The Agency Trap: Why We Must Fail to Survive

Why Competence is the Ultimate Threat to the Biosphere

Updated: 8th January 2026

A Note on Tools, Drills, and the x32 ABI: Why I Use AI Images

Before we begin, a word on the image above. I generated it using AI. There is a movement on Substack to boycott posts featuring AI-generated art. The argument is moral: AI is theft, AI is soulless, AI consumes energy. It is a classic display of what I call Performative Agency.

Refusing to use an AI tool to generate an image is like refusing to use an electric drill to bore a hole in masonry.

• The Electric Drill: Consumes high-grade electrical energy. It is loud. It is

  ‘unnatural’. But it drills the hole in 18 seconds.

• The Hand Drill: Consumes somatic energy (calories). It takes 20 minutes. It feels virtuous. But the wall doesn’t care about your virtue; it only cares about the hole.

I use AI because I respect the Maximum Power Principle. If a tool exists that allows me to crystallise a complex concept in 18 seconds, refusing to use it is not ‘resistance’; it is thermodynamic inefficiency. It is performative non-clicking in an economy that runs on throughput.

This is not a theoretical position for me. I spent a decade advocating for the Linux x32 ABI. Why? Because it was a way to reduce the memory footprint and increase cache efficiency—a concrete, unglamorous engineering effort to reduce the Entropic Drag (F_drag) of the global computing stack.

And nobody cared.

The industry ignored x32 because “memory is cheap.” They chose Bloat (High Entropy) over Efficiency (Low Entropy) because the energy surplus allowed them to be lazy.

Recently, I wrote a provocative piece titled The Entropy Tax: A Thermodynamic Case for Big Endian and ILP32. It argued that our entire network infrastructure is built on the wrong endianness and the wrong pointer size, creating a massive, invisible tax on every byte of data we move.
Was it a serious proposal? Yes.
Was it also cynical performance art? Absolutely.

I wrote it to prove a point: People will ignore a decade of real engineering work (x32) that actually saves energy, but they will riot over an AI image because it feels like a moral transgression.

That is the Agency Trap. We focus on the symbol (The Image) and ignore the physics (The Pointer Size). We boycott the drill while the house burns down.

The Mercury Mistake: Software vs. Hardware

In my working papers, A Socio-Economic Thermodynamic (SETE) Model and The Path to the Singularity, I committed a necessary academic sin: I outlined a destination—the transition from Exchange-Value to Use-Value—without providing a map. Readers asked: “How do we get there?” They imagined a policy paper or a scientifically planned de-growth. But this reveals the final illusion: we still believe we are driving a vehicle that responds to commands. We are not. We are fueling a thermodynamic runaway event, and thermodynamics does not have a reverse gear.

Specifically, in The Path to the Singularity, I identified a historical error I call the Mercury Mistake.

The ‘Strong Enlightenment’ thinkers committed an ontological crime: they extracted the deterministic ‘Software’ of Newtonian physics—the laws of impact, motion, and inertia—while discarding the Active Principles of maintenance and internal repair. They kept the ‘Clockwork’ but threw away the ‘Metabolism’.

They created a world-view where the economy is a perpetual motion machine. They convinced us that as long as the ‘Software’ (the markets, the policies, the human will) is ‘rational’, the ‘Hardware’ (the biosphere) will simply provide.

But the hardware is hitting the Resource Entropy Singularity—the point where the cost of maintaining our massive Inertial Mass (M) exceeds the energy available to do so.

The Maximum Power Trap: r-Strategy vs. K-Strategy

Many of my peers, including Nate Hagens, correctly identify that we are ‘blind’. Nate calls it Energy Blindness—a failure to see the quantity of the ‘fuel’ we are burning.

But the real crisis is Entropy Blindness. It isn’t just that the tank is empty; it’s that the car’s weight (M) and internal friction (γ) are increasing exponentially. Nate is still looking for a “5th Law”—a way for humans to “rationally choose” to sit on their hands.

This is a logical flaw. Nate treats the Maximum Power Principle (MPP)—the drive to maximise energy throughput—as a universal “4th Law” of thermodynamics. He believes we are biologically mandated to burn the world.

He is wrong. MPP is not a law of physics; it is a Principle of Selection for a specific biological mode: the r-strategy.

• r-Selection (The Pioneer): Maximises growth, speed, and throughput. It dominates in open, energy-rich niches (The Carbon Pulse). It is the weed, the rat, the invasive swarm.

• K-Selection (The Climax): Maximises efficiency, stability, and longevity. It dominates in closed, full environments.

Humans are quintessentially K-strategists. Biologically, we are slow-growing, long-lived primates with massive parental investment. We are evolved for stability. Our tragedy is that the ‘Strong Enlightenment’ has force-fed us an r-selected culture. We are K-selected animals trapped in an r-selected ‘Software’ that treats the Maximum Power Principle as a moral imperative.

