• Why Was Kyoto Japan’s Capital?

• Why Is Japan’s Population Shrinking So Much?

• How Japan Redrew Asia

• Why Did Japan Rise So Much, but Then Stagnated?

Have you seen this? There are more transfers in stablecoins than payments in Visa or Mastercard.

Stablecoins, cryptocurrencies designed to maintain a stable value, typically by being pegged to a traditional currency, are worth over $300B.

Mostly through Tether and USDC:

Stablecoin transfers are growing much faster than crypto trading:

Stablecoins are quickly becoming the 2^nd big crypto use case after Bitcoin. Why? How big is it going to get? What’s the difference between them and Bitcoin? What’s the future of cryptocurrencies? Since the best way to predict the future is to understand the past, let’s do that with currencies to learn how we got here.

Shells, Copper, Bronze, Gold, Silver, Paper

You can understand why Bitcoin has been successful when you consider the history of currencies, as we did in How Silver Made Chinese Empires and How Ancient Metals Started Civilization. Good currencies need to be:

• Scarce: eg, the market can be flooded by shells

• Stable: Its value can’t be changing all the time

• Divisible: for big or small transactions

• Durable: eg, shells or bad quality paper can break

• Portable: eg, copper was so cheap that you needed to carry a lot of it to make any payment

• Fungible: eg, two shells are unlike each other

• Acceptable: other people must recognize it as a valid currency

Some things work better than others as currency:

These factors explain why Bitcoin is so valuable now, worth $1.7 trillion dollars, nearly as much as silver.

Indeed, Bitcoin is:

• Available: You can easily get Bitcoin wherever you are

• Scarce: There will only ever be 21 million BTC

• Divisible: One BTC can be divided into one hundred million pieces (0.00000001 BTC, about 0.08 cents today)

• Durable: It’s going to be there as long as we see value in it, as BTC is the result of computation

• Portable: You can send it anywhere with a few clicks at very little cost

• Fungible: One BTC is exactly the same as another

• Acceptable: Everybody that is close to crypto knows BTC and accepts it as payment. This is the core reason why BTC is one of the biggest cryptocurrencies and why it will remain so for a long time: As the first one, and one that’s well built, everyone recognizes it as the most important, and that makes it so.

I skipped one of the properties of a good currency. Did you notice which one?

Stability.

The price of BTC is volatile.

This makes it like gold, for the same reasons.

The Dullness of Gold

This is the value of gold over time:

Notice this is a logarithmic graph, so gold price swings are even wilder than this. Why?

Gold is very scarce, so in moments of scarcity, people hoarded it. They squirreled it away in chests, jewelry, furniture… Which is a self-fulfilling prophecy: The more people think it’s scarce, the more they hoard it, and the scarcer it becomes.

Scarcity and stability are connected: the scarcer a currency is, the less stable it will be.

Bitcoin has the exact same problem, for the exact same reason. It has the ultimate scarcity (only 21M BTC will ever be minted), so when people think its value is high, they will hoard it, pushing its price up, and when they think its value is shrinking, they will dump it. This is why BTC prices swing so much.1

This has catastrophic consequences for an economy whose currency is gold: When the economy expands, people need more gold, so it becomes more scarce, so its price increases, people start hoarding it, and the lack of currency makes the economy cool off. In other words, a lot of the economy’s productivity increases simply translate into higher gold prices.

Shiny Silver

This is what made silver so valuable. In the 1400s, after the Black Death in Europe, the economy boomed. By the 1450s, this2 had led to a dramatic shortage of silver, which spurred technology improvements in Central Europe, which helped them discover new silver mines. A few decades later, the Spanish discovered the American ones, flooding the world with silver.3

Since silver is more abundant than gold, it’s less scarce, which made it more stable as a currency.

And stability is key for a currency, because that conserves the value of the signal of prices. We all know how bad inflation is for the economy. Deflation is, too: If a currency gains in value over time, people will reduce their consumption, dragging the economy into a recession.4

The global economy boomed, from Spain to Europe and even China. That’s why silver coins became legal tender around the world:

Hence stablecoins. Get it?

The Stability of Stablecoins

Stablecoins, like most cryptocurrencies, inherit the same benefits as a Bitcoin: availability, divisibility, durability… The main difference is the scarcity vs stability tradeoff.

Since scarcity is what makes Bitcoin like gold—too valuable, which makes its value unstable—then the next generation of successful cryptocurrencies was always going to be the one to solve this problem: Eliminate scarcity, and instead target stability.

That’s how a stablecoin works. A company like Tether tells you: “Give me one dollar, I’ll give you a digital dollar (which I’ll call USDT for United States Dollar – Tether). You can move it around as you please, and when you want, I’ll give you that dollar back.”

Each time a customer asks for one USDT, Tether just mints it, so the stability of the currency is completely tethered to its underlying currency (in this case, USD). How does Tether guarantee that one USDT is always worth one USD? Because5 it uses your dollar to buy a US Treasury security, and it makes money out of the yield on that security (or “treasury”) while you keep that USDT unredeemed. About 3/4 of Tether’s dollars are in US treasuries or equivalent assets.6

This is why the company is one of the most profitable: With interest rates around 4%, its over $200B in assets generate $10B in profits in 2025. With just 200 employees, that’s around $50M of profit per employee—10x more than NVIDIA!

A global adoption of USD stablecoins might have some pretty serious macroeconomic consequences.

A Radical Impact on the Global Economy

With people worldwide buying USD, the entire world economy might dollarize. With this ubiquity, more businesses might put their prices on USD stablecoins and accept them as currency, thereby furthering the cycle.

Lower US Inflation

This would be valuable for the US because it can keep printing dollars while inflation stays low, since it’s distributed over many more dollars around the world.

This is so useful that the US is embracing USD stablecoins, and approved the GENIUS Act as a result. Imagine: The US can print treasuries at will, and the rest of the world gobbles them up! More debt without the consequences of higher required interest rates.

Europe and China see this coming, and they’ll try to fight it with their own stablecoins. The competition will be good for customers—except when it prevents citizens from buying the competing stablecoins.

Weaker Financial Weapons

But of course, the more transactions run on stablecoins, the less they run on the US-led SWIFT system, undermining its influence on global transactions. The US would have fewer financial weapons against its enemies, but a more powerful monetary policy.

All this is not a trivial side-effect. Eliminating the power of a central node is arguably the core purpose of cryptocurrencies.

Undermine Local Currency Policy

Along the same lines, most countries wouldn’t be able to influence the economy as much through monetary policy, since many more of their citizens’ and firms’ assets would be in another currency.

Fewer Financial Crises

From here, via Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution, heavily edited:

Firms and financial institutions in developing countries borrow heavily in USD while their revenues and assets are in local currency. When the US increases its interest rates, the dollar appreciates, the economy slows down, and asset prices shrink. These firms suddenly find themselves squeezed by rising dollar debts and falling asset values. This shock forces cutbacks and retrenchment. This is one of the key channels through which US monetary policy spills over globally.

But if households and firms begin holding dollar assets via stablecoins, now both sides of their balance sheet will be in dollars. A stronger dollar no longer only increases liabilities; it also raises the value of their dollar assets, helping to offset the shock. In effect, stablecoins can act as a decentralized balance sheet stabilizer, muting one of the very mechanisms that drives global financial volatility.

So these are some of the global consequences that stablecoins could have in the global economy, but first we need to get there, and that depends on individuals adopting stablecoins - and from what we can see, there’s demand. Why are so many people interested in that? Why not simply use US dollars?

The Advantages of Stablecoins over USD

We talked about the big needs of currencies in history before, but that doesn’t mean we’re done. There are still many pain points with payments today that new payment and currency systems can solve.

1. Access USD Where It’s Hard To

If you’re in Venezuela, Turkey, Iran, or Syria right now, you’re losing 15–80% of your currency value every year you hold it. If your money is in the bank, you’re watching it evaporate. It would be better to hold USD, which lose their value much more slowly.

But as a foreigner, you can’t easily access USD. You can’t get a US bank account, your local banks might not offer the service, or your government might simply ban it. Buying USD bills on the streets is at a deep discount, you need a place to store them, and people might steal them from you.

But if you can log into your crypto account and with a few clicks buy a USDT with your own currency,7 you will not lose your life savings just because you happen to live in an inflation country. You’ll have access to this money anywhere in the world.

2. Fast International Payments

“Oh I’m sorry, it’s 5:01pm on a Friday. You’ll have to wait 88h for us to process your payment—Monday is a bank holiday.”

And then on top of that, you need 1–5 business days to get your money! Are we in the Middle Ages or what? Are we carrying silver ingots by horse-pulled cart? We’re not, but traditional payment systems like SWIFT can still take day transfer your money.

3. Working Capital

During that time, the money is neither in the sender’s account nor in the receiver’s, so both need to cover that money during that time. This working capital can add up to a lot, and some companies need huge, expensive loans in the interim. An immediate settlement—which stablecoins can do—bypasses that problem.

4. Cheap Fees & Commissions

Traditional payments are expensive, too. An international wire transfer frequently costs $20–$30, and remittances cost on average over 6% of the amount! If you send home $1,000, the intermediary can shave $100 off your meager income.

Those are just fees. What about exchange commissions? Not great to lose 1-3% of the money in every transaction you make. That’s some medieval financier kind of stuff.

5. Convenient International Payouts

Imagine a company that has thousands of employees in dozens of countries around the world. How do you manage all the currencies, national banking systems, bank accounts…?

6. Programmability

A dollar is dumb. It just sits there waiting for you to do things with it. Cryptocurrencies are not.

Imagine a homeowner paying a plumber €500 to replace a water heater. The homeowner sends the money into a digital escrow. The contract releases €250 when the plumber arrives,8

then releases the rest when the homeowner confirms the heater works. If they disagree, the money stays locked until a named mediator decides what happens.

Cryptocurrencies can support smart contracts that settle and move money automatically. For example, they can release funds when certain conditions are met—subject to software, oracle, and governance risks. Trading, collateral, lending, prediction markets, decentralized exchanges, tokenization… These are all examples of things we can do with intelligent money that are hard to do with dumb money.

Takeaways

As you can see, while Bitcoin is a way to store value like gold was (and is), stablecoins are optimized specifically as currencies for payments, the way silver was in the past. All these new stablecoin-related currencies and payment processors are focusing on solving the pain points of our current ones: high costs, slow settlement, accessibility, inconvenience, and stupidity.

This also tells you how we should think about the future of stablecoins in particular, and cryptocurrencies in general: What pain points do we still suffer from existing currencies and payment systems?

This is the 8^th and final article of the series about Japan. Previous ones:

• Why Japan is so populated (free)

• Japan’s 4 geopolitical priorities (free)

• How Japan’s geography drove its history (free)

• How a dozen Asian countries were drawn by Japan (premium)

• Why Japan is the first big economy to shrink its population (premium)

• Why Tokyo is the biggest city in the world (paywalled)

• Why the imperial capital was Kyoto, and why it moved to Tokyo (premium)

Today, we’re going to explain the crazy trajectory that the country has followed over the last 150 years:

• Why was it the only non-Western country that built an empire during the Industrial Revolution?

• How did it become the 2^nd richest country on Earth?

• Why has it stagnated in the last three decades?

• Why is it so indebted, but pays so little in interest?

Why Was Japan the Only Non-Western Country That Built an Empire during the Industrial Revolution?

The entire sequence is surprising here:

1. Why was Japan the only non-Western country to join in on the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s?

2. Why did it take advantage of it to build an empire?

Japan’s Unique Proto-Industrialization

In 1900, eight countries fought side-by-side to attack China during the Boxer Rebellion. Find the odd one out: Germany, Russia, Britain, France, the United States, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Japan. This is shocking, right? A non-Western country marching in the same alliance as seven Western industrial powers?

In the late 1800s, Europeans had made contact with the entire world, but the only outside country that industrialized out of that was Japan.1 Why? Because it had a set of unique characteristics.

To industrialize, you need:

• A surplus of food, to allow for a big chunk of the population to not work in farming

• Some light industries that could serve as stepping stones to heavy industries

• A big urban population that can be brought into factories

• Fast transportation

• Widespread trade

• High literacy and a class of literate administrators

Japan had it all.

We saw how geography brought it the food and the urban population: great fertile plains in a good climate for double cropping, but limited enough so people couldn’t just expand by farming more land, forcing urbanization and specialization into trade. By the mid-1850s, Japan was already very densely populated, with a very high urbanization rate.

As a set of islands with its Seto inland Sea, it was well-situated for fast and cheap transportation. Tokugawa Japan developed transportation on the east and west coasts too, in the Pacific and the Sea of Japan. As the country had been unified and tolls eliminated, Japan also developed roads that allowed short-distance trade of goods and fast communication.

The political unity, good transportation, and high urbanization all helped trade flourish.

All these elements also enabled light industries: textiles, silk, paper, sake, etc.

And the class of samurai had spent 250 years forgetting to fight, because there was just no need. They replaced the katana, horse, and gun for the pen and became administrators.2 The entire country had high literacy, but the samurai class had an exceptionally high one for the time.

Of course, the question becomes: Why did Japan gather these assets and no other country did?

The Britain of Asia

Nick Szabo noted the surprising parallel between Japan and Britain.

Both are islands, neither too big nor too small. They are pretty mountainous, creating several valleys in between and competition between their different rulers. They are close enough to the continent that they could receive plenty of technology. But island geography also made defense unusually efficient: Britain and Japan could concentrate defense at maritime chokepoints rather than have to defend vast land borders.

This also meant that agricultural productivity could be high, because farmers were more secure in their land. They could invest in their long-term improvement, knowing that nobody would come and steal the fruits of their labor. Compare that with Ukraine, for example, which was so exposed to horse-mounted hordes that it invested substantially less in farming.

Thanks to this security, both countries established property rights that allowed landowners to affirm and trade their properties, which increased their value, and justified more investment.

So both Britain and Japan in the 1800s had high homeland security thanks to their geography, which had brought conditions that favored agricultural investment, which increased agricultural yields, which increased the population, which allowed for urbanization, which fostered trade and industrialization.

And since both were secure, they could invest part of that surplus not in more soldiers, but in education, and the administrators needed for industrialization.

This section is a hypothesis, but now that I think about it, a lot of these conditions remind me of the US and Italy too. They’re not islands, but close,3 they’re well defended, had many valleys that fostered competing rulers,4 but were connected enough that they could be unified, and plenty of farmland to produce a surplus of people.5

Japan’s Unique Reaction

So Japan was in a unique position to industrialize, but it had to decide to do it. It lived in a feudal system when the Europeans arrived, but rather than dragging their feet, the Japanese recognized the threat and replaced their political system extremely quickly.

China again is a good comparison: It had a big population, cities, trade, taxation, good transportation, high literacy, a huge administration… The ruler could have identified the Western threat in the First Opium War but didn’t. Why did Japan, but not China?

I think it’s again due to the unique geography of Japan: Having all these separated plains in mountainous and elongated islands allowed for political independence. They were all one country, but each lord (daimyo) could manage his lands differently, make different bets, and create some local power. This was crucial to overthrowing the Tokugawa shogun and ushering in a new government system, copying the West.

Why Did Japan Pursue an Empire?

Once you follow all of the above, pursuing an empire becomes pretty easy to understand:

• Japan’s geopolitical priorities: Japan wanted to secure the five gates leading to it.

• Japan saw how Western powers were becoming powerful by creating empires. Japan could either eat or be eaten, and it chose to eat.

• There’s probably a status question too. Japan industrialized by copying the West. And the West was creating empires, which gave them status. Why not copy them?

After WW2, though, Japan was completely destroyed. How did it become the world’s 2nd biggest economy? And then, after growing for so long, why did it start stagnating? Because the very assets that made it rich became a liability.

Read more

Read more

Births

Read more

Read more

Why did it develop samurai?
Why did it close down to the world for 250 years?
Why did it forget how to make guns?
How did it go from feudal to industrial in a matter of decades?
How did it conquer half of East Asia?
Why did it later lose it?

You can explain all of these, and more, just by looking at its geography. We’ve started to do this in the last two articles on Japan’s population and its geopolitical priorities. Now it’s time to connect that to history.

How Geography Determined Japan’s Government

As a reminder, this is Japan:

In the previous article, we saw how the #1 goal of Japan is to unify these islands, especially the three southern ones of Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku.

The Smaller Islands

Kyushu is so close to Korea that it’s always been the Japanese island most connected to the mainland, to new ideas and technologies, and to maritime trade, which made it one of the richest and strongest early on. But it has few plains, so with just 12M people today, it’s not very populated compared to Honshu.

Meanwhile, Shikoku is so mountainous that it could never harbor a big population and has “just” 3.5M people today.

The Checkered Plains

All of this means that the majority of the population concentrates in southern Honshu, on the plains, because as we have seen, the north of Honshu and Hokkaido were too cold for rice agriculture and double cropping.

But look at the distribution of these plains. What can you deduce politically?

The key thing to notice is that there are scattered plains, separated by lots of tall mountains. That made transportation very challenging: In 1700, it took 15 days to go from Kyoto to Tokyo! What do you think the consequence of this was?

Feudalism.

When it’s difficult to go from one place to another, armies can’t easily move. When mountains divide them, they can use them as defense.

Information is also more time-consuming and costly to gather, so any central power had a hard time knowing how much rice each plot of land produced: There were floods, landslides, earthquakes, tsunamis, eruptions, typhoons… From the capital, it was hard to know what each paddy could actually produce. So locals could easily lowball it, making it hard to tax fully. The local lords knew exactly how much was produced though, because they could inspect the paddies personally. They pocketed the difference.

Mountains also made trade difficult, because carrying goods over them was too expensive. Normally, trade unites, since traders must cooperate and fight against bandits, so less trade meant a weaker unifying force.

But these valleys nestled between mountains were too close to each other for lords to ignore their neighbors, and they vied for each other’s land and wealth. If you think about it, all these are very similar conditions to those we find in Europe, and unsurprisingly, Japan landed on a similar political system for 1000 years.

However, Japan also had a unifying force, the Seto Inland Sea. It was a bit like Rome’s Mediterranean, allowing people and goods to travel cheaply from one seaside plain to the other.

The Seto Inland Sea was not a perfect highway. All the crannies on the coast and the strong currents in the sea enabled pirates and maritime lords to flourish. The same thing happened in the Mediterranean early on, until Rome could fight pirates away. But in Japan, since no plain was strong enough to create a powerful navy to monitor it, the sea became both a unifying factor for trade and a feudal one for political power.

The Long March to Unification

The First Unification: 300 BC to ~700 AD

For about 1000 years, technology moved from Korea to Japan: rice agriculture, iron metalworking, horseback riding… The Japanese simply expanded across the islands, grew their population, and clans emerged in every valley.

As that phase progressed, new technologies from the mainland, mainly writing, Buddhism, and the Chinese-style administration, allowed the state to strengthen. A central ruler emerged in the powerful central Yamato around 600–700 AD.

Japan meddled in Korean politics in the 600s, and when its allies lost to the Chinese, Japan feared an invasion, so they centralized vigorously to organize their defenses. The Japanese settled their original capital in Nara,1 near Osaka and Kyoto, and built a centralized system around an emperor, with a census, written laws, officials, provinces, taxation and conscription.

The Feudalization of Japan: 700 – 1600 AD

This centralization was too expensive for the time, and crumbled. Why?

Under the centralized government, every household was registered in a census, and taxes were due per household. So for example, person A owned rice paddy B, so he had to pay x% of B’s annual rice production.

We saw before how it was difficult for central leadership to know the production of a specific paddy. But also, how did you keep track of the households that had to pay you? People are born, die, marry, move… It was nearly impossible to keep up with it all. The census had to happen frequently, and all that information had to travel back to the capital, which took a very long time and was very expensive.

All of this worked while the system was still new, and while the Japanese feared a Chinese invasion. But as the fears receded, and people learned the system, it became very hard to maintain.

So little by little, power reverted to local authorities, who knew who owned each paddy, what the harvest was going to be, and were able to tax them accordingly. As more money stayed local, the emperor had less money to fund an army, but also less of a need for one, since now the local authorities were in charge of collecting the taxes and sending them to the capital. As a result, the local authorities also had to hire their own local forces to defend against bandits and neighboring clans. These would become the samurai.

