Power in a Machine Republic
Discussion
Excerpted from Chor Pharn:
- Energy-compute – Infrastructure as power
"The machine surplus is physical before it is digital. America’s industrial strategy merges the energy transition with AI deployment: electrify, compute, subsidise. Data-centre investment exceeds $100 billion a quarter and will surpass $3 trillion within three years. The Department of Energy and the Department of Commerce have become coordination ministries—issuing credits, directing supply chains, and arbitrating between environmental limits and strategic urgency.
The corridor’s external dependencies are structural. Gulf capital funds the grid; Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese manufacturers supply chips and materials; Canadian and Australian mines provide critical minerals; Chinese refineries and Indonesian nickel feed the supply chain despite sanctions. Protectionism raises costs; friend-shoring deepens dependence. Industrial policy delivers capacity but not autonomy. The machine expands; sovereignty thins.
- Information – Attention as governance
The information corridor mediates everything else. Platforms are now political infrastructure: they translate surplus into perception. Engagement metrics, not elections, determine which problems the public notices. The business model rewards agitation; the advertising market finances volatility. When politics and media share the same algorithms, outrage becomes the stabiliser of the system.
Regulation trails innovation. The European Union writes the most influential rules for data and AI; India and the Gulf enforce localised compliance; American firms optimise around all of them. The state’s influence is indirect—content moderation requests, security briefings, and antitrust gestures that signal attention without imposing control. The information corridor delivers visibility but not coherence."
(https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/machine-surplus-governing-abundance)
What are the Geopolitical Implications ?
Chor Pharn:
" The shape of a machine republic
Together these corridors form a self-balancing network. Finance funds energy; energy powers information; information legitimises security; security protects administration; administration guarantees finance. Each corridor sustains another while constraining it. The system can absorb shocks but not direction. Politics has become the art of sequencing crises so that no corridor fails simultaneously. That is the condition in which the United States, and soon other advanced economies, now operate.
Global feedback — from clients to co-owners
Before we map the global feedback loops, we need to restate the mechanism. The United States built each corridor to project control outward; many former clients now hold enough capital, capability, or standards power to act as co-owners. China is the clearest case: a near-complete stack in energy, compute, information, finance, and—incrementally—security and administration has already shocked Washington into expulsions, friend-shoring demands, and a revived Monroe-doctrine posture that stretches from Venezuelan oil and rare earths to Greenland and Canada. The question for this section is broader than China. In each corridor, which other actors can exercise similar leverage and trigger an American backlash—financial, regulatory, or security—when they do? The recent hardening toward India makes sense in this light: discourage a second “escape-velocity” peer before it forms. The same test applies to Russia, the Gulf, Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and Australia. Who can shift from buyer or rule-taker to sponsor or gatekeeper—and how does the U.S. respond when the veto sits outside its borders?
Each corridor was once a channel of American projection; every one now contains partners strong enough to redirect it. The empire’s former clients have become co-owners of its operating system. When they exercise that leverage, Washington experiences the result as political shock and responds with the familiar mix of regulation, coercion, and moral rhetoric. These shocks arrive through finance, energy-compute, information, security, and administration, reshaping the republic’s sense of control.
In finance, the new sponsors are Gulf and Japanese institutions. Their combined purchases of Treasuries, equity stakes, and infrastructure vehicles underwrite U.S. liquidity just as China’s reserves once did. Japan’s monetary decisions now swing the long end of the Treasury curve; Gulf sovereign funds price data-centre and grid projects. The European Union, through its financial-stability and crypto frameworks, writes rules that U.S. firms must obey to trade abroad. Each partner can tighten or loosen America’s own credit conditions without firing a shot. When Tokyo or Riyadh signals hesitation, the White House stages a debt-limit crisis or launches a “Buy American” round to restore confidence. The dollar’s privilege endures, but its governance is shared.
In energy-compute, the dependencies are material. Gulf hydrocarbons and capital, East-Asian fabrication, and allied minerals supply the physical core of the machine surplus. Taiwan, Korea, and Japan gate the semiconductor tool chain; the Netherlands’ ASML is a single-firm veto on advanced lithography. Canada and Australia control critical minerals but also restrict extraction on environmental or Indigenous grounds. Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines have become gatekeepers for nickel and copper refining. Every time these partners assert domestic priorities, Washington answers with subsidies, sanctions, or renewed talk of a Monroe Doctrine that extends from Venezuela’s oil to Greenland’s rare-earths. The instinct to reclaim autonomy only exposes the scale of the loss.
The information corridor is now a global commons that no one governs. Brussels dictates privacy and platform standards; India and the Gulf enforce data localisation and cultural moderation; Korea and Japan dominate entertainment exports; Turkey and the smaller authoritarian states practice selective throttling and license blackmail. U.S. platforms remain profitable but no longer define the rules of discourse. Each new regulation abroad forces a recalibration at home—stricter moderation here, symbolic bans there. The political class experiences this as humiliation: a superpower unable to police its own speech infrastructure. The emotional reaction is protectionism in the language of freedom.
In security, co-ownership is now industrial. Japan and Korea produce ships, missiles, and munitions that the U.S. once monopolised. Turkey sells drones to America’s partners and adversaries alike while using NATO vetoes for leverage. Qatar mediates regional wars that Washington cannot control yet cannot ignore. Poland and Eastern Europe decide the tempo of the Ukraine front; Australia dictates the schedule of AUKUS submarines; India purchases cooperation à la carte. Each of these states occupies a node of the U.S. defence network and can slow or redirect it. The American response is familiar: pay more, promise more, accuse allies of freeloading, then fold the concessions into the next budget.
Even the administrative corridor has co-owners. The European Union writes the extraterritorial regulations—on AI, privacy, ESG—that shape American firms. Singapore, the Gulf free-zones, and London’s law firms host the compliance infrastructure that U.S. agencies quietly rely on. The rule-set that governs the machine republic is increasingly transnational, drafted through negotiations that Congress never sees. Each foreign standard imported for convenience becomes a limit on sovereignty. Washington’s answer is convergence by stealth: expanding executive authority to enforce alignment, the same method it once condemned in Beijing.
The pattern is clear. The United States designed a world of clients; those clients became shareholders; the shareholders now hold vetoes across the empire’s corridors. Each assertion of independence by a partner provokes an American backlash—tariffs, sanctions, legislation—that further centralises decision-making in the executive branch. The more the republic resists co-ownership, the more it must imitate the administrative capitalism it opposes. Angela Zhang’s observation about U.S.–China convergence describes not an episode but a permanent condition.
The geopolitical theatre that follows is emotional rather than strategic. “Friend-shoring” campaigns, punitive investigations, and moral denunciations mask a simpler truth: the U.S. cannot re-monopolise the systems it built. Its sphere expands not through conquest but through annexation of risk—absorbing the volatility that others generate while exporting its own through finance and regulation. The Monroe Doctrine returns in digital form: not soldiers in the Caribbean, but investment reviews and export controls stretching from Canada’s lithium to Venezuela’s oilfields. The purpose is the same—to ring-fence the machine from rival co-owners.
Each corridor’s externalisation produces a domestic echo. The Treasury defends dollar primacy at the cost of fiscal space; Commerce pursues “secure supply chains” that raise consumer prices; Defense builds “integrated deterrence” that depends on allied vetoes; the bureaucracy codifies exceptions that Congress cannot repeal. Every victory abroad narrows the range of motion at home. The United States remains the indispensable platform of the world economy, but it is no longer the programmer. Its institutions run the code others now help to write."
(https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/machine-surplus-governing-abundance)