The Hardware Almanac

On the transition from software-defined power to hardware-defined power, and why the institutions meant to govern the modern world are not equipped to survive it.

Arya Somu  ·  2026

The world is mid-transition from software-defined power to hardware-defined power. The most consequential resource on earth is a three-nanometer transistor etched in a single building complex on a 36-kilometer island. How wars get fought, how markets are priced, how nations survive: everything downstream of that fact is being renegotiated in real time, and almost no one with institutional authority understands what they are renegotiating.

This is an attempt to document the transition as it is happening: its origins, its physical reality, the specific ways each major institution is miscalibrated to navigate it, and what the world looks like depending on how it resolves. It is not a policy paper and it is not investment research. It is an almanac in the original sense: a structured attempt to make visible a set of conditions that most people are living inside of without seeing.

I am writing this at nineteen, from the specific vantage point of someone who has spent several years building exchange infrastructure, running a systematic macro fund, and studying the physical sciences. That vantage point is not academic. It is the vantage point of someone who has had to think seriously about hardware constraints in practice, and who has watched the intellectual frameworks taught in economics and strategy departments fail to account for those constraints in increasingly consequential ways.

The argument here will seem overstated to some readers until it doesn't. That is the nature of structural transitions. They are invisible until they are undeniable, and by the time they are undeniable, the window for navigating them intelligently has usually closed.

Table of Contents

Each essay is meant to stand on its own, though I'd strongly encourage reading the series as a whole.

I.
The World We Thought We Lived In
The post-Cold War consensus, how abstraction won the twentieth century, and the single assumption buried inside everything that followed.
II.
The Physical Reality
The actual hardware geography of the world. TSMC, ASML, rare earths, and the full supply chain from raw material to inference cluster.
III.
The Institutions and Why They Are Wrong
Markets, governments, militaries, and international bodies: each examined for the specific way it is miscalibrated to handle hardware as sovereignty rather than logistics.
IV.
The Bifurcation
The world is already splitting into two compute stacks. The second-order effects of that split are almost entirely unexamined.
V.
What Happens Next
Not predictions. Scenarios. What the good resolution requires and what the bad resolution looks like.
 
Epilogue
Why this, why now, and what the almanac principle means for how we read the world going forward.