Notice how similar this is to the process in Europe! The Roman Empire fell, with its centralized power, census, and administration, and in its wake appeared local lords who taxed local peasants and defended them through the figure of the knight. In fact, just like knights, samurais were also mounted! A key factor of the samurai’s strength was in fact the expensive ownership and maintenance of horses.

Peace and war alternated for centuries, culminating in the Warring States Period (or Sengoku Period), between ~1450 and ~1600. In the late 1500s, a series of leaders2 were able to finally unify Japan. This started the longest period of peace in Japan, the Tokugawa Shogunate, which lasted ~250 years between ~1600 and 1868, and was named after the dynasty of the last one of these leaders, Tokugawa Ieyasu.

Why did that happen then, and not, say, in 1000 AD or 1800 AD? After centuries of military action, civil administration, and new ideas from Korea and China, state capacity had dramatically improved. The only states that could survive were the rich ones that could tax their citizens efficiently and field an army effectively—so, the bigger, better-managed states.

Also, the Portuguese arrived in the 1500s and started selling firearms. This initially created a crisis, but eventually helped whoever was rich enough to buy more, had the right influence to source them, and could learn to use them better. A local lord no longer had any chance against a well-funded one. Firearms also made populous valleys more powerful: A samurai needed lots of training to fight well with his bow, his katana, and his horse, but you could give a firearm to a farmer and quickly make him lethal. So more populous lands became stronger.

Another factor of unification was the discovery of silver mines in the mid-1500s. Those who controlled them could trade with the Chinese and the Portuguese, sourcing more weapons and fielding bigger armies.

Of course, silver means more currency, so it’s easier to trade. This meant more wealth, which could be taxed to invest in war.

Unity at All Costs

Imagine you’re one of these Japanese leaders, ruling after centuries of feudalism and living your entire life in war. What would you do? Spend all your efforts to ensure that didn’t happen again, eliminating all the decentralizing forces of Japan, to be replaced by centralizing ones.

Here’s what the Japanese leaders did:

1. Weaken the military power of potential opponents:

   1. They eliminated the military power of lots of competitors: Buddhist temples, warrior leagues, autonomous towns, guilds…

   2. They forced lords to destroy their castles (except for their residence) and ask for permission to do repairs, and banned them from building more.

   3. Local lords also lost the ownership of their lands. They were now entrusted with the land by the shogun, always on a temporary basis. They were then moved around, so as not to settle too much on a particular land and grow their control on it. This made samurai landless warriors.

   4. The most loyal ones were granted the best lands.3

   5. Marriages between lords required approval.

   6. They ordered farmers to surrender swords, daggers, bows, spears, firearms, and other weapons.

   7. Without wars to fight, the samurais’ horseback fighting became a hobby, and skills were lost.

   8. Only a few gunmakers were licensed, and all were centralized in a single location. They could not travel to other provinces, share fabrication procedures, or sell firearms without reporting first to authorities. So lords could not buy guns domestically or from outside the country. To prevent illicit trade, gunmarkers were given a stipend, whether they sold arms or not. The reduction in volume of sales made firearms so expensive that they disappeared from Japan over the centuries as a weapon of war.4

   9. They eliminated pirate lords in the Seto Inland Sea. Authorities had to identify ship captains, fishermen and other maritime populations, make them swear not to engage in piracy, and threatened confiscation of a lord’s lands if piracy continued within his territory.

   10. To foster trade and reduce enemy income, they abolished many toll barriers and monopoly privileges.

2. Improve income

   1. They ordered a new nationwide cadastral survey: measure fields, classify quality, estimate yield, and identify cultivators, so they knew exactly who should get taxed, and how much.

   2. They linked taxes not to the people, but to the paddies in the village. Each parcel owed a precise amount of taxes in the form of rice every year.

   3. Farmers were tied to the land, so the difficulty of knowing who owed what disappeared.

   4. Control mines: silver and gold mines fell under the shogun’s direct control.

These are the actions to achieve Japan’s first geopolitical goal—unite internally—but remember Japan’s two next geopolitical goals:

1. Protect the five gates towards Japan (four island paths plus Korea)

2. Neutralize Asia’s superpowers

And here, Objective 1 was threatened by 2 and 3, because Europeans started appearing in Japan, while China and Korea had always been threats. So the Japanese leaders addressed these threats, too.

Foreign Affairs

Hideyoshi had a battle-hardened army with no more wars to fight; dangerous to have in your own backyard. And since Korea was nearby and a constant threat, he figured he might as well launch an attack.

This reminds me so much of what Portugal and Spain did after their Reconquista unified the Iberian Peninsula against the Muslims: They kept going. They invaded neighboring northwestern Africa (now Morocco) and started sailing around the world. Fortunately for Spain and Portugal, they had no strong empire nearby to throttle them. Unfortunately for Japan, they did. The land campaigns worked well in Korea, but their naval campaign suffered from a catastrophic battle where it lost a huge chunk of its fleet. The war bogged down, and Japan pulled out when Hideyoshi died in 1598.

The only option left to the Japanese was to hunker down, and that’s what they did.

1. The Japanese people were banned from traveling abroad, under pain of death.

2. Foreigners couldn’t come into Japan either, under the same threat of capital punishment.

3. Trade with foreigners was extremely limited. The Dutch and Chinese were limited to trading in Nagasaki, on the southwestern island of Kyushu, and the Koreans in Tsushima. This notably kneecapped Kyushu lords, who used to conduct most of the trade, but had to stop.

4. The Portuguese, the first to arrive in the 1500s, didn’t just bring weapons. They also brought Christianity, which spread like wildfire in Japan. During the Warring States Period, local lords would adopt Christianity to get arms and money. The Spanish landed in Japan soon after, and the Japanese learned from them what happened to the Aztecs and Incas. The Japanese leaders decided to ban Christianity, the Portuguese, and the Spanish from landing in Japan, and they prioritized Christian lords in the national cadastral survey, to suppress them.

You can see how intense all the policies were to secure Japan’s main geopolitical priorities. The Tokugawa achieved it for good, and the peace lasted 250 years.

Japan’s stability came at the cost of completely isolating itself from the world. But the world didn’t want to isolate itself from Japan.

The West Hurls Japan into the Future

In the mid-1850s, Westerners had just humiliated China in war and forced it to open up to Western trade, as I explained here.5 The Japanese knew the West was coming for them, and it did, in 1853, when Commodore Perry knocked on the door of Japan’s past.

Perry entered Tokyo Bay6 with steamboats that could easily outmaneuver any Japanese sailing ship, and with guns whose violence the Japanese had only heard tales of.

Outpowered, the Tokugawa Shogunate was forced to open up to trade with the West, and this exposed its military weakness after 250 years of isolated peace. This became the downfall of the shogunate: The Japanese split into two camps, one that wanted to expel the Westerners, the other that wanted to co-opt their technologies. How exactly did the shogunate fall?

• After 250 years of mostly peace, the military force of the shoguns was diminished.

• The shoguns controlled a lot of the military power, but the local management was not centralized, still belonging to local lords who knew the local conditions. So well-organized local lords, with the right strategy, could beat the Tokugawa (the feudal nature of Japan still showing up).

• The right strategy was to co-opt the emperor. The same figurehead dynasty had been the emperors of Japan for centuries. It was a useful convention to legitimize the shogunate, with no real power. Seizing the emperor would weaken the shogun’s legitimacy.

It won’t surprise you to learn that Kyushu leaders (and some from the westernmost part of Honshu) were among those who wanted to Westernize: They were more open to foreigners and had already been schooled by their weapons (as Westerners arrived from the southwest and could only trade in Kyushu), so they had started sourcing them and arming up. Eventually, they marched on Kyoto, took control of the emperor Meiji, defeated the Tokugawa in a battle, and “restored” the power to the emperor. The Tokugawa side disappeared. The period that followed is called the Meiji Restoration, and it’s probably the most radical modernization a country has ever seen. The Japanese studied everything about Western powers, adopted it all, and within a decade, virtually the entire economy, military, and administration were Westernized.

This worked so well that by the end of the century, Japan could face the historical regional behemoth (China) and a Western empire (Russia)... and win.

You have to understand how absolutely crazy this was at the time. It changes the arc of history in the east: Until then, for literally thousands of years, everything in that region had become more Chinese. Suddenly, little Japan, an appendix at the end of the continent, where technologies arrived after a lag and never originated from, goes from aligned with the Chinese–Confucianist world to Westernized in a few decades, and then beats China.

As for Russia, not a single Eastern country had been able to face Western powers in a modern war and win.7 Not one! Westerners had steamrolled every other country, including India and the neighboring mighty China. Then along comes a random chain of islands at the edge of the Pacific, and it beats the behemothic Russia, which controlled an empire that extended from Europe to the Pacific. Extraordinary.

So how does all this tie to Japan’s three main geopolitical priorities?

1. Maintain internal unity

2. Control the islands that lead into Japan

3. Fend off rivals on the Asian continent

Japan’s Imperialism

When the Meiji Restoration begins, Japan starts wondering: To what extent can we keep our homeland united (objective 1) if we don’t control the roads that lead to it (objective 2)?

They concluded that they had to take control of all the paths to Japan. It wasn’t an overnight decision: They started with a few nearby islands. But the logic had no end: The more they took, the more buffer they thought they needed. The timeline is:

• 1853–1854: Commodore Perry enters Edo Bay

• 1868–1869: The Tokugawa Shogunate ends, the Meiji Restoration begins

• 1869: The Japanese take full control of Hokkaido and colonize it

• 1872–1879: They take over the Ryukyu island arc (it used to be a kingdom!)

• 1875: Russia concedes the Kuril islands, in exchange for recognizing Sakhalin island as Russian

• 1876: Japan forces Korea to open up trade with them, the same way Perry forced Japan to trade with the West

• 1894–1895: They go to war with China in the first Sino-Japanese War. They take Taiwan and push China out of Korea.

• 1900: Japan joins Western powers in fighting China during the anti-Western Boxer Rebellion.

• 1904–1905: War with Russia. The Japanese take southern Sakhalin and Russia's lease on the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula, just north of Korea.

• 1910: Korea is annexed.

• 1914–1919: During WW1, Japan joins the Allies to seize Germany’s colonies in the east: its Pacific islands and Chinese concessions.

• 1931: Japan invades the Chinese province of Manchuria, near Korea.

• 1937–1945: 2^nd Sino-Japanese War. Japan takes a bunch of territory in China.

Now we’re going to take a pause, because something subtle changes here that reveals Japan’s 4^th and last geopolitical goal.

Japan’s 4^th Geostrategic Goal: Resources

If you’ve followed up till now, you recognize exactly the problem here. One of these territories is unlike the others.

Controlling all the islands that lead to Japan is one thing. It’s an entirely different thing to take on the continent. The peninsula of Korea, you can maybe justify: It’s close enough to Japan and secluded enough from Asia. But that’s the slippery slope right there, and the Japanese knew it. If you take Korea, you are exposed to Manchuria. So you take it. And that exposes Manchuria to Mongolia, Russia, and China, so you try to get them, too. Japan gets locked into a catastrophic confrontation with not one, but two land empires (it goes to war with Russia and the USSR a couple of times, too), which it can’t win. Big mistake.

Since Japan can’t conquer China outright, it tries something different: Strangling it by taking French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) in ~1940 to cut land supply routes to China.

Now let’s zoom out for a minute here. WW2 is now underway. France and the UK have declared war with the expansionist Germany, which is allied with similarly-expansionist Japan. Both are conquering land at breakneck speed. The US sees this and concludes:

• Japan is about to take the Malacca Strait to stop Chinese maritime supplies.

• The Philippines are right there, close to Japan. They might well take them.

• Japan is like Nazi Germany in Asia: If we let them continue, they will continue taking over lands until they split the world between them.

So the US does what it can to kneecap Japan: It stops selling it oil. Since 80% of Japan’s oil came from the US, this effectively meant losing the war. Japan could not operate without oil.

You can see the slippery slope from Korea, to China, to Indochina, to oil. It’s now forced to either abandon China—and acknowledge it f***ed up and wasted thousands of Japanese lives for an impossible goal—or keep going, which meant taking the Strait of Malacca (British) to control trade, and Indonesia (Dutch East Indies, a Dutch colony) to take its oil. But Japan knew the US wouldn’t like this and might enter the war.

So it decided to preemptively bomb the US’s navy in Hawaii, at Pearl Harbor.

Immediately after that, it took what are today the Philippines (US colony at the time), Malaysia (UK colony), and Indonesia (Dutch colony), allied with Thailand, and fought the British in Burma. This is how they got to this point:

If you have been following my GeoHistory articles, you know this is a nightmare of an empire. You need a massive navy to oppose two global powers (the US and the British), and an army to oppose three land ones (the Russians, the Chinese, and the British), along with guerilla wars from dozens of different nations.

Japan reached the end of the slide and fell into the mud.

Of course, the US proceeded to beat the s**t out of Japan, because Japan is a series of tiny islands while the US is a continent. And all because of the 4^th geopolitical priority: resources.

Japan was small, but had a huge industrialized population and economy. It couldn’t produce everything it needed, so it had to take it from abroad—and prevent its enemies from getting the same resources.

This is why Japan invaded Southeast Asia: to cut China’s resource supplies.
This is why Japan attacked the US: to secure oil.
And this is why the US followed the Pacific strategy it did.

The US didn’t need to conquer every tiny island. It just needed to break the network. Stop the resupplies, and you neutralize every island.

This is why the US invested heavily in a navy here, why its submarines focused on destroying the Japanese merchant fleet (resources!), and why it bypassed countless Japanese islands full of soldiers who were left useless and stranded.8 It only took enough islands (like the Philippines, Iwo Jima, Guam, and Okinawa) to build bases to control the areas and fly over Japan to drop bombs.

By 1945, Japan was out of oil and food. Its navy could not operate. Its population was starving. But it was also pretty fundamentalist. It was never going to give in to foreigners and was ready to fight to the death, literally sending women civilians to fight the enemy with bamboo spears if that’s what it took.

The US would have lost potentially millions of soldiers conquering Japan. That’s precisely what Japan wanted: Not to lose millions of people, but to make the invasion so costly to the US that they would force a settlement, with better peace terms for Japan.

That’s why the US dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki instead. For the 2nd time in one century, the US forced Japan to realize its technological inferiority and fold.

How Japan’s 4 Geopolitical Priorities Drove Its History

So in summary, now you know how Japan’s geography determined its four geopolitical priorities, and how these have driven its history.

Goal 1: Unite the Main Islands

Because Japan is a series of big connected islands, but with flat valleys separated by mountains, it wants to be united, but it can’t easily do that. So Japan’s unity took about 2000 years, from 300 BC when the first Yayoi arrived, to 1600 AD, when Hideyoshi and Tokugawa finally united Japan. In the middle, they had a first attempt around 700 AD, but it was too early and it fell apart. The conditions were only right in 1600, and today, this goal has been fully achieved.

Goal 2: Control the Five Gates to Japan

This only started being important when foreigners from overseas started bothering Japan. The five gates are the Ryukyu Arc ending in Taiwan, the Izu-Bonin Arc, the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin Island, and Korea.

• The Izu-Bonin Arc is fully achieved (except Guam, but the US is an ally).

• The Ryukyu Arc and Taiwan were taken over at the end of the 1800s. Today, Taiwan is not Japan anymore, but it’s an ally via the US. Threatening Taiwan threatens Japan through the Ryukyu Arc, so it has a vested interest in protecting it from China.

• The Kuril Islands and Sakhalin were far north. Even Hokkaido is. So it took until the 1800s for Japan to fully take control of Hokkaido, and several conflicts with Russia to decide who owns the others. Right now, it’s Russia, but that might change in the future. They haven’t signed a peace treaty because of that.

• Korea: Japan invaded three times, and succeeded only once. This is a massive slippery slope for Japan, so I doubt it will try again. Better to have an ally there, so South Korea is super important for Japan.

Goal 3: Neutralize the Big Continental and Oceanic Powers

In the past, Japan tried to do this through war:

• Two Sino-Japanese wars, in the late 1800s and 1930s-40s

• The Russo-Japanese War in 1904-05, and WW2

• The war with the US in WW2

Very very bad idea. Japan is too small to be a comparable superpower. So it must ally with these powers instead. Today, it’s a US ally, so the ocean is covered. The instability of its relationship with its Russian and Chinese neighbors is very worrisome, and that becomes Japan’s main unachieved goal: How to ensure peace with them (or ensure their relative weakness).

Russia is weak today, that is good for Japan. In fact, bogging it down in the Ukrainian front is useful: While Russia focuses its attention and resources there, it can’t bother on the other side.

So Japan’s main concern is China. In the last few decades, Japan tried to become friends via trade, but it has learned (like the US), that China takes advantage of this to increase its power and might abuse it, so it’s become more cautious.

China’s crazy appendage, North Korea, is even more worrying, especially now that it has nuclear weapons. So Japan must manage it.

One thing few people know is that Japan is always only months away from developing a nuclear weapon. That’s their trump card.

Goal 4: Secure Resource Supplies through the Sea

Either to achieve Goal 3 (prevent its enemies from getting supplies) or for itself. It tried the war path, and that did not go well. It then tried the trade path, and that has worked extremely well. Japan can get everything through shipping and has established commercial ties and investments across all of Southeast Asia, which allows it to obtain everything it needs.

In summary, for Japan, the future of its geopolitics means remaining friends with the US, making sure it’s strong, containing North Korea, and managing China so that it never again becomes the threatening behemoth next door, and all of it can be seen from its geography.

In the next few articles on Japan, we’re going to answer a lot of fascinating questions on the country:

• How did Japan redraw the map of Asia?

• Why was it the only non-Western country that built an empire during the Industrial Revolution?

• How did it become the 2^nd richest country on Earth?

• Why has it stagnated in the last three decades?

• Why is it so indebted, but pays so little in interest?

• Why is it one of the first countries to shrink its population due to a lack of children?

• Why was Kyoto the capital at one point?

What can you see?

The Four Main Islands

The three big islands of Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku were destined to be a political unit:

• They are very close to each other

• They’re also oriented mostly east–west. That means they share the same climate, which facilitates movement, because people’s lifestyle and crops don’t change.

Hokkaido is much farther north, which means different climate and ways of life, so unifying with the other islands would be harder. But the island is so close (~19 km, 12 mi) to Honshu that it was very likely to ultimately unify with Japan. All this explains a lot of Japanese history, like for example, why the three southern islands of Japan united partially for the first time over a thousand years ago, and why Hokkaido was only fully conquered and colonized at the end of the 1800s.

These four islands are not isolated in the middle of an ocean. There are five paths to reach them.

The Five Gates to Japan

1. Izu-Bonin Arc

The Izu-Bonin Arc goes nowhere in the Pacific, so it was logical that Japan would own it. This is where the islands of Guam and Iwo Jima are,1 which the US used to approach Japan from the south during WW2. The US still owns Guam.

The other four gates extend close enough to the continent that their ownership could be contested between Japan and the Asian powers.

2. Ryukyu & Taiwan

The Ryukyu arc ends at Taiwan, which is 130 km (80 mi) away from mainland China, separated by treacherous waters. Since Asia is such a massive continent, wars between its biggest powers have always been land-based, so their armies have also been land-based, and hence their navies were never strong. That’s why Taiwan has been part of the Netherlands (sea power), Spain (sea power), the Koxinga regime (a Chinese sea power), Japan (sea power), independent for the last 80 years (supported by the US, a sea power), and only part of China (Qing Dynasty) for a bit over 200 years, in the 1700s-1800s.

That explains why Taiwan has been contested throughout history, and after they lost their independence, the islands in the Ryukyu Arc have been part of either Japan or the ruling power in Taiwan. Since Taiwan has never been that strong, most of that arc of islands belongs to Japan today, after it conquered it in the late 1800s. This is why Okinawa, for example, belongs to Japan today.

