress around this time, too. Will his knack for wordplay remain extant? Will a cult of personality poison his brain like it did Khrushchev’s? (Or Musk’s?) Will he trust the next generation to keep up the pressure?

The upward trendlines of industrial and military growth intersect the downward trendlines of economic fragility and aging leadership in 2027.

Invading Taiwan is a lot of pain for little gain. China may depend on the international order and global trade, but the Axis of Resistance is just good business for domestic interests. The People’s Liberation Army is gearing up for a fight with the Americans because we are the only threat that would need such a force—better to have it and not use it, than to be caught off-guard.

Invading Taiwan is reckless, self-destructive, counterproductive, and potentially nation-killing—but if the Central Military Commission were to press the button, they’d do so in 2027. If they wait much longer, they may lose their chance for a generation or more.

But do we care—really? I remember one Trump/Tech/Heritage Right conversation in which one person said, “I don’t care if Western allies look like liberal American democracies,” and another responded, “I don’t care if America stays a democracy!” If that’s what Americans believe—and more do so than we care to admit—then why bother as long as the chip fabs stay online?

This post and the information presented are intended for informational purposes only. The views expressed herein are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of their current or previous employers or any elected officials. The author makes no recommendations toward any electric utility, regulatory body, or other organization. While certain information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, the author has not independently verified this information, and its accuracy and completeness cannot be guaranteed. Accordingly, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made as to, and no reliance should be placed on, the fairness, accuracy, timeliness or completeness of this information. The author assumes no liability for this information and no obligation to update the information or analysis contained herein in the future.