Alex Waters

Lecturer in geopolitics & ecological economics @RMIT

See my writing in Third World Quarterly re the challenge BRICS+ poses to neo-colonial order

[Alex Waters @Alex_Waters2050]

Delighted to announce the publication of my new academic article, written with my Indonesian colleague Jessica Putrono, in Third World Quarterly, titled:

Indonesia enters the multipolar era by joining BRICS+: three geopolitical realignment pathways for states as Global South–South cooperation platforms expand

I’m advised by the publisher that the first 50 people to download it can do so for free. Please let us know what you think!

https://t.co/6ULTUV0Vig

[Oliver Kim @oliverwkim]

Sobering reminder that hyperscaler data centers will consume as much power as whole countries in Africa

[the thicc husband & father @lukeisamazing]

China crashing the blood diamond industry is such a great story, really brings a tear to my eye

[Sharmine Narwani @snarwani]

Financial Times: Europe and the US would need to invest an extra $23.6tn over the next 25 years to end their reliance on China in critical industries such as manufacturing and technology, and to replicate China's infrastructure, research, software, manufacturing and supply chain advances.

Meanwhile, during those 25 years, the Chinese will have advanced into another stratosphere entirely. The west can no longer win this race - it spent far too much on military trophy projects, and zilch on vision, planning, infrastructure, and development of human resources.
https://t.co/UyZANKKq33

[Alex Waters @Alex_Waters2050]

Isn’t the grand experiment of ‘meritocratic’ liberal democracy glorious?

[Trita Parsi @tparsi]

If this happened in some other country, we would laugh at their backwardness. Some in Washington would argue they must be bombed...

[Tony Annett @tonyannett]

Effective corporate tax rate was around 40% during some of the best growth ever recorded. Now it’s 12%, signaling the advance of oligarchy and the death of social democracy.

[Madeline Pendleton @JeanGreige]

Whoa seems like something happened around 1991 any thoughts on what

[Jostein Hauge @haugejostein]

JD Vance is not expressing a fringe opinion when he says he's "angry about the rise of China."

He's voicing something far more widespread than most people are willing to admit. What we're witnessing is Western hegemonic anxiety expressed with less and less shame.

And I don't think this reaction has much to do with China specifically. If India, or the entire continent of Africa, had industrialized and innovated at the same speed and scale, the response from Washington and Brussels would look similar.

China's rise has simply forced a belief out into the open that many in the West would rather keep buried: a deep discomfort with the idea that "developing" countries might actually develop. That they might compete, might lead, might stop waiting their turn.

Strip away the talk of trade imbalances and national security, and what remains is a simple, unspoken assumption: the West is supposed to be on top. That assumption runs so deep that many people who hold it don't experience it as a belief at all. It just feels like the natural order of things.

So when a country like China rises, it isn't applauded as a great feat of poverty reduction or development — it's treated as a problem. Something to be managed, contained, sanctioned, or tariffed back into its place.

[Alex Waters @Alex_Waters2050]

Does it really need to be explained that a water-hungry data centre boom in a drought-prone country is a terrible idea?

The tech industry needs to be much more tightly regulated or if they can’t be socially and ecologically responsible, then we should nationalise the platforms.

[Ash @AshPolitik]

Labor government is heading into dangerous political nightmare.

NSW and VIC alone have 75 more data centres in the pipeline

Water usage, 75 data centres at 5–40 million litres/day works out to somewhere between 136.9 billion litres/year and 1.1 trillion litres/year.

Melbourne's whole urban water use is about 400–450 billion litres/year.

Right now, data centres use less than 0.1% of Australia's total water. In Sydney it's 0.7%. In Melbourne it's 0.2%.

Projected to be 20% by 2035 according to Syd Water.

Australia is about to be hit by a record super El Nino

Mega drought conditions, are potentially going to hit in 2026

AI data centres in Australia, in the effort of not being left behind, a desire for sovereign capability, for the sake of chasing an industry in a bubble that’s about to collapse?

Yeah nah, this is no go zone.

[Alex Waters @Alex_Waters2050]

This is very bad policy. Why are we even contemplating this kind of absurd preferential treatment for a handful of giant tech firms?

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Let me get this right: Anthropic are asking the Australian gvt for full immunity from IP theft - the right to train their model on everyone's copyrighted work without their consent - while simultaneously saying it's beyond the pale to do "distillation" on their models?

I've seen corporate hypocrisy in my life but this is a whole new level.

[Soda @fredsoda]

Mearsheimer predicted this btw

all america can do is engage in zero-sum games and sabotage the growth of all other nations and itself

[Alexander Aviña @Alexander_Avina]

“For nearly 250 years, America promoted freedom and equality abroad…”

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

Seven years ago a representative from Google reached out to me in an official capacity to discuss the company's energy use. I told them it would become necessary for major firms in core economies to reduce energy use in order to enable Paris-compliant decarbonisation.

They assured me that their new AI tools were already helping them identify ways to improve the company's energy efficiency, so they weren't worried. They insisted this would soon yield radical efficiency improvements, and lead to energy use reduction without any change to their production activities. "Just wait, you'll see!" they told me, full of confidence.

I told them that's not how it works. In growth-oriented capitalist firms, savings from efficiency improvements are generally leveraged to expand production. I predicted that even if their AI found ways to improve efficiency, Google's energy use would go up, not down. Seven years later and this is where we're at:

[Alex Waters @Alex_Waters2050]

I know it’s cliched but this datapoint is a good marker of how Trump 2.0 is qualitatively different to previous presidents.

[The Green Dragon Tavern @greendragonhq]

Here is a graph showing how many individual stock trades each President has made going back to 1990.

The corruption is off the charts!

[michael mezz @michaelmezz]

over centuries of industrialization, Earth has been providing us free services: cleaning our air, purifying our water… but we’re close to crossing planetary “tipping points” that would turn Earth from friend to foe.

@PIK_Climate director @jrockstrom on the Better Future pod:

[Prof Zenkus @anthonyzenkus]

The problem with Jeff Bezos' ideology is that it's based on a false premise. The idea that "six thousand years ago someone invented the plow" is based on a faulty belief that ancient humans functioned as individuals. They did not.

Ancient humans were collectivist. The likelihood that one individual invented anything is slim to none.

This is the myth of the genius.

Archeological evidence demonstrates that for hundreds of thousands of years, early humans congregated around communal gathering places, like the fire, and engaged in problem solving and passing on of shared learning down through generations.

Additionally, the plow (and tools like it) were developed by humans in Mesopotamia, Europe, Egypt, East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa as well as other places - not in one place by one person. This is known as parallel development.

Believing that the plow was invented by one genius is like believing language was invented by one person. It is a silly myth and represents the projection of current moral standards onto past events.

This is called 'presentism' and it is both an uncritical and ignorant way to view history.

Social learning was the main driver of human evolution. Collectivism is how we both survived and progressed as a species.

The myth of the genius is an example of uncritical analysis and a flawed lens used to justify the grotesque hoarding of wealth and obscene inequality that is currently tearing at the social fabric our species.

It needs to be thrown on the trash heap of history.

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

Un informe de la Universidad de Cambridge indicó que los centros de datos de Inteligencia Artificial generan un efecto de isla de calor, elevando la temperatura superficial del suelo en 2°C, detectable hasta 10 km a la redonda, con picos extremos de hasta 9,1°C.

El impacto medioambiental de los centros de datos para Inteligencia Artificial podría afectar a más de 340 millones de personas en el corto plazo.

Mientras las multinacionales contaminan masivamente y sin límites, a los trabajadores le dicen que se aprieten el cinturón y les prohíben ir al trabajo en su coche diésel en ciudad.

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

This is literally capitalism right now.

[Jason Hickel @jasonhickel]

Why did our ruling class not invest in decarbonising faster to avoid this acceleration in deadly heatwaves that scientists warned would come? Because of the capitalist law of value.

Capital invests in what is most profitable to capital, rather than what is most necessary for humanity, so our ruling class keeps ploughing investment into fossil fuels and SUVs, while we get far too little in renewables and public transit, even while the world burns around us.

We have more than enough capacity (labour, factories, technology) to address the climate crisis, but as long as capital controls investment and production we are prevented from doing it.

We are trapped by the capitalist law of value, living in a miserable shadow of the world we could have.