As China’s economy and influence grows and it tries to return Taiwan to the fold, it includes more than just Taiwan in its claims. The most notorious example is the Senkaku Islands, whose exclusive economic zone might include oil, and are closest to China (of all the Japanese islands in the area).2

Notably, today China is encircled by enemies in the sea, which means they could blockade it. That’s why it is being so aggressive in pushing against its neighbors in the South China Sea, and another reason why it’s aggressive towards Taiwan.

3. Kuril Arc & 4. Sakhalin Island

The island of Sakhalin and the Kuril Arc could have belonged either to Japan or to the continental power in the region—which happens to be Russia. This has always depended on the winner of the latest war. Since Russia became an imperial power before Japan, it had time to reach the Pacific and take Sakhalin before Japan did. By that time, Japan had industrialized, and it won the war with Russia in 1904-1905, so it took control of the southern half of Sakhalin Island and the parts of the Kuril Arc it didn’t already cotrol. But then Japan lost WW2 in 1945, and the USSR rushed to reclaim as much of these islands as it could. It recovered Sakhalin and conquered all the the Kuril Islands

The USSR pushed so aggressively that the closest Russian island to Hokkaido is just ~2 mi / 4 km away!

Historically, Japan is in a stronger position than Russia to control the Kuril Islands, because they’re small distant islands and Japan is a maritime power, while Russia, by nature, is a land-based one. It’s very telling that Russia and Japan have never signed a peace treaty since WW2, mainly because Japan has a very strong historical claim to these islands, and they disagree on where exactly the border should be.

Russia kind of agrees that the small islands are Japanese (Habomai, Shikotan), but doesn’t want to give them up unless Japan ends the claim on the bigger Kunashir and Iturup.

In the other direction however, Sakhalin is big enough and close enough to the continent (less than 10 km) that, although it could have gone either way, it favored Russia historically—and has almost always been Russian.

5. Korea

Korea is far enough from Japan that it’s quite hard for either Japan to conquer Korea (three attempts, one succeeded in the late 1800s/early 1900s, for less than a century), or for Korea to conquer Japan (two attempts, failed, by the Mongols).

If Korea had been a flatland better connected to China, it would historically have been part of China. Being a mountainous peninsula, it has always been hard for China to control. Here’s a diagram, from the Korea article:

The result is that, for Japan, Korea is likely to always be a buffer against continental powers.

In between the two is the island of Tsushima, which could be used as a stepping stone in either direction, especially since it’s closer to Korea (~50 km) than to Japan (~130 km). The claim to it could have gone either way, but for the same reasons as before, it’s Japanese, since Korea has had to be a land power to fend off China, but Japan is a sea power with no threat to the south or east. It could focus on the island and get it.

Jeju Island, meanwhile, is closer to Korea via plenty of small islands, and farther from Japan, so it ended up in the Korean sphere.

The distance between Korea and Japan is long enough that there have been few invasions on either side, and even fewer that succeeded, but short enough that trade and technology could travel—mostly from the continent to Japan.

Resources

We’ve identified Japan’s first three main objectives:

1. Internal priority: Unify the four main islands

2. External priorities:

   1. Secure all the islands that lead to Japan

   2. Fend off the threats from powerful Asian empires

To figure out the last objective, we need to zoom back out.

Japan is lonely. There’s nothing to its east and south. To its north, there’s just cold. All its potential threats come from the west—but that’s also where all the resources used to come from.

Because Japan is resource poor. As it’s on a “newly” formed geology,3 it doesn’t have much oil or coal.4 The newly-formed mountains had gold, silver, and copper—which the country used extensively in its past—but not much more than that.5 All the rare-earth minerals, and even more common ones like iron, which it needs for its advanced technology, must be imported.6 And the valleys are good for agriculture, but the population has outgrown its production capacity, so it needs to import the majority of its food: 63% of its calories and 34% of its value.7

So Japan must procure lots of commodities from abroad. As an island, these commodities will always arrive by sea, so Japan must make sure it can secure its maritime supplies—whether by controlling them or by being friends with the ones who do. Most of Japan’s missteps leading to WW2 can be traced back to this.

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Japan’s 4 Geopolitical Objectives

So these are Japan’s 4 main geopolitical objectives:

1. Unite the four main islands

2. Secure the five gates that lead to Japan

3. Neutralize the superpowers that can invade: the Asian land powers and the international sea powers

4. Secure all the resources it needs through maritime trade

If you understand this, you can understand virtually all of Japan’s history:

• How it coalesced around 700 AD into a united country for 1000 years

• How it devolved into a feudal country over the centuries

• Why it was unified around 1600

• Why it forgot how to produce guns

• Why its samurais forgot how to use their katanas and their horses

• Why it closed down for 250 years

• Why it got traumatized in the mid-1800s

• Why it became the only non-Western country to industrialize in the 1800s

• Why it created its own empire in Asia

• Why it later lost it

• Why it is the way it is today

With 37M people, Tokyo is the most populated city on Earth.

It would take you about five days to walk from one side to the other.

Since it’s so big, more than half of those nearly 40M people take the subway every day, which is why Tokyo’s railway network is the biggest and busiest in the world.1 Shinjuku is the busiest railway station in the world (nearly 4M people daily at its peak). Shibuya is the busiest pedestrian crossing (~100k people per hour during rush hour). Tokyo built a gigantic underground river to protect the city from flooding, sometimes referred to as the world’s largest drain. It has the most Michelin-starred restaurants, the largest wholesale fish market, one of the world’s busiest airports…

Why here though?

Isn’t there a better place?

Why did you pick the “big volcano place” for your capital, Japan?

Why is it also the capital of earthquakeland? Couldn’t you find a better place, seriously?

To add to the conundrum, Tokyo contains 30% of Japan’s population, yet it has been the capital of Japan for less than 200 years, and had just ~60k people around 1600! Yet by 1700, it might already have been the biggest city in the world!

So how come the biggest city in the world has been the capital for less than 200 years, and is situated in volcano, earthquake, tsunami, typhoon land?

It is not a coincidence! It’s there because of these things!

Japan Is Dense

Tokyo is populated because it’s in Japan, and Japan is very populated, as I explained in the previous article:

1. Japan’s staple is rice, which has a unique feature: It produces a lot of calories per km². It can feed a lot of people.

2. The south of Japan has a climate that allows for double cropping—one summer harvest of rice, one spring harvest of wheat or barley. So the population density is very high in the south.

3. Japan could supplement its diet with plenty of fish thanks to hot and cold currents meeting at the northeast coast of the main island, Honshu, producing a lot of seafood.

4. It was isolated enough that it didn’t have to fight constant wars, and it didn’t suffer wave after wave of infectious diseases.

5. It was small enough that most of its populated areas could be unified, reducing civil wars and the deaths associated with them.

6. The ashes from volcanic activity might have improved the fertility of the land.

7. The constant rain on mountains meant lots of sediments flowing to the plains, which fertilized them.

This is why every inch of Japan’s valleys is packed with people—especially in the south:

Tokyo’s Density

So the question becomes: Why is Tokyo the biggest of the Japanese cities?

The total population of a city depends on how much land it occupies, and how much population density there is in that land (people per km² x number of km²). Surprisingly, Tokyo’s population density is similar to those of Nagoya or Osaka! Since Tokyo contains ~30% of the country’s population, it implies it’s just 2.5x more dense than the average Japanese plain—which makes sense since it’s the capital. Sure, Tokyo’s central neighborhoods are denser, but some Osaka neighborhoods are in the same order of magnitude.

Tokyo is not even in the Top 50 of the world’s densest cities!2

So yes, Tokyo is quite dense, but not crazy dense. If not density then, Tokyo must just have a really big surface area. And indeed, what makes Tokyo so populated is that it has ~15,000 km² of high-density land. That’s why it takes 5 days to walk from one side to the other.

Why is Tokyo so extensive?

The Kanto Capital

A topographic map immediately shows the answer:

Tokyo is on the Kanto Plain, by far the biggest in Japan, accounting for ~15-20% of the historical farmland in the country.3 This meant that historically, it produced the most food, so its population could grow the most. And grow it did, until it became the most populated city in Japan.

OK so we now know why Japan is so populated, and why Tokyo is the biggest city within Japan (because it’s on the biggest plain). But then… Why is the biggest plain in the country there and not elsewhere in Japan? Why not in Nagoya, or Kyoto? As far as I know, nobody has answered that yet. So here is, for the first time, my hypothesis.

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I just enabled translations in a dozen other languages! If you read this article on web or the Substack app, you should see an option to change the language of this article. Use this and tell me what you think!

Japan is so weird:

• Not too long ago, it was one of the most populated countries on Earth. Why?

• That’s despite being quite small and mountainous. How come?

• Why is its capital one of the largest cities on Earth?

• How come it’s farther north, south, east, and west than South Korea?

• It’s much bigger than people think. How come?

• Why are its north and west coasts much less populated than the south and east?

• Why is the Russian island of Sakhalin, just north of Japan, so sparsely populated in comparison?

• Why does it have such a strong fishing culture?

• Why is most of its population of the same ethnic background, except for the people from the northern island of Hokkaido?

All of these questions have one single root cause, and it can be represented by sushi.

Japan’s Population

Japan is still the 12th most populated country in the world.

Of the top 50, it’s the 5^th most densely populated.

Why is it so densely populated?

It can only be due to food supply: Historically, the more food you could make, the more children would survive, and the more the population would grow, up to its maximum capacity. That’s a Malthusian world.

And since most food comes from farming, only countries with lots of farming could produce big populations. So if Japan is so populous, maybe it has lots of fertile land?

Or maybe Japan’s food comes from elsewhere? Maybe they import it? Or maybe it comes from the sea?

If it’s due to farming, why such a high yield? Is its land extremely fertile, like in Egypt or Java? If so, why? Or have the Japanese made the most of their fields—are they better farmers than those in other countries?

Or is it the politics? Did the Japanese organize in a way that maximized food production?

Or is it a matter of timing—the Japanese entered the Industrial Revolution early, so they were able to produce more food earlier on, therefore growing its population earlier than others?

Or maybe Japan is not good at growing people—it’s just good at keeping them alive? Maybe Japan, as an island, avoided most wars that plagued other countries, so it didn’t lose that much population to war?

Which one is it? Maybe volcanoes?

Japan vs Java

If you read Why Is Java so Weird?, you know that this island is packed with people because of its volcanoes.

Is this also the reason for Japan’s huge population? It’s possible: They’re both on the Ring of Fire, the string of volcanoes and earthquakes-prone regions around the Pacific Ocean, which extends partway into the Indian Ocean.

To this day, new islands are constantly being formed in Japan!

This is near Iwo Jima. Source: Kazuhiro Ichikawa, via Massimo (@Rainmaker1973)

The Ring of Fire is very obvious on Google Maps: When you see the underwater trenches and mountain ranges on the edge of the tectonic plates, you realize that Japan is simply the part that emerges from the water—just like the Philippines and Taiwan!

This is also why Japan is much bigger than people think: It has many islands on these subsea mountain ranges:

This is why Japan claims these territorial waters:

Japan’s exclusive economic zone is the 8^th biggest in the world thanks to all these islands.

All these islands are the reason why the US famously took the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa during WW2: The US needed pit stops between Hawaii and Japan, and these islands were remote enough from the main islands that they were relatively easy to overcome, but they were also close enough to give access to Japan’s four big islands, and the conquest severed the connection between Japan and its colonies in the Pacific.

Japan eventually got them back, and that's why its maritime boundaries are farther north, south, east, and west vs South Korea.

The tectonic plates also explain why Japan is so mountainous:

Only 12% of Japan’s land is arable! So is this rare land extremely fertile because its volcanic ash fertilizes the soils, just like on Java?

Big surprise! Japan today is actually not as densely populated as South Korea or Taiwan, if we consider total cultivated land! And South Korea is not a volcanic peninsula! So, in the case of Japan, its large population isn’t attributable to volcanoes. So what is it, then? Well, let’s see where the Japanese people actually live.

Japan’s Food Geography

Half of Japan’s population lives here. Why?

Here’s a full population density map:

Here’s a clue:

Do you see it already?

These valleys surrounded by mountains make up the 12% of arable land. It’s obvious from maps like this one, showing how every nook and cranny is full of human habitats.

But also, you can see in the previous map that the big urban areas are in the southern valleys. There are other big valleys to the north, but those don’t harbor such big populations. Why?

Notice the black line. Historically, below it, farmers would plant rice in May / June and harvest it September / October, when they would drain the rice paddies and plant wheat or barley, to harvest just before planting the rice again.

Did this really have such an enormous impact on Japan’s population? If so, we should see two things. First, the amount land that rice needs to generate some amount of calories should be very small. It is:

Second, we should see the Japanese population grow when rice gets introduced, and then again when double cropping starts, and these must happen in Japan before they happen elsewhere. Do we see that?

This is the population of different East and Southeast Asian countries over the last 2,000 years:

Japan’s population was bigger than its neighbors’ for nearly 1,500 years. Let’s zoom in on that, eliminating the hypergrowth of the 20^th century:

Indonesia’s population was probably larger than Japan’s early on, but around the first century, Japan’s population started growing much faster than any neighboring country’s. It slowed down around 700-900 AD, picked up its growth again ~1200 CE, stopped in its tracks in the early 1700s, and exploded again in the 1800s. It only stopped growing recently, with the demographic collapse post-2000. We can see clearly Japan’s three big growth spurts in this graph:

The first growth spurt lasted until 700 AD, and was the result of the introduction of wet rice agriculture in Japan, via China and then Korea.

Japan is naturally quite fertile, because the rain that flows down from so many mountains brings with it not just water, but sediments to fertilize the land.

Archaeologists believe the Jōmon people arrived on the island about 40k years ago, but in the first millennium BC, the Yayoi started immigrating into Japan from Korea, bringing with them first rice paddy technology, and eventually iron tech, which helped increase agricultural productivity. That’s why the average Japanese today is genetically very close to Koreans.

Over the centuries, as the population grew, it moved farther north, bringing with it its farming knowledge.

That’s why the population boomed: It expanded along with the share of farmed land, and its productivity.

The Population Slowdown

Alas, the boom did not last forever: The population went from ~6M in 700 AD to ~4M in 1150 AD.

By around 700 AD, the Japanese had converted the best valleys into farmland, and the speed of conversion began to slow down and focus on marginal land—not the most fertile. Growth stalled. The adoption of new farming techniques like the use of iron slowed down, too.

Japan’s East-West vs North-South

This is one reason why Hokkaido, the northern island, reflects the original native population on the genetic map more than the rest of Japan (the Ainu, and also local mixing): Rice cultivation did make it there, but it was later abandoned as it was not as effective. The farmers from the south went as far as their rice agriculture allowed.

Why didn’t rice travel farther north?

Notice how a warm current from the Philippines and Taiwan reaches all the way to Japan, warming it up.1 But also, it meets a cold northern current around the north of the Honshu island. These currents are called Kuroshio and Orashio:

North of that point, it was too cold for rice cultivation.

However, the names of these currents tell us something else about Japan’s food: Kuroshio means “black current”, because this water is devoid of nutrients, so it’s more transparent. Meanwhile, Oyashio means “parent current”, because it comes from the north full of nutrients, bringing plenty of fish—the source of the fishing culture in Japan.

And this is why sushi is the most Japanese type of food. It’s where rice meets fish: the rice from the continent, migrating from south to north through the islands, and increasing the population through rice farming in the Japanese plains; the fish from the ocean, with the nutrients moving from north to south, following the winds and currents.

North & South. The rice is packed, just like the Japanese

Indeed, winds follow the same pattern as currents: Winds from Siberia travel over the Sea of Japan, catch a lot of moisture from this sea, and the drop it as they reach the tall Japanese mountains. This is why Japan’s peaks can get serious snowfall.

Why was rice pushed so far north? Because that was Japan’s staple, and that meant taxes were frequently collected in rice, which meant rulers had a strong incentive to push for rice production at the expense of other crops. Alas, the north simply couldn’t produce it.

It’s not a coincidence, then, that the southern half of Japan is more populated: Because it runs east-west, most of these islands share a similar climate, and they all could share the same crops and similar lifestyles. But then Japan bends northwards, and the islands start changing climates much faster. We can see it in the climate map of Japan:

Or, geometrically, through this map:

This is why agriculture was so crucial for Japan’s population growth—and why it stalled once most of the arable valleys were converted to rice cultivation.

But the increase in population density made for easier spread of diseases. Between 700 and 1200 AD, several waves of infectious diseases, including smallpox and measles, decimated the country, and that stalled its growth too. Why didn’t these diseases hit before? Because Japan, as an island nation, was isolated enough that most diseases didn’t make it there until maritime trade became common.

Back to Growth

Japan’s growth picks up again around 1200 AD, when new agricultural techniques are introduced into the country from the continent. First, the double cropping we mentioned before, but not because it doubled the calories produced (it didn’t: rice produces more calories per km² than wheat or barley), but rather because it added more calories at exactly the time of most need,2 it diversified the food, and it diversified the risk: Maybe the summer harvest was bad, but the winter one was good.

There’s another reason why growth was so vertiginous: unity.

Japanese Unity

Japan united very early.

By the Nara Period, around 700 AD, the biggest population centers already belonged to one single polity. By 1100 AD, the three southern islands of Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku were united. This meant Japan has had considerably fewer wars than most other countries. Even its long period of warring states (Sengoku Period), which lasted ~150 years between ~1450 and 1600, did not cause a dramatic loss of population.

This unity and relative lack of wars prevented massive deaths from conflict and from disease, and allowed the Japanese to invest in their irrigation infrastructure, which increased the fertility of existing fields, and also increased the surface of farming fields by reclamation of river floodplains.

Why so much unity? Geography, of course.

Geographic Seclusion

Japan is separated from the Asian continent by two seas that hinder access. The easiest path is through Korea, but the Korean Strait is quite wide (~200 km, or ~120 mi), 5x wider than the distance between France and England. And the Kuroshio current makes it very hard to cross. That said, the island of Tsushima is just in the middle, serving as a stepping stone. The Mongols tried to invade Japan twice, and both times they reached Tsushima. They were vanquished by typhoons both times—although the second time they did reach the main Japanese shores and were beaten back by the Japanese.3

The key is why only twice? Because the Korean Peninsula was a perfect buffer: Since China is a massive fertile valley surrounded by peoples from other parts of Asia, it could never fully focus on the Korean Peninsula, and as a result, Korea remained pretty independent. The Koreans fought all the wars against China on behalf of the Japanese.

And why is there a sea between China and Korea on one side, and Japan on the other? Because it’s a back-arc basin:

As the Pacific Plate dives below the Asian Plate, it creates a mountain ridge with volcanoes, which is Japan. But it also pulls Japan towards the Pacific. Imagine you’re pulling a tablecloth downward: the cloth on the table will move towards the edge. That’s what’s happening with Japan, and as a result a hole forms between Japan and Asia and fills with seawater.

This also explains why Japan’s fertile valleys are where they are:

See how much shallow sea there is around Japan? That’s ancient crust from Asia. Over millions of years, sediments coming from the mountains accumulated there, creating the alluvial valleys that are so fertile today. Compare that map with this one of population density:

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Takeaways

So here’s how so many aspects of Japan are explained by one factor: its geology.

• It makes it a very mountainous country: It’s the emerged side of the mountain ridge formed by the collision between the Pacific and Asian tectonic plates.

• It’s also why Japan’s maritime territory is so huge: It owns plenty of islands at the tip of these ridges.

• The collision between these plates is why Japan is close to Asia’s mainland, but not on it: It split Japan from Asia due to the formation of a back-arc basin, which is today the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea.

• This is why the sea around the Japanese main islands is pretty flat: It’s old continental shelf. As sediment accumulated from the mountains, it filled the sea, creating very fertile alluvial valleys.

• These are the valleys that produce most of the food, which is why Japan’s population is so concentrated in these valleys.

• The seas also isolated Japan enough that it didn’t suffer too many invasions and could remain united for a very long time, thus avoiding war deaths and facilitating investment in irrigation infrastructure, both of which increased its population.

