Incidentally, manual moderation is much easier to do on a federated network where each individual instance doesn’t grow huge. Some people complaining that Lemmy isn’t growing to the size of Reddit, but I see that as a feature myself. Smaller communities tend to be far more interesting and are much easier to moderate than giant sites.

It’s the logical end point of a particular philosophy of the internet where cyberspace is treated as a frontier with minimal oversight. History offers a pretty clear pattern here with any ungoverned commons eventually getting overrun by bad actors. These spam bots and trolls are a result of the selection pressures that are inherent in such environments.

The libertarian cyber-utopian dream assumed that perfect freedom would lead to perfect discourse. What it ignored was that anonymity doesn’t just liberate the noble dissident. It also liberates grift, the propaganda, and every other form of toxicity. What you get in the end is a marketplace of attention grabbing performances and adversarial manipulation. And that problem is now supercharged by scale and automation. The chaos of 4chan or the bot filled replies on reddit are the inevitable ecosystem that grows in the nutrient rich petri dish of total laissez-faire.

We can now directly contrast western approach with the Chinese model that the West has vilified and refused to engage with seriously. While the Dark Forest theory predicts a frantic retreat to private bunkers, China built an accountable town square from the outset. They created a system where the economic and legal incentives align towards maintaining order. The result is a network where the primary social spaces are far less susceptible to the botpocalypse and the existential distrust the article describes.

I’m sure people will immediately scream about censorship and control, and that’s a valid debate. But viewed purely through the lens of the problem outlined in the article which is the degradation of public digital space into an uninhabitable Dark Forest, the Chinese approach is simply pragmatic urban planning. The West chose to build a digital world with no regulations, no building codes that’s run by corporate landlords. Now people are acting surprised that it’s filled with trash, scams, and bots. The only thing left to do is for everyone to hide in their own private clubs. China’s model suggests that perhaps you can have a functional public square if you establish basic rules of conduct. It’s not a perfect model, but it solved the core problem of the forest growing dark.

here https://archive.ph/6PDnY

Nobody is talking about defying laws of physics here. Your whole premise rests on fossil fuels running out and being essential for energy production. This is simply false.

🙄

Except USSR didn’t run out of energy.

Again, I’m explaining to you that society is a conscious and intentional construct that we make. USSR could have made changes in a similar way China did to move in a different direction. As your own chart shows, there was no shortage of energy as output rebounded. The problems were political and with the nature of the way the economy was structured.

Carbon footprint shows how much energy is being used per capita. Population density is way past the point where it’s practical for people to live off the land in some subsistence living scenario. What is more likely to happen is that we’ll see things like indoor farming being developed so that cities can feed themselves. This will become particularly important as climate continues to deteriorate, as indoor farms will make it possible to have stable environment to grow food in.

Having grown up in USSR, I know there was in fact a huge difference. The economy wasn’t structured around consumption, goods were built to last. People weren’t spending their time constantly shopping and consuming things. The idea that USSR was destined to collapse is also pure nonsense. There were plenty of different ways it could’ve developed. USSR certainly didn’t collapse because it was running out of energy.

The point is that capitalist relations are absolutely the problem here. Social systems do not have to be built around consumption. You’re also talking about natural systems that evolve based on selection pressures as opposed to systems we design consciously.

First of all, carbon footprint in China is already far lower than in any developed country. Second, as I already pointed out, most countries simply outsourced their production to China.

indeed

China’s already doing this with nuclear, so there’s a good chance they might do this with data centers too. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/chinas-first-commercial-nuclear-district-heating-scheme-expands

That’s just saying that China is one of the most populous countries in the world that also happens to be a global manufacturing hub. China still uses fossil fuels, but I think it’s fair to call it an electrostate at this point.

• China’s carbon emissions have been in a structural decline since 2023 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carbon-emissions-set-for-structural-decline-from-next-year
• Clean energy was top driver of China’s economic growth in 2023 https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-was-top-driver-of-chinas-economic-growth-in-2023/
• China installed more solar in 2025 than rest of the world combined https://electrek.co/2025/09/02/h1-2025-china-installs-more-solar-than-rest-of-the-world-combined/
• China’s solar capacity surges; predicted to top 1 TW by 2026 https://www.rystadenergy.com/news/china-s-solar-capacity-surges-expected-to-top-1-tw-by-2026
• China is also building out nuclear at a breakneck pace https://www.economist.com/china/2023/11/30/china-is-building-nuclear-reactors-faster-than-any-other-country
• New energy vehicles account for 77.6% of China’s public transport system https://www.shine.cn/news/nation/2403089981/

Finally, it’s also worth noting that China has a concrete plan for becoming carbon neutral, which it’s already ahead of

• https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chinas-energy-transition-in-5-charts/

The fact of the matter is that air is an incredibly inefficient thermal conductor so data centers have to burn a massive amount of extra electricity just to run powerful fans and chillers to force that heat away. That extra energy consumption means an air cooled facility is responsible for generating significantly more total heat for the planet than a liquid cooled one.

When you put servers in the ocean you utilize the natural thermal conductivity of water which is about 24 times higher than air and allows you to strip out the active cooling infrastructure entirely. You end up with a system that puts far less total energy into the environment because you aren’t wasting power fighting thermodynamics. Even though the ocean holds that heat longer the volume of water is so vast that the local temperature impact dissipates to nothing within a few meters of the vessel.

Yes, it is a fallacy because the problem is with the economy system as opposed to a specific technology. The liberal tendency often defaults to a form of procedural opposition such as voting against, boycotting, or attempting to regulate a problem out of existence without seizing the means to effect meaningful change. It’s an idealist mindset that mistakes symbolic resistance for tangible action. Capitalism is a a system based around consumption, and it will continue to use up resources at an accelerating rate regardless of what specific technology is driving the consumption.

The fallacy here is the assumption that if LLMs didn’t exist then we wouldn’t find other ways to use that power.

seems like the opposite is happening in practice with models drastically increasing in efficiency

yeah it’s a really powerful editor that can handle tasks you’d normally use a few different apps for

Hypersonics cover a wide range of stuff, what this article discusses are cheap low end missiles as opposed to something like Oreshnik.