The Spiral: Why the Most Important Intellectual War of Our Time Is Between People Who See Walls and People Who See Launchpads

In October 1990, a Stanford biologist sat at his desk and wrote a check for $576.07. He put it in an envelope. He addressed it to an economist at the University of Maryland. He did not include a note. No congratulations, no concession speech, not even a “good game.” Just the check, sealed and mailed.

That silence is deafening when you know the backstory. Because that check was never about the money. It was the settlement of a decade-long wager about the fundamental nature of reality itself. And the argument it represents, between people who look at a finite planet and see walls closing in and people who look at the same planet and see a launchpad, has been raging for over two centuries. Right now, in the age of AI and climate tipping points, it is reaching a fever pitch.

This is the story behind our latest episode of Coordinated with Fredrik. We called it “The Spiral” because the clash between these two worldviews is not a pendulum swinging between optimism and pessimism. A pendulum returns to the same points. A spiral goes around, but with each revolution, it moves up an axis. It progresses. Each side is forced to incorporate something the previous round missed, and the stakes get higher with every turn.

The bet that started with too many people and ended with no note

The man writing the check was Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, a book that sold two million copies and predicted hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s. Ehrlich had been on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson roughly 20 times. He got a vasectomy to set an example. He told an interviewer that he would take even money England would not exist by the year 2000. He was, in every sense, the public face of environmental doom.

On the other end of the envelope was Julian Simon, an economist who had written The Ultimate Resource, arguing that the human mind is the only resource that matters. Where Ehrlich saw mouths to feed, Simon saw minds that create. In 1980, Simon issued a public challenge: pick any raw materials, any timeframe longer than one year, and I will bet you the inflation-adjusted price goes down.

Ehrlich and two colleagues chose five metals. Chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. They placed a $1,000 bet with a payoff date of September 29, 1990.

During that decade, the world added more than 800 million people, the largest single-decade increase in human history. Demand exploded. And every single metal fell in price. Tin dropped over 70 percent. Tungsten fell by half. Hence the check.

For a lot of people, that was the end of the story. Optimists won, pessimists lost, case closed, let’s drill some oil. But the surface reading is dangerously incomplete. If you run the same bet over different decades, the results flip completely. A study found that Ehrlich would have won 61.2 percent of all possible ten-year intervals between 1910 and 2007. From 2000 to 2010, with the China boom driving metal prices parabolic, Ehrlich would have wiped the floor with Simon. It was not a definitive victory. It was a single data point in a much larger war between two operating systems for viewing the world.

The Club of Rome and the model that keeps tracking reality

The modern version of the limits worldview began in a villa in Rome in 1968, when an Italian industrialist named Aurelio Peccei gathered scientists and economists because he believed all of humanity’s problems were interconnected. Peccei was not some ivory tower philosopher. He had been tortured by fascists in the anti-resistance movement during the Second World War. He had seen civilization come apart and get rebuilt. He called the interconnected mess of global problems the “problématique,” and his group became the Club of Rome.

Four years later, a team of 17 MIT researchers built a computer model called World3 and ran it on room-sized mainframes. They tracked five variables: population, food production, industrial output, pollution, and resource depletion. The key was not just the variables but the feedback loops and delays between them. More factories mean more food, more food means lower mortality, lower mortality means more people, more people means more factories. That is the engine of civilization. But more factories also mean more pollution, which degrades soil, and more resource extraction, which gets progressively harder and more expensive. The system starts to eat itself.

The “standard run” scenario, business as usual with no major policy changes, projected overshoot and collapse around the 2040s or 2050s. Not by the year 2000, as critics endlessly claim. If you actually look at the charts from the 1972 book, all the curves keep growing well past 2000. The myth that the Club of Rome predicted the world would end in 2000 is the most persistent straw man in the history of this debate.

And the model has tracked reality with unsettling accuracy. In 2008, an Australian physicist named Graham Turner compared 30 years of actual data against the original 1972 curves. The match was terrifyingly close. A 2014 update was bleaker: the data indicated the early stages of collapse could occur within a decade. A 2020 study concluded that without major changes, economic growth will peak and then rapidly decline by around 2040. We are living inside the window of their original prediction right now.