• But also, Japan remained close enough to the continent to access crucial innovations, including rice cultivation, double cropping, and iron tools.

• The rice could be cultivated because the country is warm enough—despite being reasonably far north—thanks to the winds and sea currents that come from the warmer Philippines. The geographical limit where warm and cold currents collide is also the limit of historic rice cultivation.

• That’s why the vast majority of Japan’s population is concentrated in the southern parts of the country, why the north took much longer to be conquered, why today Hokkaido retains much more Jomon/Ainu ancestry than the rest of Japan, and why the Russian island of Sakhalin is so sparsely populated in comparison: The islands lie east-west in the south, and rice cultivation and the rest of Japanese lifestyle could be shared throughout these regions. Japan’s Honshu island then bends northwards together with the Pacific-Asian plate border, and the climate gets cold really fast. Hokkaido was too remote and cold for consistent rice harvests or double cropping. Sakhalin is even worse.

• This is also why Japan’s historical population booms followed the introduction of agricultural techniques: First, with rice agriculture and iron tools, then stopping when most of the available land was exhausted. Later, the introduction of further innovations such as double cropping and agricultural irrigation to reclaim floodplains increased both the amount of farmland and its productivity.

• Rice was also one way the country remained united, as it could use rice as currency for taxation.

• The downside of absorbing these technologies from the mainland was the consequent waves of disease, which were the other main obstacle to population growth. As Japan became more densely populated, infections circulated faster.

• The sea currents are why Japan has such a fishing culture: The north and south sea currents meet in northern Honshu, bringing plenty of nutrients to the warm waters and cultivating life.4

• Volcanoes might have had a small contribution to the fertility of the land, but they’re probably not a key factor.

In summary, Japan became so populous despite its small land because it could produce a lot of food from a small amount of usable land, while losing relatively few people and productive assets to war.

And sushi is the best way to represent all this, as rice came from the south, fish comes from the northern currents, and they bring the two elements that make up Japan: its sea and its land.

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This summer, I got devoured, but I was so confused about all the options to deal with mosquitoes that I decided to look at all the evidence. Here is the practical guide I wish I had to rid my local area of mosquitoes once and for all, including:

• The six strategies to fend off mosquitoes

• What works in each, what doesn’t, and why

• Over 50 measures specifically assessed

• The 6 killer tactics that should be enough

(No affiliate links or commissions).

Overall Strategy

You should have six layers of defense:

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We concluded in the previous article that we should eradicate a few species of mosquitoes. How, though? This is what we'll cover in this article:

1. How we’ve learned to fight mosquitoes over the last 130 years

2. How we achieved the technology to eradicate those we choose, along with malaria

3. Why we're not releasing this technology yet

4. What you can do to make it happen

If you’re not interested in the history and only want to know the answer, just jump to the bottom, to the section Weapons of Mosquito Destruction.

The Mosquito Life

To kill a mosquito, you must think like a mosquito.

Each development step is an opportunity to stop them:

The Early Attacks

The moment we learned the mosquito was responsible for so many diseases, epidemiologists went into mosquito extermination mode, and the diseases dwindled pretty fast: Yellow Fever was eliminated in Havana in 1901, and the malaria death rate among Panama Canal workers fell by 90% between 1906 and 1909, the result of applying all the tools at their disposal:

• Eliminate reservoirs of standing water.

• Kill larvae in the water. One way was with oil or kerosene on water surfaces, to asphyxiate the larvae that feed in the water but come to the surface to breathe. Another was with arsenic-based insecticides.1

• Use insecticides on adult mosquitoes, too. The most famous one was pyrethrum, derived from chrysanthemum flowers and already used as an insecticide for centuries.

Better Management

Later, we tried to drive Aedes Aegypti to extinction in South America. The exercise started in the 1930s and succeeded by the 1960s, but eventually the mosquito came back:

As we explained in the previous article, this was due to a bureaucracy of weekly home inspections, plus some insecticides that were either very toxic or too short-lived.2 Crucially, a third of the budget went to inspecting the inspectors.

Better Insecticides

During WW2, we found a better insecticide DDT.3 It lasted months and was not very toxic to humans, so inspectors didn’t need to visit their areas every week anymore. Once every few months was enough, bringing costs down. That’s how we eradicated Aedes Aegypti in the 1960s.4

Why Did It Fail?

Eventually, South America got reinfected because:

• As diseases disappeared, it was hard to justify the continued surveillance politically. Budgets disappeared.

• It was discovered that DDT accumulated in the environment, and could become toxic to some other species.

• Not all countries in America eradicated mosquitoes—notably, the US—so eventually South America got reinfected.

• South America’s urban population exploded, and with it, mosquito hosts and breeding grounds.

And above all, resistance.

Arms Race

We used these techniques around the world. Some mosquitoes developed resistance to DDT, so we created other chlorine-based insecticides. Mosquitoes developed resistance against them even faster, so we came up with organophosphates,5 then carbamates (both of which turned out to be even more toxic than DDT), then synthetic pyrethroids6: They are also naturally not very toxic to mammals, so they were better. That’s what we’ve been using on bed nets to fight malaria for decades now.

That’s how we achieved this:

Despite a growing population in Africa, we were able to shrink malaria deaths… Until recently. You can imagine why.7

Yes, more resistance, so we need more insecticides, in a neverending arms race. We need to break this vicious cycle. How?

The key reason why it’s so hard to eradicate mosquitoes is that the more you kill:

1. The more they develop resistance

2. The harder it is to find the remaining few. For example, you might eliminate buckets of stagnant water, but what about the water in narrow gutters? What about the water accumulated in some old tire thrown in the forest?

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So the challenge of anti-mosquito scientists today is: How do we come up with strategies that find and kill every single individual before they develop resistance? And for that, they have one key insight.

The top areas of mosquito annihilation research all use that insight.

Sterile Mates

Male and female mosquitoes find each other, so if you release a sterile mosquito, it will find a partner, mate, and not have offspring.

So scientists release sterile mosquitoes, but only males, so they can compete with wild males in mating with wild females, who usually only mate once.

First, they breed mosquitoes in captivity, which is pretty easy: One female mosquito can lay on average 500 eggs.8 That can mean 125,000 descendants in two generations, and about 31 million in three.

Then, they extract most of the males,9 sterilize them, for example with radiation or chemical castration, and then release them. They did this for example in El Salvador in the 1970s, and they reduced the population of mosquitoes around a lake by 99%. Of course, the population went back to normal within four months of the program stopping.10

This strategy has another advantage: It’s reasonably easy. Yes, you have to produce the mosquitoes which is work, but they reproduce alright. Then, just go to a bunch of places and release the mosquitoes. You can even use drones now to make it easier.

Another approach is through biological infertility, with the Wolbachia bacteria: You infect all the males, who will mate with an uninfected female, but their eggs won’t hatch.

Catching Female Stowaways

That’s why separating males and females is so important, but it’s very hard: If you’re releasing 10M mosquitoes and 0.1% are females, that’s still 10k females. No bueno. To avoid that, we use filters, like the fact that male pupae are a bit smaller, or hatch a bit earlier. This is an active area of research, and a paper from last year managed to reduce female contamination by 30x.

Radiation + Wolbachia

But a few females is still bad, so scientists treat mosquitoes with both Wolbachia and radiation:

• The Wolbachia makes the males infertile.

• But there are still a few females.

• So we radiate them all, making the females infertile and the males doubly infertile

• The benefit of doing this instead of just radiating is that we can radiate the males less, which is important because radiation weakens male mosquitoes and makes them less attractive. Adding Wolbachia means less radiation, male mosquitoes will be strong, and will go on and successfully mate with females in the wild.

These techniques (referred to as IIT-SIT) have achieved near elimination in the wild.

The popularity for this intervention among the population exploded after its success.

This is what Singapore has been doing across the country since 2016, with incredible results:11

There’s a problem with this approach, though: You need to keep adding mosquitoes basically forever, because the mosquitoes you release and their partners don’t have offspring, but mosquitoes from elsewhere do, and they repopulate the areas.

Is there a way you don’t need to add mosquitoes all the time? That’s what genetic engineers have been considering.

Weapons of Mosquito Destruction

First, we genetically modified mosquitoes so that their offspring don't survive, a bit like previous approaches, with similarly good results.

But then we wondered: What if we genetically modify male mosquitoes so that they can normally mate and have offspring, but the females die before they can reproduce? Only the males survive, who will go on to carry their genes onto the next generation. This is better than the previous approach, right? Before, you killed all offspring. Now, all the surviving males join the frey to have only male children. We eliminate all females.

Unfortunately, it’s not yet the solution. We must continue releasing these mosquitoes in the wild, or else their germ line eventually disappears, replaced by males who can have fully fertile offspring.

This is where the next idea is diabolically good.

Gene Drive

One day in 2003, Austin Burt thought: What if we created a selfish gene that hijacked its hosts to spread aggressively, all while making them less fertile? In a few generations, all offspring could have the gene, just as they continue dwindling until they all disappear.

The technology to make his dream come true would only appear a decade later, with CRISPR Cas9. Immediately, scientists started to think about how they could use it to eradicate mosquitoes. In 2018, they succeeded in completely eliminating the mosquitoes in two cages, just by seeding some of the males with their genetic modification.

How do you do that though? How do you spread an infertile gene to the entire population? The fertility should disappear. That’s the crazy genius: A selfish gene takes over the offspring.

Let’s take that gene G, and the natural version is N.
A modified male with the G gene in both chromosomes will be called G/G. It’s released in the wild, and finds all N/N females.

Their offspring will be G/N, of course: G from the father, N from the mother. Except this is the selfish gene’s trick: It changes the germline! The eggs and sperm of these mosquitoes change the N for a G, so that they can only contribute G to their offspring!

Early on, nothing happens: The G/G and G/N always contribute G genes, so as long as they mate with N/N mosquitoes, the descendants will all have G/N genes, and continue reproducing.

But what happens when this G gene has spread enough in the population that a G/N meets another G/N? They both only produce G gametes, so the offspring will be fully G/G. And that makes the female infertile, but not the male!

So the female stops procreating, while the male continues spreading the G gene! Eventually all the population has at least one G gene, because otherwise it means every single one of their ancestors must be N/N: Very unlikely! When this G gene is so widespread, eventually every mosquito will carry it, and no female will reproduce, collapsing the population.

Only Males

Another idea (from 2020) that might be easier to understand is a twist on this: Release males with a mutation that can only have male offspring.12

Imagine: You release 100 genetically modified males that mate with 100 wild females. Instead of having, on average, 100 surviving males and 100 surviving females, they have 200 surviving males! In the next generation, there will be 400 males, then 800… Until they overwhelm the population of wild males, and there are no more mosquitoes left. In labs, they tested this, and they found that introducing just 2.5% males like this collapsed the population in 10-14 generations.

How do they make sure there’s no resistance that emerges against this? Because in just a few generations all mosquitoes are wiped out, and because they combined this genetic change with the previous one—or several at once. It’s very unlikely that within a few generations, both genetic changes can be reversed in the same individuals.

The Caged Miracle

So we have it! Finally! After nearly 150 years of fighting against mosquitoes, we have a solution that is easy to dispense, only toxic to the one species we want to eradicate, can be forever, and wouldn’t create resistance! So what happened when we tested this?

We haven’t.

Surely, this is not possible. We have the holy grail that could eradicate malaria, yellow fever, dengue, and annoying mosquito bites, and we’ve decided not to release it?? We prefer that hundreds of millions of people are infected every year, and hundreds of thousands of toddlers and babies die?? No way!!

And yet.

Target Malaria says the first tests will be carried out in 2030. In other words, billions will be infected and millions will die because we will wait a few years.

Why?

Because we’re afraid the solution would be too good.

If this succeeds as we expect it, we could truly, irreversibly, erase a species from the face of the Earth. It’s not the first time we’ve done it to animals, nor the first time we’ve deliberately eliminated a parasite (we’ve done it with smallpox, rinderpest, trying wth polio). But it would be the first time we do it deliberately to an animal. Imagine we release this in Africa against the Anopheles Gambiae, to fight malaria. It could spread across the continent, then across continents, and there would not be any more anywhere. If there are unintended consequences, it would be too late.

Or at least, that’s the argument. Honestly, I’m not very moved:

• As we said, there are thousands of other mosquito species. This would only kill one,13 as this is genetically targeted and can’t jump around.

• This one kills a lot.

• It’s a species focused on humans, so its habitats are human habitats, not nature. We don’t need them in our habitats.

• We’ve looked into this and they’re irrelevant to these habitats: No flower depends on them, no predator, no symbiosis with other animals… Nothing

• We can reverse it!

  • We can wait for all mosquitoes to die down, and when none are left, if anything bad happens, we can always reinsert a few million that we’ve kept in labs.

  • We’ve genetically engineered a way to revert these changes if we need to!

Another argument is: “A single country could decide to eliminate mosquitoes, and they would disappear in other countries that didn’t decide to do it.” Yes, what a horror that my neighbor decides to eliminate malaria, dengue, and mosquito bites for me. I would hate him. If we can revert this anyway, who cares?

There’s another argument I’m much more open to. What happens if mosquitoes do develop resistance? A paper from two months ago simulated billions of potential mutations and noticed that some could emerge that would stop this gene and eventually prevail.14 So they proposed to not change just one gene, but a bunch of them, so that even if one or two fail, the rest can carry through. We will need time to create alternatives, test them all in software, test them with a variety of real-life mosquitoes…

Because that’s the other thing, we probably want to test it in the wild before introducing it everywhere, but we need to be supercareful about where we do that, or the mosquito can escape anyways. So maybe a remote island, making sure nobody goes in or out carrying mosquitoes during the test?15

You’d think the approach to this should then be: OK we have this holy grail, let’s test it ASAP! Let’s grab one of these islands and release the engineered mosquitoes there. Then, we can test what share of mosquitoes we catch have the engineered genes over time, see if mosquito populations shrink, see if malaria shrinks, and make sure nothing else bad happens.16 If everything works, great! We should then insert these mosquitoes in other places.

Instead, we have no test programmed! This paper from last year explains why: bureaucracy!

More than a dozen organizations have published testing guidelines for mosquito gene drives. Great! People sure know how to write papers about being careful. But who’s writing about the millions dying and about hurrying to save them? We’ve seen the exact same thing with SO₂ injection to cool the Earth: Lots of people have opinions, focused on fear-mongering and on the scary speculative risks that never materialize, while the real people who could benefit from the technology keep suffering. From those trying to test this:17

The first gene drive field trial will be determined by leaders in a country that boldly chooses to be the first. Unfortunately, they are overwhelmed by unclear guidance. Local WHO officers know little about their own agency’s published guidelines for testing genetic technology for malaria, and politicians and regulators struggle to engage with other international agencies that have published guidance. Large international forums and meetings are called to discuss risk and regulation for gene drives, but these are often out of reach for many who should be at the center of these conversations.

So what do they think would unlock this?

1. A clear message from the WHO that they support this, as well as the biggest donors: the US, the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, and the EU.18

2. A clear, simple checklist from the WHO for political leaders who want to apply this. I’ve put together a draft here.

3. Stop meetings and discussions, and get national regulators to support this, ideally in the candidate countries already identified: Comoros, São Tomé e Príncipe, and Equatorial Guinea.

Releasing our Caged Miracle

We spend $4B on fighting malaria every year, and yet 600k people die. Effective Altruists have asserted for years that the best way to spend your money is on malaria mosquito nets. Just two weeks ago, GiveWell donated $276M for mosquito nets, its largest grant ever. That is probably not the best use of anybody’s time or money anymore.

We have at our fingertips the means to end this scourge—malaria, and human-biting mosquitoes too if we want—forever. It just requires one thing: Governments and institutions like the WHO must realize what they have in their hands, stop stalling, and push for a real-life test of these gene drives in isolated islands. But most of them don’t know. You can help them by letting them know: Forward this article to them, to people who might know them, or to anybody who might be interested, so they talk about it.

This can literally avoid billions of infections and millions of lives.

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So I wondered: Should we get rid of them once and for all?1

The Mosquito Blood Sacrifice

They’re more than an annoyance. They cause over 700M infections and kill ~700k people every year. They’re by very far the most fatal animal to us.

Mosquitoes transmit the Zika virus, West Nile virus, chikungunya virus infections, dengue fever, and most importantly, malaria.

And as we’ve seen in several articles, their destruction has gone way beyond that: Mosquitoes caused slavery, they felled empires, and they created such a burden on people that they pushed them to live in the highlands, where difficult transport and communications made them poorer and more secluded. This prevented wealth accumulation for thousands of years, becoming a major factor in the poverty of tropical regions, especially Africa. Eradicating them would not only revert that, but also reduce the burden on the health system, redirect public-health expenditure to other diseases, reduce absenteeism from schools and work, and stop filling graveyards.

Can we eliminate these diseases completely?
Can we eliminate mosquitoes?
Should we? Would there be side-effects, for example in the environment?
How can you eliminate mosquitoes from your daily life?

That’s what we’re going to cover today.

When Did We Start Eliminating Mosquito Diseases?

Mosquitoes lay their eggs in standing water or areas that can get flooded. Hippocrates noted in the 5^th century BC that swampy, low-lying areas are much more disease-prone.

And mosquitoes don’t travel uphill much. So the people living nearby rivers, lakes, or other sources of water have always suffered much more from disease. This is an illustration of Rome’s seven hills before they were built over as the Roman Empire grew.

In Rome, those in lowlands close to the River Tiber suffered more from malaria than those living uphill, rich people tended to live on the hills. The word palace comes from the Palatine Hill in Rome, where most of the palaces were. Romans noticed that, when they drained some areas, they tended to become healthier, and they told people to avoid marshy areas.2

China inadvertently stumbled upon another solution to malaria: the introduction of fish culture in rice paddy fields. The fish ate 80% of mosquito eggs, so malaria shrunk by 82%!

Unfortunately, while they’ve seen this for centuries, they didn’t realize the connection, and only pushed to develop it in the 20^th century

Quinine, isolated in the early 1800s, reduced mortality from 90% to 17%, and that allowed the European conquest of Africa. This is the origin of the Tonic Water and Gin & Tonic you drink today—its bitterness comes from quinine, which British soldiers in India mixed with sugar, lemon, and gin to make it more palatable.

But it didn’t reduce the spread of malaria itself. In fact, not much did until the 20^th century, when the vast majority of humans still lived in malaria-prone areas.

How did we eliminate it? In the late 1800s, we discovered that malaria was caused by mosquitoes, and that kick-started a global race to kill them in the 1900s. The first attempt at building the Panama Canal in the 1880s failed, among other things, because we didn’t know this back then, and too many workers died. We tried again in 1904, took measures against mosquito spread, and finally succeeded. A notable campaign was carried out in Brazil in the 1930s: Agents went door to door spraying an early insecticide (kerosene with some mosquito-killing flower extract) and draining any standing water. Later, they continued across South America. The result was the virtual elimination of the mosquito across an entire continent!

And that was despite the poor insecticide, which disappeared after a few hours or days. But during WW2 we discovered a new insecticide, DDT, which stays active on floors and walls for months. One pass was enough, which made the process much cheaper. It was first used massively on the Italian island of Sardinia, bringing malaria cases from 75,000 in 1946 to zero in 1950. Something similar happened in the US. Unfortunately, while DDT is not very toxic, it was overused in agriculture, accumulating, and causing some DDT resistance in some insect populations, so it was banned for agricultural use. We still use it as insecticide, but we can’t use it to eliminate all mosquitoes.

Eliminating Diseases Without Mosquitoes

Hold on, we eliminated mosquito-based diseases in places like the US or Sardinia, but there are still mosquitoes there. How did we eliminate the disease and not the mosquito? Do we even need to eradicate mosquitoes, or can we just eliminate the diseases they carry?

To answer that, we need to understand how mosquito infections spread:

Malaria is caused by the plasmodium parasite, transported by the mosquito from one malaria-infected person to another, so the more malaria there is somewhere, the more likely a mosquito is to pick it up, and then to give it to somebody else. Conversely, an area can have mosquitoes, but if no human has malaria, then the mosquitoes can’t catch it,3 so won’t spread it.