The Kākāpō: The Anti-MPP Node

Consider the Kākāpō. Evolving in the isolated ‘island conditions’ of New Zealand, it didn’t maximise power. It didn’t optimise for flight or speed. It optimised for Persistence.

Kākāpō - A critically endangered, flightless, and nocturnal Parrot native to New Zealand (Photo: Jake Osborne ; CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The Kākāpō is a pure K-strategist. It proves that complexity does not require a ‘burn rate’. It is an evolutionary success that only faced extinction when it collided with an r-selected ‘pioneer’ system (introduced predators and industrial humans).

The Kākāpō isn’t “Energy Blind”. It is Entropy Aware. It walks because flight is a high-entropy power spend. It persists because it lives within its metabolic means.

When Nate Hagens proposes a “5th Law” of rational restraint, he is trying to invent a ‘Self-Restraining r-strategist’. That is a thermodynamic impossibility. An r-strategist that ‘sits on its hands’ in a high-leverage environment simply disintegrates. We don’t need a new law; we need to realise that the ‘r-selection’ party is over and return to our biological K-selected roots.

The Danger of Competence: Grand Agency as the Trap

If we retain a competent, functioning government as we hit the wall, they will not choose the ‘K-strategy’ of simplification. They will choose Acceleration.

• Geoengineering (The Beckwith Solution): Dimming the sun to mask the Biophysical Signal of entropy. This is a Structurally Guaranteed Compromise (SGC) designed to protect capital while the tracks melt.

• From Landlord to Seizure: In The Global Landlord, I argued that US tariffs are not about trade; they are a tool to suck Eurodollars back into the domestic market, creating a global shortage that forces the periphery to cannibalise its own resources to pay the debt. But as the Entropic Drag (F_drag) rises, the hegemon moves from financial ‘eviction’ to kinetic Military Resource Seizure. They stop asking the market for Exergy; they take it.

• The Dragon in the Coal Mine: As I detailed in my critique of China’s hyper-industrialisation, success in an r-selected niche is a suicide pact. By burning through their coal and resource base to build ghost cities and solar-panel exports, they have reached the bottom of the mine at high velocity. When US Agency (seizure) meets Chinese Counter-Agency (desperation), the result is a kinetic collision that consumes the last of the biosphere in a final fight for the scraps.

The ‘Best Case’ scenario is not that we succeed in ‘managing’ the transition, but we stop ‘managing’ it entirely.

The Two Agencies: Grand vs. Ground

To understand why failure is our only option, we must distinguish between two types of agency.

The trap I describe above is Grand Agency—the concentrated, command-and-control capacity of states and capital to enact regional or planetary-scale interventions. This is the machinery wired directly to the Maximum Power Principle, seeking leverage over the whole system. Its ‘solutions’ are inherently accelerative. This is culture forcing humanity to operate using the r-strategy.

This must be distinguished from Ground Agency: the distributed, community-scale work of ecological renewal, climate adaptation, and building material independence. This is the Island Strategy. It operates on a different logic—not of controlling the system, but of healing the land, fostering resilience, and practising the economics of Use-Value now. This is allowing humanity to engage in its biologically evolved K-strategy.

Our dilemma is that Grand Agency actively suppresses Ground Agency. The State cannot allow local resilience because it needs local resources to feed the central engine. Therefore, the failure of Grand Agency is not our disaster; it is the prerequisite for our renewal. We need the ‘Brain’ to stop giving orders so the ‘Body’ can start to heal.

The ‘Unlikeable’ Best Case: The Systemic Stroke

If Grand Agency is the trap, then Paralysis is the escape.

The scenario that offers the highest probability of biophysical survival is the one nobody wants to discuss: a chaotic, unmanaged collapse of State and Market capacity before the Singularity is absolute.

We must hope for the train to break down:

• Gridlock: A US Congress so polarised it cannot pass the funding for the Geoengineering shield.

• Incompetence: A UK Civil Service so degraded it cannot implement the new surveillance state.

• Financial Seizure: A global bond market crash that destroys the credit creation mechanism, preventing the financing of new oil exploration.

We are safer in a world where our leaders are too incompetent to execute their ‘solutions’ than in a world where they succeed. We need the brain of the Leviathan to disconnect from the muscles while there is still a biosphere left to inhabit.

Conclusion: Falling into Use-Value

We do not ‘choose’ a Use-Value economy. We fall there when the hallucination of Exchange-Value evaporates.

The ‘Agency Trap’ is the belief that the engineer, wired to the Maximum Power Principle, can invent a faster engine to escape the cliff. He cannot. Our only remaining hope is that the engine fails.

Pray for the failure of the engine. Work for the renewal of the ground it passes over.

Steven J. Newbury is a researcher in biophysical economics. This is the conclusion of a three-part series on the Thermodynamic Singularity.

Part I:

Part II:

For how we ended up here, please read: