The Lords of Zero

Tinkering with Time, Tech, and Culture #27

The Substrate War, Part II

The Lords of Zero

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There's a strange paradox sitting at the center of the AI era — one that almost no one talks about because it hides behind the glow of progress.

AI is driving the cost of everything toward zero.

Inference collapses. Training collapses. Design, simulation, modeling — all collapsing. Soon: manufacturing, energy, logistics, coordination.

Technology keeps trending toward abundance.

And yet access keeps getting more controlled.

API pricing stays sticky. Model capability stays gated. Compute stays permissioned. Weight access stays proprietary.

Someone is capturing the delta between abundance and permission.

That delta — the gap between the cost approaching zero and the gate staying closed — is where a new kind of power is forming.

These are The Lords of Zero:
the entities who sit at the point where costs collapse but control remains.

And they're becoming the third great empire of the modern world.

1. When Zero Isn't Freedom — It's Leverage

In the old economic stories, zero meant liberation.

Zero marginal cost.
Zero barriers.
Zero friction.
Zero scarcity.

But in the AI era, zero doesn't mean freedom.
It means leverage.

Because if you have control over the system where costs collapse, you don’t need to charge for the cost — you charge for the gate.

You don’t monetize scarcity.
You monetize permission.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

• OpenAI's inference costs dropped roughly 90% between GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, but API pricing barely moved. The gap between what it costs them to run a query and what they charge you — that's where the Lords of Zero live.
• Training a frontier model costs $60 million, but access to that model generates billions.
• A single H100 GPU costs $30,000, but compute-hour rental extracts multiples over its lifetime — and the margins grow as inference costs collapse.
• Open weights cost nothing to copy, but the infrastructure to run them at scale costs everything.

This is the defining economic structure of the cognitive age:

Abundance created below.
Access controlled above.
Power extracted in the delta.

This is no longer capitalism in the classical sense.
This isn’t socialism.
This is the monetization of permission — the economic logic of cognitive feudalism, where abundance is created below and access is controlled above.

“When costs collapse but gates remain, zero becomes leverage.
Zero becomes a moat.
Zero becomes a weapon.
Zero becomes the empire.”

The Lords of Zero don't fear competition — they can out-produce anyone who tries to challenge them.

The moat isn't money or patents or regulation.

The moat is physics — owning the substrate where zero lives.

2. The Three Empires Discover Each Other

For the first time in centuries, three distinct empires are emerging side by side:

Political power defines borders.

Nations, sovereignty, law, territory, identity.

Financial power defines flows.

Capital, liquidity, investment, markets, incentives.

Cognitive power defines reality.

Models, inference, filtering, simulation, narrative, and the infrastructure of thought.

And the most important realization of the decade is this:

The cognitive empire has entered the same room as the other two.

Political empires have always known about financial empires — they tax them, regulate them, sometimes seize them.

Financial empires have always known about political empires — they fund them, lobby them, sometimes flee them.

But the cognitive empire is new.
And it's different.

Because cognitive power doesn't just move money or enforce laws — it shapes what's thinkable.

It determines:

• What questions get asked
• What answers seem reasonable
• What futures appear possible
• What realities get simulated
• What narratives spread
• What becomes consensus

And suddenly, all three empires are realizing they need to negotiate with each other:

• Nations don't want to cede reality-curation to AI companies
• Markets don't want cognitive monopolies controlling flows
• AI hyperscalers don't want political capture
• And none of them want to trigger unpredictable runaway effects

We're watching the early diplomacy between empires that each believe they should be the one that defines the world.

This negotiation will shape the next century.

3. Federation as the Negotiation Mechanism

If cognitive infrastructure centralizes fully, then permission becomes permanent.

There will be no second chance to decentralize.
No re-opening of possibility.
No "we'll fix it later."