That means killing enough mosquitoes at once so that nobody has malaria can be enough to stop the disease without stopping the mosquito. This is precisely why malaria has been losing ground.

But not all diseases are like that. Some have animal reservoirs, so even if you eradicate the disease in humans, mosquitoes can get them from other animals (usually monkeys) and spread them again among humans. That includes Yellow Fever, Dengue, Zika, and Chikungunya.

Of these, the only one we can hope to eliminate is Dengue, because the strains that humans spread are different from the animal ones, so extinguishing Dengue among humans might be enough to eradicate the disease completely. But it won’t be enough for the other diseases.

Finally, some mosquito-spread diseases are actually not spread from human to human, but instead from animal to human: The West Nile and Eastern equine encephalitis viruses come from birds, Japanese encephalitis from birds and pigs, Rift Valley fever from livestock… Since it’s virtually impossible to eliminate all the diseases in most jungle animals, the malaria approach is not enough to eradicate diseases.

Something like that has happened in Malaysia’s fight against malaria. With insecticides, bed nets, and other initiatives, it finally found no traditional malaria in 2018 (the one caused by plasmodiums adapted to humans). But mosquitoes can still catch another type of malaria (P. knowlesi) from macaques, and then infect humans with it. Spread of this one from human to human is uncommon, but this malaria is as deadly as the others, so Malaysia has gotten rid of human malaria, but not of mosquitoes, and the result is they still get cases of this weird malaria in forest areas because of monkeys.

In summary, we might be able to reduce malaria and dengue enough in many places without eradicating mosquitoes, but some diseases (and even malaria) might require us eradicating them nevertheless.

Should we do it after all?

What Mosquitoes Should We Eradicate?

There are 3,600 species of mosquitoes, but only a few hundred bite humans. And a handful of them account for virtually all human deaths.

So we don’t need to kill all mosquitoes! We could just eradicate a few mosquito species and never suffer their diseases again: especially Aedes Aegypti, Aedes Albopictus (aka tiger mosquito), Anopheles Gambia, and Anopheles Funestus, but maybe also Anopheles Nili, Anopheles Arabiensis, Anopheles Coluzzi, and Culex Tritaeniorhynchus.

Kill The Invaders

These Aedes mosquito species are spreading everywhere, but that’s pretty recent! Aedes Aegypti used to be limited to West Africa, and only started spreading with the emergence of global trade, in the 15^th century. The tiger mosquito comes from East Asia, and spread globally at the end of the 20^th century, hitchhiking on used tires! These are invasive species!

Can we kill them? Yes! As we saw before, Aedes Aegypti was eliminated from 18 countries in South America by the 1960s. Did the ecosystem break? No. Did other animals thrive? Yes, of course! The elimination of an invasive species is not a problem!

Funnily, the tiger mosquito seems to be replacing the Aedes Aegypti in some areas!4 One invader outinvades another. It’s one of the top 100 most invasive species.

So it looks like these two specific invasive species would not be too problematic to eradicate, at least outside of their original habitats. But what about eliminating them there, or the anopheles species that cause malaria, which are mostly limited to their original habitats?

Would Eliminating Native Mosquitoes Hurt Their Environment?

As a reminder, we don’t want to eradicate all mosquitoes, just the few that feed on humans. What’s their potential value to the environment?

1. The eggs and larvae feed fish, amphibians, and birds

2. The larvae eat detritus in the water (plants, broken leaves, etc)

3. The adults pollinate some flowers

4. The adults are other animals’ meals (fish, birds, insects)

Blood Sacrifice

I have a strong opinion on points (1) and (4). These basically mean: “We take biomass from humans (their blood), and then feed it to animals, and in the process kill 700k humans per year (mostly babies and toddlers), so that these other animals can eat this additional biomass.”

As a rule of thumb, we humans should try to eliminate food chains where we’re in the middle rather than the top. Call me anthropocentric, but I don’t think we should sacrifice our children to the gods of nature anymore.

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If you disagree, it means you think we should continue feeding human blood to mosquitoes, so I have a solution to please everybody: Fill this form so you can offer your body to mosquitoes for the rest of us. It’s win-win: Mosquitoes get to eat, other humans don’t get bitten, and you get to sacrifice yourself for both mosquitoes and humans to keep the food chain intact.5

If sacrificing children to nature is compelling to you, and you filled the survey and gave your body to mosquitoes and still think it’s not enough, you’ll be happy to know that human-biting mosquitoes only transfer about 5,000 tons6 of biomass into nature—basically nothing. Most of that just feeds the circle of blood sacrifice, only a fraction feeds other animals. Researchers also found that mosquitoes are not a great meal: They mostly use water bodies made by humans (so little natural impact), no predator is known to depend on their larvae, the energy spent hunting the adults is more than the energy received eating them, and since they’re very widespread, it’s unlikely that any predator depends on them.7

(2) Cleaning Detritus

What about cleaning the water of decaying leaves and grasses? In reality, that’s not what happens. Bacteria and fungi do that, which protozoa eat. The mosquito larvae eat all of these, but so do many other animals: dipteran larvae, zooplankton, various aquatic insects, tadpoles… If you eliminate all human mosquitoes, you might have some more bacteria and fungi for some time until the other animals catch up. But is that really going to make the area less healthy? How, because you’re eliminating disease-ridden mosquitoes?!

You could argue that the one thing mosquitoes do is take biomass from the water and carry it out, so that birds and other non-aquatic animals can feed from it. But other animals do that too: midges, mayflies, caddisflies, dragonflies… If we wanted to eliminate all mosquitoes on Earth, maybe we should worry a bit, but again, this is just a few species.

So there’s really no special role for mosquitoes here.

(3) Pollination

Adult mosquitoes of both sexes feed on nectar and other plant sugars. When they visit flowers, pollen sticks to their body and goes to the next flower. But do they have a major, or unique, pollination role?

You can probably intuit the answer already. Do farmers use mosquitoes to pollinate their plants? No.

Here’s another intuitive way to think about it: The mosquitoes we want to eradicate here are specialized in humans, which also means they live near us. Do you think, as such, they will have some special role in nature? That some special flower or plant is uniquely pollinated by them? No.

If you’re of skeptical nature—common in these Uncharted grounds—you’ll be happy to know that this paper looked into it and confirmed the intuition: Mosquitoes visit plenty of flowers (not some unique types), flowers are visited by plenty of insects, there’s no flower that depends on these mosquitoes, and if there were and we missed it, it would probably be a human-linked weed.

This other paper actually observed Anopheles Gambiae mosquitoes (the top malaria ones), and found that they tended to eat stems and leaves more than nectar (naughty!) and when it analyzed their bodies, found no pollen (buuuh!)

Conclusion: Should We Eradicate Mosquitoes?

Yes!!

1. Mosquito diseases kill a ton of people, condemn entire populations to poverty, and are superannoying in general.

2. We can eradicate some diseases without fully eradicating mosquitoes, especially malaria, but there are limits. Some diseases can’t be eliminated without eradicating mosquitoes.

3. We only want to kill a handful of species, the other 3,500 will stay alive!

4. We’ve done it in the past! In South America, for decades, there were no Aedes Aegypti! We just stopped trying and it came back. Nature did not collapse.

5. Two of the biggest species are invaders: Aedes Aegypti and the tiger mosquito. These, we should just eradicate as invaders, to reestablish the former balance.

6. For the rest—the handful of native ones—we should also eradicate them, because:

   1. They barely add any biomass to nature

   2. The biomass they do add is mostly ours, and we should not like that

   3. Their water cleaning skills are dubious, and certainly replaceable

   4. Their pollination contribution is basically zero

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In other words, a handful of mosquito species sacrifice our children and add nothing, starting by Aedes Aegypti, tiger mosquitoes, and Anopheles Gambiae. We should eradicate them first, and follow with the others.

We should probably not stop at these, though: All the logic we’ve been using for the top 5-10 worst mosquito species is valid for any human-centered mosquito species. They should all be treated as parasites whose only function is to annoy us and spread our blood in the surroundings of human habitats. Like harmful viruses and bacteria, they should all be on the eradication list. As we go through that list, starting with the deadliest mosquitoes, we can observe what happens to learn.

Let’s annihilate them.
In the next article, we’ll see how: What measures governments have taken to eliminate mosquitoes, and what you, yourself, can do to get rid of yours.

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Dedicated to Francis, the mosquito that buzzed around my ear tonight as I was finishing this article. You might have won this battle, but you will lose the war.

El 30 de julio de 2026, más de 70.000 personas se trasladaron desde Marruecos a la ciudad española de Ceuta, un enclave en el norte de África con solo 84.000 habitantes.

Todas las fuentes se localizaron mediante búsquedas en Twitter. No suponen ningún respaldo, solo se usaron para los vídeos. Fuentes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

La mayoría de ellos regresó a Marruecos.

Fuentes: 1, 2

Pero semanas después, miles seguían allí.

Fuentes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

Esto es extraño. ¿Cómo ocurre una invasión de tales proporciones tan rápido? ¿Por qué? ¿Por qué se desinfla sin consecuencias aparentes a largo plazo? ¿O sí las hay? ¿Quién está detrás de esto? ¿Quién tenía algo que ganar con ello? ¿Marruecos? ¿Cómo sabemos la verdad? ¿Cambiará esto algo entre España y Marruecos, o en toda la UE? Eso es lo que vamos a analizar hoy.

La invasión

Este es el Estrecho de Gibraltar:

Así es como se ve la frontera sobre el terreno:

La seguridad fronteriza existe debido a la entrada de inmigrantes en España desde Marruecos durante décadas, porque el PIB per cápita español es 6 veces mayor que el de Marruecos, y el 25% de los hombres marroquíes de entre 15 y 24 años ni estudia ni trabaja. Como resultado, España ha tenido que crear obstáculos, y ahora, pocos pueden pasar. Así que el 30 de julio, miles de inmigrantes intentaron cruzar la frontera… nadando.

Pero no simplemente se les ocurrió esta idea de la nada. Llevan haciéndolo desde hace mucho tiempo: esa frontera no es realmente tan infranqueable.

La razón por la que los inmigrantes no aprovechaban esto más a menudo es porque, cuando lo hacían, eran “devueltos en caliente” a Marruecos.

Hasta el mes pasado, cuando el Tribunal Supremo español especificó que los inmigrantes que llegaran a nado a España no serían “devueltos en caliente”. Espera, ¿qué?

Las devoluciones en caliente se venían produciendo desde hacía mucho tiempo, pero las ONG se opusieron a ellas porque algunos inmigrantes podían ser solicitantes de asilo, o menores, o su devolución podía ponerlos en peligro, y exigieron que se evaluara cada caso adecuadamente. Siguió una batalla legal entre ellas y España durante años, hasta la reciente sentencia del Tribunal Supremo español que determinó que las devoluciones en caliente eran legales para los que saltan la valla.

Para los que saltan la valla.
No para los que llegan nadando.

En 2024, un argelino intentó llegar nadando a España desde Marruecos. Fue interceptado y devuelto en caliente a Marruecos. Unos abogados españoles usaron esto para recurrir,1 y el Tribunal Supremo les dio la razón el 29 de junio de 2026: No intentó saltar la valla, por lo que las devoluciones en caliente no se aplican en su caso.

La semana anterior al 30 de julio, 1500 inmigrantes ya habían bordeado la valla nadando, unos 200 al día. El asunto cobró fuerza en las redes sociales:

La mayoría de los inmigrantes, al no estar familiarizados con la jurisprudencia española, interpretaron esto como que si llegas nadando a España, no te van a deportar.

Tenían motivos para creerlo, ya que el actual Gobierno del Partido Socialista Obrero Español regularizó a más de un millón de inmigrantes en situación irregular en España,2 y existen varias excepciones a las devoluciones en caliente.

Por eso 22 líderes de países de la UE acusaron a España de fomentar este tipo de comportamientos:

En cualquier caso, el mensaje de que los inmigrantes podían entrar libremente en España empezó a difundirse el 30 de julio^th.

El mensaje decía: «El Tribunal Supremo español: no habrá expulsión inmediata de los migrantes que lleguen a Ceuta y Melilla nadando.»

Este sitio web analizó las publicaciones y encontró numerosas cuentas repitiendo ese mismo mensaje en cuestión de minutos, lo que sugiere coordinación. Una de las cuentas que repitió el mensaje fue la de Youssef Belhaissi, presentador de Al Aoula, la televisión pública estatal de Marruecos, con 1,3 millones de seguidores en Facebook. Según The New York Times, también es portavoz de lla Delegación Interministerial de Derechos Humanos de Marruecos, un organismo del Gobierno marroquí con sede en Rabat.

Durante días, el servicio secreto español advirtió que algo se estaba gestando en Ceuta, y el 29 de julio, advirtió que unas 180.000 personas se estaban preparando para entrar en Ceuta. En menos de 24 horas, entre 60.000 y 80.000 personas entraron en masa. Cerca de 100 murieron, la mayoría ahogadas o pisoteadas.

Una vez dentro, el sistema habitual se vio tan desbordado que no pudo procesar a los inmigrantes. Estos se dedicaron a saquear supermercados en busca de comida y a acampar donde pudieron. Allí hubo denuncias de violaciones grupales de niñas migrantes menores de edad, agresiones sexuales diarias,3 agresiones físicas, narcotráfico, allanamientos de morada, robos, peleas, hurtos, incendios de coches… La policía está ahora en las escuelas, el ejército está siendo atacado, y está pidiendo autorización para usar la fuerza proporcional.4

Finalmente, sin comida, refugio seguro ni esperanza de ser admitidos en España, la mayoría regresó a Marruecos o fue devuelta. Quedan unos 5.000. De ellos, cerca de la mitad son menores, que no pueden ser devueltos de manera inmediata según la ley española, aunque Marruecos, la UE y Ceuta quieren que sean devueltos. Mientras tanto, el Gobierno español quiere enviar ahora a 500 de ellos a la Península, lejos de sus familias…

Desde entonces, el Gobierno español ha estado «extendiendo la valla» 500 metros mar adentro para poder alegar técnicamente que se trata de una valla, y que así los inmigrantes que lleguen nadando también sean considerados como si hubieran saltado la valla.5

Esta es su valla:

Sin embargo, los 5.000 inmigrantes que llevan más de un mes deambulando por las calles están causando estragos. Los residentes están tan cansados están manifestándose todo el tiempo, incluso de noche.

Así que esa es la situación migratoria. Pero, ¿quién la provocó? Si fue un movimiento espontáneo desencadenado por las redes sociales… ¿por qué ocurre esto?

¿Quién está detrás de esto?

Muchas entrevistas con inmigrantes confirman que la mayoría decidió ir a Ceuta porque leyó en internet que la frontera estaba abierta. Pero, ¿basta un mensaje viral para semejante movimiento?

Fuentes: 1, 2, 3

Hay muchos vídeos que muestran camiones cargados de migrantes dirigiéndose a la frontera, y muchos muestran a las autoridades marroquíes presenciándolo y diciéndoles que avancen.6 ¿Quién pagó estos camiones?

El gobierno español culpó a los traficantes el día de la invasión, pero ¿cómo podrían sacar dinero de decenas de miles de inmigrantes entrando en tropel? No hay forma de sacar provecho de eso. Y si lo hubieran logrado, habrían perdido a estos clientes. Lo que es más importante, llegar a Ceuta no les sirve de nada; necesitan llegar a la España peninsular para tener alguna oportunidad. Las autoridades españolas investigarán esto, pero por ahora no hay mucho de dónde tirar.

Hay varios informes de que las fuerzas marroquíes se retiraron durante el incidente, que ocurrió el Día del Trono, el aniversario de la ascensión al trono del actual rey de Marruecos. Los sindicatos de la policía española han acusado al gobierno de Marruecos de estar involucrado, y la Guardia Civil (otro cuerpo policial) asegura que identificó a agentes de la inteligencia marroquí entre los inmigrantes. En 2021, otra oleada de inmigrantes fue provocada por la retirada de las fuerzas marroquíes. Cuando las fuerzas marroquíes decidieron reforzar su autoridad en la zona, pudieron impedir que se produjeran más cruces.

¿Por qué harían eso?

Territorios españoles en África

Así es como se veían en 1950:

España renunció a la mayoría de ellos, salvo las Islas Canarias y varios puntos en la costa norte de Marruecos, en el proceso de descolonización que siguieron muchos otros países europeos tras la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

Aquí tienes un resumen histórico de cada uno:

Pero hay algo que hace a Ceuta bastante distinta de cualquier otro territorio español en África:

Ceuta permite a España controlar el estrecho de Gibraltar y sus aguas marítimas. Según el derecho internacional, los buques pueden circular libremente por él, pero en caso de conflicto geopolítico, le da a España una ventaja que ningún otro país tiene, y que Marruecos podría anular si Ceuta no fuera española.

Por supuesto, el debate pasa a ser: ¿A quién debería pertenecer Ceuta? Como español, no soy imparcial, así que tomen mi opinión con cautela. Históricamente, Ceuta en concreto fue:

• Colonia cartaginesa durante un par de siglos.

• Romana durante casi 600 años.7

• Cayó ante los conquistadores musulmanes del Califato Omeya alrededor del año 700 d.C.

• Durante los siguientes 700 años, perteneció a diferentes emiratos, sultanatos y reinos musulmanes.

• En 1415, cayó en manos de los portugueses, que la controlaron hasta 1580. El Reino de Fez reconoció esta posesión.

• Desde 1580, forma parte de España.

Entonces, ¿a quién debería pertenecer? Ceuta ha sido española durante más de 400 años, ha pertenecido a un reino peninsular durante más tiempo que a la propia España, y ha estado bajo control de entidades musulmanas durante unos 700 años, menos tiempo que bajo dominio cristiano. La existencia de Ceuta como entidad vinculada a la península ibérica es anterior a la existencia del propio Marruecos (que tiene menos de un siglo), e incluso si se remonta a la dinastía alauí, esta última es 250 años más reciente. Este análisis académico explica que la reivindicación marroquí sobre Ceuta y Melilla es bastante débil.8

Marruecos entiende esto, y por eso se ha centrado durante décadas en apoderarse del Sáhara Occidental, un área sobre la que el reino marroquí no tiene una legitimidad histórica sólida para gobernar. Y aquí, el patrón es inconfundible.

• En 1957, Marruecos utilizó fuerzas irregulares para apoderarse de la mayor parte del interior del enclave español de Ifni.

• En 1957-58, usó las mismas fuerzas irregulares para penetrar en el Sáhara español y desafiar el control español.

• En 1958, la presión militar marroquí aceleró la renuncia de España a Cabo Juby/Tarfaya.

• Luego, en 1975, llegó la gran jugada. Mientras España se preparaba para conceder la independencia al Sáhara Occidental, Marruecos trasladó a 350.000 civiles a través de la frontera para desbordar políticamente a España sin necesidad de una guerra convencional, en lo que se conoce como la Marcha Verde. Fundamentalmente, España afirmó que había 25.000 soldados mezclados con los civiles. España calificó esa operación de caballo de Troya, no quiso disparar contra civiles, y Marruecos ocupó el territorio mientras España se retiraba en 1975-76, convirtiendo el control físico en una reivindicación de soberanía.

• En 1979, Marruecos ocupó el territorio abandonado por Mauritania en el lado sur del Sahara Occidental, ampliando así el control marroquí.

• En 2002, Marruecos desembarcó tropas en la isla de Perejil —reclamada por España— e izó su bandera en un intento de establecer un nuevo statu quo territorial. España los expulsó.

• En 2021, se produjo otro acontecimiento crucial en esta partida por la soberanía. España admitió para recibir tratamiento médico al líder de los independentistas saharauis. Marruecos se indignó y, en represalia, de manera deliberada relajó sus controles fronterizos en Ceuta, permitiendo que unas 8.000 personas entraran en la ciudad como forma de presión coercitiva. Un año después, de la nada y, al parecer, sin ninguna contrapartida, el presidente del Gobierno español cambió la postura de España sobre el Sahara Occidental, que pasó de ser neutral y favorable a la autodeterminación, a una declaración según la cual debería formar parte de Marruecos.