The man who saved a billion lives and still said it was temporary

While the Club of Rome was modeling collapse, an agronomist from Iowa was busy proving them wrong with his bare hands. Norman Borlaug had gotten to college on a wrestling scholarship. He ended up developing semi-dwarf, high-yield wheat varieties through a technique called shuttle breeding, growing two generations per year by alternating between locations in Mexico.

The test came in the mid-1960s, when India and Pakistan teetered on the brink of exactly the catastrophe Ehrlich was predicting on television. Borlaug shipped his seeds. They arrived during the Indo-Pakistani War. The results were staggering. Pakistan’s wheat yields nearly doubled within five years. India went from famine threat to grain surplus so fast that local governments had to close schools and use classrooms as temporary granaries because they ran out of storage.

The Congressional Gold Medal credits Borlaug with saving over one billion lives. He is the single greatest data point in the techno-optimist argument. But here is the thing that both sides tend to forget: Borlaug himself was not a blind optimist. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he called his Green Revolution “a temporary success” and “a breathing space.” He warned about population growth in nearly every speech he gave for the rest of his career. He knew he had not solved the problem forever. He had bought us a few decades to get our house in order.

A quantum physicist, a basement, and a philosophy built on thermodynamics

The modern acceleration movement exploded out of a very unlikely origin. In 2022, a French-Canadian quantum physicist named Guillaume Verdon quit his job at Google, moved into his parents’ basement in Quebec, sold his car, bought $100,000 worth of GPUs, and started a movement on Twitter under the pseudonym BasedBeffJezos.

The name was a pun on Jeff Bezos. The philosophy was a direct shot at Effective Altruism, the movement associated with AI safety and existential risk. Where EA said slow down, we might destroy ourselves, Verdon’s movement said speed up, or we definitely will. He and his co-founders called it effective accelerationism, or e/acc.

The intellectual foundation is built on the work of MIT biophysicist Jeremy England, whose theory of dissipative adaptation proposes that under certain conditions, matter spontaneously organizes itself into more complex structures because those structures are better at spreading energy around. A forest dissipates far more solar energy than a desert. Life, in this framing, is a mechanism the universe evolved to increase entropy faster. Intelligence and technology are even better mechanisms. A data center takes organized energy and converts it into waste heat and information. It is, thermodynamically speaking, a machine for accelerating entropy.

E/acc takes this and runs with it. They argue that civilization is a higher-order dissipative structure, that resistance to acceleration is metaphysically misguided, and that humanity’s cosmic duty is to climb the Kardashev scale from a Type 0 civilization to one that harnesses the energy of an entire planet, then a star, then a galaxy. Energy consumption is not a vice. It is a moral virtue.

This moved from fringe Twitter into the heart of Silicon Valley strategy at startling speed. In October 2023, Marc Andreessen published his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, a 5,200-word essay that used the phrase “we believe” 113 times and called sustainability, the precautionary principle, and trust and safety the enemies of progress. After the 2024 US election, tech figures began explicitly connecting e/acc principles to deregulatory politics.

The geographic split is not a coincidence. Limits thinking is a European movement. The word “décroissance” comes from French. Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics was adopted as an official planning framework in Amsterdam. The precautionary principle is baked into EU regulation. E/acc is a Silicon Valley movement, full stop. Its founders are tech workers. Its patron saints are venture capitalists. Its cultural habitat is X. American frontier mythology, libertarian philosophy, and venture capital’s fundamental business model, exponential growth or death, created the conditions for its emergence.

Both sides are right, and both sides are dangerously wrong

The hardest part of this story is that neither tribe has the full picture.

The Jevons Paradox sits at the center of the conflict like an oracle telling both sides exactly what they want to hear. In 1865, William Stanley Jevons observed that more efficient steam engines did not reduce coal consumption. They increased it, because cheaper energy opened up new uses. We see this playing out with LED lights (90 percent more efficient, yet global light pollution has exploded) and now with AI. From 2010 to 2020, data center energy use stayed flat despite massive computing growth because chips kept getting more efficient. AI shattered that trend. US data center power consumption hit 183 terawatt-hours in 2024 and is projected to reach 426 terawatt-hours by 2030. In Ireland, data centers now consume 22 percent of total national electricity.

