I was reviewing a GitHub repo for a new direct-air carbon capture startup when my timeline erupted over New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The mayor had just issued a desperate public plea, asking residents to set their air conditioning units to 78 degrees to prevent the local power grid from collapsing under the weight of a historic, coast-to-coast heatwave. My immediate thought, as someone who has spent a decade scaling digital platforms and studying user retention, was simple: this is an incredibly hostile UX.
You do not solve a systemic load-balancing issue by begging your daily active users to voluntarily degrade their own experience. Asking a premium user base to sit quietly in a 78-degree apartment while they try to work is not a viable deployment strategy; it is a guilt trip disguised as an infrastructure policy.
So when the Department of Energy quietly deleted roughly 6,000 web pages dedicated to energy conservation right in the middle of this catastrophic thermal event, the mainstream press naturally panicked. Pundits accused the White House of burying vital survival information just as the mercury spiked. But if you strip the politics away and evaluate the infrastructure from first principles, the administration is actually demonstrating elite product management. They identified a massive, bloated library of legacy documentation that directly contradicted the American growth narrative, and they ruthlessly deprecated it.
I actually pulled the Wayback Machine cache for some of these 6,000 deleted pages just to see what the government was allegedly hiding from us. The content was genuinely embarrassing to read in the current year. We are talking about thousands of government-hosted HTML pages earnestly advising citizens to apply weatherstripping to drafty windows, unplug appliances when not in active use, and close blinds during peak sunlight. This is the equivalent of trying to fix a catastrophic memory leak in a billion-dollar enterprise software suite by asking the engineering team to type their code slightly slower. It is analog patching for a system that fundamentally requires exponential scaling.
I was discussing this exact dynamic over lunch yesterday with a few founders in the generative AI space. The consensus among the table was unanimous: the very concept of conservation is a 20th-century trap. We are currently in the middle of a civilizational sprint to build artificial general intelligence. The compute required for this transition is staggering. OpenAI alone requires oceans of base-load power just to train its next generation of multimodal models. Asking Americans to artificially constrain their energy expenditure because the ambient temperature outside happens to be 106 degrees is fundamentally anti-progress. You do not build a sustainable competitive advantage by powering down.
Surprisingly, the political right seems to intuitively grasp this, even if their framing is clumsy. Ted Cruz has been loudly attacking Mamdani’s 78-degree mandate on social media, treating the mayor's request as an assault on American liberty. While the senator from Texas largely lacks the vocabulary of a Series B founder, his underlying thesis perfectly mirrors the tech ecosystem's core demand: frictionless consumption is a non-negotiable metric. If the domestic grid cannot handle a citizenry running central air at 64 degrees while simultaneously training localized language models and rendering 4K video, the solution is not to throttle the user's output. The solution is to force the grid to iterate.
The absolute worst thing you can do during a historic heatwave is signal to capital markets that you are willing to compromise on personal ambient cooling.
Dax is exactly right. Every time a citizen voluntarily unplugs a dehumidifier or turns off a ceiling fan to save a few megawatts, they are sending a bearish signal about America’s energy appetite. We need to be pushing the hardware to its absolute physical limit. The grid operators will never invest in next-generation fusion or advanced geothermal arrays if we keep bailing them out by sweating in our living rooms. We have to break the current system to incentivize the funding for the next one.
This is why we need to stop viewing rolling blackouts as a crisis and start viewing them as a forced iterative feedback loop. When a substation transformer physically melts down in the Texas sun, that is not a tragedy. That is simply the infrastructure identifying a bottleneck for us in real-time. It is an automated bug report. Keeping 6,000 pages of federal tutorials on how to use a desk fan only delays this necessary reckoning. By wiping the repository clean, the Department of Energy has finally stopped trying to support a broken user behavior.
The critics complaining about the suspicious timing of the White House's web page purge fundamentally do not understand how you execute a paradigm shift. You do not leave the old instructions up while you are trying to force adoption of the new reality. If Apple had left floppy disk drives in the iMac just in case, we would never have adopted USB. By deleting the conservation guides exactly when the heatwave is peaking, the government is forcing a hard fork. They are telling the American public that the era of saving power is over, and the era of demanding infinite power has begun.
Tomorrow’s energy abundance will not be achieved by sitting in the dark, sweating through our organic cotton t-shirts, and waiting for the local utility monopoly to graciously restore service. It will be achieved by demanding so much raw power that the laws of physics are forced to offer us a better deal. I, for one, have already set my smart thermostat to 58 degrees, and I encourage anyone who actually cares about the future of compute to do the exact same.