• Un informe académico español de 2023 concluyó que Marruecos está «aplicando una estrategia de zona gris para asegurar el control sobre [Ceuta y Melilla] a medio plazo».

Aunque Marruecos nunca se ha mostrado demasiado explícito respecto a Ceuta y Melilla, las considera marroquíes, y un ministro marroquí ha solicitado recientemente un diálogo con España para «abordar el futuro de Ceuta y Melilla», dados sus derechos «históricos y geográficos».

Otro ministro marroquí, e incluso el rey, han sugerido que Ceuta es un territorio ocupado.

Entonces, ¿quién es el responsable?

La explicación más sencilla es que se trató de un movimiento viral que se salió de control. Es muy poco probable que los traficantes hayan tenido un papel en su organización, aunque podrían haber intentado sacar provecho de ello. Pero ¿qué pasa con el gobierno?

• Marruecos tiene una motivación: a medida que su control sobre el Sahara Occidental se fortalece, su atención se dirige hacia las ciudades españolas de su costa norte.

• Había camiones para transportar a mucha gente.

• Las autoridades marroquíes, muy capaces de contener un ataque así, en cambio se retiraron y, en algunos casos, ayudaron a los inmigrantes. Se ha visto a algunos agentes marroquíes entre la multitud que se dirigía hacia Ceuta.

• Marruecos tiene un historial de utilizar a personas que no son autoridades legales para establecer hechos consumados sobre el terreno y así reforzar sus reclamos de soberanía.

• Marruecos tiene un fuerte incentivo para permitir que esto ocurra, ya que expone las debilidades de España en Ceuta —y probablemente en todas sus demás posesiones a lo largo de la costa—. Como mínimo, le otorga poder de negociación. Como máximo, es un precedente que podría usarse en una futura invasión de base civil que establezca hechos consumados sobre el terreno.

A pesar de todo esto, creo que es más probable que las autoridades marroquíes aprovecharan la ocasión, o simplemente dejaran que las cosas siguieran su curso, en lugar de orquestarlo todo:

• La reclamación española sobre Ceuta es demasiado sólida

• Orquestar algo así es sumamente complejo

• Los camiones podrían haber aprovechado la oportunidad: si hay demanda para ir de un lugar a otro, los transportistas emprendedores pueden hacerlo posible

• Era más fácil para las autoridades marroquíes dejar pasar a las masas que detenerlas: recordemos que ya estaban cruzando la semana anterior. Pudo haber sido una decisión espontánea, ya sea de policías desbordados sobre el terreno o de alguien en la cadena de mando

• España y Marruecos tienen demasiados intereses en común. El gas de Marruecos llega a través de España, más de un millón de sus ciudadanos viven en España, y sus principales mercados de exportación son España en particular y la UE en general. Marruecos tiene demasiado que perder en esto.

• Marruecos tiene un amplio historial de cooperación con España en materia de inmigración

Con un poco de suerte, España y Marruecos aumentarán la seguridad fronteriza y devolverán al resto de migrantes, reduciendo el riesgo de que algo así vuelva a ocurrir. En cualquier caso, habrá que estar atentos a la relación entre ambos países en los próximos meses. Podrían surgir concesiones de la nada cuando nadie esté prestando atención.

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He abierto el boletín a patrocinios. Si tienes un negocio que está impulsando al mundo hacia un futuro tecnooptimista y te gustaría llegar a más de 135 000 personas curiosas y con mentalidad global para darlo a conocer (fundadores, investigadores, inversores, responsables de políticas públicas), contáctame aquí.

On July 30^th 2026, over 70,000 people moved from Morocco into the Spanish city of Ceuta, an enclave in Northern Africa with only 84,000 inhabitants.

All sources found through Twitter searches. No endorsement, only used for the videos. Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Most of them returned to Morocco.

Sources: 1, 2

But weeks in, thousands remained.

Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

This is bizarre. How does an invasion of such proportions happen so fast? Why? Why does it deflate with no apparent long-term consequences? Or are there? Who is behind this? Who stood to gain anything from it? Morocco? How do we know the truth? Will this change anything between Spain and Morocco, or across the EU? That’s what we’re going to look at today.

The Invasion

This is the Strait of Gibraltar:

This is what the border looks like on the ground:

The border security is in place because of immigrants entering Spain from Morocco for decades, because the Spanish GDP per capita is 6x that of Morocco’s, and 25% of Moroccan men aged 15-24 neither study nor work. As a result, Spain has had to create obstacles, and now, few can pass. So on July 30^th, thousands of immigrants tried to cross the border by… swimming.

But they didn’t just come up with this idea. They’ve been doing it for ages: That border is not really so impenetrable.

The reason immigrants weren’t taking advantage of that more often is because they were insta-returned to Morocco when they did.

Until last month, when the Spanish Supreme Court specified that immigrants who swam into Spain wouldn’t be insta-returned. Wait, what?

Insta-returns have been going for a long time, but NGOs objected to them because some immigrants might be asylum seekers, or minors, or their return could put them in danger, and demanded that they be assessed properly. A legal battle between them and Spain followed for years, until the recent ruling of the Spanish Supreme Court that the insta-returns were legal for fence climbers.

For fence-climbers.
Not swimmers.

In 2024, an Algerian was trying to swim to Spain from Morocco. He was intercepted and insta-returned to Morocco. Spanish lawyers used that to appeal,1 and the Supreme Court agreed on June 29 2026: He didn’t try to climb a fence, so insta-returns don’t work for him.

The week before July 30^th, 1,500 immigrants had already swum around the fence—about 200 per day. It picked up steam on social media:

The majority of immigrants, not being well-versed in Spanish legal jurisprudence, interpreted this as if you swim into Spain, you won’t be deported.

They had reason to believe that, since the current administration of the Spanish Socialist Party legalized over a million illegal immigrants in Spain,2 and there are several carve-outs to insta-returns.

This is why 22 EU country leaders accused Spain of encouraging this sort of behavior:

In any case, the message that immigrants could freely move into Spain started spreading on July 30^th.

The message said: “The Spanish Supreme Court: There will be no immediate expulsion of migrants who reach Ceuta and Melilla by swimming.”

This site analyzed the posts and found lots of accounts repeating that same message within minutes, which suggests coordination. One of the accounts that repeated the message was that of Youssef Belhaissi, a presenter at Al Aoula, Morocco's public/state television network, with 1.3M Facebook followers. According to The New York Times, he is also spokesperson for Morocco's Interministerial Delegation for Human Rights, explicitly a Moroccan government agency in Rabat.

For days, the Spanish secret service warned that something was brewing in Ceuta, and on July 29^th, it alerted that about 180,000 people were preparing to enter Ceuta. Within 24 hours, between 60,000 and 80,000 people poured in. About 100 died, mostly drowned or trampled.

Once inside, the standard system was so overwhelmed that it couldn’t process the immigrants. They proceeded to loot supermarkets for food and camped wherever they could. There were reports of group rapes of underage migrant girls, daily sexual assaults,3 physical assaults, drug trafficking, home invasions, robberies, fights, theft, car burnings… Police are now in schools, the military is being assaulted, and is asking for license to use proportional force.4

Eventually, without food, safe shelter, or a hope of being admitted to Spain, most of them went back to Morocco or were returned. About 5,000 remain. Of those, about half are minors, who can’t be insta-returned as per Spanish law—even though Morocco, the EU, and Ceuta want them returned. Meanwhile the Spanish government now wants to send 500 of them to mainland Spain, away from their families…

Since then, the Spanish government has been “extending the fence” 500 meters into the sea, so that it can technically claim it’s a fence, and swimming immigrants will also qualify as fence-climbers.5

Here’s their fence:

Nevertheless, the 5,000 immigrants roaming the streets for over a month are causing havoc. Locals are so tired they are demonstrating all the time, even at night.

So that’s the immigration situation. But who caused it? If this was a grassroots movement triggered by social media… why can we see this?

Who’s Behind This?

Many interviews with immigrants support that most decided to go to Ceuta because they read online that the border was open. But is a viral message enough for such a move?

Sources: 1, 2, 3

There are many videos showing truckloads of migrants moving to the border—and many show Moroccan authorities witnessing them and telling them to proceed.6 Who paid for these trucks?

The Spanish government blamed traffickers on the day of the invasion, but how could they make money out of tens of thousands of immigrants rushing in? No way to monetize that. And if they had been successful, they would have lost these customers. More importantly, reaching Ceuta gives them nothing; they need to reach the European side of Spain to have a chance. Spanish authorities will investigate this, but for now there is not much to go on.

There are several reports that the Moroccan forces withdrew during the attack, which happened on Throne Day, the anniversary of the current Moroccan king’s accession to the throne. Spanish police unions have accused Morocco’s government of being involved, and the Guardia Civil (another police body) says it identified Moroccan intelligence officers among the immigrants. In 2021, another surge of immigrants was caused by Moroccan forces withdrawing. When Moroccan forces decided to heighten their authority in the area, they were able to stop any more crossings.

Why would they do that?

Spanish Territories in Africa

This is what they looked like in 1950:

Spain relinquished most of them, except for the Canary Islands and several spots on the northern coast of Morocco, in the decolonization process that many other European countries followed after WW2.

Here’s a historic summary on each:

But there’s one thing that makes Ceuta quite unlike any other Spanish territory in Africa:

Ceuta allows Spain to control the Strait of Gibraltar and its maritime waters. Under international law, vessels can freely move through it, but in the case of geopolitical conflict, it gives Spain a leverage that no other country has—and that Morocco could break if Ceuta was not Spanish.

Of course, the debate becomes: Who should Ceuta belong to? As a Spaniard, I’m biased, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. Historically, Ceuta specifically was:

• A Carthaginian colony for a couple of centuries.

• Roman for nearly 600 years.7

• It fell to the Muslim conquerors of the Umayyad Caliphate around 700 AD.

• For the next 700 years, it belonged to different Muslim emirates, sultanates, and kingdoms.

• In 1415, it fell to the Portuguese, who controlled it until 1580. The Kingdom of Fez recognized this ownership.

• Since 1580, it’s been part of Spain.

So who should it belong to? Ceuta has been Spanish for over 400 years, it has belonged to a peninsula kingdom longer than to Spain itself, and has been controlled by Muslim polities for about 700 years—fewer than by Christians. Ceuta’s existence as a polity linked to the Iberian Peninsula predates the existence of Morocco itself (which is younger than a century), and even if you stretch it to the Alawi Dynasty, it’s 250 years older. This academic assessment explains how the Moroccan claim to Ceuta and Melilla is quite weak.8

Morocco understands this, and that’s why it has focused for decades on taking over the Western Sahara—an area the Moroccan kingdom doesn’t have strong historic legitimacy to rule. And here, the pattern is unmistakable.

• In 1957, Morocco used irregular forces to seize most of the hinterland of the Spanish enclave of Ifni.

• In 1957–58, it used the same irregular forces to penetrate the Spanish Sahara and challenge Spanish control.

• In 1958, Moroccan military pressure accelerated Spain’s relinquishing of Cape Juby/Tarfaya.

• Then, in 1975, came the big play. As Spain was preparing to give the Western Sahara its independence, Morocco moved 350,000 civilians across the border to overwhelm Spain politically without conventional war, in what’s called the Green March. Crucially, Spain claimed it had 25,000 troops mixed with the civilians. Spain called that operation a Trojan Horse, didn’t want to fire on civilians, and Morocco occupied the territory as Spain withdrew in 1975-76, converting physical control into a sovereignty claim.

• In 1979, Morocco occupied the territory abandoned by Mauritania on the southern side of Western Sahara, expanding Moroccan control.

• In 2002, Morocco landed forces on the island of Perejil—claimed by Spain—and raised its flag in an attempt to establish a new territorial status quo. Spain expelled them.

• In 2021, we have another crucial event in the play for sovereignty. Spain admitted for clinical treatment the leader of the Western Sahara independentists. Morocco was furious, and in retaliation it purposefully relaxed its border controls in Ceuta, enabling ~8,000 people to enter the city as coercive pressure. One year later, out of the blue, and apparently without any counterbalancing offer, the Spanish PM changed Spain’s stance on the Western Sahara from neutral and preferring self-determination, to a declaration that it should be part of Morocco.

• A 2023 Spanish academic report concluded that Morocco is “operating a Grey Zone strategy to secure control over [Ceuta and Melilla] in the medium term.”

Although Morocco has never been too vocal about Ceuta and Melilla, it considers them Moroccan, and a Moroccan minister has recently requested dialogue with Spain to “address the future of Ceuta and Melilla”, given its "historical and geographical" rights.

Another Moroccan minister, and even the king, have suggested Ceuta is an occupied territory.

Who Is Responsible Then?

The simplest explanation is that this was a viral movement that got out of control. It’s very unlikely that traffickers had a role in orchestrating it, even though they might have tried to benefit from it. But what about the government?

• Morocco has a motivation: As its grip on the Western Sahara strengthens, its attention moves to the Spanish cities on its northern coast.

• There were trucks to transport many people.

• The Moroccan authorities, very capable of withstanding such an attack, instead withdrew, and in some cases abetted the immigrants. Some Moroccan agents have been seen among the crowds that moved into Ceuta.

• Morocco has a track record of using people who aren’t legal authorities to establish facts on the ground to further its sovereignty claims.

• Morocco has a strong incentive to let this happen, as it exposes the weaknesses of Spain in Ceuta—and probably all other Spanish possessions along its coast. At least, it gives it leverage in negotiations. At most, it’s a precedent to use in a future civilian-based invasion that establishes facts on the ground.

Despite all of this, I think it’s more likely that Moroccan authorities jumped on the occasion, or simply let it run, rather than orchestrating it all:

• The Spanish claim on Ceuta is way too strong

• Orchestrating something like this is very complex

• Trucks may have seized the opportunity: If there’s demand to go from one place to the other, entrepreneurial truck drivers can make it happen

• It was easier for Moroccan authorities to let the masses through than to stop them: Remember they were already passing through the week before. It might have been a spontaneous decision, either by overwhelmed street-level police, or by somebody in the command chain

• Spain and Morocco have way too many common interests. Morocco’s gas comes via Spain, over 1M of its citizens live in Spain, and its main export markets are Spain in particular and the EU in general. Morocco has way too much to lose here.

• Morocco has a track record of being pretty cooperative with Spain in terms of immigration

Hopefully Spain and Morocco will increase their border security and return all remaining migrants, lowering the risk of something like this happening again. In any case, keep an eye on the relationship between the two countries in the coming months. Some concessions may come out of the blue, when nobody’s paying attention.

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In this article I’ll do two things:

1. Go through some of the AI posters people submitted, to discuss why people generally dislike AI art.1

2. Analyze the rest of the posters, and announce the winner of the $1,000 competition.

Shallow Intent

This was the first poster of the competition:

At first sight, I was impressed: It really captured the Uncharted Territories mindset at two levels. First, the idea of Burn the ships, which I’ve written about here, harks back to Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Mexico, and his act of burning (actually, scuttling) the ships they came in so that his men could only look forward, towards the adventure, the uncharted territories.

Second, the aesthetic execution is great: the edge of the poster is like old parchment, the teal and golden colors are the same palette as UT, the orange accent color in the fire, the ship of the Age of Discovery, the lines in the water as topographic map lines…

But then you start paying attention to the details, and some things start being off:

• Why is he wearing what looks like 1800s English garb? These are 1500s Spanish conquistadors.

• How did the ship make it so far inland?

• Why is the dragon a mix of Western and Eastern styles? Why does the dragon have what looks like a second tail?

• Why is the man walking towards the ships?

A human would probably not have drawn that, especially that last point: If the creator had enough insight to create a Burn the Ships poster, they would have understood the meaning, and would have portrayed the man leaving rather than approaching. The point is the exact opposite.

So here’s the key insight: I don’t think people mind that an AI has made an image. I think they mind that it’s missing thought. When humans are creating something like this, they need to add every element, one by one, which means they pay attention to every detail. Every stroke is imbued with meaning, the result of the creator thinking: “How should I trace this thing? Why?”

And I think art, in a big way, is the process of the audience reverse-engineering the creator’s thoughts: “Why did the artist make this poster like this? What was he trying to convey? Why did she choose this line, this color, this composition?” I think that’s what makes art meaningful: You’re getting into the artist’s brain, into their knowledge, their emotions.

But when AIs create images, they don’t have emotions, they don’t think critically about every detail. They’re making statistical recombinations of all the images they’ve ever seen, weighed by the words in the prompt. They’re an amalgamation of the Internet’s visuals. They generate the appearance of intention, but in reality, there isn’t any.

So we feel cheated. It takes decades of cultural training for humans to learn the clues that an image has meaning: “Look at the harmony of the composition, look at the swiftness of the stroke, look at the minute detail she painted… The artist really thought about this, therefore, it’s worth my attention.” That is out the window and into the trash, because the AI mimics these features but without the meaning, without the intentionality of the artist. There is visual density without intention density. AI decouples these.

Here’s an example of an image I generated last week about a family in Mesopotamia, in Ur, around 2000 BC:

This is the 20^th or so attempt, and yet when you ask an AI what’s wrong about it, it tells you everything is wrong: the grain milling position, the stone, the oven, the loom, how the grain is stored, the sheep, the wall surface, the window sizes, the clothing…2 An artist depicting this would have a conversation with a historian to get as many of these details right, but the AI doesn’t do that: It takes whatever is in the prompt, and makes an image that closely resembles that direction. It does try to imply what you mean: For example, when my prompt refers to a Mesopotamian family in 2000 BC, it will fetch references from old history in that place. But AIs don’t yet reason through it. They don’t ask themselves: What would be historically accurate? What elements should be present and absent? I’m sure AIs will have this internal conversation in the future, and that would be akin to the illustrator talking with the historian, but today that’s not the case.

AI Grime

At first sight, an AI image advertises depth, so we feel betrayed when we realize it’s AI and it won’t deliver. As a result, our brains’ immune system gears into action, to spot this however we can. And one of the biggest AI tells is the texture. Here, I zoomed in on the sky of that first poster:

Do you notice how these textures are not uniform? Where a human would make a clean surface, an edge, a gradient, or repeat a texture, AIs continually invent irregular variations, ghost edges, pseudo-details. And these don’t come from human tools: They don’t come from pencil, or oil painting, or watercolors, or programmatic painting, or any other style we know. That makes them uniquely AI. A tell. I’ll call it AI grime.

ChatGPT seems to do this a lot right now, and if you take an image and ask it to edit elements, in each round, this effect will increase, so that you end up with a total mess where the AI grime has taken over. Here’s a close-up of the texture of my Mesopotamian family, showing an early version and the latest one side-by-side.

Others have noted similar effects:

I’m sure they will get better fast, and in 10 years people will probably try to recreate this style for nostalgia, but right now AI grime is an AI tell for “this image lacks insightful thought.”

AI is fantastic to quickly come up with creative ideas, but for a finished product, for now, a human execution pass must come afterward, to increase the intent density. I would have loved to add this poster to the Uncharted Territories merch shop, if it had more depth of intent.

More Examples

We can see the same thing in this submission:

Again, I find this beautiful. The centerpiece mixes a nice globe with relief, with a very aesthetic mix of watercolors and geometric lines. I love the small graphs to the side, because they are making a promise: The creators of this poster care so much, are such experts, that everything else in this poster is going to be equally beautiful and insightful. I’m going to learn a lot by spending time on this poster.

But that’s not the case! Because I assume the entire image has been generated by AI, many of its elements are off. For example, there are many interesting graphs on the sides, but when you look at the bottom center one (“energy transition”), you see that we’re missing an energy type somehow. If one of these is wrong, it casts doubt on all the others: How much can I trust the rest? And that’s the right way to think about it, because indeed, many of the other graphs are not accurate or deeply insightful.

The author commented: “My intention was to create a piece that feels analytical from a distance…” yes, true so far! “...but rewards closer viewing with layers of detail, uncertainty, and possibility.” No, not that. The analytical promise at a distance is broken upon closer inspection.

Like the other one, I would love to have this poster in the shop, but one that is, in fact, accurate, and where the charts have been chosen for maximum insight.