This is why federation matters — not as a revolution, but as a negotiation mechanism:

• Local inference
• Sovereign nodes
• Identity-scoped networks
• Peer-driven trust
• Substrate you own
• Cognitive grit at the edges

Federation is the only counterweight that doesn't try to topple the Lords of Zero — it simply refuses to let them own the entire stack.

Not because federation is guaranteed to win.
Historically, it rarely does — at first.
But because without it, the negotiation never happens.

The three empires need:

• something to negotiate over, and
• something to negotiate with.

Federation provides both:

• A substrate no single empire can capture
• A mechanism where all three can participate without any one dominating
• A failsafe if any empire tries to take everything

We build alternatives while we still can.
Not out of certainty — out of responsibility.

The cost of not trying is simple:

You live in someone else's tunnels forever.

4. The 70-Year Stall

There has been a list of "the day after tomorrow technologies" for seventy years:

• Controlled fusion
• Reactionless drive
• Synthetic gravity
• FTL communications
• Universal manufacturing
• Post-scarcity economics

Every decade, someone says “we’re close.”

Every decade, nothing happens.

Why?

Because every single one of those breakthroughs requires:

• Unprecedented modeling
• Unprecedented simulation
• Unprecedented abstraction
• Unprecedented design iteration
• Unprecedented cognitive leverage

The kind of leverage no human civilization has ever had.

We’ve been stuck not because the physics is impossible, but because human cognition couldn’t close the complexity gap fast enough.

Fusion requires modeling plasma instabilities across millions of interacting variables and scales we can’t visualize. Reactionless drive (if it’s even possible) requires physics we haven’t fully mapped and exotic matter states we still can’t manufacture. Gravity control sits behind mechanisms we only hypothesize. FTL requires engineering regimes that break our current materials science. Each one is theoretically glimpsable — but practically unreachable with human-speed cognition.

Each one sits at the edge of what's theoretically possible but practically unreachable with human-speed thinking.

We've been stuck in “next day” limbo for 70 years because the tools we had couldn’t match the problems we faced.

Except — possibly — now.

Because for the first time in history, cognition itself has scale.

5. The Kardashev Window

Singularity-grade AI — the kind that can recursively improve itself, explore solution spaces we can't conceptualize, and run millions of parallel experiments — may be the first machine capable of breaking the dam.

Not AI that’s “really good at pattern matching.”
AI that actually thinks, in ways we can’t.

That kind of AI doesn’t just optimize existing designs.
It finds the paths we keep missing.

Fusion might be “always 20 years away” for human researchers.
For machine-speed experimentation, it might be 18 months.

And if even one breakthrough lands — fusion, or reactionless drive, or synthetic gravity — the entire game board changes.

Each breakthrough breaks a scarcity constraint that the three empires are currently fighting over:

• Fusion → energy becomes essentially free
• Reactionless drive → space becomes accessible
• Gravity control → we escape gravity wells
• FTL → we escape the solar system
• Universal manufacturing → matter becomes abundant

Each one opens the Kardashev window — the possibility of a post-scarcity civilization expanding into the stars.

This is the real stakes:

Whether civilization hits the Kardashev window — or misses it.

And how we structure cognitive infrastructure today determines which one happens.

Do we use the Lords of Zero to cross the window?
Or do we let them lock it shut while they negotiate over Earth’s scraps?

6. Pro-Future. We Try.

There’s a kind of pessimism infecting the culture — a belief that collapse is inevitable, that doom is rational, that the future is already owned.

I don’t buy it.

We’ve spent seventy years stuck because we lacked the cognitive tools to push physics forward.
Now we have them.
But whether we use them is up to us.

This isn’t a manifesto.
It’s a reminder:

Abundance only matters if you can access it.
Future only matters if you can reach it.
And zero only matters if it sets you free.

Grey goo is a distraction.
Stagnation is the real existential risk.
We don’t need permission to try.

The Kardashev window is open. For now.

Whether we step through it and climb, or let the Lords of Zero lock it shut while they quarrel over scraps, is the only question that matters.

Part III: The Three Empires
Coming next.