Strange Attractor: The PayPal Mafia’s “Manhattan Project”
What are they building? And for whom?
“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.”
—James Madison
The United States is an extremely complex system of systems. Think of a spiral galaxy with 330 million stars in a chaotic but relatively well-ordered dance—each respecting multiple interlocking orbits. Now imagine another galaxy colliding with it.
From the perspective of any given star, you might feel fine. Your overall course is altered, but your solar system is not in danger. You’re still light-years away from any collision. But the larger system above you is being distorted and twisted to shreds—the home you once knew is scattered into space.
It’s Complicated
It will be billions of years—and we will be long gone—before the Milky Way has to worry about this problem. Nevertheless, the United States is facing something similar right now. Our national galaxy—a complex system of constitutional government, rule of law, culture, labor, resources, society, family, and daily experience—is being distorted by multiple conflicting gravitational forces trying to destabilize it.
A similar phenomenon can be seen in chaotic systems: the butterfly effect is the idea that small changes to initial conditions can have enormous impact on the final state of the system; and strange attractors are where the systems tend to end up in phase space.
In many ways, the world is an ongoing battle between simplicity and complexity, chaos and order, and binding and unbinding. The current battle for America is no different, and science is no exception. The few want to dominate the many through the centralization and capture of our epistemology—how and what we know.
Chaos Ladder
Humans are the current known apex of a long ladder of complexity derived from chaos. It is in our very nature to keep climbing up.
Out of the uniformity of the Big Bang emerged small differences which organized into the physical universe—clouds of gas which then self-organized into rotating disks. Those disks produced stars—complex, self-sustaining systems balancing fusion and gravity. Around those stars in a thin “goldilocks zone” emerged a self-organizing form of matter we call life. From that life emerged more complex forms of information: intelligence, consciousness, and self-reflection.
Our essence is to become more dimensional beings, to find more ways to unfold reality—not to close reality down, to simplify it, or to control it. But there are some that wish to do just that.
“Manhattan Project”
Peter Thiel likes to compare things to the Manhattan Project—perhaps most famously when he opined at the Republican National Convention in 2016 that innovation in the United States was in “a staggering decline for the country that completed the Manhattan Project.”
On Monday, Trump signed an Executive Order for the “Genesis Mission” that included this reference:
In this pivotal moment, the challenges we face require a historic national effort, comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project that was instrumental to our victory in World War II and was a critical basis for the foundation of the Department of Energy (DOE) and its national laboratories.
Leading this effort are: the Secretary of Energy, fracking centi-millionaire Chris Wright; PayPal Mafia member, AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks; and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios—formerly Peter Thiel’s chief of staff and hedge fund manager.
The project is described this way in Trump’s executive order:
The Genesis Mission will build an integrated AI platform to harness Federal scientific datasets — the world’s largest collection of such datasets, developed over decades of Federal investments — to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.
The American Science and Security Platform, or “The Platform” as its referred to in the Executive Order, is supposed to merge together a large number of agencies and datasets into a single integrated system that’s going to probe the universe—or something. Here is the glossy video put out by the Department of Energy.
“Uniting our brightest minds, most powerful computers, and vast scientific data into one living system for discovery. Built on artificial intelligence and quantum computing, it will radically redefine the scale, speed, and purpose of scientific progress in America.”
Translation: It’s a new central nervous system for American science—and whoever controls it controls the direction, and the fruits, of discovery.
Progress for Who?
I’m no Luddite. I’ve been fascinated by these ideas for decades, and under normal circumstances I’d be excited about such a project. Unfortunately, however, these are not normal times—and these are not normal people.
Kratsios, like Thiel, is obsessed with the weaponized notion that scientific progress has slowed to a crawl and blames it on everything from DEI, to closing schools during COVID-19.
The Genesis Mission is not a race for progress; it’s a race for the elite class to capture the next set of scientific breakthroughs as fast as possible—so they can stay elite permanently.
Kratsios graduated from Princeton, Sacks from Stanford, and Wright from MIT, but they all promote ideas that they know, or should know, are false.
Department of “Energy”
The Secretary of Energy is an oil-and-gas promoter who says—like Thiel—that climate science is a hoax. So why is he so interested in AI and crypto? Why is the Department of Energy (DOE) hosting the “Genesis Mission”? Two reasons: 1) AI and crypto require massive amounts of energy; 2) Because DOE has access to nuclear secrets.
Peter Thiel is currently backing the first privately developed uranium enrichment facility in the United States. This follows directly in the footsteps of his father Klaus—who worked on a secret Uranium mine for the apartheid South African government in the 1970s, while Peter went to fascist Christian schools in colonized Namibia.