On this point, the limits crowd is right. You cannot efficiency your way to lower total consumption.

But the optimists have their own devastating exhibit. Solar energy followed a cost curve that almost nobody predicted. A watt of solar cost $76.67 in 1977. Today it is around 30 cents. A decline of over 99 percent. By 2018, solar became the cheapest new electricity source in most markets. If energy becomes nearly free and clean, a lot of supposed limits start to dissolve. Water scarcity? We have oceans full of salt water and the main barrier to desalination has always been energy cost. Resource scarcity? With enough cheap energy you can brute-force almost any material back into its constituent elements.

And peak oil, once the limits tradition’s most concrete prediction, became a cautionary tale. US production peaked in 1970 exactly as predicted, declined for 38 years, and then fracking and horizontal drilling blew past the old peak. We went from worrying about peak supply to seriously discussing peak demand.

But then there is phosphorus. This is the resource nobody talks about at dinner parties that may be the single biggest bottleneck for human civilization. Morocco controls over 70 percent of remaining economically viable phosphate rock reserves. Ninety percent goes to fertilizer. There is no synthetic substitute. You cannot 3D print the element phosphorus. Without it, Borlaug’s entire Green Revolution collapses. Estimates say we have 50 to 100 years at current consumption rates. The e/acc philosophy does not have an answer for this one.

And biodiversity loss is not a model prediction. It is a measurement. A 73 percent decline in monitored wildlife populations since 1970. Once a species is gone, its web of ecological relationships is gone forever. That is thermodynamic irreversibility. You cannot unscramble that egg.

The spiral keeps turning

The pattern repeats across two centuries, each turn incorporating the truth of the previous one while reacting against it. Malthus identified the problem of geometric growth against linear resources. He was right in principle and wrong about timing. The Industrial Revolution and Borlaug proved technology could break through Malthusian limits, but Borlaug himself warned the fix was temporary. The Club of Rome modeled the unintended consequences of that breakthrough and found the system delays and feedback loops that lead to overshoot. They were right about the structure of the problem but underestimated technology’s ability to postpone the date. Now e/acc is arguing that the solution to the problems of technology is more technology, faster. They are driving the AI boom and the clean energy transition. But they may be blind to the hard geological and biological cliffs we are racing toward.

There is a group of thinkers trying to build a bridge. The ecomodernists, led by people like Stewart Brand, the man who created the Whole Earth Catalog and then did a complete 180 on nuclear power, genetic engineering, and urbanization. Their argument is decoupling: use advanced technology to shrink humanity’s physical footprint so that nature can recover. Dense energy, vertical farming, precision agriculture. Use the acceleration toolkit to achieve the goals of the limits movement.

That synthesis may be the only path that actually works. You cannot run a modern energy company or a modern economy with only the limits mindset. That leads to stagnation, to a culture of no, to degrowth, which, whatever its intellectual merits, is politically impossible in any functioning democracy. People will not vote to make themselves poorer. But you also cannot lead with pure acceleration. That leads to recklessness, to ignoring externalities, to driving a thousand miles an hour toward a cliff because you have blind faith that innovation will magically build a bridge just before you go over the edge.

You need the optimist’s toolkit and the pessimist’s diagnostic. The diagnostic tells you what the hard constraints are: phosphorus cycles, carbon budgets, grid stability, biodiversity thresholds. The toolkit tells you how to solve for those constraints with innovation, new cost curves, new business models.

That $576.07 check Ehrlich mailed in 1990 would be worth about $1,400 today. A small price for a public lesson in humility. But the underlying wager has never been settled. The limits model says we are entering the downturn right now. Resources should get scarcer, prices should spike, the system should unravel. The acceleration model says AI and robotics and maybe fusion are about to unleash abundance that makes all previous resources irrelevant.

The tension between those two futures has never been tighter. The bet is still on. We are all waiting to see who ends up writing the next check.

This post accompanies our latest episode of Coordinated with Fredrik, where we take the deep dive into the full history, the data, and the people behind both movements. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit frahlg.substack.com