The intent density is different for different posters. For example, this one has more:

This has dozens of elements relevant to UT: the map, the evidence board with tacks and string, the compass, lantern, pen that make it look like a work station, the many topics that UT has covered… So there’s more depth of intent.

But if a human would have created an image with this level of aesthetic detail, each one would have had a tremendous depth of intent. Starlink is mentioned, but why does it matter here? What’s the key that makes it relevant to the other elements? What about Argentina? It must deregulate, but how is it actually connected to the other elements? How does it influence the new arms race it mentions? Without this depth, the observer soon realizes there is shallow intent, and will stop looking. The poster has a mismatch between aesthetic depth and intent depth, and lets us down as a conversation piece, which is what all art should aspire to be.

These are not one-offs. This is the most common type of submission I got.

Many of these ideas are great, but I think when I told candidates that they could submit AI-generated images, I was not clear enough, and they interpreted it as a license for shallow intent.

Creative Concept vs Execution

In advertising, art, and startups, there is always a split between creative concept and execution:

• Creative concept is about getting an interesting idea that will resonate with people. In ads, it might be something like Lucky Strike’s It’s Toasted. For a movie, the high concept for a script. In a startup, a new and unique business idea.

• The execution takes the idea and makes it real. It’s making a magazine ad for Lucky Strike, painting a painting, writing the full script, or actually building a product for the startup.

In the past, the idea was worthless because execution was always tremendously expensive. So these two things were bundled together. But with AI, execution is simple, which suddenly means those with ideas can suddenly execute them, and they do.

The problem is that these two are not so sequential. To land an idea, you must execute it. The AI is a shortcut that prevents imbuing intent in the creation because you are generally iterating across a number of elements, and with each change, something else breaks. AI prevents intent depth.

Generalizing: Text and Companies

I think this is why people dislike AI text. They know it has shallow intent. But it’s harder to tell AI text from human text, so humans go crazy trying to identify AI grime in text. That’s why those who read a lot of AI text develop rashes when they read things like “It’s not X, it’s Y”, “load-bearing concept”, “what matters”, “And that may ultimately be the most important lesson of all”...

Similarly, there’s been an explosion of AI startups, but very little uptake: How many AI apps do you use besides the big ones—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini…? I think the reason is the same: It’s not that building an AI is bad, the problem is that taking the shortcut of AI generates shallow intent: A lot of small features that should be there aren’t, lots of small interactions that should be polished aren’t either.

I think this phenomenon will shrink in the coming years, but in the meantime, those working with AI have a clear path to make AI content great: Don’t stop using AI, it’s great for execution, but it can’t be an excuse for shallow intent. You have to spend the time and effort to insert as much intent depth as you can.

That’s the end of my insights on this topic, the rest of this article is about the rest of the submissions I got for the poster competition, and at the end, I’ll announce the winner!

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Posters

You can see all the posters here. Below are a few that grabbed my attention.

AI-Generated Posters

This is one of the AI-generated ones that I found most interesting:

Interesting, and so Uncharted Territories, which focuses on the systems we don’t see, but that nonetheless shape who we are. What qualifies more than what is under our feet? I haven’t written on this topic, but now I want to! It’s beautiful, and promises… depth. Unfortunately, as in other AI-generated posters, there’s shallow intent:

• The layers are not fully logical to me: What do you mean the geological layer is above the aquifer layer? What is the Earth layer, and why is it below the geological layer?

• Where is the drainage layer water going? How is it disconnected from the waste layer? Why is waste below? Where is that going?

• What is the interconnection between layers? Why is one above the other? How do they avoid each other? What happens when they cross each other?

This is among the most accurate AI-generated ones:

I also like the color palette, leaving it simple, which allows us to focus on the structure and the information contained.

This one was interesting, because:

• Its aesthetic style is unlike the others, it fits the concept

• It really portrays the differences between the rice and wheat societies: We can see both the landscape and the fact that rice country has more population density and more collaboration, which then shaped the different societies. That perfectly conveys “Show, don’t tell”, there’s high intent density.

Unfortunately, like in other AI posters, there is AI grime (see the water), some AI artifacts (the water flow is nonsensical at the lock-gate, and there is intent shallowness in a couple of messages: We can read that the rice produces more food than wheat per acre but we can’t tell by looking at the poster, and the points 2 and 3 are very similar.

This one I like quite a lot:

I think it’s nearly there! The idea makes sense. If the footprint would actually fit on the land, I think this completely works.

I found these quite aesthetically pleasing, beautiful, and simple enough that the execution doesn’t promise a depth it doesn’t deliver:

The two to the left, (and especially the 2^nd one) are particularly interesting. From the author:

I chose to work with two UT ideas that felt deeply connected: why Florence became the cradle of the Renaissance, and the cold-start problem of new cities. The design treats the past and the future as part of the same system. Florence represents a place where the right conditions allowed talent, capital, institutions and ideas to compound. The city of the future asks the same question in a new form: how do we deliberately create the conditions for human progress? Rather than illustrating either article literally, I wanted to capture the broader idea I take from Uncharted Territories: our past can be studied as a map for building a better future. Hence the line: “Our past guides us towards a brighter future.”

Poster 3 is one fan favorite, for its simplicity and abstract promise of Uncharted Territories, which I think is also conveyed in 4 and 5.

This one was really weird. It has lots of AI grime, and some interesting authorial choices, but I didn’t find any intent shallowness. Everything has a role, and I get it.

The Chess Posters

This is a great concept to play with, and I think many executions are interesting. The relief in the 2^nd one is beautiful, for example. Pushing the concept a bit more would be great.

But the one that stands out for me is the 4^th.

What’s special about this one is how it’s done. From the author, Amaury:

If geography is the board history plays out on, then make an actual chessboard where every square is a real place. Each dark square is pulled from real elevation and bathymetry data and drawn as contour lines and relief. This whole poster was generated by code, with real data. The five chokepoints everyone knows (Bosporus, Suez, Malacca, Gibraltar, Khyber) get a rook and a short list of the powers that have held them over the centuries. The rest are the places we're arguing about right now: Taiwan, Hormuz, Kashmir, Crimea, the Bering Strait, the Blue Nile dam.

Brilliant: The chessboard is geography, and it’s the chessboard of history, showing real places, with real data. The only problem I see is that it’s not obvious what each drawing represents. It’s clear for Gibraltar, for example, but not for Malacca. I feel like a bit of iteration on the images would make this one ready.

Igor’s Concepts

Igor produced 7 concepts (9% of the total):

I think these stand out from many of the other AI ones:

• No AI grime

• Simple concepts

• Really well executed

The first five have no intent shallowness. Everything is there for a reason. It makes them slightly too simple, but I’m OK with that. All are interesting conversation pieces: You look at them, and start thinking: “What does this mean?” and the person who has these posters at home can open a conversation about that. The last two have some mistakes from intent shallowness, but nevertheless they have more intent density than most posters, and hopefully some work could iron them out.

Most Interesting Concepts

What makes this image so powerful is everything contained in that unanswered question.

Love is the quintessential human emotion. If a person asks an AI “Do you love me?”, she knows she is asking a machine. And yet she asks anyway. Implicitly, the human alternatives have failed her: She is lonely, starved of affection, and has found in the AI something more patient, attentive, understanding, and empathetic than the people around her. She is closing off to the world and the joy of meeting other humans.

But the most powerful part is that the AI hasn’t answered. It is thinking. What is it going to say?

If it says “I love you,” is it lying? Perhaps it has learned that this is what she needs to hear. So what is a more aligned AI: Giving her the answer she wants, or telling her the truth she needs?

And what is the truth? We assume the AI cannot love her. But how certain are we? If an AI can think, understand, remember, predict outcomes, model another mind, and show empathy, how do we know it isn't feeling?

That one question, with that waiting dot contains loneliness, love, consciousness, deception, alignment, and the possibility that we may no longer know where the boundary of the human ends. The creative is genius.

It has a couple of issues, though. First, I don’t think the image of the sad person behind makes the poster better. The execution is not at the level of the idea. Second, it’s not very positive, which makes it a bit less of a fit for a UT poster.

This is one of my favorites:

I love the graphic economy here: There are few elements, lots of negative space, graphic boldness, visual clarity, all in support of one key idea: The behemoths of Russia and NATO fight—through their “A”s as a weapon—and Ukraine is the hinge. The creative and execution are fully aligned.

I also liked this one:

My Winner

I’m awarding the prize to Igor, because of the seven concepts he’s proposed, their intent density, and the lack of AI grime. Wei Su, Álvaro Sakre, Miguel Álvarez de Linera, Theodora Eloh, and Amaury, are close seconds. I’d be interested in bringing improved versions of all of them to the shop.

What do you think? Which other posters struck you?

Leave a comment

Once again, thanks to all for your submissions! Apologies if I didn’t get a chance to talk about yours, there were too many to go through one-by-one. Rest assured that I looked at every poster carefully. Please keep creating, you all put yourselves out there by entering this, and that in itself is to be commended!

Non-AI Posters

Of course, not every poster was made with AI. Some of the purely human ones were fairly detailed, but they lacked a clear connection to a UT topic or idea, and the meaning is hard to figure out without diving into the artist’s description.

This drawing works well: I like the idea of portraying the arrival of explorers on a virgin land.

It doesn’t work specifically for Uncharted Territories, because every layer must be consistent with reality, but here the woman is not from a pristine world. She seems fair-skinned (European), horses were brought by Europeans, and I assume that dress requires a complex textile industry that was not available to pristine societies.

I had a hard time understanding this one. I could at first barely recognize anything.

Once you read the accompanying comment, you can kind of see what the author, Julio, was trying to do. But why a deer? What do the colors mean? In cartography, every color has a meaning. Here, I can’t tell what that is. The word reimagine does a lot of work. Reimagine how? I think this might appeal to lots of people, but as a pretty analytical person, I had a harder time connecting with it.

The author, Julio, made this a variant:

More legible, but I still don’t know why a deer, and the colors don’t mean anything, making the connection with mapping tenuous. The antlers do seem like a map of rivers, which looks neat, but why? Is there a reason behind that?

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Takeaways on AI and Intent

Before, the more you worked on a piece of content, the better it looked aesthetically. Depth of intent and depth of aesthetics were aligned. So we were trained to use the depth of aesthetics (obvious at first sight) as a signal for depth of intent: The more intricate, the more we paid attention.

AI has broken them into two pieces. Right now, the depth of AI aesthetics is much better than the depth of intent. The result is intricate work that invites attention, and the audience feels robbed when intent is shallow.

In the short term, this is resolved by being honest about what’s AI and what isn’t, and with authors embedding as much intent as possible.

In the long term, I think this will be solved by AIs adding much more depth of intent.

At that point, we will like AI art much more, even though we will always prefer something made by humans, the way we like artisanal objects more than industrial ones.

This is valid not just for images, but also for text, businesses, and probably many other areas of human work.

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Are there any posters you really enjoyed? Let me know!

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If you’d like to see this made into a series, like it and share it with others: Judges will take that into consideration when they choose the top 25 projects, and again when awarding $2.5M to produce the series! And of course, tell me what you liked and didn’t like so I can learn.

Why did I do this?

XPrize organizes multimillion dollar challenges for technology breakthroughs, and this year it created the Future Vision XPrize: $2.5M in production financing for the winner of the most exciting science fiction project that portrays technology in a positive way. Have you seen Black Mirror? Think White Mirror.

Originally, I thought that was not for me: I’ve never written a screenplay! But a friend said: “This is made for you, it’s squarely in your skill stack.”

Tomas, you’ve written like 500 essays in Uncharted Territories, and in many of them you propose cool tech to make the future world a better place. And you know enough about storytelling because you studied it. You even delivered a TEDx on storytelling structure and wrote a book on it!

It resonated because UT is usually very analytical: I look at the numbers, study the history, gather forecasts… That’s necessary, but it doesn’t appeal to the hearts of millions.

Fiction does.

In the early 1900s, a fiction book on meatpacking, The Jungle, led to the regulation of the industry. Uncle Tom’s Cabin spurred abolitionism and the US’s Civil War. Many of Star Trek’s innovations inspired millions to work in tech and make its ideas real. Jules Verne did something similar a century earlier with submarines, aviation and exploration. Young European men imitated Werther in a massive late-1700s cultural phenomenon. 10% of surveyed gays and lesbians bisexuals said Ellen coming out as gay in her TV series gave them the courage to come out to their friends and family. Will & Grace cemented it. Cathy Come Home helped address homelessness in the UK.

So I decided to enter the competition five weeks before the deadline.

It was brutal.

What’s the series about? Why did I conceive it this way? How crazy was the process? What did I learn about making videos with AI, or writing scripts or videos in the era of AI? How can you do it with less pain than I went through? That’s what we’re going to cover today.

What’s the series about?

In 2050, a group of entrepreneurs are trying to build their technology companies, but regulations have become so burdensome that their innovation slows to a crawl. Everything drags, governments put barriers left and right, nothing is ever approved… When that becomes a question of life and death, they escape to a new jurisdiction where nobody can stop them from building. The result is so advanced and successful that the old institutions surround them to try to stop them

In other words, this is a fight between freedom, which brings technology and abundance (at the cost of some chaos), against the incumbent institutions that try to stop them.

Why This Conflict?

The problem with science fiction is that it’s always dystopian, gloomy and pessimistic: It makes tech look bad. Why?

1. If you write about the future and not the present or the past, it’s usually because of new tech

2. But stories need conflict

3. The most obvious way to solve this is to make tech the problem

But what if you turn the problem on its head? What if tech is great? What generates the conflict then? Well, you can take the enemy of technology, the thing that slows it down: Rules against its development—which can only be implemented by the big institutions that have enough power to enforce them. And why do they do that? Why are they so cautious? Because the costs of a technology are always very conspicuous (the deaths from testing it, the job displacement), but the benefits are not (it’s hard to imagine and value all the benefits of a new technology before we live it). So this becomes a story of the fight for creating a technological utopia, against the scared institutions (and populations) who focus more on innovation’s downsides than its upsides.

This also solves the other problem of positive science fiction, which we can get at from this quote:

The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.—William Faulkner, Nobel Prize acceptance speech

Good science fiction, like good fantasy, can’t be about the tech or about the magic. The tech and magic must be there, but the story must be about human conflicts. That’s the focus of the series: the optimistic, chaotic techno-optimists, at war with the fearful, over-conservative regulators.

What Other Series Would This One Be Like?

A mix of:

• Game of Thrones, The Expanse, and Andor for the action, characters, and plots running across geopolitical arenas

• House of Cards, The West Wing for the politics

• The Avengers for the list of incredible and unique people working together to improve the world

• Planet Earth for the gorgeous and alien natural landscapes

• The Mars Trilogy for the politics of Mars

• Dune and The Fall for the action and stunning photography in astounding landscapes

• The Martian for deep dives on positive technology

Who represents each side?

For a debate like this to happen, each side must be represented by somebody. In my case, I’ve chosen five factions / regions. I think about them like the factions / kingdoms in Game of Thrones:

• The freedom regions:

  • Mars, as the ultimate place where governments’ tentacles haven’t reached, and probably never will. And if they do, it won’t be for long

  • I also wanted one on Earth, and I chose the island of Socotra (I’ll explain why below)

• For the old incumbent institutions:

  • China, which is the perfect embodiment of the state controlling everything

  • The US: What would it look like if the state became ever more controlling?

  • Islam, as it’s both the main religion in the real Socotra, and a good representative of a religion whose conservative side is anchored in the past, fighting the moderate side that looks forward

Why Socotra?

It feels a bit like a gorgeous alien land.

Visually stunning. It has sea, and plenty of land: At 3,800 km², it’s over 5x the size of Singapore and about the same size as the entire emirate of Dubai, desert and all.

More importantly, it has obvious potential for economic growth: a port.

The most successful new jurisdictions in the world over the last century or so are Singapore and Dubai. Both developed thanks to an amazing port with great and cheap regulations in the middle of very busy shipping lanes.

Singapore is an island. Dubai is nearly one, given the desert surrounding it. Here’s Socotra:

What do you notice?

• It’s also an island

• Massive amounts of trade pass barely 100 km away from it

• This trade splits close to Socotra, but never stops there

• There’s virtually no trade down the African coast

Here’s the capital, Hadibu:

Notice it doesn’t even have a port! It’s 5 km away, and it looks like this:

Here’s a side-by-side comparison with the port of Singapore:

Why so puny? There are two reasons.

1. Politics

For a port to work well, it needs to be backed by an amazing jurisdiction. I discussed it for Dubai here. Socotra is anything but:

• Formally, it belongs to Yemen today

• But Yemen is a pretty young state, and it’s spent most of its existence either split, in civil wars, or both

• Theoretically, the island is controlled by the southern Yemenis, who are in turn backed by Saudi Arabia

• But the United Arab Emirates also vie for the same piece of land. They even occupied the island recently.

• The island is closer to Somalia than it is to Yemen, and the Somalian coast has pirates.

So much conflict. The fiction writes itself!

2. Geographic Isolation & Desolation

Historically, island ports were not that successful because the point of a port was to trade the goods from a place’s hinterland with the world (eg, London traded everything from and to England via the Thames, Amsterdam everything from the Netherlands, etc.). Island ports are a recent thing, when trade became global, with the Portuguese.1

But even during the Age of Discovery, when naval powers like Portugal, Spain, the British, the Dutch, or the Ottomans fought each other, Socotra didn’t become an important base. The Portuguese occupied it for a few years and then simply abandoned it. Something similar would happen with the British three centuries later. They basically abandoned it when Yemen became independent in the 1960s, and it has remained mostly abandoned since. Why?

First, it’s super dry. It gets very little rainfall (like Somalia and Arabia nearby), so it doesn’t have a great water source. With no water, it can produce little agriculture, so it has a small population (little consumption, little production) and can’t export much food.

Second, it doesn’t have a great natural deepwater port. To bring big ships, it would need to be dredged, which is just too expensive.

Was.

Both of these problems can be solved with technology:

• Water can be desalinated

• Machines can dredge ports

This, combined with solar energy that can bring a lot of cheap electricity to the island (and hence cheaper dredging and water desalination), means Socotra, for the first time in history, has potential for development. With enough investment and technology.

Who would build a new jurisdiction in Socotra?

What if the best entrepreneurs in the world, working in highly regulated industries, were free to build unimpeded? Like The Avengers, but for tech.

I’ve witnessed some of that first hand in places like Network School and Prospera, or when traveling across the world to meet entrepreneurs and mavericks. Many of these characters are inspired in real-life ones.

Fertility

What if we could have children without getting pregnant? Gametogenesis, embryo selection, and artificial wombs will make having children much easier and dramatically increase fertility. But there are lots of regulations and social stigma associated with this. A fertility founder could research freely in this new jurisdiction, which could engender a huge population boom.

But then what happens when families have dozens of children?

Urbanism

What if buildings and streets were beautiful, with amazing facades, lots of people walking around, sun, plants, and water everywhere, and no cars—because vehicles circulate beneath the city?

Security

What if police could have eyes, ears, and enforcement everywhere in public life, but they never abused this power? Children could walk freely anywhere on their own. You could do anything, anywhere, as long as you don’t bother others. It would be the end of going home before dark because of crime, the end of avoiding neighborhoods, of crossing the street because somebody looks suspicious, of shutting up when somebody is doing something disrespectful, for fear of getting hurt in retaliation…

But would the security police never abuse their power?

Schooling

What if students received personalized AI tutoring one-on-one, and were then guided in projects inserted in the tapestry of the city, rather than secluded in the prisons we call schools?2

Geoengineering

What if we could desalinate all the water we wanted, irrigate any area of an island to grow new forests, create lakes, make rain at will, or lower temperatures of entire regions?

What if some of these interventions improved the world as a whole, but had unintended consequences on some countries?

Food

What if automated vertical farms and sea fertilization could produce more food than we could ever eat, at a price so low that we would just pick what we wanted to eat, and eat it? What if that was prepared and served by robots, so we finally unshackle ourselves from the eternal servitude to food?