These are the domains currently included in Trump’s executive order—from biotech, to nuclear, to quantum:
(i) advanced manufacturing;
(ii) biotechnology;
(iii) critical materials;
(iv) nuclear fission and fusion energy;
(v) quantum information science; and
(vi) semiconductors and microelectronics.
It’s not just a risk to nuclear security to concentrate all of this information in one location with these suspect gatekeepers. Here is the list of resources and responsibilities being given to Chris Wright, Michael Kratsios and David Sacks:
(i) high-performance computing resources, including DOE national laboratory supercomputers and secure cloud-based AI computing environments, capable of supporting large-scale model training, simulation, and inference;
(ii) AI modeling and analysis frameworks, including AI agents to explore design spaces, evaluate experimental outcomes, and automate workflows;
(iii) computational tools, including AI-enabled predictive models, simulation models, and design optimization tools;
(iv) domain-specific foundation models across the range of scientific domains covered;
(v) secure access to appropriate datasets, including proprietary, federally curated, and open scientific datasets, in addition to synthetic data generated through DOE computing resources,
(vi) experimental and production tools to enable autonomous and AI-augmented experimentation and manufacturing in high-impact domains.
(b) The Secretary shall take necessary steps to ensure that the Platform is operated in a manner that meets security requirements consistent with its national security and competitiveness mission, including applicable classification, supply chain security, and Federal cybersecurity standards and best practices.
Who gets access? Who sets priorities? Who audits results?
Effectively, the entire intellectual property of the United States, including sensitive national security data, is going to be concentrated in the hands of a few elites—with unlimited resources to exploit it.
One of the clauses reads like a gift to Elon Musk’s Optimus robot product, which is a requirement for him to get his trillion-dollar pay package.
Within 240 days of the date of this order, the Secretary shall review capabilities across the DOE national laboratories and other participating Federal research facilities for robotic laboratories and production facilities with the ability to engage in AI-directed experimentation and manufacturing, including automated and AI-augmented workflows and the related technical and operational standards needed.
But this is more than just money; this is an effort to control the future of science—and therefore humanity.
Strange Attractors
The system of life revolving around the revolutionary 18th-century idea that “all men are created equal”—as imperfectly realized as it has been—slowly evolved us towards a more perfect union, not just between states, but between people. Equality is a kind of strange attractor, a natural state of the system which increases the density of the network—building more and more complexity.
But for those who crave simplicity, who only see one direction, or whose worldview makes complex things seem messy and unnecessary—this tendency toward connection can be frightening. I think of it as complexity agoraphobia—the terror of things getting more complicated.
Narcissists are complexity agoraphobes because of their one-dimensional thinking, their singular focus on the self. Anything outside the narcissist’s worldview becomes distorted towards it—creating a kind of gravitational field around them. That’s what Donald Trump is to America: a single dimension trying to warp everything around itself. Trump is a very strange attractor because he collapses institutions into his ego.
But unfortunately, if the “Genesis Mission” is successful, Donald Trump will be far down the list of concerns, dimensionally speaking.
The science being explored is the next layer of complexity science, computer science, energy, and weaponry. Quantum information science alone is very likely going to yield major breakthroughs that can be applied across domains in the near future. This kind of cutting edge science can be invaluable to gaining an advantage in financial and prediction markets, de/encryption, and improving surveillance and weapons systems.
But who will control those secrets? Cui bono? Not you and not me. Instead, it will be confined to “The Platform,” a closed Manhattan Project by a group of white men with a long track record of wanting a less equal, less plural, and less ecologically sane world.
As they say: What could go wrong?
Better question: What couldn’t.
In the video below shared by Musk as the “hard truth,” Matt Walsh makes the argument that “our culture”—meaning white people—are intrinsically better than Somalians and therefore we shouldn’t let them live here. This is the hard truth about the current ruling class. We’ve let them get too big for their britches.
These are low-dimensional strange attractors hoarding science, hoarding resources, and hoarding our labor—because they truly think their special class is better.
From an evolutionary point of view, we’re handing the exclusive first look into our own future to people who want to take us backwards two centuries. We’re letting simple people decide our collective and individual trajectories.
“We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.”
—Carl Sagan
Simple people need complex solutions. Together we can be an even stranger attractor.
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Bluesky 🦋: jim-stewartson
Threads: jimstewartson
Ohh my Goodness 😱 your article this evening scared the hell out of me!!! What you've written is spot on, it's a road I don't want to travel down. Thank you, here's hoping you and your readers have a good Thanksgiving holiday and will reStack ASAP 🙏
It seems yo me that at some point soon the people controlling the processes you describe will stop pretending they are playing the “Democracy” game. They’ll just declare “Game over,” surround themselves with a palace guard, and declare that we can now go back to work…for them…at whatever conditions they care to declare.