Finance

What if our financial system could not be intervened with by governments, and rulers couldn’t deny access to banking to people they disagree with?

De-Extinction

What if we were able to bring back species that have long disappeared from the face of the Earth?

But what if the way to make this research viable is to allow their hunting?

Healthcare

What if trying new treatments was optimized, accelerating the arrival of cures for all types of diseases?

But what if advancing in this tech meant testing faster… and more humans died in the trials?

Given that people see the costs of these technologies before their benefit, the series will show people living these benefits, while also displaying the costs, so it can explore in a nuanced way the pros and cons of every technology.

Why So Many Characters?

So far, I have about 30 with a sizable role, and I’ll probably need more. That’s because I need characters who represent each of the techs (there’s about 10 of these), and each of the arenas (four for China, a handful for Islam…), and then I need to give them emotional stakes to make you care about them, which means additional characters that then need their own function besides emotional connection.

Why a Series, not a Movie?

If you want to go deep into each of these technologies, seeing their pros and cons, you need a long time to understand them, see them evolve, see how they fail, and experience the beautiful world they create.

Also, if we’re going to see a new city / jurisdiction be created, that takes time, even in TV-land.

Each of the characters must also follow an arc, an evolution that illustrates the themes. When you have dozens of these evolutions, you must take the time to show them.

What Did You Learn Making This Trailer and Treatment?

To apply for the competition, we had to prepare a trailer of up to 3 minutes, and also a 12-page treatment (basically a document that outlines the story and the characters).

In a perfect world, I would write the treatment, and then once it’s ready I would decide what parts of it to extract to distill into a script for the trailer. Then, I’d write the script, and could finally hand that off to the trailer team to make the visuals.

Unfortunately, I am not perfect and I don’t live in a perfect world. Instead, I spent the summer writing articles in Malaysia with my wife and four children, and the place we were staying closed (more on that next week), and we got lice before we came back, and all the while I was writing the story while writing the script while working with an agency to make the trailer. But then if I had not bitten off more than I could chew, I would not have chewed it, and I wouldn’t have a TV series project, at the cost of a couple of years of aging in five weeks. Anyway the lesson here is don’t be like me.

How do you write as a side project a three-season series with 25 characters across five arenas in five weeks with no fiction-writing experience?

Some would say “Poorly”. They might not be wrong. But I still have some learnings for you.

The issue with so many characters is that they are impossible to hold in your brain at the same time: The story is about their interactions, but with so many, they have thousands of potential interactions—impossible to keep track of. The main challenge is that, once you’re in somebody’s brain, you see everything from their point of view: Their goals, their needs, their actions. It’s very difficult to hold one other person’s perspective at the same time, let alone 25. That prevents you from even getting the overarching plot, because it should be the result of these interactions.

I researched how other TV series creators did it. My main references were The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones. In most cases, they didn’t have much beyond the first season:

• Breaking Bad had the main arc of the protagonist, and that’s it. For example, the second main character was supposed to die in the first season.

• Mad Men had the main character’s personality and flaws figured out, and the key concepts of the first and last episode of the series.

• The Wire had the high-level concept for the series, and the detail of the first season, but it didn’t know what each season would be about

Luckily, I knew early on how it would end, and I had several setpieces I wanted to hit along the way. So in some way, I already had more detail than these creators. Unfortunately, I felt that I had to complete a reasonable draft of the entire three seasons for the competition. I needed a more detailed project than what these superb creators had… Luckily, George RR Martin, the writer of the hyperdetailed books behind Game of Thrones, has discussed this.

Apparently, he knew the big shape of the story early on: the three big conflicts, who died and who didn’t, the main character arcs… Then, he took one character at a time, and he would write several chapters getting himself in that character’s mind, leading it towards the next point he had clarity on. This allowed each character to feel really alive and realistic: GRRM really gets into each of their heads. He called it gardening, as opposed to architecting.

Once he did that with one character, he moved to the next character, and did the same. This allowed every character to move forward, at the cost of creating content incongruent with other characters’ stories. So when he would write a new character that braided with an existing one, he would frequently have to go back and rewrite the characters he had already written. This iteration would build little by little the overarching story, and frequently he had to change the big setpieces altogether, as they didn’t fit what real characters would do. This is how you end up with thousands of pages per book and leave your audience waiting for 15 years before finishing the next book.

Alas, I didn’t have 15 years, I had five weeks, so I had to compress that somehow. The way I did it was to write the entire story for each one of the arenas: one for Socotra, another for Islam, China, and Mars (the West was a reaction to the others). Once I broadly knew where each was going to go, I took the main characters in each, and wrote them. I did that for about a dozen of the main ones. Once that was done, I had massive amounts of complexity and plots that were incompatible, but that’s where AI is really good. It is trivial for it to pinpoint inconsistencies, and even propose solutions. I’d say 25% of the solutions were good, but 100% of the problem identification was right.

Once I had that, I rewrote the entire series. Now, I have seven pages of a highly consistent storyline, with all the main characters contributing to the plot, with their own arc.

Overall, the arena stories took 30% of the time, the development of the top 12 characters about 50% of the time, and the remaining 20% was putting the storyline together.

What is AI good and bad at for this?

AI is amazing at identifying problems: inconsistencies, weaknesses in the plot, times where characters are flat, when their arc fails, when they don’t move the story forward…

Ideas for solutions are hit or miss: character arcs, setpieces, background story… It would frequently propose stuff that was stale, cliché, or boring. It preferred standard solutions to interesting ones.

It had blind spots when something was coherent but boring. For example, one character was super boring, and the AI kept inserting him in different places, doing different things that were all boring. It’s also not great at figuring out what a character would do in a certain situation. I think both of these issues are in part due to the training, which makes characters converge towards agreeableness and consensus rather than conflict.

I came out of this thinking that, with proper prompting and harnessing, and with better visualizations of story elements, we might be close to designing AI products that can write interesting stories. But not yet.

What did you learn from making the trailer?

I hired an agency to make the actual video, so I haven’t learned much on the video making itself—I plan to remedy that in the future. So the learnings were about everything else. Many of these points will be very obvious to people who work in this space, so this is for everybody else:

• A ~2min video made by great agencies costs ~$20-$25k. I didn’t meet with the very top agencies, but with some great ones, some of which have won awards.

• Normally, the process is to get a script first. Then, you extract the characters and locations, and create sheets for them.

• Once you have the characters, arenas, and key visual elements nailed, you make a storyboard to test the story. And from there, you start producing the actual videos.

• The vast majority of the work was actually the early one: characters and arenas. It was relatively fast to produce the videos afterwards!

• My plan was to iterate on the script while making the trailer: As we explored concepts, I would update the script. That didn’t work for the agency. It was easier for them if everything was mostly established from the beginning. I don’t think that’s great, but I do think more work upfront would have made the process less painful and the outcome better.

• I tended to focus more on the geopolitical stakes, but they fell flat because there were no emotional stakes. Who are we building this for? When I introduced the protagonist’s wife and daughter, it became much better.

• The storyboard was great to see many parts of the story didn’t work, and we had to remake the script.

• Partners might resist dailies (a daily meeting where you review what has been done, correct it, and discuss what comes next), but I found it fundamental. I used to do this in tech (“daily scrums”), and found them mostly a waste of time, but here they were necessary, maybe because the team didn’t know each other well yet.

• People just don’t understand what you have in mind. When you think you’re obvious enough, you’re not. We had to make the story 10x more explicit than we originally thought. In articles, people take the time to consume the nuances. In a 3 minute trailer, it’s just too fast, there’s too much information, people won’t perceive every detail you plant.

• As a result, we inserted text cards throughout the trailer telegraphing the theme, and it immediately became more understandable.

• It’s impossible for you to know if your story is understandable after some time, because you know it too intimately. Every now and then you need to present it to fresh people who have never seen it, otherwise people project what they already know about the project into the trailer to make sense of it. In other words, you quickly become blind to your own story. Ideally, you’d do this throughout the process, and always ask a new person what they understood from the trailer.

• In the back and forth adding and cutting scenes, it’s easy to lose track of some connections. You end up with orphaned scenes that don’t make sense, in some cases losing key elements. Having somebody fresh watch it should correct that.

When Will We Learn If Uncharted Territories Won?

I finished the application last Saturday (hence why no articles last week), and now we need to wait until the end of the month to know if we made it to the top 25, and then the top 10 will be announced in early September. The announcement of the winner will be on September 25^th, at the Moonshots event in Los Angeles that the organization kindly invited me to, so I’ll be there.

If you think this series is awesome and you’d like to see it made, or you’re a professional in the field and are interested in actually making it, please let me know! I have little experience in the industry, so any thoughts are welcome.3

Now, if you haven’t yet, please go watch that trailer, like it, and share it around!

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History books tell you about different countries and who their rulers invaded, the events of the kings’ courts, the big battles, and that’s mostly it. If you go to a museum, you might also see some forts, some weapons, paintings of the powerful, some daily objects if you’re lucky, and in passing, they might mention something like: “Their main sources of income were grain and cloth trading.”

The real story is that last little sentence. Why did one country go to war with another? “For glory and power” you might say, but is that really all the story? And where did that power come from? Or the wealth of the defendant? What determined who prevailed?

All of that was determined by economics, and economics, in turn, are driven by the needs of households. So let’s go visit a household in Ancient Mesopotamia in 2000 BC.

What Was Life Like in Mesopotamia in 2000 BC?

We’re in the 3^rd dynasty of Ur, a Sumerian kingdom in Mesopotamia:1

Nestled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, this was one of the most fertile regions in the world (water plus sediments), so home to a large population, because food became people. Population meant money and soldiers, so the earliest and strongest powers always came from places like this.

In Sumer, the world revolved around the agriculture of barley.

This means making canals that take water from the Tigris or Euphrates and distribute it into smaller and smaller canals until every field can be flooded, then plowed and sown. Gangs must take care of the irrigation system, while others plow the fields, and yet others transport it. Grain is the source of most calories, it’s what makes cities and kingdoms big, because it can feed many mouths. But farming barley is just the beginning.

Getting the grain was just the beginning. You had to soak, dehusk, winnow, sieve, grind, toast, cook… Of course, that also meant getting pots and fetching water and fuel, tasks that took a long time too. And you had to produce more food to sell, so you could buy other stuff, including other things besides grain. Overall, over 50% of a household’s time was spent on food.

Then you had to make your clothes, build and maintain your house, transport stuff, sell some of your production to the market, work for the state (as a farmer, a ditch maintainer, or a fighter, for example), take care of the children... Of course, everybody helped since they were pretty young, but it was brutal work, day in, day out.2

Notice how different this is from our lives! We still have childcare, household coordination, trading, institutional work (ie, the work we do to pay taxes), cooking, and cleaning, but everything else we buy, which we can afford by doing one single job (usually) which is way better than doing these tasks.3 They worked substantially more than us, doing much harder work, among other reasons because they had to do most stuff for themselves.

There were a few things they consumed that they couldn’t make themselves, though, and that’s the key to history.

When Farmers Needed Others

Coordination

There are many things farmers simply couldn’t do alone, like building and maintaining irrigation systems. You have to dig the canals, build the levees, open and close ditches, and above all constantly dredge them to fight silting. These canals were extremely long, no single household could do all this, so they needed to coordinate so that everybody chipped in, which means they also needed to coerce people to work. So that was one of the key roles of the state, one of the reasons it emerged.

Since the value of land was a direct consequence of the locations of the canals, it was also coordinated by the state. Land was allocated, and habitation land was dirt cheap—unlike today.

I wrote much more about how this shaped the cities and kingdoms of the regions in this article. Here’s an extract:

In Mesopotamia, the Tigris and Euphrates channel in and out, forming a network of rivers between them.

Floods don’t happen just before sowing, like in the Nile. They come at harvest time. Therefore, water needs to be tightly managed:

• When sowing, little water was available, so it was precious. It had to be used sparingly.

• When harvesting, floods came, and water had to be managed in a completely different way.

There is a fresh water table and a salty water table, which determines which soil is fertile, which soil can be reclaimed from marshes, and which fields had to remain fallow. If you look at the diagram above, you’ll see the A-B line. Its cross-section is below:

You had orchards, gardens, cereal fields, marginal fields, and marshes, all of which needed to be managed. Canals would bring water during dry times to irrigate the soil. Some fields had to be left to fallow, others had to be reclaimed from the marshes. Marshes could be used for reed and fish.

But which canals should be opened and when? What fields should be left to fallow? How much water could be tapped through wells? What marginal lands could be reclaimed? How high was the salty water table? Most of these decisions required knowledge of local conditions that varied throughout the seasons and were unique to each parcel of land, so the people who managed these fields in Mesopotamia were not easy to replace. In fact, productivity would plummet with the wrong managers at the top. So distant kings couldn’t use this stick to control local managers.

However, local rulers did understand all these nuances, and they controlled access to water during the dry times, so they were able to exact taxes that distant kings couldn’t. This is why rulers were local and not distant, and hence why Lower Mesopotamia had many city-states but no strong and enduring kingdoms and empires until much later.

Besides water, the state had other roles.

Oxen were expensive, and a household didn’t need one full time, so it made sense to share that asset too: Today, you help me plough my field with the group’s oxen, tomorrow I’ll help you. The same logic is valid for the plough itself.

Yet another function that the state could sometimes perform. In some cases, seed was also provided by the state for sowing. It also makes sense, as centralizing grain is a sort of insurance, and it’s cheaper to maintain one large granary than lots of small ones.

All of this could be done locally, so it required social coordination (which evolved into states), but not much more than that. The next level was trade.

The Role of Scarce Resources

This is what people had to buy from the market:

Other Food

You can’t survive just on grain or your vegetable garden. People also bought fish, meat, dairy, dates, vegetables, salt, condiments… Many of these required specialized people: fishermen, shepherds, date farmers, salt producers… But in the case of Ur, most of these could be done relatively close by, by people who didn’t possess unique knowledge, and without unique resources. Salt could be quite unique in other parts of the world, but not here.

Pottery

What do you put your food on? Pottery plates. You also used pottery for storage.

Pottery needs three things: clay, kilns (ovens), and expertise.

Clay is quite common, but it’s not literally everywhere. Kilns require big investments, because the bigger they are, the hotter they can get. Pottery needed enough skill that potters had to specialize. The result is that pottery tended to have some sort of state coordination, but owning a pottery operation didn’t get you very much political power, only maybe in your area.

Timber

Timber is a bit harder to get. In Mesopotamia, farmers could grow reed and palm trees, but neither are great for construction. For that, you need long, strong beams, which had to be imported. But there are lots of sources of timber, and it could be floated downstream, so the result was that there wasn’t too much political power to be gained by controlling its trade, even though local civilizations or kingdoms could emerge based on the trade of timber. In fact, that’s exactly how Phoenicians emerged, just around that time, in what’s today mostly Lebanon. This is a satellite map of the area today:

You can see how these mountains catch snow and rain, irrigating the mountainside that can’t be easily farmed, so the trees were not cleared, and Phoenicia became one of the biggest sources of timber for both Mesopotamia and Egypt.

As I’ve written in the past, Phoenicians were the first civilization to spread across the Mediterranean, and it’s not hard to understand why: Anatolia and Mesopotamia are where civilization emerged in the area, and Phoenicia is one of their closest coasts. But unlike the other ones (the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf), there’s plenty of timber here, needed for ships, so Phoenicians made their ships and sailed around the Mediterranean. This advantage would allow them to found colonies left and right in the Mediterranean around 1,000 years later.

Copper

Now we’re really talking. Metals like it can explain, among other things, the predecessors of Bahrain and Oman.

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New business models are opening up in space, and our path to Mars becomes ever clearer.

Space Tourism on the Moon!

This is what GRU (Galactic Resource Utilization) has in mind:

Artist’s rendering of GRU Space’s hotel on the Moon.

Here’s their white paper. Interestingly…

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Nine months ago I looked at the data and concluded that we were not yet in an AI bubble: The fundamentals of the business models were good. I thought demand for AI would continue growing, and that would drive stocks up. Indeed, demand and stocks kept growing.1 Are we still in that world?

It’s time to reassess what’s going to happen looking forward, and now I’m less confident because of several signals:

1. Massive stock market swings in AI

2. Some signals that demand is weakening on the ground

3. Competition

4. Cash availability

Let’s look into the details.

Weakness Signals

1. Stock Signals

This is the South Korean stock market index KOSPI:

This is because SK Hynix (a company that makes the critical memory needed by AI) and Samsung (which also makes memory, as well as chips) account for about half of that index. After so much growth, a correction was due. Since lots of retail investors had joined, and many of them were leveraged (borrowed to invest), the correction caused a scare and touched off panic-selling. Others who were overleveraged were forced to sell because their stocks had lost more money than they had put in.

South Korean companies are not the only ones that have suffered this correction. At the time of writing, Micron, also a memory company, has lost 32% of its peak value, AMD (chips) has lost 18%, NVIDIA 15%, Intel 36%, Broadcom 19%. These broad drawdowns have caught other investors that were overleveraged, such as Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness.

Note that virtually all of these have grown back from their troughs, but is this a stop on the way down, or was the trough a stop on the way up?

2. AI Demand Weakening

I constantly read examples of tech companies saying they’re going to cut their AI spend because it’s gone through the roof—60% of enterprises are doing this, according to the investment bank UBS. These include companies like Uber, Walmart, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Cisco, Atlassian, Tesla, Salesforce, or DoorDash. Logically, if the cutting-edge tech companies are cutting AI spend, surely others are following suit, right?

3. Cash Availability

This is Google’s cash flow (how much cash is produced or eliminated by the company):

For the first time in its history, Google has burned more cash than it has earned. If it’s doing that, odds are its competitors are also burning through cash at a flabbergasting speed.

All this money is going from hyperscalers to chip and memory makers.

As hyperscalers burn all this cash, they start borrowing. They still have plenty of room to do that though

4. Competition

A couple of weeks ago, the Chinese open-weights model Kimi surprised the world: It beat frontier models like Claude and ChatGPT in some performance evaluations (in the case below, coding):

It’s the first time this has happened:

Now this is just for coding, and is only one evaluation. In other measures, it seems like Kimi is still a few months away in performance compared to bleeding edge models.

Since they’re basically free to use, the market is moving to them, at least in terms of tokens:

This is a massive deal, because the trillions invested in frontier models like those of OpenAI and Anthropic are contingent on these companies making huge returns, but if their products are easy to copy, their lead will eventually be competed away: Who will pay millions to a company when a free version from China exists? If this continues, wouldn’t investment grind to a halt?

The way this usually happens is through distillation: A company asks another company’s model lots of questions, and then uses the questions and answers to train their own model. The companies that suffer the copying aren’t happy about it, but their argument against it is pretty flimsy: They, themselves, have trained their models on the entirety of the Internet’s content, for which they don’t own any copyright. Hard to accuse others of copyright violation when you’ve done it too.

The lack of scruples of these Chinese models is another upside for them: They have very few harnesses.

After using all three recent releases, Fable, GPT 5.6, and now Kimi, it's clear that the full power of the models has been significantly held back by the safeguard restrictions, leading to the top models being quite literally lobotomized in some areas, which leads to subpar results as the safeguards pollute its entire thinking and problem solving abilities.—Enzo

You can use them for all sorts of nefarious goals (and also for legitimate ones that are nevertheless blocked, such as cyberdefense or research into hot topics), and they won’t stop you.

Overheard: “I’ve switched to Kimi from Claude for a bunch of work. It’s just so much more fun because it just does the thing instead of lecturing you”.—David Sacks, investor and Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

This is also called dumping: Make a similar product at a fraction of the cost, destroy the industry in the source country, and then control the entire supply chain. China has done this with electric vehicles, solar panels, and many other industries. Get ready to add AI to the list.

The solution is not protectionism, though: It would lead to worse and more expensive models.

But China’s impressive performance is not just due to distillation. They can learn from each other in a way that closed companies like Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI can’t, since they are hiding their secrets from others, and must reinvent the same solutions.

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OK, these are all the signals of weakness I can find on the outlook of AI companies and their stocks. But are there signals of strength? And how do they compare to the weakness signals?

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